As Tears Go By - (Original Single Mono Version)

This was one of the first songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. The Stones manager, Andrew Oldham, gave it to a singer he also managed named Marianne Faithfull, who released it in 1964. It was going to be the B-side of her first single, but the record company decided to make it the A-side and it became her first hit. The Stones recorded it a year later. Faithfull became Mick Jagger's girlfriend in 1966. Their tumultuous relationship ended 3 years later. In that time, she helped write "Sister Morphine" and gave Jagger the book that inspired "Sympathy For The Devil."

In a 1992 interview with Guitar Player magazine, Keith Richards said: "suddenly, 'Oh, we're songwriters,' with the most totally anti-Stones sort of song you could think of at the time, while we're trying to make a good version of (Muddy Waters') 'Still A Fool.' When you start writing, it doesn't matter where the first one comes from. You've got to start somewhere, right? So Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had. He said, 'You ain't comin' out,' and there was no way out. We were in the kitchen with some food and a couple of guitars, but we couldn't get to the john, so we had to come out with a song. In his own little way, that's where Andrew made his great contribution to the Stones. That was such a flatulent idea, a fart of an idea, that suddenly you're gonna lock two guys in a room, and they're going to become songwriters. Forget about it. And it worked. In that little kitchen 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. And it took us a while to come up with 'The Last Time.' That was the first one we came up with where Mick and I said, 'This is one we can lay on the guys.' At the time we were already borrowing songs from the Beatles - 'I Wanna Be Your Man' - because we were really hard up for singles. So they gave us a hand. In retrospect, during the '60s the Stones and the Beatles were almost the same band, because we were the only ones in that position."

The original title was "As Time Goes By." It was changed to avoid confusion with the song from Casablanca.