(Credits: Far Out / Linda Ronstadt)
Sat 29 November 2025 18:11, UK
As far as Linda Ronstadt is concerned, Mick Jagger is the ultimate frontman.
She’s seen plenty of people try to be him over the years, and she’s seen plenty of people fail. As she puts it herself, “It seemed to me, when I saw the Ramones, for instance, that they had taken one facet of what Mick Jagger does, which is a kind of stance, maybe one move and maybe one little chip off of an emotional statement, and it was sort of limited to that,” she said.
Heaping praise on her old ‘Gimme Shelter’ singing pal, she added, “Mick Jagger has such a tremendous overview that is so many-faceted that it makes it sound so much more. But if you just take a chunk of it, it doesn’t glimmer as much.”
But it’s not just that compliment that pouting, punching, punky Mick has to thank Linda for. The pair go way back, and she even proved pivotal when it comes to one Stones track.
‘Tumbling Dice’ isn’t the first choice for the most pro-woman song in The Rolling Stones‘ catalogue. It’s certainly not the worst – perhaps ‘Under My Thumb’ or ‘Stupid Girl’ would take that crown. But the classic Exile on Main St cut largely revolves around Mick Jagger and some of his more salacious thoughts.
While he does offer a position to his lover as his “partner in crime”, Jagger usually kicks off the song by claiming, “Women think I’m tasty (“crazy” in live versions) / And they’re always tryin’ to waste me”, establishing the divide between the sexes.
Strangely enough, Jagger got some lyrical help from a notable woman in his life – his housekeeper. “It started out with a great riff from Keith, and we had it down as a completed song called ‘Good Time Women’,” Jagger told The Sun in 2010. “That take is one of the bonus tracks on the new Exile package; it was quite fast and sounded great, but I wasn’t happy with the lyrics.”
“Later, I got the title in my head, ‘call me the tumbling dice’, so I had the theme for it,” he added. “I didn’t know anything about dice playing, but I knew lots of jargon used by dice players. I’d heard gamblers in casinos shouting it out. I asked my housekeeper if she played dice. She did, and she told me these terms. That was the inspiration.”
“Obviously, it was going to be great, but it was a big struggle,” engineer Andy Johns recalled to Goldmine about the song’s recording in 2010. “Eventually, we get a take. Hooray! I thought, ‘Let’s kick this up a notch and double-track Charlie.’ ‘Oh, we’ve never done that before.’ ‘Well, it doesn’t mean we can’t do it now.’ So we double-tracked Charlie, but he couldn’t play the ending.”
The beat just kept defeating him. “For some reason, he got a mental block about the ending. So Jimmy Miller plays from the breakdown on out that was very easy to punch in,” Johns added. “It was a little bit different than some of the others. That song, we did more takes than anything else.”
Despite being on the more chauvinistic side of the rock and roll divide, ‘Tumbling Dice’ eventually became one of the most famous Stones songs covered by Ronstadt, who cut her own version in 1978. Ronstadt doesn’t beat around the bush either, kicking off the song with a provocative line of her own: “People try to rape me / Always think I’m crazy”.
“The band used to play it at sound check, and we all loved it. But no one knew the words,” Ronstadt told the Green Bay Press-Gazette in 1977. “Then, when Mick walked backstage at my Amphitheatre show, he told me, ‘You do too many ballads in your show, you should do more rock and roll.’”
“I told him I thought he should do more ballads, and we teased each other about it,” Ronstadt added. “But I made him write down the words to that song for me so we could do it.” From that moment, her back catalogue was once again extended, heading into yet another new direction. She felt liberated by performing it publicly, encouraged by Jagger, and decided that any genre was open to her.
Check out Ronstadt’s version of ‘Tumbling Dice’ down below.
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