The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards always disliked: “We rushed it”
A post ‘Satisfaction’ version of The Rolling Stones was a band at their peak stress, to say the very least. After the runaway success of their hit single, the expectations were mounting for another follow-up, one that had all the anthemic energy of the previous effort and then some.
‘Get Off Of My Cloud’ was the band’s answer to the demands, a direct and somewhat rushed response to the people banging on their door with hands outstretched, expecting another hit. But rather than feeling relief when the single was well-received, guitarist Keith Richards said he “never dug it as a record”.
“The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow-up,” he confessed in Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews & Encounters. “We were in LA, and it was time for another single – but how do you follow up ‘Satisfaction’?” he added. What Richards had in mind was a slower, Lee Dorsey-esque sound. Ultimately, what he wound up playing was a high-speed rock song he described as one of “Andrew Loog Oldham’s worst productions”.
The track seemed to resonate far more with Mick Jagger, who spent some time explaining his lyrics to Rolling Stone in 1995. “It’s a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song. The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early 1960s, and I was coming out of it,” he said. “America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society, in thought and behaviour and dress.”
His discomfort bleeds through the lyrics: “I was sick and tired, fed up with this, and decided to take a drive downtown / It was so very quiet and peaceful, there was nobody, not a soul around”. But it also reads as the Stones being sick of the constant pressure their fame brought with it and wanting to enjoy some isolation.
Richards discussed how that impacted his creative process on ‘Get Off of My Cloud’, saying in The Billboard Book of Number 1 Hits: “It’s difficult to realise what pressure we were under to keep producing hits – each single you made in those days had to be better and do better.”
Although on stage, there was never any hint the iconic British band was struggling with the trappings of success, it bubbled away in the back of their minds constantly. “If the next one didn’t do as well as the last one, everyone told you [that] you were sliding out,” said Richards. “It got to be a state of mind. Every eight weeks, you had to come up with a red-hot song that said it all in two minutes, 30 seconds.”
‘Get Off of My Cloud’ did that particularly well in the US, reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and staying there for 12 weeks – so although Richards made it no secret that he disliked the track, it remains a fan favourite that just about scratched the ‘Satisfaction’ itch.
