How Jagger’s solo album and Richards’ solo work almost killed the Rolling Stones — and what saved them

By the late 1980s, the Rolling Stones were basically a legal entity with a membership card and no band chemistry. Mick Jagger wanted to make pop radio hits and had cut She’s the Boss (1985) and Primitive Cool (1987) with producers like Nile Rodgers and Dave Stewart. Keith Richards, meanwhile, was deep into his own thing — Talk Is Cheap (1988), a loose, rootsy record with the X-Pensive Winos that sounded more like the Stones than the Stones did. The two weren’t speaking. Tour plans for 1989 were dead on the table.

The real tension wasn’t just musical. Richards felt Jagger had betrayed the band by signing a solo deal without telling anyone, and he wrote the line “you’re always taking but you never give” in “You Don’t Move Me” directly at Mick. Jagger, for his part, thought Keith was a heroin-wrecked dinosaur. Public interviews got nasty. For a while it looked like the Stones had no reason to exist.

What saved them was a meeting in Barbados in early 1989, brokered by their manager and then by Charlie Watts acting as a steady hand. They agreed to do one more album and tour, but only if they worked as a real band again — not as Jagger plus sidemen. That became Steel Wheels, their first album in three years, and the tour that followed was their biggest yet. Richards later said they realized they were “useless apart.” They’ve stayed mostly together ever since.