The Rolling Stones single Keith Richards never clicked with: “I never dug it as a record”
There’s no set rule for an artist to enjoy every track they put out. Songs will always hold a special place in their hearts, but there’s a difference between making a hit out of nothing and making it because you have to. While The Rolling Stones would have been happy to have one of their originals out in the world in the early 1960s, Keith Richards remembered being bored when coming up with the basis for ‘Get Off of My Cloud’.
Then again, The Stones reluctantly found their way into songwriting in their early years. Most artists like Elvis Presley had tried their hand at covering tunes from other artists, but after The Beatles emerged with Please Please Me, it was no longer considered a novelty to write one’s own material. It was now expected, and Richards and Mick Jagger would eventually be locked in a room by producer Andrew Loog Oldham until they came out with their first real song.
While many of The Stones’ first major original tunes would be given away to other artists, they were inching closer to their signature sound. Despite their entire MO centring around the blues, there was a nastier edge to their music looking to break out, and ‘Satisfaction’ was what launched them into the stratosphere.
From the ferocious guitar lick to Jagger’s lyrics about teenage angst and not wanting to listen to authority, this was everything that rock and roll should be based on. And as long as it worked the one time, why not try to do the entire thing over again and pretend like nobody noticed? Looking at them back to back, ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ is nearly identical to their last hit, as if they were peeking over their shoulder and copying their own notes.
Outside of being in the exact same key, though, there’s a lot more to appreciate about ‘Get Off of My Cloud’. ‘Satisfaction’ is certainly more to the point when it comes to its subject matter, but a track all about not wanting to be bothered by one’s parents is a lot more indicative of what kids would have probably been saying back in the day.
That didn’t diminish Richards’s disdain for the track, later recalling, “I never dug it as a record. The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow-up. We were in L.A., and it was time for another single. But how do you follow ‘Satisfaction’? Actually, what I wanted was to do it slow, like a Lee Dorsey thing. We rocked it up. I thought it was one of Andrew’s worst productions.”
Keef does have a small point in that the production isn’t the greatest, but that’s hardly a knock against it. The core pieces of hard rock came from a garage, and considering the genre was just being born, having a production this rough fed into the lore of The Stones being the nastier companion to the Fab Four.
While The Stones would eventually insert themselves into a popularity contest with The Beatles that they were bound to lose, tunes like this remind us that they still had a lot more charisma to spare. They were still learning to crawl writing-wise, but if they had this much attitude right out of the gate, imagine what they would sound like once the true classics started rolling in.
