When it came time to pick the lead single off their new album, 1973’s Goats Head Soup, the Rolling Stones wanted “Angie.”
Executives at Atlantic Records disagreed.
“They really wanted another ‘Brown Sugar’ rather than a ballad, and there were some heated arguments,” Marshall Chess, president of Rolling Stones Records, said in the book “According to The Rolling Stones” as quoted by antiMusic.
The band prevailed, and the tender “Angie” became their seventh U.S. No. 1 hit for the week ending Oct. 20, 1973.
“I don’t think you can write really interesting rock ‘n’ roll songs if you can’t get into ballads and slower stuff,” Keith Richards, the band’s guitarist who wrote “Angie,” told Robert Sandall in an interview for the liner notes to Jump Back: The Best of the Rolling Stones 1971-1993.
According to his memoir “Life,” Richards wrote the song while undergoing treatment for heroin addiction in a Switzerland facility. Speculation about its inspiration centered on two Angelas: David Bowie’s then-wife and Richards’ daughter.
In the Jump Back liner notes, Richards said the name Angela was starting to “ring around the house” after his daughter’s birth but added he wasn’t into writing songs about his children. However, in “Life,” Richards claimed he didn’t know the baby’s gender yet while writing the song.
‘” Angie” just fitted. I mean you couldn’t sing ‘Maureen’…” he told Sandall.
He added in “Life” as quoted by antiMusic, “…it was not about any particular person, it was a name, like, ‘Ohhh, Diana.’”
Despite the record company’s hesitation, “Angie” was a hit domestically and abroad. Goats Head Soup was the Rolling Stones’ third consecutive album to top the Billboard 200 and eventually sold three million copies in the U.S.
“it’s quite a straight, schmaltzy pop tune, with the piano and string arrangement so prominent, which is probably why it was so popular in Latin countries at the time,” Mick Jagger, the band’s lead singer, told Sandall. “It was definitely a change of pace for us, almost like a reaction to the harder sound of Exile.”
