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You certainly can’t accuse Mick Jagger of not promoting the Stones’ new album, Foreign Tongues. In addition to doing interviews with the New York Times and many major music and news outlets, the 82-year-old frontman has also done an hour-long sitdown with Conan O’Brien on his Needs A Friend podcast.
So what did we find out? Well, Jagger never met Elvis. How come? Because John Lennon convinced him not to bother.
This tale dates back to August 1965 when the Beatles stopped by to meet Elvis during their second American tour. It was, by all accounts, an awkward encounter, and one that Lennon found unsatisfactory. “Elvis – what a total anti-climax HE was,” he later told the NME. “Either he was on pills or dope… whatever it was, he was totally uninterested and uncommunicative.”
Lennon related his disappointment to his friend, Jagger: “I remember John telling me [gives passable Lennon impersonation] ‘yeah, you should never meet your heroes. I would never meet Elvis, Mick, if I were you.’
“So I didn’t. I took John’s advice. It was really stupid of me, really. I’d have loved to have met Elvis! Why’d I take John’s advice? It put me off. I wanted to keep my Elvis to myself, my version of Elvis. I didn’t want my version of Elvis shattered like John’s was, but maybe my Elvis version would have been different.”
Later on, Jagger remembers another of his friendship/ rivalries, with David Bowie. “Yeah, we were competitive,” the singer recalled. “David was SO competitive, much more competitive. I was made competitive by David. I mean, had to be.”
“When he was doing like Jean Genie, he was very Stones-y, you know? That was a very Stones-y period. So he would come over and play me, Jean Genie, you know,” Jagger told O’Brien before slipping into character as Bowie: “‘I’ve got it, you want to listen?’ Yeah, of course. I said, ‘God, you’ve nicked all my things.’ ‘Yeah, I know, man. I know. It’s like a homage to you.’”
O’Brien also asks Jagger about the recent story where he was spotted in an Oxford pub performing a turn at a folk evening. “Yes, I had dinner at an Oxford College. Very interesting people, very pleasant. And then one of the students that I was talking with said, ‘I play mandolin. I’m going down the road to play with an Irish band. So do you want to come?’ So I said, ‘sure.’”
Starting to chuckle, he continued: “So I took a couple of people that I was with and the provost of the college. It was a very small pub, very friendly people. And the band was doing fiddle pieces and the guy joined in with his mandolin. But no one was singing.
“So I thought, oh well, here’s an opening. So I did a song that I’d actually recorded. And then I had to rehearse it just mentally because I hadn’t sung it in years. And I remembered at least three verses. But it was fun.”
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