News The day Waddy Wachtel told Mick Jagger he was playing a Rolling Stones song “wrong”
There’s a good chance that Mick Jagger doesn’t need to answer to anyone anymore until he’s dead in the ground. For all of his years as the leader of The Rolling Stones, Jagger feels more like a myth than man these days, constantly strutting his stuff like he did in his prime while also being able to sing a lot better than many of his contemporaries could hope to. Even a rock god is fallible, though, and Waddy Wachtel had the unenviable task of confronting Jagger when he made a mistake.
Let’s just call it like it is: Mick Jagger doesn’t seem like he can make mistakes. For as long as The Stones have been together, it feels like Jagger has his sound down to a science, and even if he were to screw it up, it seems like it would have been a happy accident rather than anything too messy.
When the band worked on Bridges to Babylon, the claws came out when Wachtel walked into the studio. It’s not like Wachtel didn’t have a good track record as a guitar player, either, serving as a veteran guitarist on the studio scene and working with industry veterans like Stevie Nicks.
All of the pieces were there for Wachtel to make a great song, but ‘Anybody Seen My Baby’ had a harsh note in it that was too bad to ignore. When talking about the track, Wachtel remembered hearing a wrong chord in the mix, saying, “I told [producer] Don [Was], ‘Something’s wrong, someone’s playing a wrong chord there’, and we’d solo’d all the instruments and found out it was Mick’s.”
Suffice it to say, the man who wrote works like ‘Paint It Black’ was less than thrilled to have to be called back in again to play the track. Jagger was always a perfectionist when it came to organising where all the elements of a song should be, so hearing that he was the one who screwed up is the equivalent of telling Dave Grohl that there’s something wrong with a Foo Fighters piece.
Whereas the Jagger of yesteryear may have dealt with this with a two-finger salute and sent Wachtel on his way, he eventually just asked Wachtel to perform the track himself. Although the attitude of Jagger’s guitar may have been gone, it’s probably better to have the right notes added in than have something that transparently doesn’t work.
Because if you’re looking at the rest of the record, they weren’t short on stuff that didn’t work. Although half of the album would have made for a decent Stones project, hearing a song like ‘Might As Well Get Juiced’ is one of the most misguided tunes that they had ever taken on, especially towards the end where it sounds like the band took a song to an EDM producer and let them do whatever they wanted with it.
Out of all the entries on the record, ‘Anybody Seen My Baby’ feels the closest to what the group used to be about, which was enough to convince Keith Richards to play on it after refusing to play anything on the song. Jagger and Richards may be joined at the hip for life, but sometimes you need a middle ground like Wachtel to bounce ideas off.
