Sixty Years of “Come On”: How the Rolling Stones Began

This is how Sturm und Drang sounds: rattling, frenetic, loud. Keith Richards’ electric guitar is slightly overdriven, Brian Jones imitates the whistling signal of a steam locomotive on his harmonica and Mick Jagger sings: “Everything is wrong since me and my baby parted / All day long I’m walkin’ ’cause I couldn’t ‘t get my car started.“ Towards the end, Bill Wyman’s bass gets louder and louder, only Charlie Watts stoically keeps his beat.

The Rolling Stones’ debut single “Come On” was released 60 years ago on June 7, 1963. The track, barely two minutes long, is rock ‘n’ roll riot in a nutshell. The band recorded a first version on May 10th at Olympic Studios near London’s Marble Arch.

Because the record company was unhappy with the result, the group had to record the song again, this time at Decca Studios in West Hampton. The record peaked at number 21 in the UK Singles Chart. A triumph? Not for the ambitious Jagger. “I don’t think ‘Come On’ is a particularly good track,” he later said. “Basically, it was junk.”

Chuck Berry wrote the song. Its original, created in 1961 at the Chess Studio in Chicago, is a rumba. The tremolo guitar sounds playful, there is – unlike later with the Stones – a saxophone and a piano and Berry sings in the style of a talkin’ blues.

They are lines from the life of a loser, where everything has gone wrong since his “baby” left him. The car doesn’t start, he doesn’t have the money to get it repaired, and the phone that his beloved could use to call doesn’t ring. It ends with a please get in touch: “Come on / Tell me something, baby.”

The single’s B-side was also written by an African American, Willie Dixon. Today, this form of cultural appropriation is viewed critically, at that time it was the norm in music capitalism: black people compose music that white people turn into hits. Exploitation? Not only.

The Rolling Stones were true blues enthusiasts. They named themselves after a song by Muddy Waters and brought two of their idols from the USA for their first tour of Great Britain in autumn 1962: Little Richard and Bo Diddley. Jagger struck up a conversation with Richards on a train ride because he had some blues records with him. The debut album The Rolling Stones (1964) contains eleven covers and one of the first Jagger/Richards compositions: Tell Me (You’re Coming Back). The rest is pop history.