The music industry may look like an artistic playground, but behind the curtain, it’s a brutal, competitive world. Chart wars rage every Friday, and even within bands, egos clash over who gets credit, control, and the spotlight. Keith Richards knows that grind all too well—and he once pulled a fast one on his own band just to keep a song for himself.
Over their decades-long run, The Rolling Stones have been both a democracy and a dictatorship. Sometimes the band moves as a unit, sharing responsibilities and creativity; other times, one member—usually Jagger or Richards—takes the wheel and drives things forward solo. For Richards, that power struggle has swung both ways, especially during the band’s more chaotic periods.
During the making of their 1972 masterpiece Exile on Main St., both Richards and Jagger were working at full tilt. They were holed up in Villa Nellcôte, the now-infamous French mansion drenched in excess and chaos. Despite all the madness, Richards managed to write one of his most beloved songs in a single afternoon—and he wasn’t about to let it slip through his fingers.
The song was ‘Happy’, a raucous, feel-good burst of energy that somehow poured out of Richards when he was feeling anything but. And once he had the bones of the track, he wasn’t waiting for Jagger to put his stamp on it. Richards raced to finish it before anyone else could touch it, laying down the vocals himself and locking it in.
“I’d stolen it and captured it before anybody else knew it existed,” he later said. And he wasn’t joking. He knew that if Jagger caught wind of it, he’d likely want to take over on lead vocals—something Richards wasn’t about to allow this time.
It wasn’t about stealing the spotlight. It was survival.
While ‘Happy’ might sound like a carefree celebration, it came from a darker place. Richards was at one of his lowest points personally, and writing the song became a form of therapy—his way of climbing out of the hole. “Some of the happiest ditties in the world come out because you’re feeling exactly the opposite,” he once admitted. “I was feeling anything but happy when I wrote ‘Happy.’ I wrote it to make sure there was a word like that, a feeling like that.”
That desperation to feel something lighter, even for just a moment, explains why Richards was so protective of the song. This wasn’t just a fun rock track—it was his rescue rope.
Years later, ‘Happy’ remains one of his all-time favorites. “I play ‘Happy’ quite a lot, more often than any of the others,” Richards has said. “I love playing it.” Even he admits the song is out of character. “I’m not known for happy and joyful stuff. I’m probably more aligned to Lucifer and the dark side,” he joked.
But that’s what makes ‘Happy’ so powerful. It’s Richards at his rawest—desperate, defiant, and determined to feel something better. He didn’t just write a song. He stole a moment of joy, locked it down, and made sure no one—not even Mick Jagger—could take it from him.
