Twenty three years of Rock 'n' Roll hasn't dampened Mick Jagger's zest for making music. He finally found time to make a solo album and time to talk about it.

The release of Mick Jagger's She's the Boss finally put to rest the theory that Keith Richards embodies the Rolling Stones' sound.

When Jagger first announced his intentions to record a solo LP, it was largely assumed that the record would teem with the reggae and urban dance rhythms the Stones' singer had long fancied. But instead She's the Boss sounds much like a Stones record, proving once and for all that one Glimmer Twin does not outshine the other.

Even a number of the many musicians who participated in the sessions for the LP were surprised by the music's straightforward character — Jan Hammer, for one.

"I was hoping for something a little more avant-garde," says the keyboardist, who spent two weeks last summer at Nassau's Compass Point Studios with Jeff Beck, Colin Hodgkinson, Tony Thompson, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, with Bill Laswell producing.

"But even though we never stretched beyond the traditional, I think it's great."

And, he adds, echoing a frequently voiced first impression.

"It sounds like a very good Rolling Stones album."

Actually, Jagger's reluctance to experiment shouldn't come as such a surprise, for he's always been an extremely commercially minded musician, though perhaps the relatively poor showing of the Stones' last album, Undercover, dampened any desire to deviate musically. Nor should one be surprised by the quality of the songs, for in much the same way that the Beatles' Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership was in name only by the time the group was in its prime, Jagger and Richards often write separately and have for sometime: Sticky Fingers contains one of the Stones' most exotic, complex songs, Moonlight Mile, written solely by Jagger.

Nile Rodgers, who produced three of the LP's nine tracks at New York City's The Power Station, notes that Jagger is also a highly adept rhythm guitarist, even though he didn't begin to play the instrument on Stones tours until just seven years ago.

"A lot of the tracks were done live, with Mick playing, singing and directing the band. And while he didn't leave any of his parts on, he certainly could have. In fact, they sounded dynamite to me."

Most of the musicians on She's the Boss expressed astonishment at Jagger's commitment to the project. Though he may often seem laconic and self-effacing when describing the Stones' creative process, in the studio Jagger is tireless.

"You'd think he'd wait till the basic tracks were done and them come in and do his vocal," marvels Hammer. "The guy sings every song like it's the closing number at a concert before 50,000 people," to which drummer Michael Shrieve adds, "Mick just stays with something until it's finished. There were a lot of tracks that I felt sounded good, but he knew what he was looking for and wanted a certain type of feel. If it doesn't sound good to him, he has no qualms about saying so."

Shrieve, who was down at Compass Point for about 10 days, reckons that he played on every track, but by the time perfectionist Jagger was done testing various players and rhythm sections, he ended upon only the opening cut, Lonely at the Top. Musicians as talented as Steve Gadd, Will Lee and Richard Tee were among those whose contributions didn't survive the final track selection.

Two of She's the Boss's songs were co-written with guitarist Carlos Alomar, who assisted Jagger with the album's demos, recorded with bassist Carmine Rojas (David Bowie, John Waite) and Utopia drummer Willie Wilcox.

"Most of the arrangements on the record are pretty true to the original demos I made," says Alomar, who wasn't able to play on the LP. "I listened to all the material that Mick had and helped him develop these little pieces into whole songs."

At the time of his record's release, Jagger was recording the Rolling Stones' 23rd studio album in their 23-year history, at Paris's Pathe-Marconi Studio, which is where IM&RW spoke to him. He promised the new LP to be ready by the summer, to be followed by the group's first American tour since 1981. He also insisted — lyrics on She's the Boss to the contrary — that at age 41 and as the father of a child by longtime companion Jerry Hall, (I Can't GetNo) Satisfaction no longer applies to his life. PB


How did you happen to start writing songs that would be your songs instead of Rolling Stones songs?

"I'll tell you what happened: We finished the Undercover album and then did some videos; that was at the end of January 1984. I went on holiday after that. I'd worked about nine months with the Rolling Stones almost continuously. So during this vacation, I went to Barbados. Jerry was expecting a baby at that point — it was like the last two weeks — so I wrote most of these songs, apart from one, in that period of time. Obviously I wasn't really in the mood to go straight into the studio with the band after spending nine months with them, so I just did some demos real quick. And they sounded good, so I thought, 'Well, this is a good time. If I'm gonna do a solo album, I might as well get on with it.' Cause I had the songs.

