Beast Of Burden Angie Honkey Tonk Women Tumbling Dice The Rolling Stones

Beast of Burden Album: Some Girls (1978)
Angie Album: Goat's Head Soup (1973)
Honkey Tonk Women Album: Through The Past Darkly (1969)
Tumbling Dice Album: Exile on Main St. (1972)
by The Rolling Stones

Sometimes misunderstood as a putdown, this is a rare Stones song from the '70s that treats women as equals. Jagger sings that he don't need no beast of burden."

A beast of burden is an animal that labors for the benefit of man, like an ox or a pack mule.

Rolling Stones guitarist Ron Wood explained in a promotional interview for the Some Girls album: "That's another one that just came very naturally in the studio. And I slipped into my part and Keith had his going. It may have appeared as though it was planned. We can pick it up today and it will just naturally slip into the groove again with the guitars weaving in a special way. It's quite amazing really. Ever since Keith and I first started to trade licks, it was a very natural thing that, for some unknown reason, if he's playing up high, I'm down low and the other way around. We cross over very naturally. We call it an ancient form of weaving - which we still are impressed by it to this day. Unexplainable, wonderful things happen with the guitar weaving. There's no plan."

Beast of Burden isn't about a specific woman. Most women in Stones' songs are composites of many.

A live version of Beast of Burden from their 1981 US tour was used as the B-side of their "Going To A Go-Go" single.

Keith Richards wrote Beast of Burden with Mick Jagger, who improvised a lot of the lyrics in the studio. While the band played, Jagger came in with different lines to fit the music. As a result, some of the lyrics are less than meaningful and a little repetitious.

Beast of Burden could be allegorical - it was written by Keith as a kind of homage to Mick for having to carry the band while Keith was strung out on heroin: "All your sickness I can suck it up, throw it all at me, I can shrug it off."

While Keith Richards spent much of the '70s insulating himself with drugs, former London School of Economics student Jagger was running the band. However, by the time of Some Girls, Richards wanted to share the workload. Mojo magazine January 2012 asked Richards how much this song was about his relationship with Jagger. He replied: "Mick wrote a lot of it but I laid the general idea on him. At the time Mick was getting used to running the band. Charlie was just the drummer, I was just the other guitar player. I was trying to say, 'OK I'm back, so let's share a bit more of the power, share the weight, brother."

Bette Midler released a popular cover of "Beast Of Burden" in 1983 that charted in America at #71. Mick Jagger appears in the video.

The Chinese ministry of culture ordered The Stones not to play Beast of Burden when they performed there in 2003. It was going to be the first time The Stones played in China, but they canceled because of a respiratory disease that was spreading through the country.

There aren't many opening acts that could get away with playing a Rolling Stones song in their set, but Pearl Jam did just that when they played "Beast Of Burden" on November 19, 1997 in Oakland, the last of four nights they did duty as The Stones' warm-up act.

Pearl Jam did it out of love: They were huge fans of the song and The Rolling Stones weren't playing it, so they thought they should.

The big rumor about Angie is that it was written about David Bowie's wife, Angela, who wrote in her autobiography that she once walked in on Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed together - a story Jagger denies. According to the rumor, Jagger wrote this song to appease her, but it was Jagger's bandmate Keith Richards who wrote most of the song. Jagger had this to say about it: "People began to say that song was written about David Bowie's wife but the truth is that Keith wrote the title. He said, 'Angie,' and I think it was to do with his daughter. She's called Angela. And then I just wrote the rest of it."

There was also speculation that Richards' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg inspired this song, but Keith cleared it up in his 2010 autobiography Life, where he wrote: "While I was in the [Vevey drug] clinic (in March-April 1972), Anita was down the road having our daughter, Angela. Once I came out of the usual trauma, I had a guitar with me and I wrote 'Angie' in an afternoon, sitting in bed, because I could finally move my fingers and put them in the right place again, and I didn't feel like I had to s--t the bed or climb the walls or feel manic anymore. I just went, 'Angie, Angie.' It was not about any particular person; it was a name, like ohhh, Diana. I didn't know Angela was going to be called Angela when I wrote 'Angie.' In those days you didn't know what sex the thing was going to be until it popped out."

A rare ballad for The Stones, Angie was the first single released from Goat's Head Soup. It wasn't typical of their sound, since most of the band's material at the time was hard and aggressive. Still, it was a huge hit, and their only ballad that hit #1 in the US.
This is one of the few Rolling Stones songs that is acoustic.

