STREET FIGHTING MAN
“Street Fighting Man” is a song by English rock band The Rolling Stones featured on their 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Called the band’s “most political song”, Rolling Stone ranked the song #301 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. (More from Wikipedia)
The frequent hit songs by the Yardbirds – “I’m a Man”, “Happenings Ten Years Time Ago”, “For Your Love”, “Heart Full of Soul”, “Shapes of Things”, “Over Under Sideways Down”, etc. – hit my eardrums with at least as powerful an impact as the greatest Rolling Stones songs, like “Brown Sugar”, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”, “Paint it Black”, “Get off of My Cloud”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, “Street Fighting Man”, etc. To me though, these songs sound every bit as fresh to me today, probably because they haven’t been played to death on oldies’ radio as much as anything else.
(May 2014)
* * *
The concert was made not long after the release of one of my favorite Rolling Stones albums, Beggars Banquet, and includes two songs from that album, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man”, plus several more from their most recent album at that time, Let it Bleed: “Gimme Shelter”, “Love In Vain”, “Midnight Rambler”, “Live with Me”, and “Honky Tonk Women” – a country version of this song was included on Let it Bleed under the name of “Country Honk”, while “Honky Tonk Women” itself was released five months earlier as a single only. The Greatest Group on Earth was the only concert album that I had of the Stones for several years (in fact, I did not own very many albums back then, period) – just one live album by the Rolling Stones had been officially released previously, Got Live If You Want It! (1966) – so I played this record a lot.
(September 2017)
