The two Rolling Stones albums Mick Jagger hated: “It’s not very good”
To be fair, you could hardly describe any rock star as a wallflower, but particularly not Mick Jagger. If there’s any frontman in the history of music who’s notorious for their exuberance and energy – as well as quite often not being able to keep their mouth shut – it would be him, but in many ways, it’s this exact formidable charm that has made Jagger not only a rock superstar but a beloved celebrity icon.
Despite the flowers, there is also a more controversial side to Jagger’s sharp tongue, largely because he can’t seem to hold his opinions in. Whether that makes him more endearing or insufferable as he grows older is another matter, but one thing is certain: after more than 60 years of treading the boards, he absolutely does not care about holding back his personal thoughts. If nothing else, it’s because as time wears on, he’s probably acutely aware that if he doesn’t voice them now, he might be holding them to his grave.
While this is definitely not to suggest that Jagger’s days are numbered, it’s only natural that in a career as lengthy and illustrious as his, he wouldn’t take kindly to everything The Rolling Stones have produced. In fact, quite the opposite – Jagger has been overwhelmingly vocal about which of the band’s efforts deserve their golden status and which should be left to rot by the roadside.
In this vein, among the Stones’ prolific scores of studio albums, there are two sore thumbs that stick out as blights on Jagger’s musical soul. But surprisingly enough, they aren’t from the band’s dreaded 1980s rough patch or even some of their more recent ageing efforts – but instead from what is widely constituted as their peak period of the 1960s, as Jagger feels they just don’t meet the stratospheric standards they would go on to set.
The first is the 1967 album Between the Buttons, which Jagger once told Rolling Stone he feels should just fade into obsoletion as: “Frank Zappa used to say he really liked it. It’s a good record, but it was unfortunately rather spoiled. We recorded it in London on four-track machines. We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times, we lost the sound of a lot of it.”
Similarly, The Rolling Stones’ follow-up album from later in the same year, Their Satanic Majesties Request, failed to live up to his heady standards either, but the difference was that on the latter, there was also an ulterior motive at play. With regard to the album as a whole, Jagger later admitted: “It’s not very good. It had interesting things on it, but I don’t think any of the songs are very good. It’s a bit like Between the Buttons. It’s a sound experience, really, rather than a song experience,” however, the sound versus song dichotomy turned out to be his weapon of choice.
The blitzing sound of Their Satanic Majesties Request was formulated with one aim – to oust manager Andrew Loog Oldham, as Jagger confessed: “We did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck,” Jagger confessed. The ‘Satisfaction’ singer then added: “Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.”
In this sense, the plan came together, and in the long run, Jagger didn’t really care if the album copped the title of being The Rolling Stones’ worst effort, because for once, being rubbish was all in a day’s work. Maybe that’s why he’s so brutal with his words – because he knows more than most that they are really the truth.
