How the Rolling Stones’ Acid-Rock Misfire Quietly Shaped a Generation of Experimentalists

The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request is usually written off as a coked-out, Sgt. Pepper copycat—the album where the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band tried on paisley and didn’t quite fit. Critics hated it, and the Stones themselves distanced from it for years. But beneath the muddled songwriting, the album was a laboratory. During sessions at Olympic Studios, the band and engineer Glyn Johns experimented with early tape loops, phasing, and backward effects on tracks like “2000 Light Years from Home” and “She’s a Rainbow.” They weren’t just borrowing from the Beatles; they were quietly pioneering studio-as-instrument techniques that would become standard for psychedelic rock.

The album’s surrealistic cover—a 3D lenticular photograph designed by Michael Cooper of a mock witch’s sabbath—was itself a technical gamble. It was one of the first pop albums to use that technique, and the imagery (flowers, crystals, astral robes) signaled a deliberate