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Rolling Stones unreleased:You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone
Written by: Stanley Kesler/William Taylor Recorded: Bob Beckwith’s home, Bexleyheath, or Dick Taylor’s home, Dartford, England, late 1961 Guest musicians: Dick Taylor (guitar)
The Rolling Stones before The Rolling Stones
Long before The Rolling Stones had a name, a record deal, or even the faintest idea that anyone would care about their home recordings decades later, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were simply young blues fanatics trying to figure out what they could do with the music they loved. Under the wonderfully unassuming name Little Boy Blue and The Blue Boys, they were rehearsing and recording wherever they could, turning bedrooms and homes into makeshift studios. One of those early snapshots is You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone, a song written by Stanley Kesler and William Taylor that found its way into the group’s 1961 repertoire. It may not sound like a future rock empire yet—and, frankly, that’s exactly what makes it fascinating. Before the Stones became the Stones, this was the messy, experimental beginning.
The story behind Little Boy Blue and The Blue Boys
You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone belongs to that fascinating period when Jagger, Richards and their musical friends were still operating as Little Boy Blue and The Blue Boys, a name that sounds almost absurdly innocent when you know what came later. The group was part of the informal musical circle developing around Dartford in late 1961, with Jagger and Richards increasingly discovering that their shared obsession with American rhythm and blues could become something more than teenage enthusiasm.
According to the information associated with the track, it was recorded either at Bob Beckwith’s home in Bexleyheath or at Dick Taylor’s home in Dartford, which tells you almost everything about how far these future rock stars still were from professional recording studios. The guest musician listed is Dick Taylor on guitar, another important figure in this earliest Stones story, later a member of The Pretty Things.
There is something particularly appealing about hearing this material in hindsight. We know the ending of the story; they obviously didn’t. At this point, there was no global Rolling Stones machine waiting around the corner, no Brian Jones-led band yet, and certainly no stadium audience screaming their names. There were just musicians borrowing equipment, learning songs and recording performances on reel-to-reel machines. Other surviving early recordings from the same period include versions of Around and Around, Little Queenie, Beautiful Delilah, I Ain’t Got You and Johnny B. Goode”
From Little Boy Blue to The Rolling Stones
That makes You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone more interesting than its obscure status might suggest. It isn’t simply another unreleased track buried in the Stones archive; it is evidence of the formation process that eventually produced The Rolling Stones. The recording captures Jagger and Richards before their partnership had developed into one of rock’s defining songwriting relationships, and before the group had established the identity that would soon take them out of Dartford and into London.
There is also a nice historical irony here. The song was already an established composition by Kesler and Taylor, and Elvis Presley had recorded it years earlier. So the young Jagger and Richards weren’t trying to invent rock ’n’ roll from scratch—they were absorbing, copying, reshaping and learning from records that had crossed the Atlantic. That’s precisely how their musical education worked.
And that is the real attraction of this recording. You’re Right, I’m Left, She’s Gone doesn’t need to sound like Satisfaction to matter. In fact, it’s better that it doesn’t. It lets us hear something much rarer: the moment before the mythology began, when The Rolling Stones were still just a possibility.
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