News The musician Mick Jagger called the “guru of lyrics”
Mick Jagger sits well and truly at the top of the music food chain. Very few artists have reached his dizzying heights of success and notoriety as The Rolling Stones remain perhaps the most famous band on the planet. But when it comes to lyricism, there is another artist that Jagger holds up as the best.
In the mid-1960s, as The Rolling Stones quickly gained popularity, the music scene was buzzing. The 1960s and ‘70s are still held up as a real golden period for music, as so many of history’s most iconic and respected artists were busy at work. The Beatles were getting more experimental. The folk scene was enjoying a boom thanks to Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez. The countercultural scenes were giving the world more and more greatness as The Doors and Led Zeppelin were leading the way in the rock world. There seemed to be no end of talent shaping the music industry as we know it today.
The Stones were a major part of the exciting new music wave, gaining fame on both sides of the pond. It was a time when rock and roll well and truly dominated, usurping pop as the new sound of the youth. It seemed that everyone was on the hunt for something different and deeper than the cookie-cutter pop that had come before.
“It’s hard to think of the absolute garbage that pop music really was at the time,” Jagger told Rolling Stone. “And even if you lifted your game by a marginal amount, it really was a lot different from most everything else that had gone before in the 10 years previously.”
It was this desire for depth that Jagger credits for the success of the man he considered to be the best of the best. “The lyricist who was really good at the time was Bob Dylan,” he told the magazine. “Everyone looked up to him as being a kind of guru of lyrics.”
Dylan didn’t seem to fit in one mould. While he started as the next big thing in the country and folk world, he quickly evolved beyond that when he picked up an electric guitar. But while his instrumentals became rockier, his lyricism never dumbed down his rich storytelling style. Too wordy to be considered easy-listening or mainstream but catchy enough to make him a star, Dylan found a golden middle ground.
For Jagger, hearing these songs be released in real-time as Dylan put out record after record was something totally new. “A lot of it was perhaps not as good as we thought, but at the time it was fantastic,” he said, discussing how Dylan changed the face of music. “‘Gates of Eden’ and all these Mexican-type songs, even the nonsense ones: ‘Everybody Must Get Stoned’ and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, ‘Positively 4th Street.’”
That praise was echoed by Keith Richards too, who once said, “I’d work with Bob any[where]. I’d work with Bob in hell or heaven. I love him.”
The admiration was mutual. In 2020, while promoting his new record Rough & Rowdy Ways, Dylan was asked which songs by other artists he wished he’d written. In response, he mentioned three Rolling Stones songs; ‘Angie’, ‘Ventilator Blues’ and ‘Wild Horses’.
