Before They Make Me Run #37

2 years ago
7

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Please click the link below to read the complete backstory and watch the video for this song.

https://www.songfacts.com/facts/the-rolling-stones/before-they-make-me-run
I would like to thank Songfacts and Creative Commons for being my main source of information and urge you click these linksSongfacts is a website that provides information on songs, albums, and artists. They have a wide range of topics such as the Rolling Stones and their albums. The Rolling Stones is one of the most popular bands in history and Songfacts has information about all of their songs click They also provide a video of the song and a complete summery of story behind the song.Creative Commons is an American non-profit organization that provides free licenses for copyright protections. They are responsible for the Creative Commons license which allows people to use copyrighted material without asking permission from the original author.
This is about the rock and roll lifestyle that got Keith Richards in trouble. The song was recorded while he was out on bail after getting caught with heroin and arrested for drug trafficking in Toronto in 1977. He was found guilty of the lesser charge of heroin possession, and sentenced to probation.
Richards sang lead and did the majority of the work on this song. With Keith's drug charges pending, Mick Jagger took a lot of control on the album, but this song was pretty much all Keith.
The original title was "Rotten Roll."
Richard's vocals were double-tracked to make them stand out.
This lyric in the first section is about Keith Richards' good friend Gram Parsons:

Booze and pills and powders, you can choose your medicine
Well it's another goodbye to another good friend

A member of The Byrds, Parsons died in 1973 at age 26 after taking an overdose of alcohol and morphine. His corpse was stolen and burned in the Mojave Desert.
An engineer named Dave Jordan helped mix this song. He went on to work with groups like The Specials and The Pogues.
This was one of the songs that took Keith Richards the longest time to work in the studio. He explained in his book Life (2010): "For sheer longevity - for long distance - there is no track that I know of like 'Before They Make Me Run.' That song, which I sang on that record, was a cry from the heart. But it burned up the personnel like no other. I was in the studio, without leaving, for five days... I had an engineer called Dave Jordan and I had another engineer, and one of them would flop under the desk and have a few hours' kip and I'd put the other one in and keep going. We all had black eyes by the time it was finished... That's probably the longest I've done. There have been others that were close - 'Can't Be Seen' was one - but 'Before They Make Me Run' was the marathon."

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