NEW YORK—The Peppermint Lounge is filled with mostly college-aged kids and more than a few patrons who look like the 19-year-old age minimum is part of their imagination, or at least the result of some artistic fiddling with their driver’s license.

They’re all there to see Mari Wilson, who’s dippity-dooing through her set of revived early ’60s soul/pop, right down to her elbow-length white gloves, beehive hairdo and a band sporting matching black turtlenecks and white sport coats. It’s a blast from the past and, for the kids at least, it’s still a blast.

Mick Jagger—the man who gave satisfaction in the ’60s, sucked in the ’70s, and who’s started up the ’80s with a good foot forward—would probably get a kick out of it. He knows the look, after all, and he grew up with the musical style. He probably even spent a bit of time in turtlenecks and dinner jackets, too, but those days are over. Now he’s sitting 10 stories above the Peppermint in the studio of photographer Bill King, sporting a white swashbuckler’s shirt and tight gray pin-striped pants.

The present, however, is certainly predominant in Jagger’s mind. Promotional interviews, photo sessions, videos to shoot. A new album, Undercover (the band’s last of original material for Atlantic), should be out by the time you read this. And if you buy the idea that there’ll never be a major Stones album again, you have to abandon any ideas that this band’ll never change; Undercover is a tough record to get a bead on, with its rap vocals and island rhythms, and only a handful of the classic bright, bright, bright guitar hooks.

But any time the present is up for discussion, so is the past. Jagger turned 40 in July, and the Stones turned 20 in September. One thing has remained consistent, at least—fashion and image are still a major concern for the Stones’ singer/songwriter/personality extraordinaire. Even though he was laid low by a stomach virus the day before, he still appears trim and energetic.

He still goes through a chat by rote, though (he has, after all, just signed away his autobiography to Bantam Books for a rumored $1.5 million). And at 40—and on the verge of a second fatherhood with girlfriend Jerry Hall expecting (he has a daughter, Jade, by ex-wife Bianca) —Jagger sounds as much like a shrewd businessman as a rock singer/sex symbol. Insiders say he has his eye on every aspect of the Stones’ operation, from marketing to merchandising. In conversation, if-s clear he now knows how to get his satisfaction through planning and a certain degree of calculation.

Throughout the 40 minute interview, Jagger exercises his famed nervous energy by pacing around the room and literally bouncing toward a person everytime he makes a joke—his personal rim shot. His answers come quickly at first, but he often tries to rephrase them, leaving the impression of an intelligent, articulate man who’s had plenty of practice coming to grips with the role stardom affords him.

In his birthday essay to you in the London newspapers, Pete Townshend made plans to meet you in a pub, buy you two pints of ale and talk one last time about the old days. Have you taken him up on his offer?

(Laughs) No. I will next week, because I’ve got to go see him in London. But I did get a very nice book of erotic drawings from the museum of Naples. I can’t remember (the other gifts)—I’m very bad about remembering. I wasn’t even around.

Paul McCartney and some other pop stars have turned 40...

Yeah, like Paul Simon...

Which shows you’re never too old to marry Princess Leia (general laughter). But as you turned 40—and the Stones turn 20—there’s a disproportionate amount of attention.

It’s something to journalists, I think. Most people on the streets don’t even know or care. It’s only the bits in the Post, bits in the Times and bits in Rolling Stone that make people aware of it. It’s really a journalistic invention. As you said, nobody really worried about Paul’s birthday because they couldn’t see an angle on it.

Was the attention at all embarrassing?

It started a long time before. People started phoning up and saying would I do pictures for People magazine, would I go out and have a birthday dinner, was I going to have a big party and all that sort of thing. You could see it coming, so you got used to the idea. I really didn’t want to get into it.

I think the angle they found was that so far you’ve stayed eternally young.

No one’s eternally young, but you don’t want to look too decrepit. That’s why I’m sitting in front of this mirror (laughs).

At one point you talked about how you wouldn’t want to be singing “Satisfaction” when you were 50...

Or 40 or 30.

But now you find yourself there.

