The Rolling Stones song that divided the band: “The best we’ve done”
Not everything a band plays has to be their favourite piece of music ever conceived. Everyone has those songs they wish they could forget, and even if a track has a lot of potential, there’s no telling whether it’s going to go down like gangbusters with the crowd or leave everyone with blank expressions on their faces when they leave the show. A lot of it is trial by fire, but it would take a lot of convincing for The Rolling Stones to get on board with songs outside of their comfort zone.
Then again, the biggest common thread of all great Stones songs was the blues. The whole point behind some of their greatest tracks was for Keith Richards to live out the fantasies that he heard about when listening to people like Willie Dixon and Robert Johnson back in the day, and while they did have a pop streak to them, their heart would always be in making energetic blues tunes.
That wasn’t what was selling at the time, though. The Stones had cut their teeth as an R&B group when they first played in the London clubs, but when the British invasion began, Mick Jagger and Richards had slowly turned themselves into pop songwriters. There was no way they would have thought of writing something like ‘As Tears Go By’, but once they had their bearings, they were as prolific as anything John Lennon and Paul McCartney were doing.
Some of their early records may have been solid helpings of rock and roll, but ‘It’s All Over Now’ was a bit of a sore spot for the rest of the group. It still has its roots in blues, but there’s something about the raw sound of the record that hit the rest of the band differently when they first recorded it.
When talking about the track at the time, Brian Jones remembered being less than thrilled hearing the playback, saying, “I’m not all that keen on the record. It’s alright, but I don’t know, there’s just something.” That may have been because of its lean towards country music, but that was only a step in the right direction as far as Richards was concerned.
Jones was always a bit of a blues purist in many respects, but Richards knew there was a lot more waiting for them if they tried out new styles, saying, “As it happens, I think ‘It’s All Over Now’ is the best single we’ve done, and I’m glad to say the group improves every time it makes a single. At least, we think so. I like the overall sound on this new one more than I did on anything before.”
While Jones did eventually get on board and start playing a million different instruments on some of the band’s best-known songs, it was clear that Richards was heading in the right direction by bringing a bit of a twang to everything. He already had a slightly country edge to the way that he played, and when the band eventually moved on after Jones’s tragic passing, Richards had graduated from listening to Muddy Waters to being influenced by artists like Hank Williams as well.
So while ‘It’s All Over Now’ was a bit further away from the blues than what Jones had hoped for, it was all about them progressing forward like everyone else. After all, The Beatles would have gone nowhere if they stayed with their traditional Merseybeat sound, so it was about time that their rivals started thinking in the same way.
