The musicians Mick Jagger said always hated The Rolling Stones: “They saw it as a threat”
The entire definition of rock and roll could easily be a silhouette of Mick Jagger for casual music fans.
Even though The Rolling Stones’ frontman’s tongue is still one of the mascots of the group half the time they play, it’s Jagger’s energy that has kept the band moving every single time they put on a concert, and even Keith Richards is one of the only remaining members still standing. But even when The Stones were making their stone-cold classics, Jagger remembered other genres loathing everything they did.
Then again, every single concerned parent who cared about what their kids were listening to usually had a problem with The Stones. They were already being the antithesis to The Beatles in lots of ways, and if the girls were screaming over a bunch of well-meaning lads from Liverpool, hearing about what was going on behind closed doors with Jagger and Richards would have been enough to make your skin crawl.
But beyond their nefarious habits, Jagger was already getting a lot of blowback from the jazz community before the band had even gained traction. If we’re being honest, The Stones were practically a blues band more than a rock and roll act in their earliest stages, but even when they were copying some of the greatest bluesmen of all time, it was easy for people to look at them as a bunch of snot-nosed kids that were trying to make a mockery of what blues was supposed to be.
And when compared to jazz, rock and roll might as well have been music at a preschool level. Miles Davis had moved far beyond anything that rock and roll had ever done, and while there were still people like Jimi Hendrix who could wow anyone once he got onstage, Jagger could remember countless jazz artists from around that time who would badmouth them at every opportunity.
In those days, jazz stood for something more sophisticated, and rock and roll was everything they were against, with Jagger recalling, “In the old days, jazz people hated rock ’n’ roll. I can’t even start to tell you how much they hated it. I guess they saw it as a threat, and they didn’t think that rock people had any technical ability, which a lot of the time was true, but it doesn’t really matter; classical musicians used to look down on jazz people, who didn’t have as much technical ability.”
If you were to look at the members of The Stones, though, there’s a good chance that Charlie Watts would have agreed with them to a certain extent. He considered himself a jazz drummer before he really started working with The Stones, and while his style was more unorthodox than every other hard-hitting drummer, he figured that it would serve the song a lot better if he had the right feel than worrying about throwing in some strange fills.
But it’s not like the band couldn’t stretch out when they wanted. There was no way in hell that they were going to go on some long jazz odyssey or anything like that, but when Mick Taylor joined the group, there was a certain fluidity in the solos that was reminiscent of what some of the greatest jazz improvisers were doing in their prime, especially when they started jamming and let the tape roll on songs like ‘Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’.
Rock and roll may have been a danger to the jazz community, but it wasn’t all that threatening if you were willing to see what it was all about. After all, the greatest artists fear what they don’t understand, but it takes true legends to learn from the new school and apply it to what they’re doing every time they make a new record.
