Every Ring Is a Song: The Stories Behind the Old School Collection
A gardener in wellington boots. A flare gun fired into a casino ceiling. A dead singer and a band that decided to keep going anyway.
Every piece in the Old School collection is named after a record somebody wore out. Here's where the names actually come from.
THE RING THAT STARTED IT
Keith Richards Inspired 'OLD SCHOOL' Skull Ring
Keith bought his in a London shop in the seventies. The jeweller told him it was a memento mori — a reminder that you're going to die, so get on with it.
He's worn it on stage almost every night since. Fifty years, one ring, no explanation ever offered. It's on his hand in nearly every photograph taken of him after 1978.
Also in gold, blue, and black.
THE GARDENER
JUMPIN' JACK FLASH (#487)
Keith's gardener was called Jack Dyer. He walked past the window in wellington boots one morning in 1968 and woke Mick up.
Mick asked what the noise was. Keith said "that's Jack — that's jumpin' Jack."
They wrote it that afternoon. It put the Stones back on course after two years of drifting, and Keith has opened shows with it ever since.
THE FLARE GUN
SMOKE ON THE WATER (#P852)
4 December 1971, Montreux. Deep Purple were there to record an album. Frank Zappa was playing the casino next door.
Somebody in the crowd fired a flare gun into the ceiling and the whole building went up.
The band watched it burn from their hotel across the lake, smoke lying flat on the water. Then they wrote it down. Four notes — and now every guitar shop on earth has a sign asking you not to play it.
THE SINGER WHO DIED
BACK IN BLACK (#BNB)
Bon Scott died in February 1980. The band had a choice — stop, or don't.
They found Brian Johnson, wrote the album in six weeks, and released it in an all-black sleeve as a funeral for their singer. It went on to sell fifty million copies and become the second best-selling album ever made.
It is, start to finish, a record about carrying on.
HELLS BELLS (#P825) — track one, side one
It opens with a bell. An actual two-thousand-pound bronze bell, cast in England, because the recording of a real church bell kept picking up birdsong.
Brian Johnson walked into a studio in the Bahamas to replace a dead man and opened with that.
HIGHWAY TO HELL (#R0241) — the record before
1979, and the last album Bon Scott ever finished. He was dead six months later at thirty-three. Angus said the title came from the road itself — the long haul between Perth and the east coast, in a van with no air conditioning.
THE PUPPET MASTER
MASTER OF PUPPETS (#P850)
1986. Eight and a half minutes about addiction, written from the drug's point of view — I'm pulling your strings, twisting your mind and smashing your dreams.
Cliff Burton's last record. He died in a bus crash in Sweden five months after it came out, aged twenty-four.
On the pendant, the skull forms the body of the guitar and a skeletal hand grips the fretboard, fingers set to play. The song rendered literally.
THE MAKEUP COMES OFF
LICK IT UP (#103)
1983. The band had worn the makeup for a decade and sales were sliding. So they went on MTV live, wiped it off on camera, and let the world see their faces for the first time.
Biggest gamble of their career. The album went platinum.
THE SLIPPED DISC
HEART OF GOLD (#706)
Neil Young's only US number one, 1972. He wrote it flat on his back with a slipped disc, playing acoustic because he couldn't stand long enough to hold an electric.
Then he spent the next fifty years avoiding the middle of the road it put him on.
A gold skull called Heart of Gold is a joke worth making.
THE FUNERAL
PAINT IT BLACK (#P871)
1966. Brian Jones picked up a sitar he'd been messing about with and played the line that made the record.
It's a song about grief — a man watching a funeral procession and wanting the whole world darkened to match. The Stones have never stopped playing it.
THE REST OF THE RECORD
WHOLE LOTTA LOVE (#R0236) — Page wrote the riff at his house on the Thames in 1968. Four notes, and it's been the first thing a million people learned to play badly.
ROCK YOU LIKE A HURRICANE (#485) — Scorpions, 1984. Forty years later it still gets played before every hockey game in North America.
BAD TO THE BONE (#r0013) — George Thorogood, 1982. Barely charted, then turned up in Christine and Terminator 2 and became shorthand for a man walking into a room like he owns it.
BLUE ON BLACK (#461) — Kenny Wayne Shepherd was twenty when he wrote it. Seventeen weeks at number one on the rock chart in 1998.
IT'S ONLY ROCK 'N ROLL (#938) — 1974, and the Stones were being told the party was over. Half apology, half shrug, entirely unbothered.
ROCK 'N ROLL FANTASY (#097) — Bad Company, 1979. The gap between what the crowd sees and what the band lives.
AND THE ONE THAT ISN'T A SONG
TCB (#424Gold)
Taking Care of Business, in a flash. Elvis had the lightning bolt designed in 1970 and handed the rings to the men who travelled with him.
It was a crew badge before anyone used that phrase. If you had one, you were in. He wore his until he died, and most of the originals are still with the families.
See the full Old School collection →
Every piece is heavy 316L stainless steel. Song titles aren't trademarks — these rings aren't affiliated with, endorsed by, or licensed from any artist or label. They're named for records we like.
