The Stones record their most underrated album in Jamaica, featuring the lushest ballads of their career. Mick Jagger begins his bromance with Bowie, and they create “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” with future Stone Ron Wood.
The accepted wisdom is that the quartet of albums the Rolling Stones released from 1968 to 1972 (Beggar’s Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, and Exile on Main Street) represent their pinnacle. Still, a smaller subset of fans prefers Goats Head Soup (1973) and It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (1974), which have a sound distinct from any other era in the band’s history.
After the lo-fi, sludgy production of Exile was criticized in the press, they strove for a cleaner mix with Goats. In contrast to the previous rootsy vibe, they colored their guitars with wah-wah pedals, phaser pedals, and a Leslie speaker cabinet. The cabinet housed multiple speakers that spun around in different directions to give the instruments a swirling, undersea sound. Billy Preston often played along on clavinet for blistering funk workouts like “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)” and “Fingerprint File,” which could have fit in the year’s blaxploitation movies.
On songs like “Winter” and “Time Waits for No One,” Mick Jagger and guitarist Mick Taylor returned to the style they explored on Sticky Fingers tracks “Moonlight Mile” and “Sway,” with Taylor unleashing endlessly ascending solos accompanied by majestic strings. It was the richest Stones era for melancholy ballads with opulent landscapes you could get lost in, like “Coming Down Again,” a way for the average listener to vicariously experience the effects of Richards’s opioid and Quaalude addictions without actually taking the drugs.
The band didn’t want to record in the UK because the government would tax them at 97 percent. They couldn’t record in France anymore because Richards and longtime partner Anita Pallenberg had been found guilty of possessing enough heroin to traffic. So they decamped to Dynamic Sound Studios in Kingston, Jamaica, to work in the same room where Jimmy Cliff recorded The Harder They Come, with the same Chinese Jamaican engineer, Mikey Chung. Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded Catch a Fire there a month before the Stones arrived.
Richards wrote in his memoir, “Two large, double gates guarded by the man with the shotgun would open and let us in and then close behind us.”1 Bassist Bill Wyman recalled, “Studio A was a low building, little bigger than an outhouse. Inside was an eight-track recorder and the room where we recorded. Someone described it as just this side of claustrophobic; they were right.”2 The drum stool was nailed to the floor.
Ironically, there’s no reggae on Goats Head Soup. “We just didn’t want to do it at that juncture,” Jagger later explained.
“More important, we didn’t think we were capable of doing it,” Richards chimed in.3 Jagger, Richards, and drummer Charlie Watts were avid fans, but they didn’t feel competent enough to tackle a reggae cover until 1976 (“Cherry Oh Baby”). The only song to carry a hint of Jamaica on Goats Head Soup (named after a local food dish) was “Can You Hear the Music,” with a flute that vaguely recalls Johnny Nash’s version of Marley’s “Stir It Up.” The song harks more to Brian Jones’s world music album Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka.
Richards did, however, bond with a pack of Rastafarians for life and thereafter returned to the island almost yearly. “After Goats Head Soup I’ve lived there whenever I can. I have family there—villages welcome me with open arms.”4 After the Rastas grew accustomed to him, they invited him to smoke the covenant in the Rasta village Steer Town, where he joined in playing drums and singing hymns from a hundred years ago.
Richards came up with the title and music for the album’s most famous track, “Angie,” during a stay at a clinic to get (temporarily) clean while Pallenberg gave birth to their second child, Dandelion (later renamed Angela). Richards wrote in his memoir that as soon as he could move without feeling he had to shit the bed, he grabbed his guitar and started singing “Angie,” which he claimed was an arbitrary name but shares the first syllable with Anita.5
The band recorded a rough version called a guide track, then overdubbed more polished performances. On the final version of the song, you can hear Jagger’s original vocals in the background, sometimes out of sync with his final overdubs.6 Being the Stones, it was probably a sloppy accident that couldn’t be fixed, but it wound up sounding cooler than if the track had been antiseptically polished.
