STEEL WHEELS (TO SHEA STADIUM)
How appropriate it was that I took the Long Island Railroad for my long-coveted interview with Mick Jagger at Shea Stadium in October of 1989. It was my own mood-setting version of “steel wheels” on my way to speak with Mick and check out the show. It was a trip I had taken many times since my oldest son (and a co-author of this book!) had become a Mets fan in the ’70s. But this was going to be different. This was going to be some face-to-face time with the man whose records I had been playing on the radio since 1964—Jumpin’ Jack Flash himself! Lucifer! Mick the Magic Jagger!
By 1989, WNEW-FM had given up any pretense of being a progressive rock radio station. It had abandoned its freeform roots in favor of a slick, commercial, lowest common denominator format generated by a computer program called DJ Select. (Ugh!) What was responsible for this abomination? The usual suspects—greed, homogenization, and slavish devotion to commerce over art. Add to the mix a series of bad owners, bad general managers, and, worst of all, bad program directors who put the station on the path to its eventual demise in the late ’90s.
I had come from an era in which athletes played their entire careers for one team. Even as the world and the media and the business were changing all around me, I naïvely assumed that I would play out my career at WNEW-FM.
Not so fast, Mr. Fornatale!
After twenty years at 102.7 FM in New York, I accepted an offer that I couldn’t refuse from our fiercest competitor down the dial—92.3 K-ROCK. I made the move in September of 1989, thanks to Mark Chernoff, one of the best program directors I ever worked for. My new employers wanted to make the most of my defection. They promoted the hell out of my arrival and made it quite clear that knocking WNEW-FM from its lofty perch was a main priority. They searched tirelessly and relentlessly for weaknesses and vulnerabilities—cracks in the foundation of the once mighty 102.7.
One golden opportunity presented itself less than three weeks after my arrival at K-ROCK. The Rolling Stones were coming to New York to play six concerts at Shea Stadium. Was there any way the new upstart “classic rock” station could undermine “the place where rock lives,” as the sloganeers called it. Turns out, there was.
Another new wrinkle in the marketing of rock ’n’ roll was spearheaded by the Stones on this tour. They had developed their own line of official clothing—way beyond the standard T-shirt sales—that was going to be sold not only at the concerts, but also at mainstream consumer outlets such as Macy’s. The promotion director at K-ROCK came up with a brilliant idea. The station would fully promote the new line of Rolling Stones clothing on the air in exchange for an exclusive interview with Mick. All parties agreed to the terms and a rendezvous was set up to take place in Mick’s dressing room prior to one of the shows at Shea. NEW had been caught napping, and the fact that a former DJ of theirs got the assignment added to the embarrassment of the situation. Needless to say, I was thrilled and grateful to rub their noses in it after witnessing the decay of a great radio station that I had loved for so long as a listener and as a performer.
I was at the press gate right on time with my equipment-bearing engineer. We were led through the bowels of Shea to the Mets clubhouse that I had been to a couple of times before—but was shocked to see that it was unrecognizable as a Major League team’s locker room. The whole area had been redone in the ambience of a desert oasis! There were floating curtains everywhere, beautiful women dressed in harem outfits, tables full of food and fruit and beverages—even real palm trees, for God’s sake! (Maybe even a hookah or two, but perhaps that was just my imagination running away with me!)
We were setting up our equipment in Davey Johnson’s office—also not looking anything like a baseball manager’s lair—when in strolled Mick Jagger looking feisty, fit, and friendly. I was nervous, but focused. After all, here was a man quite used to handling “the press,” quite used to fielding questions that were very often stupid, prurient, repetitive, and banal—and, only sometimes, profound and thought provoking. But this was Shea Stadium, and with my opportunity to meet Mick, I was determined to swing for the fences.
Mick reached out his hand, greeted me warmly, and said, “I’ve enjoyed listening to you on the radio.” He was going out of his way to make me feel comfortable! What a trip. And it worked. I decided to start our conversation with a question that I thought would break the ice in a favorable fashion, and show him right away that this wasn’t going to be one of those banal interviews:
“Hello again everyone, this is Pete Fornatale back with you on 92.3 K-ROCK on location at Shea Stadium with my special guest, renowned fashion designer— Mick Jagger!”