Keith Richards wrote Angie in Switzerland after the Exile on Main St. album had been approved by the record company, but before it was released. "Angie" was one of the first songs The Stones recorded for Goat's Head Soup, which they first attempted in Jamaica at the Dynamic Sounds studio in Kingston. They got very little done at these sessions, arriving nightly with armed escort and locking the doors until they were done for the day. Much of the album was done at sessions in Los Angeles and London under more hospitable conditions.

The Angela Bowie rumor picked up steam in 1990, when she went on The Joan Rivers Show and claimed she once walked in on David Bowie and Mick Jagger in bed together naked. What's even more shocking is that Rivers had her own talk show. She was quickly replaced by Arsenio Hall.

Nicky Hopkins played piano on Angie. He became part of the band's inner circle after working on the 1966 Stones album Between The Buttons.

In 2005 German chancellor Angela Merkel appropriated Angie's acoustic ballad for her Christian Democratic Union Party. "We're surprised that permission wasn't requested," said a Stones spokesman of Merkel's choice of song. "If it had been, we would have said no."

The line from Angie, "Ain't it time we said goodbye," was used as the title to Robert Greenfield's 2014 book, which chronicles his time covering the Stones' 1971 British tour and their Exile on Main St. sessions for Rolling Stone magazine. Greenfield is not a fan of the song, however, calling it "soppy and far too sweet for my taste."

Angela was born in a Catholic hospital, and her name was bestowed upon her by the nuns. "I'm glad she was called Angela, because Anita had adorned her with all these really weird names like Dandelion, which Angela quickly got rid of as soon as she grew up," Richards told Uncut magazine in 2020. "So she's Angie now, strangely enough."

In this song, Mick Jagger sings about having a go with two different honky tonk women. The first is a "gin-soaked, bar-room queen in Memphis" - likely a prostitue. The second is a "divorcée in New York City." Jagger would sometimes introduce it as being "a song for all the whores in the audience."

Like many Rolling Stones songs, Honkey Tonk Women has highly suggestive lyrics, but they are just subtle enough to keep it from getting banned by radio stations. British rock bands often wrote lyrics that were ambiguously offensive, falling just in line with BBC guidelines for airplay. A good example in this song is, "She blew my nose and then she blew my mind," which implies both cocaine and sex, but didn't give the BBC any specific reason to ban it.

The Stones started recording Honkey Tonk Women as a country song based on Hank Williams' "Honky Tonk Blues." They made it into a rocker for release as a single and released the country version, "Country Honk," a few months later on Let It Bleed.

Keith Richards explained in a promotional interview: "'Honky Tonk Women' started in Brazil. Mick and I, Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg who was pregnant with my son at the time. Which didn't stop us going off to the Mato Grasso and living on this ranch. It's all cowboys. It's all horses and spurs. And Mick and I were sitting on the porch of this ranch house and I started to play, basically fooling around with an old Hank Williams idea. 'Cause we really thought we were like real cowboys. Honky tonk women. And we were sitting in the middle of nowhere with all these horses, in a place where if you flush the john all these black frogs would fly out. It was great. The chicks loved it. Anyway, it started out a real country honk put on, a hokey thing. And then couple of months later we were writing songs and recording. And somehow by some metamorphosis it suddenly went into this little swampy, black thing, a Blues thing. Really, I can't give you a credible reason of how it turned around from that to that. Except there's not really a lot of difference between white country music and black country music. It's just a matter of nuance and style. I think it has to do with the fact that we were playing a lot around with open tunings at the time. So we were trying songs out just to see if they could be played in open tuning. And that one just sunk in."

Lead guitarist Brian Jones was a founding member of the group and was considered their leader in their early years, and when The Stones finished recording "Honky Tonk Women" on June 8, 1969, they drove to his house and fired him. The single was released July 3, 1969, the same day Jones was found dead in his swimming pool.

Mick Taylor had taken over for Brian Jones on lead guitar, and this was his first appearance on a Stones recording. Taylor claims he came up with the famous guitar riff, even though Richards plays it.

The distinctive cowbell used to open the song was played by producer Jimmy Miller. He set the tempo for the song by venturing into the studio and hitting the two small cowbells his had set up on a prong.

Young drummers often practice playing this song because it requires them to play different patterns at the same time with the hands and feet working independently.

Reparata & The Delrons, an early '60s girl group, sang the backup vocals.

There is no bass on the verses.

