The chemistry between The Rolling Stones was eternally difficult to put a finger on. At various different points, the band released songs where every member was absent at some point. Even band leader Mick Jagger and Keith Richards weren’t immune to getting the shaft at certain points. But each musician brought something essential to the final product, and songs could change in an instant once one of them got a hold of it.
Perhaps the best example comes in the form of the Sticky Fingers album cut ‘Bitch’. On its surface, ‘Bitch’ is a fairly standard rock song, but under the hood, it has that indelible magic that only the Stones could conjure up. With blaring horns and a swaggering attitude, the song also plays with the beat by switching up the emphasis on where beat one lands. It’s only complicated when you think about it: for the band, it was completely natural.
“Maybe listeners knew a year or six months later that the beat turned around, but at the moment I wasn’t conscious of that,” Keith Richards later observed. “It comes so naturally, as it’s always happened, and it’s always given that extra kick when the right moment comes back down again. That’s what rock and roll records are all about. I mean, nowadays it’s rock music. But rock and roll records should be 2:35 minutes long, and it doesn’t matter if you ramble on longer after that. It should be, you know – wang, concise, right there.”
“Rambling on and on, blah blah blah, repeating things for no point… I mean, rock and roll is in one way a highly structured music played in a very unstructured way, and it’s those things like turning the beat around that we’d get hung up on when we were starting out: ‘Did you hear what we just did? We just totally turned the beat around.’ (laughs),” he added. “If it’s done in conviction, if nothing is forced, if it just flows in, then it gives quite an extra kick to it.”
As engineer Andy Johns remembers, Richards was the essential ingredient that brought ‘Bitch’ to life. “When we were doing ‘Bitch’, Keith was very late,” Johns claimed. “Jagger and Mick Taylor had been playing the song without him and it didn’t sound very good. I walked out of the kitchen and he was sitting on the floor with no shoes, eating a bowl of cereal. Suddenly he said, ‘Oi, Andy! Give me that guitar.’”
“I handed him his clear Dan Armstrong Plexiglass guitar, he put it on, kicked the song up in tempo, and just put the vibe right on it,” Johns added. “Instantly, it went from being this laconic mess into a real groove. And I thought, Wow. That’s what he does. Instantly it went from not very good, feels weird, to BAM and there it is. Instantly changed gears, which impressed the shit out of me.”
Mick Jagger felt that the song was good enough to warrant its own single release, but the band’s distributors at Atlantic Records baulked at the idea, instead placing ‘Bitch’ on the B-side of the ‘Brown Sugar’ single. “We always have trouble getting airplay. I don’t really… I think cuts like ‘Bitch’… to my mind there was never anything written that was offensive in that,” Jagger claimed in 1971.
Adding: “But Atlantic told me they couldn’t get it played. None of our songs want to encourage drug use. I don’t particularly want to encourage drug use. Not encourage it – I mean, you can write about it but you don’t have to encourage it.”
