Why is The Rolling Stones’ 1967 album called ‘Between the Buttons’?
Following the release of their landmark 1966 LP, Aftermath, The Rolling Stones immediately began recording their next release during a tour of the United States that same year. Under pressure to deliver two new albums a year as they did in their early days, but with the newfound expectation that they’d record entirely original material, the band struggled to live up to the hype.
The result was Between the Buttons, an album that Mick Jagger later admitted he doesn’t very much care for, apart from its opening track ‘Yesterday’s Papers’. While history has been kinder to the record than the lead singer of the Stones is, it hardly stands up next to the release that precedes it in the band’s discography. And it’s far less interesting than the experimental psych-rock album that came after it in 1967, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Aside from ‘Yesterday’s Papers’, Between the Buttons showcases the poppier side of Jagger’s songwriting collaboration with Keith Richards, not least on the Side One track ‘Connection’, which still regularly features in live performances by the Stones. The song threatens to turn into the Monkees single ‘I’m a Believer’ throughout its verses, with Richards and Jagger throwing harmonies back and forth like the Everly Brothers.
Nothing in the lyrics of these songs or any others provide any indication as to the meaning behind the album’s title, however. Ironically, given his distaste towards the record, Jagger may well have been the one who provided the inspiration for its name.
So, how was it named?
When the Stones’ drummer Charlie Watts came to a recording session wearing a shirt with sparkling buttons, Jagger suggested to the band’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, that their name album cover should definitely include eye-catching buttons. Oldham later requested that Watts, who’d previously worked as a graphic designer, draw a cartoon strip for the album’s back cover.
“Andrew told me to do the drawings for the LP and said the title would be between the buttons,” Watts told a press junket at the time of the record’s release. What Oldham had apparently meant was that the album’s name would be placed between the shining buttons of a shirt on the album’s cover. But Watts mistook his words to mean something else. “I thought he meant the title was ‘Between The Buttons’, so it stayed,” the drummer added.
In the end, the front cover of the album displayed the title and band name inside the buttons of Watts’ duffle overcoat, in a photograph of the group deliberately taken out of focus. The words are squeezed into the shape of two circular buttons and set in a trippy typeface emblematic of psychedelic rock’s breakout year.
Yet, with hindsight, the title itself has become more emblematic of the stage the Rolling Stones were at in their career when they recorded the album. It seemed to slip between the solid landing points behind and in front of it as the band transitioned from their early R&B-infused sound into the age of psychedelia and beyond before coming out the other side playing an entirely novel version of the blues.
The Stones weren’t yet ready to record Beggars Banquet, but they weren’t the same point who recorded Aftermath, either. They were between the fast-forward button that would take them to their most celebrated era, both with and without Brian Jones, and the rewind button that would land them back in the territory of their biggest influences. Just playing the rock and roll superstardom they’d already achieved at its own speed.
