Even a band as historically great as The Rolling Stones can sometimes go off-stride now and then. There was once a time in the 60s when the legendary band seemed to be losing their artistic way.
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A single song helped them get back on the path that they claimed as their own. That path eventually led them to rock glory, the likes of which few other bands have ever experienced.
The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones
Right from the start, The Rolling Stones presented a vastly different option than The Beatles in the competition for British Invasion supremacy. The obvious difference was the attitude. Where The Beatles came off as clean-cut and family, The Rolling Stones were presented as raucous and dangerous.
The images of the two bands were more a construct of the respective bands’ handlers than anything based in reality. But you couldn’t deny the authentic musical divide between the two groups.
The Beatles, while indebted most to Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, borrowed from many kinds of influences, everything from country to musical theatre. Meanwhile, the members of The Rolling Stones shared a love for harder-edged blues, a sound that they combined with the backbeat of early rock and roll. And they didn’t deviate from that much in their early years.
Too Pop
While The Stones relied on a lot of cover material at the beginning of their career, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards soon established themselves as top-notch songwriters in their own right. And they saw the benefit of trying different styles of songs, especially the softer, more pop-oriented material that courted the singles charts.
For a stretch in the 60s, The Rolling Stones became experts at the kind of melodic, psychedelically tinged ballads that The Beatles also did so well. Little by little, they strayed from their signature sound until they went a bit too far from their comfort zone. The end result: Their 1967 album, Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Majesties Request represented the band’s attempt to give fans an album experience like what The Beatles did earlier in the year with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But it came off sounding like they were playing catch-up instead of forging their own identity. They learned their lesson.
Changing in a “Flash”
During a writing session for their next single, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were startled awake early one morning by Richards’ gardener, a fellow named Jack Dyer whom Keith called Jumpin’ Jack. The seeds for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” were planted.
The Stones built “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” on a bruising guitar riff that set the tone for a furious, blues-rock musical attack. Mick Jagger’s lyrics speak of hurricanes, bearded hags, and spikes through the skull. “In fact, it’s a gas,” he belts, defiant in the face of all these atrocities.
“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” didn’t indulge in any flower power. If anything, it trampled the flowers in front of it. And it set the tone for the incredible stretch of albums that were about to come from The Rolling Stones. These albums put them at the top of the musical world. And they defined them as the rock and rollers most willing to wade through the muck and mire of the world as it was, instead of offering up platitudes of how it could be.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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