The 1950s musician Mick Jagger called better than Elvis: “The first person I admired”
There aren’t many musicians in rock and roll history who have been natural-born performers quite like Mick Jagger was.
Sure, there was the golden age of performers that came before him, like James Brown and Tina Turner, but when you think of some of the greatest acts to come out since the British invasion, half of them are working off the same playbook that Jagger was whenever he strutted his way across the stage. He was doing everything he could to get himself into the history books with his favourite performers, but he could also admit when he wasn’t as keen on some of the other rock royalty that came his way.
But you have to understand that Jagger held himself and everyone else to a higher standard than most when it came to the live show. He was the one who was running enough miles around the stage for a half-marathon, and when you look through the amount of ground that he has covered as a musician, he wasn’t going to have that much tolerance for the stripe of artists that come onstage and play on stools.
He might not have wanted people to go as over the top as a band like Kiss did back in the day, but he did have his reservations with bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood. He wanted something that had a bit more of a thrill, and that even managed to extend to some of the greatest rock and rollers that had come before him. But that kind of audience engagement usually reveals itself in a lot of different ways.
Take someone like Bob Dylan, for example. He wasn’t moving around as much as Jagger was, but it was always easier to listen to every single word he said whenever he made a record. He beat people up through the course of a single song, and Jagger wanted to do that same thing in the way that he approached some of those old blues tunes that he heard when he met Keith Richards.
So people like Elvis Presley should have been right up his alley, but Jagger felt a fondness for Little Richard before anyone else. Richard was willing to do everything he could to impress his audience and sweat his ass off every single time he got behind the piano, and Jagger was transfixed the minute that he heard him playing tunes like ‘Long Tall Sally’ and ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ live.
It was all about grabbing the audience by the throat, and even when Presley was becoming one of the biggest things in the world, Jagger felt that Richard was giving the kind of performance that ‘The King’ didn’t have, saying, “When I was 13, the first person I really admired was Little Richard. I wasn’t particularly fond of Elvis or Bill Haley… they were really good, but for some reason they didn’t appeal to me.”
If you look at them back to back, though, Richard and Presley are like two different sides of the same coin. Both of them were architects of rock and roll to a certain degree, but when you look at the way that Presley approached his music, it was still in the rockabilly tradition. He could make his fair share of Little Richard covers like ‘Tutti Frutti’, but the whole point was getting that same kind of rush when you heard Richard shredding his throat throughout his versions of ‘Keep A’Knockin’.
So while Jagger doesn’t necessarily sing like Richard or have the same kind of screams that he did in his prime, it was never about the diction and the songwriting for him. It was about raw passion whenever someone came onstage, and Ricard had every bit of swagger that anyone could have asked for from a performer when he kicked his leg up onto the piano while playing.
