Mick Jagger, Pilgrim: More gravy please, oh, and keep the cranberry sauce...

So here we are in the year 2001, the first full year of a new millennium, with the groundwork of these entirely new and unknown Days of Fear having been laid out by suicide glory madmen at the yokes of a few sovereign jet-liners, flying them straight through the psyche of what we used to consider a fairly rational world - and we’ve got nothing more, according to the pages of Rolling Stone magazine, than cuurent day versions of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan to show for it. Christamighty, someone put me out of this untold misery before I book myself a winter’s vacation to Kanduhar.

"An insuperably strong record that in time may well reveal itself to be a classic," grovels Rolling Stone impresario Jann S. Wenner in his absurd review of Mick Jagger’s insufferable new solo outing Goddess in the Doorway. It’s the kind of blowhard hyperbole that gives rockwriting a rotten odor while hedging its bets in the same breath. May well reveal itself? MAY? REVEAL? You gave the goddamn record five fucking stars Jann! FIVE! That’s one…two…three…four…five! And forgive me if I’m wrong, which I may well be considering the only other ratings I see in your little entertainment rag wobble between the advertiser pleasing 3 to 4 stars, but five (5) (V) is the holy grail in your system; the pinnacle, the zenith, el top-o-roo, not the Hilary Step but Rolling Stone’s Mt. Everest summit itself. Five big RS stars and you’re only able to sum up all of your insipid blabber about Mick’s new wares with a shaky "it might…just maybe…and perhaps"? That it "may well reveal itself" to become a consideration as a "classic"? Holy hell man, you slapped those big ass stars right on the cover of the issue – all FIVE of them, and you leave us with a sad-assed maybe? What the fuck is that? Give us a reason Jann, toss us an unequivocal this IS a fucking classic, the old Mick’s new record is a king-hell all-time you-gotta-have-it-or you-just-don’t-matter five goddamn star masterpiece that makes Sgt. Pepper’s sound like a shitty copy of an Alan Lomax field recording featuring a drunk on moonshine Appalachian jug band. But just maybe? Dear God man, put the pen away and leave the writing stuff to someone sensible.

Or, um, wow I just thought of something…maybe no one else who’d also heard Mick’s new platter thought it was worth the plastic it was shrunk wrap in. Maybe the discerning ears at Rolling Stone kept passing the disc along like some sort of collection hat at a revival meeting.

Employee 1: "Hey man, the boss really wants you to do a good review on this new Jagger disc."

Employee 2: (excited at first) "Really? Cool, wow, thanks. Have you heard it?"

Employee 1: (with a sour look on his face, turning away quickly) "Yeah I have, it’s, um, pretty (unintelligible)"

Employee 2: "It’s pretty what?"

Employee 1: "(unintelligible)" (walks away briskly)

One hour later:

Employee2: "Hey man, the boss really likes this new Mick Jagger disc, and he really thought you’d dig it. So here, give it a good review man."

Employee3: "R-r-really? He liked it and wanted me to review it?

Employee2: "Yeah, he thinks it’s really good too. So you wanna make sure and give it a good listen…and review."

Employee3: (accepting the disc from Employee2) "Have you heard it? Is it really good?"

Employee2: "I was only able to give it a quick spin."

Employee3: "It kicks ass, huh? Because, you know Jagger’s other solo stuff sucked."

Employee2: "Um, well, yeah, the boss loves this thing."

Employee3: "And you did too? You thought it rocked, huh?"

Employee2: "Is that my phone? I-I-I think that’s my phone man. I really gotta run Good luck…remember, the boss loves it."

45 Minutes later:

Employee3: "Hey Pete, have I got some good news for you!"

Employee4: "Really? What is it?"

Employee3: "Well, the big boss man really digs this new solo record by Mick Jagger, and he wanted you to do a review of it."

Employee4: "Really? Wow!! But I’ve only been writing for Rolling Stone for a couple of weeks. They don’t want a big name freelancer? Or someone better known?"

Employee3: "No, no, no, they want you man!"

Employee4: "Wow, okay. But hey, don’t all of Jagger’s solo records suck?"

Employee3: "Yeah, they have…but so have all the Stones records for the past twenty-five years. I guess the boss thinks Mick’s finally done it this time. He really loves this disc."

Employee4: "Wow, cool…a really good Mick Jagger disc! And I get to review it!"

Employee3: "Yeah, knock yourself out man."

25 Minutes later:

Employee4: "Um, hey man, can I um, talk to you?"

