If you like this please consider supporting the site. Stones Data is not affiliated to the band. Your donation helps to do what I do, pay for its maintenance costs and keep the page updated daily. Thank you! *Donate here

Rolling Stones songs: Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
*Click for MORE ROLLING STONES SONGS 1962-PRESENT

When the sun goes down/ Ain’t nobody else around…

Written by: Russell/Burke/Wexler
Recorded: RCA Studios, Hollywood, USA, Nov. 2-3 1964
*Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012

From Songfacts:
Solomon Burke wrote this with Bertrand Russell Berns and Jerry Wexler. Berns (aka Bert Russell or Bert Berns) was one of the great American songwriters and record producers of the 1960s. Burke is a soul and country music pioneer and member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Wexler is a music journalist who became a highly influential music producer, and is regarded as one of the major record industry players behind 1960s soul music.

A song about the virtues of the one you love, this was one of Burke’s best-known tunes. Burke was one of the early Atlantic Records soul singers, paving the way for greats like Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding, though he never achieved their level of success.

The Rolling Stones are big fans of Burke, and recorded this song for their 1965 album The Rolling Stones Now!. Burke opened for The Stones and performed with them at a show in Los Angeles on November 4, 2002.

Burke performed this on the Food Network show Emeril Live, where Burke also make his Turkey Delight sandwich.

Solomon Burke recalled to Mojo magazine August 2008 that he’d hired musicians from Charlotte, North Carolina, to play at a gig in Long Island and he drafted them in to play the instrumental riff on this. The riff was the money march he did at church where the congregation marches down the aisle to the front to make offerings. Burke continued: “Got the band cooking, get a bit of echo, we went through it, came back out, said to (record executive/producer) Jerry (Wexler), ‘Whaddya think?’ He said, ‘Too fast. Doesn’t have any meaning.’ (Engineer) Tommy (Dowd) says, ‘What can we lose? His band’s here, let’s just cut it.'”

The Blues Brothers covered this for the 1980 film of the same name, starring SNL royalty Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi as the title duo. The band performed the song, along with Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher,” over the end credits.

Bob Tischler, the soundtrack’s producer, told Sound on Sound the recording was done at Bill Putnam’s Universal Recording in Chicago. He explained: “The live area at Universal had a big booth, so we had the horn players in there playing at the same time as everyone else, individually miked with probably Sennheiser 441s. We did everything at once, with baffles around the drums and some of the other instruments, and someone – usually John Belushi – laying down a guide vocal that would subsequently be replaced.”

For the film’s closing songs, the crowd joins in the performance, so the audience vocals were still needed. The studio booth was big, but not that big. So Tischler took the Chicago recordings to the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, where the scene was filmed, and played them back to the audience so they could sing along and be recorded via the miked stage. Time to get technical: he used “two Ampex 24-track machines that were sync’ed together with SMPTE (time)code” to fuse the elements together for the feel of a live performance.

Nine years later, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” was released as a single in the UK, backed by “Think” and it peaked at #12.

From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book:
Although this number is credited to “Solomon Burke–Bert Berns–Jerry Wexler,” Burke has always protested that he was the sole writer, claiming that he used to sing it in church as a child. He claims to have sung it to Jerry Wexler and Bert Berns during a recording session at Atlantic on May 28, 1964, but that they judged the tempo to be far too fast for the song to be a
hit. Wexler, meanwhile, has always claimed that the song resulted from a three-way collaboration. Whatever the truth may be, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” was only a modest success for Solomon Burke on the 1964 R&B charts. It did, however, spawn a vast number of cover versionsentered the Rolling Stone list of Greatest Songs of All Time at number 429. The Stones recorded it on November 2, 1964. There are two studio versions. The first, which opens the second British album, has a runningtime of 5:05; the second, which opens The Rolling Stones, Now!, destined for a US audience, plays for only 2:58.
(Ref. everybody needs somebody to love)

If you like this please consider supporting the site. Your donation helps to do what I do. Thank you! *Donate here