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Rolling Stones songs: 2000 Man
Don’t you know I’m a 2000 man/ And my kids, they just don’t understand me at all…
Original title: I Want All the People to Know Written by: Jagger/Richard Recorded: Olympic Sound Studios, London, England, July 7-22, Aug. 5 and Oct. 16, 21 and 23 1967 *Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012
Mick Jagger: vocals Keith Richards: guitar, backing vocals Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: drums Guest musicians: Nicky Hopkins (organ)
Imagine a world where progress is an illusion—where the future simply loops back on itself, repeating the same human confusions in new clothes. That is the quietly unsettling vision embedded in 2000 Man. Mick Jagger’s futuristic narrator is neither enlightened nor liberated by the year 2000; instead, he is reduced to a number, an identification printed on plastic film, tending peculiar flowers by a lonely window. His morals, too, feel strangely unmoored: a wife who still respects him despite past failures, and an affair not with a person but with a computer—a symbol of intimacy as artificial as the society he lives in. For Jagger, tomorrow doesn’t promise clarity or comfort. The Rolling Stones use this character to suggest that even in an age of dazzling technology, human contradictions and emotional disarray refuse to disappear.
Experiments In Sound
When Mick Jagger later reflected on the making of Their Satanic Majesties Request, he described the sessions as drifting into stranger and more experimental territory as the weeks progressed. 2000 Man, recorded near the end of the album’s creation in October 1967, embodies that spirit completely. The track unfolds in three distinct sections, each representing a different facet of the Stones’ late-’60s ambition. Yet the brilliance of those ideas did not always translate smoothly in the studio. The musicians grappled with arrangements, sonic textures, and mixing decisions that sometimes left the final product feeling muddled. This tension—between daring creativity and the limits of their execution—permeates every moment of the song.
The result is a piece that is both adventurous and uneven, a musical sketch where the Stones push the boundaries of their sound while occasionally losing their grip on its coherence.
Folk Roots and Futuristic Shadows
The song begins with a delicate acoustic passage from Keith Richards, played on his Hummingbird guitar with the same crisp elegance he would later refine on Beggars Banquet. Nicky Hopkins’ piano adds warmth, while Brian Jones colors the intro with electric dulcimer tones, giving the folk foundation an almost otherworldly shimmer. However, Charlie Watts’s drum part introduces an unexpected complexity. His rhythm—paired with a delayed snare effect—creates a sense of imbalance that blurs the clean simplicity Richards and Jones had crafted.
Yet this opening feels intentionally fragile, as if mirroring the fractured identity of the 2000 Man himself. Beneath the folk exterior lies a strange, unsettled tension: a futuristic folk tale wrapped in the gentle textures of pastoral instrumentation. The Stones appear to be toying with the idea that the future might not be sleek or streamlined at all—it may instead be a patched-together world of familiar shapes warped into unsettling new forms.
When the Groove Awakens
At the 1:19 mark everything sharpens. The second section slips into a livelier tempo, grounding the song in a more traditional rock pulse. Twenty seconds later the transformation is complete: the groove locks in, the drums settle into their natural swagger, and Keith unleashes a blend of lead and rhythm guitar that injects the song with unmistakable Stones firepower. Nicky Hopkins switches to the Hammond B-3, delivering swirling, vibrant organ lines that push the track into full rock territory.
A brief jazzy interlude appears a little later, a whimsical detour before the band circles back to the folk section—now more cohesive and confident. Jagger’s vocals shift from high, strained registers to a grounded rock delivery as the song evolves, and he layers in harmonies that reinforce the song’s conceptual strangeness. Even with its moments of brilliance, 2000 Man remains a puzzle of ideas that never fully clicks into a single, unified piece.
Legacy and Reinvention
Despite its flaws—and perhaps because of them—2000 Man has endured as one of the Stones’ most underappreciated deep cuts. Its blend of science-fiction themes, fractured identity, and musical experimentation stands apart from the swaggering blues-rock that made the band famous. The song’s sense of a society turned upside down echoes the unease found in earlier Stones classics like Mother’s Little Helperand19th Nervous Breakdown, but here the anxiety is projected into a distant, digitized future.
Its afterlife became even more surprising when Kiss recorded a muscular, breath-stealing version for their 1979 Dynasty album. Their interpretation, sung by Ace Frehley, tapped into the song’s futuristic grit with a clarity and force that the original’s chaotic charm only hinted at.
2000 Man may never have achieved mainstream recognition, but its strange blend of folk beauty, rock muscle, and dystopian storytelling continues to resonate—an unsettling prophecy wrapped in one of The Rolling Stones’ boldest experiments.
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