Fighting with a close friend or sibling can be the most difficult kind of conflict, specifically because they know exactly what to say to get under your skin, and the same is certainly true of bandmates. When you work together in a collaborative sense for weeks, months, and years on end, you get to know your colleagues in a platonic but still very intimate way. Music, to some degree, requires vulnerability.
So, when bandmates start turning against one another, these vulnerabilities can turn into weak spots that either party tries to target. Take, for example, the nickname that Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards gave his longtime bandmate and vocalist, Mick Jagger, in the early 1980s—a particularly tempestuous era that Richards dubbed World War III. The band had been through a lot at that point: drug addictions, lineup changes, arrests, and court appearances, to name a few.
Videos by American Songwriter
Consequently, the band dynamic began to shift. Richards noticed Jagger wanting to exert more control over the band. From an outsider’s perspective, this seems like a natural response to seeing your band, which already has a decades-long career, start to falter under internal and external forces alike. But that clearly wasn’t going to sit well with Richards, who took to making fun of Jagger behind his back and, sometimes, right to his face, without Jagger knowing it.
Keith Richards Adopted a Secret Code to Talk About Mick Jagger
In his memoir Life, Keith Richards recalls coming up with a nickname to describe Mick Jagger and what Richards called his “unbearable” attitude. “We were in Paris, back at Pathé Marconi, in November or December of 1982, working on songs for Undercover,” Richards wrote. “I went to WHSmith, the English bookshop on Rue de Rivoli. I forget the title of the book. But there it was, some lurid novel by Brenda Jagger. Gotcha, mate! Now, you’re Brenda, whether you know it or like it or not. He certainly didn’t like it.”
The next detail sounds like something that anyone with social anxiety has worried about happening to them: Richards used his secret nickname for Jagger right in front of him. “We’d be talking about ‘that b**** Brenda’ with him in the room, and he wouldn’t know,” Richards recalled. The guitarist said it took Jagger “ages to find out.” And we can’t imagine the reaction was pretty.
Not to get too psychoanalytical about it, but it’s easy to see how Richards might feel betrayed by Jagger’s growing sense of ownership over the band. These men had been playing together for years, since they were young, scrappy kids. And although Richards had fallen off the cart a bit due to his worsening drug addiction, he was still an undeniably integral part of the band. Hurt people hurt people and all that.
In any case, Richards realized the error in his ways. “There’s a terrible thing that starts, and it’s very much like the way Mick and I behaved towards Brian [Jones]. Once you release that acid, it begins to corrode.” While their friendship was never quite the same after that, the rock ‘n’ roll machine has kept purring all these years later.
Photo by Michael Putland/Getty Images