The Rolling Stones "Between The Buttons" Decca ?LK 4852 Mono 3A/1A UK 1st 1967

	£		21
	$		28

The Rolling Stones ? "Between The Buttons"  Decca ?LK 4852  UK 1st press
Mono Vinyl, LP, released in 1967.
The vinyl has a few surface marks, but played through beautifully on my elderly stereo - no hop, stick or jump. The sleeve shows some signs of wear and is a little grubby at the rear, but is in generally good condition, with no rips or writing. The spine is intact and legible. Matrix / Runout  Side 1 : XARL-7644-3A Matrix / Runout  Side 2 : XARL-7645-1A
"Between the Buttons" is the Rolling Stones' fifth British and seventh American studio album, released on 20 January 1967 in the UK and 11 February in the US as the follow-up to "Aftermath". It was the beginning of the Stones' brief foray into psychedelia.
It is among the band's most musically adventurous works; by the time principal recording occurred on the album, founder Brian Jones had all but abandoned his original role as guitarist, instead playing a wide variety of other instruments. Also appearing on the album were band members Mick Jagger (lead vocals, various percussion, harmonica), Keith Richards (lead and rhythm guitar), Bill Wyman (bass), and Charlie Watts (drums). Keyboard parts were contributed by former member Ian Stewart and frequent collaborator Jack Nitzsche. It would be the last album produced by Andrew Loog Oldham, who had to this point acted as the band's manager and produced all of their prior albums.
The photo shoot for the album cover took place in November 1966 on Primrose Hill in North London. The photographer was Gered Mankowitz, who also shot the band photos for the cover of "Out of Our Heads". The shoot took place at 5:30 in the morning following an all night recording session at Olympic Studios. Using a home-made camera filter constructed of black card, glass and Vaseline, Mankowitz created the effect of the Stones dissolving into their surroundings. The goal of the shoot was, in Mankowitz's words, "to capture the ethereal, druggy feel of the time; that feeling at the end of the night when dawn was breaking and they'd been up all night making music, stoned." Brian Jones' disheveled and gaunt appearance on the cover disturbed many of his fans, and critic David Dalton wrote that he looked "like a doomed albino raccoon."
"Brian [Jones] was lurking in his collar," Mankowitz commented years later, "I was frustrated because it felt like we were on the verge of something really special and he was messing it up. But the way Brian appeared to not give a shit is exactly what the band was about." Outtakes from this photo session were later used for the cover and inner sleeves of the 1972 ABKCO compilation release "More Hot Rocks (Big Hits & Fazed Cookies)".
The back cover of "Between the Buttons" is dominated by a six-panel cartoon accompanied by a rhythmic poem drawn by drummer Charlie Watts. When Watts asked Oldham what the title of the album would be, he told him it was "between the buttons", a term meaning "undecided". Watts gave the phrase to the title of his cartoon which in turn became the title of the album.
"Between the Buttons", like many British long-players, differed between its UK and US versions. The UK edition (in the form Oldham and the Stones intended it) was issued on 20 January 1967 (Mono, LK 4852; Stereo, SKL 4852) on Decca Records, concurrently with a separate single, "Let's Spend the Night Together" b/w "Ruby Tuesday." As was common in the British record industry at the time, the single did not appear on the album. "Between the Buttons" reached number three in the UK.
"Between the Buttons" was called "among the greatest rock albums" by Robert Christgau, who later included it in his "Basic Record Library" of 1950s and 1960s recordings, published in Christgau's Record Guide: Rock Albums of the Seventies (1981). AllMusic's Richie Unterberger hailed it as one of the Rolling Stones' "strongest, most eclectic LPs". In a retrospective review for Entertainment Weekly, David Browne called the album "a cheeky set of sardonic Swinging London vaudeville rock", while Billboard magazine's Christopher Walsh wrote that "it's brimming with overlooked gems, the band delivering a captivating blend of folky, Beatles-esque pop and tough bluesy rockers." Tom Moon wrote in The Rolling Stone Album Guide (2004) that the album was "lighter and thinner" than Aftermath and, "having belatedly discovered pop melody, Jagger and Richards were suddenly overdosing on the stuff." Jim DeRogatis included "Between the Buttons" in his 2003 list of the essential psychedelic rock albums.