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.
The song Hank DeVito, the pedal steel guitar for Emmylou Harris. He was married to Nicolette Larson around then, but I'm not sure if she inspired it.
I’ve sung the wrong lyrics many a time at karaoke night. As long as you sing them with conviction, and sing in the right key, nobody cares :)
Joe Cocker. I don’t think he ever actually wrote a song. But he took over every song he covered. Everybody needs to play to their strengths.
Except when John Roarke did Ronald Reagan in the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
That's gonna take a lot of love.
The pain line? Kinda liked it... Double negative and all...at least the infinitive isn’t split (”To nobly go...”).
Life would be ecstasy, you and me and Leslie...
I always thought it was “girl reaction”.
Her cover was pretty good.
My sister gets lyrics so wrong, she can’t even sing “Tequila” right.
“Some girls” do that to you!/sac😆😆
I never said it was. Artie Shaw didn’t like “Begin the Beguine” but he and his outfit had to perform it because it was popular. He also didn’t write “Frenesi” which is one of my favorite recordings by him. In the Big Band and post-Big Band days every band was expected to know and perform some of the hits of competing ensembles.
Blues and other folk performers, along with itinerant musicians of the Middle Ages and before, didn’t typically write their own repertoire, and it’s not unusual for the composers to be unknown.
The singer-songwriter approach isn’t exactly new — Kassia composed and performed for the Byzantine audience — but it isn’t hard, it’s just hard to compose songs someone else wants to hear and/or perform. Laura Nyro wrote a handful of the hits for Fifth Dimension, there’s even a version of her “Sweet Blindness” the FD performs with Frank.
Just from a math standpoint, it’s likely that there will always be more non-composing performers. Carlos Santana has composed his own, but his three early hits — “Black Magic Woman”, “Evil Ways”, and “Oye Como Va” — are all covers.
“One of the most cringe worthy lines in all time”
How bout
“Blinded by the light
Revved up like a deuce
Another runner in the night”
Except “deuce” wasn’t what we thought it was 🙄
“Wrapped up like a douche”
Mick Jagger sauntered drunkly up to Linda Ronstadt backstage one night and asked her why she did not sing rock and roll songs.
Linda challenged Mick to teach her one.
He taught her "Tumblin' Dice" and the rest is history.
Taylor Swift songs all sound the same with the common theme of her being too stoopid to date guys that boink her tall, 8th grade girl body and then dump her.
Her popularity is based on similar dumb bimbos who are stuck in the same Enstein-like repetition.
They get wrecked up like a douche that’s a roamer in the night?
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