The Rolling Stones song that had a “big impact” on Tom Waits
The relationship between Tom Waits and The Rolling Stones is well established. It might seem like an odd one on paper: one of the world’s biggest stadium rock acts rubbing elbows with the king of experimental old-timey music. But their shared love of classic blues and rugged rock and roll makes Waits and the Stones a natural pairing.
Specifically, Waits has shared a friendship with guitarist Keith Richards that stretches back decades. “He has impeccable instincts about what a song needs and doesn’t need,” Waits said about Richards in a 2011 interview with The New York Times. “If you’re doing an overdub, he wants to hear everybody who played on it because he wants to know, ‘Where do I sit? I want to know everybody who’s there. Maybe I have to stand behind somebody. Maybe I have to knock somebody over and get in their place’. That kind of thing.”
Waits was still a struggling figure in the early 1970s singer-songwriter movement when The Rolling Stones released Exile on Main St. in 1972. The raw sound that the Stones achieved recording in the dank basement of the Villa Nellcôte fell in line with Waits’ approach to music, with one track in particular giving Waits some true inspiration.
“‘I Just Want To See His Face’ – that song had a big impact on me, particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does,” Waits told The Guardian in 2005. “When he sings like a girl, I go crazy. I said, ‘I’ve got to learn how to do that.’ I couldn’t really do it until I stopped smoking. That’s when it started getting easier to do.”
Waits saw parallels between ‘I Just Want To See His Face’ and some of the material in his own canon. “‘Shore Leave’ has that, ‘All Stripped Down’, ‘Temptation’. Nobody does it like Mick Jagger; nobody does it like Prince. But this is just a tree of life. This record is the watering hole,” Waits adds. “Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it.”
Waits would eventually get to work with Richards when the guitarist appeared on his classic 1985 album Rain Dogs. The pair would continue to collaborate over the years, with Richards publically stating his openness to continuing their work together. “With Tom, it’s no sweat. We didn’t have to do anything together, we just did it because we were together,” Richards told Uncut in 2023. “Sometimes we write things together, and sometimes we’ll have dinner or something. It’s an organic thing and great fun. I loved working with him and jeez, I’d do it again anytime Tom!”
Check out ‘I Just Want To See His Face’ down below.
