The 1966 Rolling Stones song that Mick Jagger fell out of love with: “It’s not very good”
Mick Jagger didn’t ever want to be defined as simply a rock and roll singer for the rest of his life.
The Rolling Stones are still the symbol of what every great rock band should aspire to be, but there was never any point where Jagger felt that they couldn’t mix it up and start making tunes that played with whatever new musical flavours of the day that were happening at any given time. Nothing can take away from the power of their classics, but even when working on their early hits, Jagger knew when they were making something that was well below their usual standards.
But it took a while for him and Keith Richards to even write a half-decent song whenever they were writing together. It took Andrew Loog Oldham locking them in a room before they came out with something substantial in their early days, and a lot of what they were making was so soft that they were already writing for other people before they got the right tone they were searching for on their albums.
It wasn’t necessarily cool for them to be making tunes like ‘As Tears Go By’ right out of the gate, and since they were already known for playing blues covers, ‘Satisfaction’ was their first proper introduction to the world. They had been making tunes for years at that point, but when everyone heard Richards’s signature guitar riff kicking everything off, they knew that they were hearing something that sounded a bit more dangerous.
The Stones were always meant to have a little bit more grit behind their delivery, and a lot of what they were singing about wasn’t anything you would hear in your average Beatles song. The Fab Four were writing for their teenage audience, but Jagger’s lyrics about going against authority and sexual frustration was bound to be more than a little bit risque for the times when he first opened his mouth.
Then again, a song like ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ didn’t seem to have the same kind of punch that he was hoping for out of his music. The tune had everything that you’d be looking for in a Stones classic, but even after making tunes like ‘Get Off Of My Cloud’, Jagger only saw this kind of tune as an example of them spinning their wheels a little too much after getting their first major hit.
Jagger was proud to have hit on something more novel than the average love song, but he wasn’t about to say that ‘Breakdown’ was one of his favourite songs by any stretch, either, saying, “To write about anything other than the normal run-of-the-mill love clichés was considered very outre and it was never touched. Anything outside that would shock people. So songs like ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’ were slightly jarring to people. [But] it’s not very good, really.”
Even if it wasn’t one of his personal favourites, this kind of song was what broke down the door for him to write about more pressing topics. Everyone else would have shied away from the darker side of life, but thanks to this one little song, Jagger was creating a bridge that would eventually lead him to drug culture on ‘Mother’s Little Helper’ to the nastiness of ‘Street Fighting Man’ to singing about the coming apocalypse that will leave the Earth in ruin on ‘Gimme Shelter’.
And now look at how far we’ve come. The Stones have long since been dethroned as the heaviest band in the world, and an entire new genre of music called metal has taken that dark slant and made it their entire identity. Is that what Jagger thought he was getting himself into when making this little song? Probably not, but he doesn’t really get a say in how his music is remembered. All that he could do was make the songs that he felt the strongest about, and no one else was going to take that away from him.
