‘As Tears Go By’: The Rolling Stones, kitchen lockdowns, and the beginners guide to beginning
What is the secret sauce that bands like The Rolling Stones possess that allows them to keep writing such good songs decade after decade?
If you could bottle whatever talent it is they have and sell it, then you’d make millions in moments, there’s no doubt about it. However, if you speak to the majority of creative people and ask them what the secret is, chances are, they’ll tell you that there isn’t one. Sure, they’ll have their own techniques and will share different means of approaching things, but for the most part, the key to engaging with your creativity is just to start. It sounds simple, because it is, but does that mean you’re going to end up writing songs as good as The Rolling Stones?, no probably not, but you won’t know unless you try.
When Rick Rubin spoke about being a creative person and revelling in said creativity, he said that persistence and continuity are the two best qualities you can possess, and in his book, The Creative Act, he wrote that you need to be consistent if you want to call yourself an artist, and attested that it had nothing to do with the end result and everything to do with your relentlessness in getting there.
“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice, or you’re not. It makes no sense to say you’re not good at it. It’s like saying, ‘I’m not good at being a monk.’ You are either living as a monk, or you’re not,” he wrote, “We tend to think of the artist’s work as the output. The real work of the artist is a way of being in the world.”
Going back to The Rolling Stones, the blues-infused Londoners are probably the best example of how you can be successful with this kind of mindset. When they started their career, they didn’t play any original material, and it was starting to look like they never would.
You can trace the origin of The Rolling Stones all the way back to a Muddy Waters tour in the ‘50s. Waters is arguably one of the greatest blues guitarists in the world, as even when playing in relatively simple pockets of music, he manages to unleash some level of emotional maturity and resilience which is unlike anything you have heard before. Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top, who has a pretty good understanding of the blues, once said that Waters was leagues above anybody else.
“Nobody can do what Muddy did, but his energy is still fueling that fire,” he said. “You can hear his enthusiasm in bands like the White Stripes or the Black Keys. I’d recommend his first album, The Best of Muddy Waters, with the early Chess singles, to anyone. Every track is worthy. The albums Johnny Winter produced in the late Seventies, Hard Again and I’m Ready, are also terrific.”
In 1958, Muddy Waters brought his iconic sound to the UK, and in the crowd were a number of budding musicians who had never seen blues or R&B music played live before. Amongst them were The Rolling Stones, who felt so captivated upon hearing him play live that they decided they had to start doing it themselves.
After rejigging line-ups here and there, we eventually arrived at the original Rolling Stones formation, and they got to work playing covers of the R&B stars who had inspired them. There weren’t many bands playing these covers in the UK, and so The Rolling Stones immediately turned heads (even though they weren’t playing original music yet). There was no doubt that they could all play, and when you have a lineup as captivating as The Stones, it’s hard to deny that they will one day become stars. That’s exactly what Andrew Loog Oldham thought, hence why he opted to sign the band in lieu of songs to call their own.
While he was happy with the way they looked and sounded, Oldham knew that eventually The Rolling Stones would have to start writing their own songs, and he told them time and time again to stop beating around the bush and get to work, but to no avail, and even though Keith Richards and Mick Jagger tried writing music, when no ideas came, they resorted to playing covers, forcing Oldham to take drastic measures.
In a bid to get his band writing and intent on finishing a song, Oldham decided he would lock the band members in a kitchen and not let them out until they had three minutes of music, leaving us wondering whether it as stroke of genius or an act of abuse, but what was great about the move was the fact that in forcing the band to write, Oldham had made them begin their long career as creatives.
“When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from,” said Keith Richards when discussing the track. “You’ve got to start somewhere, right? So Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had. He said, ‘You ain’t comin’ out’, and there was no way out.”
What song did they put together as a result? It was ‘As Tears Go By’, a track which went all the way to number one with a little help on vocals from Marianne Faithfull. Were they happy with it? No! It was too soft, and the complete opposite of how they wanted to sound, but that didn’t matter, they had started writing, and now there was no chance of them stopping.
“We had a number one hit with Marianne Faithfull,” said Richards when discussing the track ‘As Tears Go By’. ”So suddenly, ‘Oh, we’re songwriters’, with the most anti-Stones sort of song you could think of at the time, while we’re trying to make a good version of [Muddy Waters] ‘Still A Fool’.”
The song might not be Keith Richards’ favourite, but it is an ode to beginning. The adage remains that if you want to start writing music, writing anything, painting, engaging with your creativity in any way, shape or form, the best thing you can do is just start. You probably won’t like what you create, but who cares?
