by Marc Spitz
In a word: technology. Digital recording, digital imaging, the new world of perception would allow machines to make the Rolling Stones look young, sound young, be young when, physically, they could no longer pull it off; their 2005 world tour in support of their last studio release to date, A Bigger Bang, the tacit bow for the Stones as we knew them, in their early sixties, but still fighting fit. Where to go from there? Into the virtual mystic. When the Stones appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as part of the promotion of A Bigger Bang, they were weathered and old; it was a bit grim and not a great fit with the vital-sounding new material like “Rough Justice” and “Oh, No Not You Again.”
When Exile redux was released, Mick and Keith appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone as their twenty-eight-year-old selves. They aged five years, and then de-aged thirty-five. By the way, the first time that Mick Jagger appears as his younger self on the cover of a magazine that could have easily run a photo of the current Mick was in 1989, when he appeared on Spin’s December 1989 issue in a feature written by Lisa Robinson timed to the Steel Wheels juggernaut.
There’s always been a weird ethic to just how much they will flog the old material. If they do a megatour, it’s usually on the back of a new studio album (with few exceptions like 2002’s 40 Licks). “If we go out on tour, we gotta do a record,” Mick has said. “It shows you are an actual functioning rock band. I don’t want to be one of those bands that does hits. People say, ‘I much prefer to hear “Brown Sugar” than some new song.’ Well, I don’t give a shit what you prefer.” Perhaps it was the surprise critical response to A Bigger Bang, praised like no Stones album since 1983’s Undercover , that freed Mick up to go to the vaults?
Or perhaps it was sensing a sort of pattern commercially, if not creatively. A Bigger Bang, despite deserved “it’s their best album in years,” didn’t sell more than their last two albums. Like all of their post–Steel Wheels releases, it debuted high, provided an excuse for a mega-grossing tour, then fell off the charts without leaving behind a major hit single or selling much more than their standard million copies (ostensibly to hard-core Stones fans who are completists).
In 2006, the Stones switched record labels yet again, moving from Virgin to Universal, and taking their massive and highly lucrative back catalog with them.
They needed to do something to boost the catalog sales and turn kids on to the old stuff without covering themselves in dust and shoving themselves in the nostalgia closet. Again, technology came to the rescue. Universal was looking for marketing angles, eager to find one that might restart media interest in the Stones as musicians and not just a tabloid concern or a tired institution. They suggested a reissue of Exile, knowing that it might be distasteful to Mick. Exile was long identified as a “Keith” album. Mick had disparaged the sound quality in interviews in the past, “not just because of the vocals but because generally I think it sounds lousy.” He much preferred the follow-up, Goats Head Soup, and pretty much stood alone there. Goats Head Soup, underrated as it is, has no myth. Exile’s myth was astronomical, one of rock and roll’s most enduring and imitated. You can’t know about the album without knowing where and under what conditions it was recorded: the Villa Nellcôte, the sixteen-bedroom mansion and former Nazi headquarters by the sea in the South of France. They’d been chased from England by the Labour Party and the tax man. Keith was a strung-out pirate, shooting Thai heroin and crafting a masterpiece from chaos, pulling riffs and soul out of the impossibly blue sky. Mick was . . . where was Mick anyway? The Exile myth is largely a Keith affair. Mick was off in Paris with Bianca. Now, four decades on, with the double album universally regarded as the Stones’ masterwork, Mick was finally ready to insert himself into the story and not just the mix. He was ready to acknowledge the public opinion that this was the Stones’ masterpiece, and a chance to put his take on it. He’d stopped, as he approached seventy, running from the past, and revisiting Exile would be the first offering from a man with a new sense of resolve.
Now it was the fans’ turn to be agitated. Not since George Lucas tinkered with the Star Wars trilogy in the digital age had such a wave of worry been stirred up. Exile was holy. What on earth could the Stones be thinking? Were they so hubristic that they could fuck with their own legacy? This was far more mercenary and base than Pete Townsend unloading all his teenage wasteland anthems wholesale, or Brando rerecording his Godfather dialogue for a video game. Did they not know when to just up and walk away? They didn’t look or sound anything like those rooster-haired, pouting, weary, rock and roll outlaws, on the run from the cops and the tax man, “partying in the face of tragedy,” as Lester Bangs famously called it. This was tantamount to Sean Connery picking up his Walther PPK again.
