Mick Jagger: The Rolling Stone Interview
“A certain prudent man,
when he felt himself to be in love,
hung a little bell round his neck
to caution women that he was dangerous.
Unfortunately for themselves
they took too much notice of it;
and he suffered accordingly.”
— A.R. Orage
I‘ve been missing the Rolling Stones for years — ever since they released Exile on Main Street, as a matter of fact. Of course, I’ve seen them on their occasional concert tours — which have become more and more circuslike — and enjoyed a number of their mid-Seventies songs (“Star Star,” “If You Really Want to Be My Friend,” “Time Waits for No One,” “Fool to Cry,” “Memory Motel”). But during their post-Exile period, the Stones seem to have been around more in body than in spirit.
In their original Sixties incarnation, the Rolling Stones presented an eerie quality that combined the hustling menace of the spiv, the coolness of the dandy and the unpredictable amorality and frivolity of the Greek gods. And in such a guise, they exuberantly took on the role of devil’s advocate for what was then beginning to be thought of as the Love Generation — ridiculing the vices and hypocrisies of family and social life in songs like “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Mother’s Little Helper” (“Doctor, please/Some more of these,/Outside the door,/She took four more”). But the Stones didn’t stop there. As seemingly unassimilable voices of disengagement, they attacked the vice of the spirit of society itself in such songs as “Sympathy for the Devil” and “2000 Man” (“Oh, daddy, is your brain still flashing/Like it did when you were young?/Or did you come down crashing/Seeing all the things you done?/Oh, it’s a big put-on”)
As spoken and sung by their shining and narcissistic knight, Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones — as I once wrote in these pages — presented themselves as beings of exalted indifference, innocent malice, careless cruelty. It was these ambiguous mixtures of emotions that one found in such songs as “Play with Fire,” “Back Street Girl” and “Star Star” — a mixture revealing the disturbing yet fascinating quality of a child grown up too soon, like a six-year-old dragging on a cigarette. And it was this “child” who dangerously explored the ever-lurking but disapproved world of sex and drugs in such songs as “Under My Thumb,” Sister Morphine” and “Monkey Man.”
Yet when the Stones were at their most exploitative, they seemed their most liberating, because we became aware of the reversal of that social and psychological pathology by which the oppressed identify with their oppressors: we sensed that the Stones, from their position of indifferent power, were singing in the voice of the hurt and abused, thereby magically transcending all humiliating barriers (“But it’s all right now In fact it’s a gas”).
It is exactly this kind of playful yet powerful ambiguity that I have missed in the Stones’ work during the recent, musically dispiriting past few years. But now we have Some Girls — an album that draws on, in a remarkably unhackneyed way, the Stones’ love for blues, the Motown sound, for country music and Chuck Berry, and that combines and transforms these elements into the group’s most energized, focused, outrageous and original record since the days of ‘Between the Buttons,’ ‘Beggar’s Banquet,’ ‘Let It Bleed’ and ‘Exile on Main Street.’ And it is an album that thematically crystallizes the Stones’ perennial obsession with “some girls” — both real and imaginary.
After years of standing in the shadows, the soul survivors are back on their own, with no direction home, sounding just like…the Rolling Stones.
The following interview with Mick Jagger took place during two evenings in late April and early May at Rolling Stones Records in New York.
You’ve been a Rolling Stone for about fifteen years. How does it feel?
What a funny question! It’s a long time, maybe too long. Maybe it’s time to restart a cycle — yeah, restart a five-year cycle.
Along with the Who, the Rolling Stones are two of the last Sixties English rock groups that are still together.
I think both groups are very fragile.
There are rumors that the Rolling Stones will break up very soon.
That’s rubbish. They said it in 1969, too. They say it all the time. Both groups are fragile because they’ve got problems of various kinds. The Who’s are different from ours. In our case, if Keith [Richard] gets put into prison, it makes the future of our band a bit shaky. I mean, he goes on trial October 21st, and you know what the charge is: peddling heroin, which is punishable by life imprisonment.
Maybe we can start talking about “Miss You,” which you’ve released in three versions: a 45 disc, an LP track and a twelve-minute version, on which there’s a fantastic harmonica solo by a guy named Sugar Blue, who plays like a snake charmer.
Yeah, Sandy Whitelaw discovered him playing in the Paris Métro. He’s a blues harpist from America, and he plays not only in the subway but in a club called La Vielle Grille. He’s a very strange and talented musician.
The lines in the song about being called up at midnight by friends wanting to drag you out to a party remind me of “Get Off My Cloud.”
I’ve a limited number of ideas [laughing].
And I like the line, “You’ve been the star in all my dreams.”
Dreams are like movies, in a way. Or movies are like dreams.
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