Moves Like Jagger

During the late sixties, a phenomenon engulfed the United States. Millions, spangled in the stars and the stripes, succumbed to the to the sound of guitar wielding, redcoats, playing a rock & roll bought forth from beyond the sea. Novel, exotically foreign and daring in it is approach. This euphony emanated new vitality and represented the dawning of a new age. This was the British Invasion and Britannia ruled the airwaves.

At the forefront of this takeover were the Stones and at their helm stood none other than Mick Jagger.

Undoubtedly one of the most metaphysically inclined and intelligential performers of our era, Mick Jagger is also one of the most taciturn. The following interview is based of the October 12th, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone and should by no means be considered an authentic depiction or representation of Mick Jagger, rather an exegesis of the artist’s influence and impact. Formalities aside, let us commence…

Is it true that with songs such as "Come On" and "King Bee" you really re-discovered Slim Harpo and Chuck Berry for a majority of the American populous Who had never been exposed to that kind of music beforehand?

Yeah. Most people had no idea about it that's why we stopped doing blues. We didn't want to continue doing blues forever, just long enough to turn people on to others who were very good at it and not have to carry on the mantle ourselves. So you could say that we did blues to turn people on, but it’s beyond me why anyone would be turned on by us, frankly its unbelievably stupid. I mean what's the point in listening to cover "I'm A King Bee" when you can listen to Slim Harpo, the very man doing it himself?

So your change in style came about once you believed, a majority of people had been turned on to blues?

Honestly, I think our change came about the same time a lot of the beat groups started popping up. Back when there were no hit groups and the Beatles were playing The Cavern. We were blues purists; into all those commercial things but never had the guts to do them on stage because we were so horrible and so aware of being blues purists, you get what I mean? You see back in those days nobody knew each other. We didn't know the Beatles or the Animals from Adam, yet we were all doing the same material. We used to be so surprised to hear other people do the same things we were doing. The thing is that the public didn't know about any of this music because the record companies were issuing hundreds of singles a week so naturally most people missed a huge lot of them.

It was also at this time that you first ran into censorship problems with the words "half-assed games." Many of the disc jockeys in the United States cut that part out.

Really? Frankly I don't know what's considered rude in America cause it's all so different, isn't it! Anyway, coming down to all controversy that shrouded us in the day, we weren’t purposefully singing about subjects thought to be taboo: drugs, sex and violence. We just wanted to honestly explore a subject not otherwise discussed. Anyhow, censorship is weird.

When you first came to San Francisco in 1965, the Diggers put out a broadcast describing the Stones as the embodiment of what they called, the ‘breaking up of old values.’

Yes, this came about after a series of songs like "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Mother's Little Helpers," "Have You Seen Your Mother" . . .
 Ha-ha; "Have You Seen Your Mother" was the final straw. We came to a full stop after that. I just couldn't make it with that anymore, what more could we say. I find it all quite amusing, where you had the Beatles singing, “Let It Be,” you had us singing “Let It Bleed.” But obviously these songs bothered people because for the first time rock songs were saying things that couldn't be said before. It's spending all the time in America. All these songs were written in America. It is a great place to write because all the time you are being bombarded with all of it and you can't help but try and put it in some kind of form. As far as I'm concerned those songs just reflect what's going on. Drawing attention if you will, to society’s confusion between evil imagined and real, between arbitrary social conventions and real ethical principles. We just used the energy of these subjects to inspire our music. And at the end of the day, they simply lived up…or down to people’s expectations of them.

What would you say to people who see your songs as political or sociological statements?

Well it's interesting, but it's just the Rolling Stones sort of rambling on about what they feel. At our best, we were just testing the boundaries of the liberation so freely promised by rock. Were drugs OK? We didn’t just sing about this stuff, we experienced I firsthand, we lost Brian, and the nearly Keith…Was flirting with violence OK? Pete sake, we sang about it until someone got killed right in front of stage where we were preforming, back at the Altamont Speedway in California.

Works Cited

Cott, Johnathan. Mick Jagger: The Rolling Stone Interview . 12 October 1968. 26 September 2014 <www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-rolling-stone-interview-mick-jagger-19681012>.

Puterbaugh, Parke. The British Invasion: From the Beatles to the Stones, The Sixties Belonged to Britain . 14 July 1988. 26 September 2014 <www.rollingstone.com/music/news/the-british-invasion- from-the-beatles-to-the-stones-the-sixties-belonged-to-britain-19880714>.