The Rolling Stones’ “finest hour”, according to Mick Jagger
There is a curious pitfall that a great deal of artists plunge into when they appraise their own back catalogue: they herald a dud as their most significant. Bob Dylan claims that the patchy Shot of Love is his opus, Leonard Cohen crowned 1979’s middling Recent Songs was his favourite, and Patti Smith placed Banga ahead of Horses. None of these options are bad albums; some of them are great, in fact, but in the culturally transcendent sense, they pale in comparison to the gleaming masterpieces that they managed to produce. The same lack of holistic foresight can not be said of Mick Jagger.
The pouting frontman is a fellow who calls a spade a spade when perusing the vast back catalogue of the Rolling Stones. He championed ‘Gimme Shelter’ as the best single in their output, in my opinion, the correct choice. “It was a very moody piece about the world closing in on you a bit,” Jagger said of the track that now sadly has a remaining prescience. “When it was recorded, early ’69 or something, it was a time of war and tension, so that’s reflected in this tune. It’s still wheeled out when big storms happen, as they did the other week. It’s been used a lot to evoke natural disaster.”
And when it comes to his “finest hour”, the gyrating star was just as on the money. When discussing Exile on Main Street with The Talks, Jagger was quick to praise the 1972 masterpiece as the pick of the bunch among the band’s many lauded LPs. “My finest hour,” he proclaimed. “Well, it is certainly good and certainly it was a very creative period, a really good period. Some very good things came in that period in music,” he said, evidently with a ‘period’ fixation only matched by BBC Four programming.
The band was assured during this period, and they were freed from the sway of trying to be like The Beatles, too. Financial difficulties had forced them to focus, and with that came a liberated return to the slightly more bluesy style that spawned them. Psychedelic experimentations like Their Satanic Majesties Request were shelved in favour of what they knew best. Being anything other than the blues gone bad never suited them anyhow.
As Jagger said upon initial release: “This new album is fucking mad. There’s so many different tracks. It’s very rock ‘n’ roll, you know.” Few press releases put it as bluntly as that. It affirmed that they were a band who knew themselves, which is perhaps why the transcendence of their best records has never been lost on them.
Nevertheless, when you’re blitzing through a purple patch at the prolific rate the Stones were, then you are bound to gather some moss along the way. As Jagger added in his appraisal of both the Stones and the golden counterculture era as a whole during the time: “There was some crap as well, but there were some really good things, some good rock things, it was a very good period for soul music as well.”
Aside from his own finest moment, he then went on to add that some of his favourite records came out at that time. “They had great albums by Curtis Mayfield, James Brown, Marvin Gaye,” he added. And then he hit the brakes on his own back-patting, continuing: “It’s a very good album, but I don’t know if I have a best one. […] I don’t really have favourites. And I don’t listen to Rolling Stones albums.”
Keith Richards, on the other hand, is certainly not a man who would apply the same modesty, having once grumbled with glowing pride: “You’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones.” And of the third most significant factor in our solar system, he cites the following trio as the band’s finest hours from his standpoint: Beggars Banquet (1968), Sticky Fingers (1971), Exile on Main Street (1972).
Despite the fact that Jagger might not be quite so forthright in his opinion or spin Exile on Main Street all that often, that doesn’t stop him from looking back at it all with fondness. As he surmised: “I don’t regret anything and I am very fond of all of it. My years with the Rolling Stones are and were a wonderful time, really. I mean, you could paint it in a very dark light: it was decadent, yeah it was quite decadent, but decadence is very enjoyable, isn’t it?”
That much is proven by a record of utter abandon crafted when by a band on the run with hell to raise. They’d been derided as beyond the pale following Altamont, but this became their shimmering statement of bold defiance.
