a taste of the rolling stones

Paint it black

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Table of Contents

A Brief History 5

The Logo 6

An Interview with Mick Jagger 9

A Visual Discography 15

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The Rolling Stones, an English rock band formed in London in 1962, has helped shape and define music through the decades, having become one of the most iconic, influential rock bands of all time, and still going strong. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards formed a songwriting partnership early in their careers, both crediting manager Andrew Loog Oldham as the one to give them the push they needed to begin their years-long collaboration. Some of these songs include the hits “Get Off of My Cloud,” “Wild Horses,” and “Beast of Burden.” The original band consisted of Brian Jones, instrumentalist, pianist Ian Stewart, bass-ist Bill Wyman, drummer Charlie Watts, with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on vocals. Jagger and Richards eventually took over leadership of the band as Jones became increasingly unable to function. He died in 1969. Mick Taylor replaced Jones just prior to his death, but left the band in 1974. He was then replaced by Ronnie Wood who is still with the band. Wyman quit the band in 1992 and was replaced in 1994 by Darryl Jones, though he is not officially a band member. The Rolling Stones came to the United States as part of the “British Invasion” which included the Beatles, Manfred Man, and Herman’s Hermits. During the 1970’s, the band had its share of front page news as several members bat-tled drug addiction and arrests, a sign of the times when drug excess was rampant, even glorified. In the 1980’s the band members cleaned up their act and thrived in the MTV revolution, producing songs and videos that received extensive play as their popularity soared.

A Brief History

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Designed by John Pasche in 1970, the pop art design perfectly encapsulated Mick Jag-ger’s sensuous lips and the band’s rebelliousness and has been in continuous use by the Rolling Stones ever since. Pasche was commissioned to produce the logo after Jagger approached the Royal Col-lege of Art in London in 1969 to help him find a design student - the Stones had been frustrated by the bland designs offered by their record label Decca Records. Subsequently, Jagger visited Pasche’s degree show and this led to discussions for a logo and other work for the Stones’s own label, Rolling Stones Records, after the group’s contract ended with Decca Records in 1970. This iconic logo, first used on the Stones’s Sticky Fingers album, is one of the most vi-sually dynamic and innovative logos ever created. Designed in the UK by a British artist for one of the country’s most successful groups of all time, it’s wonderful that it has now found a permanent home in London, where the band was originally formed.

The Logo

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WENNER: When did you first realize you were a performer, that what you did onstage was af-fecting people?

JAGGER: When I was 18 or so. The Rolling Stones were just starting to play some clubs around London, and I realized I was getting a lot of girl action when normally I hadn’t gotten much. I was very unsophisticated then.

WENNER: It was the attention of the girls that made you realize you were doing something onstage that was special?

JAGGER: You realize that these girls are go-ing, either quietly or loudly, sort of crazy. And you’re going, “Well, this is good. You know, this is something else.” At that age you’re just so impressed, especially if you’ve been rather shy before. There’s two parts of all this, at least. There’s this great fascination for music and this love of playing blues – not only blues, just rock & roll generally. There’s this great love of that.

But there’s this other thing that’s performing, which is something that children have or they haven’t got. In the slightly post-Edwardian, pre-television days, everybody had to do a turn at family gatherings. You might recite poetry, and Uncle What ever would play the piano and sing, and you all had something to do. And I was just one of those kids [who loved it].

I guess you just want some sort of gratification. You have to want some sort of approval. But it’s also just the love of actually doing it. Fun.

WENNER: You were going to the London School of Economics and just getting started playing with the Stones. How did you decide which you were going to do?

JAGGER: Well, I started to do both, really. The Stones thing was weekends, and college was in the week. God, the Rolling Stones had so little work – it was like one gig a month. So it wasn’t really that difficult – we just couldn’t get any work.

WENNER: How committed to the group were you then?

JAGGER: Well, I wasn’t totally committed; it was a good, fun thing to do, but Keith [Rich-ards] and Brian [Jones] didn’t have anything else to do, so they wanted to rehearse all the time. I liked to rehearse once a week and do a show Saturday. The show that we did was three or four numbers, so there wasn’t a tre-mendous amount of rehearsal needed.

