“Keep Your Hands To Yourself” by Georgia Satellites

"Keep Your Hands to Yourself" was the Georgia Satellites' debut single, out on Elektra in November 1986, and it's the kind of bar-band stomp that sounds like it was hammered together in an afternoon. Singer Dan Baird claimed the song more or less wrote itself on the bus home from his construction job. It's a plain twelve-bar blues in A, Baird and Rick Richards banging out the guitars over Rick Price's bass and Mauro Magellan's drums, with Jeff Glixman producing, and the story is a good old-fashioned standoff: a girl who won't let her boyfriend any closer until he puts a ring on it.

It came within a whisker of the top, sitting at number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in February 1987 while Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer" held the summit. Allmusic's Stephen Thomas Erlewine heard the ghost of Chuck Berry in its swagger and its wit.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.