Tell Me – Sixty years later and they keep coming back. #MusicisLife #TedTocksCovers #TheRollingStones

The Rolling Stones debut album was released in the United Kingdom on this day sixty years ago.

Interestingly, the album was released on the Decca label in the U.K., and six weeks later it was released in North America on London Records, with a subtitle that labeled them as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’. This tag demonstrates the effort to follow up the unprecedented success of The Beatles. Was this a marketing strategy? An unintended result of this approach saw the immediate rivalry between fan bases develop.

The album spent 12 weeks at #1 in the U.K. in 1964, while in the United States it managed to make its way to #11. Remarkably, ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers’ remains the only Rolling Stones American studio album release not to make the top five on the Billboard album charts.

Think about that?

There is a significance to this because, incredibly, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are still active all these years later. In fact, The Rolling Stones re-released ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers’ in August of 2022 and this re- issue coincided with the band’s 60^th anniversary tour.

Looking back sixty years this month, it is clear that The Rolling Stones and The Beatles took very different routes to success, and their ultimate status as legendary musical acts. On this date in 1964 The Beatles were celebrating 14 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, the Stones charted a more traditional course. It was all about the blues. Here is a review by Sean Egan of BBC Music that was shared in a 2010 book called ‘1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die’.

It’s a testament to the group’s brilliance that the result was still the best album to emerge from the early 1960s British blues boom … the ensemble lovingly delivered some of their favourite shots of rhythm ‘n’ blues.”

Sean Egan

In fact, although the album was called ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers’ it contained exactly one original Rolling Stones song. That is today’s feature, ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back’) which offered a glimpse of what Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were destined to become as a song writing team. While the rhythm and blues tributes served as a launching pad, the ultimate goal was to create a musical evolution.

[‘Tell Me’] is very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very pop song, as opposed to all the blues songs and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.”

Mick Jagger

First Mick, Keith, Brian, Bill and Charlie needed to get the listeners attention, and then through the years they would come back…again and again and again…

For The Rolling Stones, ‘Tell Me’, which dropped the ‘You’re Coming Back’ on subsequent pressings, followed their two previous singles which famously offered the John Lennon/Paul McCartney song ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’

and the Buddy Holly classic ‘Not Fade Away’.

Yes folks, there was a time when The Rolling Stones needed an introduction. The delivery of ‘Not Fade Away’ in this clip served notice to the world.

The Rolling Stones were not just another band from England.

As much as The Rolling Stones had a dream about where they wanted to head as an act, much of what they were producing was being orchestrated by their management and production team. ‘Tell Me’exists as a prime example. The song was recorded during a couple of sessions at Regent Sound in West London. The recordings included tracks both with and without Ian Stewart on piano. In the end, it was revealed by Keith Richards that the entire song was literally a series of spliced overdubs.

‘Tell Me’ … was a dub. Half those records were dubs on that first album, that Mick and I and Charlie and I’d put a bass on or maybe Bill was there and he’d put a bass on. ‘Let’s put it down while we remember it,’ and the next thing we know is, ‘Oh look, track 8 is that dub we did a couple months ago.’ That’s how little control we had.”

Keith Richards

The recording shared at the outset of this post is the ‘long version’. It clocks in at 4:06. It does offer the Ian Stewart piano track, however the first pressing of ‘The Rolling Stones’ offered the piano-less track. The longer version that includes Ian Stewart is by far the superior piece of music. By the time ‘Tell Me’ managed to make its way to the United States on ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers’ it had been slightly edited to 3:48. The manipulation continued. When ‘Tell Me’ was determined to be the U.S. single, it was once again edited down to under three minutes to increase the likelihood of radio play. With Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Wanna Make Love to You’ as the B-side, ‘Tell Me’ rose to #24 on the Billboard Hot 100. Not quite the level attained by The Beatles, but The Rolling Stones got just enough of a taste of success to determine what needed to be done to get to the next level.

By the time their second record, ’12 x 5’ rolled around in November the band had recorded three originals among their collection of R&B tributes. From that time forward the Stones committed to creating just a little bit of their own material on each album, while always sticking to their roots. For Mick and Keith, the song writing talent did not come quite as easy as it seemed to be for John Lennon and Paul McCartney, but in time they clearly got the hang of it. Famously, manager/producer Andrew ‘Loog’ Oldham is said to have confined them to a kitchen and to not come out until they had written something of merit. According to Keith Richards;

So, what Andrew Oldham did was lock us up in the kitchen for a night and say, “Don’t come out without a song.” We sat around and came up with ‘As Tears Go By’ It was unlike most Rolling Stones material, but that’s what happens when you write songs, you immediately fly to some other realm. The weird thing is that Andrew found Marianne Faithfull at the same time, bunged it to her and it was a fuckin’ hit for her – we were songwriters already! But it took the rest of that year to dare to write anything for the Stones.”

