I was thinking the same thing watching him at the Grammys. We are so familiar with him I think it is often lost on us the degree of his fame. What a life. Really...who were bigger icons in the 21st century?

Elvis
Beatles
Sinatra
Bing Crosby
Jolsen
James Dean, Marily Monroe but only because they died
Jim Morrison but only because he died

Quote
slew
The Life book is NOT that bad. It's interesting and what Mick did with the record deal was pretty bad back in the 80's with solo stuff tacked on and not telling the band. .

In his "Jagger Remembers" ROLLING STONE '95 interview Mick claims that Keith was aware of the solo record deal, so that does not justify his angriness. If that is true what really pissed Keith was the whole idea of Mick leaving The Stones (him).

Here is the 80's scenery-part:

WENNER:I remember that when you made “Dirty Work,” you were about to tour and then changed your mind.
JAGGER:Touring “Dirty Work” would have been a nightmare. It was a terrible period. Everyone was hating each other so much; there were so many disagreements. It was very petty; everyone was so out of their brains, and Charlie was in seriously bad shape. When the idea of touring came up, I said, “I don’t think it’s gonna work.” In retrospect I was a hundred percent right. It would have been the worst Rolling Stones tour. Probably would have been the end of the band.
WENNER:But, finally, it was your decision not to tour. Was Keith upset with that?
JAGGER:Oh, yeah.
WENNER:And the next thing you do is a solo album.
JAGGER:Yeah. He must have been quite unhappy with that. But when we signed the recording contract with CBS, I had a provision to make a solo record. Keith knew all about it, so it wasn’t a bolt from the blue. I don’t want to excuse what happened; it was a very bad period. Everyone was getting on very badly.
WENNER:And then it turned into a public battle between you and Keith, with all the sniping in the press.
JAGGER:I think that was Keith’s way of trying to get back at me; he just liked to mouth off about it. He quite enjoyed it. He became very upset and overreacted when I wanted to do a solo record, which in retrospect seems a natural thing to want to do.
But even before that, everyone was bored playing with each other. We’d reached a period when we were tired of it all. Bill [Wyman] was not enthusiastic to start with – there’s a guy that doesn’t really want to do much. He’s quite happy, whatever he’s told to do, but he’s not suggesting anything, not helping... a bit morose and bored. You’ve got Charlie overdoing it in all directions.

I think now when we all have read LIFE it is good re-read that interview. Perhaps now some of Mick's sayings make more sense. It is also intersting to notice how he rates the Stones material through the ages. (in fact, he seems to share the over-all picture of teh quality of their output. He knows when the muse was on. His remarks of VOODOO LOUNGE are spot on. Contrary to Keith that seemingly doesn't have a critical approach at all to their music, and seemingly lost the touch to the contemporary musical scene by the late-70's) And one can only wonder how diplomatic and loyal he is to Keith. (Listen "On Keith Richards' drug habit")

[www.jannswenner.com]

- Doxa



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 2011-02-17 09:22 by Doxa.

Here is the correct icon-list 1-3...




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To summarize Mick's "cool" views on the Stones recorded history, I edit him from ROLLING STONE interview '95 here:

WENNER:I recently listened to the very early albums, the first four or five you did, and they’re all pretty much the same. You were doing blues and covers, but one song stood out: “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back),” your first U.S. hit and your first composition together with Keith. It’s the first one that has the seeds of the modern Stones in it.
JAGGER:Keith was playing 12-string and singing harmonies into the same microphone as the 12-string. We recorded it in this tiny studio in the West End of London called Regent Sound, which was a demo studio. I think the whole of that album was recorded in there. But it’s very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very pop song, as opposed to all the blues songs and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.
WENNER:The first full album that really kind of jumps out is “Out of Our Heads.”
JAGGER:What’s on there? [Laughter] I have no idea. I’m awfully sorry.
WENNER: “Cry to Me,” “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” “Play With Fire,” “I’m All Right,” That’s How Strong My Lore Is”...
JAGGER:Yeah. A lot of covers, still.
WENNER:But it had a unity of sound to it.
JAGGER:Most of that was recorded in RCA Studios, in Hollywood, and the people working on it, the engineers, were much better. They knew how to get really good sounds. That really affects your performance, because you can hear the nuances, and that inspires you.
WENNER:And your singing is different here for the first time. You sound like you’re singing more like soul music.
JAGGER:Yeah, well, it is obviously soul influenced, which was the goal at the time. Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. “Play With Fire” sounds amazing – when I heard it last. I mean, it’s a very in-your-face kind of sound and very clearly done. You can hear all the vocal stuff on it. And I’m playing the tambourines, the vocal line. You know, it’s very pretty.
WENNER:Who wrote that?
JAGGER:Keith and me. I mean, it just came out.
WENNER:A full collaboration?
JAGGER:Yeah.
WENNER:That’s the first song you wrote that starts to address the lifestyle you were leading in England and, of course, class consciousness.
JAGGER:No one had really done that. The Beatles, to some extent, were doing it, though they weren’t really doing it at this period as much as they did later. The Kinks were kind of doing it – Ray Davies and I were in the same boat. One of the first things that, in that very naive way, you attempted to deal with were the kind of funny, swinging, London-type things that were going on. I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time. But it became an interesting source for material. Songwriting had only dealt in clichés and borrowed stuff, you know, from previous records or ideas. “I want to hold your hand,” things like that. But these songs were really more from experience and then embroidered to make them more interesting.
WENNER:Where does that come from in you? I mean, you’re writing about “Your mother, she’s an heiress/Owns a block in St. John’s Wood,” but she’s sleeping with the milkman, or something.
JAGGER:Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just kind of rich girls’ families – society as you saw it. It’s painted in this naive way in these songs.
WENNER:But at the time to write about stuff like that must have been somewhat daring.
JAGGER:I don’t know if it was daring. It just hadn’t been done. Obviously there had been lyric writers that had written stuff much more interesting and sophisticated – say, Noel Coward, who I didn’t really know about. He was someone that your parents knew.
The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan. Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time. And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the 10 years previously.

A lot of it was perhaps not as good as we thought, but at the time it was fantastic. “Gates of Eden” and all these Mexican-type songs, even the nonsense ones: “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street.”

