The brutal song Keith Richards wrote about Mick Jagger: “You’re a dirty, dirty rat scum”
The Rolling Stones have used friction as a tool for their songwriting on many occasions throughout their storied career. For the most part, this rage has been used to produce art that has helped improve the world, such as the protest anthem ‘Street Fighting Man’, inspired by student riots occurring over Europe against the Vietnam War.
The legendary English group have never been afraid to wear their heart on their sleeves, and they prefer this blunt approach to delicately concealing hidden messages in their lyrics. Through their forthright methodology, The Rolling Stones cemented themselves into the hearts of millions across the globe and at times, their life as a band played out like a soap opera.
Although they have consistently produced high-quality music, The Rolling Stones have faced a vast number of challenges along the way, which would have been the death of most bands. Whether this be the death of their beloved bandmate, Brian Jones, or the Altamont disaster, The Stones are well-versed in tragedy.
As a result, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger’s relationship is hard to explain. They have been through immense pain since the band’s formation and need one another to survive creatively. However, another key ingredient of their brotherhood is the occasional argument.
Over the years, the songwriting duo have endured their fair share of public spats, which have turned unsavoury. Furthermore, one incident led to Richards being forced to apologise to Jagger to save the future of The Rolling Stones. It stemmed from a comment in the guitarist’s autobiography, Life, when he claimed: “Marianne Faithfull had no fun with his tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls – but it doesn’t quite fill the gap.”
After Richards insulted Jagger’s manhood, their relationship briefly soured, but thankfully, it was only a short-lived feud. Richards later said of the sorry incident: “We resolved it, in our own way, you know. I said I regret if I caused you any, you know, inconvenience or pain, or something. I’d say anything to get the band together, you know? I’d lie to my mother.”
Due to working so intensely for many decades, Richards and Jagger know how to push each other’s buttons. While this has led to many squabbles, in one instance, Richards used his anger as necessary fuel to write the vicious track, ‘Had It With You’.
Although ‘Had It With You’ was aimed at Jagger, he was also tasked with delivering the vocals on the recording. “You’re a mean mistreater, You’re a dirty dirty rat scum,” Jagger sings at one point on the track. Meanwhile, at another point, he scowls: “You always seem to haunt me, Always try to haunt me, Serving out injunctions, Shouting out instructions, But I had it, I had it I had it with you.”
In his autobiography, Richards recalled the events that led up to him unloading his anger on the track, explaining of the Dirty Work album track, “I wrote ‘Had It With You’ in Ronnie [Wood]’s front room in Chiswick, right on the banks of the Thames. We were waiting to go to Paris, but the weather was so dodgy that we were stranded until the Dover ferry started rolling again. Peter Cook and (my father) were hanging about”.
He continued: “There was no heating, and the only way to keep warm was to turn on the amps. I don’t think I’d ever written a song before, apart maybe from ‘All About You,’ in which I realised I was actually singing about Mick.”
Although the song isn’t a Rolling Stones classic, ‘Had It With You’ perfectly lays out their relationship, which is equally full of love as much as hate. Those two elements are constantly at odds, but ‘The Glimmer Twins’ wouldn’t have it any other way, and these two feelings are the forces that make The Rolling Stones great.
While Richards didn’t set out to write ‘Had It With You’ about Jagger, the lyrics flowed out of him before he could even process where they’d come from. No specific argument led to its creation, but it was the result of feelings that he’d allowed to fester inside of him, which thankfully only manifested into a brooding rock ‘n’ roll anthem.
