His feelings have since changed as he realized what a beautiful song they’d created. In a recent interview shared on TikTok, Richards called “Beast of Burden” a “special song.” Mick Jagger ad-libbed ‘Beast of Burden’ lyrics.
“I didn’t write it as a special song or [think] it was a special song when I recorded it, but it’s grown on me over the years, and I realized why people respond to it so much.” The song has become somewhat of a standard that Richards holds himself to when writing new music. He expressed his desire to repeat the song’s success, saying:
“I wish I could write another one just as good, you know? That’s my aim. But it’s a beautiful song. It just has all of the feel, and, you know, what I aim for is to write great soul ballads. And that’s getting close. Those who say it’s about one woman in particular, they’ve got it all wrong,” he explained. ”
"We were trying to write for a slightly broader audience than just Anita Pallenberg or Marianne Faithfull. Although that’s not to say they didn’t have some influence in there somewhere.
I mean, what’s close by is close by!” So, what are the lyrics about? It seems that even Richards himself doesn’t know! “It was another strict collaboration between Mick and me,” Richards continued.
"I think I had the first verse—’I’ll never be your beast of burden’—along with the hook, and we were still working very much in our traditional way: Here’s the idea, here’s the song, now run away and fill it in! Some of the theories surrounding it are very intriguing, but they’re about as divorced from reality as can be. I find it quite amusing that there are people in the world who spend a lot of their time trying to decode something that is, at the end of the day, completely undecodable. I mean, even I’ve forgotten the code!”"
Keith Richards: 'Gimme Shelter was born thanks to a huge storm over London'
‘Gimme Shelter’ is a track that would be wholly impossible without Merry Clayton’s perfect vocal performance.
Let It Bleed, was released by Decca Records on December 5, 1969.
Keith Richards was sitting in a London flat in Mayfair on a stormy day in 1969, thinking about Chuck Berry riffs as he strummed on an acoustic guitar and looked out of the window. In that moment, he came up with the music for The Rolling Stones’ song “Gimme Shelter.”
“There was this incredible storm over London, so I got into that mode, just looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell,” he recalled in his memoir, Life. “And the idea came to me… My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine. It just happened to hit the moment.”
It reflected the times, the end of the 60s
Mick Jagger loved the melody and co-wrote lyrics for a song that seemed to capture the violence of the Vietnam War and American society in one dark piece of music, with its memorable opening. The song is a key part of the album Let It Bleed, which was released by Decca Records on December 5, 1969 and is being reissued in a 50th-anniversary limited deluxe edition.
The Vietnam War, was violence on the screens, pillage, and burning. And Vietnam was not ‘war’ as we knew it in the conventional sense. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it . (Mick Jagger)
Richards’ home at the time was a Mecca for musicians and welcomed a fine array of 1960s heroes throughout the years. One such unnamed guitarist would forget his guitar and become a part of history. “That was done on some nameless Australian full-bodied acoustic Maton guitar. It looked like a copy of the Gibson model that Chuck Berry used,” Richards remembered of the riff.
“The thing had all been revarnished and painted out, but it just sounded great. Some guy crashed out at my pad for a couple of days, then suddenly split in a hurry and left that guitar behind, like, ‘take care of this for me’, I certainly did.” The guitarist would often use the different ‘feel’ of guitars, finding nuances in notes that few rockers would ever pick up on. This guitar would be an instrument he would never pick up again.
“At the very last note of the take, the whole neck fell off. You can hear it on the original track,” recalled Richards. He expertly provides a cathartic creative vision of the instrument’s last moments. “That guitar had just that one little quality for that specific thing. In a way, it was quite poetic that it died at the end of the track.”
(Source: Udiscovermusic - Faroutmagazine - Cheatsheet)