WENNER:Then you did “December’s Children (and Everybody’s).” Does that title mean anything particular?
JAGGER:No. It was our manager’s [Andrew Loog Oldham] idea of hip, Beat poetry.
WENNER:That record features “Get off My Cloud.”
JAGGER:That was Keith’s melody and my lyrics.
WENNER:This is decidedly not a love song or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”
JAGGER:Yeah. It’s a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song. The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early ‘60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.
---
WENNER:Is there anything more to say about “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” than has already been said on the record? Written sitting by a pool in Florida...
JAGGER:Keith didn’t want it to come out as a single.
WENNER:Is there anything special to you about that song, looking back at it after all these years?
JAGGEReople get very blasé about their big hit. It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was a big thing, and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. You know, we went to playing Singapore. The Beatles really opened all that up. But to do that you needed the song; otherwise you were just a picture in the newspaper, and you had these little hits.
WENNER:Was “Satisfaction” a great, classic piece of work?
JAGGER:Well, it’s a signature tune, really, rather than a great, classic painting, ‘cause it’s only like one thing – a kind of signature that everyone knows.
WENNER:Why? What are the ingredients?
JAGGER:It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kind of songs.
WENNER:Which was?
JAGGER:Which was alienation. Or it’s a bit more than that, maybe, but a kind of sexual alienation. Alienation’s not quite the right word, but it’s one word that would do.
WENNER:Isn’t that a stage of youth?
JAGGER:Yeah, it’s being in your 20s, isn’t it? Teenage guys can’t often formulate this stuff – when you’re that young.
WENNER:Who wrote “Satisfaction”?
JAGGER:Well, Keith wrote the lick. I think he had this lyric, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” which, actually, is a line in a Chuck Berry song called “30 Days.”
WENNER:Which is “I can’t get no satisfaction”?
JAGGER:“I can’t get no satisfaction from the judge.”
WENNERid you know that when you wrote it?
JAGGER:No, I didn’t know it, but Keith might have heard it back then, because it’s not any way an English person would express it. I’m not saying that he purposely nicked anything, but we played those records a lot.
WENNERo it just could have stuck in the back of your head.
JAGGER:Yeah, that was just one little line. And then I wrote the rest of it. There was no melody, really.
WENNER:When you play it today, how do you feel about it? You’ve got to play it every night.
JAGGER:Well, I try to do it as well as I can, and I do the verse softer, so I give it some sort of dynamic. I try to make it melodic. Maybe we shouldn’t really do it every night; I don’t know.
WENNER: “As Tears Go By” was your first big, classic ballad. Who wrote that?
JAGGER:I wrote the lyrics, and Keith wrote the melody. But in some rock, you know, there’s no melody until the singer starts to sing it. Sometimes there’s a definite melody, but quite often it’s your job as the singer to invent the melody. I start with one melody, and I make it another melody, over the same chord sequence.
WENNER:You wrote it when you were 21. What do you think of it now?
JAGGER:It’s a very melancholy song for a 21-year-old to write: “The evening of the day, watching children play....” It’s very dumb and naive, but it’s got a very sad sort of thing about it, almost like an older person might write. You know, it’s like a metaphor for being old: You’re watching children playing and realizing you’re not a child. It’s a relatively mature song considering the rest of the output at the time. And we didn’t think of doing it [initially], because the Rolling Stones were a butch blues group. But Marianne Faithfull’s version was already a big, proven hit song.
WENNER:Why did you go and rerecord it? Because you had a particular affection for that song?
JAGGER:Well, it was already a hit, so, you know [laughs], and Andrew was a very simple, commercial kind of guy. A lot of this stuff is done for commercial reasons.
WENNER:Were you surprised that something of this kind popped out of you at 21?
JAGGER:It was one of the first things I ever wrote. I see songwriting as having to do with experience, and the more you’ve experienced, the better it is. But it has to be tempered, and you just must let your imagination run.
You can’t just experience something and leave it at that. You’ve got to try and embroider, like, any land of writing. And that’s the fun part of it. You have this one experience looking out of a window, seeing children. Well, you might not have felt anything, but then you just let your mind drift and dream, and you imagine an older person doing that. You put yourself in their point of view, and you start to write other things, and all this is a very subconscious thing. Out of that comes a mature thought, out of a young person.

I was reading Pushkin, and his stories are autobiographical. But not totally, because he was never in Siberia – but his friends were, so he uses it. You use your own experience, and then you spice it up with your friends’ observations and your imagination.

WENNER:The next record was “Aftermath,” which has “Paint It, Black,” “Under My Thumb” and “Stupid Girl.” Does that stand out in your mind at all?
JAGGER:That was a big landmark record for me. It’s the first time we wrote the whole record and finally laid to rest the ghost of having to do these very nice and interesting, no doubt, but still cover versions of old R&B songs – which we didn’t really feel we were doing justice, to be perfectly honest, particularly because we didn’t have the maturity. Plus, everyone was doing it.
[Aftermath] has a very wide spectrum of music styles: “Paint It, Black” was this kind of Turkish song; and there were also very bluesy things like “Goin’ Home”; and I remember some sort of ballads on there. It had a lot of good songs, it had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.

WENNER:Why does “Under My Thumb” work so well?
JAGGER:It’s got Brian playing these marimbas. That riff played on marimbas really makes it. Plus, the groove it gets in the end of the tune. It speeds up, actually. And it becomes this kind of groove tune at the end. It was never a single, but it was always a very well-known album track. And then it became a thing feminists fastened on.
WENNER:Illegitimately, you think.
JAGGER:It’s a bit of a jokey number, really. It’s not really an anti-feminist song any more than any of the others.
WENNER:It’s more caricaturish than it is about real women.
JAGGER:Yes, it’s a caricature, and it’s in reply to a girl who was a very pushy woman.
WENNERomebody specific?
JAGGER:No, I don’t think so.
WENNER:Also, on that same album you’ve got “Stupid Girl,” which is a really nasty song.
JAGGER:Yeah, it’s much nastier than “Under My Thumb.”
WENNER:What was going on in your life when you were writing songs like “Stupid Girl”?
JAGGER:Obviously, I was having a bit of trouble. I wasn’t in a good relationship. Or I was in too many bad relationships. I had so many girlfriends at that point. None of them seemed to care they weren’t pleasing me very much. I was obviously in with the wrong group.
WENNER:Your pain worked out well for the rest of us.
JAGGER:[Laughs] The pain I had to go through!
WENNER:Then you did “Between the Buttons.” What do you think of that album?
JAGGER:Frank Zappa used to say he really liked it. It’s a good record, but it was unfortunately rather spoiled. We recorded it in London on four-track machines. We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times, we lost the sound of a lot of it.
WENNERoes that record mean a lot to you?
JAGGER:No. What’s on it?
WENNER: “Connection.”
JAGGER:It’s nice. “Connection” is really nice.
WENNER: “Yesterday’s Papers.”
JAGGER:Yeah, the first song I ever wrote completely on my own for a Rolling Stones record. “My Obsession,” that’s a good one. They sounded so great, but then, later on, I was really disappointed with it. Isn’t “Ruby Tuesday” on there or something? I don’t think the rest of the songs are that brilliant. “Ruby Tuesday” is good. I think that’s a wonderful song.
WENNER:Why?
JAGGER:It’s just a nice melody, really. And a lovely lyric. Neither of which I wrote, but I always enjoy singing it. But I agree with you about the rest of the songs – I don’t think they’re there. I don’t think I thought they were very good at the time, either.
WENNER:You then did “Their Satanic Majesties Request.” What was going on here?
JAGGER:I probably started to take too many drugs.
WENNER:What do you think about “Satanic Majesties” now?
JAGGER:Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like “Between the Buttons.” It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience. There’s two good songs on it: “She’s a Rainbow,” which we didn’t do on the last tour, although we almost did, and “2000 Light Years From Home,” which we did do. The rest of them are nonsense.
WENNER:I listened to it recently, and it sounds like “Spinal Tap.”
JAGGER:Really, I know.
WENNER:Was it just you trying to be the Beatles?
JAGGER:I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it.
The whole thing, we were on acid. We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of colored paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it. [Laughs] Also, we did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.

