Some times the beauty of rock and roll can befound in the dirt under its fingernails, but The Rolling Stones don’t often take on reality.
The songs ‘Street Fighting Man’, ‘Hang Fire’, and ‘Undercover of the Night’ are rare political turns from the band, but those tracks cover events rather than specific people. They are moments so big that it would feel irrational to ignore them.
The group have caricatured themselves on occasion, most notably on ‘Jigsaw Puzzle’ and ‘Torn and Frayed’., and in doing so cemented their positions as simple, hedonistic creatures that live for love and life itself. However, when it comes to their lyrical inspirations, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards aren’t ones to kiss and tell very often.
That doesn’t mean that there hasn’t been a fair amount of speculation, though. ‘Brown Sugar’ is often associated with Jagger’s former flame Marsha Hunt, ‘Sweet Black Angel’ was confirmed to be directly inspired by Angela Davis, and ‘Angie’ has been tied to David Bowie’s former wife, Angela. Surely Marianne Faithful and Anita Pallenberg have inspired their fair share of Stones songs, among other partners, but the truth is that Jagger and Richards often made amalgams when writing the lyrics to some of their most famous songs.
As it turns out, ‘Beast of Burden’ might have been an exception. As Richards revealed in an interview with Harper’s Bazaar back in 2017, the band looked to expand their scope beyond their immediate partners. “We were trying to write for a slightly broader audience than just Anita Pallenberg or Marianne Faithfull,” Richards said. “Although that’s not to say they didn’t have some influence in there somewhere. I mean, what’s close by is close by!”
Ultimately, Richards laughed off attempts to pin it on a specific person. “Some of the theories surrounding it are very intriguing, but they’re about as divorced from reality as can be,” he said.
Adding: “I find it quite amusing that there are people in the world who spend a lot of their time trying to decode something that is, at the end of the day, completely undecodable. I mean, even I’ve forgotten the code!”
Most people believe the song not to be about the two men’s lovers, but Richards writing about Jagger, and in 2012 in Mojo, the guitarist addressed the notion: “Mick wrote a lot of it but I laid the general idea on 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 the power, share the weight, brother.”
Now, we won’t cast aspersions as to whether Richards truly has forgotten the code or is just enjoying a chance at playing around in an interview, but considering the volume of libations he has imbibed over the years, one wouldn’t hold it aginast him if he had. He was a guitarist who, after all, had written the riff for ‘Satisfaction’ in the middle of his sleep, hitting record on his own snoring after completing the guitar lick.