When We Met Mick Jagger

His act was a kind of pop flamenco: all fury, passion, authority, male arrogance. When Helen Lawrenson met up with him during the recording of the Stones' 1968 classic album, 'Beggars Banquet,' she eventually gave into it.

Meeting a 26-Year-Old Mick Jagger (And Reluctantly Learning to Like Him) Even if you loathe Mick Jagger, as I first did, you cannot afford to ignore him, because he is a significant leader of the pop-culture scene, perhaps more acutely than anyone else the voice and symbol of the new generation. At his visceral, demonic best, he can make all other pop singers seem namby-pamby by comparison. The endless procession of young men singing in childlike, barely audible, hillbilly castrato style or the affectedly droning monotone which makes so many of them indistinguishable from each other; even The Beatles—especially Paul McCartney with his sweet, thin voice and wide-eyed innocent face, looking like a Twenties' ingenue about to chirp boop-boop-a-doop—not one of them can match the menacing, flashing intensity that Jagger can bring to a song. His act is a kind of pop flamenco: all fury, passion, authority, male arrogance. I first saw the Rolling Stones more than three years ago on a British television pop-music program. Mick was blasting forth his cri du ventre—"I can't get no satisfaction"—strutting, prancing, jerking, his face distorted, his voice strident, a Corybant of boiling energy. I was appalled. More disturbing, though, was the realization that I was curiously angry, a reaction I couldn't understand, because the major interests of my life do not include song hits in the Top Ten, as ephemeral as spume, or those who sing them. An examination of my initial response revealed that the feeling of shock (which, in my case, soon changed to fascination) was one I shared with older people everywhere. While they may dismiss other pop singers with boredom, annoyance, amusement or contempt, Jagger provokes anger. 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