The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards called true rock and roll: “It comes so naturally”.

The Rolling Stones have embodied everything great about rock and roll since the day that they started. When there is inevitably an encyclopedia on what the genre was all about, chances are that no one would mind if the main logo on the front was just a portrait of Mick Jagger’s tongue logo. Whereas Jagger was the lead singer, Keith Richards was always the pure rock and roller in the group, and for him, nothing got better than putting together the basis for a song like ‘Bitch’.

Then again, finding their core sound wasn’t something that was going to happen overnight. The Rolling Stones had seen their fair share of great singles throughout the 1960s, but if you look at how they progressed throughout the decade, it’s hard not to get caught up in their sound and the sound of another semi-obscure band from Liverpool around the same time.

As much as The Stones claimed to have a diverse catalogue, there were a lot of times when they took a few too many pages out of The Beatles’ playbook. It’s never a bad thing to take cues from one of the biggest acts in the world. Still, it’s a little hard to ignore the similarities when Jagger and Richards started making psychedelic music the minute that Sgt Peppers came out or wrote a long anthem like ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ right after ‘Hey Jude’ was released.

As the 1970s started, though, The Stones finally had their own sound. The Fab Four had long since faded away, and Jagger and Richards got back to what they knew best: the blues. Although it’s debatable whether Sticky Fingers is the best Stones album, ‘Bitch’ might be one of the best rock songs they have ever made.

Whereas a lot of their best material usually comes back to the blues, there’s no other genre this can be categorised as other than rock and roll. Featuring that slight push and pull between Richards and Charlie Watts, the entire track has that kind of bad attitude that rock and roll is built on, which is looking to both excite kids and infuriate parents in equal measure.

For Richards, nothing was more straight-ahead rock than what they captured here, saying, “It comes so naturally, as it’s always happened, and it’s always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again. That’s what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it’s rock music. But rock and roll records should be 2:35 minutes long, and it doesn’t matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there.”

Even though The Stones were being looked at as musical gods at that point, the greatest strength of the tune is that it doesn’t sound like musical deities are playing it. This was just the sound of a band in their element cutting loose for no one else but themselves and that kind of purity could never be replicated if they decided to just roll through the song a few times and get it absolutely perfect.