"Street Fighting Man" is a song by English rock and roll band the Rolling Stones featured on their 1968 album Beggars Banquet. Called the Stones' "most political song", Rolling Stone ranked the song #295 on their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
Inspiration
Originally titled and recorded as "Did Everyone Pay Their Dues?", containing the same music but very different lyrics, "Street Fighting Man" is known as one of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards' most politically inclined works to date. Jagger allegedly wrote it about Tariq Ali after Jagger attended a March 1968 anti-war rally at London's U.S. embassy, during which mounted police attempted to control a crowd of 25,000. He also found inspiration in the rising violence among student rioters on Paris's Left Bank, the precursor to May 1968.
On the writing, Jagger said in a 1995 interview with Jann Wenner in Rolling Stone,
"Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet...It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions. ...I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; DeGaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing."
The song opens with a strummed acoustic riff. In his review, Richie Unterberger says of the song, "...it's a great track, gripping the listener immediately with its sudden, springy guitar chords and thundering, offbeat drums. That unsettling, urgent guitar rhythm is the mainstay of the verses. Mick Jagger's typically half-buried lyrics seem at casual listening like a call to revolution."
“ Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy,
'Cause summer's here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy ”
“ Hey, said my name is called Disturbance;
I'll shout and scream, I'll kill the King, I'll rail at all his servants ”
“ Well now what can a poor boy do, Except to sing for a rock & roll band?
Cause in sleepy London Town there's just no place for a street fighting man, no ”
Unterberger continues, "Perhaps they were saying they wished they could be on the front lines, but were not in the right place at the right time; perhaps they were saying, as John Lennon did in the Beatles' "Revolution," that they didn't want to be involved in violent confrontation. Or perhaps they were even declaring indifference to the tumult." Other writers' interpretations varied. In 1976, Roy Carr assessed it as a "great summer street-corner rock anthem on the same echelon as 'Summer in the City', 'Summertime Blues', and 'Dancing in the Street'." In 1979, Dave Marsh wrote that it was the keynote of Beggar's Banquet, "with its teasing admonition to do something and its refusal to admit that doing it will make any difference; as usual, the Stones were more correct, if also more faithless, philosophers than any of their peers."
Recording
Recording on "Street Fighting Man" began at Olympic Sound Studios in March of 1968 and continued into May and June later that year. With Jagger on lead vocals and both he and Richards on backing, Brian Jones performs the song's distincitve sitar and also tamboura. Richards plays the song's acoustic guitars as well as bass, the latter being the only electric instrument on the track. Charlie Watts performs drums while Nicky Hopkins performs the song's piano which is most distinctly heard during the outro. Shehani is performed on the track by Dave Mason. On the earlier, unreleased "Did Everybody Pay Their Dues" version, Rick Grech played a very prominent electric viola.
Watts said in 2003,
"'Street Fighting Man' was recorded on Keith's cassette with a 1930s toy drum kit called a London Jazz Kit Set, which I bought in an antiques shop, and which I've still got at home. It came in a little suitcase, and there were wire brackets you put the drums in; they were like small tambourines with no jangles... The snare drum was fantastic because it had a really thin skin with a snare right underneath, but only two strands of gut... Keith loved playing with the early cassette machines because they would overload, and when they overload they sounded fantastic, although you weren't meant to do that. We usually played in one of the bedrooms on tour. Keith would be sitting on a cushion playing a guitar and the tiny kit was a way of getting close to him. The drums were really loud compared to the acoustic guitar and the pitch of them would go right through the sound. You'd always have a great backbeat."
On the recording process itself, Richards remembered,
"The basic track of that was done on a mono cassette with very distorted overrecording, on a Phillips with no limiters. Brian is playing sitar, it twangs away. He's holding notes that wouldn't come through if you had a board, you wouldn't be able to fit it in. But on a cassette if you just move the people, it does. Cut in the studio and then put on a tape. Started putting percussion and bass on it. That was really an electronic track, up in the realms."
Bruce Springsteen would comment in 1985, after including "Street Fighting Man" in the encores of some of his Born in the U.S.A. Tour shows: "That one line, 'What can a poor boy do but sing in a rock and roll band?' is one of the greatest rock and roll lines of all time. ... [The song] has that edge-of-the-cliff thing when you hit it. And it's funny; it's got humor to it."
Jagger continues in the Rolling Stone interview when asked about the song's resonance thirty years on; "I don't know if it [has any]. I don't know whether we should really play it. I was persuaded to put it [on Voodoo Lounge Tour] because it seemed to fit in, but I'm not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don't really like it that much." Despite this, the song has been performed on a majority of the Stones' tours since its introduction to their canon of work.[8]
On the song, Richards said, only a few years after recording the track in a famous 1971 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Greenfield, that the song had been "interpreted thousands of different ways". He mentioned how Jagger went to the Grosvenor Square demonstrations in London and was even charged by the police, yet he ultimately claims, "it really is ambiguous as a song."
Release
Released as Beggars Banquet's lead single on August 31, 1968, "Street Fighting Man" was popular on release but was kept out of the Top 40 (reaching number 48) of the U.S. charts in response to many radio stations refusal to play the song based on what were perceived as subversive lyrics. This attitude would be enforced as the song was released within a week of the riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The B-side was album-mate "No Expectations". "Street Fighting Man" would not be released in the United Kingdom until 1970.
It has been included on the compilations albums Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits Vol. 2), Hot Rocks 1964-1971, Singles Collection: The London Years (in its 45 RPM single mix, in mono with an additional vocal overdub on the chorus) and Forty Licks. A staple at Stones live shows since the band's American Tour of 1969, concert recordings of the song have been captured and released for the live albums Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out!, Stripped, and Live Licks.
Legacy
"Street Fighting Man" has been covered by many artists. Rod Stewart covered it on the debut solo album An Old Raincoat Won't Ever Let You Down. Oasis recorded a version that was released as the B-side to their 1998 single "All Around the World". The song can be found on the fourth and last studio album by Rage Against the Machine entitled Renegades. It appears on Mötley Crüe's Red, White and Crüe album as well as the Ramones' 2002 re-release of Too Tough to Die. The band Prima Donna performed a live cover early in their career. The band Tesla also covered this song on their cover's album Real to Reel which can be found on the rare disk 2 track number 5. (You needed to attend a concert during the Reel to Reel tour to obtain this disk.)
Guitarist Pete Townshend of the Who has claimed that the staccato beat/rhythm structure of "Street Fighting Man" is the inspiration for "I'm Free" on Tommy. From a musical perspective it is interesting that it is produced entirely on acoustic instruments apart from the electric bass.
In 2009, the Australian rock band Sick Puppies used the first 15 seconds of Rage Against The Machine's version for their single "Street Fighter (War)".
Radio Personalities Opie and Anthony use Rage Against the Machine's version as part of the opening theme for their show.
Pages: 
Beggars Banquet, song by song discussion thread (Read 4,393 times)
