‘Wild Horses’: The Rolling Stones classic Mick Jagger and Keith Richards gave away
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards have their names credited to many classic songs by The Rolling Stones; they’re the band’s beating heart. Yet, as is expected of a group whose lives are so shrouded in mythology, conjecture and altered perceptions, their story features a lot of a contradictory information. Big characters, the constant push and pull between the pair, and heavy living will do that.
Unlike their Liverpudlian counterparts, The Beatles, it can be challenging to get to the bottom of what actually happened in pivotal moments for The Rolling Stones. Take ‘Wild Horses’ for example. Not only is the mellow number one of their finest efforts, and a highlight of 1971’s Sticky Fingers, but the motivations behind the song, and its key line, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”, are shrouded in contradiction.
According to some reports, it started with Richards writing it for his newborn son, Marlon, in 1969, as he regretted leaving him to go on tour. Then, Jagger re-wrote the lyrics to fit in with his own existence, keeping only that central line. Although Richards claims he doubts that Jagger wrote his chunk based on his disintegrating relationship with singer Marianne Faithfull, and maintains it was well over by then, she asserts that after she emerged from a drug-induced coma in 1969, the first thing she said was, “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”.
As we know, the band might have been entering their most critically acclaimed patch that year, but their drug use was being taken to different levels entirely. It would be a defining factor in Jagger and Faithfull’s relationship ending, and Richards becoming a husk of himself over the coming years. Thanks to a crippling heroin addiction, his condition reached new lows after the release of Sticky Fingers, when the group hightailed as tax exiles from Britain to the South of France and recorded Exile on Main St.
Despite worsening conditions, the death of founding member Brian Jones in 1969, fleeing their homeland, and the split of Jagger and Faithfull, it’s quite incredible that The Rolling Stones produced their most creatively fertile chapter in the years that followed. ‘Wild Horses’ remains emblematic of this quality, but strangely, and perhaps owing to their mental states, the band weren’t the first to release it.
It had to wait two years until Sticky Fingers to see the light of day. The band even recorded ‘Wild Horses’ during their three-day session at Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Alabama in early December 1969. It was the last of three tracks completed following ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘You Gotta Move’.
Despite completing these first touches of what became Sticky Fingers, as Richards’ great friend, Gram Parsons, of The Flying Burrito Brothers was also at the studio, he asked The Rolling Stones if he could record it with his band, which they obliged. At the time, personal relationships in The Flying Burrito Brothers were starting to fray, and they were struggling to pen material, which accounts for why Parsons asked. The cover arrived on their second album, Burrito Deluxe, in April 1970. However, it did not land. Unsurprisingly, given that the group were falling apart at the seams, the album was trashed.
Despite The Flying Burrito Brothers and The Rolling Stones crediting each other as influences during this era and teaching each other new tricks, Parsons’ friendship and possible romance with fellow heroin user Richards during this strung-out era was a point of contention. Jagger even debated quitting The Rolling Stones over it.
For Flying Burrito Brother, Chris Hillman, it was also a problem. Parsons began to lose interest in the group during this era, and in the Fallen Angel documentary, he attributes this to his growing obsession with his new friends in The Rolling Stones. He also puts this down to Burrito Deluxe being a failure, as it could have been much better if he’d concentrated on his own music. From wearing outlandish clothes to travelling separately from his bandmates in a limousine to $500 a night shows, it seemed that the extravagant lifestyle of his world-famous British friends was rubbing off in the wrong way.
Importantly, Hillman commented in the film: “Gram came from a very wealthy family and had this ongoing trust fund, which was about $55,000 a year, and it’s sort of like he had been seduced by all that without quite earning it yet.”
It wasn’t long before Parsons’ behaviour became too much to bear. Despite securing a song from his A-list friends in The Rolling Stones, his unacceptable behaviour, which included missing gigs and being too inebriated to play, led to him being fired in June 1970. He would then get closer to Richards as their heroin addiction worsened when The Rolling Stones were in France, but he was eventually asked to leave by Richards in July 1971 as a result of his continued obnoxious behaviour, with him wanting to clean up the environment.
Still, their connection to one another remained close, and Richards has often lamented the tragic loss to music felt by the death of Gram Parsons.
