Who wrote The Rolling Stones’ number one hit ‘Miss You’ with Mick Jagger?
By the mid-1970s, The Rolling Stones seemed to enter into a period of relative decline. After the critical fervour their double album Exile on Main St generated in 1972 and the commercial success of its follow-up Goats Head Soup album and single ‘Angie’ a year later, the band’s following plateaued, and their musical output waned as members of the Stones began to drift apart from one another.
Things came to a head when guitarist Mick Taylor quit the group in December 1974. The next year became the first since 1963 which didn’t see the release of a studio album by the Rolling Stones. And the band’s 1976 experimental record Black and Blue was a critical and commercial disappointment.
The Stones needed a new lease of life, and they found it in the most unexpected of places—on stage in Toronto’s El Mocambo club during a rehearsal session for a secret gig at the venue. The band would close out the night playing dice and sharing dope with Canada’s First Lady. But they opened it with a jam session before the crowd arrived, with Jagger doing his best Nile Rodgers impression on guitar while the band’s touring keyboard player provided a disco-style accompaniment.
Out of this jam came the answer to most of their problems in one song. ‘Miss You’ features exactly the kind of seductive disco strut that would propel the Stones back to the top of the charts again. Behind Jagger’s wordless vocal hook – the catchiest thing either he or Keith Richards had come up with since the days of ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ and ‘Gimme Shelter’ – it was Bill Wyman’s part on the bass guitar which drove the song’s disco rhythm. Yet Wyman wasn’t the one responsible for this innovation in the Stones’ sound.
Who wrote the bass part, then?
As Wyman has acknowledged, his bassline came straight from the keyboardist in that first jam session with Jagger. On the keys at the time was the man who’d filled in some of the gaps left behind by Mick Taylor in the band’s setlist, in addition to newly-hired guitarist Ronnie Wood. “Those bass lines came from Billy Preston,” Wyman said in a 1978 interview. He’d left the rehearsal before this first version of ‘Miss You’ came together. “Billy picked up my old bass when they started running through that song.”
This fateful intervention by the man who famously accompanied The Beatles on ‘Get Back’ and John Lennon on his debut album proved to be what brought the Stones into the disco era. There were attempts at dance music on Black and Blue that didn’t come off, but ‘Miss You’ led from the front on the next Stones record, their acclaimed return to form Some Girls.
Although the track is credited to Jagger-Richards, the latter had nothing to do with its composition. A Jagger-Preston credit would reflect the real creative process behind the final Stones single to get to number one in the US. But ever the unsung talent in whatever band he played with, Preston didn’t get the recognition he deserved, and his fundamental role in writing ‘Miss You’ went unrewarded.
