by Marc Spitz
Mick’s duties to the Stones have certainly interfered with what might have been a sturdier career. In 1981, he was cast in a supporting role in director Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, playing Wilbur, the companion to Jason Robards’ titular eccentric, determined to build an opera house in the Amazonian jungle. In order to fund this venture, he charters a boat and pulls it over a mountain in order to get to the rubber-rich parallel river on the other side. The documentary Burden of Dreams chronicles the production nightmares that plagued the set, from political skirmishes with the natives to illness and the logistical terror of actually getting a boat over a mountaintop. It also contains the only footage of Mick as Wilbur, shortly before he dropped out to hit the road in support of the newly released Tattoo You. In the footage from Burden of Dreams, we see what might have been. He is a scream, playing his part jungle-twitchy and sweaty, a camp figure with rolling eyes and clicking teeth as he recites poetry alongside Robards in the bell tower of the local church.
“Wilbur, you are definitely my man!” a dissolute Robards cheers. They seem a perfect odd couple and clearly could have sustained the chemistry. Herzog, writing in his diary from that period (later published as Conquest of the Useless), describes Mick as a trooper as well, helping to shuttle cast and crew to and from the set in his private car and laughing uproariously when accidentally bit by one of the jungle’s many monkeys. He also kept the director amused during the singularly punishing shoot. “Whenever we take a break, he distracts me with clever little lectures on English dialects and the development of the language since the late Middle Ages,” Herzog recalled.
By early 1991, after yet another massive Rolling Stones tour, Mick was once again ready to commit to an acting job. He accepted the role of futuristic bounty hunter Victor Vacendek in the modestly budgeted sci-fi endeavor Freejack alongside Emilio Estevez, Rene Russo, and Anthony Hopkins. Freejack would be Jagger’s first major above-the-title role since Ned Kelly. The project promised good company. Estevez was still a going concern as a box office star. Young Guns, in which he played Billy the Kid, was looking like a franchise after a successful sequel (helmed by Freejack’s director, New Zealander Geoff Murphy). Anthony Hopkins had just won an Oscar for playing Dr. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, and former model Rene Russo was well on her way to becoming the decade’s go-to pretty girl who can hang with the boys (she would shoot Lethal Weapon 3 in the same year). “Smart” science fiction was hot again thanks to Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 smash Total Recall, the follow-up to his equally witty and nihilistic RoboCop (1987). Arnold Schwarzenegger was about to reprise his role as the Terminator. Things looked auspicious for Freejack. Like all good smart sci-fi, it purported to be an adaptation of a cult novel (Robert Sheckley’s Hugo Award–nominated late ’50s offering Immortality Inc.). It also rode the then fashionable “cyberpunk” wave, inspired by the novels of William Gibson and the advent of the World Wide Web. Cybernetics was to the mid-’80s and early ’90s what the Tibetan Book of the Dead and the I Ching were to Mick Jagger’s 1960s. The part offered to Mick was the showiest in the film and, in truth, he is the only interesting thing about it.
Victor, as written, is a stock villain in that he’s motivated, or so we are led to believe, by money, but Mick Jagger works that “evil face” with grimaces, frowns, and camp eye-pop, giving him a moodiness and middle-aged gravity that is his own. As with Schwarzenegger, underrated as well, we feel more for the “villain” than the hero and so (and here comes a spoiler) when the cad is through circumstances inspired to behave heroically, we are validated. Every time Mick opens his mouth we are reminded that for all the gravity expressed by Hopkins, it’s all a bit “silly.” Only Amanda Plummer (as a nun!), who wields a shotgun, is equally pleasing. If you want to look at bad rock-star acting, compare Mick’s performance with that of New York Dolls singer David Johansen, who plays Estevez’s scumbag agent and is another we can imagine messing someone up. Johansen and Jagger never share any screen time, unfortunately.
