Crossfire Hurricane (2012)

Mick Jagger: Self

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Quotes 

• Keith Richards, Himself : Of course, you have to talk about Andrew Oldham, who'd been working for Brian Epstein, with the Beatles. He went around London and he heard we were kicking up a storm in some clubs. He took a look around and he said, "Hey, there can't be just one band in England."

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Andrew wanted to make the Rolling Stones the anti-Beatles. So, you got heroes, you got an anti-hero. Like in a movie, you got good guys and bad guys. Andrew decided that the Rolling Stones were the bad guys. It wasn't just an accident. He thought the Rolling Stones would suit that image. It helps to have people that go along with it or would fit the bill. It's good to have an actor to play the part.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : You see, you're thrust into the limelight in a youth oriented thing. It's not about growing up. It's about *not* growing up, in a way. Then, it's about bad behavior. Then, you're about bad behavior. So, then, you start behaving badly.

  Keith Richards, Himself : It's a weirdly situation. I mean, if you - If you did something wrong, even better. And the Beatles got the white hat.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : What's left? The black hat.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : The "Jumpin' Jack Flash" character is more: been through the mill and come out the other side smiling. The "Sympathy" character is much more complicated; because, my inspiration for that came from Baudelaire and "The Master and Margarita". So, I had all these things going on. It was very much of the time and everything. I mean, its got the violence of the time in it. It's provocative.

• Keith Richards, Himself : [final lines]  You just don't fuck with the Stones, you know. This is a simple rule, where it don't pay.

  [laughs] 

  Mick Jagger, Himself : You had this kind of fuck the world, you can do anything, attitude. For a moment, that was definitely there. I mean, you felt you're riding in a wave and all. Well, you can't be young forever.

• [first lines] 

  Brett Morgen, Himself : Do you want to do a sound check?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Yeah. One-two. One-two. One-two. - - One-two. One-two. One-two. Hello-hello-hello. Hello-hello.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : Okay. I think we're good. So, before we start, I just want to ask you, how's your memory?

• Dick Cavett, Himself : [the Dick Cavett Show - July 25, 1972]  Say, I don't know if I'm supposed to see this, but, there was a plate of something going around here. People offering little pills.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Vitamins and salt.

  Dick Cavett, Himself : Vitamins and salt pills.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : A, E, C, and salt. Drink the salt with plenty of water.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : As a singer and doing a performance, you gotta be very finely in tuned to what's going on in the audience. Little Richard literally taught me this stuff. I watched how he harangued the crowd almost. He would tease them. "Everybody stand up. I said, stand up!" You know and they would. He was outrageous. It kept it all alive, you know, and you never quite knew what was going to happen.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : In those days, we only played covers. The first album was all covers. I remember having this discussion, well, what are we going to do. We can't make a second album of covers. We already knew we'd come to the wall there.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Andrew Oldham said if we wanted to keep going, you've got to, really, we need new material. Well, this was something I couldn't have conceived of.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : We start in experimenting with writing. Well, maybe we weren't very good at it. But, we would try. You know, maybe not everybody can write.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : The first song I remember writing in the Rolling Stones was, "Tell Me." Which is a tiny, minor, mini-hit. You know, which was very gratifying, because, we'd only done these cover songs.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : Every little moment we had of hanging around, Keith and I used to be sitting with guitars, trying to write songs. We wrote songs all the time. We were constantly coming up with ideas. We started writing songs that were reflective of the time we where living in and that struck a chord with our audience.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : You're connecting and you're getting a lot of feedback. I mean, you're feeling what the audience is feeling. So, your exchanging with the audience a kind of ideas stream.

• Interviewer : [historical footage]  Why do you think that most of your work is about dissatisfaction in song. Why do you think you're so popular?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Because, most young people are dissatisfied.

  Interviewer : In what way?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : With the generation that they think is running their lives.

  Interviewer : What things are you dissatisfied with?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : The generation that runs our life.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : It felt like an explosive mount. People felt this sensation that something was going that had never happened before - that they'd been waiting to happen.

