The whims and wills of The Rolling Stones‘ recording process weren’t always the easiest to understand. In essence, almost every song started out as either a rough demo or a jam that would be fleshed out in the studio. Fok songs would be turned into frantic sambas, like in the case of ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Reggae tracks would turn into riff rockers, like what happened to ‘Start Me Up’. If the band didn’t capture the right feel, then songs would often fall by the wayside.
The sessions for the band’s 1978 album Some Girls were particularly hectic. Keith Richards was in the middle of a drug trial stemming from his bust in Toronto a year earlier. If he had been convicted, Richards was facing a very real chance of spending the rest of his life in prison. That heaviness was translated into a certain punky fury that coloured much of the material on the album, including tracks like ‘Respectable’, ‘When the Whip Comes Down’ and ‘Shattered’.
But Richards was also feeling fragile. Although their relationship had changed over the years, Mick Jagger was still one of the most consistent figures that Richards could lean on in those days. During one of the Some Girls sessions, Richards came in with an uptempo soul number that only had a chord progression and a title: ‘Beast of Burden’. However, sensing Richards’ fragile state, Jagger opted to turn the song into a supportive ballad for his co-writer and friend.
“It just cropped up in the studio,” Richards recalled in 1982. “It started kind of faster and funkier and more shouted and became – when everybody else started playing, we decided to cut it ‘relax’ and it came down to what it is in just one take. That was it.”
“Actually, if anything, I was trying to say sorry to Mick for passing on the weight of running this band,” Richards added in 2011. “We were at the stage where we were getting bigger. The whole music business was getting bigger, and I was basically trying to say to Mick: ‘You don’t have to do it on your own…’ No (he didn’t listen). He very rarely does. That’s why I love him… At the time, Mick was getting used to running the band. Charlie was just the drummer. I was just the other guitar player. I was trying to say, ‘OK, I’m back, so let’s share a bit more of this power, share the weight, brother.’”
Jagger himself disagrees with the interpretation. “No, (it’s not about Keith’s heroin situation). I think that’s just made up. I think that’s rubbish,” Jagger shared in 2011. “But you know, it’s so long ago. People, they like to make up stories and whatever, what you believe happened at the time. I could tell you, I could make up all sorts of stuff about how ‘Far Away Eyes’ was written – it wouldn’t be correct, I’m sure, but it might sound good (laughs).”
But to Richards, ‘Beast of Burden’ will always be about how he and Jagger were in it for the long haul. “When I returned to the fold after closing down the laboratory, I came back into the studio with Mick… to say, ‘Thanks, man, for shouldering the burden,’” Richards claimed in 2003. “That’s why I wrote ‘Beast of Burden’ for him, I realise in retrospect – and the weird thing was that he didn’t want to share the burden any more.”