"But to me there is no difference. I am not saying I couldn't have done these songs with the Rolling Stones. I just write songs. I don't see my songs for myself and the songs for the Rolling Stones as any kind of different animal."

One thing that surprised us: When you toured in '81, you said that you thought Rock and Roll had some inherent limitations, and that if you wanted to do something different, you'd have to do it as a solo album because the Stones are a Rock and Roll band. And yet this album is very much Rock and Roll.

(Laughs) "I know. Well, that's the way it turned out. I could've gone in another direction, but the tunes dictate the kind of record you're gonna make. I liked the way it sounded, so I wasn't going to theorise about it.

"I could've said, "Oh, I'm going to make a Jazz album," but I'm not really a Jazz singer. And I don't really know who is that's any good. I'm a Rock singer. I think it's very much in the roots of what I do."

Did you have a specific sound in mind before picking the producers and the musicians?

"All I had were the songs and the demos that I did. And I started to speak to Bill Laswell and Nile Rodgers. Obviously I didn't know exactly how they were going to sound, but from the demos I had a good idea of how I wanted them to sound.

"When I write something, I have a very clear idea sometimes of what I want it to sound like. The frustrating thing is trying to get that across to other people and to get it down on tape. Sometimes during this process the idea will change, and you get something better or different than what you expected. It came out around 50/50, exactly on target, and then the other things changed a little bit."

There are a lot more keyboard textures on this album than on most Rolling Stones records.

"There's quite a lot of keyboard, but I think you could also say there's a lot of guitar as well. It's not like a total keyboard album. It started out very guitar based, and then you just put in your harmonies, and things tend to be on the keyboard level. There's a lot of live stuff, and the stuff I did with Jeff Beck is like him answering me singing live. Most of the recording was done with four or five pieces live. You know, a lot of recording work today is done by basing things around a computerised drum track; often you just layer it. Everything on this is live."

Did you keep the live vocals as well?

"A lot of the vocals are live and a lot of them are not. The trouble with doing live vocals is that I don't like to record in a booth when I'm doing vocals, because I'm too separate from the band, I like to stand up in the middle of the band and dance around, and you don't always get a very good sound on the vocals. I was lucky on a song like She's the Boss that the sound was good enough to keep.

You've said before that the final mix on most of the Stones albums ends up being something of a fight between you and Keith. Did you have anybody to fight with this time?

"All the producers (laughs). We had a few disagreements, but basically between the engineer, the producer and myself, we worked out a pretty good agreement. You ask these producers to help you, so you want the benefit of their advice. I would take it most of the time. Obviously I had the final say on it, but I found that both producers were really very helpful.

"When it comes down to mixing, you want to go over the top of the mix first of all, try different ways. You can lose the original grooves lot and use too much of the texture that you've overlaid. But you want to try that out first and let it go further. And then maybe you listen to it a couple of days later and come back to it. That's an advantage of computerised mixing, but it still takes a long time."

How did you end up deciding on Bill Laswell and Nile Rodgers?

"I liked some of Bill's hip-hop work; I liked his stuff with Herbie Hancock. He's sort of an intellectual in a way, and he has a lot of solid musical knowledge. When I met him, we got on quite well, and I found him easy to work with. Also, he wanted very much to make some Rock music records, 'cause he'd been working with African music and very different kinds of stuff.

"I am not saying I couldn't have done these songs with the Rolling Stones. I just write songs"

"As for Nile, he's a much more outgoing person and a real New York kind of guy. Also, he's a guitar player, someone I could just sit down and play things to. I found him stimulating in another way. He loves to play Rock and Roll. He was telling me that when he was a teenager, he used to like Led Zeppelin, and he'd get the piss taken out of him by his black friends for liking this Rock music.

"They both helped me very much with the vocals. They'd get me to push myself a little bit harder and to do things different ways. Nile was helpful with things like harmonies."

Did Rodgers bring Jeff Beck into the project?

"No, actually, I did. Jeff's an old friend of mine. But Bill Laswell was very keen to work with him, because he admires Jeff's work a lot. And I'd played with Jeff lots of times. He'd kind of been out of the business for a while, so he was very keen to get back into it at that point. He worked very, very hard on the record."