WENNER:After it came out and it was kind of a chunk record, how did you consider it?
JAGGER:A phase. A passing fancy.
WENNER:You followed up with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”
JAGGER:We did that one as a single, out of all the acid of “Satanic Majesties.”
WENNER:What’s that song about? “Born in a crossfire hurricane...”
JAGGER:It’s about having a hard time and getting out. Just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.
WENNER:And it did bring you back. You launch this golden era: “Beggars Banquet,” “Let It Bleed,” “Sticky Fingers,” “Exile on Main Street.” Let’s start with “Beggars Banquet,” a record that you could not have predicted from your earlier work. It had extraordinary power and sophistication, with songs like “Street Fighting Man,” “Salt of the Earth,” “Stray Cat Blues” and “Jig-Saw Puzzle.” What was going on in your life at this time? What were you listening to and reading?
JAGGER:God, what was I doing? Who was I living with? It was all recorded in London, and I was living in this rented house in Chester Square. I was living with Marianne Faithfull. Was I still? Yeah. And I was just writing a lot, reading a lot. I was educating myself. I was reading a lot of poetry, I was reading a lot of philosophy. I was out and about. I was very social, always hanging out with [art-gallery owner] Robert Fraser’s group of people.
And I wasn’t taking so many drugs that it was messing up my creative processes. It was a very good period, 1968 – there was a good feeling in the air. It was a very creative period for everyone. There was a lot going on in the theater. Marianne was kind of involved with it, so I would go to the theater upstairs, hang out with the young directors of the time and the young filmmakers.

WENNER:Let’s start with “Sympathy for the Devil.”
JAGGER:I think that was taken from an old idea of Baudelaire’s, I think, but I could be wrong. Sometimes when I look at my Baudelaire books, I can’t see it in there. But it was an idea I got from French writing. And I just took a couple of lines and expanded on it. I wrote it as sort of like a Bob Dylan song. And you can see it in this movie Godard shot called “Sympathy for the Devil” [originally titled “One Plus One”,] which is very fortuitous, because Godard wanted to do a film of us in the studio. I mean, it would never happen now, to get someone as interesting as Godard. And stuffy.
We just happened to be recording that song. We could have been recording “My Obsession.” But it was “Sympathy for the Devil,” and it became the track that we used.

WENNER:You wrote that song.
JAGGER:Uh-huh.
WENNERo that’s a wholly Mick Jagger song.
JAGGER:Uh-huh. I mean, Keith suggested that we do it in another rhythm, so that’s how bands help you.
WENNER:Were you trying to put out a specific philosophical message here? You know, you’re singing, “Just as every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints”...
JAGGER:Yeah, there’s all these attractions of opposites and turning things upside down.
WENNER:When you were writing it, did you conceive of it as this grand work?
JAGGER:I knew it was something good, ‘cause I would just keep banging away at it until the @#$%& band recorded it.
WENNER:There was resistance to it?
JAGGER:No, there wasn’t any resistance. It was just that I knew that I wanted to do it and get it down. And I hadn’t written a lot of songs on my own, so you have to teach it. When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can’t force them to like it. And if they like it, they’ll do a much better job than if they’re just playing ‘cause they feel they’re obligated.
WENNER:They get inspired.
JAGGER:And then you get inspired, and that’s what being in a band’s about rather than hiring people. But I knew it was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It’s all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England – you’re skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.
WENNER:The song has a very strong opening: “Please allow me to introduce myself.” And then it’s this Everyman figure in history who keeps appearing from the beginning of civilization.
JAGGER:Yeah, it’s a very long historical figure – the figures of evil and figures of good – so it is a tremendously long trail he’s made as personified in this piece.
WENNER:What else makes this song so powerful?
JAGGER:It has a very hypnotic groove, a samba, which has a tremendous hypnotic power, rather like good dance music. It doesn’t speed up or slow down. It keeps this constant groove. Plus, the actual samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it’s also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive – because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.
But forgetting the cultural colors, it is a very good vehicle for producing a powerful piece. It becomes less pretentious because it’s a very unpretentious groove. If it had been done as a ballad, it wouldn’t have been as good.

WENNER:Obviously, Altamont gave it a whole other resonance.
JAGGER:Yeah, Altamont is much later than the song, isn’t it? I know what you’re saying, but I’m just stuck in my periods, because you were asking me what I was doing, and I was in my study in Chester Square.
WENNER:After Altamont, did you shy away from performing that song?
JAGGER:Yeah, probably, for a bit.
WENNER:It stigmatized the song in a way?
JAGGER:Yeah. Because it became so involved with [Altamont] – sort of journalistically and so on. There were other things going on with it apart from Altamont.
WENNER:Was it the black-magic thing?
JAGGER:Yeah. And that’s not really what I meant. My whole thing of this song was not black magic and all this silly nonsense – like Megadeth or whatever else came afterward. It was different than that. We had played around with that imagery before – which is “Satanic Majesties” – but it wasn’t really put into words.
---
WENNERid it cause you to back off that kind of satanic imagery?
JAGGER:The satanic-imagery stuff was very overplayed [by journalists]. We didn’t want to really go down that road. And I felt that song was enough. You didn’t want to make a career out of it. But bands did that – Jimmy Page, for instance.
WENNER:Big Aleister Crowley...
JAGGER:I knew lots of people that were into Aleister Crowley. What I’m saying is, it wasn’t what I meant by the song “Sympathy for the Devil.” If you read it, it’s not about black magic, per se.
WENNER:On that same record you did “Street Fighting Man.” Tell me a bit about that.
JAGGER:It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions.
WENNERid you write that song?
JAGGER:Yeah. I wrote a lot of the melody and all the words, and Keith and I sat around and made this wonderful track, with Dave Mason playing the shehani on it live.
WENNER:The shehani?
JAGGER:It’s a kind of Indian reed instrument a bit like a primitive clarinet. It comes in at the end of the tune. It has a very wailing, strange sound.
WENNER:It’s another of the classic songs. Why does it have such resonance today?
JAGGER:I don’t know if it does. I don’t know whether we should really play it. I was persuaded to put it in this tour because it seemed to fit in, but I’m not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don’t really like it that much. I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; DeGaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing.
WENNER:Was this written in response to having seen what was going on with the students in Paris, a direct inspiration from seeing it on television?
JAGGER:Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet....
WENNERleepy London town?
JAGGER:Isn’t “No Expectations” on that record?
WENNER:It’s got that wonderful steel guitar part.
JAGGER:That’s Brian playing. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes.
That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It’s funny how you remember – but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.

