50 Years ago today the Rolling Stones released their first single On 2 May the Rolling Stones new manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, booked a recording session for them to make their first record. The only issue was they had no idea what to record. Mick and Keith were not writing songs at this point, so it was a case of trawling through their record collections to see what they should cover. Eventually they settled on Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’ that was on the album ‘Chuck Berry’ that their Chess Records hero had just released. For the b-side they decided to revisit Muddy Waters’ I Want To Be Loved, a song that they had already had a go at recording two months earlier at IBC Studios, prior to finding a manger and a record company interested in releasing their records. On Tuesday 7 May the band rehearsed at The Wetherby Arms in Chelsea, just around the corner from Mick, Keith and Brian’s flat, in order to stamp their style on ‘Come On’. Three days later they were in the old Olympic Sound Studios, located in Carton Street, near London’s Marble Arch to make their first record. ‘Come On’ lasted just 1 minute 45 seconds, and at the end of the session, Roger Savage, the engineer, suggested that Oldham should mix the tracks in his role as the Producer, but as it was his first session and he had no idea what he was on about he just told Savage to finish it off as he wanted. Come On was released four weeks later on Friday 7 June and made No.20 on the NME singles chart. Decca apparently sent just 4 copies of the new single to Oldham’s office, so the band had to go out and buy extra copies. Neither were the Stones that keen on their first record; they stopped playing it on gigs after about three weeks. One day Oldham went to see the band at the Scene Club in Soho and went mad, insisting that they played it at every show… it didn’t last long.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Jun 2013 07:53:11 +0000