The Rolling Stone interviews

by edited by Jann S. Wenner

  You’ve been doing one of Kurt’s unrecorded songs during the encore on this tour. How many of those songs exist?

  There are three completed, finished songs. And there are ten others, and then there’s all the riffing. There’s one song called “Opinions” that was a couple of years old. It was from the era when he was in Olympia, Washington, between Bleach and Nevermind. The other one goes, “Talk to me/In your own language, please” [she sings the lyric and guitar riff]. The third one, I can’t sing. It’s too fucking good. Every part of it is really catchy. He was calling it “Dough, Ray and Me.” I thought it was a little corny.

  It was the last thing he wrote on our bed. The chorus was “Dough, Ray and me/Dough, Ray and me,” and then it was “Me and my IV.” I had asked him after Rome to freeze his sperm. So there’s this whole thing about freezing your uterus.

  Then there’s a song called “Clean Up Before She Comes,” which is classic, formula Nirvana. There’s the one we’re going to play tonight. Melissa sings my part, and the part I’m singing is Kurt’s part. I just call it “Drunk in Rio.”

  I recorded a whole slew of stuff in Rio that was just me and Kurt. It was when Nirvana did that Hollywood Rock Festival in Rio [in January 1993]. Patty [Schemel, Hole bassist] and me went down there, so we recorded. There’s these beautiful harmonizings with me and Kurt. Of course, I can’t release the shit. No matter how aesthetically right it would be to do. “Fuck it, fuck what people say.” No, I can’t. I have to do this on my own. And no matter how normal it seems, the contribution of your husband or wife to your art, our case and circumstances were different. And now it would even be grosser.

  Yet one of the most provocative images in the video for “Doll Parts” is the young blond Kurt-like boy.

  Because it was my right to reference it. And I wanted to reference it. It happened. My husband was taken away. It was tasteful. I had this gorgeous little boy with me; we had a real fun time with him.

  I have this real obsession with grace. That’s the number one thing I look for in a person in the physiological realm. But part of grace is not speaking—like the silent ballerina. I’ve wondered, after everything that’s happened, “You can change your persona. You can be the silent widow.” But I cannot kill the thing inside of me. That has to be kept alive. Or I will die.

  MICK JAGGER

  by Jann S. Wenner

  December 14, 1995

  When did you first realize you were a performer, that what you did onstage was affecting people?

  When I was eighteen 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.

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

  You realize that these girls are going, 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, pretelevision days, everybody had to do a turn at family gatherings. You might recite poetry, and Uncle Whatever would play the piano and sing, and you all had something to do. And I was just one of those kids [who loved it].

  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?

  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.

  How committed to the group were you then?

  Well, I wasn’t totally committed; it was a good, fun thing to do, but Keith [Richards] 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 tremendous amount of rehearsal needed.

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

  It was very, very difficult because my parents obviously didn’t want me to do it. My father was furious with me, absolutely furious. 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 totally stupid. But I didn’t really like being at college. 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.

  Tell me about meeting Keith.

  I can’t remember when I didn’t know him. We lived one street away; his mother knew my mother, and we were at primary school together from [ages] seven to eleven. 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 eleven, 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 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 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 five. 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 fifteen, sixteen 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.

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

  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 twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes 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.

  Shocked by you?

  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, 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.

  What was it like to be such a success at such a young age?

  It was very exciting. The first time we got our picture in the music paper called the Record Mirr
or—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-oriented press to national press and national television, and everyone seeing you in the world of two television channels, and then being recognized by everyone from builders and people working in shops and so on. It goes to your head—very champagne-feeling.

  I recently listened to the very early albums, the first four or five you did, and they’re all pretty much the same. You were doing blues and covers, but one song stood out: “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back),” your first U.S. hit and your first composition together with Keith. It’s the first one that has the seeds of the modern Stones in it.

  Keith was playing twelve-string and singing harmonies into the same microphone as the twelve-string. We recorded it in this tiny studio in the West End of London called Regent Sound, which was a demo studio. I think the whole of that album was recorded in there. But it’s very different from doing those R&B covers or Marvin Gaye covers and all that. There’s a definite feel about it. It’s a very pop song, as opposed to all the blues songs and the Motown covers, which everyone did at the time.

  The first full album that really kind of jumps out is ‘Out of Our Heads.’

  What’s on there? [Laughter] I have no idea. I’m awfully sorry.

  “Cry to Me,” “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man,” “Play With Fire,” “I’m All Right,” “That’s How Strong My Love Is” . . .

  Yeah. A lot of covers, still.

  But it had a unity of sound to it.

  Most of that was recorded in RCA Studios, in Hollywood, and the people working on it, the engineers, were much better. They knew how to get really good sounds. That really affects your performance, because you can hear the nuances, and that inspires you.

