In 1981, the Rolling Stones released Tattoo You, an album that featured a mix of previously unreleased material from the 1970s. The album kicked off on a high note with the high-energy Billboard hit “Start Me Up,” but closed on a very different note with “Waiting on a Friend,” a tender track about friendship that had been sitting unfinished for nearly a decade.
Written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, “Waiting on a Friend” features a mellow acoustic melody and gentle vocals from Jagger. A soulful saxophone solo from jazz great Sonny Rollins highlights the song.
Jagger once told Rolling Stone that he found “Waiting on a Friend,” which was originally worked on during the sessions for Goats Head Soup in the early ‘70s, while digging through old song bits for Tattoo You.
“Yeah, that’s an old record,” the rock legend shared in a 1995 interview. “It’s all a lot of old tracks that I dug out. And it was very strange circumstances. [Producer] Chris Kimsey and I went through all the tracks from those two previous records. It wasn’t all outtakes; some of it was old songs. And then I went back and found previous ones like ‘Waiting on a Friend’ from Goats Head Soup. …Then I had to write lyrics and melodies.”
While the lyrics speak of “waiting” on a friend, Jagger clarified that unlike most Stones songs, it wasn’t necessarily a woman he was singing about.
“Just let me be cynical for a moment,” he told Musician magazine in 1983. “First of all, it’s really not about waiting on a woman friend. It’s just about a friend; it doesn’t matter if it’s a man or a woman. I can see people saying, ‘Oh, we’re all much older now, Mick’s writing this much more compassionate stuff, must be about a real person.’ But that’s only in their perception of it.”
In fact, the accompanying music video, the Stones’ first for MTV, featured the Rolling Stones bandmates meeting up at a bar in New York’s East Village.
Jagger also addressed the songwriting process and video in the 1993 liner notes for Jump Back: The Best of the Rolling Stones.
“This one dates from the Goats Head Soup sessions. We all liked it at the time, but we didn’t have any lyrics, so there we were,” the Rolling Stones frontman recalled. “As well as the vocal, we stuck on that amazing sax solo at the end by Sonny Rollins. The lyric I added is very gentle and loving, about friendships in the band. At least I think that’s what it was about. The influence of the video comes in here because when we scripted it, we had me and Keith sitting round waiting for each other. But I can’t actually remember now if that was the original idea of the song.”
Forty-five years after its release, “Waiting on a Friend” remains one of the Rolling Stones’ most intriguing songs, and a reminder that the band had a soft side that could be just as powerful as their hard rocking edge.
Related: 1965 No. 1 Classic Rock Hit Ranked Among the ‘Greatest Songs of All Time’ Was Written in Ten Minutes
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