There was a certain rhythm to the way The Rolling Stones worked. Perennially unhurried, the rest of the band was usually subjected to the whims and wills of Keith Richards’ spotty attendance. Some days, Richards would stumble into the studio late at night with material ready to go. Other times, he wouldn’t show up at all. Even when Richards was living one floor above the recording space, like he did during the production of Exile on Main St., he would still be a no-show.
Sometimes the rest of the band didn’t wait up for Richards. When Mick Jagger had the basic form of ‘Moonlight Mile’, the powerful ballad that would eventually be the closing track on 1971’s Sticky Fingers, Richards was nowhere to be found. Instead of waiting up, the Stones elected to start recording without their main guitarist. Mick Jagger provided acoustic guitar, leading the rest of the band through the arrangement.
“When we finished our European tour in October 1970, we were at Stargroves, my country house in England. We were sitting around one night, and I started working on what I had initially written,” Jagger recalled in 2015. “I felt great. I was in my house again, and it was very relaxing. So the song became about that—looking forward to returning from a foreign place while looking out the window of a train and the images of the railway line going by in the moonlight.”
“But the lyrics I wrote didn’t come across like that because they weren’t so on the nose,” Jagger added. “They were more imaginative and wistful than if I had written them straight, like, ‘I’m tired of the road, you know?’ The feeling I wanted was the image of elongated space that you’re travelling through to get home: ‘Oh, I am sleeping under strange, strange skies / Just another mad, mad day on the road / My dreams is fading down the railway line / I’m just about a moonlight mile down the road.’ It was about the difficulty I was going through of being away.”
Jagger didn’t have to leave the sessions thanks to the recording taking place in his house. But Richards had left earlier in the day, just before the band decided to begin recording ‘Moonlight Mile’. “At some point during the evening, I think Keith left to go home, and Bill, for some reason, wasn’t there,” Jagger remembered.
Adding: “After Keith left, just Charlie, myself, and Mick (Taylor) were in the room. I finished doodling pretty late, probably around midnight, and we started playing the song to see how it sounded. I’d already come up with the guitar riff, so I started playing it and singing. I was playing my guitar when Mick added something, and then Charlie started playing. That’s when I realised it was more than doodling, that this was a real song we could record as we fooled around with it.”
“The instrumentation was really interesting and created this really interesting mood. Several hours later, we decided to record. At the house, there was a big living room when you walked in, sort of a big double-height imitation-gothic hall. It had a nice high ceiling, so we recorded most everything in there,” Jagger said. “Mick and I were both familiar with the song’s melody lines. But then you get someone like Charlie playing the drums, and you find you’re building an atmosphere… I think the three of us finished recording the basic track around 6 a.m. The sun was coming up.”
Trumpet player Jim Price, who was touring and recording with the Stones as an auxiliary addition to the band, added the delicate piano lines to the song. British cellist Paul Buckmaster created a string arrangement after the basic track was finished. During the entire production of ‘Moonlight Mile’, Richards wasn’t involved in the song’s creation at any point.
“The only thing in Sticky Fingers I don’t have anything to do with is ‘Moonlight Mile’, ’cause I wasn’t there when they did it,” Richards recalled in 1971, shortly after the album’s release. “It was great to hear that because I was very out of it by the end of the album, and it was like listening, really listening. It was really nice.” Richards echoed similar sentiments in his 2010 autobiography Life. “‘Moonlight Mile’ was all Mick’s,” he wrote. “As far as I can remember, Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it.”
