I mean, straight men in their seventies don’t dress like a pirate unless they are actually a pirate, okay?

I always thought the song was, like, Mick’s way of letting Keith know gently that, no, Mick was not going to fuck him and shit. Because if you can’t tell that Keith Richards is gay then you just don’t know how to look. I mean, straight men in their seventies don’t dress like a pirate unless they are actually a pirate, okay?

So when Mick sings

“I saw her today at the reception
A glass of wine in her hand
I knew she was gonna meet her connection”

The ‘her’ is Keith, and Keith and Mick are at, like, some party or shit, and Keith’s looking for his drug dealer, because he’s not going to get to fuck Mick and now he needs some more drugs. Pretty obvious.

Then Mick sings

“But I went down to the demonstration
To get your fair share of abuse
Singing, "We're gonna vent our frustration
If we don't we're gonna blow a fifty-amp fuse"

And the ‘demonstration’ is a metaphor for the recording studio, where Keith is abusive of Mick because Mick isn’t rock-and-roll enough, and won’t fuck him and shit. And Mick’s saying, like, ‘I get your frustration, dude, but maybe just play your guitar and get over it, okay?’

Then Mick sings

“I went down to the Chelsea drugstore
To get your prescription filled”

And that’s pretty obvious: Keith can’t do shit in the studio without his drugs, so Mick is saying, I’ll get your drugs, okay? Because we gotta write songs and shit.

And then Mick sings

“I was standing in line with Mr. Jimmy
And man, did he look pretty ill
We decided that we would have a soda
My favorite flavor, cherry red
I sung my song to Mr. Jimmy
Yeah, and he said one word to me, and that was "dead"

Which is all about Mick waiting at the dealer to get Keith’s drugs, but Jimmy Page is ahead of him, and Jimmy looks all thin and wasted and shit, which people thought was cool back then, but Mick wasn’t buying it. So, even though Jimmy looks ill and wasted and shit, even Jimmy knows that Keith is gonna die soon with all the drugs he’s taking, because Mick not wanting to fuck him hurts him that much.

And then Mick sings

“In her glass was a bleeding man”

Which is just poetry shit, it doesn’t, like, really mean anything or nothing. Then Mick sings

“She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands”

Which means Keith keeps trying to hide how fucked up he is on drugs from everyone, but he’s not fooling Mick, Mick knows his shit. So Mick tells him

“You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need”

Which basically just means — hey —  just because I’m not going to fuck you doesn’t mean that there aren’t other dudes with big lips who would fuck you, because you’re Keith Richards of the fucking Rolling Stones, dude, even Bill Wyman gets chicks.

Paul McCartney had this problem in the Beatles, too: like, Lennon would get all pissy at him because he wanted McCartney to fuck him, and McCartney was like, no dude, and then wrote “Let It Be.”