News

Fake "Mick Jagger" response to Keith Richards

5:39 p.m. · November 5, 2010 · by Dan Nishimoto

Let me be clear: the fake "Mick Jagger" response to Keith Richards' autobiography Life is essential reading.

Say what? Slate published a piece this morning saying that journalist Bill Wyman shares the name of the former Rolling Stones bassist. They also claim that the bassist Wyman has been an archivist for the band "over the past five decades." Wyman the journalist says he was sent a package including Jagger's response and a handwritten note, "Bill: For the vault. M."

It's all fiction (the byline reads, "What if Mick Jagger responded to Keith Richards about his new autobiography?" and the piece is credited to Bill Wyman, not Mick Jagger). But anyone interested in The Rolling Stones and the recent rancor sparked by Keith Richards' outspoken book will want to read the entire response. Even for those with a passing interest in the Stones or a general interest in long-term creative relationships will find the piece of interest as a reflection on a decades-long friendship, creative partnership and business relationship -- or, as Wyman puts it, an "unusual coalition" -- that has been fraught with excesses of every imaginable kind.

The piece, speaking as Jagger in the first person, stresses two points: "Our bond, his talent." The early years of Richards and Jagger are seen as idyllic: "For the next nearly 10 years, we were rarely apart. Even after we were famous, we lived at each others' flats or houses. We were still very young, and, like puppies, we'd cluster together." But Wyman also repeats the idea that the two were young, successful and making mistakes along the way, most notably in not taking responsibility for Brian Jones' decline. To give some perspective, Wyman frequently asks, "What were you doing at 25?"

Wyman speaks in adulation of Richards' early talent, listing his early compositions and praising the "primal feel of the chording." He places importance of Richards' music over the lyrics: "...no one would have paid attention if the chords weren't arresting, irrefutable. The songs spoke primarily through their music, not their words."

Wyman makes clear that Richards hit a creative explosion in the '60s and abruptly declined in the early '70s. More important, he frames the rift between Richards and Jagger as a difference in perspective. Speaking as Jagger, he writes, "It is said of me that I act above the rest of the band and prefer the company of society swells. Would you rather have had a conversation with Warren Beatty, Andy Warhol, and Ahmet Ertegun … or Keith, his drug mule Tony, and the other surly nonverbal members of his merry junkie entourage? Keith actually seems not to understand why I would want my dressing room as far away as possible from that of someone who travels with a loaded gun." Wyman frames Jagger's personality as careful or calculating, depending on opinion.

Wyman continues to describe the complications of the band's creative and business mechanics, but before the midpoint of the piece it becomes clear that he sees the two men as having grown apart, yet are stuck together because of their history, as well as the band.

Yes, it's (rock) fiction, but the entire piece is 4 browser pages of worthwhile reading. In case you just want some highlights for weekend party talk, here are some bits:

On Exile on Main Street being overrated and that Richards' skills were already diminished by that album

Those who like Exile on Main St. like its denseness, its mystery, its swampy commitment... But I think its murk promises depths that aren't there. There are decent but no major songs on Exile. Let's go back an album, to Sticky Fingers. I wrote "Brown Sugar." Mick Taylor wrote "Sway" and most of "Moonlight Mile," and made "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" his own. Keith and I together did most of the rest, like "Wild Horses," but, in the end, he didn't write most of the thing's best songs...

...Some nice tracks— "Rocks Off," "Happy"—but there is no "Gimme Shelter" or "Let It Bleed." Chords that once threatened society in some significant now way rarely radiated outward.

On the lean years of the '70s and '80s

The next few years were difficult. I don't want to say Keith wrote no songs. He did. But successively, in each album, the process became more difficult, as both his capacity for the job declined along with the quality of what he did write. He mocks the disco songs—"Hot Stuff," "Miss You," "Emotional Rescue." But what would the commercial impact of those albums have been without those immediate hits? We were being outsold by everyone from Supertramp to the Doobie Brothers as it was. At the same time I had to come up with tracks and weasel promising material out of our cohort and not give up songwriting credit, which I accomplished in all but one or two cases.

Returning to the point that Jagger and Richards had an important bond

I go into such detail to describe the arc of our decline accurately but also note this sad corollary: Keith brought something out of me, way back when. Through Exile, I felt I had to rise to his songs. When he checked out creatively, I lost something important. While there is some spark, I guess, in "Some Girls" or "Shattered" or whatever, however contrived, I know most of the other songs sucked. In the 1980s and '90s it got worse. I could conjure up only the most banal cliché or the most pretentious polysyllabic nonsense. Compare "Sympathy for the Devil" with "Heartbreaker." One Godard made a film about. The other is a TV movie. I literally wrote a song called "She's So Cold" and then, a few years later, one called "She Was Hot."

On Richards today

Keith doesn't write good rock songs much any more, but what he does do, every four or five years, is craft a beautiful little ballad. ... These songs are more honest than his book. "

In "The Worst," he says something about "I'm the worst kind of guy/ For you to be around." That's a song that might ring true for many people. It makes me think about how Keith lost me only after I lost him.

On why Richards wrote what he did

Why did he write it? Or, rather, having decided to write it all down, why did he devote so much of it to carping about me?

Well, he's not talking about me, really. He's just trying to get my attention, I think, in the end. The remaining part of the rancor comes from the fact that he knows he lost me, many years ago. ... He's trying to get my attention. To connect. To have it be how it once was. At our age, I think there's no basis for it. Keith celebrates his own unchanging character, and I have had quite enough of that.

A journalist's responds as Mick Jagger to Keith Richards on Slate.