Rumor had it that the song was about an affair Jagger had with Bowie’s wife, Angela. However, it was recorded at the end of 1972, and he became close with Bowie the following spring.
Label exec Ahmet Ertegun did not want to release it as a single, but it became the biggest hit single of the year worldwide, per Wikipedia. Today it stands as the band’s sixth-bestselling song across all platforms (“Paint It Black” and “Satisfaction” being first and second).7 It resonated with activists frustrated by the lack of obvious progress since the ’60s, with its lyrics of dreams, love, and money all gone up in smoke. Eight days after the single was released, Abbie Hoffman was busted for selling coke. Black Panthers fled the organization in the wake of Huey Newton’s cocaine-fueled internecine violence. Commune members confronted the fact that living off the land with a crowd of people could actually be more stressful than getting a conventional job.
The song was a tragic bookend to “As Tears Go By,” one of Jagger-Richards’s earliest songwriting jobs, commissioned by their manager for folk pop artist Marianne Faithfull nine years earlier. She and Jagger became one of the era’s most glamorous couples. But by decade’s end, her escalating addiction to cocaine and heroin contributed to a miscarriage and derailed her career. She lost custody of her son and attempted suicide twice. Jagger fought to hold the relationship together, but, per her memoir, she preferred squatting in Piccadilly Circus for a year and a half as an anorexic junkie.8 Her stunning beauty gone, she blended into the demimonde of drug dealers, prostitutes, and street people, finding strange relief in anonymity. Jagger tried to scare her straight with Exile’s “Shine a Light,” painting a picture of her dead in the alley. On “Angie” he implores her, “Ain’t it good to be alive?”
In “Winter,” Jagger wishes he could wrap a coat around his former love to keep her warm. He sings that he’s burning his bell, book, and candle, a tradition from the ninth century in which clerics burned candles to excommunicate someone. “We judge him damned,” bishops would intone, “to eternal fire until he shall recover himself from the toils of the devil and return to amendment and to penitence.”9 Faithfull eventually recovered and launched a second act as a singer-songwriter. She credited a brief affair with Bowie at the end of the year with inspiring her to think about lyric writing in a new way.10 (She and the Troggs were guests on the TV special he taped that fall, The 1980 Floor Show.)
The other women in the Stones’ entourage endured even more horrific calamities during the Jamaica sessions. A local man pushed his way into Bill Wyman’s room with a knife demanding money, then forced him to go under the bed while he raped his common-law wife, Astrid.11
Richards returned to London without Pallenberg after the two had a fight. When she attempted to enter their hotel with six Rastas, the manager would not let them in, and Pallenberg blew up at him. In return, the hotel helped the police bust her for pot. According to the memoir of Richards’s assistant and dealer “Spanish Tony” Sanchez, she was raped in jail by guards and inmates before being released to return to England.12 The experience no doubt accelerated her spiraling need to self-medicate.
“She was dying to survive,” Richards sang in “Coming Down Again,” his strongest ballad, with gentle accompaniment by Mick. Richards said that musically the song was in the vein of both “As Tears Go By” and the country style taught to him by his friend Gram Parsons,13 who died nineteen days after Goats Head Soup was released from a morphine and alcohol overdose.
The song was followed on the album by “Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker).” The band first attempted the track in Jamaica but rerecorded it later that spring. The new lyrics focused on an April 28 police killing in South Jamaica—the one in Queens, New York. While investigating a robbery, two undercover policemen stopped ten-year-old Clifford Glover and his stepfather to question them. Glover and his stepfather thought the officers were muggers, as they were not in uniform, and ran. Officer Thomas Shea shot Glover in the back; the bullet went through his heart, as in the song. Shea was subsequently acquitted, igniting protests and riots in Queens, not unlike more recent events with Black Lives Matter. Jagger denounces the cop as a heartbreaker “with your .44,” the same gun Clint Eastwood celebrated that year in Magnum Force, the latest installment of his Dirty Harry series about an undercover cop.
