The one singer Mick Jagger and Rick Rubin both crowned as the “greatest”
The entire essence of a rock and roll band comes down to what Mick Jagger did whenever he sang.
The Beatles and The Stones were a lot more friendly than what the rivalry had said about them for years, but compared to his bandmates, Jagger did everything he could to leave the audience absolutely stunned every single time they sang one of their tunes. Rick Rubin could certainly see that he was looking at a genius, but he felt that there was something more that Jagger didn’t tap into.
At the same time, was there anyone asking the frontman to be more sophisticated? The biggest names in rock and roll before then had been people like Chuck Berry and Little Richard, and while they both loved them to bits whenever they got offstage, there was no chance that he and Keith Richards were going to come anywhere close to what they did whenever they came up with their own material.
Berry was already becoming the king of the three-minute rock and roll song, so all that they could hope to do was make something that was as entertaining as that whenever he sang. Jagger could break out the Little Richard wails when he wanted to and even casually break everyone’s heart with the right ballad, but since he had a bass in his hands, he was always going to be playing second fiddle to what his heroes were doing.
The Stones’ frontman never stopped moving from the moment that he got onstage, but even then, he was never going to come anywhere close to what someone like James Brown could do. Brown practised for hours at a time before he became one of the biggest stars in the world, and even with all of the dance steps that Jagger made during their shows, no one came close to what the hardest working man in show business could pull off.
Jagger was dumbfounded watching him, and he figured that no one else could have pulled off those dance steps better than ‘The Godfather of Soul’, saying, “I copied all his moves. I copied everybody’s moves. I used to do [James’] slide across the stage. 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, and then you catch it. James probably did it best.”
And while Rick Rubin was trying to capture a vibe every single time he got to the studio, he did know that no one else could have possibly touched what Brown was doing when seeing him perform live, saying, “I remember going to Minneapolis to visit Prince, and there was an endless loop of James Brown’s performance in the 1964 film The T.A.M.I. Show running. That may be the single greatest rock and roll performance ever captured on film.”
Jagger and Rubin didn’t always see eye to eye when they were in the studio together, but when you look at the way both of them operated, it’s not like they didn’t have anything in common when it came to Brown’s work. The soul legend was working hard to get that same kind of feeling every time he performed, and even if the rest of the world wasn’t listening to R&B, Rubin knew that it was about capturing the best performances just like he heard out of Brown when producing Jagger’s solo record.
Not all of it worked, and it took them a while to settle their differences, but when you have perfection to look up to as a model, it’s not shocking when you end up falling short. Jagger was already one of the greatest frontmen that rock and roll had ever seen, but he and Rubin both had to admit that there were some pieces of their careers that were always going to be in the shadow of someone like Brown.
