100 Greatest Rolling Stones Songs

The Stones cut plenty of blues covers but rarely sounded this authentic: an unplugged, acoustic-slide-guitar-driven cover of the Rev. Robert Wilkins’ country blues about a boy who returns home after venturing out into the world on his own. Considering that the Stones began as blues purists, they were making a kind of homecoming too.

Richards showed rarely seen romantic maturity and musical subtlety on this haunting gospel hymn. It features a sax solo by Wayne Shorter, recorded at 5:30 a.m. during the last Bridges to Babylon session. “I wouldn’t have been able to write songs like that 10, 15 years ago,” he said. Don Was agreed: “It’s the most radical thing on the album. Keith really wrote a sophisticated piece of music.”

A simple power-chord rocker telling a clueless lover to get lost. But what “Let Me Go” lacks in depth, it makes up for in punk-rock attitude. Richards slashes away and Wood provides Creedence-y licks, while Jagger contemplates hanging out at gay bars and tells his soon-to-be ex-lover, “Can’t you get it through your thick head this affair is dead as a doornail?”

Like almost everything on Tattoo You, this grunting, growling stomp was recorded years earlier – in Rotterdam, during the Black and Blue sessions. It’s a five-minute, cowbell-thwacking jam, with funky organ from Billy Preston and the great Sonny Rollins on sax. It’s also a superb showcase for the range of Jagger‘s voice, which leaps from soul-man falsetto to bluesy moans.

A huge hit about a pill-popping mom, propelled by an electric guitar imitating a sitar. “Very strange number,” Jagger observed “Like a music-hall number.” Richards had no problem with his partner’s lyrics: “A lot of the stuff Chuck Berry and early rock writers did was putting down that other generation. We used to laugh at those people.”

Who else could smuggle the word “tits” onto the radio in 1981? Right next to the word “ass”? Only one band, and only one man: Keith Richards, who snarls, chants and wheezes his way through a celebration of his callipygian muse. Of course, he’s still married to the woman he was with when it came out – and their two daughters happen to have the initials T and A.

The Stones delved into Watergate-era paranoia on this post-Sly Stone funk workout, in which Jagger sings about “some little jerk in the FBI” with a stack of papers on him “six feet high.” It was cut during their last sessions with Taylor, who played bass while Wyman switched over to synthesizer; Taylor laid down what may be the only bass solo on a Stones song.

Written on the same early-1969 Italian vacation that “Midnight Rambler” was written, “Monkey Man” is nearly as menacing. Wyman’s spine-crawling vibraphone and mordant bass line have an air of creepy mystery, and Richards plays a piercing riff as Jagger offers the sulfuric disclaimer: “I hope we’re not too messianic or a trifle too satanic.” Not at all, Your Majesties.

Few Stones tracks are as atmospheric as this gauzy, left-field gem; Jagger strums an electric guitar while woozily crooning lines like “Nothing will harm you/Nothing will stand in your way,” over a restrained, bare-bones accompaniment. This fever dream set to music inspired multiple EDM remixes 30 years later.

The working girl in this song must be one of the Stones‘ toughest and most formidable female characters: She takes the bus to the factory by day, she parties hard and starts fights by night, she makes Jagger wait in the rain for her to get off work. It’s an acoustic Beggars Banquet oddity that feels like a country song yet incorporates tablas, mandolins and a fiddle solo.

Did Jagger ever get the woman from “She’s So Cold” together with the woman from “She Was Hot”? The possibilities are staggering. This hopped-up ode to a steamy babe came with a video in which redheaded actress Anita Morris gets the boys so revved-up the buttons of their trousers pop off. MTV couldn’t take the heat and made them recut it.

The big soul ballad on Exile is also the album’s longest song. Jagger sings about watching friends fall apart and lovers fade away, as he staggers through a long night of sex, booze and the bedroom blues. His whisper-to-a-scream vocals build over piano, horns and those dramatic drum fills in the final choruses. Somehow the Stones have never played it live – but Phish have.

The 1937 Robert Johnson recording is a pillar of blues history, and the aching version on Let It Bleed (reprised heavily on the live album Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out) is no doubt its most famous cover. Recast with a honky-tonk feel, Jagger wrings pain from the lyrics, and Taylor sets his slide guitar on stun. “I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor, especially on that slide,” writes Richards in his memoir, paying respect where it’s due.

A lovingly sleazy picture of New York street life, with a raw two-chord riff and a Lou Reed-style tale of a gay hustler who arrives in the big city fresh from the West Coast; he’s determined to get over, whether that means garbage collecting or turning tricks. “A straight gay song,” Jagger called it in Rolling Stone at the time. “I’m not sure why I wrote it. Maybe I came out of the closet.”

