It is funny to look back into the mid- to late '70s and realize how worried rock fans were about the potential scenario of disco music killing off their relatively young genre. Young rock fans would be despised and reviled by their friends for admitting they liked even a single dance tune. There was a famous event staged by a rock radio station at a baseball game where irate rock fans burned a big bonfire of disco albums, the end result looking like something out of Lord of the Flies. But the Rolling Stones had always been rather daring with taking on new challenges, especially if the new influence was African-American- or Jamaican-based, as with reggae, soul, blues, funk, and R&B. Mick Jagger was always conscious of commercial trends, but he was also usually wise enough to understand what could easily be integrated into the Rolling Stones' repertoire. So if there was a rock band or artist, aside from David Bowie, who could challenge their listeners' perceptions about what rock & roll is, it might as well be the so-called "greatest rock & roll band in the world." "Miss You" was the shot across the bow for Stones fans, a harbinger of things to come (i.e., more overt nods to disco on Emotional Rescue). But while it sported the necessary "four-on-the-floor" bass drumbeat of disco, "Miss You" is really just a funky soul song, which — as Jagger realized — was pretty much all disco was, with a slightly different, more insistent drumbeat. The difference between "Miss You" and, say, the song "Emotional Rescue," is that "Miss You" fits more easily into what the Stones were all about: twin minor-key guitars riffing off of each other, meaty-sounding and prominent in the mix and a raw, soulful Jagger singing lyrics that are at once sexy, macho, urbane, street, and witty: "It's just some friends of mine that say 'Hey, what's the matter man?/We're gonna come around 12/With some Puerto Rican girls that's just dying to meet you/We're going to bring a case of wine/Hey, let's go mess and fool around, you know, like we used to.'" Aside from the beat, the song is based around a hook line played on the harmonica by Sugar Blue and sung in falsetto by Jagger, Keith Richards, and Ron Wood. The evolution of the song happened with Jagger jamming in a tour rehearsal with Billy Preston, who played keyboards on some of the Stones' records and toured with them. Bill Wyman mentions that he formed his bass line out of an instance where Preston started fooling around with a bass guitar. Also featured on the track is the distinctive electric piano of Faces keyboardist Ian McClagen. There is a spontaneity to the lyrics and the groove that came from the approach to the recording. The band was all playing and singing in the same room together, almost unheard of in the '70s, when most bands tracked their parts separately, or at least had the sounds isolated and then mixed together. The album version is a concise version of other run-throughs which, as heard on extended mixes (by Bob Clearmountain) and bootlegs, have Jagger vamping more and coming up with different lyrics as he sing-speaks. The verses and chorus arrangements only seem to be an outline for where the song ultimately goes. The energy that typifies of the whole record Some Girls is palpable in "Miss You." Richards had just kicked heroin and was ready to prove the band was still a potent force; Jagger had been living in New York and was exposed to musical influences such as new Latin music, dance, and punk rock, and felt a fire under him from hearing the young upstarts in punk rock bands put down the Stones as has-beens. Most of the record, in fact, is more three-chord guitar rock & roll; the more extended forays into dance music occurred on the band's next record, Emotional Rescue, which lacks the urgency of Some Girls and sounds thin in comparison to the latter. "Miss You" did indeed serve as a revitalization of the Stones and proved them to still be a vital commercial and artistic force. The single spent 16 weeks at the number one spot on the U.S. chart. Etta James did a sultry R&B version for her Matriarch of the Blues (2000). Prince was known to drag out a faster, funkier version in his live performances.