How John Lennon and Billy Preston helped make The Rolling Stones song ‘Miss You’
By the end of the 1970s, disco fever was taking over every genre of music. From classic soul singers to rock and roll lifers, nearly every artist who was looking to stay contemporary was plugging into the four-on-the-floor rhythms of the genre. The Rolling Stones were no exception – although they were reckoning with punk and country on their 1978 album Some Girls, one song dealt with disco head-on, ‘Miss You’.
The origins of ‘Miss You’ came out of a jam session between Mick Jagger and Billy Preston. Preston had been touring with the Stones at the time, and some of their rehearsals and performances found their way onto the 1977 live LP Love You Live. During the sessions, Jagger formed the basic structure of what would eventually become ‘Miss You’.
“The idea for those bass lines came from Billy Preston,” bassist Bill Wyman would later confirm. “We’d cut a rough demo a year or so earlier after a recording session. I’d already gone home, and Billy picked up my old bass when they started running through that song. He started doing that bit because it seemed to be the style of his left hand. So when we finally came to do the tune, the boys said, ‘Why don’t you work around Billy’s idea?’ So I listened to it once and heard that basic run and took it from there. It took some changing and polishing, but the basic idea was Billy’s.”
But as it turned out, another one of Preston’s former collaborators also believed he was an inspiration for the single. John Lennon was in the middle of a self-imposed break from the music industry when ‘Miss You’ was first released, but Lennon believed that his 1974 Walls and Bridges album cut ‘Bless You’ was a starting point for ‘Miss You’.
“‘Bless You’ is again about Yoko. I think Mick Jagger took ‘Bless You’ and turned it into ‘Miss You’,” Lennon told Playboy in 1980. “The engineer kept wanting me to speed that up – he said, ‘This is a hit song if you’d just do it fast.’ He was right. ‘Cause as ‘Miss You’ it turned into a hit. I like Mick’s record better. I have no ill feelings about it. I think it’s a GREAT Stones track, and I really love it. But I do hear that lick in it.”
When it eventually appeared on Some Girls and later went to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 as the Stones’ final chart-topper, ‘Miss You’ was given the customary “Jagger/Richards” songwriting credit. Neither Preston nor Lennon was acknowledged, but according to Wyman, he was also snubbed of a songwriting credit.
“When I did the riff for ‘Miss You’ – which made the song, and every band in the world copied it for the next year: Rod Stewart, all of them – it still said Jagger/Richards,” Wyman told Classic Rock in 2002. “When I wrote the riff for ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, it became Jagger/Richards, and that’s the way it was. It just became part and parcel of the way the band functioned.”
Check out ‘Miss You’ down below.
