Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue

by Marc Spitz

  Ferry, in Montreaux recording his next solo album, The Bride Stripped Bare, heard through the grapevine of world travelers that Hall had been spotted with Mick. Soon it was in the gossip columns. He froze up. When Hall’s father passed away from cancer, he sent her his condolences via telegram. “Brian took me leaving him very badly,” Hall recalled. “He kept all my clothes.”

  Eric Clapton never did much with the heartache that Carla Bruni left (he gave at the office there with “Layla”). Roxy’s next album featured his own “she did me wrong” song, the kind that Mick was an unlikely master at. The gorgeous “Dance Away,” like much of The Bride Stripped Bare, was written for Jerry Hall, and about the man who stole her away: “Yesterday, when it seemed so cool,” Ferry croons, until he sees his Texan beauty “hand in hand with another guy.” She’s dressed to kill, but he’s the one who’s dyin’. That is, until he feels the beat. Ferry danced his pain away (the cover of Roxy’s album Manifesto has about eight girls on the cover) but ostensibly learned from his mistake: bringing the girl he adores to a Rolling Stones concert. “I had left a book by the bed called The Mists of Avalon, about Druids,” Hall writes of one of the possessions she left behind in the home they shared. “Bryan wrote a beautiful album called Avalon that was a huge success.” That album, released in 1982, had a bird of prey on the cover. “Mick could out-irony Bryan anytime,” says music journalist Rob Sheffield. “I love ‘Dance Away.’ One of the best late Roxy songs. The thing is, Bryan always meant it . . . he never had the ironic escape clause that Mick always had.”

  Jagger and Hall stayed together longer than expected: twentytwo years and four kids, culminating in a later-contested ritual wedding in Bali (which involved the sacrificing of a chicken), but their relationship was ultimately a victim of the same thing that vexed Chrissie Shrimpton and Bianca (and potentially several dozen others). In 1989 he began seeing Bruni, and has continued to chase women, including the young Angelina Jolie.

  “Making love and breaking hearts, it is a game for youth,” Jagger sang in 1981 on “Waiting on a Friend.” It’s probably one of the things that indeed keeps him young, but certainly in exchange for a lot of collateral heartache. Hall finally kicked Mick out after he had a baby with model Luciana Morad (he is now linked with fashion designer L’Wren Scott). She has since gone on to star in a reality show in which she picks a boyfriend from a group of contestants. She’s currently a Levitra spokeswoman, which is, in its own way, pretty darn camp.

  16

  “State of Shock”

  The 1980s were about big dreams and wild, ultimately fruitless, ideas: trickle-down economics, Star Wars nuclear missile defense shields, time machines built out of DeLoreans, Cop Rock, and the notion that Mick Jagger as a solo artist might have more pull than Mick Jagger, front man of the Rolling Stones, the greatest rock and roll band in the world. One can’t really fault Jagger, who turned thirty-seven in the summer of 1980, for starting to feel a little restless and thinking that it may be more dignified to go it alone. In September, John Lennon gave what would become one of his very last interviews to Playboy in promotion of his comeback Double Fantasy. Lennon had spent the ’70s on a spiritual journey that took him from wounded, primal-screaming ex-Beatle to inebriated Lost Weekender to househusband and father and now, at forty, a wise, mature rock and roll adult; perhaps the first of his kind. With typical Lennon acid wit, he turned his eye toward the Stones, who released their seventeenth album, Emotional Rescue, in June. “You know, they’re congratulating the Stones on being together 112 years,” Lennon said. “Whoopee, you know . . . whoopee. At least Charlie and Bill still got their families. In the’80s they’ll be asking, ‘Why are these guys still together? Can’t they hack it on their own? Why do they have to be surrounded by a gang? Is the little leader frightened someone’s gonna knife him in the back?’ That’s gonna be the question. They’re gonna look at the Beatles and Stones and all those guys as relics . . .”

  The words reportedly stung Mick deeply. Lennon was the Beatle both he and Keith felt closest to, the band’s leader and a sort of older-brother figure. On the Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus DVD from their shelved 1968 concert special, Mick calls John “Winston” (his given middle name, although he later changed it to “Ono”). John calls Mick “Michael.” The Beatles gave the Stones their first Top 10 British single and carved a path they could follow through America. Now it seemed John was again clearing brush and building roadways into adulthood and daring Mick and Keith to follow him there—if they could.

