Love Is Strong

You are locked into The Zoo, thezoorocks.com, commercial-free album rock the way the dial used to sound before the consultants got hold of it. Right now the track is “Love Is Strong,” the door that opened Voodoo Lounge in 1994, and if you have not heard Mick Jagger blow harp like that in a while, stay where you are. This is the Stones after the long layoff, after Steel Wheels, after the solo records, walking back into the room like they still owned the lease.

Keith Richards has always said the song is a cousin of “Wicked as It Seems,” the cut from his 1992 solo album Main Offender. Same bloodline, different clothes. He started it in Ireland while Mick was still out pushing Wandering Spirit. Early on it carried the title “Love Is Strange,” and the room was Ron Wood, Richards, Ivan Neville, and producer Don Was, working the groove before Jagger ever laid a vocal on it. Bootlegs of those sessions still circulate among the faithful. When Mick finally arrived he changed the title, rewrote the lyric, and did the thing nobody expected: he sang through the harmonica microphone, dropped the melody an octave, and got that breathy, half-whispered tone that makes the record feel like a conversation held too close. He told interviewers he had been doing harmonica homework, playing along with records before the sessions, because you do not just pick the thing up. The harp sits on a sequence that is not a straight twelve-bar, which is exactly why it works. The Stones have always been better when the blues is bent instead of copied.

Sessions ran from the fall of 1993 into the spring of 1994, first at Ron Wood’s place and Windmill Lane in Dublin, then at A&M in Los Angeles. Don Was produced with the Glimmer Twins, Don Smith engineering. Darryl Jones, the Miles Davis and Sting alumnus Charlie Watts had recommended, played bass. Bill Wyman had already stepped away, so “Love Is Strong” is the first Stones single the founding bassist does not appear on. That fact alone marks the record as a new chapter, whether the band wanted the headline or not. The finished track runs just under four minutes, credited to Jagger and Richards, and it leads the album the way a good opener should: no fanfare, just the riff, the harp, and Mick telling somebody their love is strong and they are so sweet, that they make him hard and they make him weak, and that someday they have got to meet.

Virgin put the single out in early July 1994, ahead of the album on July 11. It was the band’s first release on the label, and the company spent real money. The black-and-white video came from David Fincher, cut by Robert Duffy, with the effects work done at Digital Domain under Fred Raimondi. Giant Stones stride through New York while ordinary people lock into embraces at their feet. In 1994 that size trick was not a phone filter. It was compositing, camera moves, and a lot of hours, and it won the MTV Video Music Award for Best Special Effects. The clip also took the Grammy for Best Short Form Music Video. The Stones played the song at the VMAs that year, and the giant-Keith image turned up all over the Voodoo Lounge tour advertising. Teddy Riley even cut club mixes for a sampler, which tells you how far the label was willing to push a mid-tempo rock single into other rooms.

The charts told a split story. In the United Kingdom the single reached number 14. Norway took it to number 3, the Netherlands to number 6, New Zealand to number 12. On the American Billboard Hot 100 it stalled at number 91, the lowest a Stones lead single had ever gone, and rock radio still treated it like a hit, sending it to number 2 on the Mainstream Rock chart. Canada was kinder: number 2 on the RPM singles list. “Out of Tears” and “You Got Me Rocking” followed and did not restore the old pop crossover either. Voodoo Lounge still moved about two million copies in the States, hit number 2 on the Billboard 200, and in early 1995 became the first winner of the Grammy for Best Rock Album. The song later landed on Forty Licks and on GRRR!, which is how a single that barely dented the Hot 100 ended up in the permanent set. They played it on the Voodoo Lounge tour, again in 1998, and on the Bigger Bang run.

A little history, because the song does not float free of the band that made it. The Rolling Stones came together in London in 1962 around Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Brian Jones, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts, with Ian Stewart on piano until the image men decided he did not fit the photograph. Alexis Korner’s scene, Chess records, and a stubborn idea that English boys could play American blues without apologizing for the accent: that was the start. By 1965 they had “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and a rivalry with the Beatles that the papers loved more than the musicians did. Aftermath, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St. The run from the late sixties into the early seventies is the textbook, and it cost them Brian Jones, who was edged out and then found dead in his pool in 1969, and later Mick Taylor, who joined for the golden stretch and left in 1974. Ron Wood came over from the Faces and never really left. The seventies gave them Some Girls and a second wind in the discos and the punk rooms at the same time. The eighties nearly split the Glimmer Twins for good. Steel Wheels in 1989 put the show back on the road. Voodoo Lounge, five years later, proved they could still cut a studio record that did not sound like a contractual obligation. Charlie Watts died in 2021. Steve Jordan has held the drum chair since. Hackney Diamonds arrived in 2023 with guests and a reminder that Jagger and Richards can still finish a song when they feel like it. The tongue-and-lips logo, drawn by John Pasche in 1971, is older than most of the people listening to this station, and it still means the same thing: loud guitars, a singer who moves like the song is a dare, and a rhythm section that refuses to rush.

“Love Is Strong” is not “Gimme Shelter” and it is not trying to be. It is a 1994 Stones record that remembers what the band is for. The lyric is pursuit, not autobiography. The groove is patient. The harp is the hook. Richards’ guitar does not grandstand. Watts, still very much with them then, plays it dry and exact. If you came in late, the album around it also holds “You Got Me Rocking,” “Sparks Will Fly,” “Out of Tears,” and “I Go Wild,” a set that put the Stones back on rock radio when a lot of programmers had already filed them under oldies. The Zoo does not file anybody under oldies. We play the record.

More Stones, more deep cuts, and the rest of the Voodoo Lounge hour live on The Zoo at https://thezoorocks.com/. The band’s own house is https://rollingstones.com/. Find them on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/therollingstones, on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/therollingstones/, and on X at https://x.com/RollingStones. For the session notes and the long view, the fan archive Time Is on Our Side is at https://www.timeisonourside.com/, and the long-running It’s Only Rock ’n Roll fan club is at https://iorr.org/. Keep it tuned right here. The next one is another cut from the same shelf, and it does not ask permission either.