2000 Light Years from Home and the Stones' Space-Age Psychedelia

The most interesting thing about “2000 Light Years from Home” is that Brian Jones’ new Mellotron basically is the song. He’d just discovered the thing—a tape-replay keyboard that could mimic flutes, strings, and choirs—and he layered it into a cold, alien drone that makes the track feel like a transmission from deep space. The band was deep into their “Their Satanic Majesties Request” sessions, and this was their most convincing trip into psychedelia.

Beyond the Mellotron, the recording leaned on studio tricks that were cutting-edge for 1967. The phased, swirling sound came from an early version of automatic double-tracking (ADT), which engineer Glyn Johns used to smear the vocals and guitars. There’s also a ghostly theremin-like whine that was probably a signal generator or a processed guitar—accounts differ. Mick Jagger’s vocal was drenched in echo, adding to the sense of being alone in a capsule. The whole thing was tracked at Olympic Sound Studios in London, and the band’s drug bust earlier that year gave the paranoid, lost-in-space lyrics an extra edge. It’