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Rolling Stones songs: Star Star
Honey, I’m open to anything/ I don’t know where to draw the line…so
Also known as: Starfucker Written by: Jagger/Richard Recorded: Dynamic Sounds Studios, Kingston, Jamaica, Nov. 25-Dec. 21 1972; Village Recorders, Los Angeles, USA, Jan. 13-15 1973; Island Recording Studios, London, England, June 1973 *Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012
Mick Jagger: vocals Keith Richards: lead guitar, backing vocals Mick Taylor: rhythm guitar Bill Wyman: bass Charlie Watts: drums Guest musicians: Ian Stewart (piano), Bobby Keys (tenor saxophone)
Star Star doesn’t politely close Goats Head Soup—it kicks the door in, tracks mud across the carpet, and dares you to complain. Released in 1973, the song finds the Rolling Stones leaning hard into their most infamous instincts, delivering a finale that’s loud, lewd, and unapologetically confrontational. It’s the sound of a band fully aware of its reputation and more than willing to weaponize it.
Lyrically, Mick Jagger turns the rock-star fantasy inside out. What could have been a boast becomes exaggerated satire, piling up sexual bravado, celebrity namechecks, and grotesque imagery until the myth collapses under its own excess. The result is less seduction than social commentary—with a smirk.
Musically Star Star returns to Chuck Berry–fueled basics: ripping guitars, pounding piano, and relentless drive. It’s crude by design, controversial by instinct, and a fitting snapshot of the Stones at their most provocative peak.
More about Star Star by The Rolling Stones
*By Marcelo Sonaglioni
Star Star: The Stones’ Most Outrageous Closer
By the time Goats Head Soup staggers toward its closing track, the Rolling Stones sound less interested in subtlety than in lighting a match and casually tossing it behind them. Star Star arrives as a deliberately unrefined finale, a song that feels like a raised eyebrow turned into a riff. It’s a return to primal Stones instincts: loud guitars, bad manners, and a narrator who doesn’t bother pretending he’s learned anything. Instead of romance, we get obsession; instead of longing, a grotesque inventory of sexual bragging.
Mick Jagger frames the tale like a victory lap, half-aware that the story is ridiculous and leaning into that absurdity with relish. The result isn’t a confession so much as a provocation, daring the listener to decide whether this is satire, sleaze, or both at once. Ending the album this way feels intentional—less a farewell than a taunt, as if the band is saying, “you made it this far, now deal with us at our worst.”
From satire to headline bait
The song’s narrative wastes no time establishing its central figure: a groupie whose talents are apparently so legendary they’ve become communal property. The language is exaggerated to the point of cartoon, painting sexual bravado as something grotesque rather than glamorous. What starts as a rock-star fantasy quickly curdles into parody, with Jagger knowingly inflating the myth of access and excess that followed the Stones everywhere by the early ’70s.
The tale starts with a rock singer swooning over a lover who leaves him breathless, recalling steamy moments of legs wrapped tight and foam-filled fun. But the song doesn’t linger in romance—it shifts gears fast, spotlighting a woman whose talents are so infamous that “everyone wants to get their tongues beneath her hood” and scribble her name into their little black books. The joke sharpens when Hollywood enters the picture. Namedropping Steve McQueen and John Wayne turns rumor into spectacle (yrics like “giving head to Steve McQueen” and “I bet you keep your pussy clean” left record execs panicking., transforming celebrity culture into a grotesque chain of conquest.
This wasn’t accidental outrage—it was bait. The original title, Starfucker made the intention clear enough that Atlantic Records intervened, forcing a rename that fooled exactly no one. Feminist backlash, BBC discomfort, and nervous executives followed on cue. The Stones, naturally, responded not with apologies but with inflatable props and smirks, confirming that outrage was part of the performance.
Mick Jagger (1975): “People always give me this bit about us being a macho band, and I always ask them to give me examples. Under My Thumb… Yes, but they always say Starfucker, and that just happened to be about someone I knew. There’s really no reason o have women on tour, unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to fuck. Otherwise they get bored, they just sit around and moan. It would be different if they did everything for you, like answer the phones, make the breakfast, look after your clothes and your packing, see if the car was ready, and fuck. Sort of a combination of what road manager Alan Dunn does and a beautiful chick.”
Old riffs, new nerve
Musically Star Star plants itself firmly in Chuck Berry territory, a familiar Stones refuge whenever subtlety is not on the agenda. Keith Richards launches the track with a riff that sounds like muscle memory, happily rummaging through everything Berry ever taught him. There’s joy here—almost too much of it—as if the band knows controversy will do the rest of the work. Mick Taylor shadows Richards with disciplined rhythm and slips in a solo that suggests refinement trying, and failing, to civilize the chaos.
Richards, blissfully indifferent, keeps blasting away, creating the illusion of dueling leads. Charlie Watts holds a strict, almost stubborn groove, refusing to swing when provoked, while Bill Wyman compensates by delaying his bass entrance until the second verse, effectively restarting the song midstream. Ian Stewart’s boogie-woogie piano adds raw propulsion, though Bobby Keys’ sax stabs barely surface in the mix, present more in theory than impact.
Jagger, image manager
Jagger’s real performance isn’t musical—it’s strategic. By this point in the band’s history, he fully understood the public caricature of the Rolling Stones as decadent, misogynistic, unstoppable, and possibly dangerous to polite society. Star Star doesn’t challenge that image; it weaponizes it. The lyrics exaggerate machismo until it collapses under its own weight, daring critics to miss the point. Jagger later bristled at accusations of intent, claiming he simply wrote what he saw. Whether sincere or conveniently evasive, the effect was the same: the song deepened the Stones’ sleaze mythology.
The echoes of Carly Simon’s You’re So Vain released months earlier with Jagger quietly on backing vocals, only sharpen the irony. Lines mirror lines, Hollywood looms large, and egos ricochet across pop culture. If the song feels mean-spirited, that may be the point—it’s a portrait of excess with no flattering angles.
Mick Jagger (1978): “I suppose we ask for it if we record things like that. Christ, I don’t do these things intentionally. I just wrote it… That’s real, and if girls can do that, I can certainly write about it, because it’s what I see. I’m not saying all women are star-fuckers, but I see an awful lot of them, and so I wrote a song called that. I mean, people show themselves up by their own behaviour, and just to describe it doesn’t mean you’re anti-feminist”
Aftershocks and afterlife
Radio stations struggled with Star Star, the BBC most visibly among them, though not enough to resist sneaking it into late-night coverage of the band’s 1973 tour. Critics later summed it up neatly as a document of its time, epitomizing the excess of the decade rather than transcending it. Live, the song refused to behave. Performances on Love You Live and later tours leaned into the rudeness, with lyric changes keeping the provocation current. Atlantic’s attempts to bury the worst lines in the mix only emphasized the guitars, inadvertently turning controversy into volume. In the end, Star Star never became a greatest-hits staple, but it didn’t need to. It survives as a closing statement that’s loud, crude, and self-aware—an unfiltered snapshot of the Stones daring anyone to confuse maturity with restraint.
Keith Richards (1973): “Atlantic Records tried to balls about a bit with this latest album. They’ve given us a lot of trouble over Starfucker for all the wrong reasons – I mean, they even got down to saying that Steve McQueen would pass an injunction against the song because of the line about him. So we just sent a tape of the song to him and of course he okayed it. It was just a hustle though. Obstacles put in our way“
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