The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards dismissed as “a terrible piece of tripe”
No one creates their best work on the first try—or at least, most don’t. Even talent needs skill, and skill takes training. It improves over time as the muscle strengthens and confidence builds. The Rolling Stones knew this well, as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards took time to become the iconic songwriting duo they’re known as today. In the beginning, by their own admission, they were writing “tripe”.
There are numerous conflicting stories about how and when Jagger and Richards finally started writing. When the band formed in 1962, penning their own material wasn’t on their mind. Instead, they were firmly in the tradition of covering rock and roll classics. In the same way that jazz artists prove their worth by singing the standards, The Stones were busy doing the same, making the rounds of the clubs and getting their name out there by doing their renditions of everyone’s favourite hits and their favourite blues songs.
But eventually, if they wanted to grow and truly have an enduring career, the band would have to write their own songs. According to John Lennon, he was responsible for that happening. After asking Lennon and Paul McCartney for a song to sing, Lennon claimed that merely witnessing them writing was what pushed the ‘Glimmer Twins’ to get to work.
“That’s how Mick and Keith got inspired to write, because, ‘Jesus, look at that. They just went in the corner and wrote it and came back!’” Lennon said, recalling a night when one-half of the Fab Four completed that track in record time in a club, adding, “Right in front of their eyes, we did it. So we gave it to them.”
However, the band’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, also allegedly has his hand in the pudding. The story goes that Oldham literally locked the pair in a room and said he wouldn’t let them out until they had a song. He even had stipulations about what kind of song he wanted, instructing them, “I want a song with brick walls all around it, high windows and no sex.”
As he was preparing to launch The Stones as a real band, the kind that writes its own songs, Oldham wanted a good, clean song that the radio could play. While obviously the group was powered by seductive blues and rock, their manager wanted something simple and somewhat innocent for this first attempt. The result? ‘As Tears Go By’.
Initially, the song was titled ‘As Time Goes By’ and was inspired by a song from the movie Casablanca. But, apparently, it was Oldham again who decided it should be changed at the last minute. Unsurprisingly, The Stones seemingly let their manager take control of the track because the band absolutely hated it. “We thought, what a terrible piece of tripe,” Richards said as he and Jagger finished their first song and hated what they’d made.
But Oldham loved it. “We came out and played it to Andrew [Oldham], and he said, ‘It’s a hit’”, Richards said to the baffled duo. They were even more vexed when the song was sold to their friend and Jagger’s then-girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, and it gave her a breakout hit, actually making her and the band a pretty penny. Richards said, “We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope!”
So, while they might have thought the song was trash, it was the trash that started it all. It showed them that they could, in fact, do it—they could write a successful song, and so, they stuck at it, and the rest is roll and roll history.
