The greatest frontman that Mick Jagger ever witnessed: “Did it best”
Trying to tell Mick Jagger to stay still while playing live is often like asking the tide if it would kindly not come in.
The Rolling Stones’ frontman did everything he could to give the audience a good time. If you strapped a step tracker to him for the night, he’d probably have run a half marathon by the time the house lights came up. There was never a moment to stand still or simply take in the crowd, but he still felt there were plenty of artists working with something far more magical than he was.
Because a lot of what Jagger was doing came from the blues tradition, and while some of the greatest guitarists in that genre sat in a chair, he was going to give it to the people directly. Howlin’ Wolf made his voice sound like one of the scariest voices of all time, and if he could do that without even moving that much, Jagger was going to make sure that every audience had the kind of experience that they wouldn’t soon forget.
It’s easy to consider Freddie Mercury one of the greatest frontmen of all time, but you wouldn’t have had that kind of stage presence without Jagger coming first. He wasn’t going to stop until every single person in the crowd was on their feet whenever he sang, but that was nothing compared to what the R&B world was doing. The best Motown groups of all time had their routines choreographed to a tee every time they played, but with James Brown, you genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen from one song to the next.
First of all, Brown was already one of the single greatest dancers to hit the stage, and half of the appeal was seeing what he was going to do every single time he played one of his sets. He already had the reputation of being one of the almighty godfathers of soul, so he wasn’t exactly going to spend the back half of his career singing nothing but ballads for the rest of his life with his band behind him.
And when you listen to the way that he performed, he was practically playing the band like an instrument half the time. You can hear on all of those live recordings that he’s talking to every member of the band when they needed to bring things up in the mix, and his back and forth with the Fabulous Flames made for the kind of push and pull that anyone could have fallen in love with from the moment they laid eyes on him.
Jagger was very much a student of Brown’s at the time, and when it came to the traditional rock star moves, the frontman felt that ‘The Godfather’ had some of those signature moves down to a tee, saying, “I used to do his slide across the stage, when you move laterally from one side of the stage to the other, twisting your foot on one leg. I couldn’t do the splits, so I didn’t even bother. Everyone did the microphone trick, where you pushed the microphone, then you put your foot on it , and it comes back. James probably did it best.”
You weren’t going to see Jagger break out the same kind of moves that Brown was doing, but that’s because doing so would incapacitate someone for several days if they weren’t ready. Brown was almost superhuman whenever he played his tunes, and by the time that one of his handlers draped that coat over him at the end of the night, it felt like he had truly done the impossible in front of his fans.
Jagger could certainly hang with the best of them, but Brown was proof that there would always be someone with slightly more stamina than you have every single time you played. And if Brown’s moves exist on film and vinyl forever, Jagger at least had something that he could set his sights on every single time he performed.
