The Rolling Stones: All Number 1 Songs Ranked Worst To Best
6. Ruby Tuesday
US #1, UK #3, 1967
Ask anyone to name the most popular Rolling Stones songs and chances are none of their ballads will make the list. Yes, the band is more commonly associated with their bangers about sympathetic devils, getting started up, or one's inability to get what they want, even if said songs (sadly) didn't top the main charts in the biz. But, much as they can rock out, the Stones can also mellow out, and when they do, they kick up an altogether different kind of storm. Funny enough, though, Ruby Tuesday, the first Stones ballad to top a main chart, was the B-side to the raunchier Let's Spend The Night Together, which found some resistance from US radio.
Keith Richards had grown frustrated with his inability to get his lover, Linda Keith, to steer off the drug-fuelled path she was on. He met with her parents and they got a court order to bring her back home, which set the course for her to turn her life around and raise a family in New Orleans. Without Richards.
Ruby Tuesday was inspired by the inevitable end of their relationship and it shows the Stones at their melancholic best. Jagger takes Richards' lyrics and portrays the role of a man who knows there is no way to be with someone as unbridled as the girl in question, yet there is a hint of gratefulness throughout, over the relationship that was and the love that still is.
Fun Fact: The song gave its name to a chain of American restaurants, which was suggested to the chain's founder by comedian Bob Hope.