“I’m a purist,” says Liz Phair, who recorded her classic songby-song response to the original back in 1993. “Not at all an audionerd. That’s totally a boy thing and I don’t want my dream world to be interrupted by some new conception. Don’t come in and, like, fuck with my dream.”
Nothing short of a time machine and a new lease at Villa Nellcôte, Keith and Anita Pallenberg’s mansion on the Côte d’Azur, where much of the album was recorded, would do for fans like Phair. Messing with an acknowledged masterpiece was dangerous. Paul McCartney seized “Let It Be” from Phil Spector and had in 2003 released Let It Be—Naked to a sort of vaguely hostile indifference.
So why did Jagger come around? Largely, it was a surprise. These up-in-arms Stones purists were genuinely shocked. If there’s anything Jagger hates more than nostalgia, it’s a pattern. Secondly, the myth of Nellcôte, a Keith myth, was also useful to Mick.
Finally, it was a challenge, one involving boxes and boxes of undated archives, but one that the Stones were uniquely qualified to take on, as they’d been picking and choosing from rapidly aging session tapes since the end of the ’60s. Even the Exile stuff was not really Exile stuff. “We’ve used like, ‘Sweet Virginia,’ which was on Exile on Main Street,” Jagger told Creem in 1982. “That was recorded from before Beggars Banquet. Know what I mean? And we’ve always done things like that and kept things because some things worked good sometimes and some things don’t. But it doesn’t really make any difference on anything because as long as it doesn’t sound old.” For this Exile reissue, sounding old but feeling new was the goal.
Mick commissioned the Stones’ producer Don Was to investigate extra studio material from the period. “When Mick first called me about it,” Was told the New York Times, “it was like he was asking me, ‘Can you do me a favor, man? Can you take the garbage out?’ ” As they listened to hours and hours of tapes from the Stones archive, a place Was compared to the warehouse in the last scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark, they would narrow down an Exile period, tracks that had both the feel and the vintage. Some were obvious, like an alternate take on the album track “Loving Cup” or a version Keith sung of “Soul Survivor.” Others fit the carbon-dating criteria but presented a challenge. There were no vocals. Mick decided to complete these tracks, some of which he’d recorded nearly forty years earlier. “I listened a bit to the regular album and just sort of copped the attitude a bit,” Mick told Rolling Stone cryptically.
Eventually Mick got into the process; if nothing else, it was new and therefore interesting. When it leaked out gradually that the vocals were entirely new, the Stones camp were cagey, not because of the potential groan-factor but because they knew what would soon come to light: The experiment was succeeding. These songs sounded, against all probability, like great Rolling Stones songs. “I don’t know if that takes away from them or not,” Mick has said of his slightly tweaked vocals. “I mean I could have fibbed and you totally would have believed me.”
The original Exile on Main Street producer, Jimmy Miller, passed away in ’94, but mixer Andy Johns, who mixed the record in ’72 at Los Angeles’ Ocean Way, was on board, as was industry veteran Bob Clearmountain. Richards was brought in to add a little bit more guitar, and Mick Taylor, who left the band in 1974, met Mick
in London to lay down some new solos, but really these tracks live or die by Jagger not only sounding like himself, but sounding newly engaged. “The strange thing is that ‘Plundered My Soul’ is very good,” the Times’ Ben Ratliff said of the album’s first single. “[It’s] the most soulful and energetic Stones track I can think of in almost thirty years.” Rock’s Peter Pan had finally found a way to stay young. So identifiable are the young Stones with this era that it’s shocking to watch the documentary Stones in Exile, in which Mick and Charlie traipse through Olympic Studios as elderly men.
When the Stones appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone to promote the album, they were, indeed, young men, “lithe,” as David Gates’ cover story described them, their faces unlined, the future ahead. That same year, Vanity Fair ran no fewer than three cover stories featuring artists in their postcard prime: Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and Elizabeth Taylor (five if you count tribute issues to Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett). The Stones were a part of the zeitgeist once again.
