Songwriting is hard. If you don’t believe me, just ask Mick Jagger.
Jagger and his fellow Rolling Stones compadre, Keith Richards, originally started the band because they were inspired by blues and R&B artists. Because they were such lovers of the likes of Muddy Waters, in the early days of the band, they opted to simply play covers of such artists. They would have likely continued to do this had it not been for their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, getting them to write their first original number.
Richards and Jagger found it so difficult to write a new song that Oldham ended up locking them both in a kitchen and not letting them out again until they had a complete piece of music. The final result was pretty good, as it got The Rolling Stones in the charts; however, Richards always regretted the song as he felt as though it was the antithesis of what the Stones were trying to make.
“We had a number one hit with Marianne Faithfull,” said Richards when discussing writing the song ‘As Tears Go By’. “So suddenly, ‘Oh, we’re songwriters’, with the most anti-Stones sort of song you could think of at the time, while we’re trying to make a good version of [Muddy Waters] ‘Still A Fool’.”
Be that as it may, it did get the ‘Glimmer Twins’ off the mark. They had an original song to call their own, and despite the unconventional methods, they were always grateful to Oldham for forcing them into essentially setting the groundwork for the band to build upon.
“We were in the kitchen with some food and a couple of guitars, but we couldn’t get to the john, so we had to come out with a song,” said Richards. “In his own little way, that’s where Andrew made his great contribution to the Stones. That was such a flatulent idea, a fart of an idea, that suddenly you’re gonna lock two guys in a room, and they’re going to become songwriters. Forget about it.”
So, Mick Jagger was finally a songwriter; however, that didn’t mean songwriting would be a breeze from that moment onwards. While he was responsible for plenty of hits, and a great deal of the songs he wrote are still considered timeless, he also wrote songs that many deemed offensive. He had a real obsession with sex, and that trickled down into his music, which was sometimes playful but very often crossed lines.
Songs like ‘Some Girls’, ‘Star Star’ and ‘Brown Sugar’ were all received with controversy, to the extent that Jagger had to come out and apologise in some way for them. However, regardless of the anti-Stones slander, he had his first number one with or without the infamy which surrounded the other tunes, and we can all agree that Mick Jagger has been a pretty good songwriter for The Rolling Stones. It begs the question, did he keep his songwriting talents within the band? Or did he ever offer them out to somebody else?
So, did Mick Jagger ever write songs for other artists?
Yes, he wrote plenty; his way with words and unique relationship with rhythm could be applied to artists around the globe, not just to the band that he was most famed for fronting, and so he duly branched out.
One of the most heartbreaking songs he wrote was with his ex-partner, Marianne Faithfull, as the two of them were responsible for ‘Sister Morphine’. The track was originally released by Faithfull as the B-side to her song ‘Something Better’. While it is about a man who is involved in a car accident, there is certainly a double entendre, as the themes of drugs and addiction impacted both Faithfull and Jagger throughout their lives.
“I wrote this story about a man who’d had an accident,” explained Faithfull. “He’s dying, and in terrible pain, and all he wants is for the nurse to bring him another shot. It’s definitely a kind of junkie song except that neither Mick nor I knew much about junkies back then.”
Jagger worked with plenty of other artists as well. Over time, he lent his writing credentials to the likes of The Mighty Avengers, Gene Pitney and Tracey Day. While his writing career was turbulent at times, if you’re as good as him, it would be a shame to keep any of your ideas bottled up.
