The Rolling Stones album half the band walked out on: “The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody”
Keeping a band like The Rolling Stones together was never as easy as it looked.
They might look like the epitome of a gang whenever the remaining members are onstage, but the idea of them clicking together for a few minutes was nearly impossible, which is why seeing them together after all this time is unbelievable. But despite their reputation as the longest-running rock and roll band, it’s not like they had to be in love with every single album they were working on.
Then again, it’s hard to really get a read on the members’ tastes based on what they were doing. Keith Richards has always been an open book when it comes to being influenced by the greatest names in blues, country, and rock and roll, but Mick Jagger always seemed to be a little bit on the fringes of rock and roll half the time. He could dance like no one else, but his vision for the band is a lot different from what a lot of people would want to hear.
Exile on Main St is known as a classic for a reason, but going through every single one of their records, Jagger singled it out as one of the albums he never cared for much. All of the songs are practically an encyclopedia for what makes the band sound great, and yet Jagger always seemed to be slowly pushing that sound out of the room, the further they moved away from the 1970s.
He wanted to be more of a chameleon like David Bowie, but that doesn’t usually make for the best career pivots, either. The frontman’s lacklustre solo career left a lot of people confused about why he wasn’t in The Stones, and even when he decided to try a few new tricks with his band, making tracks like ‘Miss You’ or even ‘Might As Well Get Juiced’ in the 1990s were always going to be an acquired taste.
If there’s one period of the band that is best forgotten altogether, though, it’s the 1980s. None of them were happy with each other, ‘The Glimmer Twins’ relationship had hit an all-time low, and even if Richards had a few more tricks up his sleeve in his own solo career, it doesn’t feel like any of the fire is there on an album like Dirty Work. All of them are clocking into work, but when listening to tracks like ‘Fight’, it feels like the band is completely a chore rather than having fun.
And according to Richards, the band couldn’t even be bothered to come to the studio half the time, saying, “The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody. Bill Wyman almost stopped turning up; Charlie [Watts] flew back home. In retrospect, I see that the tracks were full of violence and menace: ‘Had It with You’, ‘One Hit (to the Body)’, ‘Fight’. We made a video of ‘One Hit (to the Body)’ that more or less told the story — we nearly literally came to blows, over and above our acting duties.”
It’s not like the album is being pulled in a thousand different directions or anything, but when listening to it all the way through, you can tell that something is drastically wrong. Everyone in the band could have easily been on autopilot throughout the whole thing, and while there are a few moments where they sounded genuinely pissed off, all of the bad-boy attitude can feel more than a little bit cheap on this record.
If nothing else, Ronnie Wood was the first one to admit that the record was well below the band’s standards, even if his proof was the fact that he contributed more songs than he should have to the record. Wood is more than capable of writing a great tune, but when he’s being brought in to tighten up a Rolling Stones album, you know that Richards and Jagger aren’t working together properly.