Keith Richards

Mick Jagger tells a slightly different story.

Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him. I think Andrew may have said something at some point along the lines of “I should lock you in a room until you’ve written a song” and in that way he did mentally lock us in a room, but he didn’t literally lock us in. One of the first songs we came out with was that tune for George Bean, the very memorable ‘It Should Be You’.

Mick Jagger

Here is ‘It Should Be You’ by George Bean.

And then The Rolling Stones and what goes down as their first true original. This dates back to 1963.

Just one more thing. Listen to ‘One Mint Julep’ by Ray Charles, which was produced by Quincy Jones, and note the similarities in the music.

Nevertheless, Mick and Keith had a template and they just kept right on going. It was a little sluggish at first, but once they got the hang of it…Once again, the significance of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ is recalled. This time by John Lennon. This speaks to how Mick and Keith observed John and Paul put the song together.

We were taken down to meet them at the club where they were playing in Richmond by Brian Epstein and some other guy. They wanted a song and we went to see what kind of stuff they did. Mick and Keith heard we had an unfinished song – Paul just had this bit and we needed another verse or something. We sort of played it roughly to them and they said, “Yeah, OK, that’s our style.” But it was only really a lick, so Paul and I went off in the corner of the room and finished the song off while they were all still sitting there talking. We came back, and that’s how Mick and Keith got inspired to write … because, “Jesus, look at that. They just went in the corner and wrote it and came back!” You know, right in front of their eyes we did it. So, we gave it to them.”

Keith Richards

It took a while for the Jagger/Richards style to emerge. Here is a case in point. Somehow, ‘Tell Me’ was initially offered as a Saturday afternoon dance routine.

This is a clip from a BBC show called ‘Take 7’ which was a variation on American Bandstand.

Compare this tame presentation to the greasy, garage band style portrayed in this footage from 1978. Style can either be emulated or cultivated. In the case of The Rolling Stones; they invented rock and roll raunch. Some would object to the suggestion that they are innovative, but when an act establishes trends and travels six decades of rock and roll terrain, there will always be paths that needed to be forged. The Rolling Stones reside at the cutting edge of originality and the authenticity is accented by the fact they have always taken time to thank their music mentors.

Professors of the School of Rock.

This may be their best quality.

As I moved ‘through the past darkly’ in search of cover versions of ‘Tell Me’ it was interesting to note that this song has fewer covers than most every other Rolling Stones feature I have written. The good news is what ‘Tell Me’ lacks in quantity, it makes up for in quality.

Here is The Grass Roots from their 1966 album ‘Where Were You When I Needed You’. Evolving out of The Wrecking Crew, The Grass Roots are best known for songs like ‘Midnight Confessions’ and ‘Live for Today’. This is just a solid, straight forward nod to the Stones original.

Ted Tocks Covers always make time for The Andrew Oldham Orchestra. It’s important to understand how Oldham perceived the songs he produced, and then applied to an orchestral style. Elements of this are obvious in the Rolling Stones original. The importance of Andrew ‘Loog’ Oldham in the success of The Rolling Stones success cannot be understated.

Once again, a Ted Tocks Covers exploration has delivered me to former Cheap Trick drummer, Bun E Carlos. This is from his 2016 album ‘Greetings from Bunezuela’. The vocals are courtesy of Alejandro Escovedo.

When writing about The Rolling Stones it all becomes about perspective. Everything is seen through a lens that looks back through sixty years of music history. When you compound the analysis with the R&B artists who inspired them, the retrospective can take a listener back nearly a century. The reason ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’ is such a fascinating focal point stems from its significance as the band’s first original single. At the time there was an element of mystery. Were they just another band. Were they really ‘England’s Newest Hit Makers’. Would the fickle buying public gravitate to the message, and less refined style. Where The Beatles were seen as the boy next door type, The Rolling Stones were more like they undesirables from the wrong side of the tracks.

How would it all play out?

Six decades ago, this was all a story to be told.

Today we have the benefit of knowing the answer.