Cover Story: Jagger Remembers

Yeah, there's all these attractions of opposites and turning things upside down.

When you were writing it, did you conceive of it as this grand work?

I knew it was something good, 'cause I would just keep banging away at it until the fucking band recorded it.

There was resistance to it?

No, there wasn't any resistance. It was just that I knew that I wanted to do it and get it down. And I hadn't written a lot of songs on my own, so you have to teach it. When you write songs, you have to like them yourself first, but then you have to make everyone else like them, because you can force them to play it, but you can't force them to like it. And if they like it, they'll do a much better job than if they're just playing 'cause they feel they're obligated.

They get inspired.

And then you get inspired, and that's what being in a band's about rather than hiring people. But I knew it was a good song. You just have this feeling. It had its poetic beginning, and then it had historic references and then philosophical jottings and so on. It's all very well to write that in verse, but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England -- you're skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.

The song has a very strong opening: "Please allow me to introduce myself." And then it's this Everyman figure in history who keeps appearing from the beginning of civilization.

Yeah, it's a very long historical figure -- the figures of evil and figures of good -- so it is a tremendously long trail he's made as personified in this piece.

What else makes this song so powerful?

It has a very hypnotic groove, a samba, which has a tremendous hypnotic power, rather like good dance music. It doesn't speed up or slow down. It keeps this constant groove. Plus, the actual samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it's also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive -- because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro-whatever-you-call-that rhythm. So to white people, it has a very sinister thing about it.

But forgetting the cultural colors, it is a very good vehicle for producing a powerful piece. It becomes less pretentious because it's a very unpretentious groove. If it had been done as a ballad, it wouldn't have been as good.

Obviously, Altamont gave it a whole other resonance.

Yeah, Altamont is much later than the song, isn't it? I know what you're saying, but I'm just stuck in my periods, because you were asking me what I was doing and I was in my study in Chester Square.

After Altamont, did you shy away from performing that song?

Yeah, probably, for a bit.

It stigmatized the song in a way?

Yeah. Because it became so involved with [Altamont] -- sort of journalistically and so on. There were other things going on with it apart from Altamont.

Was it the black magic thing?

Yeah. And that's not really what I meant. My whole thing of this song was not black magic and all this silly nonsense -- like Megadeth or whatever else came afterward. It was different than that. We had played around with that imagery before -- which is Satanic Majesties -- but it wasn't really put into words.

After the concert itself, when it became apparent that somebody got killed, how did you feel?

Well, awful. I mean, just awful. You feel a responsibility. How could it all have been so silly and wrong? But I didn't think of these things that you guys thought of, you in the press: this great loss of innocence, this cathartic end of the era . . . I didn't think of any of that. That particular burden didn't weigh on my mind. It was more how awful it was to have had this experience and how awful it was for someone to get killed and how sad it was for his family and how dreadfully the Hell's Angels behaved.

Did it cause you to back off that kind of satanic imagery?

The satanic-imagery stuff was very overplayed [by journalists]. We didn't want to really go down that road. And I felt that song was enough. You didn't want to make a career out of it. But bands did that -- Jimmy Page, for instance.

Big Aleister Crowley . . .

I knew lots of people that were into Aleister Crowley. What I'm saying is, it wasn't what I meant by the song "Sympathy for the Devil." If you read it, it's not about black magic, per se.

On that same record you did "Street Fighting Man." Tell me a bit about that.

It was a very strange time in France. But not only in France but also in America, because of the Vietnam War and these endless disruptions.

Did you write that song?

Yeah. I wrote a lot of the melody and all the words, and Keith and I sat around and made this wonderful track, with Dave Mason playing the shehani on it live.

The shehani?

It's a kind of Indian reed instrument a bit like a primitive clarinet. It comes in at the end of the tune. It has a very wailing, strange sound.

It's another of the classic songs. Why does it have such resonance today?

I don't know if it does. I don't know whether we should really play it. I was persuaded to put it in this tour because it seemed to fit in, but I'm not sure if it really has any resonance for the present day. I don't really like it that much. I thought it was a very good thing at the time. There was all this violence going on. I mean, they almost toppled the government in France; DeGaulle went into this complete funk, as he had in the past, and he went and sort of locked himself in his house in the country. And so the government was almost inactive. And the French riot police were amazing.

Was this written in response to having seen what was going on with the students in Paris, a direct inspiration from seeing it on television?

Yeah, it was a direct inspiration, because by contrast, London was very quiet . . .

Sleepy London town?

Isn't "No Expectations" on that record?

It's got that wonderful steel guitar part.

That's Brian playing. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It's funny how you remember -- but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.

"Let It Bleed"?

Yeah. What's on that? It was all recorded at the same time, these two records.

What do you mean? Those two records were recorded back to back?

Some of them were recorded on one and spilled over to the next.

It's got "Midnight Rambler," "Love in Vain," "You Can't Always Get What You Want." This seems to be one of the bleakest records that you made. The songs are very disturbing, and the scenery is ugly. Why this view of the world? The topics are rape, war, murder, addiction . . .

Well, it's a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens, pillage and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense. The thing about Vietnam was that it wasn't like World War II, and it wasn't like Korea, and it wasn't like the Gulf War. It was a real nasty war, and people didn't like it. People objected, and people didn't want to fight it. The people that were there weren't doing well. There were these things used that were always used before, but no one knew about them -- like napalm.

Are you saying the Vietnam War had a heavy influence on this record?

I think so. Even though I was living in America only part time, I was influenced. All those images were on television. Plus, the spill out onto campuses.

Who wrote "Midnight Rambler"?

That's a song Keith and I really wrote together. We were on a holiday in Italy. In this very beautiful hill town, Positano, for a few nights. Why we should write such a dark song in this beautiful, sunny place, I really don't know. We wrote everything there -- the tempo changes, everything. And I'm playing the harmonica in these little cafes, and there's Keith with the guitar.

"Gimmie Shelter"?

That's a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It's apocalypse; the whole record's like that.

Whose idea was it to do the Robert Johnson song "Love in Vain"?

I don't know. We changed the arrangement quite a lot from Robert Johnson's. We put in extra chords that aren't there on the Robert Johnson version. Made it more country. And that's another strange song, because it's very poignant. Robert Johnson was a wonderful lyric writer, and his songs are quite often about love, but they're desolate.

"You Can't Always Get What You Want"?

It's a good song even if I say so myself.

Why is that one so popular?