It is difficult to imagine Mick Jagger doing anything other than being a rock god; he was never going to be stuck behind a desk his whole life, covered in hi-vis on a building site, or tearing tickets on a commuter train.
Still, it wasn’t always all about sex, drugs, and rock and roll for Jagger. During the teething years of the 1960s, The Rolling Stones were little more than a cover band, playing their own spins on old American blues and R&B tracks for niche audiences in England’s capital. While their takes drew the attention of audiences, they sure as hell weren’t the only cover band in London at the time.
It was only when Jagger and Keith Richards began to write their own, original material, following advice from manager Andrew Loog Oldham, that their rock and roll destiny was truly cemented. After all, it was Jagger and Richards’ songwriting prowess which landed The Stones some of their most beloved hits, stretching all the way from the adolescent frustration of ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ to the profound political commentary of ‘Street Fighting Man’ a few years later.
Inevitably, it took the pair a little while to find their foot as songwriters – nobody writes ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ on their first attempt – but there is still a lot of value to be gained from the songwriters’ earliest efforts. Back in 1985, Jagger told Rolling Stone, “I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.”
If all of Jagger’s best songs come from experience, there is no telling the heartbreak that he was experiencing when working on the first-ever Jagger-Richards composition, ‘As Tears Go By’. A melancholic, intimate ballad, the song was worlds apart from the blues-heavy rock anthems The Rolling Stones were known for at that time. But, as Jagger notes, “You can’t just experience something and leave it at that. You’ve got to try and embroider, like, any land of writing. And that’s the fun part of it.”
Although ‘As Tears Go By’ was never going to typify the sound of The Stones, it nevertheless formed an essential moment in the development of Jagger and Richards as songwriters. Oldham gave the track to a teenage Marianne Faithfull, whose recording reached the top ten of the UK singles chart in 1964, more or less launching the vocalist’s career.
The following year, in 1965, The Rolling Stones recorded their own version of the song, stripping it back to an acoustic, folk-influenced effort, which witnessed a similar degree of success to Fathfull’s original, reaching the top ten in the US.
Of course, the song was far from being the band’s biggest success, particularly in the unbelievably productive year of 1965. However, the fact that the very first song produced by the Jagger-Richards partnership had the power to reach the upper echelon of the pop charts was vital in spurring the pair on to write more.
Without that atypical ballad, the songwriters might never have landed upon ‘The Last Time’, ‘Satisfaction’, or any of the other utterly iconic anthems which have made The Rolling Stones such an infallible power within rock and roll for over half a century.
