As far as we can tell, the closest that Mick Jagger ever came to writing about his songwriting/sparring partner Keith Richards came in the song “Live with Me” in 1969: My best friend, he shoots water rats / And feeds them to his geese. Richards, on the other hand, came at his Rolling Stones’ bandmate pretty hard on his 1988 solo song “You Don’t Move Me.”
In the song, Richards was somehow circumspect about the target of the lyrics while also scoring a direct hit. Here are the circumstances behind the intra-band feud that led to one of rock’s most notorious put-down songs.
Stumbling Stones
Maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards feud from time to time. If you were in close quarters with someone for the better part of six decades, you’d probably work up a bit of a lather about them occasionally. Considering how different Jagger and Richards’ personalities seem to be, the two should be commended that they’ve held it together so long, instead of being castigated for the random blowup.
The biggest of those blowups, arguably, occurred in the middle of the ’80s. It was a rough first part of the decade for the Stones, with Jagger and Richards constantly at loggerheads about their artistic priorities. Jagger believed the band should play the ’80s pop game, while Richards stayed steadfast in his belief in a traditional rock approach.
Things came to a head with the 1986 Stones’ album Dirty Work. Jagger pretty much left Richards in charge of the proceedings. That was odd, considering Richards had struggled to get back into a position of power in the band after personal troubles in the late ’70s allowed Jagger to determine the course of action. Jagger then refused to tour the album and he mostly stayed away from promoting it, instead focusing on his solo career.
Cheap Thrills
Richards had resisted releasing a solo album out of loyalty to the Stones. But he finally relented in the wake of Jagger’s distancing himself from the band. Talk Is Cheap arrived in 1987, and it allowed Richards the opportunity to play the traditional rock he desired. Critics were much kinder to it than Jagger’s pair of ’80s solo records.
When people heard “You Don’t Move Me,” they immediately connected it to Jagger. Couplets like Why do you think you got no friends / You drove them around the bend, or What makes you greedy / Makes you so seedy, couldn’t be interpreted in any other way than shots across the bow of the S.S. Mick.
Richards had worked out the sinewy music to “You Don’t Move Me” first, but he couldn’t seem to get a hold of the lyrics. That’s when Steve Jordan, his musical collaborator on Talk Is Cheap, suggested he write about Jagger. The song is comparable to “How Do You Sleep?” John Lennon’s diatribe against Paul McCartney. But whereas that song mostly focused on slighting McCartney’s music, “You Don’t Move Me” is much more personal in its insults.
“Move”-ing On
Richards has always played somewhat coy in definitively saying “You Don’t Move Me” was about Jagger. He has even implied he used the Jagger imbroglio as a distraction, and the song was actually aimed at an unnamed woman. In other interviews, he’s owned up to it to a degree, while always maintaining he didn’t initially intend the song as one big potshot. But that’s certainly how it turned out.
In any case, the icy relations between the two (they allegedly went a few years without speaking around that time) started to thaw not long after the song was released. The Rolling Stones reunited for Steel Wheels in 1989, with the lead single “Mixed Emotions” acting as a kind of burying of the hatchet in song.
Nonetheless, “You Don’t Move” remains a searing audio relic of a time when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards couldn’t even be in the same room together. If we view them in the parlance of romance, they were on a break. And Richards’ ruthless song certainly helped do the severing.
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