“I want the answer in writing”: The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards said made no sense
Rock and roll has always been built on songs that don’t have any specific meaning. For as many songs that Chuck Berry made that told a singular story from beginning to end, no one could go wrong with someone like Little Richard, having tunes that relied on pure swagger and only a handful of lines to get the job done. Although The Rolling Stones had certainly taken rock into new places by the early 1970s, Keith Richards had to admit that there was nothing coherent about this deep cut.
Then again, by the 1970s, The Stones seemed to use every album as a new opportunity. They had already spent the last few years of the 1960s riding the coattails of The Beatles, but now that the Fab Four had gone their separate ways, that left the door open for the band to start getting back in tune with the blues music that they loved as kids, turning records like Beggars Banquet into the most beautiful melancholy the world had ever seen.
And it’s not like newcomer Mick Taylor could be ignored, either. Although he was going to have massive shoes to fill after Brian Jones passed away, Taylor’s approach to jamming was half the reason why albums like Sticky Fingers worked so well, especially when he started working on tracks like ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ and kept pushing the band forward during each of his solos.
Even by The Stones’ standards for excellence, though, Exile on Main Street occupies a weird space in their catalogue. While it’s comprised of some of the best material that the band would ever make, it’s also all over the map to some degree, whether going back to the blues on ‘Stop Breaking Down’, leaning into country on ‘Sweet Virginia’, or kicking up the tempo to as fast as they could go on ‘Rip This Joint’.
Compared to everything else, ‘Casino Boogie’ is The Stones in all their glory. Coming out of ‘Shake Your Hips’ on the first side of the record, the tune is a showcase for their sense of groove, with Richards playing off of Charlie Watts perfectly and making riffs that any other guitarist would have considered the best that they had ever done.
When the groove hits this hard, though, Richards figured out pretty quickly that they didn’t need any lyrics that told a story, saying, “I don’t know what (the lyrics) mean, and nor does (Mick). And if he does, I want the answer in writing.” While the idea came from the abstract poetry William Burroughs was known for, it doesn’t make for anything coherent, especially with every line sounding like a laundry list of different words.
Even though the groove was well-constructed, Mick Jagger thought it hardly counted among their greatest works. Despite their strange experiment, Jagger felt that ‘Casino Boogie’ never came together, thinking that it worked better as a jam rather than an actual song.
But that’s the beauty of a band like The Stones. They could present the listener with what is, in essence, a perfect song, and the crowd would have to do the rest when it came to figuring out what the lyrics mean. It could be complete gibberish and make absolutely no sense, but looking at how it fits in the context of the song, it makes all the sense in the world.