WENNER:“Let It Bleed”?
JAGGER:Yeah. What’s on that? It was all recorded at the same time, these two records.
WENNER:What do you mean? Those two records were recorded back to back?
JAGGERome of them were recorded on one and spilled over to the next.
WENNER:It’s got “Midnight Rambler,” “Love in Vain,” “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” This seems to be one of the bleakest records that you made. The songs are very disturbing, and the scenery is ugly. Why this view of the world? The topics are rape, war, murder, addiction....
JAGGER:Well, it’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn’t like World War II, and it wasn’t like Korea, and it wasn’t like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected, and people didn’t want to fight it. The people that were there weren’t doing well. There were these things used that were always used before, but no one knew about them – like napalm.
WENNER:Are you saying the Vietnam War had a heavy influence on this record?
JAGGER:I think so. Even though I was living in America only part time, I was influenced. All those images were on television. Plus, the spill out onto campuses.
WENNER:Who wrote “Midnight Rambler”?
JAGGER:That’s a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don’t know. We wrote everything there – the tempo changes, everything. And I’m playing the harmonica in these little cafes, and there’s Keith with the guitar.
WENNER: “Gimmie Shelter”?
JAGGER:That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that.
WENNER:Whose idea was it to do the Robert Johnson song “Lore in Vain”?
JAGGER:I don’t know. We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson’s. We put in extra chords that aren’t there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that’s another strange song, because it’s very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they’re desolate.
WENNER: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”?
JAGGER:It’s a good song, even if I say so myself.
WENNER:Why is that one so popular?
JAGGER:‘Cause it’s got a very sing-along chorus. And people can identify with it: No one gets what they always want. It’s got a very good melody. It’s got very good orchestral touches that Jack Nitzsche helped with. So it’s got all the ingredients.
WENNER:Anything else you can think of on “Let It Bleed”?
JAGGER:I think it’s a good record. I’d put it as one of my favorites.
---
WENNER:After Brian died, you recorded what has to be considered another classic Stones album, “Sticky Fingers.” Was it strange making an album without Brian?
JAGGER:Oh, yeah. A whole new world, an era away from “Beggars Banquet.” We had Mick Taylor in the band, and we had a new record company. We’d been at Decca, and we’d been rather successful, but we didn’t get paid very much, and it was like being with strangers.
WENNER:The cover of that album is a pair of jeans with a real zipper.
JAGGER:This was Andy Warhol’s idea.
WENNER:There’s underwear on the back. Is that you?
JAGGER:No. It’s one of Andy’s... protégés is the polite word we used to use, I think.
WENNER:All right. That’s the news in this interview. Why does “Brown Sugar” work like mad?
JAGGER:That’s a bit of a mystery, isn’t it? I wrote that song in Australia in the middle of a field. They were really odd circumstances. I was doing this movie, “Ned Kelly,” and my hand had got really damaged in this action sequence. So stupid. I was trying to rehabilitate my hand and had this new kind of electric guitar, and I was playing in the middle of the outback and wrote this tune.
But why it works? I mean, it’s a good groove and all that. I mean, the groove is slightly similar to Freddy Cannon, this rather obscure ‘50s rock performer – Tallahassee Lassie or something. Do you remember this? “She’s down in F-L-A.” Anyway, the groove of that – boom-boom-boom-boom-boom – is “going to a go-go” or whatever, but that’s the groove.

WENNER:And you wrote it all?
JAGGER:Yeah.
WENNER:This is one of your biggest hits, a great, classic, radio single, except the subject matter is slavery, interracial sex, eating pussy...
JAGGER:[Laughs] And drugs. That’s a double-entendre, just thrown in.
WENNER:Brown sugar being heroin?
JAGGER:Brown sugar being heroin and –
WENNER:And pussy?
JAGGER:That makes it... the whole mess thrown in. God knows what I’m on about on that song. It’s such a mishmash. All the nasty subjects in one go.
WENNER:Were you surprised that it was such a success with all that stuff in it?
JAGGER:I didn’t think about it at the time. I never would write that song now.
WENNER:Why?
JAGGER:I would probably censor myself. I’d think, “Oh God, I can’t. I’ve got to stop. I can’t just write raw like that.”
WENNER: “Wild Horses.” Is that a Keith song?
JAGGER:Yeah, it was his melody. And he wrote the phrase “wild horses,” but I wrote the rest of [the lyrics].
WENNER:It’s one of the prettiest.
JAGGER:I like the song. It’s an example of a pop song. Taking this cliché “wild horses,” which is awful, really, but making it work without sounding like a cliché when you’re doing it.
WENNER:What about “Moonlight Mile”? That’s a song without Keith – that’s you and Mick Taylor.
JAGGER:Yeah, we recorded it in my house in the country, Stargroves. And we recorded a lot of stuff [there]: “Bitch,” stuff from “Exile on Main Street.”
WENNER:At the same time? And then just divided the songs between records?
JAGGER:Yeah. It’s a good house to record in. And that’s also where the Who made an album. Led Zeppelin recorded one. But anyway, I remember Mick Taylor playing that song. Real dreamy kind of semi-Middle Eastern piece. Yeah, that’s a real pretty song – and a nice string arrangement.
WENNER:You do “Dead Flowers” on this record. You put on this kind of loopy, country voice.
JAGGER:I love country music, but I find it very hard to take it seriously. I also think a lot of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in cheek. The harmonic thing is very different from the blues. It doesn’t bend notes in the same way, so I suppose it’s very English, really. Even though it’s been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to speak.
WENNERo you have anything to say about “Sister Morphine,” which is also on this album? Did Marianne write part of this?
JAGGERhe wrote a couple of lines; she always says she wrote everything, though. I can’t even tell you which ones. She’s always complaining she doesn’t get enough money from it. Now she says she should have got it all.
WENNER:What is it about?
JAGGER:It’s about a man after an accident, really. It’s not about being addicted to morphine so much as that. Ry Cooder plays wonderfully on that.
WENNER:It’s not what we think it was – it’s not about Marianne Faithfull?
JAGGER:No. If you listen to the lyrics – that’s what I remember, anyway. “Here I lie in my hospital bed.”
WENNER:Cousin cocaine?
JAGGER:Yeah, that’s the bit she wrote.
WENNER:Critics say your next album, “Exile on Main Street,” is the best Stones album. What do you think?
JAGGER:It’s a bit overrated, to be honest. Compared to “Let It Bleed” and “Beggars Banquet,” which I think are more of a piece, I don’t see it’s as thematic as the other two. I’m not saying it’s not good. It doesn’t contain as many outstanding songs as the previous two records. I think the playing’s quite good. It’s got a raw quality, but I don’t think all around it’s as good.
WENNER:What was the atmosphere recording “Exile”?
JAGGER:Well, “Exile on Main Street” was done in different pieces. There’s this part which is recorded at Olympic [Studios], maybe a third. Another part is recorded in my house in the country in England. And half of it’s recorded in Keith’s basement in the South of France, and it’s all mixed in L.A.
WENNER:What was the band like at that time?
JAGGERtoned is the word that might describe it. [Laughs] It’s the first album Mick Taylor’s on, really. So it’s different than previous albums, which had Brian on them – or Brian not on them, as the case may be. It was a difficult period, because we had all these lawsuits going with [business manager] Allen Klein. We had to leave England because of tax problems. We had no money and went to live in the South of France – the first album we made where we weren’t based in England, thus the title.
WENNER:Was the band at its drug zenith at that time?
JAGGER:Yeah.
WENNER:What was the mood? What was the vibe around?
JAGGER:Just winging it. Staying up all night.
WENNER:Keith was a full-scale junkie at that point?
JAGGER:Totally.
WENNER:And everybody else?
JAGGERtoned on something; one thing or another. So I don’t think it was particularly pleasant I didn’t have a very good time. It was this communal thing where you don’t know whether you’re recording or living or having dinner; you don’t know when you’re gonna play, when you’re gonna sing – very difficult. Too many hangers-on.
I went with the flow, and the album got made. These things have a certain energy, and there’s a certain flow to it, and it got impossible. Everyone was so out of it. And the engineers, the producers – all the people that were supposed to be organized – were more disorganized than anybody.

