Posted on 07/11/2023 2:16:03 PM PDT by nickcarraway
‘Tumbling Dice’ isn’t the first choice for the most pro-woman song in The Rolling Stones’ catalogue. It’s certainly not the worst – perhaps ‘Under My Thumb’ or ‘Stupid Girl’ would take that crown. But the classic Exile on Main St cut largely revolves around Mick Jagger and some of his more salacious thoughts. While he does offer a position to his lover as his “partner in crime”, Jagger usually kicks off the song by claiming, “Women think I’m tasty (“crazy” in live versions) / And they’re always tryin’ to waste me”, establishing the divide between the sexes.
Strangely enough, Jagger got some lyrical help from a notable woman in his life – his housekeeper. “It started out with a great riff from Keith, and we had it down as a completed song called ‘Good Time Women’,” Jagger told The Sun in 2010. “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,” he added. “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.”
“Obviously, it was going to be great, but it was a big struggle,” engineer Andy Johns recalled to Goldmine about the song’s recording in 2010. “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,” Johns added. “It was a little bit different than some of the others. That song, we did more takes than anything else.”
Despite being on the more chauvinistic side of the rock and roll divide, ‘Tumbling Dice’ eventually became one of the most famous Stones songs covered by a prominent female singer when Linda Ronstadt cut her own version in 1978. Ronstadt doesn’t beat around the bush either, kicking off the song with a provocative line of her own: “People try to rape me / Always think I’m crazy”.
“The band used to play it at sound check, and we all loved it. But no one knew the words,” Ronstadt told the Green Bay Press-Gazette in 1977. “Then, when Mick walked backstage at my Amphitheatre show, he told me, ‘You do too many ballads in your show, you should do more rock and roll.'”
“I told him I thought he should do more ballads, and we teased each other about it,” Ronstadt added. “But I made him write down the words to that song for me so we could do it.”
Check out Ronstadt’s version of ‘Tumbling Dice’ down below.
Is it possible for writers today not to virtue signal and view all recorded history prior to last two seconds as morally pejorative?
No is thy answer
It’s not
That’s one of the problems cover bands have.
You mean knowing the exact words?
Well, if they acknowledge that past songs and movies don’t have to be correct, they might realize their standards are stupid and don’t work. And we can’t have that.
No, as in, cover bands never write anything.
Now there’s a woman who could pull it off, even though she can’t sing. :^)
[wiki-wacky: “written and composed by Donna Weiss and Jackie DeShannon in 1974.”]
Not among my favorites of theirs.
One of the most cringe worthy lines in all of music. Right up there with, "Cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain."
Taylor Swift would whine about the ‘misogyny’ of such a song and refuse to cover it. Music and musicians suck these days.
Fridays! That was a great, underrated show.
I don’t think she covers songs, because she makes a lot of money from royalties.
The only covers she does is her own. All her Big Machine catalogue is being redone as “Taylor Versions” . She gets all the royalties.
He’s can’t just shut-up and write an article. Moralization where intros once were.
Yeah, there were no lyric sheets in “Exile”, and that would have been a difficult track to guess all the lyrics on.
Fun fact: Otis Redding and the Stax band did a lot of covers, but they didn’t have lyric sheets for most of the songs. They would just go downstairs to the record store and stand around a record player listening to the original and trying to write down the lyrics as best they could. This led to some pretty funny misheard lyrics in their covers, including their version of “Satisfaction”, where “I can’t get no girly action” becomes “I can’t get no good reaction”, etc.
Some folks try to judge the past by the standards of the present.
I prefer to judge the present by the standards of the past. The present often fares badly by comparison.
My sister was the lead singer in a local Country Music band in Connecticut years ago. She would buy the 45. Mishear the Juice Newton lyrics (Queen of Hearts), sing the wrong lyrics, and no one cared.
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