I wanna be your man
..anyway
On Ringo's (and my little brother's) birthday, a Lennon/McCartney number penned for Ringo, and sung by him on their 2nd album 'With The Beatles'.
Made famous of course by the Rolling Stones, for whom it was their first UK #1.
Back in 1963, although already notorious, the Stones were essentially simply part of the British blues revival, a covers band (a very good one), and they'd run out of material to cover. Rehearsals in Ken Collyer's Jazz Club, Newport St were petering out, and their manager (& Brian Epstein's former press secretary), Andrew Loog Oldham, stepped out into Leicester Square for a breath of fresh air and a think. Walking along, he hears a toot from a Rolls-Royce. It's the Fabs, on their way back from yet another awards dinner (Variety Club GB, as it happens), well-fed & quite 'refreshed'. "Why the long face, Andrew?" Climbing into the Roller, he explains. "Don't you worry!" cry John & Paul. "We'll help you out!" and they turn the car round and off to Newport St. In they walk. "All right, wack?" "mumble, mumble". Sitting down at a table in the corner, they put their heads together and 25 minutes later they present the Stones with their ticket to fame & fortune.
What the Stones and certainly what Andrew Loog Oldham didn't know, was that Lennon & McCartney had pretty much had the song already written out, and the huddle over the table was a bit of a conjuring trick to make it look like they could write hits at lightning speed. But the trick worked sufficiently that once the session was over, Andrew Loog Oldham took Mick'n'Keef back to the flat they were sharing, and basically locked them in the kitchen until they produced a song of their own. And that was the beginning of the Jagger/Richard partnership and the beginning of the end for Brian Jones as leader of the Stones.
Ken Collyer himself is a significant figure in all this. After the WWII the Glenn Miller style of big band went out of fashion, and jazz split into two camps, modern (be-bop) and trad. The split was deep and bitter. You were either with Ronnie Scott & the boppers, or you were with Ken Collyer and the trads.
Ironically, it was the trads that opened the future of pop music. They wanted to take jazz back to its roots, stripped of all the lush orchestration of the big band years. And in investigating the roots of jazz, they instigated, first, skiffle, and then the blues explosion, which led of course to the British Invasion of 1963/4.
Et tout le reste est littérature