Songfacts®:

• John Waite said of this song: "'Rough & Tumble' was the first thing we cut for the album of the songs that were recorded in Los Angeles. I had brought the band together for a quick rehearsal in Santa Monica. We had a rough blueprint of the songs we were going to be recording from some pretty raw demos. The band was tuning up, and Luis played this great blues lick. Five minutes later, we had the basis of 'Rough & Tumble.' Bang! There it was! It was all done 'on the fly.' It felt like it really set the tone for the recording the next day."
• John Waite explains how The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards' inspired this song: "I based the song on an idea that a friend once told me. He was in the Russian Tea Room in New York with Keith Richards taking a leak, and Keith leaned and said, 'All we've got to do is stick together and everything is gonna be OK.' I carried that around with me for a couple of weeks thinking about it because it was such good news...such a good thing to say. Getting through the world if you're in love with somebody is like a precious thing. The world is going to throw stuff at you, and you gotta get through it somehow. You've got to stick together. 'Rough & Tumble,' even though it's open for interpretation, is really about surviving the stuff that life throws at you." >>

  Suggestion credit:
  DeeTheWriter - Saint Petersburg, Russia Federation, for above 2