You Got Me Rocking

Composers: Mick Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date: November 1993-April 1994
Recording locations: Windmill Lane Recording, Dublin, Ireland & A&M Recording Studios, Los Angeles, USA

Producers: Don Was & The Glimmer Twins        Chief engineer: Don Smith
Performed onstage: 1994-95, 1997-99, 2002-03, 2005-07, 2012-17, 2019, 2021-22, 2024

Line-up:

Drums: Charlie Watts
Bass: Darryl Jones
Dobro guitar: Keith Richards
Electric guitars: Keith Richards (incl. solo)
Slide electric guitar: Ron Wood
Lead vocals: Mick Jagger
Background vocals: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bernard Fowler & Ivan Neville
Piano: Chuck Leavell
Maracas: Mick Jagger
Handclaps: ---

 

I was a butcher cutting up meat
My hands were bloody, I'm dying on my feet
I was a surgeon till I started to shake
I was falling but you put on the break

Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now


I was a pitcher down in a slump
I was a fighter taken for a sucker punch
I'm feeling bad, guess I lost my spring
I was the boxer who can't get in the ring


Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
There ain't no stopping me

Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
( You've got me rocking) All right

Oh yeah

Oh
Mmm

I was a hooker losing her looks
I was a writer, can't write another book
I was all dried up, dying to get wet
I was a tycoon drowning in debt

I said
hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey, hey
You've got me rocking now

Hey, hey
There ain't no stopping me

Hey, hey, hey
(You've got me rocking now)

I said hey, hey, hey - yeah
I said hey, hey, hey
(You've got me rocking now)

Hey, hey, hey - ahh...
Hey, hey
You've got me rocking now


That's all right - oh
Come on, baby, right here
Come on, come on...

Yeah...
Hey... hey, hey, hey, hey

Don't you stop me, d
on't you stop me
Don't, don't you stop me

Oh you got me

Oh - yeah...

Whoo!

 

 

TrackTalk

Hybrids, ones (that Mick and I wrote) together (include): Love Is Strong, Got Me Rocking, and Sparks Will Fly.

- Keith Richards, June 1994


(The songs) come in different ways, SO many different ways. For instance, You Got Me Rocking. It started off as Keith playing the piano as sort of a slow, boogie-woogie blues. And the form was, like, just the same thing going round and round and round. You never knew whether you were singing the verse or the chorus. And it was very fluid, good fun and all that. But then, when we went to play it with the band, it was like, Well, am I singing the verse here or what? What's going on? Is this a chorus? Do we need another part? So we had to decide if we needed a bridge there, and if this was going to work. I want to know when I'm finished singing the verse! I've got to know! Otherwise, it all sounded the same. Ah, it doesn't matter, Keith would say. Well, it matters to ME! And, of course, he's right. And I'm right. We're BOTH right. So we transpose it from piano to guitar - I was playing the guitar, Keith is playing piano and singing. And then I started playing slide guitar, and it started to sound like Elmore James. And then back to something else. Finally I said, Keith, you've got to come off the piano and play guitar. I can't hear what's going on, there's too much racket! Then the song had to take on the band thing, with everybody playing, so you start to codify it a bit, where the chorus is and so on. And it STILL doesn't have a lyric, and I'm STILL messing with the melody. Keith had a couple of them he was using when he played. If it's going to be a rock song, it has to have a definite chorus and melody. So, I picked one. Maybe that's not how Keith remembers it, but that's how I remember it.

- Mick Jagger, May 1994


Keith is also great at phrases. You got me rocking now - that was his phrase, and Mick finished it.

- Chuck Leavell, June 1994


(The monster drum sound) is the stairwell. It's on four or five songs on the album - You Got Me Rocking... It (was) a 4-flight stairwell, and I started off at the top, which is Moon Is Up, and I ended up at the bottom playing You Got Me Rocking and Thru and Thru... The studio's at the top. It's like going down, then? So it's open all the way down. So we started off out by the door there, and then Don Smith said, Would you go to the bottom and try it? It was a bit small down there, but it was all right. The problem is you can't hear anything down there except drums. Such tremendous sound.

- Charlie Watts, June 1994


The mystery guitar will no longer be a mystery if I tell you. (Laughs) What the hell... It's a solidbody dobro, but I play it with a stick - just a little stick I picked out of Ronnie's garden. It's just an interesting percussion effect.

- Keith Richards, June 1994


There could be (a ZZ Top-quality to it). I haven't heard ZZ Top for a long time. Apart from the fact that we both play rock & roll, the comparison wouldn't occur to me, but you never know. We all cross over. I know that to me the rhythm has a bit of Motown, like Going to a Go-Go, a little funky. I was looking for a swampy rhythm, something punchy. Wrote the thing on piano and then transferred it over the guitar.

- Keith Richards, June 1994


One (reviewer) talked about his unbidden irony in the line I was a hooker losing my looks. I wrote that completely as a joke on myself.

- Mick Jagger, July 1994


The sense of this is like, You've got me buzzin' again, or whatever word you want to use. It's about someone who was becoming a disastrous failure, until they woke up. You know, the butcher that cuts himself, the surgeon who shakes, the pitcher that's in a slump, the tycoon who loses all his money.

- Mick Jagger, 1994



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