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The Rolling Stones

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26 Sep, 1964

Time Is On My Side

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The band releasesTime Is On My Side, from the album, 12 x 5. Richards:

In America we were basically known for heavy, slowish kind of ballads. Time Is On My Side, Tell Me, Heart of Stone, that was what we were known for. Strangely enough that was our thing. Every single was a slow song. Who would believe it? You’d think they’d be clamoring for out-and-out rock and roll, but no, it was the Soul ballads that happened for us in America.

The Rolling Stones - Time Is On My Side (Live) - OFFICIAL PROMO

7 May, 1966

Paint It Black

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The band releasesPaint It Black, from, Aftermath. Richards:

We were in Fiji for about 3 days. They make sitars and all sorts of Indian stuff. Sitars are made out of watermelons or pumpkins or something smashed so they go hard. They’re very brittle and you have to be careful how you handle them. We had the sitars, we thought we’d try them out in the studio. To get the right sound on Paint It Black we found the sitar fitted perfectly. We tried a guitar but you can’t bend it enough.

13 Apr, 1967

Warsaw concert

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The band performs their first concert behind the Iron Curtain at Stalin Palace in Warsaw, Poland. Among the songs performed during the set are Paint it Black, Lady Jane, and Satisfaction.

25 May, 1968

Jumpin’ Jack Flash

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The band releases their song, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, from the album, Through The Past Darkly (Biggest Hits Volume I). Richards:

The lyrics came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside, and there was the sound of these boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer. It woke Mick up. He said, ‘What’s that?’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.’ I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase ‘Jumping Jack.’ Mick said, ‘Flash,’ and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it.

31 Aug, 1968

Street Fighting Man

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The band releases their song, Street Fighting Man, from the album, Beggars Banquet. Jagger:

It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions…. I wrote a lot of the melody and all the words, and Keith and I sat around and made this wonderful track, with Dave Mason playing the shelani on it live. It’s a kind of Indian reed instrument a bit like a primitive clarinet. It comes in at the end of the tune. It has a very wailing, strange sound.

The Rolling Stones - Street Fighting Man (Live) - OFFICIAL

Jul 1969

You Can’t Always Get What You Want

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The band releasesYou Can’t Always Get What You Want, from the album, Let It Bleed. Jagger:

It’s a good song, even if I say so myself. It’s got a very sing-along chorus, and people can identify with it: No one gets what they always want. It’s got a very good melody. It’s got very good orchestral touches that Jack Nitzsche helped with. So it’s got all the ingredients.

The Rolling Stones - You Can't Always Get What You Want (Live) - OFFICIAL

11 Jul, 1969

Honky Tonk Women

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The band releases their song, Honky Tonk Women, from, Let It Bleed. Richards:

Honky Tonk Women started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn’t stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It’s all cowboys. It’s all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. ‘Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can’t give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there’s not really a lot of difference between white Country music and black Country music. It’s just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in.

5 Dec, 1969

Gimme Shelter

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The band releasesGimme Shelter, featuring Clayton, from, Let It Bleed. Jagger:

That song was written during the Vietnam War and so it’s very much about the awareness that war is always present; it was very present in life at that point. Mary Clayton who did the backing vocals, was a background singer who was known to one of the producers. Suddenly, we wanted someone to sing in the middle of the night. And she was around. She came with her curlers in, straight from bed, and had to sing this really odd lyric. For her it was a little odd – for anyone, in the middle of the night, to sing this one verse I would have been odd. She was great.

The Rolling Stones - Gimme Shelter (Live) - OFFICIAL PROMO

Love In Vain

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The band releasesLove In Vain, from the album, Let It Bleed. The song is a remake of Johnson’s blues classic. Richards:

For a time we thought the songs that were on that first album were the only recordings Robert Johnson had made, and then suddenly around ’67 or ’68 up comes this second bootleg collection that included Love in Vain. Love in Vain was such a beautiful song. Mick and I both loved it, and at the time I was working and playing around with Gram Parsons, and I started searching around for a different way to present it, because if we were going to record it there was no point in trying to copy the Robert Johnson style or ways and styles. We took it a little bit more country, a little bit more formalized, and Mick felt comfortable with that.

The Rolling Stones - Love In Vain (Live) - Official

Midnight Rambler

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The band releases their song, Midnight Rambler, from the album, Let It Bleed. Jagger:

That’s a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know. We wrote everything there – the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafés, and there’s Keith with the guitar.

The Rolling Stones - Midnight Rambler (Live) - OFFICIAL

23 Apr, 1971

Dead Flowers

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The band releasesDead Flowers, from, Sticky Fingers. Jagger:

I love Country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek. The harmonic thing is very different from the blues. It doesn’t bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it’s very English, really. Even though it’s been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak.

The Rolling Stones - Dead Flowers (Live) - OFFICIAL

12 Jun, 1971

Wild Horses

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The band releasesWild Horses, from the album, Sticky Fingers. Richards:

Wild Horses almost wrote itself. It was really a lot to do with, once again, f-cking around with the tunings. I found these chords, especially doing it on a twelve-string to start with, which gave the song this character and sound. There’s a certain forlornness that can come out of a twelve-string. I started off, I think, on a regular six-string open E, and it sounded very nice, but sometimes you just get these ideas. What if I open tuned a twelve-string? All it meant was translate what Mississippi Fred McDowell was doing – twelve-string slide – into five-string mode, which meant a ten-string guitar.

14 Apr, 1972

Tumbling Dice

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The band releases, Tumbling Dice, from, Exile On Main St. Jagger:

This was originally titled Good Time Woman. It started out with a great riff from Keith and we had it down as a completed song called Good Time Women. That take is one of the bonus tracks on the new Exile package; it was quite fast and sounded great but I wasn’t happy with the lyrics.
Later, I got the title in my head, ‘call me the tumbling dice’ so I had the theme for it. I didn’t know anything about dice playing but I knew lots of jargon used by dice players. I’d heard gamblers in casinos shouting it out.
I asked my housekeeper if she played dice. She did and she told me these terms. That was the inspiration.

The Rolling Stones - Tumbling Dice (Live) - OFFICIAL