Composers: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Recording date: December
1969 & April 1970
Recording location: Olympic
Sound Studios, London, England
Producer: Jimmy
Miller
Chief engineers:
Glyn
Johns & Andy Johns
Performed onstage: 1970-71,
1973, 1976, 1989-90, 1994-95, 1997-99, 2002-03, 2005-07, 2012-16, 2018
Probable line-up:
Drums: Charlie
Watts
Bass: Bill
Wyman
Acoustic guitars: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Electric guitars: Keith
Richards & Mick Taylor (incl. solo)
Lead vocal: Mick
Jagger
Background vocals: Mick
Jagger & Keith Richards
Piano: Ian
Stewart
TrackTalk
Dead Flowers was all written before (we recorded it). I'd played it a hundred times at home.
It's a sort of joke. Yeah, it's probably a
down lyric but it's done in an upbeat way; a vulnerable song done in an
invulnerable way (laughs). It's a pretty straight country tune. I wrote
it very quickly.... Mick Taylor, he sounds like a real old country
player, with all these pulls and things. I like doing it really fast.
The rest of the band always complain it's too fast, but that's the way
I like doing it.
I used a brown Gibson ES-345 for Dead Flowers
...
I love country music, but I find it very hard
to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with
the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek. The harmonic thing is
very different from the blues. It doesn't bend notes in the same way, so
I suppose it's very English, really. Even though it's been very Americanized,
it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak.
The "country" songs we recorded later, like
Dead
Flowers on Sticky Fingers or Far Away Eyes on
Some
Girls, are slightly different (than our earlier ones). The actual music
is played completely straight, but it's me who's not going legit with the
whole thing, because I think I'm a blues singer not a country singer -
I think it's more suited to Keith's voice than mine.
I think some girl sent me a bunch of dead flowers, so I thought that was a good line.