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If you believe the Rolling Stones were always the polished professionals of stadium rock, the messy, booze-fueled birth of their 1964 B-side Little by Little is here to set the record straight. While the band was busy ignoring each other in a cold London studio, a fake birthday party involving fine cognac and a silver coin proved that sometimes, the best way to record a blues homage isn’t with focus and discipline, but with pure, unadulterated chaos. It turns out that capturing the spirit of the greats is surprisingly easy when you’re desperate to finish before the tension in the room explodes.
And little by little I’m losin’ my love for you/ Yeah, little by little I’ve found out you was untrue…
Mick Jagger: vocals Keith Richards: guitar Brian Jones: guitar Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: drums Guest musicians: Ian Stewart (piano), Gene Pitney (piano), Phil Spector (maracas)
More about Little By Little by The Rolling Stones
The stolen blueprints of 1964
The early sixties British rhythm ’n’ blues scene was essentially a high-fidelity echo chamber of Chicago blues, where the masters of the genre were often relegated to the shadows of history. The Rolling Stones were notorious culprits in this regard; their 1964 track Little by Little is a prime example of musical appropriation. They unceremoniously lifted the title from a 1959 Junior Wells and Earl Hooker blues number and borrowed the laid-back, infectious rhythmic skeletal structure of Jimmy Reed’s 1963 hit Shame, Shame, Shame. While the band displayed a brazen disregard for credit, the lyrics remained an original, stinging narrative of a romance eroding bit by bit due to infidelity. It was a fascinating, if morally complex, collision of borrowed American DNA and the raw, developing spirit of a band just beginning to find its own voice.
Orchestrated chaos at Regent Sound
The February 4, 1964 session was a high-pressure ticking clock. Decca was breathing down their necks for a B-side to Not Fade Away, but the studio atmosphere was toxic; the Rolling Stones were locked in a stalemate, refusing to speak to one another. Salvation arrived in the form of Phil Spector and Gene Pitney, who were passing through London. Pitney staged a theatrical intervention, faking his own birthday to justify a round of cognac. The ruse dissolved the tension, sparking a sudden, frantic collaboration. Jagger and Spector locked themselves in a Regent Sound Studios corridor and conjured the song in mere minutes, turning a tense standoff into an explosive creative breakthrough.
A star-studded homage to the blues
The recording process was anything but conventional, functioning more like a wild, high-stakes party than a professional studio session. The track captured a lightning-in-a-bottle energy, featuring a crisp Keith Richards guitar solo—prompted by a shout from Jagger—followed by an impassioned, raucous harmonica break. Bill Wyman even contributed a supercharged bass chorus, adding grit to the proceedings. Perhaps most eccentrically, while Phil Spector was officially credited with maracas, the actual percussive texture of the song was created by Spector striking an empty cognac bottle with a United States half-dollar.
Producer Andrew Loog Oldham (1964): “After we had done Not Fade Away, Phil Spector and Mick disappeared. Nobody noticed they had gone until about five minutes later when they returned, looking very pleased with themselves. They sat down, told us to be quiet, and played the number they had just written in the outside corridor. It was very good, so we decided to use it as the B side. Mick took hold of his harmonica, Phil found the maracas again, and Gene Pitney and the Stones’ road manager, Ian Stewart, sat down at the same piano. It was a fantastic scene!”
Geme Pitney: “When I stopped off in from Paris one time and Phil Spector was in London and Andrew Oldham called me from the hotel and told me he was having a terrible time because he was trying to do what was the follow up toI Wanna Be Your Man and all the boys hated each other that day and he had them in a little dinky studio in Denmark Street and he couldn’t get them to do anything. I had 5 fifths of cognac that I was bringing home, so I took one fifth over to the studio and I told them it was a custom in my family that when anybody had a birthday, that everybody had a water glass of cognac until the bottle was empty. So, we ended up with a hell of a session and out of it came Not Fade Away(sic) and I played piano and Phil Spector played an empty cognac bottle with a half dollar, clicking it, and we played on the flip side which was Little By Little.”
Hidden credits and studio masks
The internal politics of the track were as messy as the session itself. While Jimmy Reed remained uncredited, Phil Spector was formally listed alongside “Nanker Phelge” (the collective pseudonym used for group-composed material) This blend of ego and anonymity defined the era. The song appeared on their self-titled debut album, The Rolling Stones, solidifying its place in their early catalog as a testament to how quickly the band could manifest magic—literally finishing the entire composition and recording in roughly twenty minutes of sheer, improvised force.
But there’s still more…
Beyond the studio antics, the song served a vital commercial purpose. Released on February 21, 1964 as the B-side to their third single, it helped propel the band to unprecedented heights. The record became their first top 5 hit in the United Kingdom, peaking at a formidable number 3 on February 27, 1964, proving that their unconventional, slightly stolen alchemy was exactly what the public craved.
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