“It took us a while”: The first Rolling Stones song Keith Richards was proud of
Smashed-up hotel rooms, drug busts, and a different city every night, The Rolling Stones embodied the archetypal life of rock and roll excess during their heyday. In all the anarchy and stories of wild antics, it can be easy to forget that the Stones were only teenagers when they first got together in 1962. As such, it took the budding young blues outfit a few years to truly find their feet, both as performers and songwriters. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards penned some of the most iconic rock tunes of all time, but it took them a long time to get there.
Each founding member of The Rolling Stones was deeply ingrained in London’s blues scene during the early 1960s, and when Brian Jones set about forming the group, American blues music was the be-all and end-all. Artists like Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters formed the bulk of the Stones’ inspiration during those early days, and their live performances were routinely dominated by covers of old-school blues, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll songs.
While the young band found a dedicated audience for this sound, if they were going to have any chance of making a mark on rock history, they would have to write their own material. It was the band’s pseudo-rivals, The Beatles, who led the charge when it came to self-penned songs during the 1960s. Prior to the advent of Lennon and McCartney, the majority of rock and pop groups had their songs written for them and dictated by the record label.
So, when The Beatles started to make an impact with their original material, The Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, encouraged Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to begin writing original material for their band, too.
‘As Tears Go By’ was the first composition written by the Jagger-Richards writing partnership, but it was so unlike anything The Rolling Stones had recorded before that Oldham offered it to Marianne Faithfull. Reaching nine in the UK singles chart, the song encouraged Jagger and Richards to continue writing, but it would take a little longer to strike upon the prolific rock and roll sound they would eventually become synonymous with.
“I thought, ‘What are we doing here playing the fucking blues, and writing these horrible pop songs and getting very successful?’” Richards once recalled. “They had nothing to do with us, except we wrote ’em.” According to the guitarist, their breakthrough single as a writing partnership did not arrive until 1965, when ‘The Last Time’ hit the airwaves and went straight to the top of the singles chart.
Recalling the success of the single, Richards shared, “It took us a while to come up with ‘The Last Time’. That was the first one we came up with where Mick and I said, ‘This is one we can lay on the guys.’” When the single reached number one shortly after its release, the pair of songwriters must have been feeling pretty vindicated in their efforts. ‘The Last Time’ went on to define the sound of the Stones during the mid-1960s and set the Jagger-Richards partnership on a path to creating some of the most iconic rock songs in history.
Despite the songwriter’s pride over the song, ‘The Last Time’ has regularly attracted accusations of plagiarism. Although only Richards and Jagger’s names appear on the songwriting credits, the track is virtually identical to the traditional gospel song ‘This May Be the Last Time’, recorded over a decade prior by The Staple Singers. None of the original songwriters received credit for the success of The Rolling Stones track, and the single was far from being the only time the band stole inspiration from underappreciated Black artists without credit.