The album would have a better reputation today if it opened with the incendiary “Heartbreaker” instead of the somewhat corny “Dancing with Mr. D.”—and if they had replaced “Hide Your Love” with “Through the Lonely Nights,” a haunting Gram Parsons–influenced song with Eagles-like country rock harmonies that they consigned to a B side.
Todd Haynes’s glam epic Velvet Goldmine focuses on the friendship/love affair the Bowie-esque lead has with a figure who appears to be Iggy Pop on the surface, but the story includes elements from Bowie’s relationship with Jagger, such as Angie finding them in bed together.
Bowie had been a fan for years, stage-naming himself after the Jim Bowie knife because Jagger meant “knife” in Old English. Their friendship began in earnest after Jagger and his wife, Bianca, visited Bowie backstage at his May 12 show at Earl’s Court.14 Soon the two singers were observed at the London club Tramp, at a Diana Ross show, at the Muhammad Ali/ Ken Norton fight. The Bowies moved close to the Jaggers on Cheyne Walk in October. When Angie returned home one morning to find the two men sleeping naked together in the bedroom, she “felt absolutely dead certain that they’d been screwing. It was so obvious, in fact, that I never even considered the possibility that they hadn’t been screwing.”15
Bebe Buell recalled, “I used to get some pretty strange phone calls from Mick and David at three in the morning, inviting me to join them in bed with four gorgeous black women. Or four gorgeous black men.”16
Bowie’s backup-singer/girlfriend Ava Cherry reportedly told biographer Christopher Anderson that the two “were really sexually obsessed with each other. Even though I was in bed with them many times, I ended up just watching them have sex.”17 She told the New York Post, “It’s called a cookie. I was the tasty filling. It was wonderful, just like it should have been—everybody on their respective side doing whatever they do. We were friends.”18
Years later, though, Cherry backpedaled. “Nah, honey. I told them I didn’t say that, but it didn’t stop them from writing it.”19
LA club owner and disc jockey Rodney Bingenheimer maintained, however, “Mick and David were lovers, of course. They didn’t exactly make a secret of it.”20
Whatever they were, they were also rivals. Once Jagger had been the twenty-one-year-old enfant terrible singing “Time Is on My Side,” but Bowie had supplanted him as the outrage du jour. Perhaps that was why “Time Waits for No One” was the first song the band tackled when they regrouped for It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll sessions in November.
“I went to Brazil, which is possibly why there is a little Latin influence there,” Taylor said. “It was done in one or two takes.”21
Richards kicks things off with a riff that plays throughout the song. Elton John’s percussionist Ray Cooper provides the tambourine, maracas, and the sound of a ticking clock. But the key to the track’s eerie grandeur is Bill Wyman’s mysterious synth riff, always hanging back a beat before entering each verse.
Richards had been playing Dobie Gray’s recent hit “Drift Away” constantly; maybe its lyric about wasting time had gotten to Jagger. Echoing Shakespeare, the singer acknowledges the band is star-crossed and sated by leisure. Filler songs have started to gather on their albums for the first time in six years. Quoting Deuteronomy 11:14 (“gather thy corn”) and Confucius (“The years do not wait for us”), he goads himself, “Hours are like diamonds, don’t let them waste.”
The Stones pushed themselves for another ambitious track, “Fingerprint File,” a protest song about “some little jerk in the FBI keepin’ papers on me six feet high” who wiretaps Jagger while the SIS (the Los Angeles Police Department’s Special Investigation Section) takes ultraviolet/infrared photos of him. There was a “fat FBI file” on Jagger. According to biographer Philip Norman, in 1967 the FBI conspired with Britain’s MI5 and the News of the World tabloid to bust Jagger and Richards. The band also wrote a song sympathetic to black dissident Angela Davis, “Sweet Black Angel.” Perhaps Jagger felt safe releasing “Fingerprint File” because the Supreme Court had recently decreed the FBI couldn’t conduct electronic surveillance without a court order. The decision forced the FBI to drop charges against the Weather Underground and the White Panthers. “Fingerprint File” sounds as relevant today, only as of this writing it’s the president claiming he’s the victim of FBI surveillance (in a government program labeled “Crossfire Hurricane,” after a lyric from “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” no less). “What a price to pay,” Jagger laments.
