The third Rolling Stones album Out Of Our Heads was released 60 years ago today (September 24), and whilst it’s not the most heralded of their many long players, it was a pivotal release for the group.
It’s the last to rely heavily on covers and the first where you can glimpse Jagger and Richards getting to grips with a new style of songwriting, one coloured by their own lives, and growing reputation as insolent young princes of a new age.
You can see this in Play With Fire, where Jagger warns off a high-society girl from getting involved with him. Or the rolling blues rock libertarian cry of I’m Free.
And also The Last Time, which wasn’t on the UK version of the album – singles and albums were very much separate entities at the time in Britain – but was on the US edition. Its release marked the start of a new era for the band: it was the first time a Jagger and Richards song had been given a single release.
But that’s not to say that it doesn’t lean heavily on existing sources. The most notable of which is a 1955 recording by the Staple Singers of This May Be The Last Time. As you can see below, the two songs share identical choruses…
At least the Stones fessed up to the theft. When interviewed for the 2003 book According To The Rolling Stones, Keith Richards admitted that – initially at least, they had found inspiration hard to come by: "We didn't find it difficult to write pop songs, but it was VERY difficult - and I think Mick will agree - to write one for the Stones. It seemed to us it took months and months and in the end we came up with The Last Time.”
Luckily for the Stones, the Staple Singers track was merely the most recent version of an old gospel song that went back several generations. “I think I was trying to learn it on the guitar just to get the chords, sitting there playing along with the record, no gigs, nothing else to do.
"At least we put our own stamp on it, as the Staple Singers had done, and as many other people have before and since: they’re still singing it in churches today.”
“It gave us something to build on to create the first song that we felt we could decently present to the band to play... The Last Time was kind of a bridge into thinking about writing for the Stones.”
Another possible influence could be Maybe The Last Time, a 1964 James Brown B-side and a song that the Stones would have surely been familiar with. Though it should be pointed out that the two tracks share nothing more than a title and a general theme:
Jagger’s lyric though sees him honing his personality as an arrogant buck, unmistakably in charge in his relationships with women – a role that he would later refine on later songs like Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb.
“No one had really done that,” he said in a 1995 interview with Rolling Stone. “The Beatles, to some extent, were doing it, though they weren’t really doing it at this period as much as they did later. One of the first things that, in that very naive way, you attempted to deal with were the kind of funny, swinging, London-type things that were going on.”
“I didn’t even realise I was doing it at the time. But it became an interesting source for material. Songwriting had only dealt in cliches and borrowed stuff, you know, from previous records or ideas. ‘I want to hold your hand,’ things like that. But these songs were really more from experience and then embroidered to make them more interesting.”
At the end of 1964, the Stones had scored their second UK Number One with Little Red Rooster. A follow-up was needed then, and quick. With the group touring in the States, manager Andrew Oldham used a free day to book them into RCA Studios in Hollywood. Oldham produced but Phil Spector was on hand assisting and Jack Nitzsche provided tambourine.
Though the song is credited to Jagger/Richards, and Keith plays the solo, the central riff and hook is played by – and was quite possibly created by - Brian Jones.
The session also yielded another Mick and Keith original, A Mess Of Fire and three covers. After some post-production from Andrew Oldham, The Last Time was selected as the next single and was in the shops within six weeks. Within another three it was at Number One in the UK.
The song would surface again in 1967 when The Who recorded a cover as a gesture of solidarity with the Stones, then embroiled in the media scandal over the Redlands bust with both Jagger and Richards facing possible prison sentences.
Then, thirty years later, an orchestral version recorded by a group of session musicians called, rather grandly, The Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra, was sampled by the Verve on Bitter Sweet Symphony.
As you might recall, Jagger and Richards were credited as sole composers of the Verve’s signature hit, much to Richard Ashcroft’s annoyance, but hugely ironic given the fact that both Stones fully admit they themselves had stolen it from the Staple Sisters gospel track.
Despite its somewhat tangled history, for the two leading Stones The Last Time will always represent a turning point. “It was the first song that we felt we could decently present to the band to play…” Keith said in the 2003 interview.
“The Last Time was kind of a bridge into thinking about writing for the Stones. It gave us a level of confidence; a pathway of how to do it. And once we had done that, we were in the game.
"There was no mercy, because then we had to come up with the next one. We had entered a race without even knowing it."
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