Songfacts®:

• Inspired by The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Vashti Bunyan decided to become a traveling musician singing her own tunes - which is why she was aghast when Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones' manager/producer, presented her with the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind" as her first single in 1965.
  
  "I was outraged," Bunyan told the Songfacts Podcast in 2023. "I didn't want to sing somebody else's songs, even if it was Mick Jagger and Keith Richards."
  
  Despite her feelings, Bunyan agreed to cover the song and was grateful one of her original tunes, "I Want To Be Alone" was included as the B-side. Only when she finally got into the recording studio did she realize that, in her own small way, she was contributing to something much bigger.
  
  "It was the most extraordinary experience," she continued. "It was incredible to be amongst young people taking over because all the people that I'd been knocking on the doors of were the old guard, the old impresarios, and to be amongst people like Andrew Oldham and The Stones and the young musicians who were playing the arrangements was just a wonderful feeling that things were changing."
• Although she admired Oldham, Bunyan severed their working relationship after her single flopped. The following year, she teamed up with Canadian producer Peter Snell on "Train Song," which also went unnoticed. After a few more releases failed to catch on, she took a 30-year hiatus from the music industry until the 2000 reissue of her obscure debut album, Just Another Diamond Day, revived her career.
• Jimmy Page, who made his living as a session musician in the mid-'60s before joining The Yardbirds and founding Led Zeppelin, played guitar (along with Big Jim Sullivan and John McLaughlin) on Bunyan's rendition, with Stones' regular Nicky Hopkins on piano. That same year, Page played on Jackie Trent's #1 UK hit "Where Are You Now (My Love)" and Marianne Faithfull's Top 10 entry "Little Bird."
• Bunyan was the second act to try to spin The Stones' cast-off into a hit. Earlier in 1965, it was first released by the American pop duo Dick and Dee Dee, who opened for The Stones while they were in California on their first US tour in 1964.
  
  But their first brush with the band was in London, when Dick managed to convince Andrew Oldham to squeeze the duo in for a recording session at Decca - despite the fact they were signed to Warner Brothers. Pressed for time, Oldham wasn't able to search for material or musicians, so the producer offered them a few scrapped Stones demos, including "Blue Turns To Grey" and "Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind," for the duo to sing on.
  
  Dee Dee Phelps recalled the session in her memoir, Vinyl Highway: "Andrew indicated Dick and I were to go into the large studio and stand before the single microphone. We put on earphones and listened while the musical track to 'Some Things Just Stick In Your Mind' started to play. Andrew lowered Mick Jagger's voice until it started to fade away. Over the tracks, Dick sang lead and I sang harmony. We could still hear the Rolling Stones faintly singing backup vocals in the background, 'Bom, Bom, Bom.'"
  
  With Oldham producing and The Stones backing them, Dick and Dee Dee were sure they had a hit, even more so when they premiered it on the popular variety show Shindig!, but it surprisingly went nowhere.
• The Rolling Stones included their 1964 recording on the 1975 compilation Metamorphosis, but it, along with "We're Wastin' Time," was omitted from the American edition.
• Bunyan's version was used in the 2012 movie Arthur Newman, starring Colin Firth.