Freejack is, in its way, pioneering. It charts out territory later covered by Christopher Nolan’s critically adored blockbuster Inception . The final scene takes place, for example, in Anthony Hopkins’ mind as he lingers in a dream state or coma. Thus far, Hopkins has literally phoned it in. When he appears onscreen, he’s usually on a video phone. His one moment of interaction with Estevez, Russo, and Jagger takes place in the portals of his own brain: “Welcome to my mind.” Jagger and Estevez never turn into buddies as they chase each other all over the decaying landscape. “Though the action is nonstop, it’s so unengaging that we might as well be watching a blank screen,” the Washington Post criticized. It was not a box office hit. All of its other stars went on to enjoy big box office in the following years. Estevez launched another franchise with the kiddie hockey flick The Mighty Ducks. In addition to two Lethal Weapons, Russo starred alongside Clint Eastwood in the classic suspense film In the Line of Fire, and Anthony Hopkins would play Dr. Lecter again twice in the next decade. Within two years, Mick would be back on the road with the Rolling Stones for their Voodoo Lounge tour, and once again enjoying guaranteed adulation. And yet he refused to give up his pursuit of a respected film career.
Since Freejack, he has returned to his habit of playing much more affecting, smaller parts. These choices grew increasingly more brave, and as he entered middle age, Mick finally began to carve out something like a sustained film career, that of a character actor and not a leading man. In the 1997 adaptation of Martin Sherman’s controversial late ’70s stage play Bent, set during 1930s Berlin as the Nazis began rounding up and interring Jews, gays, gypsies, and cripples, Mick appears in drag as Greta, a respected businessman by day and a nightclub performer by night who avoids detainment by ensuring that nobody finds out about his hidden life.
Greta is the first thing we see, swinging on a giant parakeet perch, nylon stockings on his skinny legs in a decadent, prewar Berlin nightclub, singing a Marlene Dietrich–style ballad, miles away from anything the Stones had ever done. As with Herzog in the jungle, Mick was willing to rough it for the sake of the lowbudget project. He attended workshops in London with director Sean Mathias and the cast, which included Clive Owen and Sir Ian McKellen. “In the first scene, when he came down from the trapeze, it was from an incredible height. He was nervous and frightened but he didn’t complain,” Mathias recalls. “He had an entourage with him on set, a group that protected him and looked after him, but he was very affable. He took a great interest in supporting the film.” Bent, with its explicit gay sex and depressing subject matter, was not designed to be anything but a labor of love, and Mick, blending with the cast around a converted, unused power station, was certainly sacrificing a measure of comfort for a project that was bound to upset some of his fans. “I think it was a brave choice; although Bent appeared onstage some years before, it was fairly radical as a film in the mid-’90s,” Mathias says. “A lot of people who couldn’t deal with these ideas in the film: gay love; a great more people other than Jews also tragically being sent to the concentration camps. And also being viewed as a historical piece through the telescope of time. AIDS was still so incredibly present in our lives. Not new but pretty frightening.”
In The Man from Elysian Fields, his next dark and interesting character role, he plays Luther, an elegant pimp and mentor to struggling novelist Andy Garcia. He injects the role with a real sadness (we later find that Luther, a former prostitute himself, has fallen in unrequited love with one of his hires, played by Anjelica Huston). It’s one of those “only in L.A.” slice-of-life pictures with wooden dialogue, but the actors transcend the material and provide a quiet dignity, the kind that it’d be hard to imagine another rock star of his caliber tapping into. And yet, like Bent, The Man from Elysian Fields garnered very little critical attention, much less acclaim. Performance, his very first film, still stands alone as his most lauded.
“The thing that makes him so great onscreen is also, in a funny sense, paradoxically a handica
p, because he’s famous no matter what character he plays; he’s Mick Jagger playing it,” says Mathias. “But in a way, as with many famous, classic Hollywood stars, you will always identify with them as the stars themselves. Greta Garbo may play Camille brilliantly, but we always see Greta Garbo up on that big screen. Humphrey Bogart. Tom Cruise. Tom Hanks. The big stars are famous for delivering what we know they can deliver there. And Jagger has that because that face is so etched and so extraordinary—those lips are so iconic you can’t get away from that.”
