The Rolling Stones songs written about the women they loved
Where The Beatles wrote about love, The Rolling Stones wrote about lust, right? Well, yes and no. Though remembered as the tough and unfeeling counterpoint to the fluffy and unthreatening Fab Four, The Stones were no strangers to romance. The various relationships of the Mick Jagger-Keith Richards songwriting duo greatly informed the band’s output, leading to the creation of some of their most celebrated hits. The critical difference between the Stones and the Beatles’ approaches to romantic songwriting is that Jagger rarely revealed the identity of his muses. Where John Lennon sang “Oh Yoko”, Jagger sang “oh mind your own business”.
The knock-on effect of that secrecy is that the inspirations behind many of the songs below are up for debate. We’ve cherry-picked the tracks that are generally believed to have been written by Mick or Keith about – or in response – to one of their relationships, of which there were rather a lot, it turns out. Though we tend to remember Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg, Jagger engaged in various flings over the years, generating a wealth of material. That being said, almost all of the obviously romantic stuff was written about Faithfull.
Looking at the dating history of Kieth Richards and Mick Jagger, the two bandmates appear to have had rather different understandings of romance. Where Jagger seems to have found it pretty much impossible to keep it in his pants, cheating on various partners over the years, Richards seems to have remained fairly faithful to those he chose to form relationships with.
Below, we’ll be exploring The Rolling Stones’ discography not by album or era, but by paying attention to the women in Jagger and Richards’ lives at the time. So let’s begin.
The Rolling Stones songs about women they loved:
Marianne Faithfull
Marianne Faithfull’s stormy relationship with Mick Jagger lasted from 1966 to 1970 and coincided with the most creative period in the Rolling Stones’ career. The 17-year-old Faithfull met Jagger and the rest of The Rolling Stones at a party in ’66, where Andrew Loog Oldham organised Jagger and his bandmate Keith Richards to write a song for the aspiring folk singer called ‘As Tears Go By’. While the track didn’t open the door to a glittering music career (The Rolling Stones’ subsequent version eclipsed the original by some margin), it did mark the beginning of one of the 1960s’ most publicised love affairs.
Alongside ‘You Can’t Always Get What Your Want’ and, to an extent, ‘Sympathy for The Devil’ – the lyrics were inspired by her copy of The Master and Margarita – Marianne Faithfull is believed to have been the inspiration behind ‘Wild Horses’. Though it started as a song about Keith Richards not wanting to leave his newborn son, Marlon, this Sticky Fingers track was later rewritten to reflect Jagger’s disintegrating relationship with Faithfull, who once claimed that the “wild horses couldn’t drag me away” line was the first thing Jagger said to her after she came out of a drug-induced coma in 1969.
Anita Pallenberg
Pallenberg dated two Rolling Stones members between 1965 and 1980: Brian Jones and Keith Richards. The German-Italian actress and model met the band while working on a meddling assignment in Munich in ’65, where she began a friendship with Jones which, over the next two years, gradually morphed into a romantic relationship. By 1967, however, their relationship had soured.
Pallenberg is believed to have been the inspiration behind the “Lady Pharoah” in ‘She’s A Rianbow’, featured on His Satanic Majesties Request. By then, Keith Richards had witnessed Jones being abusive to Pallenberg during a trip to Morocco and decided to take her back to England, where they fell in love. ‘Gimme Shelter’, though not written directly about Pallenberg, may well have been penned out of longing for her to return from one of her many film productions. Though Richards and Pallenberg never married, they did go on to have three children together. In 1980, Kieth Richards wrote and performed lead vocals on the Emotional Rescue track ‘All About You’, which, though also interpreted as being about Richards’ increasingly fractious relationship with Jagger, was most likely written about the failure of his romance with Pallenberg, which ended in 1979 when he met Patti Hansen.
Bianca Jagger
Bianca met Mick Jagger at a concert after-party in Paris in September 1970. From that moment, they were inseparable, with Bianca refusing to leave the shindig without Mick. He later bombarded her with telephone calls and eventually persuaded her to fly to Italy, where The Rolling Stones were on tour. Nine months later, they were married in St. Tropez, where the Niceraguan-born Bianca’s refusal to sign a 28-page pre-nuptial agreement was a sign of things to come.
In the end, Jagger cheated on Bianca with model Jerry Hall. But not before writing ‘Respectable’, featured on 1978’s Some Girls. “I was banging out three chords incredibly loud on the electric guitar, which isn’t always a wonderful idea but was great fun,” Jagger said of the song. “This is a Punk meets Chuck Berry number. The lyric carries no fantastically deep message, but I think it might have had something to do with Bianca”. The lyrics: “She’s so respectable/ Get out of my life/ Don’t take my wife,” would certainly suggest so. The words even include a lurid reference to Bianca’s visit to the White House. “You don’t worry about the things that you used to be/ You’re a rag-trade girl, you’re the queen of porn/ You’re the easiest lay on the White House lawn.” Nice one, Mick. Very supportive.
Bianca is also believed to have inspired ‘Miss You’, though the couple were on the cusp of divorce due to Jagger’s infidelity around the time of its creation. The frontman would later challenge that rumour, arguing that ‘Miss You’ was written about a generalised feeling of longing rather than a specific girl.” I’m not so sure.
Claudia Lennear
Claudia Lennear has been widely credited as the inspiration behind the Rolling Stones’ famously controversial song ‘Brown Sugar’, recently removed from the band’s setlist. Lennear was a member of the vocal trio Ikette when she began dating Mick Jagger in 1969. While another African American woman, Marsha Hunt – the mother of Jagger’s first child – has claimed that she was his inspiration, Lennear has always defended her role in the song’s creation, describing it as “one of the greatest rock songs of all time, and not because I had anything to do with it”.
Initially titled ‘Black Pussy’, ‘Brown Sugar’ features some of the most racist and misogynistic lyrics in the ’70s rock canon. It depicts a highly eroticised tale of slavery in the Antebellum South involving rape, heroin, whips and cunnilingus. “Brown Sugar, how come you taste so good?” Jagger sings, “Just like a young girl should.” Lennear has since said that she understands the outrage of modern fans but believes that recent concerts have missed out on “a great part of rock ‘n’ roll history”.
“When do we learn to understand history without getting upset?” she added. “Right now we’re not really in that space.”