  Ironically, the Stones were finally in a good place creatively, better than they’d been through much of the ’70s. Some Girls yielded three hit singles in the chart-topping “Miss You,” “Beast of Burden,” another all-time classic, and the punky, tough “Shattered.” Even Lennon admitted that their first single of the new decade, “Emotional Rescue,” was a beautiful song. “Emotional Rescue,” is perhaps the most eccentric Stones single ever released. Like Lennon’s own “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” it’s a song suite. Mick sings the verses in falsetto, addressing, yet again, a woman in trouble, a gold digger locked up in a tower. The groove of “Emotional Rescue,” like “Miss You,” is built around a club disco bass line, heavily indebted, like most singles from that era, to Chic’s Bernard Edwards. Charlie plays the beat with a swing; four on the floor and as light as smoke-machine vapor. Mick wrote the song while sitting alone at an electric piano, which gives it a late-night, urban-soul feel as well. In the studio, Bobby Keys’s snaky, vaguely porn-soundtrack sax is another highlight. It’s avant-garde pop that you can roller disco to; not at all out of place with the post-punk era’s early pop hits like “Money” by the Flying Lizards, “Pop Muzik” by M, or “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s, and points the way to where Mick might have wanted to take the band. Keith, off heroin since the late ’70s, couldn’t see why being a killer blues-rock combo was not enough. It was a new wave, and only one of the Glimmer Twins seemed eager to ride it.

  The Stones still looked great, too. Between March and July of 1980, they shot two video clips for the title track, one in a strobe-lit “Thermo-graphic” mode, calling to mind the cover sleeve for the album, also entitled Emotional Rescue, and a second with the band performing in a red, black, and white backdropped room, with snatches of the Thermo-graphic footage edited, but mostly with nothing but their personalities as pyrotechnics. This would be the first footage that a new generation would see of the Stones. The band adapted well to the new world of video thanks largely to the miles of attitude they brought to the set. Most of the ’60s-born artists who pioneered the video clip look either sullen by design or perturbed by having to lip-synch (check out the early Moody Blues videos). Only a few seemed ready for the camera: Rod Stewart, the solo Robert Plant, Paul McCartney, and, of course, the flamboyant Elton John.

  In the “Emotional Rescue” clip, the Stones not only look like the “gang” that Lennon indicted; they seem at peace and then some when faced with this new marketing burden. They giggle at each other as if to say, “Crazy, man. We’re making a . . . ‘video.’ Wot? We used to call these ‘promos.’ ” Keith is in full rock and roll lion mode, healthy, fit, with a little silver in his hair. Ron Wood looks like he’s just heard a good dirty joke (but then he always looks that way). Even Charlie manages a smirk. The video for the follow-up single is even better, with Keith resplendent in leopardprint and Mick in red and black singing into a très new wave checkerboard microphone in what appears to be the freezer compartment of a small Frigidaire. “When I touch her, my hand just froze!” he shouts while staring with mock alarm at his clawlike fingers. The videos off Tattoo You, their classic 1981 release, were better still, with Mick in a skintight purple tank top and white sweats doing Joe Jagger–style calisthenics for “Start Me Up.” “Hang Fire” featured inexplicable cuts to giant, oiled breasts squeezed into a red bikini top; “Worried About You” and “Neighbors” were fun and feisty; and, best of all, “Waiting on a Friend” perfectly captures an aimless day in Lower
Manhattan, featuring Mick literally waiting on Keith on a stoop in New York’s East Village. They got music video. They were still making one hit after another.

  The ’80s were going to be great for this band! Weren’t they?

