And little by little I am losing my love for you

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

18/07/65 : The Rolling Stones - The Rolling Stones


Skipping over a live album and Buddy Holly's FIFTH posthumous collection, we come to our fifteenth visit with The Stones (moving them into second place on their own) - I'm expecting a collection of perfectly serviceable but completely inessential US R&B covers.

And it certainly starts that way with two I know in "Route 66" and "I Just Wanna Make Love To You" - after that they get a little bit more obscure, but it's hardly earth-shattering, although it is at least competent. However, I do think we need some historical context here because I can imagine that things were different back in '64 when this came out and they were introducing these songs to an audience that hadn't heard the like before, so I can see it was a big thing. However, I struggle to imagine too many people revisit this nowadays except as a historical curiosity.

We're at #20 in the charts this week on the fifth week of a six week run - however, that was its third run and its first one was where it did the damage with 43 weeks in the chart and 12 consecutive weeks at #1. Which suggests it really was a big thing indeed. The top five this week were  TSOM, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mary Poppins and Burt Bacharach with a new entry for Nina Simone (#19). 

Wikipedia tells us this is their debut album and the artwork was "unheard of" because of the lack of album title and band name - which does seem quite brave for a debut album. It's mostly covers of US songs from the 40s and 50s, but there are three original Stones numbers - two credited to Nanker Phelge (a pseudonym for all the group members) and one credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. Interestingly, not Richards because professionally he was Keith Richard at the time - despite the fact that his real name is Keith Richards. 

There are also some interesting names singing backing vocals on "Little By Little" - Allan Clarke (from The Hollies), Graham Nash, Gene Pitney and Phil Spector, which suggests this wasn't your average debut album from an unknown band. And one final interesting name for you is Ian Stewart who played organ on several of the tracks - he was a founding member of the band before Andrew Loog Oldham decided he didn't fit the image and demoted him to road manager, which he did for the next 20 years until his death. Critically the album was well received and it also did well commercially, getting to #1 in Australia and #11 in the US. 

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which doesn't surprise me because it's also what we saw for their follow-up album. Which I preferred to this, but I think both need to be considered within the context of the time - they were obviously giving the people what they wanted.

11/07/65 - Interesting, but not great
25/07/65 - Yeah, I liked this one

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