Keith Richards’ cassette tape trick that made 'Street Fighting Man' sound like a riot

The distorted, overdriven guitar on “Street Fighting Man” wasn’t a cranked Marshall — it was Keith Richards playing a Gibson Hummingbird acoustic with a capo at the third fret, recorded through a portable Philips cassette deck that was already maxed out. The tape saturation and tiny speaker gave the acoustic track a compressed, fuzzy crunch that sounded like a full-throttle electric. Richards then double-tracked the part with a second cassette machine playing back the first, creating that sludgy, chaotic texture that fit the song’s street-fight mood.

Lyrically, Mick Jagger wrote the song in early 1968, directly inspired by the escalating student protests in Paris (the ’68 May events). The line “What can a poor boy do / ’cept to sing for a rock ’n’ roll band?” was both a shrug and a challenge — the band knew their audience was young, angry, and looking for an anthem. But they were careful not to endorse violence outright. The song got banned from many American radio stations because of the title and the line “the time is right for violent revolution,” though Jagger insisted it was a documentary observation, not a call to arms.