  Mick was the first superstar to tape an endorsement for MTV. In the late summer of ’81, the channel was a fledgling network that was desperately trying to pad out its list of affiliates. The network’s founders flew to Paris, where Mick was living and working at the time, to ask him to recite the start-up channel’s slogan in an effort to get affiliates across the country to agree to sign on to carry it. Mick protested that he didn’t do commercials but eventually agreed (for the price of one dollar) to say, “I want my MTV,” in a bumper promo. While being accepted by the MTV audience would, inside of a few months, become key to every single marketing campaign no matter what an artist’s status or stage in their career might be, at the time, it felt like a typically canny risk. MTV might have seemed an utter folly to a less savvy pop star. Mick instantly legitimized them and the affiliates soon multiplied. In return, he was given an informal pass. He was about to turn forty, but he would always have the loyalty of the network, aimed squarely at the teenage dollar: the very same currency that made the Stones in the ’60s. Could he have the audacity to court it again two decades on? Yes he could.

  Meanwhile, the ’60s oldies were becoming more and more lucrative every day. In 1983, as the Stones were about to release their next album, another strong effort entitled Undercover. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” their 1969 hit, was featured (as part of a hysterical and wordless joke) in the funeral scene at the beginning of the classic baby boomer film The Big Chill, along with a revival of Motown hits. Even as he appreciated the money, Mick absolutely hated the notion of being a retro act. “I think MTV has done something great—although quite by accident, I’d imagine. It’s shaken up all the radio people and made ’em realize that there’s more to life than all those bands that they were playing over and over and over. Like the Rolling Stones,” he told Rolling Stone that year.

  As he had been with a pre-fame Prince (whom Keith Richards dismissed as fluff for never paying his dues on the circuit like he, as well as other prodigies like Stevie Wonder, had), Mick found himself smitten by several other future titans of the MTV generation, including Duran Duran, who were to become Keith’s bête noires. The “Fab Five” were too pretty, too airy, a redux of Mick’s early ’70s fascination with David Bowie. Keith could abide punk rock, derivative as it was, but new wave rubbed him the wrong way. He couldn’t understand what Mick saw in these kids, or how it could possibly be good for the Stones.

  “Keith’s not a flavor-of-the-month person,” Ron Wood has said. “He’s not a great trend follower. Keith knows what he likes. Mick is always interested in what’s new, which is very good for the band because it gives us this push and pull.” By the mid-’80s it was mostly push. “He’d get involved with these groups like Duran,” says Bill German, who founded the Stones newsletter Beggars Banquet and later wrote about his experiences with the band in the memoir Under Their Thumb. “It really got under Keith’s skin. Hanging out with Paul Young. God, it’s right there in his name. Paul Young! Mick wanted to be affiliated with these people and it just drove Keith crazy. Mick’d worry ‘Oh the Stones, they look like a bunch of pensioners.’ He wanted to distance himself from being perceived as a retro act.”

  Mick carefully distanced himself from his own legacy in his forties. The Rolling Stones started as fan boys, collecting and studying records, and there’s always been a bit of that in their fans as well; even today there are websites that archive every B-side, tour date, set list, or bootleg ever. In interviews, Mick would now play dumb with regard to the band’s history. The trainspotting detail of Stones album minutiae which drove fans like German to fervid distraction were beneath him. “I’m not a historian,” he has said. “I have no idea about our history. I don’t even know which songs appear on which albums. I have to go and look it up.”

  “Keith knows where his bread is buttered,” German says, “Mick forgets that. Sorry Mick, but you’re stuck with us schlubby fans.” Such displays of insecurity, Keith fretted, reflected poorly on the whole band. “Keith would say, ‘You don’t need anything from these younger groups. Why are you coming to them?’” German recalls. “He liked things that stand the test of time. Whereas he saw these guys as flavors of the month, Mick would invite them up to the studio when Keith wasn’t there.”

  As MTV gained power and influence, the Stones’ videos become more elaborate, expensive, and plot driven; mini movies, really. Their big-budget “Undercover of the Night” premiered on MTV in the fall of ’83, the year of Scarface, and featured (at that time) a controversially violent plot, with Jagger portraying multiple roles: a wealthy South American businessman, a rock star kidnapped by masked terrorists, and, in a video within a video within a video conceit, Mick Jagger, fronting the Stones, as a young couple on the couch channel surf from the original movie to MTV. Keith, in an act of unmistakable symbolism, fires a bullet through the screen.

