Mick (Jagger) on his musical roots | Don’s Tunes

Mick Jagger:  

I first wrote songs in the blues idiom. And most of the writers that I learned form were blues writers – John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon – they were all in their forties when those songs were written. Those guys were not particularly young or particularly old . . . they just wrote as they felt it.

James Brown was a big favorite, and a different kind of music than I played at that time, which was mostly Chicago-style blues and rock. In those days, he did a lot of ballads, and also did super-fast stuff like “Night Train.” All these songs were on this huge-selling album, where you kind of lived the James Brown show without actually seeing it, so I was very familiar with it. When I first went to America, I met James at the Apollo, and he let me hang out with him. I was just a kid, really. He was, like, ten years older than me or something, but he’d been doing it for so long, and he had it down so much. He was kind to let me hang out, and I watched the shows. They did, like, four or five shows a day. Not all with the same intensity, obviously. It’s not possible. So I watched him there at the Apollo, we hung out some, and then I met him various times, we crossed paths on tours and so forth. I went on stage with him at the Apollo in the seventies. He called me up on stage with him. It was kind of a cringy moment for me, because English people don’t really…(laughs)…I just wanted to watch the show. I wasn’t there to be called up to dance with James Brown. But of course, you had to. That was the first time I was on stage at the Apollo, funny enough. James was always very nice to me, always giving me advice.

Photo: Peter Webb

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