‘Far Away Eyes’: The song Keith Richards thought Mick Jagger sang as a “caricature”
Not everyone is intended to get their way in any rock and roll band. The whole thing is set up like a democracy for a reason, and even if the guitarist writes all the songs, they sound completely different once they’re given over to the frontman or are played slightly off when the drumming starts playing. While Keith Richards has been able to lock himself in with whomever he’s playing with, he admitted that there were some songs where Mick Jagger didn’t deliver the performance he had in mind.
But listening back to some of Richards’s favourite songs, there is no better proof for the phrase, “If you want to get something right, do it yourself.” If some songs were a bit too close to home for Richards or sounded better a certain way, it wasn’t out of the question for him to leave Jagger out of the equation altogether, usually playing what he thought was right for the tune and churning out tracks like ‘Happy’ or ‘You Got the Silver.’
That’s because Jagger and Richards rarely spent too much time on the same musical page. They both had their favourites from the world of rock and roll and blues, but listening back to how they were trying to sound in the 1980s, it was clear that Jagger wanted to make something far more en vogue than Richards was willing to go, especially when thinking that his calling was his cover of ‘Dancing in The Street’ with David Bowie.
Richards was always interested in more rootsy music, which is evident when you look at his solo material. There might be the odd song that sounds like a typical pop hit or heartbroken ballad, but when playing off of Steve Jordan, his best material gravitates towards old-school blues or the sounds of country music that he picked up on from Gram Parsons.
Although The Stones have their country side, it was always clear that it was a passion project for Richards rather than anything sincere. Even if songs like ‘Sweet Virginia’ sounded absolutely gorgeous on Exile On Main St, Richards remembered that Jagger was practically taking the piss out of himself when working on tracks like ‘Far Away Eyes.’
Despite being one of the most earnest moments on Some Girls, Richards had to admit that Jagger could have sung it a thousand times better had he stuck with his original vision for the song, saying, “Mick feels the need to get into these caricatures. He’s slightly vaudeville in his approach. ‘Far Away Eyes’ is like that. He did it great every time except for the final take. It’s the SOUND version of what he was doing wrong VISUALLY. When he sings it as a caricature, it sounds like it would be great for a show. You expect Mick to walk out in his cowboy duds on an 18-wheeler set.”
It’s easy to hear some of that twang become a bit grating towards the end, but Jagger can still sell it fairly well, even with the pantomime version of it. A lot of the greatest country songs could benefit from having some cheeky humour behind them, but if you’re talking about a low and lonesome song about a woman who got lost along the way, it’s not the best idea to make it seem like a cheap joke.
Then again, that doesn’t make ‘Far Away Eyes’ a terrible song by any means. The Stones could make something that sounded rootsy when they wanted to, but it was a shame that all Richards managed to get out of the frontman was the same cadence he had when singing tracks like ‘Dear Doctor.’
