THE STONES’ SEVENTH trip to the top of the charts came on October 20, 1973. Of the eight singles that rose to that pinnacle, only one other could even remotely be considered a ballad—“Ruby Tuesday”—and that was only because of the uproar caused by the original A side—“Let’s Spend the Night Together” (see chapter 14). “Angie,” however, was a hardcore power ballad. Recorded for the Goats Head Soup album, it was released as a single on August 20, over a week before the official album release, and once again started tongues wagging (no pun intended). But first, let’s take a look at the nuts-and-bolts process of the writing and recording.
KEITH RICHARDS: Sometimes you have a hook, a phrase or a word or a name or something which maybe you don’t even intend to keep. A classic example is “Angie,” it was just a working title, like who’s gonna call a song “Angie,” how boring another chick’s name you know? But when you come around to actually writing the song and you sing “Angie, Angie,” eventually you have to live with it and say, “This song’s ‘Angie.’” Whether you intended it to be or not, that’s what it is. Sometimes you cannot get out of it, it’s meant to be there and you have to accept it. Other times, maybe the way somebody’s playing something will suggest a word or a phrase that nobody’s thought of before. Songs just come about in so many different ways.
So that’s how “Angie” got her name. Then what about all the wild speculation concerning who or what the real Angie was? Here are just a few of the names that have been floated over the years: Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Mick Taylor, Angie Bowie, Angie Dickinson, Dandelion Angela Richards.
MARSHALL CHESS QUITS IN 1977
MARSHALL CHESS: At the end of my time with the Stones I had major problems with various addictions. At the end of Black and Blue I decided to quit. I woke up in a five-star hotel in Montreux and I felt like shit. I walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and I could see the shape I was in—black circles around my eyes, painfully thin, horrible to look at. That night I told Mick I wanted out. It was like telling a girlfriend I’d been dating for eight years that I was leaving because it wasn’t working anymore. If I hadn’t got out I wouldn’t have survived. Quite simply, I’d have died. After I left the Stones it was a tough job coping with the change. My phone calls dropped from seventy a day to two a day. I had a million friends who loved me because I was a part of the Stones. Soon as I left, they didn’t want to know. I had to get used to some kind of normality.
And how long did it take him to get clean?
MARSHALL CHESS: It took me years to get straight, properly straight. You stop taking drugs but it takes forever for your brain to start working normally again. I still smoke marijuana but I think of that as like having a beer. I haven’t touched anything harder since 1978. It’s really difficult to come off all that stuff. It’s like climbing Everest. When you get to the top you get a tremendous sense of well-being.
Jagger has stated definitively that the song isn’t about Angela Bowie, pointing out that they hadn’t met when it was recorded. He has speculated in some places that the song is named after Keith’s daughter. Keith solves the mystery—sort of. He was in Switzerland receiving treatment for heroin addiction.
KEITH RICHARDS: When I was in the clinic, Anita was down the road having our daughter, Angela. Once I came out of the usual trauma, I had a guitar with me and I wrote “Angie” in an afternoon, sitting in bed, because I could finally move my fingers and put them in the right place again, and I didn’t feel like I had to shit the bed or climb the walls or feel manic anymore. I just went Angie, Angie. It was not about any particular person; I didn’t know Angela was going to be called Angela when I wrote “Angie.” In those days, you didn’t know what sex the thing was going to be until it popped out. In fact, Anita named her Dandelion. She was only given the added name Angela because she was born in a Catholic hospital where they insisted a “proper” name be added.
What can you make out of all this? It’s up to all of us, really. Once a work of art is thrown out into the world, it no longer belongs to the artist. It doesn’t matter what Robert Frost meant by “The Road Not Taken.” What matters is what YOU think it means. The same goes for “Angie.” Personally, I like this post on the Internet from Angie in Schnecksville, Pennsylvania, who wrote on a thread about “Angie”: “I think the song is about me!”
One final postscript: “Angie” is the biggest-selling single in the whole Rolling Stones catalog. Keith’s perceptive observation?
KEITH RICHARDS: When you get the middle of the road market, sales are amazing!
KEITH GETS A BLOOD CHANGE . . . OR DOES HE?
One of the most famous Stones’ urban legends is that when Keith went to rehab in Switzerland in 1973, he had all his blood transfused as a way of beating his addiction. Keith himself was the source of the rumor as he claims he told a journalist he was having his blood changed to mess with him. In Tony Sanchez’s highly unreliable account of being Keith’s bodyguard, he does add some rich detail to the story, which has no doubt helped to propagate it, but according to both Keith and medical sources, the rumor is false. You can’t cure addiction by merely detoxifying the blood. The problem—as Keith has proved over and over again—is staying clean afterward.