The Rolling Stones - Come On - Non-Album Tracks (1963)

Certain classic musical artists from the 1960s and 1970s don't lend themselves to much in the way of alternate albums. For instance, Creedence Clearwater Revival put out pretty much all their music on their albums, with very few stray tracks such as singles or outtakes or songs only done live. However, the Rolling Stones are the opposite. Their recorded output in the 1960s and 1970s is a total mess! In fact, many excellent songs of their have never been officially released in any form.

There's a good reason for that. Around 1970, the Stones got rid of their hard-nosed business manager Allan Klein. Or at least they tried to. Many lawsuits followed, which dragged on into the 1980s. It turned out that Klein's company ABKCO kept the rights to all the Stones' music up until about 1971, and Klein made way more money on releases of that music than the actual Stones did. (Note that a few days ago I posted a George Harrison bootleg called "Beware of ABKCO" - Klein and his company screwed the Beatles too.) As a result of this financial situation, for decades, the Stones avoided releasing or repackaging their 1960s material, since doing so would benefit their financial enemy more than them, and they had plenty of money from their other releases. The one exception was "Metamorphosis," a 1975 rarities album that they were forced to put out as part of a settlement to one of the lawsuits with Klein.

Happily, that situation may finally be starting to change. Klein died in 2009. In 2012, the Stones included some previously unreleased 1963 recordings on a bonus disc of their "GRRR!" greatest hits. In 2017, the Stones released "On Air," a collection of their BBC performances from 1963 to 1965. Hopefully, more archival releases will follow.

In the meantime, I've tried to gather up all the group's quality stray tracks that I could, and I've organized them into a series of alternate albums that augment the Britsh versions of their officially released albums. As with the Kinks, I think there's as much or more quality material not on their albums up until the early 1970s as there is on their official albums!

So here's the first of a series of alternates. This covers everything they did in 1963. They put out a few singles that year, but no album, so all of it is fair game for my purpose. Some of the material here is still unreleased, but the sound quality is essentially the same as the released stuff.  The songs are in rough chronological order. The album is 36 minutes long, which would be a long album for that year.

For this and any other album of stray tracks I post here, if you see any good songs I've missed, please let me know and I'll add them in. (Note that I try to avoid including duplicates of songs released elsewhere unless there's a very good reason to do so.) There are some recordings from before 1963, but I thought they weren't that interesting, except for die-hard Stones fans, and that predates when they became the Stones anyway.

The bonus track, "Go On to School," dates way back to 1961, before the Rolling Stones even began. The band, Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys, was an early version of the Stones, with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in it. I would have included more early songs like this one if they were good, but most suffer from bad sound quality. For some reason, this one sounded a bit better than the others in my opinion, but it's still fairly rough.

01 Diddley Daddy (Rolling Stones)
02 Road Runner (Rolling Stones)
03 Bright Lights, Big City (Rolling Stones)
04 Honey What's Wrong [Baby What's Wrong] (Rolling Stones)
05 Come On (Rolling Stones)
06 I Want to Be Loved (Rolling Stones)
07 Poison Ivy (Rolling Stones)
08 Fortune Teller (Rolling Stones)
09 I Wanna Be Your Man (Rolling Stones)
10 Stoned [Instrumental] (Rolling Stones)
11 Memphis, Tennessee (Rolling Stones)
12 Roll Over Beethoven (Rolling Stones)
13 My Only Girl [That Girl Belongs to Yesterday] (Rolling Stones)
14 It Should Be You (Rolling Stones)
15 Go Home, Girl (Rolling Stones)
16 Leave Me Alone (Rolling Stones)

Go On to School (Little Boy Blue & the Blue Boys [with Mick Jagger & Keith Richards])

https://www.imagenetz.de/i5inP

Note that I chose the name of the band's first single for this album title. When I first posted this album in 2018, I used the cover art of the single with some minor changes. But in March 2021, I found a great photo of the band from 1963, so I used that instead. I kept the text from the single art though, and added in the record company logo.