The singleof Honkey Tonk Women was given away to all the fans who helped clean up after The Stones free concert in Hyde Park on July 5, 1969. This was the first concert Mick Taylor played with the band. A life-size cutout of Brian Jones, who died three days earlier, was kept on stage and the show was dedicated to him.

The Stones played Honkey Tonk Women at most of their live shows, usually with great theatrics. The Steel Wheels tour in 1989 featured giant inflatable women during the performance.

Honkey Tonk Women was banned in China. When the group made arrangements to play there for the first time in 2003, they had to agree not to play this, "Brown Sugar," "Let's Spent The Night Together," and "Beast Of Burden." They ended up not playing because of a respiratory disease that was going around China.

Keith Richards says Honkey Tonk Women can be "a bastard to play." He told Rolling Stone: "When it's right, it's really right. There's something about the starkness of the beginning you really have to have down, and the tempo has to be just right."

Chrissie Hynde, the lead singer of The Pretenders, joined The Rolling Stones on stage in Leipzig on June 20, 2003 and sang Honkey Tonk Women as a duet with Jagger.

Rick Nelson released a cover of Honkey Tonk Women on his 1971 album Rudy The Fifth. His version, which is in more a country style akin to "Country Honk," is the song that got him booed off the stage when he played a "Rock & Roll Revival" show that year at Madison Square Garden. Nelson had never played one of these nostalgia shows, and he thought he could play something new in his set. The crowd, there to hear the hits, didn't like it and let him know. The experience led Nelson to write "Garden Party," which became a hit song the following year and got his career back on track. In that song, he included this line:

When I sang a song about a Honky Tonk
It was time to leave

"Honky Tonk Women" was used as the title for a session of the amime series Cowboy Bebop. Along with other classic rock songs, this was used to introduce the "Femme Fatale" character.

Tumbling Dice was originally titled "Good Time Woman," with different lyrics. Mick Jagger told the story of the song to The Sun newspaper May 21, 2010: "It started out with a great riff from Keith and we had it down as a completed song called Good Time Women. That take is one of the bonus tracks on the new Exile package; it was quite fast and sounded great but I wasn't happy with the lyrics.

Later, I got the title in my head, 'call me the tumbling dice' so I had the theme for it. I didn't know anything about dice playing but I knew lots of jargon used by dice players. I'd heard gamblers in casinos shouting it out.

I asked my housekeeper if she played dice. She did and she told me these terms. That was the inspiration."

The Stones recorded Tumbling Dice in the musty basement of the Villa Nellcote, a place Keith Richards rented in France so the band could avoid paying taxes in England. They would sleep all day and record at night with whoever showed up. For this track, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards played guitar, and Mick Taylor, ordinarily lead guitarist, played bass.

Jagger played guitar on Tumbling Dice, something he rarely did.

This was the only track from Exile to chart in the Top 20 of the singles chart. Jagger told The Sun: "It's obviously the most accessible and commercial song on the record. After 'Tumbling Dice,' I remember there wasn't really a follow-up single. People said, 'So, what are you going to release now then?'"

Jagger: "It's like a good guitar-hook tune. It's a bit like Honky Tonk Women in a way, in the way it's set up. But it was done for Exile. It's got a lot more background vocals on it. A very messy mix. But that was the fashion in those days.

Tumbling Dice features Bobby Keys on sax and Jim Price on trumpet. They showed up in France to help with the album, and played with The Stones through the early '70s. Keith Richards and Bobby Keys were born on the same day: December 18, 1943.

Background vocalists on Tumbling Dice include Vanetta Fields and Clydie King.

Linda Ronstadt covered Tumbling Dice in 1977. Ronstadt's career during the 1970s was based largely on her successful covers of other artists' songs.

Exile on Main St. was a double album, and the victim of poor sales and harsh criticism when it was released. Over the years, it has become more appreciated and is considered some of The Stones' best work.

Andy Johns, who engineered the Exile sessions, told Goldmine in 2010: "Obviously it was going to be great but it was a big struggle. Eventually we get a take. Hooray! I thought, 'Let's kick this up a notch and double track Charlie.' 'Oh, we've never done that before.' 'Well, it doesn't mean we can't do it now.' So we double-tracked Charlie but he couldn't play the ending. For some reason he got a mental block about the ending. So Jimmy Miller plays from the breakdown on out that was very easy to punch in. It was a little bit different than some of the others. That song we did more takes than anything else."