The Robert Frank–shot Exile cover appeared on T-shirts and other merchandise, and while not everyone loved the record, it was, for a time in the spring of 2010, the biggest story in rock.
“Unlike the album proper, the bonus tracks are given a clean scrubbing, and it’s blatantly obvious in places that Mick’s vocals are circa 2009, not 1972,” Pitchfork magazine groaned. “If allowing Jagger to touch up those vocals was the price to pay to allow Exile to receive the tribute it deserves, it’s still a bargain.” But Stones fans and kids interested in rock myths bought it. The album debuted at No. 2 in America and topped the charts in England, and for the first time in a long time, made us wonder . . . as they approach their golden anniversary in 2012, what are these guys going to do next? Who the fuck is Mick Jagger and what will he do next?
EPILOGUE
“Onstage with a Cane”
Mick Jagger is so imprinted on our pop culture DNA strands, as his Bent director Sean Mathias observed, that he doesn’t really need to tour and record. It’s hard to look at a fashion magazine today without seeing the Jagger-face in the form of his youngest daughter, Georgia May. His daughter with Jerry Hall, Elizabeth, posed for Playboy in the spring of 2011. His son James is in a band (Turbogeist). The fact that Mick now has children that are approaching the age when people first started wondering how long Mick could keep fronting the Stones (Karis, his first child with Marsha Hunt, and Jade, his child with Bianca, are now in their early forties) has once again turned the subject to age and, with that, professional vitality and, ultimately, mortality.
If you are going to be asked questions by dozens if not hundreds of reporters over fifty years, your take on the issue is bound to change. Most famously, Mick told People magazine in 1975, “I only meant to do it for two years. I guessed the band would disperse one day and say good-bye. I would continue to write and sing but I’d rather be dead than sing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m fortyfive.” Two years earlier, he told urbane talk show host Dick Cavett that he could easily see himself doing it at sixty. “Going onstage with a cane,” citing Marlene Dietrich, then playing cabaret shows to adoring cinema fans, as an example of the way it could be pulled off.
Back in 1966, he fretted, “I’m dreading [old age]. There are only a few very old people who are very happy. When their minds stop thinking about the present and future, and stay wrapped up in the past, they are awfully dull. I don’t want old dears saying ‘How old do you think I am? Forty-eight? No, I’m seventy-eight, and I watch all the pop shows and I’ve got all your records.’ Then I think it’s time to grow up.”
The real question ultimately does not fall to Mick, especially since we, his fans and observers, have never vacillated from our opinion on the matter. Why have we not let this guy get old? Is it racism, as some have suggested? Are we not really used to our white rock stars up there playing at seventy (Chuck Berry played a New Years Eve 2011 gig at eighty-four)? Why can we never be truly comfortable, beloved as they remain, with our Old Stones? Lord knows, we’ve had plenty of time to prepare for this guy to turn seventy. Mick Jagger is so old that the Stones had a flashback to the’60s segment on their 1981 tour (photos of the band as kids flashed on the video screens while they played “Time Is on My Side”). So old that a 1993 Esquire cover story headline read: HAVE YOU SEEN YOUR GRANDFATHER, BABY? (a reference, of course, to the Stones’ peerlessly fuzzy 1967 single, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadows?”) They are so old, a book about them called Old Gods, Almost Dead (by Stephen Davis) was released in 2001. They’re so old, they inspired Motorhead’s funniest lyric: “Blackhearted to the bone. Older than the Rolling Stones” (from “I’m So Bad [Baby I Don’t Care]”), not to mention one of (peerlessly) lethargic stand-up comic Stephen Wright’s most quoted lines: “The Stones, I love the Stones. I can’t believe they’re still doing it. I watch them whenever I can. Fred, Barney.”
And what happens after seventy? If this purported world tour is marketed as a farewell tour, will Mick and Keith be out there, like Chuck Berry, at eighty-four? In a July 2010 article about the increased virility of septuagenarians, the New York Times singled out only Mick Jagger among the rock stars approaching their seventies with regard to their performance style. “Can he really strut like that when he’s seventy-five?” the piece asked (Bob Dylan, also mentioned in the piece, would be dignified and old, touring at seventy-five).
