The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [29]
You know who we’re talking about because nearly everyone recognizes the persona Mick Jagger has created. This was how he looked to Sonny Barger, the Hell’s Angels’ lifelong spokesman, who saw Jagger and the band up close at the Altamont Free Concert. Barger said,
The crowd had waited all day to see the Stones perform, and they were sitting in their trailers acting like prima donnas. The crowd was getting angry; there was a lot of drinking and drugging going on. It was starting to get dark.
After sundown the Stones still wouldn’t come out to play. Mick and the band’s egos seemed to want the crowd agitated and frenzied. They wanted them to beg, I guess. Then their instruments were set up. It took close to another hour before the band finally agreed to come out.5
According to Stanley Booth, in The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (A Cappella, 2000), one reason The Stones took the stage at Altamont so late was that Bill Wyman had missed his helicopter ride to the raceway. But whether or not that’s true, Altamont only added to Jagger’s reputation as a guy who mainlines egomania. Don McLean’s blockbuster “American Pie,” for example, popularized the image of Jagger on stage at Altamont as the devil himself, basking in the spotlight, and even “laughing with delight” at that concert’s tragedies:
no angel born in hell could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite,
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died.
Those who’ve seen Jagger perform live know that he seems possessed by the goal of keeping all eyes on him. Mike Doughty recalled seeing Jagger at Shea Stadium in 1990, running back and forth across the stage “for no reason that I could see, other than to say, ‘Look at me! I can still run!’ And yet he sold out Shea Stadium, what, eight nights in a row?”6
Many believe that Jagger is the target of Carly Simon’s 1972 hit “You’re So Vain,” a conclusion that seems initially plausible because Jagger can be heard singing vocals during the chorus. (Who better to announce Mick’s over-the-top vanity than Mick himself?). But Simon to this day keeps the secret about who was behind her lyrical laceration of a self-indulgent ex-lover (according to Wikipedia, the odds-on favorite seems to be Warren Beatty).
Two Jaggers
But are these and countless other reports and legends really the signs of vanity? There’s another way to see and appreciate Mick Jagger if you think about him from the perspective of the great nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. The key idea is that Jagger may be treating his life and himself as a work of art.
He certainly wasn’t born “Mick Jagger” as we think of him now, so it had to come from somewhere. Early in his career, he even seemed to downplay any heroic or romantic conception of his musicianship and talent. In the 1960s, this former student at the London School of Economics said he saw the Rolling Stones as a “business”: “I came into music just because I wanted the bread…. I looked around and this seemed to be the only way to make the kind of bread I wanted. It worked, and I don’t treat it as a joke. It’s my business.”7 Decades later, in 1992, Jagger recalled his early days in music and said, “I wasn’t trying to be rebellious in those days; I was just being me. I wasn’t trying to push the edge of anything. I’m being me and ordinary, the guy from suburbia who sings in this band …”8
From the beginning, though, Jagger understood his stage persona as quite different from this ordinary suburban guy:
I feel all this energy coming from an audience. I often want to smash the microphone up or something because I don’t feel the same person on stage as I am normally… .9
In an interview with Rolling Stone’s Jan Wenner, Jagger recalled learning how he could use this other person on stage to affect, especially, his female fans:
WENNER: It was the attention of