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As science-fiction oriented songs in rock music go, there isn’t really anything better than “2000 Light Years from Home.” In terms of the album’s Pepperism, this is a moment when The Stones strain against it and, for a moment, go beyond it (I would say this is true of “Citadel” as well). On the one side, the song could have been played better. I can’t help but feel that drum and timpani roll into the vocal part could have been far more powerful—not just the playing but also the recording. To me those two beats on the timpani in “2000 Light Years” stand in for everything that’s haphazard and lackadaisical about Satanic Majesties. And yet, there is a trade-off between polish and edginess. While the dynamics of this trade-off may not always apply, it applies here. If The Stones had polished this song very much, they certainly would have lost the edge.

You’re So Very Lonely

All of the “science-fiction” songs on Satanic Majesties are concerned with loneliness and alienation. That is perhaps the reason why two songs are titled after the number 2000, the one referring to time and the other to distance. Both songs are really not literally about distance, but also isolation, loneliness, alienation, and the uncertainty of the then upcoming millenium.

As we move from “2000 Light Years from Home” to the last track, the deliberately throw-away and cynical “On With the Show,” the album draws a circle around all this alienation and uncertainty. By this time, the fiction in the album’s science fiction seems to take center stage to cast a cynical eye on the utopian optimism of “Sing This All Together” that started us on our journey. “Good evening one and all we’re all so glad to see you here” obviously nods to Sgt. Pepper’s opening and closing numbers (“You’re such a lovely audience we’d like to take you home with us”). But The Stones have it backwards, with their show’s emcee addressing the audience only at the end of the album. And with lyrics like “But we’ve got all the answers, and we’ve got lovely dancers too; There’s nothing else you have to do,” the album suggests that all the fanfare and hope of utopian revolution is confused, too easy, and perhaps just a kind of scam (a note that Lennon himself would hit on “Revolution,” and Townsend would as well in 1971’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”).

So, while in the spectrum of Pepperisms, I’ve been making connections between The Stones and King Crimson, it may be more apt to say that Satanic Majesties is tilling the ground for Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money. That sendup of Pepperism would appear a year later to deliberately parody Sgt. Pepper (including the album’s famous cover collage and gatefold portraits) and replace Lennon’s profound “A Day in the Life” with the Zappa’s self-parodying song, “The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Destiny.” “On with the Show” came first.

2000 Light Years from the Blues

Still, despite the album’s underappreciated values and ideas, Stones fans are not wrong to see Satanic Majesties as a kind of albatross or, as Keith put it, a bit of “flimflam” in their catalog. Just look at the band’s relationship to the album in recent decades. In 1989 they performed “2000 Light Years from Home” on the Steel Wheels tour, but the version is, frankly, ridiculous. Mick’s vocals and stage moves (viewable on YouTube) especially his opening interpretive dance (I don’t know what else to call it) take all of the alienation out of the song. Its rhythm has become blues, not psychedelia. “She’s a Rainbow” from about a decade later on the Bridges to Babylon tour is a little better, but Mick sings it in that exaggerated “Southern” voice he often uses, and the band rushes through the song so that it doesn’t breathe and exude its charm. In the Seventies and after, it seems, Satanic Majesties, to the Stones, had almost become an album by some other band.

The Stones don’t belong in Pepperland and they never did. One reason