The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards called “nice and dumb”
Not every rock and roll song is about the vast intricacies of life. Most people are just trying to have a good time every time they turn on the radio, and that normally means turning your brain off and getting lost in the music rather than focusing on everything falling out of the singer’s mouth. Still, even Keith Richards had to admit that The Rolling Stones were far from making intelligent music when running through the song ‘Little T&A’.
Then again, The Stones were never known as the most intellectual band in the world. They had spent the first era of their career being a covers act, and even when they started to carve out a legacy of their own apart from The Beatles, people were still looking at them as the bad boys of rock and roll who fell into rock history by association.
But that’s really undercutting what they do. ‘Wild Horses’ is still one of the most gripping love songs that they have ever recorded, and even for a group in the 1960s, tracks like ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Street Fighting Man’ were firm comments about what life on the street was like for kids who had nothing more to do than to play loud rock and roll whenever they got the chance.
By the time the 1980s rolled around, though, even the greatest rock band on Earth were probably wondering whether they had anything more to say. They had come off of their disco years on Some Girls, and while Tattoo You did put them back on top, it was full of leftovers from the past few years, including ‘Start Me Up’ and ‘Waiting on A Friend’, both of which had been in their vaults.
And it’s not like ‘Little T&A’ is the most subtle song in their career. Yes, that’s what the song is called, and it’s about precisely what everyone thinks it’s about. Even though the group has been known for being products of the era of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, this might be the least subtle sexual reference they’ve ever made, and this is coming from the safe group that snuck the line “you make a dead man come” onto the radio.
While Richards wasn’t above having a bit of smut in his lyrics, he did acknowledge that the song was dumb all the way down to the way it was recorded, saying, “The final mix brought back a bit of the naïveté of the earlier sessions, otherwise it would have been too slick. It’s nice and dumb, which is what it’s supposed to be.”
At the same time, was there really any other way to deliver this tune? Yeah, they were coming up on the age of MTV and more glitzy production styles, but how else is someone supposed to perform a song like this other than completely straight, especially with the barebones lyrics to anchor everything back down to Earth?
And without needing so much as a squelchy synthesiser, The Stones managed to make the song work as a nice piece of filthy rock and roll. It’s not what most people would have pictured for a single, but it does its job by appealing to the more primal side of the brain. Not exactly Bob Dylan-worthy, but a great tune to have a good time to all the same.
