Probable line-up:

Drums: Ron Wood
Bass: Keith Richards
Acoustic guitar: Keith Richards
Electric guitars: Keith Richards
Lead vocal: Keith Richards
Background vocals: Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bobby Womack, Don Covay, Kirsty MacColl, Janice
       Pendarvis & Dollette McDonald
Piano: Chuck Leavell
Synthesizer: Chuck Leavell
 

You better get some sleep tonight
Honey, just warn your friends
You better get some sleep tonight

They say you watch the sun go down
The same old shadows crawl over town
Those thoughts of you, it shivers me
The moon grows cold in memory, baby

You better get some sleep tonight
All you've got to do is close your eyes
You better get some sleep tonight

I wish you, baby, all the best
If you turn out like all the rest
This darkness, baby, it's chilling me
Stars stare down in sympathy, baby, yeah

You better get some sleep tonight
Warn all your friends
You better get them out of sight
You better get some sleep tonight

Well they robbed you of your dignity
They even steal your heart from me
It ain't revenge, you understand
Baby I just want to know who dealt this hand, baby

Oh I'm sorry
Get it up, get it up

All you got to do is close your eyes
You better get some sleep tonight
You better get them out of sight
 
 

TrackTalk
 

I wrote that one at the piano when there was nobody else there except Woody and me - Woody plays drums on that one. So he was sitting at the kit, I was stitting at the piano, and I got this sequence together. I mean, it's one of those songs that I write occasionally where I say, Hey, I didn't write this, this is memory playing tricks with me, this is somebody else's song (laughs). It's happened to me before, with All About You, which I kept in the can for four or five years while I kept playing it for everybody I knew with a grounding in songwriting, because I kept thinking, This sequence does NOT come from me, this is NOT my shit... Sleep is like that for me because of all the weird modulations. The chorus is virtually a doo-wop chorus in C, but then the verses modulate quite naturally into another key. I had to wait for other people to convince me to go ahead with it; for a while I was saying, This is all good fun but we're wasting time, because I'm SURE this is somebody else's song (laughs).

Yes - (I played) drums on... Sleep Tonight - I could never get over the thought of playing instead of Charlie, I thought that would be a sacrilege, but he insisted because he was going through a lot of problems at the time and couldn't be at the studio. Keith said, Right, you're on drums, so I finally hacked it into shape and when Charlie got there I gave him the sticks and he said, No, I can't get it right, you play it. It worked out good.

On Sleep you can really hear how Keith's blonde Tele rings - it's fantastic. The acoustic on there is the (Martin 1967) 00-21, which was used for Nashville tuning.

Yeah, that's high-strung, the Nashville tuning. It's a lovely stringing, it really rings. I first used that on Wild Horses down in Muscle Shoals in '69, where I picked it up. I remembered it for a year or two, then I totally forgot about it unil this year, when it came up in conversation with Alan Rogan and Joe Walsh, so we strung up a guitar like that. It gives you the feel of a 12-string without all that boom from the bottom strings and all of the hassle of having to tune TWELVE STRINGS (laughs). It just gives you that octave high G, that pretty little ring.

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