As long as we're going down the line, how about Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare? Why did you decide on them?

"I'd worked and played with them a lot, and when you're making a record, it's nice to start off with someone that you're familiar with. They're known for their reggae playing, and they wanted to prove they could play Rock and Roll. They were very keen to do it, so we started off with them, Jeff and myself. I like their approach; it's a good section."

If you have to have somebody to replace Charlie Watts...

"Yeah, it's tough, because Charlie and Bill Wyman are an excellent rhythm section. The other section I liked was Anton Fig and Bernard Edwards. They play on two of the tunes. The ballad, Hard Woman, has Tony Thompson playing drums. When I did it first, I had a much lighter approach, and then the vocals started to get harder and harder. I kinda like that, because it doesn't make it too insipid."

Lyrically, you don't sound very satisfied on this record. For someone who was about to become a father again, it sounds like there was a lot of dissatisfaction bordering on desperation.

"Well, I think there's quite a bit of humour on the album, in songs like Lucky in Love, She's the Boss and Secrets. Of course, there are serious personal-relationship themes on there. I mean, that's what I like to write about and what I like to observe in other people. I wouldn't say that it's a totally autobiographical experience. You write from observation and even things that you might read in books or whatever."

But something must have been going through your head. Lonely at the Top seems dissatisfied, ½ a Loaf certainly seems dissatisfied, and all those "hungry" and "thirsty" references.

"Yeah, well (laughs), I was getting all these primeval messages in there and I just left them in. Maybe you're right. You're the first person to have said that."

Are you dissatisfied?

"No, not really (laughs)."

If this album ends up being a huge hit, is that going to change the working relationship within the Stones?

"No, it'll just change my bank balance. It's obviously made as a commercial record, rather than just this experiment by a loony lead singer. I don't see how that's going to change anything."

Well, let's say that this record sells three times or five times more than Undercover did. And this album has a very different sound than that album did. Would you be more likely to move toward this on the next Stones album?

"Yeah, you could do that, but I think most Stones albums tend to sound different. The Stones album I'm working on now I don't think will sound like Undercover. I don't know. I don't work too much on those kinds of theories. It's hard for me to analyse; it's more of a critic's gig."

When might we hear that record?

"At the end of August, I would think."

There's been talk of a tour following the album.

"That's a probability."

You had always toured at three-year intervals. Why didn't you tour last year?

"I don't know why. Things don't always happen. I don't know why we didn't, but we didn't. There you go."

Were you disappointed by the reception to Undercover?

"I like records to sell as many as possible, but it did reasonably well."

You once said that if you hear something you like, it often finds its way into your music. What were you hearing that you liked before recording She's the Boss?

"I just punch the buttons on the radio. I listen to a lot of Reggae music, but it doesn't really seem to have influenced my playing on it. Obviously I listen to a lot of urban music and a lot of dance music. But there's no specific artist I want to mention that I've nicked anything from."

Secrets sounds to us like it has very much of a Talking Heads sort of feel. The rhythm's a lot like Life During Wartime.

"Wow (very deadpan). I thought it sounded like the Rolling Stones, but if you say so."

Other people have commented that they thought Just Another Night sounds something like the Prince arrangement on When Doves Cry.

"Wow, it sounds like Folk music to me (laughs). Well, you know, it's great I like hearing other people's ideas."

You've already done six or seven videos for this album?

"Yeah, well, I did an hour film that goes with the album, which will come out on video format. I did six of the songs and lots of dialogue scenes, and used the other songs as background. The extracts will be shown on TV, whereas the 60 minute thing will be more of a movie pace. You don't really keep up a video pace for 60 minutes. I had a lot of fun doing it. We did that in Brazil. In the middle of making the album, I got director Julien Temple in. I started playing him some of the songs, and we worked on different ideas for scripts and characters and stuff like that. It was good to do that before the album was totally finished. Usually you do videos almost like an afterthought. I enjoyed the whole process of that, as well as the acting and running about."

Was some of the material written with video in mind?

"Well, I wouldn't say that, but some of it I made a little more cinematic."

Will the fact that you put so much energy into this mean that Keith will have more input on the new Stones album?

"We'll see. Time will tell."