‘Following The River’: The Rolling Stones song Mick Jagger “always liked”
Any musician can claim to have those few songs that got away. Whether they were given away to another artist or never fleshed out properly, these are the tunes that were destined to remain in the musical vaults and never be brought out because of how they missed the mark. But since nothing was off the table with The Rolling Stones, it’s easy for Mick Jagger to take something out of the vaults and flesh it out years after the fact.
But looking at The Stones’ body of work, that includes more than a little bit of odds and ends throughout their career. Whereas The Beatles already had a problem getting a balance of their singles and album cuts straightened out between the US and the UK, The Stones’ catalogue was an absolute mess, usually taking the best bits of their singles and putting them on albums on the other side of the Atlantic.
Despite some fine moments on all of their albums, it’s easy to forget some of the fantastic material that was never released as a single. While their releases became more standardised once the 1970s kicked in, people never managed to latch onto something like ‘Far Away Eyes’ or ‘Coming Down Again’ as much as they should have, usually catering to the ballads and rockers that were pushed by the label.
Then again, there’s a reason why the rockers were the ones that got picked. Keith Richards is a practical riff machine in human form, and whenever he got the right sound out of his signature Telecaster, it was up to Jagger to get the right lyric to wrap everything around. And when they started work on Exile on Main St, they came out with more songs than anyone could have predicted.
Even though most double albums tend to be messy, there’s hardly a dud on the Stones’ massive collection of ditties, whether that’s dipping into country songs, working on fast-and-loose rockers like ‘Rip This Joint,’ or finding time to cover old standards like Robert Johnson’s ‘Stop Breaking Down.’
For all of the great moments on the album, it’s saying something that Jagger thought the song ‘Following The River’ was good enough to be counted alongside them when releasing it as an added bonus track on the revamped version of the record, saying, “I’ve always liked it, but I never quite knew what was going to happen to it. It’s got a beautiful piano on it, which I didn’t play. And I’d heard this before but it didn’t have any lyrics at all. I could hear different melodies, but I didn’t know how I was going to get the melody to fit with this already existing track, which is very heavily piano. And when it actually came together, it’s a very good moment.”
But the interesting part of the track is seeing a glimpse into the band’s creative process. Hearing Nicky Hopkins’s gorgeous piano lines would have made for a decent instrumental, but looking through every part of the song, each section could have been in its own chorus until Jagger was able to flesh out every piece until it sounded finished.
While any chance of tampering with Exile on Main St would have been tempting fate, ‘Following the River’ will always be worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as their classic ballads. It’s not exactly as ramshackle as their magnum opus, but you’d be hard-pressed to find another song that cuts to the core of what The Stones are all about.
