‘100 Years Ago’: The song The Rolling Stones retired from touring
Try as you might, it is difficult to think of any rock band that rivals The Rolling Stones in terms of their enduring success and breadth of material. For upwards of six decades, the Stones have been one of the biggest rock outfits on the face of the Earth, morphing from adolescent blues devotees to archetypal rock stars recognised the world over. What’s more, the songwriting partnership of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards has produced a wealth of iconic tracks to such an extent that some of their greatest compositions have fallen through the proverbial cracks.
It was band manager Andrew Loog Oldham who first convinced The Rolling Stones to begin writing their own music, inspired by the self-penned success of The Beatles. Until that point, their work had largely been cover versions of blues standards and rock and roll tracks, but their original work elevated the group to the top of the rock and roll pyramid. The very first song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote together was ‘As Tears Go By’, which became a hit for Marianne Faithfull but did not fit with the image of the Stones.
Nevertheless, the pair continued to write songs together, quickly landing upon works like ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and the gospel-inspired ‘The Last Time’, which earned the band a colossal degree of mainstream success, committing them to the pages of rock history indefinitely. Soon, the group began experimenting with a wide variety of sounds and inspiration, trying their hand at psychedelic rock and typifying the hippie age with anthems like ‘Gimmie Shelter’ or ‘Sympathy for the Devil’.
The 1960s were never going to last forever, and the Stones’ image of being Britain’s youthful rock rebels was slipping away by the end of the decade. Popular culture was moving on from the counterculture boom of hippiedom, and the Jagger-Richards partnership was keen to move with the times rather than being lost to the obscurity of time. As a result, the Stones’ early-1970s period is among their most profound and productive eras.
While records like Sticky Fingers and Exile On Main St. are regularly hailed among the greatest rock albums of the 1970s, certain triumphs from that period often go overlooked. Goats Head Soup, for instance, was a divisive album upon its release in 1973 and has since been largely overshadowed within the Stones’ discography. However, if you dig deeper into the album’s tracklisting, it contains some of their most complex and expansive works.
A notable highlight on the 1973 album, ‘100 Years Ago’, sees Jagger tackle the experience of ageing, backed up with country-esque instrumentation that soon descends into a complex and innovative funk jam. Despite the captivating sound of the song, it has never been held in particularly high regard by the band themselves. In fact, the song had been gathering dust for years before being included on Goats Head Soup.
“’100 Years Ago’ was one that Mick [Jagger] had written two years ago and which we hadn’t really got around to using before,” Mick Taylor once revealed.
Even after the song’s eventual release, ‘100 Years Ago’ continued to be overlooked by both the band and mainstream audiences. In their extensive career as a touring band, the song has only been included in two live shows, the opening two dates of the 1973 European tour. After that, the song was never played again by the band and – to date – it doesn’t appear like it will be reappearing anytime soon.
Whether the Stones axed the song from their setlists due to its technically demanding funk breakdown or simply substituted the underrated track for one of their many crowd-pleasing big hits is unknown. After all, there are plenty of Stones tracks that rarely see an outing in their live shows, resulting from their extensive era-defying discography. Nevertheless, ‘100 Years Ago’ remains a woefully underrated Jagger-Richards effort.