Unlike Jones, Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin, and John Lennon, Mick, Keith, Paul McCartney, and Dylan are ’60s figures who were fated to wrinkle. But unlike Dylan, only Mick was a symbol of sexual liberation, one who so deftly parodied the social mores of the middle-aged and middle class of ’60s-era London (“What a drag it is getting old . . .”). As a young man, his beauty alone seemed revolutionary, neither fully male nor fully female, pretty or ugly, as the artist Cecil Beaton recorded with wonder in his since-published ’60s diaries. Those who gazed on him then once saw possibility; they now see mortality.
“He was a good-looking boy in those days,” says Keith Altham, who first interviewed the Stones in 1966. “Now he looks like a gargoyle who should be tacked on the side of Notre Dame cathedral.” This does not help him solve the Brenda problem, the one he doesn’t acknowledge. Yes, Mick did himself no favors with the “Satisfaction,” quote, a durable sound bite. And typically, he has never issued a warm mea culpa on this subject or even a nice, bitchy retort: “Would you prefer I’d died?” putting us on the spot, on the defense, whereas Keith addressed the issue at length in his memoir, Life.
Instead, Mick simply absorbs the negativity. “A sexy black hole in space,” the journalist Keith Altham has called him. Subsequently, we once again must fill the void. Each crag and thinning wisp on Keith is a big “Fuck you” to those who’ve been writing his obituary since 1973 (when the N.M.E. selected him as the next great rock icon to croak). Growing old for Mick is a great “I told you so” to those who were threatened by his youthful beauty and the perceived arrogance that went with it (and those jealous of his wealth and way with women, for sure). It’s as if a certain faction of the pop media had been laying in wait for something to humanize him.
“You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,” James Fox’s on-the-lam gangster Chas comments when encountering Jagger as Turner in 1968’s Performance. Jagger was only twenty-five at the time and already the line was poison-tipped and portentous. When Mick Jagger was fifty, by the way, he looked more fit than most people do at that age, freakishly so, which I suppose is “funny.” Check the blue-lit sleeve photos for Wandering Spirit; on one he’s even bare-chested. Let’s just throw this out there as if we needed more evidence that the guy is a paradox: He has clearly had no cosmetic surgery. Look at his face compared with, say, Steven Tyler or David Bowie or Madonna. It’s as raw and lived in as Keith’s: pride over vanity, soul over brain, perhaps. When I interviewed him for Spin back in 2002 (when he was just shy of the big 6 -0) I addressed this.
MARC: How do you think you’re aging?
&nbs
p; MICK: It’s a bit of a problem in rock music. You gotta keep your body together.
MARC: Do you have a game plan for aging gracefully?
MICK: No more than anyone else. Thank god for technology.
I didn’t press it, and at the time of this writing, it looks like he still hasn’t turned to it.
There is still time. There’s longevity in the Jagger genes. His mother passed away at eighty-seven. His father lived to age ninetythree. If Mick’s performance on the 53rd annual Grammy Awards in February of 2011 is any indicator, he can still shake his hips, hit the notes, and vie with musicians a third his age. He brought down the house with a tribute to the late Solomon Burke, releasing as he had with the Red Devils in the early ’90s, his occasionally dormant inner record-collecting geek. Similarly, his version of Dylan’s “Watching the River Flow,” on the Ian Stewart tribute album Boogie 4 Stu: A Tribute to Ian Stewart (featuring the other Stones as well as founding bassist Bill Wyman) brought to mind a man half Mick’s age. Connecting with the old blues and soul seems to bring out his best, and probably keeps him young. Mick and his fellow Rolling Stones have become like the old bluesmen they worshipped in their teens, but it’s the model of Mick, displayed to such relieving and exhilarating effect on the Grammys, that really powers the Stones corporation. I would pay to see them play “Start Me Up” on a stool, but there are moments when even I ask, “Why do they want to play ‘Start Me Up’ on a stool?” When we think of “Brenda” we assume one thing: the money (when we think of Keith we assume: the glory). But perhaps it really is the search—the one that began when he played his very first Rolling Stones show there on Oxford Street, the Marquee stage, 1962.
