The Rolling Stones song that “just never worked” live
It wasn’t quite time for studio experimentation when The Rolling Stones began recording Aftermath in 1965. The band had just experienced their biggest jump in popularity thanks to the cross-continental success of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and were replicating the song’s success with tracks like ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ and ’19th Nervous Breakdown’. Within a year’s time, the band would begin adding additional instrumentation and world music influences into their sound, and perhaps the first sign of things to come was ‘Mother’s Little Helper’.
Featuring a mix of acoustic and distorted electric guitar paired with music hall themes and cheeky references to pill-popping housewives, ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ was a step out of the band’s blues roots and into something far more theatrical. According to Keith Richards, the song was an extension of what he viewed as his gypsy roots.
“I think I had that song pretty well set up, arrangement-wise, when I brought it into the studio,” Richards claimed in 2002. “I had the main riff. It might have been Bill Wyman who came with (the) ending… ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and ‘Paint It Black’ are these semi-gypsy melodies. I don’t know where they came from. Must be in the blood somewhere.”
“That’s a twelve-string [guitar] with a slide on it,” Richards added. “It’s played slightly Oriental-ish. The track just needed something to make it twang. Otherwise, the song was quite vaudeville in a way. I wanted to add some nice bite to it. And it was just one of those things where someone walked in and, ‘Look, it’s an electric 12-string.’ It was some gashed-up job. No name on it. God knows where it came from. Or where it went. But I put it together with a bottleneck. Then we had a riff that tied the whole thing together. And I think we overdubbed onto that. Because I played an acoustic guitar as well.”
The song’s unique arrangement made it quite a challenge to reproduce in the live setting. The song had a more-or-less permanent place in the band’s 1966 setlists, but by the time they went on their 1967 European tour, the song had disappeared from their live sets. Across more recent years, the band has occasionally revived older tracks, but ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ has never been one of them.
“We’ve often tried to perform ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ and it’s never been any good, never gelled for some reason – it’s either me not playing it right or Keith not wanting to do it like that,” Charlie Watts explained in 2003. “It’s never worked. It’s just one of those songs. We used to try it live but it’s a bloody hard record to play, although we did perform it live on Ed Sullivan.”
Check out ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ down below.
