One day the Rolling Stones’ “Time is On My Side” came on my iPod, and I was shocked by what I heard.

Everybody’s heard this song a million times, including me. But somehow I never before noticed the astonishing rhythmic irregularity of the tambourine. Suddenly the song was unlistenable.

Others have remarked on this, particularly percussionists. “I can’t think of another song with worse tambourine playing,” one wrote on DrumForum.org in 2013. A commenter on the Rolling Stones Fan Club online forum compared “waiting to hear how far off the beat the next hit will be” to Chinese water torture. “Now I can’t hear anything else on the track,” they wrote.

But apparently the main stream of fans and casual listeners is able to hear the song just fine. Even if the tambourine raises a few eyebrows, it has done nothing to detract from the song’s status as a key recording by a seminal rock band.

Before exploring this rhythmical Rorschach test, it’s necessary to establish a few specifics.

First, the Stones issued two studio recordings of “Time.” Both are from 1964, and each is a fairly faithful reading of Irma Thomas’ rendition from earlier that year. The first Stones version, cut in London in May, was released as a single in the U.S. and rose to No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100, making it the band’s biggest hit in the States to date. But it is the second version, recorded five months later in Chicago, that listeners today hear most.¹ It’s the one that made my jaw drop, listening in 2020.

The tambourine on Version 1 is shaky, but nowhere near as bad as it is on Version 2. That may be because the first recording is almost 10 beats per minute faster than the second, and it’s harder to keep the rhythm in a slow song than in a fast one.

While the earlier version is quicker, the later one has more of what we’ve come to expect from the Stones in terms of attitude. Discographer Martin Elliott writes: “It seemed as though it was necessary to re-record the song in order to liven it up for the British market. It became a popular live song, even if the screams tended to drown this rousing ballad.”²

Speaking of live performances, there are two (from October 25 and 29, 1964) available on YouTube. Both are indeed accompanied by incessantly screaming American teenage girls, who probably were already familiar with Version 1. But both live performances are closer — in terms of calendar as well as tempo — to Version 2, clocking in at about 100 bpm. In neither live performance does anybody play tambourine.

Most sources say the studio tambourinist was Mick Jagger. Which makes sense, because both Versions 1 and 2 likely were recorded live, as opposed to using overdubs, and Mick would have had his hands free while singing. The tambourine is relatively loud in both mixes, suggesting it was close to Mick’s vocal mic.

The fan club has Brian Jones on the tambourine for both studio recordings, but this seems unlikely. His guitar arpeggios can be heard throughout the studio and live recordings (though they are far less prominent in Version 2).

Close listening to Version 2 reveals there are actually two tambourines in the mix. That fact is most apparent at about 00:34, on the most out-of-time tambourine tap of them all. Unfortunately, it’s the quieter of the two tambourines that’s more accurate.

If Version 2 is a live take, were there two people playing tambourine at the same time? Did  Charlie Watts have a tambourine attached to his hi-hat? Could the second tambourine be an overdub — a salvage attempt?

Whomever the rhythmically challenged tambourinist may have been, it’s shocking to me that this is the performance they went with. Nobody wanted to try it again? Nobody suggested taking a pass without tambourine, as they had done on Ed Sullivan and in Santa Monica? Had their studio time run out? Did Andrew Loog Oldham and the lads listen back to what they’d recorded and say, “Good enough”?

Well, it has been good enough, for enough listeners, for over half a century. “I’m pretty sure they did it to add to the overall relaxed theme of the song,” writes one DrumForum commenter. “Usually something like that would [bother] me, but I feel it fits with the song.”

All this has prompted me to interrogate my attitudes about rhythm and recording.

My practice regimen and recording approach has been guided for years by a metronome or some other precise, nonhuman rhythmkeeper. This undoubtedly has increased my sensitivity to musical gestures that don’t conform to the grid.

But it’s not simply that the tambourine on “Time” is not exactly on the beat. Sometimes it’s a little before the beat. Other times it’s way before the beat. The irregularity is what makes it so maddening.

The song is in 6/8 time, and the tambourine attempts to land on the fourth beat of each bar. There are 87 tambourine taps in all, with most of the errors occurring in the first half of the song. I would classify the majority of the taps as close enough. Four you could get away with calling flams, making (with Watts’ snare drum and the second tambourine) one beat of two closely spaced strokes. Eleven taps are sore thumbs, so far ahead of the beat as to undermine the entire performance.

Instrumentally the rest of the recording is solid enough, but there is another blemish: Mick and the backup singers (Jones and/or Keith Richards and/or Bill Wyman) aren’t always in tune when they sing, “You’ll come runnin’ back to me-ee-ee.” While the tambourine dominates my attention, other listeners might be more offended by the singers’ pitchiness.

I couldn’t help but think how easy it would be, were the song recorded today, to clean up this mess. What if Chess Records had isolation booths and a digital recording setup? The instrumental tracks could have been recorded first, as a live take or even individually. The singing and tambourine could have been added later. Finally, the mixing engineer could have adjusted the backing vocalists’ pitch and nudged each errant tambourine tap closer to where it ought to be.

Of course here we run into questions of authenticity. If it were somehow possible to alter the original recording, to smooth its rough edges, Stones diehards probably would feel it had lost its magic. And not just Stones diehards: There are music listeners and practitioners for whom “feel” is preferable to sterile accuracy. Roots drummer Questlove says in an oft-quoted soundbite: “The sloppier that you deliver it, the more heartfelt and human it is.”

Tim Barnes asserts that mistakes in Rolling Stones songs generally, and on “Time Is On My Side” in particular, “are themselves an important characteristic.”

On an earlier single, “Not Fade Away,” some overdubbed handclaps lose the beat as the rest of the music fades out. Barnes sees this as an aesthetic choice, an “acceptance of the unmusical.” (For the record, these claps are not nearly as distracting as the “Time” tambourine.)

Barnes writes: “Once the Stones achieved the perfect distillation of this attitude — not bothering to re-record such a simple but important performance — they had developed a musical and stylistic approach that was eventually to become more of a rock ‘n’ roll standard than any of the songs they began their career covering.”

The argument here is that deliberate sloppiness, or at least disregard for refined playing, is a hallmark of rock music. But that sounds more like punk or grunge than the British invasion. And in any case that standard has long since worn away: Major label releases these days are quantized and autotuned to perfection. Mistakes are once again considered mistakes.

In whatever time they inhabit, rock stars of the Rolling Stones variety are supposed to make it look easy while also sounding somewhat decent. Rawness is part of the Rolling Stones brand, but I wouldn’t say unpreparedness is. “Time Is On My Side” seems to straddle the line between these two attitudes. It doesn’t quite hit the note, it’s not quite on the beat, and whether through determination or carefreeness it just keeps on going.

Notes

1. Version 2 is included on most “best of” compilations. On the official Rolling Stones YouTube channel, Version 2 has 1.3 million views, compared to 40,000 for Version 1. There’s a similar gulf between the two versions on the iTunes Store.
2. Elliott, Martin. The Rolling Stones complete recording sessions 1963-1989. Sterling, 1990, p. 40.
3. The Rolling Stones: All the Songs, by Phillip Margotin and Jean-Michel Guesdon (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2016, pp. 80-81), asserts the tambourine is overdubbed in both studio recordings. But if that’s true it raises even more questions about why it wasn’t redone, mixed lower, or left out altogether.
4. Barnes, Tim. “Loosen Up.” Living Through Pop, edited by Andrew Blake, Routledge, 1999, p. 22.

More sloppiness on tape

The intro of “Rock’n Me” by the Steve Miller Band (1976) is pretty, pretty, pretty loose.