What, exactly, is a Ruby Tuesday?
In the broader lore of The Rolling Stones, a handful of familiar questions will always come up. How did Mick Jagger and Keith Richards meet? Who designed the famous tongue logo? What’s the meaning behind the Sticky Fingers sleeve? What on earth is a Ruby Tuesday?
There’s validity in seeking answers to all of those questions, but that last one in particular seems pretty telling when it comes to The Stones’ legacy, especially when you look at the creative engine behind some of their most popular songs, and how the pair worked together on seemingly mundane concepts and made them explode with a new kind of energy.
Written by Richards with help from Brian Jones for the band’s Between the Buttons album, ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was inspired by Linda Keith, Richards’ girlfriend at the time, serving as a rumination on saying goodbye and wallowing about having to move on when “all you’ve got left is the piano and the guitar and a pair of panties”.
For all of these reasons, it came to Richards pretty naturally. After all, in his mind, the easiest songs to write are the ones informed by heartbreak, because they fall out of you faster and more organically than any other type of song. As he put it himself, “Break his heart, and he’ll come up with a good song.”
The song captured Jagger’s heart, too. “That’s a wonderful song,” he said. “It’s just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but I always enjoy singing it.”
What is a Ruby Tuesday?
So why is it called ‘Ruby Tuesday’, a seemingly random name with little connection to the song’s message or story? Well, in a sense, that’s precisely why, as the name itself seems more figurative, drawing on the associations with colour psychology and days of the week to create a sense of melancholy, because after all, the colour ruby seems pretty dreary, and Tuesdays themselves can inspire bleak connotations.
And together, it exudes that familiar sense of brooding that comes with a breakup. Richards explained this himself once, saying how the name ‘Ruby Tuesday’ came from two threads – the first being how he felt at the time, and the second being when he wrote the song. “It was probably written about Linda Keith not being there,” he said. “I don’t know, she had pissed off somewhere. It was very mournful, very, very Ruby Tuesday, and it was a Tuesday.”
Elsewhere, he said that ‘Ruby Tuesday’ became another moniker for both Linda and how he was feeling, explaining, “The thing about being a songwriter is, even if you’ve been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Basically, Linda is ‘Ruby Tuesday’.”
The name also captures someone who’s free-spirited, much like the groupies that The Stones came across in their heyday. A ‘Ruby Tuesday’, in the broader sense, considers all those they might have come across that left an impression on them, whether longer-term lovers or people they met in passing, and Linda was the perfect conduit for the bittersweet cycle. As Richards implied in the lyrics, “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday / Who could hang a name on you? / When you change with every new day / Still, I’m going to miss you.”
