I’ve never been nearly as huge a fan of the Rolling Stones as I am of their friendly rivals from the 1960s, the Beatles. For that matter, there are a lot of other rock bands I listen to considerably more often than the Stones. I can only claim familiarity with a limited part of their catalog. I only own two studio albums (Let It Bleed and Exile on Main St.), the Hot Rocks compilation, and a promotional sampler with half a dozen classic tracks and half a dozen from A Bigger Bang, their most recent studio album. Other than the songs appearing on these albums, I am familiar with a few other frequently played songs from throughout their career, but that’s about it. However, out of the songs I know, there are a lot of good ones and quite a few great ones. Recently I wrote a retrospective on the Stones for an online music service (unfortunately only members can view the articles and reviews, though I will eventually post them here, after I’ve let the website have exclusive use of them for a sufficient period of time). Before doing so, I listened to the 50-track version of their new compilation GRRR! through the music service I was writing for, and was reminded of how many good songs they’ve had throughout their career. This inspired me to try to come up with a list of my fifteen favorite Rolling Stones songs.
I always have a lot of difficulty with this kind of list, because I often like a lot of songs (or albums) more or less equally, but for very different reasons, making it very hard to choose one over another. Also, my preferences will vary to some extent depending on my mood. In fact, I think it would be nearly impossible for me to make a list of my fifteen or even twenty favorite Beatles songs, because I think so many of their songs are equally great (I wasn’t even able to limit myself to twenty songs when only choosing from those written by Paul McCartney or those written by John Lennon). I might be able to make such a list for some other favorite artists like Queen, Genesis, Randy Newman or Sting, but it would be pretty hard in those cases too. It wasn’t even easy to do it for the Rolling Stones. In one respect, the difficulty was the same – choosing between several songs that I liked more or less equally well. But for the Stones, another difficulty was that problem was that there were some songs, particularly from later in their career, that I couldn’t remember well enough to decide whether I should include them. On the other hand, of course, they have a lot of songs that I’ve never even heard (the majority of the songs they’ve recorded, in fact) and therefore didn’t even consider, which at least narrowed down the field a lot. I originally intended to make a list of ten, but considering the size of the Stones’ catalog (even considering only the parts I’m familiar with), I ended up expanding that to fifteen. The first three songs are the ones that nine times out of ten I would name as my favorites, though the exact order might vary. The others I would say I have a decided preference for, but on any given day they might be in a different order or even replaced by other Stones songs that didn’t quite make the list this time.
Some might observe that few of my choices are the straight-ahead rock and roll songs that the Rolling Stones are best known for. Actually, I like that kind of song a lot as well, but in a catalog as huge as that of the Stones, it’s easier for a song to stand out if there is something unusual or quirky about it. I like clever arrangements and unusual sounds, and so these things are common features in many of my favorite songs by whatever artist. “Paint It Black”, “Sympathy for the Devil”, and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” are not what might be called typical Rolling Stones songs, but they are in my opinion the best ones they ever recorded. I’m also quite fond of the psychedelic “2000 Light Years from Home”, which probably wouldn’t be ranked among the group’s top 15 or 20 songs by most Stones fans (it didn’t even make the 50-track version of GRRR!, unlike every other song here, though it is on the 80-track version). On the other hand, I also like some more stereotypical Stones songs like “Street Fighting Man”, “19th Nervous Breakdown”, and “Let’s Spend the Night Together”. While I imagine many ardent Stones fans would strongly disagree with some of my choices, this is after all a list of my own subjective preferences as a casual fan of the group. Maybe when I have the opportunity to listen to more of their songs, my preferences will change.
My Top Fifteen Rolling Stones Songs
Sympathy for the Devil
Paint It Black
You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Ruby Tuesday
Mother’s Little Helper
2000 Light Years from Home
Street Fighting Man
Miss You
Tumbling Dice
Honky Tonk Women
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
19th Nervous Breakdown
Let’s Spend the Night Together
(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction
Gimmie Shelter
Honorable Mentions: The Last Time, We Love You, She’s a Rainbow, Jigsaw Puzzle, Rocks Off, Angie, It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It), Beast of Burden, Start Me Up, Streets of Love, Doom and Gloom
Note on Song Authorship: All of these songs were officially attributed to the songwriting team of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. However, this may not be accurate in all cases. While the two collaborated much more than Lennon and McCartney, who despite sharing credits wrote many songs entirely separately, a number of Jagger/Richards songs were mostly written by one or the other, and some songs apparently had input from other members of the band, even though they didn’t get credit (though I should note that most of the information I’ve seen about the songwriting is secondhand, rather than being based on direct quotes by band members). As it happens, it seems Jagger was mainly responsible for writing two of my three favorite Stones songs. Both “Sympathy for the Devil” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” were mainly his work, and he really outdid himself on these two songs. Bill Wyman apparently claimed that the third song in my top three, “Paint It Black”, was a group composition that should have been attributed to “Nanker/Phelge”, the collective pseudonym the Stones used for songs written by the whole group. Whether this was true or not, Brian Jones’s sitar riff is one of the main reasons the song is as good as it is, a point that has been acknowledged by Richards. Of the other tracks, “Ruby Tuesday” apparently was written mainly by Richards with some help from Jones (one of the few instances of Jones playing a major role in writing a song). Wyman has claimed to have written the riff for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”. “Gimme Shelter” was mainly written by Richards. As far as I know, the other songs on the main list are genuine Jagger/Richards collaborations (of the honorable mentions, the chorus of "The Last Time" was lifted from the traditional gospel song "This May Be the Last Time", recorded by the Staple Singers).
