How 'Between the Buttons' Pushed the Stones into Pop and Psychedelia—and Why 'Ruby Tuesday' and 'Let's Spend the Night Together' Were the Turning Point

The strangest thing about Between the Buttons is that it’s the album where the Rolling Stones finally stopped pretending they were just a blues cover band. Released in early 1967, it’s a grab bag of music hall, baroque pop, and psych-tinged weirdness—far from the snarling R&B of Out of Our Heads. Tracks like “Ruby Tuesday” and “Let’s Spend the Night Together” weren’t just hit singles; they were the sound of a band deliberately trying on new clothes. “Ruby Tuesday” pairs a haunting recorder and piano with Brian Jones’s delicate flute and cello, a full leap into chamber pop that owed more to the Beatles’ Revolver than to Muddy Waters. Meanwhile, “Let’s Spend the Night Together” keeps a pounding piano riff and a raw vocal, but the layered harmonies and the psychedelic guitar filigree show they were already thinking beyond twelve-bar structures.

The contrast with their earlier R&B sound is stark. On The Rolling Stones (England’s Newest Hitmakers), they were covering Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon, leaning into raucous rhythm sections and Jagger’s blues shout. Between the Buttons drops that minimalism for ornate arrangements: “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” literally ends with a Dixieland jazz breakdown, and “Complicated” toys with double-tracked vocals and a harpsichord. What’s fascinating is how both sides of the Stones’ identity survive here—the sneering energy of their R&B days is still in the DNA, but now it’s filtered through a studio-savvy, pop-conscious lens. This album doesn’t renounce their roots; it just weirdly reframes them.