Fact #148393

Mick Jagger (vocalist, Rolling Stones) : That was a big landmark record for me. It's the first time we wrote the whole record and finally laid to rest the ghost of having to do these very nice and interesting, no doubt, but still cover versions of old R'n'B songs -- which we didn't really feel we were doing justice, to be perfectly honest, particularly because we didn't have the maturity. Plus, everyone was doing it.

It has a very wide spectrum of music styles. Paint It Black was this kind of Turkish song; and there were also very bluesy things like Goin' Home; and I remember some sort of ballads on there. It had a lot of good songs, it had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.

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AFTERMATH by Johnny Black

The Rolling Stones fourth album, Aftermath, was the first on which singer Mick Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards wrote every song. Well into the mid-1950s, the roles of songwriter and performer had been almost entirely separate in popular music. Songs were composed by so-called Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths like Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen or Cole Porter, and sung by specialist singers like Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald or Bing Crosby.
The distinction between the two jobs was, however, much less pronounced in folk and blues circles, where a Woody Guthrie or a Leadbelly would habitually write and perform his own songs.

As rock'n'roll evolved, emerging young artists like Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Bob Dylan drew their inspiration from blues, folk and country music, and thus considered it perfectly normal to write their own material. Thus, the boundaries between folk, blues and popular music became increasingly blurred.

With the arrival of The Beatles, and their in-house writing team of Lennon and McCartney, the floodgates burst wide, and The Stones were in the vanguard of innumerable British bands who decided to follow The Fab Four's lead. Mick Jagger has admitted that their first attempt at composition was "a horrible song", adding, "It was pop, and we didn't record it, because it was crap."
To their surprise, Jagger and Richards found that their earliest songs, including As Tears Go By for Marianne Faithfull, didn't match their personalities. "We were these two rebellious band members and we would write nice little tunes, but sentimental stuff."

By the end of 1965, however, they'd got the hang of it and set to work on their first entirely self-composed album. Recording started at the end of a gruelling US tour, with a five day session, from 6-10 December in RCA Studios, Los Angeles, California, USA. From the outset, it was obvious that this would be the first real Rolling Stones album. With the solitary exception of a sprawling semi-jam, Goin' Home, the Stones' original incarnation as r'n'b wannabes was swept aside. Gone were the regurgitated hymns to American cars, bars and boardwalks, replaced by songs about suburban housewives on tranquillisers, brain dead dolly birds and the corrupted values of modern life.

And if these songs, shot through with mysoginistic, narcissistic and sneering lyrics, revealed The Stones as not terribly nice chaps, at least they now had their own identity.
Although Mick and Keith were writing the songs, Brian Jones' gave the album much of its musical appeal. The baroque dulcimer in Lady Jane, the sitar in Mother's Little Helper, the marimbas on Under My Thumb, these are all Jones' contributions, lifting the tracks out of the riff-rock ruts they might otherwise have sunk into.

The release of Aftermath affected the band in three important ways. First, it brought them a new level of respect, placing them on a par with The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks. Secondly, generating their own material gave Jagger and Richards full creative control of the band's musical direction. Lastly, it earned them songwriting royalties which, before very long, would prove exceedingly lucrative.

(Source : by Johnny Black, first published in the book Albums by Backbeat Press, 2007)