‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’: The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger called “bullshit”
The cardinal sin of any rock and roll star is being inauthentic. Although many have tried to do what they can to sell the idea of being one of the greatest artists to ever grace a stage, others insist they are badass and get taken down a few notches when people realise that they are putting on an act that no one is buying. Mick Jagger may have exuded everything that a frontman was supposed to be, but he had to acknowledge that this Rolling Stones song was nothing but fluff.
Then again, The Stones were always ones to practice what they preached half the time. They may have come up in the same era as The Beatles, but they were definitely the bad boy counterpart to the Fab Four, usually pulling from guttural versions of the blues rather than the pop side of the spectrum.
It’s not like they couldn’t reach across the aisle, though. Throughout Jagger and Keith Richards’s first writing sessions, they were interested in getting their music out to anyone, which normally meant writing a few syrupy ballads that weren’t exactly going to sit well if they were played right next to tunes like ‘Walkin’ The Dog’. But somewhere along the line, tunes like ‘Satisfaction’ gave them more of their signature menace.
And looking at their behaviour, Richards was usually one to live up to that rock and roll lifestyle. Aside from being one of the best rhythm guitarists the world has ever seen, the fact that Keef is still standing today is a modern miracle of the endurance of the human body, especially considering his steady heroin habit in the 1970s, his blood transfusion, and the alleged story about snorting his father’s ashes when he ran out of his own supply.
If Richards was the rock and roll bad boy who dabbled in drugs, Jagger was the one exuding sex appeal. Aside from being able to strut around the stage without hardly breaking a sweat, he was the one responsible for making some of the filthiest lines that anyone had heard in the 1960s on tracks like ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and ‘Who’s Been Sleeping Here’. That’s not to say that all of them were entirely true, though.
When talking about the first era of the group, Jagger remembered thinking that there was a lot of fabrication going on that he didn’t acknowledge back in the day, saying, “All those songs we sang were pretty tame, really. People didn’t think they were, but I thought they were tame. A lot of it was bullshit, the whole idea of ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’ and a lot of other things—it was so ridiculous.”
Even if it isn’t much to get worked up about today, it’s safe to say that parents were horrified at the time. Looking through the rest of the tunes on the charts, hearing Jagger singing about wanting to take someone to bed was practically X-rated compared to Lennon and McCartney singing about holding hands for the first time.
Both The Beatles and The Stones may have had the same teen demographic when they started out, but even if Jagger didn’t believe in a tune like ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, he sold it perfectly. The minute you take a look at the band playing the song live, you know that they are a force to be reckoned with just as much as the Fab Four were back in the day.
