Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar (Backstage demo NYC Nov. 27 or 28, 1969)

Rolling Stones Brown Sugar (Backstage demo NYC Nov. 27 or 28, 1969) There is video available on this but since it's the earliest version of Brown Sugar that I know of it certainly justifies preservation as audio only. Wish I'd had it when making the Recording Brown Sugar video. Maybe I'll redo it... Quote from The Rolling Stones Chronicle. Mick Jagger: I wrote Brown Sugar 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 I had this new kind of electric guitar, and I was playing in the middle of the outback and wrote this tune. God knows what I'm on about on that song. It's such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go... I never would write that song now. I would probably censor myself. I'd think, Oh God, I can't. I've got to stop. I can't just write raw like that. Quotes from Stanley Booth's The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones (possibly the best book ever about the band, still). Edited by Flip [ Booth and Jagger, waiting for a flight a few days before the recording session, begin discussing songwriting] "Mick said that Keith had written about three hundred unrecorded songs. 'I've got a new one meself,' he said. 'No words yet but a few words in my head-called Brown Sugar-about a woman who screws one of her black servants. I started to call it Black Pussy, but I decided that was too direct, too nitty-gritty." [After the band got a good take of You Got To Move...] "Mick and Keith were sitting in the middle of the studio on folding chairs, Mick playing Brown Sugar on the guitar, teaching it to Keith as he [Jagger] wrote the lyrics, not stopping till he had its three verses finished."

Added 7 Sept 2026