I’ve always been a Keith guy. Not Mick. Keith.
Can’t exactly explain it; it’s something about mystery, about cool, about secrets. I’ll get back to that in a minute. Point is, my view is, well, evolving.
We saw the Rolling Stones a week ago down in the Ozarks, the last show of their tour. It’s my fourth time seeing them, but it was Angie’s first. She’s heard me muse about this Keith Richards business for years; she gets it, too.
Maybe it was seeing the whole thing through her eyes; maybe it was the fact that we stood right up close to the stage, able to see the production close-up. But I have to say that, while I’m still a Keith guy, I have a newfound respect – awe, maybe? – for Mick Jagger.
You can’t stop watching him. He’s not just singing, not just contorting himself, not just in constant motion – he’s really the energy force driving the whole show. It’s as if his body is the drumset, as if the guitar chords emerge from his elbows, his knees. He, that person right there, is Jumpin Jack Flash. He can’t get no satisfaction. He met a gin-soaked barroom queen in Memphis. He knows it’s only rock and roll, but he likes it. It’s him.
That used to annoy me, ever so slightly, because those riffs were Keith’s. It was Keith’s band; Mick was the singer, the front-man. Mick got all the attention, running around so much, as if he needed all the attention. But the soul of the thing, the heart, was Keith.
Keith was the swashbuckling pirate, the recovered junkie, the guy in the black hat. He conjured those riffs out of the darkness, maybe in a deal with the devil. He’d been to places nobody else could go, and he came back, and as a result was so confoundingly cool that he was slightly scary.
Still is, even at 80. Well, maybe he’s not scary anymore, but you still know he knows things the rest of us don’t. And he still conjures those riffs out of thin air. Still the coolest guy in the world.
But Mick Jagger? The guy is astonishing, a showman in the best possible sense. In many ways, he is the show. His voice is the percussion and the melody; his lyrics, while they’re not entrancing, draw power from the way he snarls them, spits them, caresses them, bends them, the way they pair with the riffs. “I was born in a crossfire hurricane” doesn’t make rational sense, but you know you can feel it when you hear it.
He just turned 81, which makes it more amazing, but it’s not even that. I’m telling you, these guys outperform bands half their age, a quarter of their age.
And let’s be clear: It’s a band. It’s a band that managed to survive without Brian Jones, without Mick Taylor, without Bill Wyman, even without the great Charlie Watts. The reason is pretty obvious.
It’s not an “or” question. It’s an “and” proposition.
