Glyn Johns and the Cassette Trick Behind 'Street Fighting Man'

Glyn Johns engineered Beggars Banquet at a time when the Stones were tired of polished production and wanted raw energy. His biggest sleight of hand came on “Street Fighting Man”: Keith Richards had written the riff on a cheap acoustic guitar, but in the studio the band couldn’t get the right percussive crunch. So Johns placed a cassette recorder—a Philips mono dictation machine—directly in front of Richards’ acoustic, overloading its tiny microphone. He then fed that distorted cassette signal back into the board, essentially using the tape recorder as a preamp. The result was the song’s signature fuzzy, compressed rhythm track.

Johns also kept the session loose and live. He recorded the band playing together in one room, with no isolation booths, and used minimal overdubs. For “Sympathy for the Devil,” he captured the famous conga groove by having Rocky Dijon and other percussionists circle a single mic. The entire album was mixed in a week, partly because Johns wanted to avoid the overproduction that had bogged down Their Satanic Majesties Request. His cassette-recorder trick for “Street Fighting Man” became a piece of rock folklore—a reminder that limitations often force the most creative solutions.