The “piss taking” Rolling Stones song that John Lennon loved but Mick Jagger couldn’t stand
As the two most prominent frontmen of their generation, there are several parallels between John Lennon and Mick Jagger.
Superb songwriters, personalities and performers, both men were equipped with the necessary tools needed to make it to the top of the game. However, despite this immense similarity, Lennon and Jagger could have differing opinions, an essential component of any worthwhile relationship.
John Lennon outlined this when speaking to Rolling Stone in 1980 in the final interview before his death. In the comprehensive discussion, the former Beatle conveyed his frustration at music critics and outlined a number of examples where they’d “attacked” him, ranging from his days in the Fab Four to the Plastic Ono Band. He was particularly aggrieved by one critic calling 1963’s ‘From Me to You’ “below-par Beatles”.
Lennon felt that the typical ‘build them up to knock them down’ approach was a damaging one, recognising how many of his peers have been hit with the same arc. He used Mick Jagger as an example of a prominent musician used as critic fodder. “But it’s not just me,” he asserted. “Take Mick, for instance. Mick’s put out consistently good work for 20 years, and will they give him a break?”
He made is clear that this wasn’t rhetorical, continuing, “Will they ever say, ‘Look at him, he’s No. 1, he’s 37, and he has a beautiful song, ‘Emotional Rescue,’ it’s up there? I enjoyed it, a lot of people enjoyed it.” But in the classic cat-and-dog tale of The Beatles and the Stones, it comes with cracking comic irony that, on this occasion, Jagger agreed with the critics when they questioned whether ‘Emotional Rescue’ was really his most sincere work.
While Lennon didn’t name any specific critics when discussing the negative response to the 1980 Rolling Stones single, many notable ones weren’t keen on it. In his review of the album of the same name, Ariel Swartley of Rolling Stone wrote that on the title track, Jagger’s “voice sounds as estranged and bewildered as the echoing horn”.
Generally speaking, there was a feeling that the song represented a sagging hollowness from the band that they once hailed. While Swartley wasn’t a fan of ‘Emotional Rescue’, according to a 1980 Rolling Stone interview, Jagger wasn’t keen on it either, despite John Lennon’s high praise.
Asked how he worked up “all that falsetto stuff” on the track, the frontman explained that it resulted from ad-libbed studio work. Rattled off in a lighthearted, throwaway moment, he noted that it was not a remarkable feat of artistic triumph, saying, “I wrote that on an electric piano in the studio, then Charlie [Watts] and Woody [Ronnie Wood] and I cut it immediately, live.”
While that might have been what made the Stones so electric in their early days, Jagger saw this version as a rather tepid incarnation. “It was all done very quickly,” he said. “I think the vocals could’ve been better. It’s just one of those recording-studio things. You would never really write a song like that in real life.”
With that in mind, where Lennon saw thrilling fast-food, Jagger saw something a little undercooked. He continued to explain that it just “comes out [like that] in the studio, ’cause it’s all ad-libbed, the end part. It was never planned like that.””But that part’s really funny, the speech,” he added. “Yeah, it’s all a joke, really. There’s a lot of pastiche all over the album. It’s all our piss-taking, in other words. Pastiche is just a big word for it.” While Lennon thought that represented a comfortable having resonating fun, Jagger thought it was a funny band lucriating in their comforts a little too freely.
Listen to ‘Emotional Rescue’ below.
