Dead Flowers Miss You The Rolling Stones

Dead Flowers Album: Sticky Fingers (1971)
Miss You Album: Some Girls (1978)
The Rolling Stones

In Dead Flowers, Mick Jagger addresses a girl named Susie with more than a little disdain: She's welcome to send him dead flowers, but he'll put roses on her grave. The music and lyrics both have a distinct country vibe. Jagger explained in 1995: "I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue-in-cheek. The harmonic thing is very different from the blues. It doesn't bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it's very English, really. Even though it's been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak."

Mick Jagger, 2003: "The 'country' songs we recorded later, like 'Dead Flowers' on Sticky Fingers or Far Away Eyes on Some Girls, are slightly different (than our earlier ones). The actual music is played completely straight, but it's me who's not going legit with the whole thing, because I think I'm a blues singer not a country singer - I think it's more suited to Keith's voice than mine."

The line, "I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon" is probably a reference to shooting up heroin.

This song rolled during the final credits of The Big Lebowski. Allen Klein, Rolling Stones manager and owner of the song initially wanted $150,000 for the movie's use of it. He was then convinced to let them use it for free when he saw the scene in which The Dude says, "I hate the f---in' Eagles, man!"

The lyrics to Miss You were seemingly inspired by Mick Jagger's deteriorating relationship with his wife, Bianca. Jagger has claimed otherwise, saying: "'Miss You' is an emotion, it's not really about a girl. To me, the feeling of longing is what the song is."

Session musicians included Sugar Blue (James Whiting) on harmonica, Mel Collins on sax and Ian MacLagan on electric piano. Collins had played with King Crimson, MacLagan had been in the band Faces with Stones guitarist Ron Wood. Sugar Blue was from Harlem, but was playing in the Paris metro (their subway) when someone from The Stones record company heard him and brought him to the sessions.

The bassline, horns and drums gave this a disco sound that alienated many of their fans, but also propelled it to the top of the charts. The Stones thought of it as more R&B than disco.

Drummer Charlie Watts explained: "A lot of those songs like 'Miss You' were heavily influenced by going to the discos. You can hear it in a lot of those four on the floor rhythms and the Philadelphia-style drumming. Mick and I used to go to discos a lot... It was a great period. I remember being in Munich and coming back from a club with Mick singing one of the Village People songs - 'Y.M.C.A.', I think it was - and Keith went mad, but it sounded great on the dance floor."

This was the first single released from Some Girls. Jagger took a lead role on the album, mainly because Keith Richards had been arrested for drug possession in Toronto the previous year, and it was unclear what his sentence would be. Facing a maximum of life in prison, Keith had other things to worry about besides making an album. After this was released, the Canadian judge sentenced Richards to continue his addiction treatment and play a benefit concert for the blind.

Jagger and Billy Preston came up with the basic track while touring Europe in 1976. Stones bassist Bill Wyman said: "The idea for those bass lines came from Billy Preston. We'd cut a rough demo a year or so earlier after a recording session. I'd already gone home, and Billy picked up my old bass when they started running through that song. He started doing that bit because it seemed to be the style of his left hand. So when we finally came to do the tune, the boys said, Why don't you work around Billy's idea? So I listened to it once and heard that basic run and took it from there. It took some changing and polishing, but the basic idea was Billy's."

The same day they recorded this track, The Stones came up with the idea for "Start Me Up."

This is a rare Stones song with a dominant bassline. Many of their songs were driven by the rhythm guitar of Keith Richards.

This was the last of eight #1 hits for The Rolling Stones in America.

When this song hit the charts, some other rockers felt safe entering the disco waters. Most notably Rod Stewart, who went disco with "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy?" after hearing this song and seeing that The Stones were getting away with it. Stewart's song was a huge hit, but he faced more of a backlash from rock fans as he seemed to embrace the genre. Rather than shy away from his sexy smash, Stewart embraced it, making the song a staple of his setlists (somewhat ironically) throughout his career.

Van Halen used the bassline on their 1981 song "Push Comes To Shove."