His production company, Jagged Films, has kept going as well, producing equally little-seen period pieces such as Enigma, as well as the flop remake of The Women. He’s been developing a project with Scorsese titled The Long Play. Jagger is an eccentric; an auteur; a product of the ’70s. Look at the directors he’s chosen to make Rolling Stones concert films: Scorsese and Hal Ashby, with whom he collaborated closely on the 1983 tour documentary Let’s Spend the Night Together, one of the Harold and Maude director’s last films. “There was definitely a greater bond between Mick and Hal than there was with the rest of the band,” Prince Rupert Lowenstein has said. “Mick was a man who was the incarnation of the band for Hal and also much more interesting in the filming side than all the rest.” (According to Ashby’s biographer, Keith Richards was uncooperative and irritated by the cameras.) Like any Hollywood veteran, he’s been overpraised and he’s been underrated, but never truly considered (you won’t find any Mick Jagger film festivals). But he’s stayed involved for five decades now. In 2007, Keith Richards, who has never deviated from his role as musician, made his debut as the father of Captain Jack Sparrow; it was stunt casting à la Performance, and while amusing, didn’t require much beyond the growth of a black beard and mustache. “It’s not just about living forever, Jackie,” he says in his pirate croak; “it’s about living with yourself forever.” If film is indeed forever, then Mick Jagger has certainly done enough fine, complex work beyond Performance to justify continued pursuit, but it would be great to see him one day get the role that he’s been longing for. He’s more than just an evil face.
19
“The Red Devils’ Blues”
What producer Rick Rubin would become famous for doing to other artists, he first did for himself. By 1993, more than a decade into the advent of hip-hop, certain old-school terminology had, according to Rubin, grown tired and stale. The cofounder of Def Jam Records had, by the start of the ’90s, moved from New York City to Los Angeles to run the label’s offshoot, Def American, which featured hit acts like the Black Crowes. Rubin noticed that the word “def,” meaning “cool,” had been formally added to the lexicon, included in the Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary in May of 1992. He decided that in order to keep the hip-hop that he loved fresh, “def” had to go. On August 27, 1993, the word Rubin helped popularize would be buried at Hollywood Memorial Park’s Chapel of Psalms. Rubin sent out invitations to friends and peers to come pay their final respects to “def.” The Reverend Al Sharpton presided over the services. “Def was kidnapped by corporate mainstream entertainment and returned dead. When we bury def,” he said in his stentorian preacher tone “we bury the urge to conform.” Pals Trent Reznor, Tom Petty, members of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (whose Blood Sugar Sex Magik was recorded in the former’s haunted castle in the Hollywood Hills), were among those gathered to pay their last respects. A coffin was filled with remnants of def, including record company literature and album covers. Rubin was thirty and on the verge of becoming the bearded Buddha of the music industry, a sort of guru of the studio, adept at getting to the nut of what was good about an artist and bringing it back to the foreground. It was something he did with young acts like the Chili Peppers and thrash metal kings Slayer, but those were new acts, young, hungry, and just finding their sound. What Rubin, like Quentin Tarantino, then in the process of reminding John Travolta what was great about himself, would come to be best known for was motivating older acts. He’d routinely take legends and franchises and get them back in touch with their sometimes squandered gifts. In the following decade he would apply this to Tom Petty and Neil Diamond, and form a legendary partnership with Johnny Cash. Mick Jagger, however, was his first.
Mick had not lost his taste for finding a solo voice, and his previous two solo albums had, by the ’90s, sounded somewhat dated, especially the very ’80s Primitive Cool. Mick was commendable for chasing new sounds, but some of his material gave Richards’ “only dig what’s always good” ethos some credence. While I was interviewing Jack White for Uncut magazine in 2008, he complained to me, “I know in my heart that music if you ask anybody, ‘When do you think music, especially rock and roll, which was sounding incredible; when do you think it started sounding not very good?’ that arc starts in the ’80s and that same arc starts when digital technology came into play to the studios, and all that new trickery started destroying country, rock and roll, everything. Who escaped the ’80s with good sounding records? Not many people. Even with a great band like Gun Club, you can hear gated reverbs and all that crappy digital stuff.” A rocker making music since the early ’60s is hard pressed to try to stay interested in the recording techniques, lyrical conceits of the past, no matter how good the drums sounded.
The Stones’ sound, look, and attitude circa ’68 to ’72 had never gone out of style, but in the early ’90s it seemed to be in vogue again. Rock and roll decadence with threadbare velvets and sashes instead of grunge flannel. Def American had in the ’90s broken the Black Crowes, who took a Stonesy look and sound circa 1971 into the American Top 10, and Guns ’n’ Roses had not been completely drained of their power. Commercially speaking, they were the world’s biggest band. Again Mick was searching for the balance between the Stones and the new. He would not make one album with Rubin; he would make two: a contemporary rock record called Wandering Spirit and a wildcard that was not exactly old, not entirely new.