Written in 1965 and originally a hit for Chris Farlowe, “Ride on Baby” is like a scorched-earth version of “Under My Thumb.” Jagger drops breakup bombs (“By the time you’re 30, you’ll look 65/You won’t look pretty and your friends will have kissed you goodbye”) as Jones earns his pay, playing marimba, harpsichord, koto and rhythm guitar.

A Stones song in waltz tempo with accordion? This old-world-flavored folk ballad appeared on the British version of Between the Buttons and featured Jagger in the role of a manor-bred man keeping his mistress in check. It was his favorite Buttons track, and given how slyly it tweaks English class and sexual hypocrisy, it’s not hard to see why.

Richards cranked out a vintage snarling-guitar punisher while Jagger sounded like a reborn blues warrior, belting lines like “Once upon a time I was your little rooster/Now am I just one of your cocks?” Richards said the riff came in his sleep, “almost like ‘Satisfaction'”; 40 years later, his dreams were better than the reality of mid-’00s rock.

One of Jagger‘s most potent early sex-god moments was manifest on this Howlin’ Wolf cover, which the band released as a U.K. single in November ’64 against all advice. “We wanted to make a statement,” said Richards, with a challenge to the label: “See if you can get that to the top of the charts, motherfucker.” Sure enough, it hit Number One. Foreshadowing events to come, it was cut without inviting Jones, who laid down his slithering slide part after the fact.

The Stones‘ greatest Motown-style rave-up is about turning down an ex-lover (or “poor discarded baby”) who wants to get back together. The band didn’t release it as a single until 1975, but Jagger produced a version by British blues singer Chris Farlowe (signed to Andrew Loog Oldham’s Immediate label), which was a U.K. hit in July 1966.

The delicious, droning flip of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is a fond farewell of sorts to the psychedelia of the Their Satanic Majesties Request era. The sax is Jones, and the subject is likely Jagger‘s girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. As love letters go, it’s pretty impressive: “Child of the moon/Give me a wide-awake, crescent-shaped smile.”

One of the most grown-up moments of their career, “Fool to Cry” is a falsetto ballad about a child helping Jagger through heartbreak. It’s highlighted by Nicky Hopkins’ airy Fender Rhodes jazz keyboard and slide guitar from Wayne Perkins. Written almost entirely by Jagger, it was never a Richards favorite: He fell asleep when they played it live in 1976.

In 1965, as Otis Redding was covering “Satisfaction,” the Stones cut a version of this Otis classic (originally recorded in 1964 by Memphis soul man O.V. Wright). But where Redding’s version is plaintive, the Stones’ is driving and overheated, with Jones’ and Richards‘ frenzied strumming and Jack Nitzsche’s ascending organ backing Jagger, who sounds more like a stalker than a dream date.

A tambourine-spangled folk rocker with chime-y, Byrds-like guitar, this offhandedly libertarian tune wasn’t a big hit, but it’s one of the Sixties’ most pliant anthems. That’s probably why it has remained a concert favorite – the Stones‘ version in Shine a Light sounds like it was written yesterday.

This Exile stomper takes its name from the basement in Nellcôte, where it was recorded. “It was divided into a series of bunkers,” Richards said. “Not a great deal of ventilation.” The only Stones song on which Taylor received a co-writing credit, it digs deep into their blues roots. But the Stones sound more like dirty scavengers than reverent revivalists.

Of all the seventies rock songs with “Bitch” in the title – from Elton John‘s “The Bitch Is Back” to David Bowie‘s “Queen Bitch” – none bitched harder or louder than this one. Despite its raw immediacy, it was recorded in an all-night session over many takes, with Richards arriving late in the process to work in his punishing riff on the fly.

Another dark moment in the Stones‘ unflowery psychedelic phase. Sounding like an imperiled lord of the manor, Jagger surveys a world in chaos and, ignoring it all, beckons for a few maidens to “please come see me in the citadel.” Richards‘ bad-trip riff is made even trippier by Jones’ Mellotron, saxophone and flute.

Why did the Stones call this album Some Girls? “Because we couldn’t remember their fucking names,” as Richards put it at the time. The title song remains one of the Stones’ funniest moments, as Jagger sings about the hard work of womanizing, pursued by groupies who take his money and take his clothes. The roué in the song dishes about his sexual tangles with women around the world (from gentle Chinese girls to prissy Brits to greedy Americans) over a leering blues-grind track that gave him plenty of room to be heard. Jagger’s delivery is boozy and sly, and one line in particular raised hackles: He confesses he doesn’t have the “jam” to satisfy “black girls,” who “wanna get fucked all night.” Predictably, this blew up into a major media controversy. Jagger protested that the song was intended as a joke. As he told Rolling Stone in 1978, “Most of the girls I played the song to like ‘Some Girls.’ They think it’s funny; black girlfriends of mine just laughed. . . . I really like girls an awful lot, and I don’t think I’d say anything really nasty about any of them.”

