News Mick Jagger on the David Bowie song that sounds like The Rolling Stones
The late David Bowie was better than anybody at pilfering aspects of other people’s work and recreating them in his own image. While very few would dare to doubt his originality, it is mightily ironic that a man famed for being one of the finest creatives popular culture has ever known is so greatly indebted to the works of others. One band Bowie looked to for inspiration was The Rolling Stones.
Bowie’s work might be widely influential and even distinctive – despite its many different chapters and constant metamorphosis – yet, from the first release to the last, it is possible to perceive some very evident influences. Whether it be 1960s folk in his formative years, jazz in the mid-1970s, or even disco with his global number one, 1983’s Let’s Dance, it is remarkable that Bowie got away with so openly pulling from other artists for so long.
However, on occasion, Bowie was caught in the act. The prominent example is from his most memorable early songs, ‘The Jean Genie’. It was his old friend Mick Jagger, with whom he recorded the classic 1985 cover ‘Dancing in the Street’, who pointed out that the 1972 hit sounded like his band, The Rolling Stones.
Not long after Bowie passed away in 2016, Jagger wrote about his late friend in Rolling Stone and recalled being shown different mixes of ‘The Jean Genie’ and instantly thinking it sounded like his band. “I can’t remember how I met David – which is weird – but we used to hang out in London a lot in the early days of the Seventies; we were at a lot of parties together,” Jagger said. “He would come around my house and play me all his music — I remember him playing me different mixes of ‘Jean Genie’, which was really kind of Stones-y, in a way. That’s what I enjoyed: watching him develop as an artist.”
In a separate Rolling Stone article from that year, Bowie was quoted as admitting to ‘The Jean Genie’ trying to emulate a specific era of The Rolling Stones, their 1964 eponymous debut album. “I wanted to get the same sound as the Stones had on their first album on the harmonica,” he conceded. “I didn’t get that near to it, but it had a feel that I wanted – that ’60s thing.”
Famously, it wasn’t just The Rolling Stones who inspired the track; the iconic riff played by Mick Ronson was inspired by the Bo Diddley song ‘I’m a Man’.
