The Rolling Stones have been making noise for a lot longer than the majority of other rock musicians. The Stones have always been associated with the slightly darker side of rock & roll, which includes sex, drugs, and numerous other misadventures that no mother wanted their child to be engaged in, ever since an accidental meeting between Keith Richards and Mick Jagger in the 1960s. Even while they may have had a string of successes, not every one of their works is necessarily a particular favorite.
There are quite a few songs that don’t stand up throughout time, even if many tunes may not function right now. When discussing their famous song “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger felt that the lyrics had lost their meaning over time. He later admitted as much to Rolling Stone: “I’m not sure if it has any resonance for the present day. I don’t really like it that much. I thought it was a very good thing at the time”.
It’s not difficult to see where Jagger is coming from given that more individuals who experienced the struggles of the late 1960s than anybody in the present era identify with the need for a young man’s revolution. However, Jagger’s talent for crafting truthful lyrics helped him capture the feeling of disenfranchisement shared by the majority of young people at the time.
While some of these songs were hits for obvious reasons, it’s difficult to tell which songs are destined to become classics unless you look back on them. Jagger said that Richards hated the riff he came up with for “Satisfaction” in the BBC documentary My Life as a Rolling Stone. “I remember sitting with Keith and writing the song Satisfaction. Our manager Andrew Oldham said, ‘This is like a number one single, this is great!’ Keith was like, ‘I don’t really like it. It can’t come out as a single.’ And it went to number one like instantly”.
Before giving his electric guitar a fair dose of fuzz, Richards didn’t even conceive of the song’s primary riff as a guitar part, instead believing it would have been a beautiful horn line. Regardless of how he felt, the song was a huge success all over the world and provided audiences with something different from bands like The Beatles.
Songs aren’t the only things that have that cold demeanor. The band’s record Their Satanic Majesties Request isn’t one that Jagger and Richards really enjoy listening to when they’re going over the band’s discography. Although the band may have attempted to embrace psychedelia, Jagger recalls that drugs usually won out in the studio, confessing: “Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There are two good songs on it: ‘She’s a Rainbow’ and ‘2000 Light Years From Home’. The rest of them are nonsense”.
Regardless matter how The Stones choose to rank their albums, each one has had a profoundly positive influence on rock & roll. Nothing will ever erase how the fans felt when they heard that music, even if Satanic Majesties or songs like “Satisfaction” angered Keith Richards or sounded crap to Mick Jagger. Looking back, the lyrics of those songs might seem a little cringe-worthy, but every Stones song has a sound of sheer agony just waiting to burst out between the riffs.
