Jagger and Richards as Songwriters

OVERVIEW

In the last lesson, we looked at the Beatles. In this lesson, we will consider their counterparts in the British Invasion, the Rolling Stones. As we will see, the Rolling Stones had a very different trajectory than the Beatles did. They began as a blues cover band in London, and although their career exploded at about the same time as the Beatles', they far outlived their Fab Four counterparts as a group. Today, the members of the Rolling Stones are in their seventies and still going strong.

OBJECTIVES

Be ready to:

Recall the British blues revival tradition, which began as British musicians studied and emulated the music of Chicago blues musicians such as Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters

Recall the early days of the Rolling Stones and consider how their style changed as they moved from recording mostly covers of blues music to writing their own material

Identify the many ways in which the Rolling Stones were the opposite of the Beatles, apart from being a British rock band that was popular beginning in the middle of the 1960s

Jagger and Richards as Songwriters

Keith Richards

As the Rolling Stones began to achieve some modest success on the British popular music charts, Oldham realized that they were losing significant amounts of money because they were paying songwriting royalties to the artists whose music they were covering. Instead of playing the music of "middle-aged blacks," as Oldham put it, he encouraged the members of the group to begin writing their own songs. According to legend, Oldham locked Jagger and Richards in a room and refused to let them out until they managed to write a song. Jagger and Richards both admit that their earliest efforts were pretty terrible, but they quickly improved. Their recorded earliest effort, "The Last Time ♫," went to number 1 in the UK but did not grab the attention of American audiences.

Richards and Jagger wrote more and more songs of the band's songs over time, but the Stones' first six albums contain a mix of cover songs and Jagger-Richards originals. In fact, the majority of the songs on these albums are covers, and these cover songs are steeped in the Chicago blues tradition of artists such as Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley. The Stones were not averse to incorporating other American styles into their music. "It's All Over Now ♫," which is a cover of a Bobby Womack rhythm and blues song, includes a 12-string rhythm guitar and vocal harmony gestures borrowed from the genre of country and western music.

Mick Jagger

"The Rolling Stones have been the best of all possible worlds: they have the lack of pretension and sentimentality associated with the blues, the rawness and toughness of hard rock, and the depth which always makes you feel that they are in the midst of saying something. They have never impressed me as being kitsch."

-Jon Landau

FUN FACTS

The Rolling Stones' "famous tongue logo was inspired by the Indian Hindu goddess Kali The Destroyer. It was designed by John Pasche, who was a student at the Royal College of Art in London when he got a gig designing a poster for The Stones 1970 European tour. Mick Jagger was wowed by the poster, so he asked Pasche to create a logo for their new record label. Jagger suggested Kali as a starting point, and Pasche incorporated Mick's mouth into the design. The logo first appeared on the inner sleeve of the Sticky Fingers album. The cover of that album was designed by Andy Warhol, who is sometimes mistakenly credited with creating the lips logo."

Songfacts