‘Slipping Away’: The Rolling Stones song written at gunpoint
Make no mistake about the impact that Muddy Waters had on music. It was during one of his sets that young The Rolling Stones members had their minds blown by the power of music and subsequently became obsessed with trying to recapture that magic. As such, when they first came together as a band and started making music together, it shouldn’t be seen as a surprise that they initially decided to cover well-known Muddy Waters tracks.
They were all talented musicians, and that world-renowned Rolling Stones flare has always been there. As such, the band was instantly recognised as people with potential, and their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, wasted no time taking the band under his wing. However, there was one problem: they weren’t writing any original songs.
It might sound surprising now, given the plethora of hits that have come from The Rolling Stones, but they weren’t natural songwriters. They knew the music they liked and what they wanted to make, but those two things didn’t come naturally to them. It took their manager locking Mick Jagger and Keith Richards in a kitchen before they got their first song, and Richards admits that the track wasn’t the direction they wanted to go in.
“When you start writing, it doesn’t matter where the first one comes from,” said Richards, “You’ve got to start somewhere, right? So Andrew locked Mick and myself into a kitchen in this horrible little apartment we had. He said, ‘You ain’t comin’ out’, and there was no way out.”
Things got easier for The Rolling Stones. As Richards said himself, what was important was that they had written their first original song. It might not have been a clear reflection of how the band wanted to sound, but the awkward first track was out of the way. Once they had overcome this hurdle, they were in a position to keep writing without fear, which led to the creation of some of their greatest hits, which are still loved by fans worldwide.
Old habits die hard, though, and while the Rolling Stones became progressively better songwriters as their time as a band continued, there were some tracks which didn’t come as naturally as others. Richards remembers one of these all too well, as when he and the band originally started writing the song ‘Slipping Away’, it did exactly as its name suggested. Apparently not feeling a great affinity neither for nor against the song, the Rolling Stones were happy to let the track slip through the cracks.
Once they all revisited the song, they realised just how much potential it actually had and, therefore, decided that it made sense to have another try at rewriting it. Richards wasn’t so sure, but everyone else put him under enough pressure that he had no choice other than to comply.
“It just kind of tailed off at the end of Steel Wheels. We realized what potential it still had, and the band and especially the horn guys said, ‘You’ve got to do that!’” said Richards, “So in a way, I agreed to do it at gun point. But when I got into it, I really liked singing that song. It’s got some depth.”
