Mick Jagger's 'She's the Boss' and Keith Richards' Blunt Reaction

By 1985, the Rolling Stones were in a deep freeze. Keith Richards was deep in heroin recovery, and Mick Jagger was restless—he wanted to keep moving, keep making pop music that fit the MTV era. While Keith was off getting clean in Jamaica, Mick booked time with producer Bill Laswell and a cast of session players (including Jeff Beck and Pete Townshend) to cut his first solo album, She’s the Boss. Jagger later said he just wanted to try something different without the baggage of the Stones. But the timing couldn’t have been worse.

Keith Richards didn’t hide his feelings. He called the album “a joke” and “a parody of Mick Jagger” in interviews. The real sting came in his 2010 autobiography Life, where he wrote: “Mick went off and made a solo album. It was like a declaration of independence, or maybe a declaration of war.” Richards felt Jagger was abandoning the band’s identity for slick, commercial pop, and the album’s reliance on outside writers and producers only rubbed salt in the wound. The feud went public and nearly killed the Stones.

For all the drama, She’s the Boss was a modest success—it reached No. 6 in the UK and No. 13 in the US, and the single “Just Another Night” got heavy radio play. But critically, it aged poorly, often dismissed as a thin, eighties-sounding side project. The real legacy of the album isn’t the music; it’s how it forced the Stones to finally address their fractured relationship, eventually leading to Steel Wheels four years later.