He got the joke right away.
MICK JAGGER: Well, that’s a first! (laughter) That’s a first, I must say!!
PETE FORNATALE: You’ve been described many, many ways over the years. How does this one feel?
MICK JAGGER: Well, it’s quite good really, something I’m quite comfortable with. I’ve been interested in fashion for a long time and I know lots of designers and I’ve watched how they work and I’ve watched how they promote and I’ve seen, you know, a lot of clothes and fashions come and go and seen them come around again . . . And I always took a bit of [offense] to a lot of rock ’n’ roll merchandising, just basically ’cause it was the same thing over and over . . . And, um, it really just came about from an accident of being shown black T-shirts again, with tongues on them.
And I said, “Well, that’s very nice—black T-shirts with tongues on them. We have no real objections to them. It’s just perhaps we should do something as well as that.” And they said, “Oh, no. What people really want, Mick, is black T-shirts with tongues on them; they don’t really want anything else.” Well, I said, “Let’s try.” Don’t underestimate people, you know, they read fashion and they see people and what they’re wearing and everything else. It’s not only in New York and LA that they wear fashionable clothes.
The triumphant Steel Wheels tour: the beginning of the second half
PETE FORNATALE: What is your hope for the rock wear, Mick? Is it something just for the tour or do you see it having a life after?
Mick the businessman takes over.
MICK JAGGER: Well, we talked very early on, we said that—you know, this is the first time we got into retail. It seemed to me common sense to go into retail . . . If you didn’t come to the show; you didn’t have the money to buy whatever you wanted to see at the show—you could buy it in the store afterwards or why don’t you buy it next month or buy some more for your kids or something. So I figured it would be good to go into retail and there was quite a lot of resistance—I don’t think that rock ’n’ roll merchandise has been sold extensively in retail before. There was a little bit of resistance in the beginning, but I think, now—we think it’s been successful enough that we can—we want to carry on, so we’re gonna design some more stuff for spring and so on.
PETE FORNATALE: If the clothes have half the life of the music they’ll be around a very long time.
MICK JAGGER: We’ll see.
Obligatory fashion talk aside, it was time to home in on the things that I really wanted to know.
PETE FORNATALE: Did you expect that at this point? Did you expect the music to have the longevity and the meaning in people’s lives that it seems to have—that it’s obvious that it has?
MICK JAGGER: No, I’d never thought about it in that way; I don’t think that most artists do. I think it’s very dangerous to start thinking about your work as far as posterity is concerned. Pop music’s a very much thing of the moment—and it lasts a moment, and if people pick it up later on and still enjoy it, that’s wonderful; and if they don’t, then they don’t. It’s very ephemeral.
PETE FORNATALE: But you have such a body of work, at this point, to draw from.
MICK JAGGER: Well, that’s the thing, if you do enough, then you got a better chance because the good things will stand up, hopefully.
PETE FORNATALE: A friend of mine gave me a video tape of the Stones’ six appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, and I watched it knowing we were going to do this interview as much to see what you were wearing as what you were [singing], and it was a really interesting evolution from ’64 to ’69. Do things like that have any interest for you?
MICK JAGGER: We’re gonna put out a retrospective video; I mean, that’s one of the fun things about looking at these old things . . . So, “What is he wearing, and what—what’s Keith wearing, is he really wearing that jacket?” (laughter) I mean, some of them stand out really well and some of them are terrible and you can laugh at them and some of them are good, and some of them are just laughs. There is a good military jacket I was wearing on The Ed Sullivan Show which you could still wear now; and then there’s some other stuff that you just wouldn’t be seen dead in.
PETE FORNATALE: Now, it seemed to me from watching the tape that Brian was the most fashion conscious. Is that a fair statement? Do you agree?
MICK JAGGER: Umm—I don’t think that’s really fair. No, I think everyone was pretty fashion conscious. Maybe he was just more outrageous.
