“Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)” is a song by English rock band The Rolling Stones, featured on their 1964 self-titled album (later referred to as England’s Newest Hit Makers in the US). It was later released as single A-side in the US & Canada only, becoming the first Jagger/Richards song that the band released as a single A-side, and their first record to enter the US Top 40. The single reached #24 in the US and #1 in Sweden. It was not released as a single in the UK. (More from Wikipedia)
People who have known me a long time might wonder why I don’t talk about music nearly so much as I write about it. I guess I have known for a long time that my tastes aren’t exactly mainstream, and that is part of it, even though I have loved a lot of the big hits over the years. But I have also had a few bad experiences over the years that have left an impression.
Once I was listening to the radio, and I heard a terrific Rolling Stones song, “Tell Me”. As I remember, I was so captivated that I immediately got on my bicycle and pedaled down to our local record store, Reznick’s (“It’s been Reznick’s for Records, for Years”) and searched around the 45’s until I found the song.
I don’t think that I even played the record myself before rushing over to my two best friends among the neighborhood kids, Billy Dalton and Waltie Baker. “Wait till you hear this”, I exclaimed – but they didn’t like “Tell Me” much at all and started laughing at me about midway through. It usually doesn’t take more than just the one time for me to clam up after something like that.
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The thing is, “Tell Me” didn’t sound as great to me either while I was playing it; I puzzled about it for years. I picked up the song years later on the first Rolling Stones album, The Rolling Stones – or actually, in the US, it was called England’s Newest Hit Makers. As far as I could tell, that was the same version that was on the single.
Just a couple of years ago, I finally found out what was going on when I read the discussion by Richie Unterberger in Allmusic about the differences between the American and the English releases of the first Stones album: “[T]he main difference lies in the version of ‘Tell Me’ included here, which sounds about two generations hotter than any edition of the song ever released in the U.S. – it’s the long version, with the break that was cut from the single, but the British LP and the original late-’80s Decca U.K. compact disc (820 047-2) both contain a version without any fade, running the better part of a minute longer than the U.S. release of the song, until the band literally stops playing.” Apparently that DJ had gotten his hands on a copy of the British version of the song, and I was fortunate enough to hear it that one time at an impressionable age.
The New Rolling Stone Record Guide review of the first Rolling Stones album, The Rolling Stones calls it “the greatest white rhythm and blues album of all time. That isn’t an opinion; it’s a fact.”
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“Tell Me” was one of the earliest Rolling Stones singles and the first song credited to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards – that is, Jagger/Richards – that was used as the “A” side of a single release. “Come On”, a Chuck Berry song was their first 45, as I wrote about several months ago.
(May 2015)
