Discouraged by the fan hysteria accompanying the band in concert at the time, their producer-manager Andrew Loog Oldham abandoned the original idea of having the album capture the Stones in a single live performance at London's Royal Albert Hall.

Coupled with the music's commercial impact, the band's high-energy concerts during their North American tour in June and July proved highly successful with young people while alienating local police, who were tasked with controlling the often rebellious and physically exhausting crowds.

[1] Several minutes into the show, however, the band's lead singer Mick Jagger was mobbed onstage by screaming girls from the audience, temporarily stopping the performance – the event was captured on film and featured in a documentary movie.

"[4] The Stones' producer-manager Andrew Loog Oldham abandoned the original idea in response to this "collective hysteria generated by the group, especially among teenagers, which threatened to degenerate into rioting", as Margotin and Guesdon describe.

Sequenced as the LP's opening track, "Under My Thumb" features a passionate introduction of the group by Long John Baldry, who had sung in Alexis Korner's London-based band Blues Incorporated alongside three members of the Rolling Stones in 1962 – Jagger, rhythm guitarist Brian Jones and drummer Charlie Watts.

[1] In his description of the performance, Draper observes "Charlie belting at his kit to drive the band forward on 'Under My Thumb,' Keith and Brian's guitars jagged under Mick's snotty vocal", adding that, "They sound almost disdainful of the fans' reaction, as if sending a message to the hysterical hordes: the Stones have not come to hold your hand, they've come to plunder".

[1] While "Lady Jane" lowers the tempo on the album,[2] "Satisfaction" (with Wyman's bass "super-miked") and "Have You Seen Your Mother" continue the Stones' frenzied and tense musical attack, according to the producer and journalist Sandy Pearlman, who observes in the latter track "the [Stones'] instruments and Mick's voice densely organised into hard, sharp-edged planes of sound: a construction of aural surfaces and regular surfaced planes, a planar conception, the product of a mechanistic discipline, with an emphasis upon the geometrical organization of percussive sounds".

[5] For the album's live recordings, the engineer Glyn Johns used the IBC Mobile Unit, the technical function of which Margotin and Guesdon say was "not yet really suited to rock concerts".

"[6] In Draper's account, "touring equipment at the time didn't have the power required to overcome a rabid audience, and so the Stones, having whipped the crowd into a frenzy, then [found] themselves trying to play louder than the screams that beset them.

[6] The name was first used for a live EP of five songs, released on 11 June 1965 in the UK by the group's British label Decca Records[1] and marketed as capturing "the unadulterated in-person excitement of a Stones stage show".

[6] The album's front cover arrays several photos of the group performing live, shot by the photographer Gered Mankowitz, who had accompanied the band for two 1965 North American tours at their request.

[1] The original LP was issued with liner notes saying it had been recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during the Stones' Autumn 1966 tour of the UK with the Yardbirds and Ike and Tina Turner.

[7] It peaked at number six on the Billboard albums chart,[6] and on 19 January 1967, it was certified Gold by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for sales of at least $1 million at wholesale value.

in February 1967, Pearlman believed the Stones' had mastered their relationship with a live audience, rendering the crowd screams a conceptual element and "an added instrumental dimension – an integral part of the music".

The majority of his review focused instead on the moral implications of the Stones performing sleazily, as he described, for an audience presumed to be mostly adolescent and preadolescent girls, leading him to condemn the band on "puritanical" grounds.

[18] However, according to Stereo Review's Steve Simels in 1977, the LP "had the distinction of being the most poorly recorded live album in history", until Jamaican musician Jimmy Cliff's 1976 In Concert, also produced by Oldham.

[19] In regards to the 1986 ABKCO CD, Mark Moses of High Fidelity observes that "considerable cleanup" had been done to what "has always been an embarrassment" in the Stones' reputation as a live act, although this is not necessarily a good thing, as Jagger is further revealed to be "annoyingly out-of-tune with the rest of the band" on several cuts.

Reviewing for AllMusic, Richie Unterberger approves of the album's concept but finds the resulting release to be disappointing for reasons that may or may not have been the fault of the production team – he cites the poor sound quality and the dubbing of artificial crowd noise onto a few studio recordings as filler.

[1] Greg Kot is more critical in MusicHound Rock (1999), feeling that none of the Stones' live albums are worth hearing because they offer no improvements over the original studio recordings.

Draper says that "the results fully justify the Stones' reputation as one of the British Invasion's finest" and serve as excellent recordings of proto-punk: "The seeds of punk lay in the '60s and, at its best, Got Live If You Want It!