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Sat 15 August 2026 3:00, UK
Like virtually every white rock and roll band that emerged during the 1960s, The Rolling Stones were endlessly indebted to a litany of pioneering Black American blues artists, but that is not necessarily to say that Keith Richards and the gang were devoid of any degree of originality themselves.
There was, after all, no shortage of blues outfits in early 1960s London, and yet The Rolling Stones managed to eclipse them all within a few short years, rising to the upper echelons of rock and roll stardom.
The best part of that success, however, arrived when Richards and Mick Jagger decided, or rather, were strongly persuaded by Andrew Loog Oldham, to begin writing their own, original songs, quickly landing upon a style that has long since been imitated, but never quite recaptured by anybody outside the Stones.
One of the prevailing reasons why nobody else could write like the Jagger-Richards partnership was that nobody else, at that time or at that age of life, was boasting the same experiences as the Stones. In just their early 20s, the band had gone from local heroes of the London blues scene to globally dominant rock and roll revolutionaries, hounded by the police, tabloids, and millions of hysterical devotees, and all of that went into their written material in one form or another.
Back in 1969, for instance, that songwriting partnership struck upon one of its ultimate highlights in the form of ‘Midnight Rambler’, a quintessential Rolling Stones masterpiece from the Let It Bleed era, which Richards once claimed, “nobody else could have written”.
Perhaps more so than any other track from that period, ‘Midnight Rambler’ plays perfectly to the strengths of each member of the Stones, paying homage to their blues roots while simultaneously capturing the spirit of the here-and-now, immersed in the throes of the counterculture years, street fighting men, and a mind full of psychotropic substances.
That 1969 track also benefited greatly from the hedonistic lifestyle embraced by the band during that time, gearing up for their time as tax exiles during the early 1970s. In fact, according to Mick Jagger, the song was heavily influenced by the surroundings in which it was written. “We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights,” he told Rolling Stone in 1995.
Further reading: From The Vault
“Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know,” the frontman mused, “We wrote everything there, the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafes, and there’s Keith with the guitar.” As simple as that, The Rolling Stones had yet another masterpiece in their sonic arsenal.
Structurally, the song is not overly complex, and its blues influences are hardly unique to the Stones. However, no other band could have brought together all of those different influences and that ingrained rock and roll spirit in quite the same way as the ‘Glimmer Twins’ did on ‘Midnight Rambler’. Richards has said a lot of off-the-wall things over the years, but it is hard to dispute his declaration of that song’s stunning originality.
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