>> it's the comment he said about vanity carrying the band that I didn't get. <<

smile: well, maybe that's because the quote is: "Vanity will not carry a band." which it won't.
as in: vanity is not the only ingredient needed to be a successful performing artist.
i hope most of us here can agree that vanity is not all that Mick has going for him. it's just part of it.
swing on ...

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nellcote'71
Keith never brought attention to his teeth or heroin addiction back in the day.
He just went about his business without trying to be a rock star - and he became the ultimate rock star in the process.

that's not true at all. Don't you see oldham's pop star-making process going full tilt from 1963-69? keith was a full participant there.

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nellcote'71
Keith is the Stones musically, for me.
I just don't like some of what he's become, that's all.
And judging from the comments on this 3 page thread it appears as though that's the majority opinion, that's all.

majority opinion doesn't seem so relevant when it's an individual's personality (or public-relations version of a personality) under discussion. Do you think he's going to adjust based on a vote?

Anyway, the Stones are actually also mick (a musician, we sometimes forget, even when he's only singing), brian, charlie, bill, and ron, and it's a good thing, too.

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with sssoul
>> it's the comment he said about vanity carrying the band that I didn't get. <<

smile: well, maybe that's because the quote is: "Vanity will not carry a band." which it won't.
as in: vanity is not the only ingredient needed to be a successful performing artist.
i hope most of us here can agree that vanity is not all that Mick has going for him. it's just part of it.
swing on ...

I know that, of course :-)

the problem is, that Keith gets asked, what he thinks about Mick´s onstage presence, and he says "excuse me while i laugh", and than he talks only! about vanity

The 'excuse me while I laugh' comment - if you read the actual interview - is quite clearly directed at what he considers to be a simplistic synopsis of the film on the part of the interviewer - not at Mick.

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bumbum
Anybody has the whole interview?

Yes...and the hysteria on here over a perceived outburst of Mick-bashing where none actually exists is absolutely laughable.

"...in an interview to promote a Martin Scorsese documentary about the band..."

Hey, Keith's been doing this kind of thing for decades -- it gets press when they're promoting a new product or tour, and it keeps them in the public eye when they're off the road.

hey guys ,keith is talkin of one of the most famous rock singer in the world,bad publicity is good for the stones,never give up on a thing.

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DandelionPowderman
"Fool in the Rain" ><

Some dance track

Well, people have told me it's hilarious when I dance to it...or almost any song for that matter...

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NumberOneStonesFan
I'd like to view a video clip of this interview dialogue to better understand the context of what Keef intended.....

Yeah - to see Keith and how he talks, is a totally different thing than a shortend written interview....

I'm sure, a video of that interview would undo a lots o' folks knots from their knickers.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2008-03-01 03:28 by open-g.

if it werent for micks vanity, the stones would vanish into thin air, try that one on for size keith

Keith needs Mick to stay cool
By Craig Brown
Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 01/03/2008


Are you a Mick or a Keith? In my experience, middle-aged men who like to think they are cool prefer to see themselves as Keith Richards, not Mick Jagger.

Even if, in real life, these men are high-powered bankers or fast-talking media moguls, in their fantasy lives they like to think of themselves as cool and sluggish rather than uptight and eager. I suspect it all goes back to their school days, when nothing could be worse than to be considered "keen".

Now aged 64, Keith Richards still likes to sneer at Mick Jagger for excessive keenness. "Mick's a maniac," he told the magazine Uncut this week. "He can't get up in the morning without knowing immediately who he's going to call. Meanwhile, I just go, 'Thank God I'm awake,' and wait for three or four hours before I do anything. He is a power freak and there's nothing we can do about it. Let him bugger about. It doesn't make any difference to what we do."

This is the sort of thing that Keith has been saying about Mick for most of their lives, often recycling the same old words. He is nothing if not repetitive. "Me, I wake up, praise the Lord, then make sure all the phones are turned off," Keith said in an interview three years ago, adding: "Mick has to get up in the morning with a plan."

