JOHN HUNTINGTON
Tammy Faye Starlite will perform Rolling Stones songs at The Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair, Dec. 14.
It was December 1968 when The Rolling Stones released one of their greatest albums, Beggars Banquet. The Vietnam War had escalated dramatically over the last few years. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy had been assassinated in April and June of that year, respectively. President Lyndon Johnson had made a late decision, in March, not to pursue re-election and, in an election that seemed to divide the country, Richard Nixon had narrowly beaten Johnson’s replacement on the ticket, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, in November.
Few other 1968 albums reflected the tenor of the times as well as Beggars Banquet did, with “Sympathy for the Devil” kicking off side one; and “Street Fighting Man,” side two. Other tracks included the weary “No Expectations” and the salacious “Stray Cat Blues.” It was an album that practically could have been subtitled, “Music for Tumultuous Times.”
This makes December 2024 the perfect time to revisit it, as Tammy Faye Starlite will do on Dec. 14, playing the entire album with her band at The Outpost in the Burbs in Montclair. She is double-billed with Lenny Kaye & Friends, and the show will benefit NJArts.net; for tickets, visit outpostintheburbs.org.
“It all started because my husband, Keith Hartel, got this new Hummingbird guitar — an acoustic guitar that is the one that Keith Richards used around this time of the Stones,” says Starlite, who lives in Hoboken. “And he said, ‘I wanna do Beggars Banquet.’ ”
Hartel will join her at The Outpost, on guitar and vocals, as will Rich Feridun on guitar, Jared Michael Nickerson on bass, Ron Metz on drums, David Nagler on piano and Eszter Balint on violin and other instruments.
Starlite — who previously has played Rolling Stones songs in her group The Mike Hunt Band and impersonated Marianne Faithfull (Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, or at least one of them, during the Beggars Banquet era) in full-length nightclub shows — agrees that the album is almost eerily fitting for the moment in history that we are living through now. Here are some of her comments, on most of the album’s 10 songs:
Mick Jagger, during a recording session for “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“Sympathy for the Devil” (side 1, track 1): “The narrator kind of embodies the essence of evil and a kind of demonic autocrat demanding fealty. … the lyrics are kind of astonishing to me, still. This is gonna sound so pretentious, but as an actor, when you’re doing really great dialogue or you’re in acting class and you’re doing a Shakespeare monologue, just to try it out, and the way the words feel in your mouth and the way it kind of carries you … that’s what these lyrics do.”
“No Expectations” (side 1, track 2): “Perhaps a lot of us feel that (i.e., no expectations), at this moment: You know, the dissolution of hope.”
“Parachute Woman” (side 1, track 4): “It’s kind of your standard male-gaze blues. It’s got a certain kind of unique mystery to it. His vocal is different. The lyrics are a bit cryptic, and overt at the same time. ‘Well, my heavy throbber’s itching/Just to lay a solid rhythm down.’ I mean … that’s not that cryptic, but it’s kind of lovely in its image, you know. ‘I’ll break big in New Orleans/And I’ll overspill in Carolina.’ That’s also a little bit of a double entendre in that last part.”
“Jigsaw Puzzle” (side 1, track 5): “It was never a hit but is kind of a favorite album track … the refrain, ‘Waiting so patiently, lying on the floor/I’m just trying to do my jigsaw puzzle before it rains anymore’ … it’s kind of observing all these people, and then it gets to this almost geopolitical … you know, he talks about the grandmas who are burning up their pensions and shouting, ‘It’s not fair!’ It just feels like how we all feel. We’re just trying to live our lives and there’s this looming pall … or, you know, it’s not even looming, it’s here, where our humanity — or our rights — are hopefully not taken away, as much as we fear. But that is the fear.”
The cover of The Rolling Stones’ album, “Beggars Banquet.”
“Street Fighting Man” (side 2, track 1): “In a sense, it’s a call for revolution. But also a call for: ‘We can’t revolt. So we’ll just scream and shout as much as we can.’
” ‘What can a poor boy do ‘cept to sing for a rock ‘n’ roll band?’ Because, you know, ‘I don’t know how much revolt we can do at this point. I guess we will at some point.’
“It’s a kind of alienation. You have all these feelings of wanting to rebel: wanting to express your dissatisfaction with what’s going on in the world. And yet that is also performative, in a sense. And I think that’s where the song is a two-sided, Janus-faced song. It’s a call to revolution and maybe an admission of … not necessarily apathy, but immobility.”
