Tim Rogers on meeting Mick Jagger, mobile dentists and flamboyant trousers. A life before and after Exile on Main Street.
A dozen times a year I’ll be asked to join friends performing songs of the Rolling Stones. As much as I protest that writing my own songs is more important to me, those Stones songs are as natural to slip into as the inevitably flamboyant trousers I wear to sing ‘em. And the question will come: “Are you playing Mick Jagger?” and I will reply “Hello, no. I am being a 56 year old Stones fan no different from the 12-year-old one dancing like EVERYBODY is watching.” Or somesuch.
When my band You Am I toured Australia with the Rolling Stones, there was a moment backstage I talked to Mick for 11 minutes – about cricket. I then watched him side of stage perform to a Brisbane crowd that showed little interest in the non-hit songs. MJ would raise his eyebrows at us, or Charlie, or Ron in frustration. But he never stopped giving out an outrageous display of energy and panache. It was 2002. Not ’66 or ’69 or ’72, or even ’81– the years that I can luxuriate as a Stones fan. They were showbiz, but not at all slick. It was some kinda wonderful. As to their “relevance” at the time? Pfft.
The Stones first moved me when I was getting my teeth drilled in a mobile dentist in Adelaide and ‘Start Me Up’ was on the radio. I was 12 and possibly gassed, but I ran home and promised my servitude to my Mum if I could just get a guitar. NOW. I was a devotee of Countdown and Sounds and radio and my folks had a wonderful record collection, but it was the time for my own little revelation. The Stones meant nothing to my contemporaries, but I located a boy at school who had all the records (and a ready supply of weed, cigarettes and booze) and the education began. I found Tony Sanchez’ wonderfully lascivious book Up And Down With… so the songs then had the conflated stories of sin ‘n’ sex.
I don’t listen to Exile On Main Street once a day like I used to, but hearing the new single ‘Rough & Twisted’ the other day – with its slipshod, herky jerk opening salvo of a guitar riff, I could hear Uncle Keef chuckling at another inversion of tropes HE (or Ry Cooder) WROTE, and we’re off again. Not dangerous or mind-bending, but fun. Chuckling, buckling 12-year-old dancing-like-EVERYONE-is-watching fun.