“Midnight Rambler (Live)” by The Rolling Stones

"Midnight Rambler" is the black heart of Let It Bleed, the Rolling Stones' 1969 album, and it was born somewhere improbably sunny: the Italian hill town of Positano, where Mick Jagger and Keith Richards stayed a few nights on holiday, Jagger playing harmonica in little cafes while Richards worked away on guitar. Jagger has said they wrote the whole thing there, tempo changes and all, and could never explain why such a lovely spot gave them something so dark.

The song is a loose biography of Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler, set to blues rock that Jimmy Miller produced. Richards has called it "a blues opera" and the quintessential Jagger-Richards song, and in the 2012 documentary Crossfire Hurricane he said nobody else could have written it.

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