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Rolling Stones unreleased: Family (alternate version)
ALTERNATE FAMILY: ANOTHER UNRELEASED STONES GEM In the summer of ’68, the Rolling Stones were cooking up chaos at Olympic Sound Studios. Mick and Keith tinkered with Family, a raw, unreleased track that’s gritty, daring, and full of experimental vibes. This isn’t chart-ready polish—it’s the Stones testing themselves, riff by riff, pushing their sound into new territory. A rare glimpse of their creative metamorphosis, it’s edgy, adventurous, and 100% pure rock ’n’ roll energy.
Written by: Jagger/Richard Recorded: Olympic Sound Studios, London, England, May 13-18-June 28 1968
Back in the chaotic, experimental summer of 1968 the Rolling Stones were deep in the creative whirlwind that would define Beggars Banquet and the era itself. Somewhere between Olympic Sound Studios’ dimly lit rooms and London’s restless streets, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were sketching, tweaking, and recording a track that never officially saw the light of day: an alternate version of Family. Unlike the polished singles that topped charts, this version is raw, exploratory, and daring—a window into the Stones’ metamorphosis as songwriters and sonic adventurers. Every note, every riff, carries a sense of experimentation, as if the band were testing the boundaries of their own identity.
What’s striking is how the song balances familiarity and novelty: you can hear the Stones you know, yet the arrangement feels almost alien, a glimpse of what could have been if they had taken a different path. It’s messy, it’s thrilling, and it’s unmistakably Jagger/Richards at work, pushing themselves beyond the confines of expectation, hinting at the evolutionary leaps the band would take in subsequent albums.
A Metamorphosis in Sound
This unreleased take of Family (still close to the “official version” that appeared in the Metamorphosis album in 1975) reveals a transitional moment for the Stones. Recorded over several sessions from May 13-18 and June 28, 1968, it shows the duo experimenting with rhythm, vocal delivery, and instrumental layering. The alternate take demonstrates how the band reshaped a standard song into something uniquely theirs, a metamorphosis from blueprint to art.
Olympic Sound Studios wasn’t just a recording space—it was a laboratory. Here, Mick and Keith could explore, refine, and challenge their own conventions. This unreleased version of Family isn’t just a track that didn’t make the album; it’s a snapshot of the Rolling Stones’ creative evolution, a raw and fascinating artifact for anyone curious about how one of rock’s greatest bands reinvented themselves in real time.
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