The icon Keith Richards thought Mick Jagger “could deliver ten times more than”
It’s hard to imagine Keith Richards ever eating, but on the off chance that he has consumed some food at one point or another, I’ll bet it was meat and potatoes rather than moules mariniere with al dente bucatini. He is, and has always been, a man who prefers things simple and rustic, whether that’s his rock ‘n’ roll or ‘Nuclear Waste’, the cocktail he claimed to have invented, which is quite literally just a strong vodka orange.
As a disciple of the blues, anything that perverts the rudimentary core of rock ‘n’ roll is met with his wrath. He’s sliced Elton John down to size as an “old bitch”, thought The Beatles lost themselves in a “mishmash of rubbish”, and cuttingly quipped, “I don’t know where Metallica’s inspiration comes from, but if it’s from me, then I fucked up.”
This has always presented a peculiar dynamic within The Rolling Stones because, in Mick Jagger, you have somewhat of a frustrated avant-gardist, reigned in by Richards’ disdain for “daft” experimentation, with enough of Jagger knowing it is for the probably for the best to prompt his return to rock normality. On this front, Richards has always yielded Their Satanic Majesties Request as a stick to beat the experimentalism out of him, heralding it as a moment he let Jagger off the leash and came to rue it as he ran amok in trendy psychedelia.
“I probably started to take too many drugs,” Jagger even eventually admitted. “Well, it’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good.” However, throughout the years that followed, Jagger kept flirting with the idea of trying on something new for a change. This especially rose to the fore when David Bowie’s weird revolution suddenly made old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll seem a little one-dimensional.
“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”.
Jagger thought there was something more to it – how couldn’t there be, he was sweeping up all the trendy kids who were once screaming for him. “He watched what David Bowie was doing and wanted to do it. Bowie was a major, major attraction,” Richards continues. “Somebody had taken Mick on in the costume and bizarreness department.”
He thought this meant jeopardising his true talent in favour of a fad-driven facsimile. “The fact is, Mick could deliver ten times more than Bowie in just a T-shirt and a pair of jeans, singing ‘I’m a Ma’,” Richards wrote. “Why would you want to be anything else if you’re Mick Jagger? Is being the greatest entertainer in show business not enough? He forgot that it was he who was new, who created and set the trends in the first place, for years. It’s fascinating. I can’t figure it out. It’s almost as if Mick was aspiring to be Mick Jagger, chasing his own phantom.”
Or, as David Bowie might retort, “Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming.” Jagger’s six decades of sold-out shows certainly prove Richards has a point, but there is still a sense that Jagger hasn’t stopped wondering whether Bowie had one, too.
