Life Rotates in 45 Revolutions Per Minute (We Love You/Dandelion)

The Rolling Stones intense We Love You is one of their great A-sides and also one of their most unknown. Peaking at just 50 upon its 1967 release in the States and only available on a small number of Stones collections, it remains one of their strangest and most personal works.
1967 had been an incredibly hard year for The Rolling Stones. Decreased record sales, the failing health of Brian Jones who would be dead within a year, drugs and the arrest of Keith, Mick and Marianne Faithfull had sent the band into a darkening downward spiral.
We Love You was recorded quickly, following the release of Mick and Keith from jail, after a particularly messy trial. From the opening sound of the jail cell door closing to the psychotic psychedelic sound that would prove so influential, We Love You is one of the most uncommon and uncompromising Stones singles. It's strange lyrics seemed to thank their fans and supporters but a deeper look reveals a bitter anti-establishment stab at the British government and authorities.
The Who had began covering Rolling Stones songs as singles as a protest to the arrests of Jagger and Richards and they weren't alone in feeling like the Stones were being made examples of. The Beatles were paying particular attention and if you listen close you can hear Lennon and McCartney singing background throughout We Love You.
The single would serve as notice to The Stones next album, the controversial and poorly received Their Satanic Majesties Request. Majesties has since gone on to influence countless bands ranging from Sonic Youth to The Flaming Lips. A band like Brian Jonestown Massacre and singer Miranda Lee Richardson would be unthinkable without Majesties dark and evil sounding psychedelia.
The b-side of We Love You, Dandelion, is another one of the Stones great moments and has become a much better known song. Dandelion would prove to be one of the lighter and more sublime moments on The Satanic Majesties Request and has appeared on countless best of collections. Keith Richards likes the song so much that he even named one of his children after it.
1968 would see The Stones making an impressive comeback, with the astonishing one-two punch of Jumping Jack Flash and Beggar's Banquet. 68 would mark the beginning of a five year run in which The Stones would lay to waste every other band in the world and would live up to their title as the greatest rock band ever.
Some of their most interesting music though would be made in their darkest year of 1967 when seemingly the world was against them. The We Love You/Dandelion 45 is a tribute to the power of the single and a reminder of just how experimental and audacious The Stones can be.

Thirty Stones Classics Mojo Forgot

The newest issue of Mojo has a listing of the fifty greatest Rolling Stones tracks of all time, as chosen by a select group of musicians. The list is interesting but I found it to be the most frustrating list of its kind since Mojo did the same for Dylan a year or so ago. The scope of artists like The Stones, Dylan or Elvis pretty much makes lists like this impossible as inevitably some real jewels will be omitted. So here are thirty favorites of mine that I hated to see left off. Some weren't too surprising in their omission but others really shocked me. So here are thirty Hot Rocks in chronological order that didn't find their way onto Mojo's list.

1. TELL ME (1964): One of the first song credited to Jagger and Richards and a real jewel. Just ask Stiv Bators and The Dead Boys who would record a scorching version of this in the late seventies.

2. AS TEARS GO BY (1965): While Marianne Faithfull's version is the best known, The Stones version is sublime and I couldn't believe it missed the list.

3. UNDER ASSISTANT WEST COAST PROMOTION MAN (1965): Searing song from OUT OF OUR HEADS that the whole group, including Brian Jones, collaborated on.

4. MOTHER'S LITTLE HELPER (1966): Another classic I was stunned not to see on Mojo's list. One of the great songs about hypocrisy ever recorded and one of the first rock songs to ever overtly cover the topic of addiction.

5. I AM WAITING (1966): One of the most tender songs they ever wrote and a real highlight to the massive AFTERMATH album. Wes Anderson would later use this to devastating effect in RUSHMORE.

6. SHE SMILED SWEETLY (1967): Anderson would use this one for THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS and it is one of the most haunting tracks off the often underrated BETWEEN THE BUTTONS.

7. WE LOVE YOU (1967): I wrote a long article on this awhile back. One of the great lost Stones classics and one of the most intense songs ever committed to vinyl. Terrifying and brilliant.

8. DANDELION (1967): Another song I have already paid tribute to on here. How in the hell was this not on the list? Later covered in an extraordinary version by Miranda Lee Richards.

9. JIGSAW PUZZLE (1968): One of the hidden treasures on BEGGAR'S BANQUET with the whole band absolutely smoking. Charlie Watts especially sounds like he might burst through your speaker at any moment.

10. FACTORY GIRL (1968): Anyone who doubts Mick Jagger's lyrical capability should replay this moving little ode to a working class girlfriend. Just beautiful.

11. FAMILY (1968): This nasty little number first appeared on the controversial METAMORPHOSIS album. Creepy and brilliantly realized.

