Mick Jagger’s 80 Wildest, Coolest, Most Outrageous Moments

The Stones hit the ground running in the Eighties, with one of their leanest, meanest, funkiest hits. Mick rails against Reagan-era U.S. imperialism, ranting, “One hundred thousand disparus/Lost in the jails of South America.” The band mix the Clash, Grandmaster Flash, Lee Perry, and Duran Duran into their own electro-throb groove. Like so many Stones classics, it’s a boogie through a combat zone. In the video, Keith plays the kidnapper who pulls a gun on Mick — he’d probably spent years waiting for that moment.

The 2018 documentary shows Aretha recording her gospel-soul classic Amazing Grace live in a Baptist church in L.A., with a congregation full of churchgoers. But two prodigal sons appear in the back row: Mick and Charlie, in town to finish up Exile. For once, Mick doesn’t want attention — he’s just there to worship Aretha, clapping in awe at her sacred genius.

A deep cut cherished by Mick/Keith shippers — barely three minutes long, the Glimmer Twins’ voices weaving together like never before, full of paranoia and fear, with no hope except each other. When you hear “Connection,” you can hear why these two have put up with each other’s bullshit for so long. How do you walk away from a sound like this?

A country-blues sermon from the Rev. Robert Wilkins, transmuted into the strange love between these two blood brothers. It’s the Bible story of the rich man’s heir who goes crawling back home in shame. But Mick has no ability to feel shame, or even surprise — he never had a doubt they’d take him back. At the end, Keith lets out a hearty “heeey!,” as if he’s so caught up in the story — and in this musical mind-meld — he can’t help himself.

A startlingly candid song hidden on the Undercover album, where Mick dishes the dirt about how lonely it feels being a jaded roué with a heart of stone. He spots one of his old flames while he’s flipping channels, no doubt in some five-star hotel. As he sings, “I saw you on TV last night in a rerun soap/You were young and beautiful, already without hope.” He wonders why he’s doomed to live his life this way. Then he goes right on living his life this way.

A poison valentine for the Woodstock generation? A surly lament for Altamont? A hardass portrait of smiling young potheads turning into zombie-eyed junkies? A countrified obituary for the not-even-dead-yet Gram Parsons? “Dead Flowers” is all that and more.

Mick reveals the dirty details of playing the ladies’ man, for any fans out there who wish they could be him. He introduces the kids in the audience to exciting new concepts like child support, social diseases, alimony, court dates, legal bills — and lets them all know they can’t afford it.

The Stones take a huge leap forward with Beggars Banquet — the album where they finally shake off the Beatles influence and blow up the blues. “Jigsaw Puzzle” is his wildly comic ramble through modern culture, a spoiled rock & roll prince watching the castles crumbling. Mick crows, “The singer, he looks angry at being thrown to the lions!” He also notes that the guitarists look damaged, the drummer looks shattered, and the bassist looks “nervous about the girls outside,” which is probably true.

The early days of music video. “Hang Fire” is a zero-budget one-take quickie — no props, no concept, just five rock stars herded into a hallway for a couple of minutes of awesomely inept lip-synching. (Woody maybe had a little too much sugar in his tea this morning.) But Mick minces like a showgirl with the rent due, especially the moment where he sneaks up to a giant picture of himself to give it a great big kiss.

In the heyday of mystic-crystal revelations, Mick goes deep on an acid trip that leaves him more alienated — and more hilariously English — than ever. David Bowie basically founded his career on this song, especially the moment where Mick muses, “You’re talking in a most peculiar way.” In that moment, you can hear “Space Oddity” and all that followed.

A fashion peak for Mick, which for him means it’s also a philosophical peak. He’s the ringmaster of the Stones’ lavish concert movie Rock and Roll Circus. Sadly, the film gets buried, because they get cold feet when they see how great the Who are that night. But Mick has never made a prettier peacock, rocking his purple trousers off as he sings “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” In his skintight red shirt and leather belt, he’s the queen of the underground.

He brings filmmaker Robert Frank along to chronicle the Stones’ 1972 American tour, named after the obscene song they recorded as a final insult to their record label. “It was my idea to make that movie,” Mick says. But when the Stones get a look at the documentary, with its sordid on-the-road sex and drugs, they decide it’s too unflattering to show people — not to mention too legally dangerous. Cocksucker Blues has been a bootleg rarity ever since.

“That’s a kind of end-of-the-world song, really. It’s apocalypse; the whole record’s like that,” Jagger tells Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner. “It’s a very rough, very violent era. The Vietnam War. Violence on the screens. Pillage and burning.” But somehow, the song feels even more terrifying today.

Mick plays the historic global-TV charity concert with Tina Turner, doing a steamy duet on “State of Shock” and “It’s Only Rock & Roll.” Mick shows that he’s deeply touched by this momentous occasion by removing her leather skirt.