WENNER: Were you torn about the decision to drop out of school?

JAGGER: It was very, very difficult because my parents obviously didn’t want me to do it. My father was furious with me, absolutely furi-ous. I’m sure he wouldn’t have been so mad if I’d have volunteered to join the army. Anything but this. He couldn’t believe it. I agree with him: It wasn’t a viable career opportunity. It was to-tally stupid. But I didn’t really like being at col-lege. It wasn’t like it was Oxford and had been the most wonderful time of my life. It was really a dull, boring course I was stuck on.WENNER: Tell me about meeting Keith.

JAGGER: I can’t remember when I didn’t know him. We lived one street away; his moth-

Mick Jagger: The Rolling Stone Interview

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er knew my mother, and we were at primary school together from [ages] 7 to 11. We used to play together, and we weren’t the closest friends, but we were friends. Keith and I went to different schools when we were 11, but he went to a school which was really near where I used to live. But I always knew where he lived, because my mother would never lose contact with anybody, and she knew where they’d

to other people’s houses to play other records. You know, it’s the time in your life when you’re almost stamp-collecting this stuff. I can’t quite remember how all this worked. Keith always played the guitar, from even when he was 5. And he was keen on country music, cowboys. But obviously at some point, Keith, he had this guitar with this electric-guitar pickup. And he played it for me. So I said, “Well, I sing, you know? And you play the guitar.” Very obvious stuff.

I used to play Saturday night shows with all these different little groups. If I could get a show, I would do it. I used to do mad things – you know, I used to go and do these shows and go on my knees and roll on the ground – when I was 15,16 years old. And my parents were extremely disapproving of it all. Because it was just not done. This was for very low-class people, remember. Rock & roll singers weren’t educated people.

WENNER: What did you think was going on inside you at 15 years old that you wanted to go out and roll around on a stage?

JAGGER: I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, “Well, I can do this.” And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing to-matoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.

WENNER: Shocked by you?

JAGGER: Yeah. They could see it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time in these little places in the suburbs. Parents were not always very tolerant, but Keith’s mum was very tolerant of him playing. Keith was an only child,

moved. I used to see him coming home from his school, which was less than a mile away from where I lived. And then – this is a true story – we met at the train station. And I had these rhythm & blues records, which were very prized possessions because they weren’t available in England then. And he said, “Oh, yeah, these are really interesting.” That kind of did it. That’s how it started, really.

We started to go to each other’s house and play these records. And then we started to go

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and she didn’t have a lot of other distractions, whereas my parents were like “Get on your homework.” It was a real hard time for me. So I used to go and play with Keith, and then we used to go and play with Dick Taylor [who was later in the Pretty Things]. His parents were very tolerant, so we used to go round to his house, where we could play louder.

WENNER: What was it like to be such a suc-cess at such a young age?

JAGGER: It was very exciting. The first time we got our picture in the music paper called the Record Mirror – to be on the front page of this thing that probably sold about 20,000 copies – was so exciting, you couldn’t believe it. And this glowing review: There we were in this club in Richmond, being written up in these rather nice terms. And then to go from the music-ori-ented press to national press and national tele-vision, and everyone seeing you in the world

of two television channels, and then being rec-ognized by everyone from builders and people working in shops and so on. It goes to your head – very champagne feeling.

WENNER: You became quite the pop aristo-crat in swinging London.

JAGGER: Well, it’s quite a while until all that. But the earlier bit was even more exciting. The suits, the ties and getting ready for “Thank Your Lucky Stars,” the innocence and naiveté of it all, and famous photographers wanting to take your picture and being in Vogue. In En-gland they were very ready for another band. It was funny, because the Beatles had only been around a year. Things happened so quickly. Then there were a lot of popular bands, and all these bands were from the North of England. Most people in England don’t live in the North, and people are snobby in England, so they wanted a band from the South. We were it.

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A Visual Discography

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