12. MEMO FROM TURNER (1968): Jagger's solo version is more well known but this full band version is just as smarmy and cutting. Still one of the most sinister sounding recordings ever released by a major band.

13. YOU GOT THE SILVER (1969): One of Keith's great songs and one of the last appearances by Brian Jones on a Stones track.

14. SWAY (1971): I can't comprehend why this track isn't on Mojo's list. One of The Stones most impassioned and rocking songs. Keith Richards rhythm lead is one of the most phenomenal guitar tracks ever layed down and Jagger's vocal on this song has no equal. Still spellbinding.

15. CAN'T YOU HEAR ME KNOCKING (1971): Another STICKY FINGERS track and one of the longest studio cuts they ever released. Listen for the great Bobby Keys sax solo.

16. ROCK'S OFF (1972): No I am not joking, unless some pages are sticking together in my Mojo, this monster track that kicked off EXILE ON MAIN STREET is not on their list. Simply put, one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded and possibly the most exciting opening for any album...ever.

17. SHINE A LIGHT (1972): In my top five songs of all time and one of the most moving songs ever written, this major track was also left off the list.

18. LET IT LOOSE (1972): Yet another EXILE track given the shaft. Have people forgotten about this double set that I consider just about the finest pure rock and roll album ever recorded?

19. SOUL SURVIVOR (1972): The searing closing track from EXILE ON MAIN STREET. Features some of the bands greatest playing and one of Jagger's best vocal performances.

20. COCKSUCKER BLUES (1972): Audacious, brutal and finally extremely moving in how great the sound of it is. The Stones most controversial, if unheard, moment is still hair raising and essential.

21. 100 YEARS AGO (1973): I've always had a soft spot for the much maligned GOAT HEADS SOUP and this is one of my favorite tracks off of it.

22. COMING DOWN AGAIN (1973): Has there ever been a better morning after song? Beautifully bruised and exhausted sounding. The band feels like they could snap at any minute.

23. WINTER (1973): One of the great lost Stones tracks. Jagger's promise to "Wrap my coat around you" is one of the warmest moments in their whole catalogue. A really moving track and my favorite off GOAT HEADS SOUP.

24. TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE (1974): My favorite post 73 track. A bitter and disappointed lyric highlighted by one of the best guitar tracks Mick Taylor ever recorded.

25. SHATTERED (1978): The Stones channel Richard Hell and deliver one of the great New York Punk songs of the late seventies.

26. CLAUDINE (1978): Still unreleased tongue in cheek take on the Claudine Longet controversy that turns out to be an incredibly infectious rock track that could have been a single.

27. LITTLE T&A (1981): Delightfully politically incorrect and rocking Keith track off of TATTOO YOU that is still a concert favorite. One of their most infectous late period tracks.

28. MIXED EMOTIONS (1989): Strip away all of the annoying eighties production and you've got a classic Stones song and one of their best play on words ever..."You're not the only one with Mick's emotions."

29. SLIPPING AWAY (1989): STEEL WHEELS closing track and, along with HAPPY, the best track Keith ever brought to a Rolling Stones album. The STRIPPED version is even better.

30. ROUGH JUSTICE (2005): The opening to their acclaimed return to form BIGGER BANG album and one of their most exciting tracks of the past two decades. The moment Keith's guitar kicks in and you hear Charlie yell "Whoa" is chill inducing. A classic.

My apologies if I listed any that I missed in Mojo's list. The main problem with their list is that The Stones, like Dylan and Elvis, are just too big for just a list of fifty best tracks. Amidst rumors that their upcoming London gig will be their last, let us all tip our hats to the one group who lived up the title as the greatest Rock and Roll band of all time.

Classic Song Chronicles: "As Tears Go By" (Mick Jagger and Keith Richards)

While it perhaps doesn't compare to the more confrontational and mature Mick Jagger and Keith Richards compositions from The Rolling Stones catalogue of the late sixties and early seventies, there has always been something special about the haunting and surprisingly tender first composition from the legendary Glimmer Twins, 1964's "As Tears Go By".
Reports vary from person to person as to the true origins of "As Tears Go By", but all seem to agree that it came about from manager Andrew Loog Oldham's demand that Jagger and Richards start writing songs together to compete with John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had suddenly turned Rock n Roll into a songwriter's field with their work with The Beatles. "As Tears Go By" would be one of the earliest songs, perhaps even the first, from the famed duo of Jagger and Richards and it still resonates today as one of their most enduring compositions.



Richard's offers up probably the most iconic story as to how the song came about in the essential According to The Rolling Stones. The legendary guitar player recalls, "The 1st one we worked on was "As Tears Go By". That was the song where Andrew locked us in the kitchen in my flat up on Mapesbury Road in Willesden. He said, 'You’ve got to try'. He put a guitar in the kitchen and locked the door and we stayed there all night."
Richard's story is the commonly accepted one but it might very well be one of the great Rock myths. Jagger remembers differently in the same book and says, "Keith likes the story about the kitchen, God bless him. I think Andrew might 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 mentally he did lock us in a room, but he didn't literally lock us in."