What that means is it’s not the actual singing. What that means is you don’t want to be in exactly the same groove, you want to change around a little bit. You don’t want to be too much of a nostalgia act. I’m totally anti-nostalgia; I never listen to old Rolling Stones records. I’m not really interested in them. They’re funny, sometimes, to hear. On the cab ride down here there was a show with Ringo (Starr). It was called, “This Is Ringo. Capture The Yellow Submarine. Let’s go back into time.” That was all the way from 80th Street down to 10th Street, and I was just thinking, “Oh, I’m glad this isn’t the Rolling Stones nostalgia show.” What about when you’re 50?

Fifty! (chuckles). Fifty! Listen to this. Fifty! God—fuck 50! You can write that. Even thpugh young children might read this?

"I'm glad this isn't the Rolling Stones nostalgia show."

Oho! I’m sure you’ve written worse.

It’s a thought, though. Look at country stars— they have careers long into their lives.

Sure, movie stars, country stars. Rock ’n’ roll was a nine-day wonder. It was supposed to be here today, gone tomorrow. Rock ’n’ roll—it’s only been around since 1955, let’s say. It’s not even 30 years yet. Because you’re still an active, producing musician, you’re really defining the age parameters for rock ’n’ roll.

If you want to make analogies with jazz or country music, all those forms of music have people who work through generations. It’s obvious you’re going to have old rock ’n’ roll singers, though some of them may look very ungainly. Some of the country singers don’t look that great, but they sound all right. It depends what shape you’re in. When Elvis (Presley) died, he was obviously in very bad shape. He wasn’t really that old for a country singer, which is what he was, partly; he was kind of like a Las Vegas country singer. He didn’t look very good onstage. He was too fat. If you still want to be onstage, you can’t abuse your body too much. (pauses) But you know, country singers do (laughs).

Can it be desirable to get to a point where it doesn’t matter what the performer looks like, so long as you can still sing well?

Sure. That’s the thing about rock ’n’ roll—there’s so many different kinds. There’s this youth-orientated kind, that depends on looks and clothes and things like that; there has always been that. Where would we be without it? Then there’s the more country, boogie-type bands, who look the same for almost 15 years. Then there’s the heavy metal group, they look another way, the same way with all the leather and stuff. It’s no problem, costume-wise.

But most bands really don’t stay together very long anymore. Most new bands break up after two, three years. They splinter off, or whatever...

When the Stones started, that was prime time for the oneor two-hit bands that did quick fades. Did you have any inkling you and the Stones would still be making headlines 20 years later?

No. Two years you’d be doing one thing like that, then you’d go out and be in another band or do something else.

And oddly enough, over the 20 years the Stones have been damned if you’ve changed, damned if you’ve played a disco song...

Not really damned — it was a pretty successful song!

OK, but I’m thinking more critically...

Well, yes. It’s not so much critics. It’s the older people that liked the Stones in the early days. People want to fix things in their mind.

You’ve been around long enough to generate a few different generations of Rolling Stones fans. Do you think about it when you’re writing or recording?

It’s really interesting. Nearly all the people that go to the big shows, buy the records—over 50 percent of them listen for about five years, buying records as a group. If you talk about it, say this album sells X copies, over half of that is bought by people who have never heard, never bought “Satisfaction,” never heard it except on oldies shows, never heard things like “19th Nervous Breakdown,” weren’t aware of anything. They know “Miss You,” maybe. That’s the first one maybe they’ve heard. It seems like that would make it easier to explore and expand your style.

Yeah, really. A lot of people buy records and they only like that band for one year, two years and then they go out looking for something else. A large percentage of those, like young record buyers, don’t have any kind of allegiance to one band; if there’s a single or an album out that’s good and that’s got a good video, they’ll buy that for a year. And after that they’ll forget, I mean the Clash were really a big band with young kids last year. This year, the kids don’t even know who they are anymore. They’re forgotten.

Are the Stones immune to that type of trend?

No. You have to pick up on it. You want that new record to be bought by the 11-yearolds. What I’m trying to say is: they won’t buy next year, maybe. It’s not that kind of market. You’ve got older people who buy records; they’ve got much more stable tastes. I’ll always like Muddy Waters ’til the day I die. Nothing’s going to change that. They’ll always go out and buy another compilation, another set with something they haven’t got a good version of.

