The vivid, chopping guitar riff that launches the Rolling Stones’ first great single of the 1970s is the ultimate realisation of what had become the band’s signature sound, putting the eclectic pop of their early days forever behind them. This was straight-ahead, state-of-the-art rock and roll.
Mick Jagger first sketched out the song during the filming of Ned Kelly, sitting alone in the Australian outback with an electric guitar to exercise an injured hand.
“I’m the riff master,” said Keith Richards. “The only one I missed and that Mick Jagger got was Brown Sugar, and I’ll tip my hat there. There he got me. I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his, words and music.”
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By the time it came to record the track, Jagger was slurring and mumbling words as confounding as The Kingsmen’s Louie Louie, but leaving enough clues to suggest the man was singing happily about heroin, slavery and cunnilingus. Indeed, the song’s working title was the much less ambiguous Black Pussy.
“God knows what I’m on about on that song,” Jagger told Rolling Stone in 1995. “It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.”
It’s unclear precisely who inspired Brown Sugar. The singer Marsha Hunt, mother of Jagger’s first child, says the song was partly about her, while Claudia Leneear, who sang the iconic female vocal part on the Stones’ towering Gimme Shelter, begs to differ.
“I think it was about me because at the time we were sort of an item, so people often wrote about the fact that it was,” Leneear said in 2014. “I think Mick must have told someone.”
The band laid down the track during a three-day session at Muscle Shoals Sound in Alabama in early December 1969, before debuting the song two days later at their infamous Altamont Speedway show in California.
“I watched Mick write the lyrics,” remembered Jim Dickinson, the session man who played piano on the track. “It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing!
“The way they did those songs, Jagger stayed on the floor with a hand-held microphone, walking around between musicians until he had all the lyrics nailed, and then he went in the control room with the engineer as the band played the rhythm track, at which point Keith took over the floor.”
At one point, Dickinson recalled a problem within the rhythm section. Charlie Watts’ tom-tom was clashing harmonically with the bass, so it was suggested that he retune the drum.
“No,” the sticksman replied casually, “I don’t ever tune my drums.”
For a moment, no one seemed concerned by this declaration, until the Stones’ utility man Ian Stewart said, “Wait a minute; you can’t just say blatantly, ‘I don’t tune my drums.’ That’s a terrible thing to say.” Watts remained unconvinced: “Why should I tune something I’m going to go out there and beat on? I’ll just go out there and hit it, and it’ll change.”
The Stones would later re-record Brown Sugar during a joint birthday party for both Richards and keyboard player Keys, and were joined by Eric Clapton and Al Kooper at Olympic Studios. The song was worked over for another half-hour, but not even that kind of firepower could capture the special ambience of the band’s three days at Muscle Shoals, and the recording didn’t surface until it appeared on expanded editions of the reissued Sticky Fingers album in 2015.
“Everything they did was at the peak of their competence,” said Dickinson. “They reached the point where they did as well as they could do it, and that was their take. It was never discussed: ‘Should we do this again? Is this a good take? Is this too slow? Is this too fast?’ When Charlie Watts got up from the drums it was a master take, and that was it. Nobody talked about it.”
Finally released as a single in April 1971, Brown Sugar topped the charts in the US and Canada, and fell just one place short of the summit in the US.
“It’s the song that’s got this absolutely amazing riff at the start that just goes nowhere, and it’s like, why did he do that?” Ian Hunter told Classic Rock. “It must have come to him in a dream or something, because you just don’t do that. Brilliant. And I just love Jagger’s voice, I love the way he sings, the way he is… Such a brilliant frontman.”
“That was the best Stones single of all time,” Alice Cooper told us. “As much as I liked The Last Time and 19th Nervous Breakdown and all their early stuff, Brown Sugar was the cream of the crop. When we’re playing a [Hollywood] Vampires show and somebody yells out for Brown Sugar, we go, ‘Oh yeah’.
“I mean, you can’t get away from that riff, it’s too good. In all honesty, I have no idea what he’s talking about. I’ve sung the song so many times, and I keep thinking, ‘What am I talking about here? Are we talking about slavery?’ But whatever it is, it works.”
Controversy regarding the lyrical content prompted the Stones to drop their fourth-most-played song from their live set on 2021’s No Filter tour, and it hasn’t returned. Patrick Burke, the author of the 2010 book Rock, Race and Radicalism in the 1960s, calls Brown Sugar a “lascivious celebration of sexual clichés associated with slavery,” while Boston Phoenix media columnist Dan Kennedy describes it as “as racist a hit song as there ever has been.”
“I don’t know,” Mick Jagger told the Independent, apparently baffled by the furore. “I’m trying to figure out with the sisters quite where the beef is. Didn’t they understand this was a song about the horrors of slavery? But they’re trying to bury it. At the moment, I don’t want to get into conflicts with all of this shit.”