Regardless of whether the locked room story is fact or fiction, the song that Jagger and Richards came up with as their debut as songwriters is a beauty. Originally called "As Time Goes By", which Oldham changed to 'tears' (snagging a co-writing credit in the process), the song's lyrically famous opening beginning with the rather odd, "It is the evening of the day" signaled a songwriting team destined to not play by the rules and who would follow nobody's lead but their own.
Oldham planned to debut the song as a Rolling Stones b-side but he quickly changed his mind and decided the song would be perfect for a seventeen year old singer who had recently come under his wing named Marianne.



It's arguable as to whether "As Tears Go By" would be known at all today as anything other than an early Rolling Stones track had Marianne Faithfull not recorded it in 1964. Her version, a worldwide hit in the fall of 64, made the song an instant classic and announced her as one of the most distinctive and memorable vocalists of the sixties. Faithfull recalled in her autobiography the first time she heard the song that would change her life, "Andrew played me a demo of the tune with Mick singing and Big Jim Sullivan on acoustic guitar. He handed me a scrawled lyric sheet and I went back into the studio and did it." Faithfull's sublimely sweet and strikingly sincere version hit the British top ten soon after and by November of 64 it was in America's top forty and Marianne Faithfull became one of the first major female stars of the British Invasion.



Faithfull perceptively points out that the song is "like a Francoise Hardy song", while Charlie Watts would take it even further, comparing it to the stuff the band Pentangle would be doing a few years down the road and saying it had, "an early English style" and that it was "the beginning of flower power." There is something to what both of them said as Faithfull's version does indeed sound at least a couple of years ahead of its time. It perhaps would have been an even bigger hit had it been released in say 66 rather than 64.

Neither Jagger nor Richards seemed too concerned about Oldham giving Faithful the song. Keith admitted to being perfectly pleased that the song was such a hit for the "ex-nun" and that even though they considered some of their early material rather, "purile and (like) Kindergarten" that they impressively always managed to, "made a decent showing in the charts."



The Stones finally released their own version in 1965 as a B-Side to the incredible "19th Nervous Breakdown". Their original version has not had the resonance that Faithfull's original has, although The Stones version actually performed better that Faithfull's had on the American charts.



"As Tears Go By" would become one of the most recorded Rolling Stones songs of the sixties and within a couple of years from Faithfull's version everyone from Nancy Sinatra (whose subtle and hushed reading of the song on her debut album is one of the definitive cuts of it) to talented Brazilian Bossa Nova singer Nara Leao had released a version.





"As Tears Go By" has been Recorded hundreds of times since Marianne Faithfull's original version, with some of the key covers of it coming from artists ranging from The Primitives to French icon Vanessa Paradis:



The song would turn out to be one Johnny Thunder's favorites and he recorded a number of beautifully bruised versions of it. The doomed and brilliant Thunders continued to perform the song up until his untimely death in the early nineties.



The song also had a surprising effect on two cinematic legends, Jean-Luc Godard and Wong Kar-Wai. Kar-Wai's breakout film from 1988 took its title from the song (and portions of it can be heard on the soundtrack) while Godard went so far as to cast Marianne Faithfull herself in his amazing Made in U.S.A. in 1966, where she can be seen singing the song to Anna Karina.



Faithfull has continued to perform what has become her signature tune, even though she admitted in her book that originally, "I was never that crazy about As Tears Go By" but time has changed her opinion of it, as she now realizes how "astonishing" it was "for a boy of twenty to have written" such a knowing song about a "woman looking back nostalgically on her life."

Among the most noteable performances of the song are when Marianne appeared on David Bowie's mythic 1980 Floor Show in the mid seventies singing it, and another came at a memorial for Linda McCartney where she took the stage with Smith's legend Johnny Marr.



The Rolling Stones all but abandoned the song for quite awhile but began performing it again in 2006 to the delight of fans all over the world. This rather extraordinary clip from that tour showcases not only the song but also celebrates the two extraordinary artists who wrote it nearly fifty years ago...

Under a Precise and Colorful Sky: The Saga of Pierre Koralnik's Anna

Serge Gainsbourg was professionally riding high at the dawn of 1965. Announcing quite boldly that he was ready to throw himself into “rock…real rock”, the already popular French singer, songwriter and actor set in motion a new direction that would reach its stunning peak, just over five years later, with the release of the mind-blowing Histoire de Melody Nelson album. Gainsbourg had a ways to go though and the two-minute 45 that began the explosion was the delightfully catchy “Poupee De Cire”, a Eurovision winner sang by the absolutely scrumptious and always captivating France Gall.