Does is make it harder to perform live, knowing that you’ve got that many people who have listened to different periods?

Yeah. If you’ve got a lot of different people, it’s easy enough to please them all. Some of them will be bored during the old sections, and a lot of people don’t like to hear new songs until they know them. They don’t like them even, they’ve got to hear them on the radio, otherwise they don’t know them. There are large sections of the crowd determined to be bored during a certain song (laughs).

The new album definitely isn’t going to win the favor of your feminist following, at least not with the tear-away cover and songs like “She Was Hot/’ “I Wanna Hold You,” “Pretty Beat Up” and “All The Way Down. ” But you and Keith have both called the antifeminist charge a misconception.

Yeah. I mean, I’m not an anti-feminist at all. I never thought, for instance, women were for one thing like raising children or cooking. Aside from having the children, men can do all those roles adequately. I like working women—I come into contact with working women more than any other kind, like singers or whatever. 1 never thought of myself as anti-feminist; I was always very keen on suffragettes (laughter).

“All The Way Down”’s obviously a song about a long time ago. “Pretty Beat Up,” that’s a song not really about very much. It’s just about losing a woman.

It’s just the way you say it, I guess.

We could’ve made it the other way around. We could’ve sung “She’s pretty beat up” or “I beat her up,” but the song’s not actually about that.

"I want to be successful in everything, but you can't. So I've settled on being successful in one."

The Stones’ 20th anniversary obviously gives you time for reflection, but are you predicting anything for the future yet? Your new contract with CBS calls for four more records.

And we don’t have to do all of them if we don’t want to. We can just do two of %them and that’s it (laughs). No, we have a commitment to do four, up to four is actually it (laughs). I don’t know quite exactly what the Stones are going to be doing. I mean Keith is “oh yeah, we’ll be on the road.” It’s nice to go on the road, but we don’t have any plans at all. Now we’re just setting up to do some videos, and I don’t know what we’re going to do beyond next week.

I may do a movie early next year, maybe not. I’m just going to start writing songs as soon as I get out of this video stuff. I want to get back to writing some more, I really want to keep going, because I’m really in the middle of writing. If I can keep it going, keep up with the lyrics and write another 12 songs, I’d be very happy. If I can get half done by Christmas, I’ll be so happy. Speaking of lyrics, “It Must Be Hell” from the new album is the most socially-conscious number you’ve done in a while.

I guess you could call it socially conscious. “Undercover Of The Night” and “Too Much Blood” are sort of socially-conscious. That’s a great journalist expression. There’s a few other things.

(Leads into discussion about the final line of “Shattered. ”) So why aren’t there words on the Stones’ records, anyway?

TURN TO PAGE 67

MICK J AGGER

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 35

(shouts) Why aren’t there words? Oh! We put words in the foreign versions. Buy an import (laughs)! I wrote some words on Exile On Main Street. I don’t know, when I look at other people’s words they don’t look very good. You can hear most of our words. You’ve picked up the rapping styles quite well on this record. Do you listen to a lot of that on the radio?

I’ve listened to it, but I’m not a great rap. It’s sort of fashionable around here to go out in Circle Studios and do it.

But a lot of that is speed, where yours rests on phrasing...

It’s just made up on the spot as well. It’s completely extemporized, as well, most of it. A couple words I cleaned up; I don’t mean clean up, just made better sounds. That was just rap off the top of my head. I didn’t write it down, even.

It seems like your pickups of street music and island rhythms are a lot purer now.

There’s that. It’s not supposed to sound particularly different from the old, normal Rolling Stones sound, but in actual fact some of the tracks come out sounding very different. All my things that I wrote, I wrote in France. I wrote when I was in the Caribbean, too. You’re influenced by wherever you go. When I was in France, I listened to a lot of African music. That’s where “Too Much Blood” came from. Same with “Pretty Beat Up,” same with “Undercover”— Charlie (Watts) and I did that. We had a big drum, and I had a guitar. It was going to be the single, but maybe it’s too avant-garde for a single, for the Stones at least.

What do you have to consider when you’re releasing a Rolling Stones single?

