Nearly half of The Rolling Stones’ work could be considered a game-changer in rock music. Although The Beatles may have sent shockwaves worldwide the minute they touched down in America to play The Ed Sullivan Show, The Rolling Stones were the demented answer to them, either playing blues covers or creating songs that no parent wanted to catch their kids listening to. For all of the incredible repertoire they have accumulated over the years, though, some of the band’s most significant material almost got shelved in their early days.
When working on the London club scene, the band’s goal was to become masters of the blues. Started by Brian Jones in the early 1960s, the entire ethos of the group initially relied on doing warped takes on American blues music, with their name taken from the title of an old Muddy Waters song.
Once the band drafted Mick Jagger on vocals and Keith Richards on guitar, though, they began to assume their classic form, putting a lot more attitude into those blues anthems. As the Stones saw the massive amount of money that could be made writing original material, though, manager Andrew Loog Oldham recommended that Jagger and Richards try their hand at writing songs.
As Richards would tell Howard Stern, “[Oldham] said ‘Listen, guys, we can’t keep doing covers forever. He locked Mick and me in a kitchen and said, ‘Come out with a song’”. Even though the songwriting duo would blossom into the greatest songwriters of their generation, their lack of confidence in their material led to them giving many of their songs away.
After being gifted the song ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ from The Beatles, Jagger and Richards brought their first song, ‘As Tears Go By’, to Marianne Faithfull, not thinking it would fit within The Rolling Stones mould. As opposed to the traditional way of writing songs for their outfit, Jagger and Richards said that most of their first songs weren’t any good for the Stones.
When explaining their process, Richards said that most of the songs resulted from practising, explaining, “We didn’t think [our songs] were any good at all. But at the same time, I think Andrew was giving us leeway to figure it out. Songwriting isn’t something that happens overnight. We were writing some of the pop crap because it’s easy”.
All the while, Richards slowly developed songs that would be good enough to show to the rest of the band. After dwelling on pop songs for so long, the duo eventually came up with ‘The Last Time’, which became the first major single the band had bearing the name ‘Jagger-Richards’ in the credits.
To this day, Richards still has the same philosophy when writing songs, wanting something that fits into the vibe of The Rolling Stones without compromising their sonic identity. Although Richards may have an innate ability to come up with riffs out of the ether, his first steps into songwriting were proof that he could be a master at pop songwriting as well. No matter how many times he sat down with his guitar, Richards knew the importance of working out that creative muscle in his brain.
