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Rolling Stones unreleased: Had It With You (alternate take)
This unreleased version of Had It With You (extreme bluesy intro included!) isn’t just another Rolling Stones outtake—it’s a crack in the band’s armor caught on tape. Born during the turbulent Dirty Work sessions, the song channels frustration, distance, and barely contained resentment at a time when the Stones were drifting apart rather than locking in together. This alternate take strips away polish and exposes tension, revealing how conflict itself became fuel. What sounds like a lean rocker is actually a personal message disguised as a song, proof that even in their most fractured moments, the Stones could still turn internal chaos into something sharp, raw, and uncomfortably honest.
By the mid-1980s Dirty Work emerged less as a conventional Rolling Stones album than as a document of fracture, fatigue, and stubborn survival. Recorded in Paris during the spring of 1985, the sessions unfolded under conditions that were anything but harmonious. Personal tensions, creative rivalries, and physical absences defined the atmosphere, with it being rare for all five core members to occupy the studio at once. Side projects pulled the band apart, egos clashed openly, and communication often happened at a distance rather than face to face. The familiar Stones method—collective, chaotic, combustible—was replaced by something colder and more fragmented.
Yet the band pressed on, partly out of obligation, partly out of defiance. Unable to record in their favored Dutch studios due to tax issues, they settled into EMI Pathé Marconi in Boulogne-Billancourt, a location that became the backdrop for one of the most strained chapters in their history. Dirty Work would ultimately reflect that tension: lean, aggressive, and emotionally bruised, an album shaped as much by conflict as by craft.
A song born before the album
Long before Had It With You took shape as one of Dirty Work’s sharpest, most stripped-down tracks, its emotional core already existed outside the studio. Keith Richards later recalled that the song’s words surfaced not amid microphones and tape reels, but during a moment of stalled motion and simmering resentment. Stranded in the front room of Ronnie Wood’s house in Chiswick, watching the Thames crawl by under miserable skies, Richards found himself waiting—physically for the Dover ferry to resume service, and emotionally for a fractured partnership to make sense again. The frustration he put into words wasn’t aimed at romance or some abstract enemy. It was directed squarely at Mick Jagger.
Throughout the early 1980s, Jagger’s growing independence, capped by his solo debut She’s the Boss, cut deeply into Richards’ sense of loyalty and shared purpose. To Keith, it felt like abandonment. Ironically, when the time came to record Had It With You during the Dirty Work sessions, it was Jagger who stepped up to deliver those lyrics with biting clarity, embodying a bitterness that had originally been aimed at him.
When the Band Held Together by Friction Alone
The broader Dirty Work project mirrored this contradiction. Ian Stewart made his final appearance on a Stones album before his death, while an array of guest musicians—Jimmy Page, Bobby Womack, Ivan Neville, Chuck Leavell—filled the gaps left by absent bandmates. There would be no tour to support the record; the group simply couldn’t coexist long enough to take it on the road. Critics were divided, yet the album performed well commercially, proving the Stones could still connect even when internally fractured. In that context, the unreleased alternate take of Had It With You feels especially revealing. It captures not just a song, but a moment when resentment, loyalty, and survival collided—an emotional snapshot of a band enduring itself.
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