The classic 1971 song Keith Richards never wanted Mick Jagger to play: “I’d never let him”
The key to The Rolling Stones’ success comes down to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards keeping each other in check.
While Richards is probably going to keep going until he is fully fossilised, the fact that Jagger wants to keep staying ahead of the game and making the most hip records that he can is normally where all the friction comes from in the group. Richards wasn’t afraid to stand up for what he wanted to include on a record, and more often than not, he could get pretty blunt about the way that Jagger decided to approach any number of their songs.
If you had asked Richards about his recorded history, he would have probably been the last one to suggest that they turn to disco in the 1970s, but he was also willing to try out something if Jagger felt strongly enough about it. ‘Miss You’ does make Some Girls one of the band’s more fondly remembered records, but the reason why people constantly go back to the tune has a lot more to do with the deep cuts like ‘Far Away Eyes’ that show the real Stones underneath all of the fashions.
But it’s not like Jagger was completely money-hungry whenever he made a song. Sure, he could probably smell money in the air whenever he was close to a hit song, but by the time the band started working in the 1970s, they had hit a stride where it finally felt like everything was working for them. They had grown to become the heroes they had strived to be, and a lot of that came down to getting everything exactly right on records like Sticky Fingers.
Even though tunes like ‘Brown Sugar’ should have looked a lot more problematic back in the day than they ultimately were, ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ is still one of the greatest jams they ever came up with around that time. A lot of the hits on the record are hits for a reason, but there’s no good explanation for why a song like ‘Sway’ didn’t become one of the all-time greats in their catalogue.
When talking about the band’s greatest songs, the tune sometimes gets overlooked, but Jagger is giving one of the best vocal performances of his entire career on this tune. Richards was happy to put his signature touch on the rhythm guitar, but since the frontman insisted on playing on the tune as well, Richards wasn’t going to claim that he was a natural when it came to his guitar playing.
Jagger had a far more unique way of playing, and while that suited this tune fine, Richards wasn’t completely sold on the idea of his musical brother playing on any more tunes, saying, “Well, like I say, acoustically he’s got a nice touch. It doesn’t translate electrically. It’s not his thing. It’s not everybody’s cup of tea… I’d never let him play electric if I could help it. He’s like Bob Dylan, same thing. They thrash away at it. No sense of electric at all. Usually, I turn him down.”
You can call it jealousy if you want, but a lot of that comes down to the way that Jagger is playing onstage as well. No one would have thought that he would have had the stamina to play an electric guitar and somehow find time to also work the crowd, and since Richards took to the guitar like it’s his second nature, he was much more comfortable watching Jagger do his own thing by running a virtual marathon every single time he performed.
Jagger could still play to his heart’s content whenever he wanted to, but Richards’s disapproval was much more of a case of him doing his job. He has said time and time again that his job was to make sure that the frontman didn’t make an ass out of himself, and the more time that his singer spent at the lip of the stage, the better off he would be.
