The Rolling Stones‘ “Start Me Up” just picked up a fresh accolade more than four decades after it hit radio: Billboard ranked it No. 21 on its staff list of the 100 best No. 2 hits in Hot 100 history, published this month.
The song never actually made it to No. 1. It spent three weeks stalled at the runner-up spot in the fall of 1981, held off the top by Christopher Cross’s “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do).” Billboard’s staff singled it out anyway, crediting Keith Richards’ opening riff and Mick Jagger’s vocal delivery for a sound where “it’s the energy of the Rolling Stones incarnate.”
That riff took an unusually long road to get there. The track dates back to sessions nearly a decade earlier, when the band first attempted it as a reggae number during the mid-to-late 1970s and quietly shelved it. Richards has said the problem was never coming up with the song, it was finishing it.
It was engineer Chris Kimsey who eventually rescued the track. While digging through old tapes ahead of 1981’s Tattoo You, he found an early rock-leaning take buried among the reggae versions and brought it back to the band. Jagger later gave Richards full credit for the foundation of the song, telling Rolling Stone, “It was Keith’s great riff, and I wrote the rest.”
Once released, “Start Me Up” became the Stones’ biggest U.S. hit of the 1980s. It spent 13 weeks atop Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, a record that stood until 1994, and later found a second life in 1995 when Microsoft licensed it for the launch of Windows 95. The band has opened concerts with it ever since, including their 2006 Super Bowl halftime show.
Nearly 45 years after almost being left in a vault for good, “Start Me Up” is still finding new reasons to get talked about.
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