The opening track on my personal Classic Rock playlist is the most famous opening guitar riffs of all time (Ok it’s a toss-up between “[I Can’t Get No] Satisfaction” and “Smoke On The Water” – let’s not get distracted!). I know it’s a cliché to like this song and visualise a young Mick Jagger belting out this song of ennui and frustration. But, when a song is this good – cliches be damned! I first heard this on “A Date With You” one late Friday night around Dec ’76. I was discovering all kinds of music then – from George McCrae and Beatles to Pink Floyd and Eagles – but, The Rolling Stones, attitude literally bursting out of the radio, just blew me away. For some reason I can’t fathom, in India we never really fell in love with the Stones – we were definitely more Beatles nation – and so I had never really heard anything by the Stones before. That sound turned my love foir the Beatles inside out – what a brilliant song to be introduced to the Stones!!  I remember looking for this amongst the vinyls at Bercos and Rhythm Corner but unfortunately came up empty. Found it some  years later and treasured it for a long time, till my Ma threw out my entire vinyl collection when I left home 🤦🏽‍♂️

Keith Richards wrote the riff for Satisfaction, literally, in his sleep. Apparently one night, almost asleep (or maybe in an advanced state of medicated meditation? 😉) in his flat in St. John’s Wood , Keith came up with a riff on his acoustic guitar, which was (thankfully) recorded on his cassette player by mistake – followed by 40 minutes of snoring!  😆. He shared the riff with Mick Jagger, who, a few days later, wrote lyrics, that are, incredibly, as good as this world-beating riff. Lyrics of frustration at the mind-games played by everyone – from Parents to Advertisers and from the Tour organisers to the Girls he wants to bed, but can’t. And, in Jagger style, he recorded it, in just one take, with the attitude knob turned up to 11!!  Amazingly, despite all that, Richards & Jagger weren’t convinced that this would be a hit and didn’t want to release it as a single – the rest of the band had to outvote them. Imagine, one of the top 10 rock songs of all time, might never have been released at all – the mind boggles !!😳

The second Stones song I ever heard left me with major trust issues for a number of years. Seriously. Back when I was a kid, I bought Anand Shankar’s debut album (you remember the yellow one with the sitar on the cover?) The opening track was a real groovy sitar-led instrumental version of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. And for a few years, I truly believed that Jumpin Jack Flash was an Anand Shankar song – only to be disabused of that notion by an announcer on AIR. I could never trust anything after that 😆. Jumpin’ Jack Flash is named after an old gardener of Keith Richards, called Jack Dyer. One night, Jagger was woken up by the sound of the gardener stomping around. Next morning, when he asked Keith about the sound, Keith said “Oh that’s Jack, that’s Jumpin’ Jack”…and a song name was born!

Schoolyard buddies Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reunited by chance on Platform 2 at the Dartford Station on 17^th Oct 1961 (There’s a plaque on the platform to commemorate this!).  Jagger was carrying a Muddy Waters record, which sparked off a conversation that led to a musical partnership that is still going strong 60 years later! The duo connected with Brian Jones at an audition and Jones pulled together the original line-up of the band, including Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts. Brian Jones, the leader of the band, named it during a phone call with a reporter. When asked for the band’s name, Jones, nonplussed, saw a Muddy Waters record lying on the floor with one of the tracks named “Rollin’ Stone”. And picked that as the name of the (future) greatest rock and roll band in the world ! Chicago Blues and Rock & Roll sounds of Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddly etc were the inspiration for The Stones early on – and they’ve pretty much stuck to a template of taking blues and rock ‘n roll sounds and making them sound more “dangerous” with hard guitaring and drums and singing them with attitude. And so, it was an obvious marketing ploy to position them as the Anti-Beatles – no suits, rumpled hair, suggestive lyrics …and a leering Jagger! The Beatles were the boys girls wanted to marry 😇…the Stones were the boys girls wanted😜.

If you go back and watch the video of “You Can’t Get Everything You Want”, you’ll notice a certain John Lennon and Yoko One in the audience! Truth is, there really wasn’t any animosity between the Beatles and Stones – the Stones’ second single was the Lennon–McCartney song “I Wanna Be Your Man”. The song was written and given to the Stones when John Lennon and Paul McCartney visited them in the studio as the two Beatles liked giving the copyrights to songs away to their friends. It reached No. 12 on the UK charts and 1 January 1964 (two weeks after I was born), the Stones’ were the first band ever to play on BBC’s new Top of the Pops program, playing “I Wanna Be Your Man”. Their careers were like a caterpillar on the T20 graph – just shadowing each other, with Beatles being slightly ahead through the 60s. Of course, the Beatles imploded at the end of 69 while the Stones are still here 50 years later! I guess you really can’t get everything you want, but you might get what you need!

“Paint It Black” has been one of my personal favourites for a long long time – from the opening riff down to the deep lyrics dealing with depression, heartbreak and loss. And Brian Jones playing the sitar – somehow, while we’ve always talked about George Harrison playing the sitar on Norwegian Wood, Brian Jones is seldom mentioned! He studied sitar under Harihar Rao, a disciple of Ravi Shankar at the same time as George was learning it. And, the melancholy sitar really makes this song flow – of course, not forgetting Charlie Watts’ drumming and Richard’s guitar laying down a path for depression to flow through. There’s just something about the song that tugs at my heartstrings. And it’s a bit crazy that this song hit #1 in the US – what was everybody drinking?

The 60s Stones were incredible – I believe, late 60s Stones were better than late 60s Beatles. “Let’s Spend The Night Together” is another one of my favourites (Ed Sullivan in the US forced Jagger to replace the lyrics to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together” – you should watch Jagger roll his eyes 😂 as he sings in that video). My other favourite is “Got Off Of My Cloud” You can well imagine why 60s dads didn’t want their daughters to listen to the Stones

 Stick around for part II – the Stones get even better!