Rolling Stones Manager Andrew Loog Oldham Called This 1964 “Dub” Track the Band’s First Good Song

The Rolling Stones released their eponymous debut in April 1964, a transformative time in music history that saw popular music’s standards shift from covers to original material. The band’s manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, knew that The Stones would have to learn how to write their own music if they wanted to keep up with the changing times.

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So, Oldham did what anyone managing larger-than-life rock ‘n’ rollers would do. He locked Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a room and told them they couldn’t come out until they wrote a song. Their first original composition, “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)”, was the only song by Jagger and Richards on their debut. And according to Oldham, it’s one of the best they wrote.

Interestingly, the final album version wasn’t actually going to make it on the release. Jagger and Richards planned on re-recording the track, treating the first version of “Tell Me” as a dub. (Which would explain why Richards opted to sing harmonies into the same mic into which he was playing his 12-string guitar.)

The Pop Ballad Marked a Turning Point for the Rolling Stones

The Rolling Stones’ shift to original music was a functional choice as well as a trendy one. In a 2013 interview with Rock Cellar Magazine, Andrew Loog Oldham said the band was short on material ahead of recording their debut. “The R&B barrel of tunes was getting raided and soon would be empty,” he recalled. “I fancied The Stones trying to that great James Ray thing, ‘If You Gotta Make a Fool of Somebody’. Then somebody told me that Freddie & The Dreamers had covered it. That’s the moment I knew The Stones had to write.”

Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1995, Mick Jagger said, “It’s 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.”

“Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)” was a hit in Belgium and Sweden, where it topped the charts. The song became their first Top 40 hit in the U.S.

While they welcomed the success of the track, the band was fairly distant from the entire release process of “Tell Me”. According to Keith Richards, The Stones thought their original version of the song was still a dub until they heard it was going on their first record. “That’s how little control we had. We were driving around the country every f***ing night, playing a different gig, sleeping in the van, hotels if we were lucky. A lot of it was Andrew’s choice.”

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