Country music that doesn’t get weighed down with reverence. Over that Bakersfield arrangement, with Wood on the pedal steel, Jagger sings about driving down the road, listening to gospel radio, hearing the preacher announce, “You always got the Lord by your side,” and running 20 red lights in God’s name. It’s a loving outsiders’ tribute to the essential weirdness of America.

This deep-blue cover of Solomon Burke’s 1962 signature tune was recorded at the same May ’65 RCA Studios sessions in Los Angeles that produced “Satisfaction.” Per legend, that was also where the Stones were first introduced to cocaine. Maybe that comes through in Jagger‘s high-strung shouts, although the Stones’ take on the R&B burner is even slower than Burke’s.

In the studio one night, Jagger improvised an outrageous falsetto-disco goof at the electric piano, backed by Wood on bass and Watts on drums. The resulting track stretches out near the six-minute mark, with Jagger making up his arched-eyebrow sex monologue as he goes along. The Stones decided to release it as a single – whereupon it became a massive international dance hit.

One of the first songs Jagger and Richards ever recorded – for a demo the “Blue Boys” gave to Alexis Korner in 1962 – their take on the churning Chuck Berry classic would spur fan frenzy in concert, and it introduced the Stones to America during their Ed Sullivan Show debut later that year. The band’s wildness freaked out the variety-show host. The little girls, however, understood.

Richards called hearing Bob Dylan a “punch in the face,” and this is one of the Stones‘ most Dylanesque moments – a country-rock blast of Highway 61 Revisited surrealism. Jagger walks us through a gallery of holy freaks (“He really looks quite religious/He’s been an outlaw all his life”). Per Richards: “Like Dylan says, ‘To live outside the law, you must be honest.'”

Recorded shortly after Taylor’s departure in 1974, “Hand of Fate” is a growling, funked-up murder fantasy. Wayne Perkins, auditioning to be Taylor’s replacement, played the sterling solo. “There was a spotlight in the middle of the room,” he said of his first meeting with the band. “They wanted to see if I looked like a Rolling Stone, and I hadn’t even played a note for ’em yet.”

This is the Stones in shimmering, stoned-baroque folk-rock mode á la “Lady Jane,” recording in L.A., with Jack Nitzsche adding harpsichord. When they performed it on the U.K. music show Ready Steady Go, with Richards on acoustic and Jones strumming a dulcimer in his lap, it was an image of the band maturing in real time.

Largely written in a hotel room during their 1965 tour of Ireland, this modest fingerpicked folk shuffle feels like a throwaway (it appeared on the 1967 outtakes set, Flowers). In fact, it’s kind of a manifesto: Jagger watches his friends grow up, marry and buy homes – “’cause there’s nothing else to do” – and opts to stay on that fence and lead the swingin’ single life, at least for now.

Early in 1965, the Stones hit the Top 20 for the second time (after “Time Is on My Side”) with this wonderfully prickly soul ballad written by Jagger and Richards. With its poking guitar twang and caddish lyrics (“If you try acting sad, you’ll only make me glad”), it’s an early flare-up of Jagger-ian devilry. Fittingly, an alternate take featured a young Jimmy Page on guitar.

The murky, clattering sound and Julien Temple’s action-thriller video weren’t the only things that set “Undercover of the Night” apart. It’s a rare overtly politicized diatribe (“100,000 diasporas/Lost in the jails in South America,” Jagger sang), with a unique echo-drenched production that took its cues from dub reggae and added to the song’s unsettling, jittery vibe.

“You can’t edit this shit,” Richards told their label about this 11-minute-plus song – possibly the longest studio track released on a rock album at that point. A slow-building electric blues about a man aching long-distance for his baby, it morphs into a fevered jam at the three-minute mark – Jagger freestyling in a way he’d refine on “Midnight Rambler.”

“Here I lie, in my hospital bed” goes the creepy opening line, and from Richards‘ grim strums to guest Ry Cooder’s sinister slide guitar, things only get more beautifully macabre. Debate still rages as to whether it’s about Jagger‘s then-paramour, Marianne Faithfull (she even had a part in writing it). Whatever the case, it’s one of the Stones‘ starkest, scariest recordings.

