Listen to Brian Jones’ isolated guitar for The Rolling Stones single ‘Get off My Cloud’
The Rolling Stones established themselves in the London R&B scene with a passion for the blues-inspired rock and roll popularised in the 1950s by American acts like Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. Multi-instrumentalist and blues fanatic Brian Jones initially helmed the group.
Having named the group after Muddy Waters’ 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’, Jones planned to infect the British charts with the blues. With Mick Jagger front and centre, it was Jones who directed the band during their launch to national stardom and shook hands with Andrew Loog Oldham, the band’s first manager and stable producer, in May 1963.
By the end of 1964, Jones had already achieved his goal of bringing the blues to Britain with the Stones’ reimagination of Willie Dixon’s blues staple, ‘Little Red Rooster’. This single became the first traditional blues track to reach the top of the UK chart, and it remains the only one to this day.
With this milestone, Jones had accomplished a feat beyond his wildest dreams, and the band’s subsequent conformity to a Beatles-channeling pop sound began to wear his patience. As Jagger and Richards became more competent as songwriters, Jones became a less potent force within the band. Compounding this withdrawal was a spiralling addiction struggle that eventually saw Jones expelled from the band.
In 1965, the Jagger-Richards writing partnership struck full stride with ‘The Last Time’, ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and ‘Get Off of My Cloud’. These original singles soared through the charts, with ‘The Last Time’ reaching number one in the UK and number nine in the US. The latter two hit the top spot on both sides of the Atlantic.
“‘Get Off of My Cloud’ was basically a response to people knocking on our door asking us for the follow-up to ‘Satisfaction’,” Richards said of the pivotal year’s third single. “We thought, ‘At last. We can sit back and maybe think about events’. Suddenly there’s the knock at the door, and of course, what came out of that was ‘Get Off of My Cloud'”
“I never dug it as a record,” he added in a 1971 interview with Rolling Stone. “The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow-up. We were in LA, and it was time for another single. But how do you follow up ‘Satisfaction’? Actually, what I wanted was to do it slow, like a Lee Dorsey thing. We rocked it up. I thought it was one of Andrew Loog Oldham’s worst productions.”
In the classic hit, Richards took the rhythm parts while Jones played the lead run throughout. The song begins with Charlie Watts’ distinctive drumming intro, which can be heard below before Brian Jones’ melodic isolated guitar lines.
