THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960S THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
The Rolling Stones/Gene Pitney: The Raunchiest Song the Stones Ever Committed to Tape
The Rolling Stones/Gene Pitney — “Andrew’s Blues”
The Stones, with Gene Pitney providing vocals, “lovingly take the piss out of” their wunderkind manager Andrew Loog Oldham in this raunchy sing-a-long, which Stansted Montfichet calls “an obscene studio shtick.”
Ah, ALO. Richard Havers writes:
Oldham masterminded The Rolling Stones rise . . . . [He] was a month younger than Keith, who himself was the youngest member of The Stones, which makes his achievements all the more remarkable. It was ALO’s innate sense of promotion, his flair, his pushiness, and his understanding of music marketing, long before anyone else understood what it meant, that helped make The Stones who they became. [He] was much more than a manager for The Rolling Stones. He “produced” their early recordings without really knowing what a record producer did. The fact is he had a sixth sense as to what worked. When the band were struggling for a follow-up to their first single, Loog Oldham hustled John Lennon and Paul McCartney into giving the Stones an unreleased and unrecorded song to cover. “I Wanna Be Your Man” made №12 on the UK charts and was the catalyst for much that followed. . . . Loog Oldham famously coined the headline, “Would you let your daughter sleep with a Rolling Stone?” Sadly, the ever-conservative Melody Maker changed “sleep” to “go.” From the outset, ALO cultivated the image of the band as anti-establishment, provocative, intelligent, and very much their own people. According to Andrew, “When The Beatles were having hit records and bridging the generation gap, The Stones were saying, you either like us or f**k off.” Every parent hated The Stones, which meant that just about every teenager loved them; ALO was a big part of furthering that feeling. . . . Perhaps most famously of all, he got Mick and Keith writing songs together. Maybe the story of locking them in a room until they wrote a hit is a little far-fetched, but it was undoubtedly Loog Oldham who saw the sense in getting them songwriting.
But, back to “Andrew’s Blues.” Bart Bealmear writes:
On February 4th, 1964, the Rolling Stones entered Regent Sound Studios in London for a session. . . . joined by some special guests: singer/songwriter Gene Pitney, Graham Nash and Allan Clarke from the Hollies, as well as genius record producer Phil Spector. By night’s end their combined efforts resulted in a few completed tracks, including one called “Andrew’s Blues,” which is quite possibly the raunchiest song the Stones have ever committed to tape . . . . In his autobiography, Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock ’n’ Roll Band . . . Bill Wyman wrote about the wild session . . . .
“We’d become friendly with Phil Spector and attended a star-studded party in his honour thrown by Decca a week earlier; so he continued the friendship by dropping in our recording. . . . Gene Pitney arrived direct from the airport, with duty-free cognac. It was his birthday, and his family custom was that everyone had to drink a whole glass. Pitney played piano while Spector and the Hollies played tambourine and maracas and banged coins on empty bottles. We recorded three songs . . . . The session then degenerated into silliness, but everybody had a great time cutting ‘Andrew’s Blues’ . . . which [was] very rude.”
The main vocalist . . . is Gene Pitney . . . . The boys lovingly take the piss out of Oldham . . . but they also mock the hell out of Sir Edward Lewis, the founder and chairman of Decca Records — the Stones’ label — and the track as a whole can be seen as a commentary on the music business. Or just a drunken lark.
See my website at bracefortheobscure60srock.com.
