100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #18 The Rolling Stones – Wild Horses

Released: 1971

Ask twenty eyewitnesses to an event how they saw it as individuals and you’ll probably get twenty subtly – and also vastly – different answers: Opinions vary. In the case of Wild Horses, Rolling Stone’s Bud Scopa was unequivocal about his perceived version of the truth: “Mick Jagger wrote ‘Wild Horses’ for and about the late Gram Parsons and its chorus describes the paradox that fueled Parsons’ life and vision.”

Whilst the doomed singer’s influence is obvious in the song with it’s rust belt country lilt and sundown sadness, Jagger’s memory is more of the relationship being less reciprocal: “I knew Gram quite well, and he was one of the few people who really helped me to sing country music — before that, Keith and I used to just copy it off records.”

What is true is that on downtime from the making Gimme Shelter the band ended up at the legendary Muscle Shoals studio in December 1969 and in three days laid down versions of Wild Horses, Brown Sugar and You Gotta Move. Reflecting on what would become one of their most enduring songs Jagger then told the same Rolling Stone twenty years after Scopa’s revelations that “It’s an example of a pop song taking this cliché ‘wild horses,’ which is awful, really, but making it work without sounding like a cliché when you’re doing it.” For a dead singer from a long time ago, it was all the same.