“I didn’t like the way it was looped”: The Rolling Stone song Mick Jagger thought never worked
For someone like Mick Jagger, there are no real limits on where The Rolling Stones can go. There are moments when they can kick back and play the same blues songs they have known for years, but it’s sometimes worth it to play a song that no one knows will work out and come out with something extraordinary when it’s over. And while some of the greatest moments The Stones ever made came from them experimenting, there were more than a few times when it flew right back in their faces.
Because as much as The Stones love to experiment, they have individual strengths that no one can mess with. The whole point behind their first few albums was about being a nastier version of The Beatles, and listening to many of their songs, there’s a particular menace in Jagger’s voice that you were never going to get out of John Lennon or Paul McCartney when they sang their traditional love songs.
And as far as their 1970s material went, the best moments in their catalogue came from them making tunes with that same bluesy tradition behind them. A tune like ‘Gimme Shelter’ doesn’t haveanywhere near the same 12-bar blues progression that everyone is supposed to have, but listening to the way that Jagger and Merry Clayton wail away on the track, it’s not that far off from the way that people like Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson used to do when they were starting out.
But as soon as The Stones thought that disco was a safe road to go down, fans knew to start asking questions. Plenty of fantastic disco artists had been storming the airwaves, and even a handful of rock stars made the transition onto the dancefloor pretty well, but listening to a song like ‘Miss You’, Jagger feels completely out of his element, and Keith Richards’s playing somehow manages to sound boring.
Many bands learn from their mistakes, but this wasn’t a trend that would stop. Throughout the 1980s, Jagger was willing to do anything he could if it meant his name would be on MTV alongside the heavy hitters in music. While the same person who embarrassed themselves in the ‘Dancing in the Street’ video with David Bowie was probably not optimal for taking musical advice from, that didn’t stop the band from taking more chances on Bridges to Babylon.
“It was really my fault – I threw the wrong song at him. We went in and wrote the loops and the programs.”
Mick Jagger
While the idea of working in an R&B groove was far from the worst idea in the world, Jagger admitted that bringing in Babyface for the song ‘Already Over Me’ was far from his finest moment, saying, “It was really my fault – I threw the wrong song at him. We went in and wrote the loops and the programs. We got Charlie to play on it. And in the end, I didn’t like the way it was looped. I said, [drummer] ‘Kenny [Aronoff], leave it. I’m gonna do it another way.’”
It’s also a shame because the band were on such a high. Voodoo Lounge had finally got them back to sounding like themselves again after undergoing records like Dirty Work, but to go back into something that was this dated was bound to be a mistake, especially further down the record when they decide to channel the sampladelic sounds of hip-hop with the Dust Brothers on ‘Might As Well Get Juiced’.
Jagger might embody everything The Stones were about, but it takes a strong frontman to at least admit when he was wrong. Because even though the best Stones songs don’t have to be complicated, they always need to groove, and ‘Already Over Me’ has none to speak of throughout its runtime.
