For every “Satisfaction”, “Start Me Up”, and “Gimme Shelter” in The Rolling Stones’ discography, there are softer counterparts like “Wild Horses”, “Dead Flowers”, and “Ruby Tuesday”. Indeed, The Stones might have a decades-long reputation of being brash, in-your-face rock ‘n’ rollers. But that doesn’t make them immune to the rogue wave of sentimentality. On January 13, 1967, the English rock band released “Ruby Tuesday” (on a Friday), one of their earliest and most enduring examples of a vulnerable, affectionate song style.
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Just before the band put out “Ruby Tuesday”, they significantly slowed down their touring schedule. As Keith Richards explained in The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years, “There were a lot of people coming in 66 and 67 with a lot more energy than we had back then. We’d been on the road, touring steadily since 63, so we were just really wasted, you know.”
The first few months of 1967 were also tumultuous in that law enforcement was attempting to crack down on The Stones’ recreational drug use. The stress of this heavy police attention, plus general road-weariness, brought The Stones back to their native Europe. And according to Mick Jagger, that’s when the band started to experience a shift in sound.
Why The Rolling Stones’ “Ruby Tuesday” Wasn’t an American-Made Song
The Rolling Stones enjoyed plenty of success in the United States throughout the mid-1960s, and the time they spent on this side of the pond inevitably started to seep into their songwriting. In The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years, frontman Mick Jagger reflected on how the U.S. and the musicians’ native U.K. affected their headspace—and, in turn, their songwriting—in different ways. Jagger argued that a song like “Ruby Tuesday” didn’t come from an American mindset. On the contrary, it was properly European.
“The States give you a lot of energy. There’s a propensity to make you very uptight in some cases, and you start to write complaining songs, whereas, like in some places in Europe, I can’t write complaining songs because it doesn’t give you that effect, you know. It gives you a feeling of being happy and sort of in harmony. In America, I rarely feel in harmony. So, you write songs that are sort of like jangling,” Jagger said.
Nevertheless, Americans didn’t seem to mind the un-American sentimentality behind “Ruby Tuesday”. The song topped the Billboard Hot 100 and Cash Box Top 100 charts. Still, this phenomenon wasn’t totally void of stereotypical American attitudes. “Ruby Tuesday”’s co-A-side, “Let’s Spend the Night Together”, was a bit too racy for many stations in the States, inherently increasing the success of the former track. Uptight indeed, Mick.
Photo by Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images
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