WENNERo it was a classic of that era, when that was a common approach to things.
JAGGER:Absolutely. But the previous ones were easier to make.
WENNER:“Let It Bleed”?
JAGGER:We were still like that, but we were grounded because we were still in England and had this way of doing it. We went to the studio and lived in London. Though it was made in a screwy way, it was organized, structured; a studio rather than a home recording. Those home recordings have a good side to them, but they get floaty; you don’t really know what you’re doing.
WENNER:Who wrote “Tumbling Dice”?
JAGGER:[Laughs] Keith and me. I wrote the lyrics.
WENNER:And he did the groove?
JAGGER:Yeah. It comes back to that thing where I really don’t remember who had the melody or not, but it doesn’t really matter.
WENNER:Why does that beat grab you so quick?
JAGGER:I don’t really know what people like about it. I don’t think it’s our best stuff. I don’t think it has good lyrics. But people seem to really like it, so good for them.
WENNERo you cringe when you hear some of the old drug songs?
JAGGERometimes. Not only the drugs – I just cringe, period.
----
WENNER:After those four great albums, it seems like a weak period starts. There’s “Goats Head Soup” which has “Angie.” And “Black and Blue” has got “Memory Motel” and “Fool to Cry.” But these records are kind of weak after those big ones. What happened? Did it have to do with Keith’s drug use?
JAGGER:Yeah, I think so. I find it so hard to remember, though, I don’t want to commit myself to saying something. I mean, everyone was using drugs, Keith particularly. So I think it suffered a bit from all that. General malaise. I think we got a bit carried away with our own popularity and so on. It was a bit of a holiday period [laughs].
I mean, we cared, but we didn’t care as much as we had. Not really concentrating on the creative process, and we had such money problems. We had been so messed around by Allen Klein and the British Revenue. We were really in a very bad way. So we had to move. And it sort of destabilized us a bit. We flew off all edges.

---
WENNER:You came back, though, with “Some Girls.” Did that have to do, perhaps, with being in New York City?
JAGGER:Yes, you are absolutely right! Well done! I’d moved to New York at that point. The inspiration for the record was really based in New York and the ways of the town. I think that gave it an extra spur and hardness. And then, of course, there was the punk thing that had started in 1976. Punk and disco were going on at the same time, so it was quite an interesting period. New York and London, too. Paris – there was punk there. Lots of dance music. Paris and New York had all this Latin dance music, which was really quite wonderful. Much more interesting than the stuff that came afterward.
WENNER: “Miss You” is one of the all-time greatest Rolling Stones grooves.
JAGGER:Yeah. I got that together with Billy Preston, actually.
WENNER:You and he came up with that?
JAGGER:Yeah, Billy had shown me the four-on-the-floor bass-drum part, and I would just play the guitar. I remember playing that in the El Mocambo club when Keith was on trial in Toronto for whatever he was doing. We were supposed to be there making this live record.
WENNER:That was the first performance of it?
JAGGER:Yeah. I was still writing it, actually. We were just in rehearsal.
WENNER:But that’s a wholly Mick Jagger song?
JAGGER:Yeah.
WENNER:And “Beast of Burden”?
JAGGER:That’s more like Keith’s song. I wrote lyrics.
WENNER:It’s got that really nice little lick on that. And “Respectable”?
JAGGER:Yeah, this is the kind of edgy punk ethos. Yeah, the groove of it – and on all of those songs, the whole thing was to play it all fast, fast, fast. I had a lot of problems with Keith about it, but that was the deal at the time.
WENNER:He told me that you kept trying to make a disco album, and he didn’t think that was the Stones. Was that the problem?
JAGGER:Not at all. I wanted to make more of a rock album. I just had one song that had a dance groove: “Miss You.” But I didn’t want to make a disco album. I wrote all these songs – like “Respectable,” “Lies,” “When the Whip Comes Down.”
WENNERo most of the songs on this album are yours?
JAGGER:No, not most. I only mentioned half. I don’t know what else is on there.
WENNER: “Shattered.”
JAGGER:That’s one of Keith’s and me in combination.
WENNER: “Far Away Eyes”?
JAGGER:Combination. I wasn’t out to make a disco record, making “Far Away Eyes.” But “Miss You” really caught the moment, because that was the deal at the time. And that’s what made that record take off. It was a really great record.
I seem to like records that have one overriding mood with lots of little offshoots. Even though there’s a lot of bases covered, there’s lots of straight-ahead rock & roll. It’s very brass edged. It’s very Rolling Stones, not a lot of frills.

----
WENNER:After “Some Girls” comes “Emotional Rescue.” Does it have a lot of resonance?
JAGGER:No, it doesn’t. You know, “Emotional Rescue” is a lot of leftovers from “Some Girls.” Really.
WENNER:And then comes “Tattoo You.”
JAGGER:Yeah, that’s an old record. It’s all a lot of old tracks that I dug out. And it was very strange circumstances. [Producer] Chris Kimsey and I went through all the tracks from those two previous records. It wasn’t all outtakes; some of it was old songs. And then I went back and found previous ones like “Waiting on a Friend,” from “Goats Head Soup.” They’re all from different periods. Then I had to write lyrics and melodies. A lot of them didn’t have anything, which is why they weren’t used at the time – because they weren’t complete. They were just bits, or they were from early takes. And then I put them all together in an incredibly cheap fashion. I recorded in this place in Paris in the middle of the winter. And then I recorded some of it in a broom cupboard, literally, where we did the vocals. The rest of the band were hardly involved. And then I took it to [producer] Bob Clearmountain, who did this great job of mixing so that it doesn’t sound like it’s from different periods.
WENNER:I think it’s your most underrated record.
JAGGER:I think it’s excellent. But all the things I usually like, it doesn’t have. It doesn’t have any unity of purpose or place or time. What do you think?
WENNER:The playing is so precise on it, so sharp. The band sound is very modern. And it’s got “Start Me Up” on it.
JAGGER:Which is a track that was just forgotten about, a reject.
WENNER:And who wrote “Start Me Up”?
JAGGER:It was Keith’s great riff, and I wrote the rest. The funny thing was that it turned into this reggae song after two takes. And that take on “Tattoo You” was the only take that was a complete rock & roll take. And then it went to reggae completely for about 20 takes. And that’s why everyone said, “Oh, that’s crap. We don’t want to use that.” And no one went back to Take 2, which was the one we used, the rock track.
WENNER:What about “Undercover,” your next album?
JAGGER:Not a very special record.
WENNER:And “Dirty Work”? I think that was the last album the Stones made before you and Keith had a falling out. How was that record?
JAGGER:Not special.
---
WENNER:After “Steel Wheels,” you took a couple of years off and came back with “Voodoo Lounge.” What were your goals going into the album? Is it a better album than “Steel Wheels”?
JAGGER:I don’t know if “Steel Wheels” is better than “Voodoo Lounge,” actually. I don’t think there’s a huge difference of quality between the two albums. I wish there was, but I’m afraid, in the end, I don’t think there is.
WENNER:On “Voodoo Lounge” it seems like you’ve got better, more distinctive songs.
JAGGER:I don’t know. Perhaps if the “Voodoo Lounge” album had been more successful commercially, I might have agreed with you, because commercial success changes everything. It colors your opinions. If it had sold 5 million albums, I’d be saying to you, “It’s definitely better than ‘Steel Wheels.’ ”
WENNER:Let’s talk about it as two rock critics.
JAGGER:That’s different.
WENNER:You told me when you started to make the record that you were going to spend a lot of time on this one, making as good a record as you could possibly make, making sure you’ve got the songs written in advance. You hired a producer, which you hadn’t done for a long time. Do you feel that you’ve met that expectation?
JAGGER:Not completely. But may be we should list the positive things rather than the negative. I think there is a really good feeling of the band on it – that the band is playing very much as a band, even though it’s got one new member [bassist Darryl Jones]. There’s a good variety of songs. It’s not overelaborate. You get a feeling of really being there, and it’s quite intimate in nature. The ballads are rather nice, and then the rock & roll numbers kick quite well and sound enthusiastic – like we’re into it. I think it’s a good frame of reference of what the Rolling Stones were about during that quite limited time in Ireland in that year.
It’s very much a kind of time-and-place album. In that way I was quite pleased with the results. But there were a lot of things that we wrote for “Voodoo Lounge” that Don [Was, the record’s producer] steered us away from: groove songs, African influences and things like that. And he steered us very clear of all that. And I think it was a mistake.

