• Writers: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
• Producer: Jimmy Miller
• Recorded: March and May, 1968 at Olympic Studios, London
• Released: August 1968 (U.S.), July 1970 (U.K.)
• Players:
  Mick Jagger — vocals
  Keith Richards — guitar
  Brian Jones — tamboura, sitar
  Bill Wyman — bass
  Charlie Watts — drums
• Album: Beggars Banquet (London, 1968)
• Also on: Through the Past, Darkly (Big Hits, Vol. 2) (London, 1969)
  Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out! (London, 1970)
  Hot Rocks (London, 1972)
  Singles Collection: The London Years (Abkco, 1989)
  Stripped (Virgin, 1995)
• “Street Fighting Man” was the first Stones track produced by Jimmy Miller, who would go on to work with the Stones on classic albums such as Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street and Goats Head Soup.
• The song was originally titled “Pay Your Dues.”
• The song was inspired by the student riots during 1968 in Paris and by the riots at the 1968 Democratic Party convention in Chicago.
• The lyric “summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the streets” was inspired by the Motown hit “Dancing in the Street.”
• The photo sleeve for the original single showed demonstrators being beaten by police. The image was banned in the U.K. and the U.S.
• Decca, the Stones’ U.K. label, originally refused to release “Street Fighting Man” as a single in the U.K., because it felt the song was too subversive. It was also banned by some U.S. radio stations, which felt the song might incite more rioting.
• About the bannings, Mick Jagger told the London Evening Standard that “The last time they banned one of our records in America, it sold a million.”
• As for the song’s durability, Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine in 1995 that “I’m not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don’t really like it that much. I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on.”
• Despite the resistance by some U.S. radio programmers, “Street Fighting Man” still hit Number 48 on the Billboard Hot 100.
• It’s worth noting that the furor over “Street Fighting Man” was subsequently eclipsed by another controversial track from the Beggars Banquet album, “Sympathy for the Devil.”
• The Beggars Banquet album, considered by many to be one of the Stones’ best, hit Number Five on the Billboard Top 200 chart and sold more than a million copies.

FAST FORWARD:

• The Rolling Stones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.
• Guitarist Ron Wood recently published an autobiography. His fellow guitarist Keith Richards is planning to publish his in 2009.