Just as the Stones were working hard on those tracks, Lester Bangs published an article in Creem magazine entitled “1973 Nervous Breakdown: The Ol’ Fey Outlaws Ain’t What They Used to Be—Are You?” “There is a sadness about the Stones now, because they amount to such an enormous ‘So what?’” he wrote in one of the gentler lines. “Somehow it blows all the Jagger charms to see him and Bowie dancing and lolling on each other’s laps at David’s ‘retirement’ party while their wives made out with quiet dignity in the glare of the paparazzi.” Rolling Stone critic Gordon Fletcher, meanwhile, dismissed the group as “a senior, ‘safe’ bizarro-perversion band.” Critics like Bangs wanted the Stones to remain the embodiment of everything parents feared (black bisexual long-haired junkie devils leading the street-fighting revolution) and hated to see Jagger jetting about in the gossip column with Bianca, the era’s equivalent of Kim Kardashian.
Jagger grumbled, “I was getting a bit tired of people having a go, all that, ‘oh, it’s not as good as their last one’ business.”22 In “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll (but I Like It),” he wondered if it would appease the critics if he committed suicide onstage, echoing Bowie’s set closer “Rock and Roll Suicide.” The cover of the single showed him committing hari-kari with a pen, like a vampire staking himself.
The song marked the band’s transition from the ambitious Mick Taylor era to the Ron Wood era, in which they maintained the same template for the next four decades. Taylor had known Wood since he was fifteen in the mid-’60s London R&B scene, but Jagger and Richards didn’t start hanging with Wood until spring ’73. Wood had recently purchased a house called the Wick that overlooked the River Thames, and it had become one of the most popular haunts for the inner circle of British blues rockers. When Wood’s wife, model Krissy Findlay, ran into Richards at a club, she told him Jagger was over at the house jamming with Wood. Per biographer Victor Bockris, it was awkward when Richards showed up, because Jagger had been discreetly checking out Wood as a possible candidate to fill in for Richards if the US blocked Richards from entering due to his drug convictions.23 But Richards and Wood got on like doppelgänger brothers. Richards moved into the coach house for months because he was fighting with Pallenberg and was paranoid the authorities were plotting to bust him again.
Wood starting working on a solo record, I’ve Got My Own Album to Do, and asked Jagger to sing on “I Can Feel the Fire,” which had a hook more reggae than anything the Stones had tried to date. Wood recalled, “After we’d done that, he said, ‘Help me with this song, ‘It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll,’ ’cause I wanna see how it turns out.’ So, say on a Tuesday evening: two guitars—Mick and I—and Mick singing lead vocal and David Bowie and myself on backup vocals.”24 They called in the Faces’ Kenny Jones for drums, as he lived nearby. Wood utilized the same Chuck Berry “Little Queenie” hook T. Rex had for “Bang a Gong.” Jagger worked himself into a lion’s roar for the song’s climax, voice still shredding at full power.
“Steal that motherfucker back,” Richards insisted when he heard it.25 “That song is a classic. The title alone is a classic and that’s the whole thing about it.”26
Jagger did a trade with Wood: “I Can Feel the Fire” would be credited solely to him in return for “It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll” being Jagger-Richards. A bad trade, but perhaps it was the entry fee to joining the Stones (which wouldn’t technically happen for another year and a half). The Stones tried to cut their own version, but, per Richards, “it just didn’t have that one-off feel.”27 So they put out the original with Jones drumming on the record, though they dubbed out Bowie.
