|
contents | jazz | |||||||||||||
| Keith Richards about Mick Jagger Rolling Stone Keith Richards offers some insight into his and Mick Jagger's working styles. "Mick has to get up in the morning with a plan, " Richards tells Newsweek. "Who he's going to call, what he's going to eat, where he's going to go. Me, I wake up, praise the Lord, then make sure all the phones are turned off. If we were a mum-and-pop operation, then he'd be Mum." On the eve of their next concert tour, Richards says that he and the rest of the band still enjoy performing after all these years. "I could see why some people may think we're phoning it in after all this time, " he tells Senior Writer Lorraine Ali in the August 15 issue of Newsweek (on newsstands Monday, August 8). "But playing the music we do, and playing it with these guys, 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' can be a new song to me every night. I mean, we don't need to do it to feed our families. We don't need to do it to prove anything. And nobody wants to be the first one to get off a moving bus. You end up in the dust -- 'Uh, excuse me, where's my suitcase?'" Ali spent time with the band in Toronto where they've been rehearsing for their next tour, which kicks off in Boston on Aug. 21. "It's that fascination with music that is still the core of the band, " Richards says. Drummer Charlie Watts "sits around and talks about this fantastic Coltrane solo. Thank God, it's the one thing that hasn't left us. You can get disillusioned with the state of the world, but the music's still OK." He takes another drag of his cigarette. "Maybe we're just a product of our time, " he muses. "Would our band translate if we were just starting out now? I'd say we'd probably be able to make a living, but I'd keep the day job." For Jagger, this is the day job-at least until he gets onstage. "Sometimes you might feel 'Here we go again.' Feel a little cynical about it, " Jagger tells Ali. "But you get out there and it takes over." Ali also previews the new album, "A Bigger Bang, " due in early September, calling it a welcome throwback to the Stones' scrappy beginnings. The most searing moment, on a song called "Sweet Neo Con, " isn't personal but political. "You call yourself a Christian, I call you a hypocrite/You call yourself a patriot, well I think you're full of s--t." "It is direct, " Jagger says with a laugh. "Keith said [he breaks into a dead-on Keith imitation], 'It's not really metaphorical.' I think he's a bit worried because he lives in the U.S." Jagger smiles. "But I don't." The Stones' last CD, "Forty Licks" was mostly repackaged material. "There's no harm in doing that occasionally, " says Jagger, "but we didn't want to do it again so soon. You become like an oldies band." On "A Bigger Bang, " all the songs are new -- a raw, "Little Red Rooster" -- style blues number, a couple of Richards's endearingly bedraggled ballads and the usual raunchy, swaggering club anthems. "We put new stuff out because we still can, " Jagger says. "We have lots of it-it's not like we're just eking it out." He says producer Don Was, "is always worried the songs won't sound like the Rolling Stones. I don't care if it sounds like them-us. It would be an achievement if it didn't." "A Bigger Bang" is their longest record in 33 years and is sequenced to sound like two sides of an old vinyl album. "The record company felt it was too long, " says Jagger. "But I said, 'What's the favorite Rolling Stones album of all time?' 'Well, "Exile on Main Street".' 'There, you see? "Exile." And how long is that?' 'It's over an hour.' 'And the problem is?' 'Uh, nothing'." write your comments about the article :: © 2005 Jazz News :: home page |