Notes and Quotes: "I Wanna Be Your Man"

Mick Jagger: We were rehearsing and Andrew brought Paul and John down. They said they had this tun—they were real hustlers then. So they played it and we thought it sounded pretty commercial, which is what we were looking for, so we did it like Elmore James or something. It was completely crackers, but it was a hit and sounded great onstage.

—Mark Paytress, The Rolling Stones, Off the Record, 2003 (35).

Keith Richards: September 1963. No songs, at least none that we thought would make the charts. Nothing in the ever-depleting R&B barrel looked likely. We were rehearsing at Studio 51 near Soho. Andrew had disappeared to walk about and absent himself from this gloom and he'd walked into John and Paul, getting out of a taxi in the Charing Cross Road. They had a drink and they detected Andrew's distress. He told them: no songs. they came back to the studio with him and gave us a song that was on their next album but wasn't coming out as a single, "I Wanna Be Your Man." They played it through with us. Brian put on some nice slide guitar; we turned it into an unmistakably Stones rather than an Beatles song. It was clear that we had a hit almost before they'd left the studio.

They deliberately aimed it at us. They're the songwriters, they're trying to flog their songs, it's Tin Pan Alley, and they thought this song would suit us. And also we were a mutual-admiration society. Mick and I admired their harmonies and their songwriting capabilities; they envied us our freedom of movement and our image. And they wanted to join in with us. The thing is, with the Beatles and us, it was a very friendly relationship. It was also very cannily worked out, because in those days singles were coming out every six, eight weeks. And we'd try and time it so that we didn't clash. I remember John Lennon calling me up and saying, "Well, we've not finished mixing yet." We've got one ready to go." "OK, you go first."

—Keith Richards, Life, 2010 (141).

Paul McCartney: We wrote "I Wanna Be Your Man" for Ringo because we wanted him to have a song on the album. On the Please Please Me album he did a thing called "Boys," which was very funny because it was a girl group, the Shirelles, that did it; we didn't write it. We didn't write use to thing what these things meant, we were in love with the sound, the music. We often used to say to people, the words don't really matter, people don't listen to words, it's the sound they listen to. So "I Wanna Be Your Man" was to try and give Ringo something like "Boys"; an uptempo song he could sing from the drums. So again, it had to be very simple. "I wanna be your ma-an"—that little bit is nicked from "Fortune Teller," a Benn Spellman song... We were quite open bout our nicks. "That's from the Marvelettes, that's from the Shirelles..." We admired these people so much, we stole quite openly, like two notes, and we were proud of it... /

We were in Charing Cross Road, where we often used to go to window-shop at the guitar shops and daydream. It was a great hobby of ours when we first came down to London. Dick James, our song publisher, was on Charing Cross Road. We'd go to his office and window-shop on the way. Coming out of his office one day, John and I were walking along Charing Cross Road when passing in a taxi were Mick and Keith. We were each other's counterparts in many ways because they became the writers in the group and were the twosome, the couple, as it were. So they shouted from the taxi and we yelled, "Hey, hey, give us a lift, give us a lift," and we bummed a lift off them. So there were the four of us sitting in a taxi and I think Mick said, "Hey, we're recording. Got any songs?" And we said, "Aaaah, yes, sure, we got one. How about Ringo's song? You could do it as a single." And they went for it and Bo Diddleyed it up a bit. I remember it as a song we had, and in that case it would be a finished song.

—Barry Miles, Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, 1997 (153-154).

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8 October, 2017