PETE FORNATALE: You seemed genuinely surprised at the press conference in July when someone pointed out that it was the twenty-seventh anniversary of the Stones’ first gig together. Are those milestones just unimportant to you or are there some that are?
MICK JAGGER: None—none of them are important to me.
PETE FORNATALE: Because?
MICK JAGGER: I just don’t take notice of them. I’m really not interested in the past very much. That’s for other people to get involved. I’m only interested in what’s going on at the moment.
PETE FORNATALE: To do what I saw you do on that stage a couple of weeks ago, you really have to be in shape for it though—correct or not?
MICK JAGGER: I’ve always been very lucky, I’ve always been in very good shape—and I’ve never had to work very hard at it, and I see people struggling . . . But you know, I don’t smoke and stuff like that. Those kinds of things really slow you down. The trouble with us being on the tour, though, is that you do have to be disciplined to a certain amount—more than you’d want. I mean, you can’t really go and get drunk every night; I can’t have a hangover and do what I do. It’s impossible. So it’s a bit like being on the tennis circuit, you know, and I see friends I know, a little bit, that are tennis players, and they want to go out and have a good time, but they just CAN’T because they have a match tomorrow. Well, it’s like that almost every day for me. And so, I can’t go and party every night. I can only do it occasionally.
PETE FORNATALE: By the way, it’s very obvious to me that you feel the responsibility to those sixty thousand people every night of delivering the absolute best that you can be . . .
Mick Jagger, modeling the Rolling Stones fashion line
MICK JAGGER: Well, they’ve paid money, and they—not only that, they’ve got high expectations. They don’t want to see sort of second-rate stuff, and if you’re in any way under the weather, you’re letting them down. I mean, sometimes you get a cold or something, but you try not to let that show.
PETE FORNATALE: That brings to mind as well, the ability of the Stones to relate to audiences of every age. When you look around that stadium, you must, at this point, see everything from toddlers to senior citizens. What do you attribute that to?
MICK JAGGER: I bet it’s just really that the Stones have been around so long (laughter).
Yeah—we’ve got a very, very large age range. In 1981 it was large and now it’s even larger, so that’s because you’ve kept some of the people that came in the ’60s and you’ve added on the ’70s and added on the early ’80s, and here we are almost in the ’90s and you get very large disparate age groups. So, I don’t know how they actually—I don’t, I’m in the worst position to judge, but—I don’t know how they actually get on, side by side. That’s the thing that interests me. You know, someone you don’t know. You find yourself in this, and there’s four of you, and you’re partying, and you’re eighteen years old and you’ve had a lot of beer and you’re sitting next to a family of rather staid, middle-aged people.
PETE FORNATALE: But, you know, it’s not the same as being with four people on a subway car . . . They might not have anything in common, but those other four know that they have love of the Stones in common.
MICK JAGGER: I know what you’re saying, but I—I’m kind of—anyway it interests me, but I can’t see it (laughter).
I knew we were clicking at this point so it was real easy to stick to questions about the group and the music.
PETE FORNATALE: The show covers such a wide spectrum of your music; have you rediscovered some songs from the group’s past that you’re really enjoying performing this time around?
MICK JAGGER: I think “Ruby Tuesday,” which we haven’t done for a while. And, I did that when I went to Japan to do solo things. I found that the audience loved that one, and they still like it here; and then “Two Thousand Light Years from Home,” which we’ve never done before, ever; and that goes down well. It’s hard, breathing life into them every night; that’s more of a problem to keep the performance to the point where it still retains your interest. If you get bored with it, then the audience will feel that. So, we have to try and change the set a little bit and bring in some more new numbers from the new album and alternate it.
PETE FORNATALE: Mick, you have been a celebrity for so long now. What aspects of it do you like and which ones do you absolutely hate?
