Bob Clearmountain's Mix of 'One Hit (to the Body)' on Dirty Work

Bob Clearmountain was called in to mix Dirty Work after the band’s original producer, Steve Lillywhite, had a falling out with the Stones. The sessions were already tense—Keith Richards and Mick Jagger were barely speaking—and the album’s sound needed someone who could wrangle the chaos into something punchy. Clearmountain had a reputation for making messy records sound crisp without losing their grit, so he got the gig.

For “One Hit (to the Body),” the lead single, Clearmountain faced a peculiar challenge: the song featured a rare lead vocal from Keith Richards on the verses, with Jagger jumping in on the chorus. To make that switch work, he pushed Richards’ voice slightly dryer and more upfront in the verses, then let Jagger’s snarling double-tracked vocal sit wider in the mix during the chorus. The result is a track that feels like a tug-of-war between the two frontmen, with Clearmountain’s mix acting as the referee—keeping the distortion on the guitars fat and the snare crackling through the tension. He later said it was one of the hardest mixes he’d ever done, simply because the band’s internal friction was baked into the tape.