“The greatest”: The Rolling Stone members select their favourite Rolling Stones song
They started out just wanting to be the best blues band in London; they certainly eclipsed that. “The Rolling Stones are truly the greatest rock and roll band in the world and always will be,” Bob Dylan once declared. “The last too,” he added, “Everything that came after them: metal, rap, punk, new wave, pop-rock, you name it, you can trace it all back to the Rolling Stones. They were the first and last and no one’s ever done it better.”
Well, that is just about the highest praise that you can ever receive if you’re a rabblerousing rocker. Not that they’ve ever been short of confidence or artistic pride themselves, as Keith Richards once said, “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.” Apparently, you’ve also got naff, cocky, hackneyed quotes, but we won’t hold that against them too much.
Well over half a century on from their first single, the band have evolved into a juggernaut that still packs stadia, stirs up controversy and defines what it is to be a rock band. Pete Townshend once said that there has only ever been two acts you can rightfully class as ‘classic rock’ bands, The Rolling Stones and his own. There are many people outside of both camps that would agree.
A few years ago, when the late great Charlie Watts was still with us, the band teamed up with NPR to look at their journey. Perusing a back catalogue brimming with the sort of hits that have transcended the band themselves and entered the wider canon of culture, Richards, late drummer Watts, guitarist Ronnie Wood, and gyrating frontman Mick Jagger all picked out their favourite track that the group have offered up.
You can check them out below.
The Rolling Stones’ favourite Rolling Stones songs:
Keith Richards – ‘Street Fighting Man’
“These riffs were built to last a lifetime,” the high-seas guitarist behind the blues-derived sound of the band once proclaimed. Nevertheless, it took a little while for the band to get moving. Competing with The Beatles in the early 1960s, the band realised that they would have to move away from covers and establish themselves.
The 1968 single ‘Street Fighting Man’ was one of the moments where their identity was crystalised. “You had this very electric sound, but at the same time, you had that curious and beautiful ring that only an acoustic guitar can give you,” Richards told NPR, and with that philosophy, the melodious mix of pop and blues that defined the Stones came to the fore with a glug of profound rock ‘n’ roll attitude.
The song has a tightness to it, too—a rhythmic cohesion that paradoxically allows for freedom. That is why it is so close to Richards’ heart. “Charlie stuck with me on this track,” he said. “I’m the rhythm player. I’m not a virtuoso soloist or anything like that. To work together with the drummer, that’s my joy. This record, to me, is one of the examples of what can happen when two cats believe in each other.”
Charlie Watts – ‘Satisfaction’
Speaking of finding their feet, ‘Satisfaction’ was the first step on the rock ‘n’ roll journey in earnest that Dylan would go on to eulogise. They struggled to escape covers and find their own sound, but then it arrived with a bang. “I chose ‘Satisfaction’,” Watts said when championing the breakthrough 1965 single. “It was just the first really big record we ever made. It’s an iconic riff. It just sums up the whole period, really.”
Once more, Watts also touched upon the connections between the members that imbue the songs with alchemical energy. “He usually starts the intros,” Watts said of Richards’ staggering start-ups. “And very much when we were in the early period of our existence, monitors were kind of non-existent, so I had to have his amplifier quite close to me, and they weren’t very big amplifiers. With an audience shouting, I needed that to know where the changes came, because you could very rarely hear Mick.”
Ronnie Wood – ‘Dance (Pt. 1)’
Ronnie Wood didn’t join the band until 1975, but he quickly became a key part of the dishevelled furniture. In truth, he was always a perfect fit—hell, he had already written ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll (But I Like It)’ – a defining anthem for the band – before he had even joined their ranks.
However, despite being a seamless fit his funkier, looser guitar style was very different to Richards’ ways. This came to the fore with ‘Dance (Pt. 1)’ from the 1980 album Emotional Rescue. “I stuck up for myself, ’cause I picked a song that I wrote,” Wood said of the jibing nature of the bickering band. “I thought, ‘No one’s gonna mention that.’ But I think people, when they hear that song, they love it — because it’s really up, and it gets everyone dancing.”
Wood added: “They followed my lead, really. I had the whole riff, and I had an instrumental in mind, just to get the groove and the funk going. And then Mick jumped over it and he just … we didn’t have to talk much. He more or less said, ‘Let me loose on this,’ you know? ‘And I’ll set it on fire.’”
Mick Jagger – ‘Gimme Shelter’
And then comes the ever-cinematic favourite of Martin Scorsese, the perfect rock anthem that reflects the stormy day on which it was written, and the stormier zeitgeist it belongs to, the dirge that decreed the death of the 1960s — ‘Gimme Shelter’. Or, as I put it: “The best song that the Rolling Stones have ever written.”
When appraising the apocalyptic masterpiece, Jagger recalled: “We thought, ‘Well, it’d be great to have a woman come and do the rape/murder verse,’ or chorus, or whatever you want to call it’. We randomly phoned up this poor lady [Merry Clayton] in the middle of the night, and she arrived in her curlers and proceeded to do that in one or two takes, which is pretty amazing. She came in and knocked off this rather odd lyric. It’s not the sort of lyric you give everyone — ‘Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away’ — but she really got into it, as you can hear on the record. She joins the chorus. It’s been a great live song ever since.”
“It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit,” Jagger said of the track that now sadly has a remaining prescience. “When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune. It’s still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week. It’s been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.”
With Jagger’s typical pomp and passion, the track swaggers with ease. It is the perfect anthem to bring out his emotion. As Roger Daltrey put it, “I’ve always thought that you cannot take away the fact that Mick Jagger is still the number one rock and roll show. The only other people I’d put up against him would be perhaps James Brown.”
