News The classic rock legends Mick Jagger completely dismissed
It’s not always easy to spot the greatest of all time unless it’s in hindsight. Even though a band might seem to show promise when they’re playing in a club, it’s anyone’s guess whether they’re going to be another flash in the pan or this generation’s answer to The Rolling Stones. While an actual Rolling Stone did have a landmark artist come across his turntable, Mick Jagger couldn’t care less about what Jimmy Page’s latest outfit had to offer.
By the time The Rolling Stones had actually gotten to the end of the 1960s, they clearly had other things on their mind than looking out for new talent. Since they were still in stiff competition with The Beatles, the band took chances whenever they could, constantly switching up their sound as Jagger and Keith Richards started taking more daring risks with their songs.
After making their first album of all-original material on Aftermath, the band never looked back, crafting albums that were designed to have a different style every time they went into the studio. While Between the Buttons and Their Satanic Majesties Request proved the band could wear different sonic hats, they always returned to the blues.
Getting back to their roots on albums like Beggars Banquet and Let It Bleed, Jagger was also in the midst of putting together The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, bringing together a host of different rock gods under one roof. While the show would eventually feature a landmark performance by The Who and a one-off performance by the supergroup The Dirty Mac, Jagger remembered producer Glyn Johns being around floating around a band named Led Zeppelin.
Ever since The Stones graduated from the blues scene, Jimmy Page had been making a name for himself both onstage and in the studio. After slogging it out as the next guitar superstar in The Yardbirds after Eric Clapton, Page knew he wanted to try something different, eventually working alongside session buddy John Paul Jones and drafting in John Bonham and Robert Plant to complete Led Zeppelin’s lineup.
After a brief stint calling themselves ‘The New Yardbirds’, Led Zeppelin’s debut had the power to shake the Earth when it was released. Despite being a bunch of blues covers and the occasional amazing original like ‘Communication Breakdown’, Jagger couldn’t be asked to care when he first heard about them.
As Johns put it, Jagger was too busy focusing on the details of Rock and Roll Circus to even bother listening, telling MusicRadar, “We were putting the Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus together around the same time, and I took an acetate of the album into a production meeting. I told them, ‘This is going to be huge,’ but Mick Jagger wasn’t interested in hearing it”.
The Stones frontman wasn’t the only one unimpressed with it, with Johns taking the same tape to George Harrison before the Beatle shrugged it off. Jagger may have been putting up a stern face, or maybe he was a bit overwhelmed but what was on the horizon. The Beatles and The Stones may have ruled the 1960s era of rock and roll, but Led Zeppelin was previewing what the 1970s were going to be, and it was going to hit a thousand times harder than anything else in its path.
