The Story Behind “As Tears Go By” by The Rolling Stones and the Birth of a Legendary Songwriting Team

The Rolling Stones were looking for material. Beatles manager Brian Epstein took John Lennon and Paul McCartney down to a club in Richmond to see the band perform. The pair of Liverpool songwriters wanted to see what kind of music the Stones played. McCartney had a part of a song and played it for Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. They confirmed it was comparable to their style and wanted to hear the rest of the song. Lennon and McCartney went over to the corner of the room and hammered out the rest of the song.

When they returned with the finished composition, Jagger and Richards were inspired to write their own material after seeing how simple it appeared. With some urging from their own manager Andrew Loog Oldham, they began a songwriting partnership that would rival even that of Lennon & McCartney. Let’s take a look at the story behind “As Tears Go By” by The Rolling Stones.

“Come On”

In June 1963, The Rolling Stones released their first single in the UK, a Chuck Berry song called “Come On” that reached the charts first. The follow-up was the aforementioned Lennon & McCartney song “I Wanna Be Your Man.” Their next single, “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly and The Crickets, was the first to be released in America. Jagger and Richards started working on their own compositions after that. Their first attempt wasn’t something they felt fit with their style. It was called “As Tears Go By” and was given to Marianne Faithfull, who had a big hit.

In 1995, Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine, “I wrote the lyrics, and Keith wrote the melody. It’s a very melancholy song for a 21-year-old to write: The evening of the day, watching children play—it’s very dumb and naive, but it’s got a very sad sort of thing about it, almost like an older person might write. You know, it’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realizing you’re not a child. It’s a relatively mature song, considering the rest of the output at the time. And we didn’t think of doing it because The Rolling Stones were a butch Blues group. But Marianne Faithfull’s version was already a big, proven hit song. … It was one of the first things I ever wrote.” 

It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces, I can see
But not for me
I sit and watch
As tears go by

Casablanca

When The Rolling Stones finally released their version of the song, it entered the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. Mike Leander arranged the strings. He would later do the same on “She’s Leaving Home” by The Beatles.

In 2010, Richards wrote in his memoir, Life: “‘As Tears Go By’—the title changed by Andrew Oldham from the Casablanca song ‘As Time Goes By’—written on a twelve-string guitar. We thought, ‘what a terrible piece of tripe.’ We came out and played it to Andrew, and he said, ‘It’s a hit.’ We actually sold this stuff, and it actually made money. Mick and I were thinking, this is money for old rope! Mick and I knew by now that really our job was to write songs for the Stones. It took us eight or nine months before we came up with ‘The Last Time,’ which is the first one that we felt we could give to the rest of the guys without being sent out of the room. If I’d gone to The Rolling Stones with ‘As Tears Go By,’ it would have been ‘Get out and don’t come back.’ Mick and I were trying to hone it down. We kept coming up with these ballads, nothing to do with what we were doing. And then finally we came up with ‘The Last Time’ and looked at each other and said, ‘Let’s try this with the boys.’

“With ‘As Tears Go By,’ we weren’t trying to write a commercial pop song,” he continued. “It was just what came out. I knew what Andrew wanted: ‘Don’t come out with a blues, don’t do some parody or copy, come out with something of your own.’ A good pop song is not really that easy to write. It was a shock, this fresh world of writing our own material, this discovery that I had a gift I had no idea existed. It was [William] Blake-like, a revelation, an epiphany.”

My riches can’t buy everything
I want to hear the children sing
All I hear is the sound
Of rain falling on the ground
I sit and watch
As tears go by

A Songwriting Team Was Born

Of course, the pair would go on to compose rock ‘n’ roll classics such as “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Paint It Black,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” and “Honky Tonk Women.” First, Richards said, they wrote songs for other artists. “After that, we wrote loads of airy-fairy silly love songs for chicks and stuff that didn’t take off,” he said. “We’d give them to Andrew and, amazing to us, he got most of them recorded by other artists. Mick and I refused to put this crap we were writing with the Stones. We’d have been laughed out of the goddamn room.”

It is the evening of the day
I sit and watch the children play
Doing things I used to do
They think are new
I sit and watch
As tears go by

Nothing to Do with Us

Richards told Guitar Player magazine in 1992: “Mick and I got hung up about writing songs, and it still took us another six months before we had another hit with Gene Pitney, ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.’ We were writing these terrible pop songs that were becoming Top-10 hits. I thought, ‘What are we doing here playing the f–king blues, and writing these horrible pop songs and getting very successful?’ They had nothing to do with us, except we wrote ’em.”

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Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images