Flashback

I had my iPod on shuffle the other day and “Citadel,” the second track from the Rolling Stones’ “Their Satanic Majesties Request” album came up.
The album, which was a huge departure from the Stones’ roots as a blues band, was released in the U.S. on Dec. 8, 1967 and was considered their psychedelic response to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that came out six months earlier.
A lot of Stones fans consider it a horrible aberration and hate it, but I love it and play it every couple of months.
The track took me back to the winter of 1967-68 when I was 22 years old and in my first year at The Indianapolis News. Specifically, it took me back to an evening when Bob Basler and I were working in his photographic darkroom in the basement of his mother’s house in the Broad Ripple section of Indianapolis. We were smoking weed and listening to this album, with special attention to the funky break that comes at about the 3:08 mark in “2000 Light Years from Home.”
It still sounds cool to my ears 43 years later.