A scathing portrait of male vanity — always Mick’s  specialty, and always his favorite target for his mean streak. A gorgeous accordion waltz about a hypocritical upper-class snob and his secret working-class mistress, as he talks down to her: “Please take the favors I grant/Curtsy and act nonchalant.”

Mick is such a symbol of Western decadence, he creates an international crisis without even trying. In August 1983, at the peak of Cold War paranoia, a 16-year-old Russian kid — the son of a Soviet diplomat — tries to defect to the U.S. because he wants to be like the Stones. It doesn’t work, but as he’s boarding the plane back to Moscow, his parting words to reporters: “Say hi to Mick Jagger.”

The climax of one of the darkest, scariest of all rock films: Performance. Mick stars as a demonic reclusive rock star named Turner, hiding out in his London mansion in a decadent menage a trois with Anita Pallenberg and Michele Breton. As he warns, “The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.” The tension explodes when Mick howls this blues curse, “Memo from Turner,” with blues guitar from Ry Cooder. The song ended up in an equally druggy movie years later — it’s part of Ray Liotta’s coke-sweat freakout at the end of Goodfellas.

It was worth a try. The Stones tried to go psychedelic in this zany Sgt. Pepper’s omelette, which they quickly disavowed. But Satanic Majesties has always been one of their most underrated records, simply because it’s one of their most Mick records. He absolutely kills it in the dystopian sci-fi blues of “The Lantern,” “Citadel,” and “2000 Man,” a totally accurate prediction of our modern world’s doom-scrolling bait-clicking phone addiction.

In his comedy special Kid Gorgeous, Mulaney gives a hilarious description of his week of agony when Mick hosted SNL, shooting down his ideas for jokes. “Never to your face does a British billionaire in leather pants go ‘not funnaaaaay!’” When the two write a song together for a sketch, Mulaney has to ask, “Motherfucker, is this how you write songs? Just one word at a time, with verbal abuse?”

Yes, the Stones do a video for this absolutely insane country-gospel spoof, with Mick sitting at the piano and batting his eyes like the most wholesome preacher in Bakersfield. Everybody in the band looks like they’re dead asleep while standing up, except for that suspiciously perky Mick. Maybe, just maybe, drugs are involved.

This bittersweet Black and Blue soul jam has to be the best song ever written about a Rolling Stone photographer. It’s allegedly inspired by the great Annie Leibovitz, a friend of the band who took so many of their most iconic portraits. Ever the soul of discretion, all Mick would explain is that “the girl in ‘Memory Motel’ is a real independent American girl.”

A tiny French village in St. Tropez gets invaded by a horde of jet-set rock & roll maniacs. Mick asks Keith to be his best man, showing a touchingly optimistic faith in human nature. Needless to say, Keith passes out and snores through the reception. Mick’s long-suffering dad tells the press, “I hope my other son doesn’t become a superstar.”

Mick has brought down the house at 30 Rock so many times: belting “Shattered” in 1978, seeing Jimmy Fallon in the mirror in 2001, karaokeing “Moves Like Jagger” in 2012. But his greatest SNL hit has to be this Weekend Update appearance, with Mike Myers playing Mick and Mick all pirated up to play a zonked-out Keith. It’s a Point/Counterpoint debate on controversial rap lyrics, Ice-T, and censorship. Mick-as-Keith just mumbles incomprehensibly, behind his shades, headband, and cigarette. His best punchline: “Mick, you ignorant slut.”

Halfway through this tune, you hear a breakdown full of clicking sticks. Why? Because the police just barged into the studio. While the Stones hastily hid their substances, producer Andrew Loog Oldham had to distract the law. “The cops had come in — they were actually in the fuckin’ studio,” he told Rolling Stone in 1987. “And I had to dash out and go, ‘Hey — you’re exactly what we want, man! Could you please get your truncheons out? And I had ‘em standin’ there, bangin’ their truncheons together, while somebody removed the stash from the control room.” Artistic inspiration can come from anywhere.

Everybody wanted to do shiny, happy drug songs in 1967, greeting the new mind-expanding dawn. But it took Mick to go all the way down, where a psychedelic trip is just another way to feel total cosmic isolation. Inner space, man.

A soulful guitar ballad about adult heartache. But the money moment is when Mick licks his lips and slips into his falsetto reverie about “pretty-pretty-pretty-pretty girrrrrls.” It’s like he can’t wait for the chance to transform himself into the prettiest girl of them all. (Pretty-pretty! Such a pretty!) It inspired one of the all-time best Stones covers, from the punk band Wild Flag, with the dueling guitars and falsettos of Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Helium’s Mary Timony.

Just trying out his short-lived “hip poetry professor just divorced and seeing what’s out there” look.

He never tries that shit again.