Sometimes, it seems that Keith can only define himself as a sort of reverse version of Mick: Mick is insufferably busy, vain, restless, bourgeois, aspirational, so Keith - good old Keith - is laid back, unambitious, naughty, grounded, cool. Forty years ago, Mick and Keith filled in Proust questionnaires for a magazine called Rave, now sadly defunct. I have a copy in front of me. Their answers look like blueprints for the future. To the question, "Who are your favourite heroes in real life?" Mick answered "Dukes", while Keith answered, "The Great Train Robbers".

Unfortunately, even the coolest dudes have mothers, and mothers are notorious for remembering just that little bit too much. "Keith was very chubby," his mother, Doris once chuckled to a reporter. "He was squat, had fat little legs and always seemed to have a cold."

But by the time Keith was 18, he was already achieving a certain measure of cool, albeit within strict financial parameters. For instance, he spent the long, cold winter of 1962-63 lying in bed, gobbing at a makeshift target on the wall.

Mick would not have approved: he always took a pride in his appearance, and liked things neat and tidy. Meanwhile, Keith preferred to throw dirty saucepans out of the window rather than wash them. As early as 1961, he had acquired the nickname Mr Unhealthy. He has always liked fast cars, but has never had the organisational skills necessary for a smooth drive. When he owned a vintage Mercedes, he was so put out by the presence of gears that he used to start it, judderingly, in third gear, and keep it there throughout each trip.

I suppose this all adds up to some sort of study in cool, but where on earth would Keith be without Mick? It is hard to imagine that he would have been able to afford a vintage Mercedes, with or without gears. Without the over-energetic Mick leaping out of bed every morning armed with a new plan, I fear Keith would still be lying in that bed, still gobbing at the wall.

Over the age of 30, there is a thin line dividing Cool from Sad, and that line is provided by wealth. Keith Richards remains the King of Cool largely because he is a multi-millionaire. If he had, by chance, ended up as the lead guitarist with, say, The Swinging Blue Jeans, and he was at present on a Sixties Revival Tour, I doubt we would now be so full of admiration for his funny little laid-back ways.

The continuing success of The Rolling Stones can be put down to Mick Jagger's eagerness to make phone calls, to his shrewd and hopelessly uncool business sense. By my calculation, the last time the Rolling Stones had a top ten hit was with Start Me Up, which reached Number 7 in the charts in August 1981.

In that same year, he managed to persuade the group to accept corporate sponsorship for their world tour, from the cosmetics group Jovan. At the time, this seemed outlandishly un-rock'n'roll, but it is now par for the course: these days, most major rock groups seem to be far more into developing their property portfolios than they are into sex, or drugs, or even rock 'n' roll.

Jagger's astute business sense ensured that, in some paradoxical way, the fewer hits they had, the more the money came in. The Rolling Stones Voodoo Lounge tour of 1994-5 earned them $320 million, and remains the largest-grossing rock concert tour. Their Forty Licks tour in 2002-3 earned them $300 million, and is the second-largest grossing tour ever.

Walter Yetnikoff, the former chairman of CBS Records, once observed quite how impressive Jagger could be as a negotiator. "In his head, he figured out what the French royalty would be on a record, doing the conversion and taking off the tax," he said, confessing, "I can't do that without my royalty guide."

According to one of his biographers, after one American tour, Jagger flew straight from New York to Switzerland with $1.2 million to deposit straight into a numbered account.

The Rolling Stones' last world tour was sponsored by the mortgage company Ameriquest. "The Rolling Stones offer a great platform to communicate our brand as proud sponsors of the American dream," explained a delighted spokesman.

Meanwhile, all Keith Richards has to do is pick up his guitar every four or five years, play cool, and poke fun, in his rambling, repetitive way, at the man who has made it all possible.

Asked last week about Jagger's powerful on-stage presence, he scoffed: "Excuse me while I laugh. He's a bit vain, let's put it like that. Meanwhile, the band can go to work. Vanity will not carry a band. But a band can carry vanity."

There is something increasingly reminiscent of Steptoe and Son about Richards and Jagger, with Keith resembling the raddled old Albert Steptoe, forever grumbling about young Harold's frantic desire to improve himself.

But it is Young Mick who keeps the show on the road; without him, Keith would have lost all claims to coolness. Instead, he would be just another wheezy old man, experiencing trouble with his gears.


[www.telegraph.co.uk]

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Gazza
The 'excuse me while I laugh' comment - if you read the actual interview - is quite clearly directed at what he considers to be a simplistic synopsis of the film on the part of the interviewer - not at Mick.

