“What’s the point”: The song that made The Rolling Stones quit the blues
At the very beginning, The Rolling Stones would consider themselves a blues band. It was the foundation that brought them together, a shared love of American blues artists that sparked their early friendship and pushed them onto the stage. But at some point, that stopped. Rock and roll took over – and for good reason.
“You know I was keen on Chuck Berry and I thought I was the only fan for miles,” Keith Richards wrote to his aunt about the day he met Mick Jagger, adding, “He’s got every record Chuck Berry ever made and all his mates have too, they are all rhythm and blues fans, real R&B I mean (not this Dinah Shore, Brook Benton crap) Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters, Chuck, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker all the Chicago bluesmen real lowdown stuff, marvellous”. From the very start, the day the duo bumped into each other on a train platform, blues was essential.
It was essential in their early performances too, as the group, for a while, were almost entirely simply a blues covers band. Around the stages of London, they cut their teeth in the world of live performance with renditions of tracks floating across the Atlantic that they’d found in record stores, heard on pirate radio, read about in magazines or however else kids those days got involved in music that wasn’t on their parent’s stations.
When that started working for them, when the crowds swelled and it became time to hit the studio, blues was essential there too. The Stones’ earliest singles and the tracks they were putting out for a good while were all covers—Chuck Berry, Arthur Alexander, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and so on.
“We were kids, you know, just kids. We did everything and that was a groove,” Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine about this period when they were new, young and excited by everything. It was standard practice at that time. All their peers were doing it too – finding songs they loved and giving them a go. Jagger wouldn’t even let the magazine give the band credit for drawing more attention to these tracks as he said, “Everybody did those kind of songs: The Beatles, The Hollies, The Searchers, everyone.”
But there was a moment when the band stopped. Sure, part of that was because eventually Jagger and Richards became the powerful songwriting duo they always seemed destined to be. But part of it also came down to the band’s own dedication to the blue artists they loved and a desire to not steal the limelight.
The second it felt like people cared more about a Stones blues cover than the real thing, the band cut it off. “That’s why we stopped doing blues,” Jagger declared. “I mean, what’s the point in listening to us doing ‘I’m A King Bee’ when you can listen to Slim Harpo doing it?” he added as a purist to the originals of these tracks with no desire to ever overtake them.
