Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: A love affair in three acts
“It doesn’t seem that we’ve been around that long,” a 40-year-old Keith Richards declared back in 1983. This was the point in history when comedians and music critics began taking the regular piss out of The Rolling Stones for being old men still playing rock ‘n’ roll, a joke that’s now older today than Keith was back then.
“When we actually started to cut our first record, we had the feeling that this is really the beginning of the end,” Richards said, “because in the early ‘60s, 99 per cent of all recording acts lasted 18 months to two years. We felt that it would be over before we really got going, so it was very strange that we just kept on going.”
And going, and going, and going. Year into year, decade into decade.
For all the triumphs, missteps, controversies, tragedies, patch-ups, and comebacks that have made The Rolling Stones’ saga so compelling across 60+ years, the real core of the story has always been a romance, of sorts, between the two primary characters, known more poetically as the Glimmer Twins. Like any good long-running soap opera, Keith Richards and Mick Jagger have provided the necessary heart and soul, brains and guts, and yin and yang of the drama: best friends who love one another as brothers but also routinely plot each other’s murders.
Mick and Keith have gotten to their wits’ ends with one another a thousand times or more, which is hardly surprising for two ‘co-workers’ forced to occupy the same spaces for that long, be it a studio, a tour bus, or a private plane. For the sake of brevity, though, we can break the epic poem of the Glimmers into three acts, including the forging of the original bond that made them invisible, the period of conflict and self-doubt that turned them into enemies, and finally the inevitable realisation that an enemy is sometimes just a friend telling us things we’re not ready to hear.
Rather than starting at the beginning, though, let’s drop the needle on act three first, as we now find Mick and Keith fully content with, and/or resigned to, their need for one another. Against all odds, they’ve kept their musical partnership, and an active, touring version of The Rolling Stones, alive and well into the 2020s, a concept that would have seemed beyond ludicrous during that first recording session in 1963.
Act three: “We always patch it up”
The third era of the Glimmer Twins arguably began in the late 1980s, when they managed to narrowly pull back the Stones from the brink of implosion one last time.
In 1986, Jagger had refused to tour in support of the band’s contentious album Dirty Work, and his relationship with Richards had cratered to a new low, where both men made their most aggressive efforts to break out as solo artists, with Jagger releasing records in 1985 (She’s the Boss) and 1987 (Primitive Cool), and Richards following suit with 1988’s Talk Is Cheap. Had any of those albums proven as commercially or critically successful as they’d hoped, maybe things would have played out quite differently, but instead, both artists returned to their Glimmer Twin layer in 1989 with their tails between their legs a bit.
Richards, in an interview with the Atlanta Journal that year, felt like he’d come to an important realisation about his relationship with Jagger, nearly 30 years into it. “Let me see if I can put this into words just right,” Keith said.
“If Mick and I are working together, there is very little problem… But when we’re not working together, we tend to rub each other the wrong way”.
Keith Richards
This was the odd paradox of the whole thing; whereas most musicians need to break up their bands when they start irritating each other to an extreme, Jagger and Richards actually needed to play together to settle their beefs.
“It’s a long-lasting collaboration, but we do have our separate ways of doing things,” Jagger told USA Today in 2005, noting that Richards had become a lot more “supportive” in his approach to teamwork over the years, adding, “I’m quite analytical: ‘I want this groove’. Keith likes to play a tune a lot until something happens.”
A growing respect for each other’s methods helped stabilise the duo’s relationship as they entered the second halves of their lives and careers, a change that perhaps was destined to make them a bit more introspective and mellow anyway. While skirmishes have certainly broken out in Stonesland over the past 30 years, including Mick being less than flattered about how he was depicted in Richards’ 2010 autobiography Life, they’ve navigated the choppy waters without much incident.
“He’s a brother, a best friend, and probably the most contentious person I know,” Richards said of Jagger in 2011, “Nothing goes totally smoothly, but we always patch it up”.
Act two: Violence and menace
In the late 1970s, as slightly younger men still in their 30s, Richards and Jagger thought they were equipped to handle any sort of challenge or crisis, be it the threat of new bands usurping their place as the kings of rock ‘n’ roll or the occasional drug bust or visa rejection.
They’d already dealt with two of the worst things any band could face: the death of one of their own, with the drowning of Brian Jones in 1969, and the murder of a fan during the band’s set later that year at the disastrous Altamont festival. As a result, the Stones of the ‘70s were now armoured to the teeth and ready for anything, until they weren’t.
When Richards was arrested for heroin possession in a Toronto hotel in 1977, Jagger lent his support and understanding, telling the press, “We’ll all rally round and join Keith”. Privately, though, his patience with Richards’ drug problems and increasing unreliability was wearing thin. At the same time, Mick freely acknowledged to reporters that his own passion for rock music was dwindling, as he began searching for other outlets for his creativity, including movie acting and writing more music not necessarily designed for the Stones. This trend, which had partially been activated by Richards’ problems, soon began to grate on Keith, particularly as he was getting himself clean from heroin and trying to get the band refocused.
“It was the beginning of the ’80s when Mick started to become unbearable,” Richards later wrote in Life, “That’s when he became ‘Brenda’, or ‘Her Majesty’, or just ‘Madam’”.
Richards recalled that the 1985 album Dirty Work, in particular, was the low point, the beginning of the Stones’ internal version of ‘World War III’, as it were.
“The horrendous atmosphere in the studio affected everybody. Bill Wyman almost stopped turning up; Charlie [Watts] flew back home. In retrospect, I see that the tracks were full of violence and menace: ‘Had It with You’, ‘One Hit (to the Body)’, ‘Fight’. We made a video of ‘One Hit (to the Body)’ that more or less told the story—we nearly literally came to blows, over and above our acting duties. ‘Fight’ gives some idea of brotherly love between the Glimmer Twins at this juncture.”
Just about everyone who was aware of the vibes between Mick and Keith in the mid ‘80s assumed that The Rolling Stones were imminently doomed. They had lost any semblance of the warmth and brotherhood that had brought them together in the first place.
Act one: A simpler time
“I can’t remember when I didn’t know [Keith],” Mick Jagger told Rolling Stone, the magazine, in 1995, “We lived one street away; his mother knew my mother, and we were at primary school together from [ages] seven to 11. We used to play together, and we weren’t the closest friends, but we were friends.”
The music love affair didn’t emerge until a few years later, though, during an oft-mythologised train ride when a baby-faced teen Jagger showed up at Dartford Station with a few LPs under his arm, some American rhythm and blues records, and Richards took notice of them, impressed.
“We started to go to each other’s house and play these records,” Jagger said, “And then we started to go to other people’s houses to play other records. You know, it’s the time in your life when you’re almost stamp-collecting this stuff… At some point, Keith, he had this guitar with this electric guitar pickup. And he played it for me. So I said, ‘Well, I sing, you know? And you play the guitar’. Very obvious stuff.”
Mick and Keith, like a lot of young English kids at that moment, were transfixed by American rock, R&B, and blues music, but their musical love affair ultimately became the stuff of legend not because they imitated the music they loved, but because they went on an adventure together to actually understand it, and to find out how their own unique skills could bring something new to it.
“I think we realised that blues are not learned in a monastery,” Richards wrote in Life, “You’ve got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back, and then you can sing the blues”.
Sometimes, the Glimmer Twins had to go out and break each other’s hearts to learn a lesson, too. But Jagger and Richards, and their fans, were ultimately the better for it. If the drama was sometimes regrettable, the music rarely was.
