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.
“Tumbling Dice “ is a great song.
The writer of this screed is obviously a WOKE nerd.
“Tumbling Dice “ is a great song.
The writer of this screed is obviously a WOKE nerd.
Reminds me of "Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man that he didn't didn't already have."
Technically a double negative is bad grammar.
In real life, it tends to get its point across with no difficulty or confusion whatsoever. In lyrics and dramatic dialogue, same deal. Nobody misses what is being said or what is meant.
Yeah, that the version that we thought we heard.
And wondered, what the h*ll does that mean?
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