When the band named their next album after the song, the critics charged that the title set up an interesting premise that the rest of the album failed to develop. Perhaps the album would have garnered more respect if they had opened with the title track, then followed with a song they recorded but left off, “Drift Away.”
When Richards lived with Wood, he continued to play the single daily. It was written by Mentor Williams, brother of singer-songwriter Paul Williams. R&B singer Dobie Gray’s cover debuted on the chart February 24 and made it all the way up to No. 5 in May. Gray had been struggling to get back in the Top 20 for the last eight years, since “The In Crowd.” In the song, he thanks his fellow musicians for being the “light through the pouring rain,” something Richards no doubt needed that summer. On June 26 he was arrested for heroin, Mandrax (Quaaludes), cannabis, and unregistered guns. The following month, his house Redlands burned, possibly after he nodded off with cig in hand. The night after he was convicted for the bust, he accidentally set his hotel room on fire. He looked like the Mr. D of Goats Head Soup, front tooth broken and gray. The busts and fire surely only worsened Pallenberg’s own post-traumatic stress from the Jamaica sojourn. The lyrics of “Drift Away” celebrated the joy of guitars and harmony, how they soothed the blues and kept one strong. The song would have answered why it wasn’t just rock and roll. If they had swapped that in and taken out “Dance Little Sister,” it would have kept the classic album streak going. (The outtake can be found on YouTube.)
By then Mick Taylor was drifting away. Unknown to them at the time, an October 19 performance in West Berlin would be his last live gig with the band for the next thirty-nine years.
Jagger later reflected, “I think he found it difficult to get on with Keith.”28 As Richards’s heroin dependency continued apace, Richards found himself in the eerie position of being the new Brian Jones of the group, the weak link losing it to drugs, merely strumming the rhythm while the other guitarist outshone him with virtuoso leads he could never play himself. He and Jones used to switch it up, sometimes one would play lead, sometimes the other, but Taylor always took the lead unless the song sounded like Chuck Berry, “which completely destroyed the whole concept of the Stones,” Richards later complained.
Richards grew sharp to Taylor in the studio. “Oi! Taylor! You’re playing too fuckin’ loud. I mean, you’re really good live, man, but you’re fucking useless in the studio. Lay out, play later, whatever.”29 Taylor would come in early and record something; Richards would arrive and erase it.
Taylor was angry that songs he and Jagger wrote were credited to Jagger-Richards. Jagger was no doubt loath to rock the boat in the most lucrative songwriting partnership since Lennon-McCartney. When Taylor picked up a copy of It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll and saw he was not credited for “Time Waits for No One” and “Till the Next Time We Say Goodbye,” he quit.
“The Mick Taylor period was a creative peak for us,” Watts acknowledged. “A tremendous jump in musical credibility. Now Keith won’t say that; Keith, I think, would prefer to play with Ronnie as a partner. But Mick Taylor was an incredible virtuoso. Brian wasn’t, he was a good all-round player, and Ronnie’s the same. He’ll play wonderful bottleneck guitar and pedal steel—any instrument, like Brian—but Mick gave our music terrific lyricism. Ronnie is a very likeable person, a great sense of humor.”30
Jagger said Taylor “would play very fluid lines against my vocals. He was exciting, and he was very pretty, and it gave me something to follow, to bang off. Some people think that’s the best version of the band that existed.”31
Still, it’s unlikely the band would have endured if Wood hadn’t made it fun for Richards again. But their adventurous era came to an end, both musically and lyrically. Marianne Faithfull had been a folkie pursued by Dylan, and she stoked Jagger’s ambitions as a wordsmith, inspiring him to write songs based on Russian novels. Bianca and, later, Jerry Hall couldn’t have cared less. Jagger would push himself on a handful of compositions over the ensuing decades: “Memory Motel,” “Undercover of the Night,” “High Wire,” “Saint of Me.” But none had the eloquence of “Time Waits for No One,” or Taylor’s guitar climbing into the stratosphere.
The dreams of the night time will vanish by dawn.