Rolling Stones songs: The Worst
*Click for MORE ROLLING STONES SONGS 1962-PRESENT

You shouldn’t stick with me/ You trust me too much, you see…

Written by: Jagger/Richards
Recorded: Ronnie Wood’s Sandymount Studios, Kildare, Ireland, July 9-Aug. 6 and Sept. 1993; Windmill Lane Studios, Dublin, Ireland, Nov. 3-Dec. 10 1993; Don Was’ Studio and A&M Studios, Los Angeles, USA, Jan. 15-Apr. 1994
Guest musicians: Darryl Jones (bass), Chuck Leavell (piano), Frankie Gavin (fiddle)
*Data taken from Martin Elliott’s book THE ROLLING STONES COMPLETE RECORDING SESSIONS 1962-2012

From Songfacts:
This is one of two tracks sung by Keith Richards on Voodoo Lounge. The other one is “Thru and Thru.” Said Keith Richards, June 1994: “(The songs I sing on this album)… they’re more or less sort of just a feeling, really. They’re little bits of your life that just come back to you, and suddenly you say, Oh, that little situation. Yeah. Now I can finally finish it off, tail it off, because now I can write a song about it. But you don’t think about it. It’s something that maybe happened maybe 20 years ago, 10 years ago, whatever, just a little incident here or there, or somebody told you something. It’s just in a way trying to transmit a certain feeling.”

The album was recorded in Dublin, Ireland. Said Richards, 1994: “It’s funny, but a lot of these songs were written in kitchens. That one I wrote in the kitchen in Barbados, and I thought, That’s a pretty melody, but what to do with it, I really didn’t know. I guess that’s where Ireland comes in, because Ireland has its own traditional music, and it’s not country music as such, but it’s the roots of it, you know? It’s that Irish feel.”

This features Chuck Leavell on piano and Frankie Gavin on violin. Fiddle player and flute player Frankie Gavin is a member of the well-known traditional Irish folk music group De Danaan. While recording in Dublin in 1993 for Voodoo Lounge, The Stones got him to contribute on “The Worst and New Faces.” Gavin also later worked on Keith’s Wingless Angels project. In November 2002, Gavin guested onstage with The Stones at their Oakland concert, performing on “Sweet Virginia.”

From the The Rolling Stones – All the Songs book:
In the second half of the sixties, the Stones started to make repeated
incursions into the world of country and western, the most striking
examples being the acoustic version of “Honky Tonk Women,” which was
renamed “Country Honk,” and the second side of the LP Exile on Main St.
In the case of “The Worst,” it is more a tribute to Irish music by the
Glimmer Twins—and in particular Keith Richards, the main songwriter and
singer. A singer, moreover, who does not have a very high opinion of
himself, going as far as advising his girlfriend to walk away: I said from the
first, I am the worst kind of guy. Do warnings come any clearer than this?