Amy Winehouse, Werner Herzog & Unfinished Music: Extras From The Rolling Stones’ Billboard Cover Story
More wagging Tongues.
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Icons only! The Rolling Stones cover the latest issue of Billboard, talking about the special guests on their new album Foreign Tongues, thoughts about AI in music, their studio dynamic and more.
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For the cover story, I sat down with Mick Jagger at a poolside garden in London and Keith Richards at the Django Jazz Club in Manhattan some 48 hours later. The interviews covered a lot of ground, and there’s only so much room in a magazine cover story – there were a lot of great things they talked about that we just didn’t have space to run in print.
Below, check out a few newsy, fascinating and distinctly Stonesy bits that didn’t make the cover story: you can watch some of these exchanges on YouTube, but a couple of them don’t appear anywhere else but here.
Keeping It Analog
Before the cameras started rolling, Jagger pointed to our film crew and three-camera setup and commented, “Lots of people on set. God, I remember when Billboard was an interview with a notepad.” That prompted me to hold aloft my little red notepad, which I’d actually picked up from London’s Design Museum the previous day. (I wanted to check out an exhibit devoted to Wes Anderson, a filmmaker who coincidentally has done a few Stones needle drops throughout his oeuvre.) “You do have the notepad!” Mick beamed. “So you’re a traditionalist.”
Speaking of traditionalists, Richards, in his interview, revealed he doesn’t even own a cellphone and doesn’t appreciate “the idea of being permanently available for everybody to call up when they feel like it. Nobody thinks, ‘You know, that’s damn rude — he might be writing a song, doing something else.'” I put forth a pretty believable hypothetical: “You got your manager sitting over there [off camera]. Jane [Rose] wants to get in touch with you, how does that happen?” His sly reply: “Well, it doesn’t.” After the interview, Rose took me aside and told me one word: “Landline.”
Covering Amy Winehouse
Talking about their surprisingly effective cover of Amy Winehouse’s “You Know I’m No Good” on Foreign Tongues, Jagger said, “We were looking for a good song to cover from a female vocalist, and we were thinking of early people, and then we said, ‘Let’s do something a bit more recent.’ We alighted on that song. I always liked that song. I could have written it, you know what I mean? Almost. I felt that I could have written that song, because it’s like a minor-key harmonica lead. I just copied the horn lead and played it on harmonica, so it felt very organic.”
“Loved the song. Always thought that Amy was a sad story in many ways, but she was one of the best to come out of England, and probably had so much more potential,” said Richards of Winehouse, whom the Stones shared the stage with at Isle of Wight Festival in 2007 for a cover of the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” (which the Stones recorded on their 1974 album It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll). “I’m not sure who kicked the idea off, whether it was Mick or Andrew [Watt, producer], but we said, ‘Well, you know, we used to, we started off, we were a cover band, basically, so if there’s one you wanted to cover now, what would it be?’ And Amy came out on top.”
Prejudices Against Singers in Hollywood
While interviewing Jagger, I ran something by him that Werner Herzog told Playboy in 2012. For context: Jagger was initially attached to the legendary director’s 1982 masterpiece Fitzcarraldo — in fact, Herzog began filming Fitzcarraldo with Jason Robards as the lead character and Mick Jagger playing his assistant, but Robards became so ill during the famously troubled Peruvian production that he had to drop out of the film. By the time the film was set to résumé with a new star (the mercurial Klaus Kinski), Jagger had to leave for a tour with the Stones; Herzog wrote his character, Wilbur, out of the script. (Herzog’s 1999 documentary My Best Fiend includes footage of Jagger acting with Robards.)
“Jagger is a tragic gap in the history of film,” Herzog told Playboy. “He hasn’t been praised enough as someone who could have been a great actor.”
“Could have been,” noted the ever-alert Jagger, laughing. I asked him if he wished he had more time to pursue acting back in the day.
“Yeah,” Jagger replied. “The thing is, I think if it was now, in this time frame, I would have been able to act a lot more, because there’s not the prejudice against singers. In fact, they take advantage of using the fame of someone in a film. Whereas in the days when I started acting, all the people in film hated you, and it was impossible to get a role — it just wasn’t the thing. Also, they didn’t use music in films either, hardly at all. Now we take it for granted; there’s music almost all the time. So now it’s much easier for singers to get acting parts, but in those days it was impossible. Yeah, it would have been nice to have done more,” he concluded, adding, “Thanks, Werner.”
When I mentioned his phenomenal performance in the 1970 film Performance, he noted, “It was such a long time ago. But I just did a cameo in a silent, black-and-white movie, The Three Incestuous Sisters with three famous actresses [Dakota Johnson, Saoirse Ronan and Jessie Buckley]. It was fun. I was playing a lighthouse keeper. I didn’t have any lines, because it’s a silent film — I didn’t have to worry about the lines.”
What’s Next, Musically — Maybe
“Yes, there’s loads,” Richards said when I asked him if there were songs left over from Foreign Tongues, an album that grew out of leftovers from Hackney Diamonds. “With every record it seems to spawn more than you actually want. All in different states of readiness. You say, ‘This one’s going to take a lot of work, put it on the back burner.’ Others that have just been lying around for ages as a basic idea, and it’s never quite clicked. And then you turn a corner, and there you are — suddenly that other piece you’ve been looking for, and you go, ‘That’s where you are. That’s why I waited.’”
Right before we wrapped, I asked Richards if he might ever do another solo effort, a follow-up to 2015’s acclaimed Crosseyed Heart. “Talking to [drummer] Steve Jordan about that the other day,” he shared. “Not a bad idea.”