  Keith Richards, Himself : And that was at that same time in London that all kinds of shit was hitting the fan and, of course, we joined in.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : We all smoked dope. I mean, except for Bill. But, it was pretty innocent stuff and then you got more and more different drugs coming in: LSD and cocaine, heroin.

• Keith Richards, Himself : [Reflecting on the impact of his first arrest for illegal drug use in 1967]  It cemented our relationships with our generation, with the public. And it sort of gave us a badge of honor, in a way, you know. To me, it just made me like, okay now, now you know who I am. Basically, givin' me a license. You know, it was Jesse James time. I mean, the cops turned me into a criminal. You know, that's when I started to carry a shooter in America.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : So, the outlaw was born.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Yeah. Yeah, it was fully blown. That was when we really put the black hat on. You know, before that it was just sort of off-grey.

  [laughs] 

  Mick Jagger, Himself : [historical footage - singing]  I was born in a cross-fire hurricane; And I howled at the morning driving rain; But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas; But it's all right. I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash; It's a gas, gas, gas...

• Mick Jagger, Himself : The violence was all pervasive. And you can't help but live in it and reflect it back again. And then, of course, it goes into a feedback loop.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : Keith and I took drugs... But, Brian took too many drugs of the wrong kind and he wasn't functioning as a musician. I don't think he was that interested in contributing to the Rolling Stones anymore.

  Keith Richards, Himself : We didn't even expect him to be there. If he turned up, we'd find something for him to do. I'd ask him, "You got anything?" You know, "What do you think about this? Want to put something over this?" Or, but, eh, by then he was already in Bye-Bye Land.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : You certainly didn't know if he was going to turn up and what state he was going to be in and then, what he was going to be able to do in that state. What job could you give him. And then, one time, when we sat around, on the floor, we played, in a circle, playing "No Expectations". And he picked the guitar and played a very pretty lines on it which you can hear on the record. And that was the last thing I remember him doing that was Brian. Or, the Brian that could contribute something very pretty and sensitive and it made the record sound wonderful.

• Keith Richards, Himself : We were workin', in the studio, don't you remember?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : And someone came in and said Brian's just died.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Everybody just looked at each other and go, "Finally." It was almost like it was bound to happen, one way or another.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : It was a horrible moment. And I don't know how many months later, that was, when we went down to see him.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : He died - three weeks later.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Fuck.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [historical footage]  We are giving a free concert in San Francisco.

  Interviewer : When?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : On December sixth. It's creating a sort of microcosmic society, which it sets an example, to the rest of America, as to how one can behave in large gatherings.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [referring to Altamont]  The whole thing was out of control. I mean, all normality and control had gone. There was no - nothing.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [referring to Altamont]  The Hell's Angels were the people doing the security. So, you know, I thought that's the way they do things in San Francisco. You know, it was a very hippy-dippy thing.

  Charlie Watts, Himself : Except, these were actual, proper, Hell's Angels. It was a bit like asking the Nazi Party to sort out the fun at the auditorium.

  Keith Richards, Himself : When I got a bad vibe about it, when I saw the condition of the Angels. Now, I can tell these guys are on acid and ripple wine. And already in the early afternoon, they're startin' to get antsy. These guys are out there just lookin' for trouble. Now, I went "Uh-oh. This'll get ugly tonight." And it did.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : [referring to Altamont]  We were scared. I mean it was scary. And these people were crazy and they were like standing next to you and we didn't know how to control it, stop it. It was completely out of our control. It was just a nightmare.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Everybody was fuckin' scared, man. I mean, I'm sure it was far more frightening for the people in the audience than it was for us.

  Charlie Watts, Himself : What we should have done was just closed shop and gone home. But, you couldn't. You got 300,000 people out there that had come, you know.