“Stray Cat Blues” (side 2, track 3): “I kind of love the subversive nature of that track. Some people are … I mean, it’s offensive, but it’s deliberately so. I think rock ‘n’ roll is where the id can run loose and have all these insane and perhaps immoral fantasies, and just live them in your mind, so you don’t have to necessarily live them out in the world. Although I wouldn’t doubt that Mick Jagger lived some of that, as they all did back then.”
“Factory Girl” (side 2, track 4): “I think the lyrics are so deft. He has these kind of slurs that he throws in. You know, she’s got stains all down her dress, her knees are much too fat. And then he says, ‘Waiting for a girl and my feet are getting wet/She ain’t come out yet.’ Like he’s waiting for her and has that kind of longing for this person he loves. It’s a bit like Springsteen (in ‘Thunder Road’): “You ain’t a beauty but hey, you’re alright.’ It’s kind of a lovely way of saying how much he loves this woman, with all of her perceived imperfections.”
“Salt of the Earth” (side 2, track 5): “It celebrates humanity and also has the lines:
“ ‘Raise your glass to the hard-working people
Let’s drink to the uncounted heads
Let’s think of the wavering millions
Who need leaders but get gamblers instead
” ‘Spare a thought for the stay-at-home voter
His empty eyes gaze at strange beauty shows
And a parade of the gray-suited grafters
A choice of cancer or polio …’
“… which makes me think of Robert Kennedy being in charge of the Department of Health. Not to be too bleak about it. But yeah, it is a celebration and it ends with this kind of gospel rave-up, musically.”
BOB GRUEN
TAMMY FAYE STARLITE
“Salt of the Earth,” which is the album’s last song, also sums it all up, in a way.
“They were hanging out with Gram Parsons,” says Starlite, “and they were exploring country music, which was so different from the psychedelia and experimentation of (1967’s) Their Satanic Majesties Request. This was just basics. The album is primarily acoustic, though ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and ‘Stray Cat’ are electric … although on ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ the guitar only comes in twice, for the solo and the outro. I think it comes from that country tradition of … you could say the common man, or stories of … the real basic emotions of humanity.
“There’s always darkness in country music, too. There’s always sadness. But it’s kind of like expunging your sadness through the lyrics, through the melody, through the guitar. It’s like the musical form itself leads to the lyrical content.”
Starlite’s Outpost in the Burbs set will contain only the 10 Beggars Banquet songs.
“I’ll probably ramble as Mick Jagger,” Starlite adds. “You know, it’s my version of Mick Jagger, which is (changes to a Jagger-like accent) just a really bad accent and being really bitchy, and jumping around.”
Asked if Beggars Banquet is her favorite Rolling Stones album, she replies:
“I think it begins the arc of my favorite Stones period, culminating in Exile (1972’s Exile on Main St.), which is probably my favorite. But Beggars is certainly up there. It’s, you know, Beggars, and Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (the 1970 live album), and Let It Bleed (1969), and Sticky Fingers (1971). But so many of the greatest songs are on Beggar’s Banquet. There isn’t a track that is filler.”
DINA REGINE
LENNY KAYE
Starlite and her band will open the show and be followed by Kaye, who will be backed by James Mastro on bass and John Jackson (formerly of The Jayhawks) on violin and mandolin, with Lonesome Prairie Dogs frontman Steve Strunsky making a guest appearance. Kaye — who will be celebrating the 60th anniversary of his first appearance with a band, at this show — has said it will be “a moment to savor, remember, and to salute the primal spirit of rock and roll.”
Starlite sees a connection between the Rolling Stones music she will perform and Kaye’s work with the groundbreaking Patti Smith Group in the ’70s.
“They created a whole new musical vocabulary and a whole new genre of music, in a sense, through her poetry, and through his guitar playing,” she says. “It kind of took the Stones, and what was going on in New York at the time, and Dylan’s confessionalism and lyricism and imagery … and took it to a different place, and made it into something really unique.
“So Lenny is inextricably linked to the Stones, at least to me.”
In addition to the Outpost show, Starlite will perform at a Bob Dylan tribute concert taking place at Little City Books in Hoboken, Dec. 12. Visit littlecitybooks.com.
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