The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger called crap: “I can say now that it’s wonderful”
The musician is never the best person to come to for advice on what a single should be. Sometimes, artists are too connected to their work to have to separate one track from the pile, and it makes for murder whenever it comes to chopping songs down from six minutes to three for a radio edit. While The Rolling Stones eventually morphed themselves into fantastic songwriters, Mick Jagger thought that his initial attempt at a single on ‘As Tears Go By’ was nothing but garbage in their hands.
Then again, anyone who had been raised purely on the blues would probably have something to say about making this kind of track. The entire premise of The Stones was about updating R&B for a new generation, and yet here they were playing the kind of pop hit that was sugary enough to give someone a contact diabetic coma if they came too close to it.
Still, it was a fairly decent effort for one of Jagger’s first songs, so giving it away to Marianne Faithfull wasn’t exactly the worst idea. After all, The Beatles had started working on material for other Liverpool bands, so why not Jagger and Richards try their hand at getting some extra cash on the side as well?
When it came to recording their next records, though, Jagger was pushed into singing the song himself for a single, which absolutely mortified him, saying, “It was pop, and we didn’t record it (at first) because it was crap. We had a successful crap ballad… I can say now it’s a wonderful tune, but we didn’t think it was that great at the time.”
Sure, the melody doesn’t exactly move that much, but that’s beside the point. This was Jagger already showing some diversity in The Stones outside of the standard bluesy songs like ‘Satisfaction’, and hearing a ballad like this was also exactly what you would expect from Jagger’s songbook.
Because even with its soft touch, ‘As Tears Go By’ is one of the darker tunes to come out of the early 1960s. It had a good foundation, but hearing Jagger talk about feeling melancholic as he watches children play all around is what eventually led him to make tracks like ‘Play With Fire’ before eventually landing on ‘Wild Horses’ from the group’s later albums.
Even with the saccharine take on rock and roll, the track would become a major hit for the group on the other side of the Atlantic, peaking on the US charts at number six. Although this was far from ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, it also taught Jagger an important lesson about what works with the public.
Most people can try to make toothless, trendy rock and roll all they want, but no one can go wrong when they start writing about their feelings. Those “crap” elements may not have been what Jagger was looking for, but without those first baby steps, The Stones would have never learned to crawl in their later years.