  Keith Richards, Himself : It's a - It's a hard line to call, you know. I mean, if we'd a walked off, I think there'd a been a riot. So, I just did the best I fuckin' could, under a bad circumstances, you know.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : It was just realizing that you were out of control. The whole thing was out of control. If you were in any kind of arena or theater, you can just leave, you know, off stage. There wasn't - you were very aware you were, sort of, surrounded; so, you were very vulnerable too - so, that was the feeling. That's why you shouldn't have been in this situation.

  Keith Richards, Himself : And then, some bastard gets killed, you know.

• Keith Richards, Himself : It's all a bit of a kaleidoscope.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : I was definitely on another planet at the time. Everybody's got a different way of dealing. You know, I didn't for awhile.

  [laughs] 

  Keith Richards, Himself : I took to the stuff. As I say, I never had a problem with drugs. I did have a problem with cops. I'd been pushed up against the - my front door, while they're leaping out of the bushes. They were just harassing me, really. There was a definite move on. And while it became obvious, we had to make a decision, you know, okay, we're moving, you know.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Keith always says he was chased out of England by the cops. Well, he may believe that; but, I mean, it's not actually true. But, the real reason the band left was money.

  Bill Wyman, Himself : We all thought that our taxes had been paid. We discovered in 1971 that we all owed in the region of a 100,000 pounds each.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Income tax was so high that to earn the money to pay back the tax, we decided that we, the best way of doing that was to leave the UK.

  Bill Wyman, Himself : You know, we got shipped to France.

• Keith Richards, Himself : It was a troglodyte existence down there. Nine, ten at night until seven or eight in the morning. The idea of playing a note before the sun went down was ludicrous - whenever you take Dracula time.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : My kind of structure is a loose structure. But, when you have no structure - it's really bad. Recording in the south of France was like that, because of all the drugs...

  Keith Richards, Himself : The junk was there to help me do the music. It gave me a space that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : It just becomes disorganized. You got some recording engineers strung out on heroin. You know, because they all want to be strung out on heroin because they think its the thing to do. When it isn't the thing to do for a recording engineer, I can assure you.

  Charlie Watts, Himself : I thought it was quite amusing the lot of it. People sort of - they hang around Keith and they think they're Keith! It's like, it's ridiculous.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : Hedonism was very much on the rise. It was a hedonistic period. The nature of restraint would have been a big pun. The idea of being restrained and disciplined was perhaps a kind of no-no.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : It's got its own film crew, it's got journalism, it's got its celebrities. It becomes more than just a tour. It becomes a grand event.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : When you're working with another person, its great to bounce things off, you know. And if you're really working well together, you feed off each other's ideas and build upon each other's ideas. So, you've got someone who takes your thing and takes it to another level.

  Keith Richards, Himself : Writing songs is a great thing. It's like a jigsaw puzzle and a kaleidoscope put together; except, its all done through the ears. And on that I would say Mick and I are probably very much on the same groove.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : I don't want to be my extrovert character all the time.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : A lot of times when you're being interviewed, you don't want to talk about what they want to talk about. You kind of don't answer their questions. And you can't get rid of it. It's a kind of protection against intrusion.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : What are you trying to protect?

  Mick Jagger, Himself : You're trying to protect your inner self, I think, is the answer.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : I've no idea why he left the band. I thought it was the stupidest idea I've ever heard. And he never told me, really, the reason.

  Brett Morgen, Himself : Why in the world would you leave the Rolling Stones?

  Mick Taylor, Himself : I don't know. Maybe I thought that I would be able to protect my family from - not Keith's orbit - but, drugs. Because, I slowly became addicted to heroin. There comes a point where you have to choose between one or the other or you die. And I, you know, I survived.

  Mick Jagger, Himself : Mick Taylor leaving was a curve ball; because, that was a really good band and it had this balance between Keith and Taylor.

• Mick Jagger, Himself : We were fancy sitting into a more of a kind of not so dangerous. The feeling was you were having a good time. It was more kind of fun. But, it was more colorful and produced and it wasn't supposed to totally seriously. And I think it was very much the Ronnie thing.