The Rolling Stones song Keith Richards took from David Bowie: “We have to steal that back”
Some of the greatest songwriters often have more tunes than they know what to do with. While some artists only write when the time calls for it, there’s an art to crafting the perfect song, and the biggest writers of all time usually have a backlog of material that we either never get to hear or they give away to someone else to have a hit with instead. Although Mick Jagger and Keith Richards already had a vast catalogue with The Rolling Stones, Richards admitted having to rescue ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ from David Bowie.
By the end of the 1970s, The Stones had become one of the few untouchable bands in rock and roll. They may have had occasional moments where they struck out in the studio, but nothing could get in the way of being effortlessly cool in the public eye, especially with Richards coming up with one lick after another.
While Goats Head Soup was a far more downtempo record than what the band had been working on, It’s Only Rock and Roll was an opportunity for them to get back to their roots. Many of the best songs on the album are covers like ‘Ain’t Too Proud to Beg’, but the title track is the pure essence of what the band was always about, featuring one of the greatest choruses of their career.
Once Richards heard it, though, Jagger said he had originally envisioned the song for David Bowie to sing. While the rockstar alien had already been making waves with his originals, it’s not that hard to see why this kind of thing would work.
Bowie was already playing the cartoon version of what a rockstar was supposed to be, so a piece that was nothing about the pleasures of rock and roll should have been a slam dunk. Even listening to the riffs throughout the track, it feels like the older brother of a work like ‘The Jean Genie’ from Aladdin Sane.
Richards wasn’t going to let that kind of track slip through his fingers, later claiming in Life, “It’s Mick’s song, and he cut it with Bowie as a dub. It was damn good. Shit, Mick, what are you doing it with Bowie for? Come on, we’ve got to steal that motherfucker back. And we did, without too much difficulty.”
Despite not getting to hear the original Bowie version, Mick Taylor’s guitar licks are much better suited to this style than Mick Ronson’s trademark fretwork. There are certainly pieces of the song that fit right in Bowie’s wheelhouse, but a line as simple as “It’s only rock and roll, but I like it” is something that Jagger was born to sing.
If anything, this kind of song would have been confining for Bowie. For someone who was known to sample every single genre imaginable, why limit yourself to saying that you have just one genre when there’s everything from soul to jazz to electronic music on the horizon?
The Stones were always a rock band before anything else, and a tune like this could practically be their mission statement. And when they decided to stray too far away from their older sound in the 1980s, ‘It’s Only Rock and Roll’ is the kind of tune that could remind them of why they were in the business in the first place.
