Given the mass of the output The Rolling Stones produced in their time, it’s only natural that sometimes, the recording process wasn’t as straightforward as in others.
One of their best-loved efforts that took its sweet time in being recorded is the 1978 track ‘Before They Make Me Run’ from that year’s Some Girls. Blending upbeat music with dark introspection, it is one of the guitarist Keith Richards’ finest moments from this era and was written in response to one of the most notorious junctures in his life.
The track was written about Richards’ hell-raising lifestyle, and he recorded it while on bail after being arrested for drug trafficking in Toronto, Canada, in 1977. At the time, the arrest was a spectral presence for the band and is rumoured to have pushed them to the brink of splitting up. Ultimately, though, the plucky Richards was only charged with possession of heroin and sentenced to probation. In a show of how far Richards’ lifestyle had affected his career, the song’s working title was ‘Rotten Roll’.
The composition is also memorable for the fact it was intended as a tribute to the late Flying Burrito Brother and former Byrds member Gram Parsons, a good friend of Richards’, who passed away owing to a mix of morphine and alcohol in 1973.
According to Richards, the significance of ‘Before They Make Me Run’ does not stop there. It is the longest recording session for a song in The Rolling Stones’ entire oeuvre. Captured over five days in Paris in March 1978, the guitarist did not catch a wink of sleep during that time. In his memoir Life, he recalled: “For sheer longevity – for long distance – there is no track that I know of like ‘Before They Make Me Run.’ That song, which I sang on that record, was a cry from the heart. But it burned up the personnel like no other”.
According to Richards, another Rolling Stones effort took so long to record that it comes in second place to ‘Can’t Be Seen’, a track taken from 1989’s Steel Wheels. He continued: “I was in the studio, without leaving, for five days… I had an engineer called Dave Jordan, and I had another engineer, and one of them would flop under the desk and have a few hours’ kip and I’d put the other one in and keep going. We all had black eyes by the time it was finished”.
He added: “That’s probably the longest I’ve done. There have been others that were close – ‘Can’t Be Seen’ was one – but ‘Before They Make Me Run’ was the marathon”.
