Ruby Tuesday

The Zoo Crew has got "Ruby Tuesday" rolling across the airwaves right now, The Rolling Stones drifting out of Between The Buttons, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks tuned in to THE ZOO, settle back and let this one breathe. It is one of those records that does not shout. It walks in soft, a little lonesome, a little pretty, and by the time Mick Jagger is asking who could hang a name on you, the room has gone quiet in the good way. The hippie side of the crew loves the baroque drift of it. The biker side loves that it still came from a band that had already earned their scars on the road. Both camps agree it belongs on the turntable.

Keith Richards has told the story more than once, and it is the kind of tale a songwriter only gets when the heart is still raw. He has said the song was probably written about Linda Keith not being there, that she had gone off somewhere, and that the feeling was very mournful, very Ruby Tuesday, and that it really was a Tuesday. In another telling he put it even plainer. Some girl you have broken up with, and all you have left is the piano and the guitar and a pair of panties, and it is goodbye. The song just comes out of that. He has said those are the easiest songs to write, because you are right there and you really mean it, and that if you break a songwriter's heart he will come up with a good one. Linda Keith was the model he had been with in the mid-sixties, a sharp, self-assured young woman he met around the same time Mick first crossed paths with Marianne Faithfull. By the autumn of 1966 the romance had come apart, and what was left got poured into a lyric about a woman who changes with every new day and cannot be kept.

The music has its own little argument attached to it, which is half the fun of Stones lore. Bill Wyman has said Keith brought the seeds of the song in and that Brian Jones helped shape the music. Marianne Faithfull remembered it the other way around. She said Brian was obsessed with the idea that Elizabethan lute music and Delta blues were cousins, and that one day in the studio he very softly played a folkish, nursery-rhyme melody on the recorder. Keith cocked his head, asked what that thing was, and when Brian played it again, perfectly, Keith went to the piano and banged it out. Engineer Glyn Johns later said Brian was extremely together and confident while he was working on it, and when it was finished he was both pleased and relieved. However the first spark landed, the finished record is the last great collaboration between Richards and Jones, and you can hear both of them in it.

They cut it at Olympic Studios in London around November 1966, during the sessions for Between The Buttons, with Andrew Loog Oldham producing. Bill Wyman put the date at the sixteenth of that month. Brian plays the countermelody on an alto recorder, that wistful line a lot of folks still swear is a flute. The double bass is a two-man job. Wyman fingered the notes while Keith bowed the instrument, which is about as Stones as a studio trick gets. Mick has been honest that he did not write a note of it. He told Jann Wenner in 1995 that it is a wonderful song, a nice melody and a lovely lyric, neither of which he wrote, but that he always enjoys singing it. That is high praise from a man who later called a lot of Between The Buttons a disappointment. He still singled this one out.

The single went out on the thirteenth of January 1967 as a double A-side with "Let's Spend the Night Together." American radio wanted no part of the night-together lyric, so a lot of stations flipped the record and played the softer side instead. That accidental blessing helped "Ruby Tuesday" climb to number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the band's fourth chart-topper in the States, while the pairing reached number three in Britain. Over here the song opened the American pressing of Between The Buttons, which landed later that January and ran to number two. Back in England the custom was to keep singles off the album, so the British Buttons left it off, along with its partner, and kept "Back Street Girl" and "Please Go Home" instead. Oldham once called the record their most English album, music-hall piano sitting next to the psych-soul of this ballad. The title itself came from an offhand remark he made when Charlie Watts asked what they were going to call the thing. A chain of American restaurants later borrowed the song's name, which is a strange little afterlife for a breakup ballad, but the record does not need the help.

Before any of that, the band was a handful of blues-mad kids in London. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had grown up in Dartford and gone to grammar school together, then lost touch. They ran into each other again at the train station, Mick headed for the London School of Economics with an armful of blues and rhythm-and-blues records, Keith on his way to Sidcup Art College. The records did the talking. In April 1962 they went down to the Ealing Club to hear Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the first amplified rhythm-and-blues band in Britain, and they locked onto the slide guitar of a Cheltenham boy calling himself Elmo Lewis, after Elmore James. That was Brian Jones. Jagger and Richards sat in with Korner's outfit, Charlie Watts was already behind the drums there, and Jones, dead set on a band of his own, pulled them toward rehearsals at the Bricklayers Arms in Soho. An ad in Jazz News brought in pianist Ian Stewart. When Korner had to give up a Marquee Club date that summer, he handed the night to the youngsters. Jones took the name from a Muddy Waters tune called "Rollin' Stone." On the twelfth of July 1962 they played their first gig at the Marquee, billed as the Rollin' Stones, with Mick singing, Keith and Brian on guitar, Dick Taylor on bass, Stu on piano, and Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, on drums. Watts came aboard not long after, Bill Wyman settled in on bass, and the rough little blues group out of the London clubs became the Rolling Stones.

That is the long road into a song that still sounds like somebody standing at a window watching a girl walk away. Catch it while the Crew has it on, and if you want the rest of the story from the band itself, the official home is rollingstones.com. They keep a light on over at Facebook, post the road pictures on Instagram, and talk shop on X. For the faithful who have been keeping the scrapbooks since 1980, the European fan club It's Only Rock'n Roll still runs the gathering place at iorr.org. Good company for a song about somebody who would not stay.