The latter half of the 1970s was not a fun time for Keith Richards. The Rolling Stones founder and guitarist had let his heroin habit get the better of him, and when he was caught with the illegal substance at a hotel room in Toronto, he was nailed with a possible trafficking charge that could have put him in jail permanently. After finally deciding to clean up, Richards was given a suspended sentence, but the travelling circus that had become his life was threatening to run him into the ground.
Instead of shying away from the publicity and his public image, Richards decided to lean into it with the Some Girls track ‘Before They Make Me Run’. A more-or-less true-to-life tale about booze, pills, and powders, ‘Before They Make Me Run’ was the ultimate summation of Richards’ wild life up to that point. Appropriately, Richards didn’t need to dig too deep in order to find inspiration for the track.
“It came fairly easily. Once I got through the work in the bars and the stuff, it probably took me a week,” Richards remembered in 2011. “I would sort of do a verse a day, slowly add to it. But I wasn’t conscious of it being particularly autobiographical. I just thought it was an interesting story. But sometimes what’s close to you, you don’t see. It’s pretty autobiographical… I was feeling a little hounded, so I think it came out of feeling that. I was on the run, basically. Very few countries would accept me at the time.”
Richards had already been kicked out of England, France, and Switzerland, mostly for drug charges and occasionally for tax reasons. The United States only accepted him on the condition that he attended a rehab facility. As his relationship with his longtime girlfriend Anita Pallenberg was falling apart, Richards found himself in constant motion.
“You never know where songs come from,” Richards added. “I probably only realized it much later, but obviously I was under several indictments at the time, and the impetus came from there. I was living all over the place at the time, man. I was moving from space to space. I was sort of on the run. That was the whole thing. But when I was writing it, I was just writing another song. You know, it’s a got a good feel, it’s got a good title. It was only later on I realized I was actually writing about myself. That happens quite often.”
When it came to recording the track for Some Girls, Richards pushed the studio personnel to the edge. Determined to get the song right, Richards holed himself in the control room mixing, overdubbing, and editing the track. By his side were a pair of rotating engineers who had to tap each other out when one collapsed from exhaustion.
“For sheer longevity – for long distance – there is no track that I know of like ‘Before They Make Me Run,’” Richards wrote in his autobiography Life. “That song, which I sang on that record, was a cry from the heart. But it burned up the personnel like no other. I was in the studio, without leaving, for five days… I had an engineer called Dave Jordan and I had another engineer, and one of them would flop under the desk and have a few hours’ kip and I’d put the other one in and keep going. We all had black eyes by the time it was finished… That’s probably the longest I’ve done. There have been others that were close – ‘Can’t Be Seen’ was one – but ‘Before They Make Me Run’ was the marathon.”
Even after the time-consuming sessions, Richards still has a lot of fondness for ‘Before They Make Me Run’. Often in rotation with ‘Happy’ and ‘You Got The Silver’ as Richards’ go-to lead vocal during Rolling Stones concerts, ‘Before They Make Me Run’ has a secured place as a pure Stones classic.
“It holds a special place in my heart,” Richards explained in 2018. “There’s several reasons, one of them quite mechanical: it’s so easy and such a groove to play onstage that you always want to play it. You can feel the band loving it. At the same time, it’s one of my best songs. I really enjoy singing it, and it still seems fresh to me when I do it.”
Check out ‘Before They Make Me Run’ down below.