WENNER:What direction did he take you in?
JAGGER:He tried to remake “Exile on Main Street” or something like that. Plus, the engineer was also trying to do the same thing. Their mind-set about it was just too retro. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with it inherently, but they went over the top; they’d gone too far.
WENNER:Maybe that’s why I like it so much. Was Was tugging you toward doing a classic Stones record? Were you trying to fight that?
JAGGER:No, I didn’t really fight it in the end. I gave up because there was no point in it. I think both Charlie and I didn’t really like it, but we could see that that was the direction you could go, and it might be successful. I don’t think it really was that successful, because I don’t think there’s any point in having these over-retro references.
I think it was an opportunity missed to go in another direction, which would have been more unusual, a little more radical, although it’s always going to sound like the Rolling Stones.

- Doxa

I like this interview very much - it's a rare glims on real Jagger and the Rolling Stones as they are, I mean without mythification that so much loved by Keith Richards and rock writes(British especially).
Btw, it's funny what he said about VL. In the end it had sold 5 million albums and now Mick always names it among his favorites

Quote
proudmary
I like this interview very much - it's a rare glims on real Jagger and the Rolling Stones as they are, I mean without mythification that so much loved by Keith Richards and rock writes(British especially).
Btw, it's funny what he said about VL. In the end it had sold 5 million albums and now Mick always names it among his favorites

Does he? I think the reason why VOODOO LOUNGE enjoys a special role (see their official site) is that it is the last album that really sold huge numbers (and they need to pick up some album of the modern age...). It still belonged to the era when albums over-all sold rather well and the record industry was a "big business" (Jagger made the remark quite recently) - it still had a function of its own and not to an excuse to hit the road. I think once Jagger noticed that his interest in making big band effort albums decreased. BRIDGES TO BABYLON was basically Mick and Keith's solo albums combined, so they didn't need to face each other too much, and A BIGGER BANG was done with such small energy and effort as posiible. It would be nice to hear what he thinks of those albums now. "what's in them?" "A-ha. Nothing special".

Funny is that in that interview they don't talk at all of Mick's solo stuff, or how Mick rates it.

- Doxa



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2011-02-17 13:06 by Doxa.

B2B did also sell well.

Quote
DandelionPowderman
B2B did also sell well.

Yeah, that's true. Georgelicks gives such numbers for their last four albums (and we can see the dramatic change happens between BRIDGES and A BIGGER BANG - but check the US sales!):

Steel Wheels (1989) :
USA : 3.200.000
Canada : 350.000 (#1)

Japon : 183.000

Europe : 1.700.000
- UK : 300.000
- France : 300.000 (#6 (4)(28))
- Allemagne : 250.000+ (#2 (6))
- Italie : 150.000 (#40 de l’année (#5))
- Espagne : 50.000+ (#6 (20))
- Norvège : #1 x2(6)(7)
- Pays-Bas : 50.000+ (#1 x2(40))
- Autriche : 25.000 (#1 x2(9)(9))
- Suisse : 25.000 (#2 (7)(12))
- Suède : #2 (6)(12)
- Finlande : 25.227

Estimations Mondiales : 6.200.000



Voodoo Lounge (1994) :
USA : 2.300.000
Canada : 300.000 (#1)
Mexique : 50.000+

Japon : 172.410

Europe : 2.200.000
- UK : 350.000
- France : 300.000 (#2 (10)(27))
- Allemagne : 700.000 (#1 x6(15)(43))
- Italie : 180.000 (#37 de l’année (#4))
- Espagne : 50.000+ (#6 (17))
- Norvège : 20.000 (#3 (6)(11))
- Pays-Bas : 100.000+ (#1 x2(39))
- Autriche : 25.000+ (#1 x3(9)(23))
- Suisse : 25.000+ (#1 x1(8)(18))
- Suède : 40.000+ (#2 x4(8)(16))

Estimations Mondiales : 6.000.000




Bridges To Babylon (1997) :
USA : 1.300.000
Canada : 100.000

Japon : 137.140

Europe : 2.000.000
- UK : 140.000
- France : 220.000 (#2 (4)(23))
- Allemagne : 800.000 (#1 x4(15)(54))
- Italie : 100.000 (#64 de l’année (#7))
- Espagne : 100.000+ (#2 (23))
- Norvège : 20.000 (#1 x1(3)(8))
- Pays-Bas : 100.000 (#1 x1(38))
- Autriche : 50.000 (#1 x5(7)(28))
- Suisse : 50.000 (#3 (8)(22))
- Suède : 40.000+ (#1 x3(5)(18))
- Finlande : #3 (3)(12)
- Belgique : 25.000
- Pologne : 50.000

Estimations Mondiales : 4.500.000






A Bigger Bang (2005) :
USA : 600.000
Canada : 100.000

Japon : 120.000

Europe : 1.200.000
- UK : 150.000
- France : 150.000 (#3 (3)(49))
- Allemagne : 250.000 (#1 x2(4)(19)
- Italie : 180.000 (#21 de l’année (#1))
- Espagne : 50.000+ (#2 (13))
- Norvège : #2 (2)(6)
- Pays-Bas : 40.000+ (#1)
- Autriche : 15.000+ (#1 x2(4)(11))
- Suisse : 20.000 (#1 x2(3)(22))
- Suède : 30.000+ (#1 x3(5)(19))
- Finlande : #4 (2)(5)
- Portugal : 20.000

Estimations Mondiales : 2.800.000

The biggest difference seemed to happen in US sales - their traditional strong market - but good "international results" seemed compansate the defeat there:

3 200 000 (52% of the overall sales) -> 2 300 000 (38%) -> 1 300 000 (29%) -> 600 000 (21%)

- Doxa



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2011-02-17 13:33 by Doxa.

Quote
Brue

Quote
skipstone
The younger generations' opinions mean nothing. They don't even know what real musicians do. Look at what they like. They think the Black Eyed Peas are relevant. There's a ton more crap out now then there was 20 or 30 years ago and it's accessible the easiest ever now and will be for quite some time.

Quit yer cryin skippy. Now here's some hard-hitting nonsense - 'There's a ton more crap out now then there was 20 or 30 years ago and it's accessible the easiest ever now and will be for quite some time.' Yeah and most of it is on internet message boards.

Hey Bruebimbo, you think that's "cryin'" then you obviously need a brain enema. It's very obvious you don't know shit about that subject matter since the only tort you came up with was "message boards". Again, how original.

Regarding changing perceptions of Mick, I find it interesting that much of the mainstream non-rock'n'roll press that loved Mick's Grammy performance is the same mainstream non-rock'n'roll press that was less than positive about Mick's Super Bowl performance (voice is shot, saggy arms, etc.).

I saw both performances as spirited and enjoyable and very representative of what a latter-day Mick Jagger performance is like. What did the press see differently?

