The 1973 Rolling Stones song that their label tried to destroy: “They’ve given us a lot of trouble”
The entire idea of The Rolling Stones would have been any other parents’ worst nightmare when they first laid eyes on them.
The Beatles could have been like the boys next door for all they knew, but when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards made their television debut in America with tunes like ‘Satisfaction’, everyone was certain that these punks were going to be the reason why rock and roll got a bad name. They weren’t going to exactly play down any of their more dangerous aspects, but they drew the line when their label started to claim that their songs were getting a little bit too dangerous.
But even by the standards of rock and roll stars, The Stones were willing to push the envelope when they wanted to. The fact that Jagger was able to sneak the line ‘you make a dead man come’ onto the radio on ‘Start Me Up’ is still one of the cheekiest sex jokes to ever make it on the airwaves, and Richards wasn’t even going to begin to play down his reputation as the bad boy of rock and roll.
He fully admitted to being a junkie more than a few times, and while it took him years to kick his heroin habit, he was still thankful to have been able to write the songs that he did when he was strung out like ‘Coming Down Again’. Then again, Goats Head Soup is a bit of an odd duck when it comes to the Stones’ classic period. It came right after their magnum opus Exile on Main St, and while there’s nothing wrong with it by any stretch, it can get lost in the shuffle just a little bit.
Which you really shouldn’t say for any album that has a song as good as ‘Angie’ on it, but there’s a good reason why some of the songs weren’t exactly ready for primetime. The band were willing to push the envelope every single time they played, but considering how many times they used the term ‘starfucker’ in one of their songs, it wasn’t like their label was ready to bend over backwards to promote them by any stretch.
This was only a few years removed from the era when John Lennon started saying ‘fucking crazy’ on ‘Working Class Hero’, so it wasn’t exactly unheard of, but the band wasn’t trying to be vulgar for the hell of it. They were telling the story of someone who tried to get everything they could to be a leech for celebrities, but that wasn’t enough to satisfy Atlantic Records when they first heard what they had done.
Richards felt that they had a perfect record to give their label, but he did remember throwing a few pot shots at his higher-ups about trying to bury one of their tunes, saying, “(Atlantic Records have) tried to balls about a bit with this latest album. They’ve given us a lot of trouble over Starfucker for all the wrong reasons – I mean, they even got down to saying that Steve McQueen would pass an injunction against the song because of the line about him. So we just sent a tape of the song to him and of course he okayed it.”
At the same time, it’s probably for the best that The Stones at least knew when they had pushed themselves a little bit too far as well. They were never going to get away with naming something ‘Cocksucker Blues’, and even if they managed to get that song out as a single, there wasn’t a chance that any concerned mother would have let their kids buy it if they knew what the tune was called.
But that’s the beauty of being a rock and roll star half the time. The Stones were always going to go for what the rest of the world would have thought was a bit ill-advised, and even if they tried to rein things in when they wanted to, they knew how to push it just enough too far to make everything seem a little bit more sinister.