Are you sure? I hope so. I still don't get the comment about Mick's vanity not being able to carry the band. I don't know why he has to sound so sarcastic all the time, especially with Mick.

But it is Young Mick who keeps the show on the road; without him, Keith would have lost all claims to coolness. Instead, he would be just another wheezy old man, experiencing trouble with his gears.


Instead of being a wheezy old man whose wife won't let him drive at all... ><

You might have to scrape me off the floor at the end of the tour, but it'll be really good scrapings. - Mick Jagger

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Bashlets
Hey, THEIF IN THE NIGHT made a great point two posts up. How many casual fans or non die hards don't have a hard time listening to Keith's voice every time it comes on?
Keith needs to fu_king grow up. We all bitch about the back up singers, but I think they are there mostly to limit Keith's backing vocals. Overall, Jagger can still hit most of the notes that he did before. Does anyone really believe Keith could still sing harmony live like on Sweet Virginia like he did in 1972 without it sounding like complete shit? I wish he could but to claim he can is just out and out denial.
I love both Jagger and Richards....but Keith has become so lazy over the past 20 years. Why aren't more of his songs on ABB? Could it be they are half completed ideas with no follow-through. Watch the Four Flicks doc when he is recording LOSING MY TOUCH. He's winging the whole thing. Then he boasts about writing BS, JJF in some interview. Hey dude, that was a looong time ago. I suspect he has tons of these half finished jams in his Connecticut home. I think Keith thinks he can "wing it" every time based on his past achievements.Richards has been the weak link in the Glimmers for a long time.

I don't know about all of this.At least Richards does not sound like a female.How many non-diehard Stones fans even know about Richards lead vocal songs?If they did hear How Can I Stop,Slipping Away,or All About You for possible examples on XM,I doubt that many people would be annoyed by it the way they are by listening to Plant scream like a woman in the middle of intercourse.

Richards' body of work speaks for itself.Lazy over the past 20 years - it's more like eight years or so since the '99 tour ended that he could have been more active but,let's be realistic,that's when he started becoming an old-timer.He has done way more than enough.At this point,he does not need to write one more song.

I dunno, I LOVE it when he gets headlines and says whatever he wants. I don't even mind when it's all taken out of context. I think it's funny and I think he knows exactly what he's doing. He's a master at the game. What I don't like is how they've messed around with the Winehouse stuff to make it come off as "Keith says to say no to drugs," kind of thing.

But I love it when the Stones are in the news and if they're being bad boys or cranky old men.... same difference!

Things have changed after that accident, just hope he doesn't turn into Gary Busey.

Now i wanna see the interview!!!

There is, of course, more than one sort of vanity. Both of them are fairly obsessed by their image and how they look (not unreasonably, given the amount of people who look at them!). While Jagger has always had the the reputation for physical vanity, I am always surprised that Keith is regarded as unconcerned about his appearance and yet wears more makeup, dyes his hair etc and has more obviously had facial surgery than Mick (although it may be due to drug abuse than for purely cosmetic reasons). More to the point, I would describe Mick's obsessions with exercise, care of his voice and stage presentation as consumate professionalism rather than vanity. Unlike his fellow Glimmer who seems to think the paying public should be satisfied with seeing him whatever state he is in or how he plays, Jagger's drive to maintain standards suggests he is rather more humble about his intrinsic worth than Keith.

I totally agree with you LadyJayne.

How do you front a band like the Rolling Stone's without being vain?

I don't see how Keef's comments were meant to be bitter or offensive. I think he was trying to make a point.

By the way, you can tell that Keith likes a lot Mick's presence on stage. he also knows Mick's the best, and of course he respects a lot him for that. So I think he was mostly joking on the interview.

Let's not forget the Stones' PR machine will be in overdrive right now in advance of Shine A Light. We've already seen the Hell's Angels attempt on Jagger's life story appear so expect a lot more of these spins to get the boys back in the news.

you're right...these recent "news stories" are not merely a coincidence.

wouldn't be surprised if the next one alludes to ahmet ertugan's
final conversation with keith before ahmet's fall which lead to his death.
just something to ignite a little more interest in the Beacon Theatre show.


IORR............but I like it!