little red rooster

Cover Versions of #1s… Kingmaker & Jesus and Mary Chain

/ UK #1s blog / 1 Comment

As in my two previous Cover Versions of #1s posts, I’m returning to Ruby Trax, a compilation released in 1992 to celebrate the 40th anniversaries of both the NME and the UK singles chart.

It’s a veritable gold mine of weird and wonderful covers of chart-topping hits by the big (and not so big) acts of the day. While this is the last time I’m going to feature these Trax, for a while at least, the album is definitely worth checking out if you enjoyed the covers by Bob Geldof and Sinead O’Connor, or Suede and Manic Street Preachers.

And of course, for a compilation of tracks celebrating number one singles, there had to be room for some interesting interpretations of Britain’s two greatest groups, the Beatles and the Stones. Some might say they are sacrosanct, I say have at them!

Probably sensibly, both covers are of the legendary acts’ less famous number ones. And it’s quite fun to hear ‘Lady Madonna’, famously Paul McCartney’s boogie-woogie tribute to Fats Domino, reimagined for guitars. Or maybe its because my favourite bit of the original is when George Harrison’s snarling guitar comes in for the second verse. At the same time, despite the switch in lead instrument, this is a fairly faithful cover.

I had never heard of Kingmaker before writing this post, and going by the limited number of views the above video has had on YouTube I think they’ve very much been consigned to the pre-Britpop dustbin. It seems they were nearly the next big thing back in the 1992-93, with a couple of #15 hits and tours with Radiohead and Suede as their support acts, before a falling out with their record label.

A much bigger name are ’80s shoegaze icons, and East Kilbride’s finest, The Jesus and Mary Chain. Their scuzzy, distorted, feedback drenched take on ‘Little Red Rooster’, the Stones’ 2nd #1 back in 1964, is a much more impressive proposition. The song dates back to the early sixties, written by Willie Dixon and made famous by Howlin’ Wolf, and despite all the noise-pop dressing the JAMC sensibly keep that driving blues riff as the song’s focal point.

‘Little Red Rooster’ may or may not be a phallic metaphor (the Stones’ version wasn’t released as a single in the US allegedly because of this), but the Jesus and Mary Chain replace bawdiness with menace. You would not be messing with this particular little red rooster on the prowl, who isn’t so much horny as he is looking for a fight.

If you are interested in hearing more of this album, it can be a bit tricky to Trax down, with many of the forty songs not available on Spotify or YouTube, at least not in great quality uploads. But if the idea of EMF covering ‘Shaddap You Face’, or Boy George doing ‘My Sweet Lord’, Vic Reeves doing ‘Vienna’ (they bent the rules to include that one…) or Billy Bragg covering The Three Degrees appeals to you, or at least sounds morbidly fascinating, then do have a browse. The full forty-track listing is here, on the LP’s Wikipedia page.

182. ‘Little Red Rooster’, by The Rolling Stones

/ UK #1s blog / 17 Comments

Pack your welly boots, your straw hat and some industrial strength bug spray – we’re off to the country. To a farm somewhere in the Miss’ippi Delta. With The Rolling Stones.

TV Rehearsal

Little Red Rooster, by The Rolling Stones (their 2nd of eight #1s)

1 week, from 3rd – 10th December 1964

It feels like the Stones’ arrival, earlier this year, passed us by. ‘It’s All Over Now’ sneaked a week at the top in the summer, but surrounded as it was by some colossal pop tunes from some legendary acts I had basically forgotten about it. The first Stones #1 should have been a bigger thing, I feel. So, they’re back. And this time they’re making sure we notice them.

Their tactic? To return with a song so unlike any of the one hundred and eighty-one previous chart-toppers that you instantly sit up and start listening. A slow, woozy blues riff comes along, reeling you in, lulling you into a vision of sipping ice-tea on a farmhouse veranda, before Mick Jagger’s languorous vocals… I am the little red rooster, Too lazy to crow for days… I am the little red rooster, Too lazy to crow for days… It’s an atmospheric song – the dusty, heat-hazed farmyard unfolds before your very eyes. Dogs begin to bark, And hounds begin to howl… All the while the hypnotic, twelve-bar blues riff continues to drag you along. Watch out strange cat people, Little red rooster’s on the prowl…

1964 has been a year, by and large, of peerless pop. But this is no pop song, not by any stretch of the imagination. There are no verses, or chorus, or bubble-gum bridge here. This is low-down and dirty blues. It’s like the band pressed record on a jamming session, a warm-up before recording the actual single, and decided to release it instead. I’m listening to it on repeat as I write this, and it’s very easy to miss when the song starts over. It could be three minutes long; or thirty minutes.

THE-ROLLING-STONES-LITTLE-RED-ROOSTER

While the lyrics might sound like the Mick Jagger manifesto – I am the little red rooster… Keep everything in the farmyard upset in every way… – one that he’s been following for the best part of sixty years, the real star here is Brain Jones and his slide guitar. The main rhythm is acoustic, but Jones’s electric guitar flirts, and slinks, and playfully cavorts around every line. One minute it’s making the sound of dogs barking, then horses rearing, then it’s the little red rooster itself. Jones was blues through and through, and felt some discomfort at the band ‘selling out’ and becoming a pop group. As the sixties progressed and the Stones moved further and further away from their bluesy roots, he became a marginalised figure on the edge of the band, until his tragic death. Looking back, it’s easy to forget that he was as much a part of the original Stones as Jagger and Richards. This record is perhaps his finest hour, and a kind of vindication. He had managed to get a full-on blues song to #1 in the British charts – the only time that has ever happened.

‘Little Red Rooster’ had originally been recorded by Howlin’ Wolf, one of the Stones’ biggest early influences, in 1961. But it’s a folk song at heart, handed down through the mists of time, probably from well back in the 1800s. His version is very raw, while another version by Sam Cooke is much more polished, with a snazzy organ doing the work of Brian Jones’s slide guitar. In those earlier versions the singer has a little red rooster, rather than being the little red rooster – which brings to mind some saucy connotations. I’m surprised Mick and the lads changed it…

Understandably, the band’s management was against releasing this as a single. It doesn’t exactly scream ‘#1 smash hit’. But it was. And I feel that this, along with all their earliest singles, have been somewhat erased from The Rolling Stones canon. For years I thought – according to the greatest hits CDs I had – that their career began with ‘Time Is On My Side’. But now I know. And while I would never name ‘Little Red Rooster’ as one of my favourite Stones songs, I am truly glad that they took this slice of Delta blues to the top of the charts for a cold and drizzly December’s week.