Employee3: "Yeah, sure. What is it?"

Employee4: "Well, um, you know that Jagger disc you gave me? The new one?"

Employee3: "Yeah, yeah, pretty hot, huh?"

Employee4: "Um, well, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I, um, I, um, well, um, I think it sucks. I mean I can hear why someone would, well might, like it. But it’s…I think it’s really, really bad." (starts to cry)

Employee3: "Easy now, easy there. Everyone thinks it sucks…except the boss of course"

Employee4: "Really? Are you serious?"

Employee3: "Yeah, he didn’t really want you to do the review. Hell, he probably doesn’t even know who the hell you are. But nobody else wants to put their name on a positive review of this thing. It’s that bad, you just can’t fake it with a record like that."

Employee4: "I know. But what are we gonna do?"

Employee3: "Don’t worry about it. I’ve got an idea."

One hour later:

Employee1: (in the Big Man’s office) "So Jann, after a lot of listening to this thing, and a lot of discussion, we all decided that it’s been far too long since you wrote something for the magazine, and what better time than this – a review of the best damn record this year! We think you deserve this. You should write this review and give it the treatment it really deserves. It’s a great, great record, and we all would feel better – privileged in fact – if it was you telling everyone about it."

In the world in which I prefer to exist this could be the only explanation for the royal treatment that Jagger’s ho-hum-old-man-lost-in-a-young-man’s-groove-filled-world record receives in the pages of Rolling Stone. I haven’t kept a tally sheet, but I do know that, according to the pages of Wenner’s rag, 2001 has seen pretty much only two essential five-star record releases – the same two, basically, who could and would have graced the pages of RS thirty years ago - Bob Dylan’s and Mick Jagger’s. Unfortunately, the truth of the matter is that Jagger’s record sucks and Dylan’s is merely an acceptable facsimile of the beautiful, brutal Dylan of yore.

The muddled high praise Wenner gives Mick Jagger’s Goddess in the Doorway is particularly infuriating because Goddess, in addition to being very, very boring, suffers from the exact same maladies as Jagger’s earlier sloppy solo outings: Mick Jagger – a bedraggled, albeit very, very wealthy old man trying desperately to do what his money cannot - that is to stay young and be hip. Only Jagger’s fountain of youth trip, as it has before, merely reveals an embarrassingly old, and entirely out of touch Jagger; the egoist who reaches too far across generational bounds to a place where the modern technologies, production, and sounds are unequivocally foreign to his seasoned talents. Where Jagger has always been a growler, he tries now to become a seducer. Where he was a proud, strutting cock, he now wants to be a suave lover. And when Jagger now coos a woman, he’s cooing a svelte, sexy seventeen year old who just finds him old and creepy, not the middle-aged Menthol smoking housewife sitting at the end of the bar who needs a rough and tumble bad boy for one night.

So Jagger has it wrong…sadly and pathetically wrong. Once the proud progenitor of the modern white suburban bluez, and never a possessor of the matinee look (let’s face it, he is, from one guy about another, homely), Jagger has lost sight of the dirty white boy allure that made him palatable in the first place. But that was bound to happen, and it shouldn’t come as a surprise to Jagger, because it sure as hell doesn’t startle any Stones fan that probably, if they are savvy, saw it coming as far back as Let it Bleed.

Greil Marcus once surmised that Let it Bleed was a record that "at the time sounded to me like the last music of the 1960’s". Marcus quickly adds, without the privilege of having even heard the misery that is Goddess in the Doorway, "and has sounded more like that ever since." Amen to that. Except that you might as well delete the "1960’s" reference and just toss Jagger’s name in there for good measure, because Marcus is right Let it Bleed was the last music of the 1960’s as well as the being the last music that Mick Jagger made. I may grant an extension and exception as far as the supernova implosion of the Stones on Exile on Mainstreet – but I tend to consider that a drug record; a desolate muddle of high-times, hangovers, and hubris more than a Jagger influenced Stones platter.

So here we are thirty years after Mick Jagger the glorious, dirty rock and roller died only to have Mick Jagger™ rise from such a beautiful corpse. And all of the sorrowful grabs at Santana-esque post-career glory (even an effort on the new disc with the inimitable Rob Thomas) on Goddess, as well as previous solo and Stones efforts, are horribly misguided, numbingly insipid, and tiresomely predictable. And if you’ve had or gained any sense over the past 30 years, you already figured this out. Now, will someone please go tell this to Mr. Wenner?

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