MICK JAGGER: Well, it’s hard—even when I’m working on the road I don’t like to be photographed the whole time. And that’s the whole thing; you have to look good the whole time. It’s a nightmare, really. I don’t like that part. You know, they always have to wear something that looks good and you don’t want to look all crumpled and asleep. When you’re on the road you’re expected to be on twenty-four hours a day almost.
PETE FORNATALE: Yeah.
MICK JAGGER: And I don’t like that. And when I’m off the road and when I’m not working I don’t want anyone to bug me; but you can’t really expect them not to. They still want you to sign bits of paper and be nice to them and so on. Sometimes you don’t always want to be nice; you know, you want to get on with your own life. And when you’re with people you don’t always want to have to be nice to the people at the next table and be gracious and you want to turn your back and say “go away,” (laughter) but then you count to five and you say, “HELLO, and how interesting that your son is also at the concert. The End.”
PETE FORNATALE: (laughter)
MICK JAGGER: It doesn’t sound very difficult, but after a while it just gets a bit monotonous, you know, to be like that and that’s when you see these stories of celebrities standing off and getting annoyed with camera people . . . It’s kind of natural ’cause they do bug you. You know, they stand outside your house, or whatever.
PETE FORNATALE: I’ve always thought that one of the good things about celebrity is that it probably gives you access to meeting people of stature or creativity that you might not have had the opportunity to do otherwise.
MICK JAGGER: Sure.
PETE FORNATALE: Is there anyone left in that category for you?
MICK JAGGER: Who I’d like to meet? Well, there’s loads of people. I mean, I just like watching people work in other fields to see how they handle themselves. It is interesting, you get to meet people. I like talking to the sort of people who were in power at one time or in power now; about how they handle their particular problems and so on. And, you know, they do sometimes give you the best seats at the restaurant as opposed to sitting next to the kitchen.
PETE FORNATALE: (laughter)
MICK JAGGER: I’m not denigrating being famous—it has its fun moments.
PETE FORNATALE: That’s great. Let’s see if we can bring it full circle. I’m just going to ask you—design is not something new to the Stones. Obviously, there have been images portrayed of the group, throughout the group’s career. Now I’m just guessing, but when you look back at old pictures of yourself, some you’re going to want to put back in the drawer and never look at again, and others you’re gonna want to keep out there because you still think it says something relevant about you at that time of your life. Either through album covers or photos, can you do that for me; and pick a couple of lasting images of the Stones that still say something today?
MICK JAGGER: Well, I think the early pictures that David Bailey did of the Rolling Stones from the first album covers and so were very formative for the band’s image . . . I can’t imagine how many photographs there are. I mean, things are very important in the beginning. [As for later images,] I suppose the Sticky Fingers cover that wasn’t a photograph of the Stones was also a very good piece that Andy Warhol did. It’s always good to have something that’s a bit groundbreaking, and that causes a bit of a stir, as well.
PETE FORNATALE: The tour has just been fabulous and the future of the Stones seems limitless. What’s left? What’s left to achieve from your perspective?
MICK JAGGER: Well, I enjoy doing other projects, I enjoy doing stage design and clothes design. I enjoy doing music, obviously it’s what I like, but I like to stretch myself in other areas. And I’m interested in other things as well. And I think the Stones will always be an important part of my life, but I’m interested in doing different things outside the Stones. And, for instance, the thing we were starting to talk about, the fashion thing, and other things, too. But, I think the Stones will keep going for a while yet.
PETE FORNATALE: It’s almost the ’90s. What’ll you do right after the tour?
MICK JAGGER: It’s in the hands of the gods. I know I can’t predict the future (laughter). But ’89’s been pretty good so far.
PETE FORNATALE: It’s been great.
MICK JAGGER: Thank you.
And that was it. Almost a half hour with Mick that felt more like two minutes. As we were packing up our gear and getting ready to leave, I thought about the question I had asked him concerning his celebrity and how it gave him the opportunity to talk to talented and interesting people that he might otherwise have never had the chance to meet and hang out with. I knew exactly what his answer meant. Even though I was on a much smaller and lower rung of the “celebrity” ladder, I got the chance to meet and hang out with Mick Jagger and it was priceless.