“One of the first ones I wrote entirely by myself,” Richards said. It’s gruff, simple country blues with his shining acoustic-slide work, some handsome Nicky Hopkins organ, and autoharp from Jones. It’s also a sleeper among Let It Bleed‘s flamboyant set pieces. As a love song by a romantic to a gold digger, it’s among the guitarist’s truly revealing moments.

One of the band’s most uncharacteristic ballads is credited as a Jagger–Richards song. But Richards had little to do with it. Taylor’s glistening Santana-esque guitar lines define it, and his extended outro may be the best guitar solo in the Stones catalog. Sadly, it would be a swan song, as he quit the band shortly after it was released, in part, he claimed, for being denied writing credit.

One of the band’s softest and most tenderhearted ballads (and their only ballad to go Number One), “Angie” was written by Richards while he was being treated for heroin addiction at a clinic in Switzerland. “Once I came out of the usual trauma,” he recalled, “I didn’t feel like I had to shit the bed or climb the walls or feel manic anymore. I just went, ‘Angie, Angie.’ ” Completed during the Goats Head Soup sessions in Jamaica, it became a gently strummed benediction with a processional piano by Nicky Hopkins and strings arranged by Nicky Harrison. “Angie” has inspired much speculation as to its inspiration. Despite writing it at the time of his daughter Angela’s birth, Richards claims the lyrics were just a placeholder that stuck: “I didn’t know Angela was going to be called Angela when I wrote ‘Angie,’ ” he said. “Sometimes you have a hook, a phrase or a word or a name or something, which maybe you don’t even intend to keep. . . . It was just a working title, like, who’s gonna call a song ‘Angie,’ how boring, another chick’s name, ya know.”

“Straight balls-to-the-wall rock & roll,” Richards said of “Live With Me.” Richards and Taylor exchange buzz-gun riffs, and Bobby Keys adds a torrid solo. The naughty lyrics – “The cook, she is a whore/The butler has a place for her behind the pantry door” – are said to be the reason the London Bach Choir didn’t want its name listed in the credits of Let It Bleed.

A tribute to Angela Davis, the Black Panther who was jailed for murder in 1970, this ballad is the band’s most activist moment. Jagger sings, “Free the sweet black slave,” framed by acoustic guitars, backwoods harmonica and a touch of calypso lilt. It may also be Jagger’s least campy, most convincing country-folk performance.

The Stones made this Buddy Holly standard sound demanding and desperate. “[We] put the Bo Diddley beat up front,” Wyman said. Andrew Loog Oldham went so far as to say it was “the first song Mick and Keith wrote. The way they arranged it was the beginning of their shaping of them as songwriters.”

As per the chorus, this tribute to groupies was titled “Starfucker,” until label honcho Ahmet Ertegun stepped in. And it became even more infamous during the 1975 tour, when a 20-foot-tall penis was inflated alongside Jagger as he sang it. The line about “givin’ head to Steve McQueen” had to be vetted with the actor, who was quite flattered.

“Loving Cup” closes the first half of Exile, punctuating a tumultuous, ragged half-hour of rock & roll with a shot of mountain-climbing redemption and lyrical warmth. Originally attempted at London’s Olympic Studios during the Let It Bleed sessions, then revived and finished in early 1972 in Los Angeles, it’s one of several gospel-steeped Exile songs that didn’t come out of the band’s hazy time at Nellcôte. This may account for its very un-basement-y maximalism: Nicky Hopkins’ majestic piano comes on like clouds parting, and the song seems to gather momentum and emotional power as it gathers influences. Jagger goes from self-deprecating come-ons (“I am nitty-gritty and my shirt’s all torn/But I would love to spill the beans with you till the dawn”) to innocent elation (“Feel your mouth kissing me again/What a beautiful buzz”) in a country drawl. The bright soul horns and a backing choir (which probably included an uncredited Gram Parsons) enhance the song’s sense of deeply spiritual gratitude.

“It’s going to be the single,” Jagger enthused about this breakneck rocker, the first song finished for Exile. They immediately took the demo to an L.A. DJ and drove around listening to their work. “It was surreal,” recalled engineer Andy Johns. “Up and down Sunset Strip at nine on a Saturday night. The Strip was jumpin’, and I’m in the car with those guys listening to my mixes.”

A lush stax/volt soul ballad via Jamaican reggae, this may be best known for its music video, featuring Jagger and Richards playing with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s close at hand. It was recorded in 1975, so although Wood appears in the clip, the scalding guitar solo was played by Wayne Perkins, one of the other candidates for Taylor’s job.

While other bands were singing about the joys of tripping through outer space, the Stones were already looking on the dark side. This song is a psychedelic nightmare, capturing the desolation (“It’s sooo very lonely”) of feeling lost in the cosmos, as Jones’ Mellotron casts an ominous spell.