You may want to put this song on while reading this post—it’ll help set the mood:
When I was in elementary school back in the Dakotas—and yes, I’m combining them into one state, but that’s a blog post for another day–Anyway, I was in 4th grade, and our school was so tiny they had to bus us to another town just to cobble together a student body big enough to call it a “school.”
The one bright side of those long bus rides? We got to bring our own music to play for the whole bus over the ceiling speakers. Kids could bring tapes to play for the whole bus. Democracy at its finest, except for the part where kids are terrible. I was the oddball who loved AC/DC and Guns N’ Roses, which was like waving a hair-metal flag in the middle of a country music rodeo. If I had a dollar for every time I suffered through the bus singalongs of Achy Breaky Heart or The Thunder Rolls, I could’ve bought my own Walkman and lived in peace.
But no. I had to adapt. Find some common ground. Enter: The Rolling Stones. I figured their bluesy rock might fly under the radar of my country-loving peers. It wasn’t hair metal; it had a twangy edge, kind of. So, I brought Let It Bleed on cassette and handed it to Sue, the bus driver. Sue was pretty quiet but pretty chill. She popped the tape in.
The problem? I’d forgotten to rewind the tape. So instead of starting with something cool, it kicked off with the opening to You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Now, if you know the song, you know it doesn’t exactly scream “rock anthem” out of the gate. It starts with a choir. A literal church choir.
Picture it: 55 seconds of angelic, ladies choir “you cant always get what you wanted” blasting through the bus speakers while every kid on that bus whipped their heads around to stare at me.
“What the hell is this?!” someone yelled. “Do you listen to church music?”
“No, no! Wait!” I said, panicking. “It’s the Stones! They’re rock and blues and maybe even a little country! Just give it a sec! It kicks in—hard!”
Except it didn’t. Not yet. I hadn’t realized until that moment how painfully long the choir intro is. That 55 seconds dragged on like an eternity, while the teasing escalated. Kids were laughing, yelling, pretending to pray. I was trapped in choir hell, desperately waiting for Mick Jagger to save me.
And then Sue, who normally didn’t say a word beyond “sit down,” slammed on the brakes—figuratively, but it felt literal. She reached up, ejected the tape, and growled, “That’s it! No more music for the rest of the ride!”
No more music! And worse? She’d cut it off before the actual rock part kicked in. So no one got to hear the Stones rock out. They just heard the choir.
I spent the rest of that ride stewing in silence, thinking, You can’t always get what you want, indeed.