When The Rolling Stones were first easing into making music, they had no sense of the prolific success that lay ahead of them. In the early days, the songwriting duo of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards toyed with a more lovelorn, pop-adjacent sound, often working on covers to hone their chemistry before committing to their trademark rattle. While their first ventures sound starkly different to the gritty, rhythm-driven anthems that propelled them to fame, it was a crucial starting point and produced one of the first songs they felt truly happy with.
As Richards explains in Keith Richards on Keith Richards: Interviews & Encounters: “You tend [at first] to write stuff that’s totally different from the stuff you’re actually playing. It takes a while. I think ‘The Last Time’ is the first song we wrote for the Stones that we could actually record ourselves.” While it was a landmark moment, it was reflective of their early reliance on covers. While the song was credited to Richards and Jagger, it was largely lifted from a 1954 gospel track by the Staple Singers.
Using pre-existing material as a launching pad, they amplified the song with a fiery riff and Phil Spector’s infamous ‘Wall of Sound’, all of which paved the way for them to pioneer the electric blend of blues and rock that characterised their later sound. To that end, when Richards was asked what felt like the first definable Rolling Stones track, he said: “The first one we felt happy with was ‘The Last Time’.
As their manager and producer Andrew Oldham recalled, it was one of a handful of Richards/Jagger material they’d been experimenting with in the studio in the mid-60s. “We did two Mick and Keith compositions,” he said in an NME interview. “‘The Last Time’ and ‘A Mess Of Fire’, and three old blues numbers, but I [had] to go back to Hollywood to do some more work on the tapes before deciding which one to use as the next A-side.”
It came about six months after ‘As Tears Go By’ and seemed to herald a new era of the Stones’ style, with Richards saying: “It was that long before we could find a style that would fit the Stones.” Before the arrival of ‘The Last Time’, they were almost cautious about bringing their own flair into the studio, sticking dutifully to covers of Marianne Faithfull and Gene Pitney.
“It took us a year or so to find our way through all that and find songs that we could feel comfortable about recording ourselves,” he admitted. When they found that comfortable point, their sound felt authentically theirs, which audiences responded to by sending it soaring up the charts – the first song to carry the Jagger/Richards credit to do so.
A week after its 1965 UK release, it hit number one, and stateside, it became the second Rolling Stones song to hit the top ten. That year, Richards reflected on the making of the landmark track in Beat International. “We wrote ‘The Last Time’ when we had a few weeks off,” he said. “Mick [Jagger] and I played around with it for days because we weren’t happy with the first title we thought up, which was ‘The Last Time’!”
