The Inappropriate Meaning Behind “Brown Sugar” by The Rolling Stones.
Mick Jagger began writing the song with the working title “Black Pu–y.” In 1995, the singer told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine: “I wrote that song in Australia in the middle of a field. They were really odd circumstances. I was doing this movie, Ned Kelly, and my hand had got really damaged in this action sequence.
So stupid. I was trying to rehabilitate my hand and had this new kind of electric guitar, and I was playing in the middle of the outback and wrote this tune.” Guitarist Keith Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir, Life: “I’m the riff master. 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 mean, I did tidy it up a bit, but that was his words and music.” Continued Jagger: “It’s a good groove and all that. I mean, the groove is slightly similar to Freddy Cannon, this rather obscure ’50s rock performer ’Tallahassee Lassie’ or something.
Do you remember this? ‘She’s down in F-L-A.’ Anyway, the groove of that—boom-boom-boom-boom-boom is ‘going to a go-go’ or whatever, but that’s the groove.” The Rolling Stones recorded the song during a three-day stop in Alabama.
There we cut ‘Wild Horses,’ ‘Brown Sugar,’ and ‘You Got to Move.’ Three tracks in three days in that perfect eight-track recording studio. Muscle Shoals was a great room to work, very unpretentious.” “Brown Sugar” debuted onstage during the fateful set at Altamont, at which the Hell’s Angels were handling the security and one killed a young man.
