Rolling Stones songs: Had It with You
*Click for MORE ROLLING STONES SONGS 1962-PRESENT

You always seem to haunt me/ Always try to haunt me…

Written by: Jagger/Richards/Wood
Recorded: Pathé Marconi Studios, Paris, France, Apr. 8-June 17 1985; RPM Studios, NYC, USA, July 16-Aug. 17 & Sept. 10-Oct. 15 1985; Right Track Studios, NYC, USA, Nov. 5-Dec. 15 1985
*Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012

From Songfacts:
Stones guitarist Keith Richards wrote this fed-up declaration of a love gone sour about his contentious relationship with frontman Mick Jagger. “I wrote ‘Had It with You’ in Ronnie [Wood]’s front room in Chiswick, right on the banks of the Thames,” Richards recalled in his 2010 autobiography, Life. “We were waiting to go to Paris, but the weather was so dodgy that we were stranded until the Dover ferry started rolling again. Peter Cook and (my father) were hanging about. There was no heating, and the only way to keep warm was to turn on the amps. I don’t think I’d ever written a song before, apart maybe from ‘All About You,’ in which I realized I was actually singing about Mick.”

This features no extra musicians. Says Richards: “Yeah, the basic track was cut with Charlie on drums, me on guitar and Mick on vocal and harp. We tried it with the full band and we realized we were just sounding like the Rolling Stones doing the Rolling Stones’ favorite sort of ‘Ye Olde Famous Rolling Stones Sound.’ But then, when we took the bass and the piano and the extra guitars off, it just sat right on the button. It came off sounding like a live radio broadcast that way…

…And at a slightly later date Ronnie and I did one overdub at the same time. But, I mean, there’s nothing in the RULE BOOK that says you’ve GOT to have a bass on there. And then there’s that middle breakdown part that almost trips over itself (laughs). Cutting a good blues track is not easy: it’s all been done a million times, and to add something new to it is not so much a matter of THOUGHT as FEEL.”

Ron Wood didn’t play on the track, but the guitarist recalled the recording session: “‘Had It with You’ was… just a couple of takes. I went in the control room and said, ‘I’m not playing on this one, you lot get in there’ – the original band – and it was great. Mick did that live harp, and I just put a little sax in the background, like a rhythm sax.”

Guitar technician Alan Rogan: “That thicker, overdriven (guitar) sound on ‘Had It with You’ comes from changing the settings on the Fender Twin, that’s all.”

From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book:
In Life, Keith Richards reveals how the words to this song came to him: “I
wrote ‘Had It with You’ in Ronnie’s front room in Chiswick, right on the
banks of the Thames. We were waiting to go back to Paris, but the weather
was so dodgy that we were stranded until the Dover ferry started rolling
again.”
It is such a sad thing to watch a good love die. These words are
addressed not to some woman who has walked out, but to Mick Jagger,
whose desire for independence from the Stones—made manifest by his
recording of She’s the Boss—was experienced by Keith as a provocation, or,
worse, as a betrayal. Did Mick Jagger take the song this way? After all, he
is the one who sings it, and persuasively, too…