(The Hit Hammer is where I'm reviewing each #1 song on the Billboard Hot 100. Starting from when the chart started in 1958 and eventually working my way to the present. To see my inspiration and more information about this blog, please refer down below)
The Rolling Stones - "Get Off of My Cloud"
Hit Number 1: November 6, 1965
Stay at Number 1: 2 Weeks
Here's an amazing example of how the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were so different. A few entries ago, I covered the song "Help!", which was a song John Lennon had written for the Beatles about their sudden rise of popularity. He was having a hard time dealing with all of the intense fame they were getting, and couldn't cope with the impossibility of being anonymous. It was a song about living up to the hype, and continuing to please your large fan base, and that starting to take its toll. Well, "Get Off of My Cloud" is essentially the Stones' version of dealing with their sudden rise in intense fame after their first #1 hit "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction". Except in "Help!" where the Beatles were pleading for some mercy to give them a break, the Stones were telling everyone to leave them the hell alone in "Get Off of My Cloud", and just let them do their thing.
Lead guitarist Keith Richards would say that the song was the band's response to being bugged to death for a follow up to "Satisfaction". He even said that the group rushed the song, only releasing it so that there was something out there so the public would leave them alone, while also delivering their frustration with constantly being bugged. Richards wanted to do it kind of slow, and in his own words, said that he thought it could be "like a Lee Dorsey thing". However, the band rocked the hell out of it, and it even slaps harder than "Satisfaction" in my eyes.
The song consists of three situations that annoy the singer, with each being followed up by the chorus of "Hey! You! Get off of my cloud!" The first one is a guy dressed "like a union jack" (the U.K.'s flag) who shows up to the narrator's apartment saying he's "won five pounds if I had his kind of detergent pack". The next is a man who calls down to the narrator's apartment at three a.m., telling them to keep it down at a party, and the last being when the narrator drives downtown to get away from it all, and falling asleep in his car just to wake up to parking tickets on his windows. It's a glorious anthem of telling everyone to get off your back, which sometimes, I just want to tell the world the same thing. I love how the song not only rocks the house down, but it doesn't hold back from its intentions. Mick Jagger sounds like a man who is fed up with the world around him, and the echoes of his "Hey! and "You!" in the chorus by the rest of the group, is what takes the song from "awesome" to "immortal". This right here, ladies and gentleman, is my favorite Stones song.
I also think it's very fitting that I'm reviewing this song during the midst of the COVID-19 saga. All of us are commanded to stay at home and not go out for any reason, unless it's important and necessary. However, I'm still seeing and hearing about people who are disobeying this, and that's just infuriating if I'm being honest with you guys. So maybe, we should all take the Stones advice here, and stay off of each other's clouds.
GRADE: 10/10
SONGS REFERENCED:
"(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" - https://rmparis12.wixsite.com/website/post/the-hit-hammer-the-rolling-stones-i-can-t-get-no-satisfaction
MY INSPIRATION / MORE INFORMATION:
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