One night in the midst of sessions at Ocean Way Studios in L.A., Rubin took Mick to a local club he liked called the King King. A former Chinese restaurant, the club had been revamped into a funky, chic music venue with a small stage, black lacquered walls, and a dark, homey ambience that made celebrities feel comfortable. The bartenders were good-looking; the door was celebrityfriendly. There were various nights for various genres (ska, swing, reggae) but Monday night was the blues night featuring the Shadows, soon to be rechristened the Red Devils. The Red Devils were a scrawny, surly, tattooed combo featuring members of L.A. roots rockers the Blasters and fronted by a charismatic and not a little Jagger-esque singer and harp player named Lester Butler. “Lester had that rock star thing,” says former Red Devils guitarist Paul Size, then a teenage transplant from the blues-guitar haven of Texas. “He had that thing. That kind of angel on one side, devil on the other side. Like Jerry Lee Lewis. Or Anthony Kiedis. He had the stage presence of perfection and also just chaos. It showed. His voice was unique and it just captured your attention. People loved it. It was something different and fresh.” Hollywood had, for the past decade, been the domain of the glam metal bands: Ratt, Poison, Faster Pussycat. The nitty-gritty blues seemed like a breath of fresh air, and hipsters of all size were drawn to the King King. Bruce Willis, he of the harmonica-blowing alter ego Bruno, was a regular who would jam on the King King stage with the band, and the Shadows played loud. The King King’s sound man was not too concerned by any local noise ordinance. If you wanted to extend your weekend by a day, the King King was the place to go in the early ’90s. Rubin and his cohort and Crowes mentor George Drakoulias loved the purity of the Monday night scene and felt inspired to expose or possibly remind Mick of that good party energy to possibly loosen him up.
One night Mick shocked the King King patrons by jumping onstage to jam with Butler and the band. The Red Devils were tipped off by Rubin, who’d already changed their name and slowly drew him into his inner circle with an eye toward recording them. “They called us and told us he was coming down,” Paul Size says. Size, a purist, wa
s not intimidated by the prospect of backing up Mick Jagger. “If they weren’t black I didn’t listen to them,” he says today, nearly twenty years later. “I was a Blues Nazi. I had seen that tongue and the lips, but I’d never gotten into the Stones. It was just classic rock to me. Part of me was like, ‘Oh just like Bruce Willis, here’s another big star on our stage.’ That’s what happens out there in L.A.: As soon as you get something, these other guys who are dying in their career try to grab it. So I thought, initially, ‘Oh great, he’s gonna grab our mojo.’ But I gotta say, when he got onstage, something happened.” Size watched Mick move and strut. He saw the reaction from the crowd. Heard the authentic tone in his singing. “I thought, ‘Wow, this guy is something else.’ I guess it brought back something he hadn’t had in a while.”
The spontaneous blues jam proved a good release indeed. Perhaps it meant little else to Mick, but Rubin got inspired. He began lobbying Mick to record an album of blues standards with the Devils. “I said, ‘Jeez, while we’re doing this record, we’re going to do another one?’” Mick recalled years later to journalist Alan Light. “Rick, you’re a hard guy to work with!” It seemed oddly timed, as the sessions for what would become Mick’s third solo album, Wandering Spirit, were going so well. Mick’s boyhood love of the blues didn’t really inform the new album sessions sonically, but might have opened him up to the power of truth. Musically there’s a lot that ended up on Wandering Spirit that could have doubled on a late-period Stones record, such as “Wired All Night.” This is likely why it has come to be so highly regarded by Stones fans; it’s got the punch of a Jagger-Richards project, but it’s certainly a bit more of a personal endeavor lyrically. Mick was writing songs plain-faced like “Evening Gown” and “Don’t Tear Me Up.” The sound, however, was very modern, “Sweet Thing” boasts a great, soulful falsetto and a future funk groove that would not be out of place on a Chili Peppers album; hardly gutbucket blues. As was his style, Mick was pursuing just that: the latest sound rendered with the newest technology, but Rubin was a persuader, and Mick sensed that he should listen to this guru in the making.
