This day in music - November 15, 1965: The Rolling Stones make their U.S. TV debut on Hullabaloo performing "Get Off of My Cloud"

By Richard K. Barry

The funny thing about my interest in The Rolling Stones is that I've never really had much. And then I started playing in a blues band with a bunch of people who knew more about the blues than I did, and they were big Stones' fans.

Then I read Keith Richards' bio and got an even better understanding of their passion for the music, particularly the blues, when I wasn't wading through pages of Richards' tales of drugs and women.

If you take Richards seriously you get a pretty good sense that they just wanted to play some music and then more or less one day found themselves rich and famous. Can't hate them for that.

It's just one of those things. I now have more respect for the band, but I've still never warmed to them. Hate to say it, but when I was a kid, their bad boy image didn't do it for me. Maybe it's time to reconsider. Our band does a nice version of Jimmy Reed's "Honest I Do," which the Stones' also covered, so I'm learning.

This clip below may in fact be the performance noted above on Hullabaloo. It doesn't specifically say so on the YouTube clip, but if you Google images for the band and include Hullabaloo as a search term, you will come upon some stills that look like the video. I guess that's what passes for research in the age of computers.

Not that it matters, but if that is not what this clip is and you know, feel free to let me know.

(Cross-posted at Lippmann's Ghost.)