Keith Richards’ stunning six word dismantling of Mick Jagger’s solo career
Throughout his career, Keith Richards has made it perfectly clear that he adores three things: the music of Robert Johnson, the vocals of Aretha Franklin, and cottage pie. The rest is open for debate and ripe for abuse from the man himself.
He values a certain soul in his music, a rare quality of cutting sincerity that shines through all the commercial shite that’s routinely crammed into the charts. So, when he thought his frontman and best friend/enemy fell foul of forgettable commercial flimsiness, he wasn’t afraid to stick the boot in and outline exactly where Mick Jagger had gone wrong.
The singer has released four solo albums over the years, and though Richards claims to only remember the existence of two of them, he says he has never listened to either. “Mick’s album was called She’s the Boss, which said it all,” Richards reflected, although it would’ve been handy if he had expanded on what, exactly, it did say.
“I’ve never listened to the entire thing all the way through,” he continued in his memoir, Life. “Who has? It’s like Mein Kampf. Everybody had a copy, but nobody listened to it,” he concluded in a very odd analogy, revealing more about the company he keeps than the reading habits of the masses.
But comparisons to the doctrine of Adolf Hitler aside, he handily condensed the main befoulment of Jagger’s discography down to just six simple words: “He really had nothing to say.”
That was it – he had torn it apart in one fell swoop. Beyond the music, the production, or anything else for that matter, the death knell for Jagger’s flailing solo work, in Richards’ curt view, was that it was utterly vapid. “It has something to do with ego,” is all he could vaguely surmise in the years that followed, echoing Carly Simon before him.
“He watched what David Bowie was doing and wanted to do it.”
Keith Richards on Mick Jagger
In actual fact, he didn’t even blame Jagger for the unamiable pursuit. Instead, he pinned it all on poor old David Bowie. Throughout Jagger’s career with the Stones, he had always flirted with the idea of departing from the strict, blues-inspired rock ‘n’ roll sphere where they operated.
Her Satanic Majesty’s Request might have kept that at bay for a while, having found the band in a psychedelic vein and, by Jagger’s own admission, “not very good” as a result. But when the inverse also proved true, when they played it safe with Dirty Work and hit upon a career low, his long-held desire to be more experimental convinced him to finally go solo for a flurry.
It was David Bowie’s weird revolution, one that suddenly made old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll seem a little one-dimensional, that he wanted to follow. But his old buddy viewed this as a grave mistake.
“Somewhere, though, he got unnatural,” Richards reflected in his memoir, Life, on the experimentation that followed. “He forgot how good he was in that small spot. He forgot his natural rhythm. I know he disagrees with me. What somebody else was doing was far more interesting to him than what he was doing. He even began to act as if he wanted to be someone else.”
You are what you are, Richards has always opined, and he thought Bowie was simply “all pose”. So, in trying to be like the Starman, he thought that Jagger surrendered his own strengths, and became not only “pose”, but an imposter with nothing to say of any real sincerity. That’s as crushing as a ‘come home with your tail between your legs’ decree can get.
But in typical bizarre Richards fashion, he also dealt him a backhanded compliment along the way, “The fact is, Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie.“