Read most parts of the Jann Wenner interview. A good interview by someone who actually cares about the music. It's interesting to know that Jagger thinks "Exile" is overrated and that "Tattoo You" was made, almost, solely by him (and Clearmountain). He speaks well about "Some Girls" but seems to be disappointed with "Wheels" and "Voodoo". And he seems very influated by salesfigures. Thanks for the transcript Doxa!

Mick has always been cool and he still is cool.
He has done some uncool things - Let's Work comes to mind....

Elvis was/is the King of Cool and went to see Nixon about becoming a DEA agent which was very uncool.

Everyone boo boos.

What no one seems to know or discuss about the 80's is that Jagger's own drug problems had spiraled. When his first solo album was a relative disappointment, he cleaned up and dedicated himself to success. Thus, the reconciliation with the band and the showy tours. What's unfortunate is that he seemed to have lost connection with his lyrical muse. Mick is a great performer, and that is cool, but he hasn't been "cool" in a while. It's amusing, well, more irritating really, to see Stones "fanatics" tire of Keith's now cartoonish persona as Stones fans tired of Mick's way back in the 80's. The truth is, cartoons sell. Mick and Keith are two of the very greatest contributors to the history of rock and roll, but they have become cartoon figures where others have flown under the radar. Really though, Dylan and Lou Reed, to name two, are cartoon figures of their own, it's just they don't tour huge stadiums. Anyway, it's good to see Jagger in even a pro forma performance at the Grammys, showing that he's better than everyone else. But don't think Keith had less respect among his peers. No one has more respect among other great rock and rollers than Keith, except perhaps Dylan (Elton's support for Jagger aside).

WENNER:On “Voodoo Lounge” it seems like you’ve got better, more distinctive songs.

JAGGER: I don’t know. Perhaps if the “Voodoo Lounge” album had been more successful commercially, I might have agreed with you, because commercial success changes everything. It colors your opinions. If it had sold 5 million albums, I’d be saying to you, “It’s definitely better than ‘Steel Wheels’.”

That is Mick - he bases success on money, on amounts, not quality.

Quote
skipstone
WENNER:On “Voodoo Lounge” it seems like you’ve got better, more distinctive songs.

JAGGER: I don’t know. Perhaps if the “Voodoo Lounge” album had been more successful commercially, I might have agreed with you, because commercial success changes everything. It colors your opinions. If it had sold 5 million albums, I’d be saying to you, “It’s definitely better than ‘Steel Wheels’.”

That is Mick - he bases success on money, on amounts, not quality.

True, but I think that is something to do with his own involvement or interest - if there is a muse or not. Look how he describes BEGGARS BANQUET/LET IT BLEED era songs, and it is all done from a artistic point of view, not a word of their commercial success (and the song he uses most words in this interview is from an album that is among their worst selling albums ever, BEGGARS BANQUET.) I think the more pragmatic approach - an album is good or band depends on its commercial success - does derive from the latter years. I guess that somehow reflect's Mick own muse (or lack of it). What he says of VOODOO LOUNGE he almost ridicules the idea of the significance of any artistic quality... (but he seemingly immediately contradicts himself by making judgements of its "too retro"-nature, that is, of its artistic nature...)

But it is difficult to say how much the great sales of SOME GIRLS and TATTOO YOU has affect on Mick liking them... and the relative failures of EMOTIONAL RESCUE, UNDERCOVER and DIRTY WORK making the opposite... It can be, but Mick own role and involvement in shaping those two very succesfull albums is really significant, much more than the other three. Plus the very simple fact that SOME GIRLS and TATTOO YOU are clearly better albums than those three... Hmmm... all of those points - wonderful sales, Jagger's inlvolvement, and the goodness - seem to go hand in hand...

- Doxa



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2011-02-19 19:14 by Doxa.

Quote
TeddyB1018
What no one seems to know or discuss about the 80's is that Jagger's own drug problems had spiraled.

a lot of truth to this, I suspect.

What if Mick became a Vegas act singing duets with Dolly parton etc.?

Quote
TeddyB1018
What no one seems to know or discuss about the 80's is that Jagger's own drug problems had spiraled. When his first solo album was a relative disappointment, he cleaned up and dedicated himself to success. Thus, the reconciliation with the band and the showy tours. What's unfortunate is that he seemed to have lost connection with his lyrical muse. Mick is a great performer, and that is cool, but he hasn't been "cool" in a while. It's amusing, well, more irritating really, to see Stones "fanatics" tire of Keith's now cartoonish persona as Stones fans tired of Mick's way back in the 80's. The truth is, cartoons sell. Mick and Keith are two of the very greatest contributors to the history of rock and roll, but they have become cartoon figures where others have flown under the radar. Really though, Dylan and Lou Reed, to name two, are cartoon figures of their own, it's just they don't tour huge stadiums. Anyway, it's good to see Jagger in even a pro forma performance at the Grammys, showing that he's better than everyone else. But don't think Keith had less respect among his peers. No one has more respect among other great rock and rollers than Keith, except perhaps Dylan (Elton's support for Jagger aside).

Sadly, we all become a cartoon in the end, a parody of our former selves.

He will always be cool.He is Mick.

when has mick ever not been cool?

I like the Wenner interview because it qualifies the myth that Keith wrote EVERYTHING in the 60ies and Mick SOMETIMES filled in some lines.

Talking about coolness. That's one more Jagger' interview that makes sense now after Life

In 1992, the members of the Rolling Stones went off to make solo albums - with the exception of the bassist Bill Wyman, who simply went off. (Jagger isn't naming likely replacements, though his office briskly denies that The Who's John Entwistle is up for the job.) So, after the Charlie Watts album and the Ronnie Wood album and the Keith Richards album, here comes the Mick Jagger album which, in a radical break with the traditional way of Mick Jagger solo albums (there have been two before this), is actually rather good.
'Y'know, what's odd is that only Charlie has done a solo album which really went away from the band. The rest of the band, including myself, has done albums which are not really a million miles away from what we do in the Rolling Stones - a little bit different, sure, and done with a different attitude. But it's not as different as Charlie doing his Charlie Parker tribute. Keith's album sounds to me exactly how it is when he says to me, 'I've got this song and it goes like this.' He didn't really go out on a limb there. Ronnie the same.' Maybe this reveals where everyone's heart is. 'Yeah. Or maybe it just shows a complete lack of imagination.'

Jagger says he wrote most of the songs for Wandering Spirit at his home in the Loire Valley, choosing it above his homes in New York, London and Mustique because 'I've got this little room there, which is sort of like a library and it's really good for making demos in.' Friends dropped in for weekends and fortnights (Charlie Watts, Doug Wimbish) and the songs formed as they fooled around - 'a kind of folky / country one', 'a Stones-ey kind of joke tune', 'a stop-time rocker, sort of a lollopy thing with a few lurches in it'. Perhaps the best is 'Sweet Thing', the new single, for which Jagger shifts into falsetto - the strange, muted howl heard on 'Fool to Cry', 'Miss You', 'Emotional Rescue'.

There was a point in the 1980s when it seemed Jagger would have to go solo for good. In an argument that nearly polished off the Rolling Stones, he was accused by Richards of smuggling a solo deal into the terms of the Stones' group contract. The issue confirmed for some a suspicion that Jagger was the McCartney to Keith Richards' Lennon: Jagger the flip entertainer, the business specialist, the money man, set in unflattering contrast with Richards, the rock'n'roller who never sold out. But perhaps this is a point of view notable less for its accuracy about Jagger than for its rosy vision of Richards, whose freedom to wander around looking famously wasted is to some extent guaranteed by Jagger's hold on the Stones' business affairs.