  The network showed the video with a warning and it became a catalyst for a new “video violence” controversy spearheaded by worried parent groups. The Stones may be forty, but they were still dangerous, the implicit message ran. “Too Much Blood,” another single with a Duran Duran (via Chic) style new wave funk bass, was even more “controversial.” During the song’s break, Mick sits at a table, wearing dark shades. He pours a glass of wine, and casually relates the (real-life) tale of a French case of murder and cannibalism that inspired him to write the song: “He took her to his apartment, cut off her head. Put the rest of her body in the refrigerator, and ate her piece by piece . . .” It’s quite nearly a rap, which must have galled Keith even more than the new wave conceits of Emotional Rescue. It also should be briefly noted that no matter how outrageous, dark, and ambitious these videos are, they all, without exception, manage to squeeze in a fleeting close-up of Charlie Watts rolling his eyes, unimpressed as he keeps the beat. Mick was about to make his biggest gambit yet for the hearts and minds of the video kids, and it would be a move that nearly destroyed the Rolling Stones forever.

  In 1984, both the Rolling Stones and Michael Jackson were label mates, under pressure to deliver follow-ups to hit records, in Jackson’s case, the biggest hit record of all time. The Stones’ contract went up for renegotiation after the release of Undercover. Their 1981 tour had established them as the biggest live draw in the world. They were a hot property and were brought to CBS Records by wildman executive Walter Yetnikoff, who promised them anything they wanted. Mick, allegedly unbeknownst to Keith and the other Stones, saw this as an opportunity to finally experiment with a career outside of the Rolling Stones. As it’s now widely known, Jackson was looking to establish himself once and for all as a solo artist, but felt similar obligations to those who helped make him. He was pressured by his family to refill the coffers and capitalize on the unprecedented success of Thriller by agreeing to a stadium tour with his brothers in support of a hastily recorded Jacksons album, Victory. He assented, but carried his own trump card.

  “State of Shock” is a pretty good song, but its greatness lies in synergy.

  There have been few instances of guaranteed hits in rock and roll. Many albums that seem predestined to be smashes simply flop. Labels end up shipping way too many copies and these get sent back in droves. But in 1984, Michael Jackson could have guzzled a liter of Pepsi and belched the alphabet and it would have moved units. A song from his teenage years, “Farewell My Summer Love,” was a Top 10 hit. He’d sung the hook on Rockwell’s “Somebody’s Watching Me” (later immortalized in a Geico insurance commercial) and the track went to No. 2. It would be good for Mick to notch a huge solo single, and good for Jackson, who’d only recently broken the color barrier on radio and at MTV to score a rock and roll hit (his mother and older brother Jermaine allegedly lobbied hard for a Michael-Jermaine duet to be the centerpiece
of Victory).

  The song had actually been kicking around for three or four years when Jackson approached Mick about a possible duet. His initial partner had been Queen’s Freddie Mercury. There are demos of the Mercury version available on YouTube. Jackson had already done rock-aimed duets with Traffic’s Dave Mason and Paul McCartney. Both “Save Me” and “The Girl Is Mine,” respectively, had been ballads. “State of Shock” was a limber, raunchy, horny rocker. “It was a perfect Stones riff, which was an extremely popular trend on R&B radio at the time,” says music journalist Rob Sheffield. “It was like Ray Parker Jr.’s ‘The Other Woman’ times Shalamar’s ‘Dead Giveaway’ plus Prince’s ‘Let’s Go Crazy’ divided by the Time’s ‘Jungle Love.’ It was pretty basic, yet it sounded more like an old-school go-for-the-throat Stones riff than anything on the most recent Stones albums. It showed that Michael Jackson could imitate the Stones at least as well as the Stones could imitate hip-hop (all over Undercover).” The song was put in storage because it was begging for Mick Jagger. “It’s basically a song about how much fun it is to be Mick, or be near him.” True enough, Michael Jackson seems to catch the fever as the track unfolds, gleefully shouting, “We’re doin’ it!” “It’s why the Freddie Mercury version doesn’t work at all. Who wants a three-note melody from Freddie Mercury?” Sheffield asks. The fact that “State of Shock” (issued as a single in July of ’84, shortly before Mick’s forty-first birthday) was so “Stonesy” certainly vexed Keith. That it charted higher than the past three Stones singles (eventually hitting No. 3 on the Billboard charts) added salt to the wound.