The best songwriters of all time (6): Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
The songs of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were to become the blueprint for a whole generation of rock’n’rollers. There was the unforgettable riff, the thunderous chorus, the pent-up anger, the biting humor and the stroppy motto of not avoiding any taboo.
Sometimes they would just rudely kick down the door and reduce the whole place to rubble
They wrote personal songs in a political context (“Satisfaction” and “Get Off Of My Cloud”). Reflected the student unrest in the late 1960s (“Gimme Shelter” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”). The themes were social agony and its effects on the individual (“Brown Sugar” and “Sympathy For The Devil”). And sometimes just rudely kicked in the door to tear the place down (“Start Me Up” and “Rip This Joint”).
The Rolling Stones: “Start Me Up”
One of the many controversies that Jagger and Richards cultivated over the years was the question of who or what initiated their songwriting partnership in the first place. Keith adamantly claimed that Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager at the time, locked them in the kitchen until they wrote As Tears Go By.
“People love this kind of drama because they can always identify with one of the two partners – and that always feeds their curiosity.”
Jagger, on the other hand, wants to know that Oldham only exerted verbal pressure at most. “He may have symbolically locked us in a room, but that never happened in reality.” Like Lennon & McCartney, Jagger & Richards didn’t write all the songs together. “Happy,” for example, came entirely from Keith, “Brown Sugar” from Mick. But both were on board when the Stones’ biggest hits were created.
“I think this partnership is a construct that has a fundamental advantage,” Jagger once told Rolling Stone. “People love this kind of drama because they can always identify with one of the two partners – and that always feeds their curiosity.”