While the first France Gall collaboration in 1965 was a small triumph for Gainsbourg, he found himself growing more and more frustrated as the year progressed. He had never been more popular with the public, but his personal life was scattering as his marriage to then wife Beatrice was disintegrating. By the end of the year, France’s most popular songwriter was an exhausted artist who needed a break from marriage and, briefly, the public eye. He found that respite at the apartment of a friend named Pierre Koralnik, a young Swiss filmmaker who offered his pad to Gainsbourg so the struggling artist could effectively get refueled.




Author Sylvie Simmon’s notes in her entertaining Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes that tension arose between the two young roommates fairly quickly, when Koralnik criticized Gainsbourg for offering up too much mediocre material to singers not worth the vinyl they were being pressed on. Gainsbourg had reasons though for his prolific songwriting period between 1966 and 1967, which was namely to open “up the record market” to release “whatever he liked.” The gamble paid off and, by 1967, Serge was ready to begin one of the most remarkable periods for any popular musician ever, a five year span that would see him creating some of the most astonishing and influential albums of the era (first with Brigitte Bardot and then with Jane Birkin). Before Gainsbourg was entranced and then shattered by Bardot he wrote the music for, and acted in, the spectacular television film Anna, a visionary work Koralnik had crafted with the help of writer Jean-Loup Dabadie.





A propulsive pop-art masterpiece featuring eye popping color and one of the best soundtracks of the sixties, Anna (1967) is a miracle of a film, and the fact that it was originally made for television and not the big screen makes it one of the most head scratching curiosities of the sixties.




Originally planned as a vehicle for red-hot British singing sensation Marianne Faithfull, Anna was granted its perfect heroine when Jean-Luc Godard’s muse and then wife Anna Karina came on board. Joining the luminous and haunting Karina was the wonderful and handsome Jean-Claude Brialy starring as Serge, a hip young ad exec who becomes positively entanced by a photograph of a mysterious young woman who he becomes obsessed with tracking down.



With New Wave icons Karina and Brialy aboard, Anna stands as one of the most bizarre chapters in a delirious period of filmmaking that would see the original directors of the famed French movement scattering in dramatic, and often antagonist, ways. Koralnik was not part of the New Wave, but there is no denying its influence on Anna, specifically Godard’s stunning 1961 colorful masterpiece A Woman is a Woman, a musical satire which Karina had also graced with her delightful presence.




Anna is a wonderfully hard production to pin down. Savage satire mixed with a sweet love story and frenzied comedy crossed with surrealistic fantasy, Anna in its own way is one of the most confrontational films of the period. More than anything else though it is a brilliant musical, filled with some of the most exciting songs of Serge Gainsbourg’s career. It is also a tribute to the great beauty of Anna Karina and Jean-Claude Brialy, as well as being both a homage and critique to our fascination with such perfection in pop culture.







While either Karina and Brialy feature in almost every shot in Anna, a couple of other welcome faces pop up as well, including Marianne Faithfull who was able to make time in her incredibly frantic schedule to film one of Anna's most memorable scenes. French singing sensation Eddy Mitchell also appears in a crowded and dizzying party sequence.







Perhaps the real star of Anna, outside of Gainsbourg’s score and Karina’s face, is the dazzling photography of cinematographer Willy Kurant. The talented Kurant, who has worked with everyone from Jean-Luc Godard to Pink Floyd, is at the top of his game here and Anna is absolutely astounding to look at. Kurant’s photography is so vivid, and the costume designs of Lison Bonfils and Anne Frantz are so spectacular to look at, that they almost overwhelm the fact that Koralnik’s film is at its heart a rather biting satiric look at the often shallow and materialistic place the world was becoming in 1967. Who’s kidding who though, as Anna is also a firm celebration of that world, a contradiction that makes it all the more entrancing all these years later.







With its extraordinarily bizarre dance sequences, catchy and altogether tremendous Gainsbourg score and a haunting final sequence that foreshadows Bob Fosse’s ferociously autobiographical All That Jazz by well over a decade, Anna is impossible to take your eyes off of. It is, simply put, one of the most perfectly realized and rendered works of the sixties.







The imaginative Koralnik has mostly remained in television throughout his career, but he has a couple of features to his credit including the masterful and intense Cannabis (1970), one of the most memorable films the unstoppable team of Gainsbourg and Birkin made together. His greatest work, Anna, would be a hit on French television (and in some French theaters) but one has to wonder what its impact would have been on the worldwide big-screen. Serge Gainsbourg barely took a moment to ponder on its possible impact to the viewers who saw it that summer of 67, as all things Bardot soon entranced him. Anna probably became a fading memory fairly quickly for those involved but it remains a captivating experience, and one that seems specific to the sixties, as something this alive and colorful would have been all but impossible at any other point in time.