'There's a lot of bullshit that Keith never got involved with. Not that I wanted him to get involved, because you get two people involved it takes twice as long, it's another committee for everything. But there's a lot goes on in making a record that isn't to do with guitar-playing or songwriting. I work a lot with Charlie on a lot of aspects of it. And Keith knows that if Charlie and I are doing it, then it's not only me, and it's not only Charlie.'

The fury between them dispersed. Richards has said they've been firmer friends since. As if to confirm it, last December Jagger pushed his way into the over-stuffed Marquee Club to watch his writing partner play a furtive solo show. 'It was a good gig. Kind of too small. And the drums were so loud upstairs. I was on the balcony which was full of rather horrible-looking people in raincoats; rather ugly-looking crowd, up on the balcony - all the liggers. Of course, I've seen him up close, so for me it wasn't a novelty.' Cue the Jagger grin, a wicked flash of teeth, eyes closed entirely.

In March, Jagger and Richards will begin writing the next Stones album. 'We've got to talk about where we're going to do this. Maybe I'll go over to Keith's place in Connecticut and then maybe we can go to the Caribbean. But it helps to charge up being in the city first, because it's sort of city music. If you spend your whole life in the country, you start to write like The Byrds. Which may not be what's needed.'

As with Lennon & McCartney, the question of who wrote what in the Jagger /Richards partnership has taxed the curious - a mystery compounded in their case by the instability of the authors' own recollections. 'Sometimes,' says Jagger, sounding both amused and narked, 'I see what Keith remembers he wrote and I say, 'it's completely wrong, y'know? That's not true at all, you're thinking of that other song. So wrong, you were not even anywhere near there.'

'But I do remember 'Brown Sugar'. I had one of the first electric guitars you could play through headphones. And I was shooting the film Ned Kelly and I was out in the middle of this field, way in the middle of nowhere in Australia, on an afternoon off. Somehow I'd shot my hand during a gun sequence, and it was all stitched up - the film company was really worried, because they thought I was going to sue them - and I'd just managed to get my hand together to play guitar again. So I went out with these headphones on and I started to play and it was 'Brown Sugar'.

'And 'Sympathy for the Devil', I can remember; I was living in this big house in Belgravia, wandering around with an acoustic guitar. It started out as a Bob Dylan thing - 'Please allow me to introduce myself' - and then it became this samba . . .'

He says 'Sympathy for the Devil' is still among his favourite songs to perform, along with 'Start Me Up'. 'On the last tour, we opened with 'Start Me Up' and I sang 'Sympathy' from a tower. And all these other factors come into play. I mean, how can you divorce yourself from the fact that you're singing the first bit on top of a tower? Or that, in 'Start Me Up', it all goes BANG] before you go on and suddenly you're on in front of all these people? So all these events stick in there.

'And I always enjoy doing 'Ruby Tuesday' - you can get your voice around it. It's also quite difficult, cos normally you can't hear what's going on. On stage with the Stones, you're flying blind most of the time, to be honest. Sometimes I look at Keith and I don't know what he's playing and I'm trying to make Charlie play the time, cos I can't hear him, and so on, and when I hit the note right at the bottom - hopeless. It's the numbers that aren't so well known that are hardest: people are listening, but you don't know if they're really enjoying them, or if they think it's a bore and they should go out and get hot dogs.

'Before I go on, I'll sit down at the keyboards and sing a couple of blues songs. And I'll do 'Start Me Up' in different keys for a joke. Or 'Start Me Up' in minor keys, which is even weirder. If you go on cold, you blow your voice after three numbers. Which I did for quite a few years. But I took some advice. Most rock singers never warmed up - they'd have a couple of vodkas and a big joint and then go on. And no wonder you had so many people who had problems with their throats.'

Some think that, as a performing spectacle, the Rolling Stones are now lost to the depressing rituals of stadium rock - jetting between football grounds to play the same set, on the same stage, adulation guaranteed. Even their dressing-room furniture travels the world with them, wheeled backstage at every venue to maintain a reassuringly familiar atmosphere in those tricky pre-show moments. And while there are clearly those who enjoy watching rock in Wembley Stadium, Mick Jagger isn't among them. 'I went as a punter to watch a rock show there. I was in the so-called Royal Box - it's terrible, so far away. If the screens aren't any good, you can't see anything. Plus you can't turn it up very loud there, 'cos of all the sound restrictions.' He lets loose a noisy laugh. 'Great value for money, that is.'

And yet he's a defender of the big-scale show and of the skill involved in making it work. 'It's bullshit they're all the same. Each town has its own feeling - different personalities, and the different make-up of the culture, and the look of audiences, what they wear. And occasionally, you'll get a slow one. A dead stadium audience is, like, a nightmare. You can't just expect people to get into it - they might be cold or tired or bored, or waited too long. You get out there and you've got this rush of energy. But the whole deal is, you've got to cool down and suss out what sort of audience it is. You've got to think, well, these people in front are really wild and crazy, we don't have to worry about them. But those people to the side, we could lose them, so we've got to play to them.

'Last time around, we had that funny show at Wembley, the World Cup semi-final show? England versus Germany. I remember going through the details beforehand with Harvey (Goldsmith, concert promoter), and I said, ooh well, it's the World Cup semis, maybe we'd better not play that night. But then I thought, well, England's never going to get in the semi-final - great confidence in English football - we'll be all right. And of course it did happen. And everyone was watching little TVs, or listening to the radio. When the goal went in, Woody thought it was his solo that was getting applause. Only Woody could be so far removed from the reality. Thought his solo went down better here than it went down anywhere.'

All that stadium-adjusted thrusting and posturing can also pay off in the studio. The record producer Alan Winstanley once spoke about recording Jagger's duet with David Bowie on a cover version of 'Dancing in the Street'. During run-throughs, the hired musicians were in trouble, sounding like some limp nightclub act. Then Jagger arrived and walked directly into the sound-room, punching the air and pushing his lips out, a spinning parody of himself; and suddenly the drummer started hitting harder, the bass player locked in tighter and the whole thing drew together. This would have to be Jagger's grandest musical asset: he fires people up.

But who fired up Mick Jagger? Can he even remember any more, sat at the heart of the Rolling Stones' collosal business machine? There is at least one moment on the new album which suggests that, left to his own devices, he remembers well enough. It's where he covers a song called 'Think', a number he used to hear James Brown sing when, in the 1960s, Jagger would hang around during Brown's residencies at the Apollo.

'He was like a kind of father figure, he was full of advice. 'I'm a businessman,' he would say, 'I'm a businessman'. I don't know if this actually impressed me - he didn't strike me as a businessman very much - but that's what he wanted to be. And I used to watch how he'd handle the audience. And his dance steps, which I could never really do. I used to try, but I could only manage the one where you wiggle across the stage on one foot.

'And James had this valet who would always hold James's trousers out for him ready. And James would be talking to me and he'd take no notice of this guy with the trousers, who was just left standing there. This was my introduction into the way things are done in the world of . . .' Jagger twitches in his chair. 'Well, in the world of James Brown, anyway.'
[www.independent.co.uk]