  And your singing is different here for the first time. You sound like you’re singing more like soul music.

  Yeah, well, it is obviously soul influenced, which was the goal at the time. Otis Redding and Solomon Burke. “Play With Fire” sounds amazing—when I heard it last. I mean, it’s a very in-your-face kind of sound and very clearly done. You can hear all the vocal stuff on it. And I’m playing the tambourines, the vocal line. You know, it’s very pretty.

  Who wrote that?

  Keith and me. I mean, it just came out.

  A full collaboration?

  Yeah.

  That’s the first song you wrote that starts to address the lifestyle you were leading in England and, of course, class consciousness.

  No one had really done that. The Beatles, to some extent, were doing it, though they weren’t really doing it at this period as much as they did later. The Kinks were kind of doing it—Ray Davies and I were in the same boat. One of the first things that, in that very naive way, you attempted to deal with were the kind of funny, swinging, London-type things that were going on. I didn’t even realize I was doing it at the time. But it became an interesting source for material. Songwriting had only dealt in clichés and borrowed stuff, you know, from previous records or ideas. “I want to hold your hand,” things like that. But these songs were really more from experience and then embroidered to make them more interesting.

  Where does that come from in you? I mean, you’re writing about “Your mother, she’s an heiress/Owns a block in St. John’s Wood,” but she’s sleeping with the milkman, or something.

  Yeah, yeah. Well, it was just kind of rich girls’ families—society as you saw it. It’s painted in this naive way in these songs.

  But at the time to write about stuff like that must have been somewhat daring.

  I don’t know if it was daring. It just hadn’t been done. Obviously there had been lyric writers that had written stuff much more interesting and sophisticated—say, Noël Coward, who I didn’t really know about. He was someone that your parents knew.

  The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan. Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics. It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time. And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the ten years previously.

  A lot of it was perhaps not as good as we thought, but at the time it was fantastic. “Gates of Eden” and all these Mexican-type songs, even the nonsense ones: “Everybody Must Get Stoned” and “Like a Rolling Stone,” “Positively 4th Street.”

  Then you did ‘December’s Children (and Everybody’s).’ Does that title mean anything particular?

  No. It was our manager’s [Andrew Loog Oldham] idea of hip, Beat poetry.

  That record features “Get Off My Cloud.”

  That was Keith’s melody and my lyrics.

  This is decidedly not a love song or “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

  Yeah. It’s a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song. The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early Sixties, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

  Based on your coming to the States in ’64?

  Sixty-four, ’65, yeah. And touring outside of New York. New York was wonderful and so on, and L.A. was also kind of interesting. But outside of that we found it the most repressive society, very prejudiced in every way. There was still segregation. And the attitudes were fantastically old-fashioned. Americans shocked me by their behavior and their narrow-mindedness.

  It’s changed fantastically over the last thirty years. But so has everything else [laughs].

  Is there anything more to say about “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” than has already been said on the record? Written sitting by a pool in Florida . . .

  Keith didn’t want it to come out as a single.

  Is there anything special to you about that song, looking back at it after all these years?

  People get very blasé about their big hit. It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was a big thing, and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. You know, we went to play in Singapore. The Beatles really opened all that up. But to do that you needed the song; otherwise you were just a picture in the newspaper, and you had these little hits.

  Was “Satisfaction” a great, classic piece of work?

  Well, it’s a signature tune, really, rather than a great, classic painting, ’cause it’s only like one thing—a kind of signature that everyone knows.

  Why? What are the ingredients?

  It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kind of songs.

  Which was?

  Which was alienation. Or it’s a bit more than that, maybe, but a kind of sexual alienation. Alienation’s not quite the right word, but it’s one word that would do.

  Isn’t that a stage of youth?

  Yeah, it’s being in your twenties, isn’t it? Teenage guys can’t often formulate this stuff—when you’re that young.

  Who wrote “Satisfaction”?

  Well, Keith wrote the lick. I think he had this lyric, “I can’t get no satisfaction,” which, actually, is a line in a Chuck Berry song called “30 Days.”

  Which is “I can’t get no satisfaction”?

  “I can’t get no satisfaction from the judge.”

  Did you know that when you wrote it?

  No, I didn’t know it, but Keith might have heard it back then, because it’s not any way an English person would express it. I’m not saying that he purposely nicked anything, but we played those records a lot.

  So it j
ust could have stuck in the back of your head.

  Yeah, that was just one little line. And then I wrote the rest of it. There was no melody, really.

  What about your relationship with Keith? Does it bug you, having Keith as your primary musical partner? Does it bug you having a partner at all?

  No, I think it’s essential. You don’t have to have a partner for everything you do. But having partners sometimes helps you and sometimes hinders you. You have good times and bad times with them. It’s just the nature of it.