After fleeing Britain to avoid the Labour government’s high taxes on big earners, the Stones recorded their next  album on the French Riviera. Tumbling Dice, released Tumbling Dice in April 1972, was the first single from what most fans regard as their masterpiece, Exile On Main Street.

 

Whereas their last hit, Brown Sugar, was sharp and brittle, this was laid-back, loose and sloppy – the sound of an all-night party fuelled by drink, drugs and girls. Which, by all accounts (including their own), is exactly what it was.

It’s all about the groove conjured up by Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor, playing bass in the absence of his repulsive bandmate (presumably hanging out at a nearby French playground).

 

Keith’s riff is taut but slack at the same time: one of those seemingly effortless affairs he used to come up with on demand. Then there’s Nicky Hopkins’s bar-room piano; and the choir – well, the three backing singers – adding that gospel flavour to the intro. And the chorus. And that chant (“You got to roll me”) over the final section, with Jagger ad-libbing into the fade.

 

It’s also got a classic Stones lyric, apparently inspired by a chat about gambling with the dice-playing housekeeper at the French villa where they recorded the album in an underground bunker once occupied by Nazis – sleeping all day, recording all night – and a typical Jagger storyline of a man struggling to remain faithful to any woman… how DOES he come up with this stuff?

 

Ironically, that ‘loose’ sound is said to have taken the band, and producer Jimmy Miller, up to 150 takes to perfect; a kind of musical vesion of Dolly Parton’s adage that “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” Surprising since they had first recorded a version of the song – then called Good Time Women – in 1970 for the Sticky Fingers album, with Ian Stewart’s piano lending it more of a bluesy boogie-woogie feel than the finished article.

 

Footnote: Linda Ronstadt recorded a cover version in which she changed the opening line “Women think I’m tasty / But they’re always trying to waste me” to “People try to rape me / Always think I’m crazy.” Which seems regrettable today.

 

Footnote 2: one of those three backing singers, Clydie King, went on to have her own hit record under the stage name ‘Brown Sugar’ – and was reportedly secretly married to Bob Dylan, giving birth to two of children by him.