It’s the lead track off the album. It’s got to be a hit; if it’s not like a real hit, a Top 10 hit, then it’s a failure as a lead song. If you go with something a little left field, then you can blow it. Sometimes I really know. Like on the Tattoo You album, I thought “Start Me Up” was the only single on the album. To me that was just obvious. On this album there’s maybe more than one, two singles. It’s just which one to release first. It seems like when you put out a single like “Miss You, ” as well as it did, you were taking a risk.

That was the obvious single off the record. Everyone just loved that one. There was no quarrel. This album there isn’t one that stands out to me, or maybe I’m too close to it. I’ve got a friend who works for another record company—he works in the disco section, the dance section or whatever. Everyone in the whole company liked “Undercover” and they didn’t like “Too Much Blood” because it was more surprising.

But the record company tends to be more conservative. They want to work the record that’s easier to work. I agree with them. I wouldn’t be behind something Where everyone’s going “fuck this.”

I imagine Atlantic Records must have been overjoyed with “Start Me Up.”

Yeah, because they didn’t think it was going to do anything. I thought it was like a Top 10 record. It was the only single off the record, as far as I was concerned. But Atlantic didn’t think it would do anything. Unlike Tattoo You, which had a quiet side, this record never lets up.

It’s a hard record. There’s no ballads. We took off any of the ones...there were two ballads, two love songs. We just didn’t finish them. We said we’re going to make it all up. So it’s very hard. There’s not much...romanticism (snickers).

Some of your romantic peers, like Lennon and McCartney, have been immortalized by Muzak and alleged adult arrangements, but that type of acceptance has eluded your compositions with Keith.

They’re not as melodic. The lyrics to “Tie You Up” don’t lend themselves to that kind of thing, like Simon and Garfunkel does and stuff like that. You’re talking about melodic stuff...

There’s a very good version in Thai of “As Tears Go By,” I heard it in a Thai restaurant in'New York the other day. There’s a lot of versions of that one. “As Tears Go By” is the one often played by bar bands and things like that.

Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band tells the famous story of you actually getting up to perform that song at one bar.

That’s “As Tears Go By,” yeah. That was a Philippino bar band in Vienna. It’s actually true, but he tells it quite different from me. It is a true story, as opposed to some of this stories.

Do you like to get the softer stuff on record often?

Yeah, sometimes you need a break. We didn’t have those kind of songs on this kind of record. It’s true to itself—what comes out is what comes out. You don’t say “All right, I want to write more romantically.” I could do it. After this record I could sit down and say, “I really think I have to be more personal.” It won’t necessarily come out like that. You start coming out with mean and bitter love songs instead of romantic ones, or it could work the other way.

Are we getting a new child song next?

Oh no, I doubt it pretty much. I’ll leave it to John (Lennon). He’s better at it than me. No, I don’t write like that. Things affect you for years and years, you come back and you might write about some memory. A new child on the way is probably going to affect your lifestyle.

It does affect the checkbook. It does affect you a lot, having a new baby. You have to be around. You can’t travel as much. You’ve got to get down and do some work. It’s a lot of work. But you can’t let it affect you totally. You let it be as much as you want. You don’t want to go out on the road the first two or three months of the child’s life. After that, you have to be very balanced about it. I’ve done it before, so it’s not like I’m totally new at it. I think I can manage perfectly well. If you’re lucky enough to have the money, it’s not hard; if you have to live in one room, it’s a problem.

You, however, live in several countries.

I like to spend time in a lot of different places. Lots and lots and lots. Lots of musicians do. I go everywhere—all over America, all over Europe, the Caribbean, Rome, South America...

Could you ever see yourself staying in one place?

No, I don’t see it. It’s stupid just to travel like an Idiot, the way they shove you around. I like to be in transit. I’m only going to be here for two months, so OK, I stay there. Then you make your life there, take it easy, work, find something to do. Then, after that, you go somewhere else. Usually you settle down, because you want to start working for that period of time. You need to go into a city at some point—I don’t think I could work on rock ’n’ roll music out in the country very much, or in the islands. It’s too laid back.

You’ve spent plenty of time in America. Have you liked it better over the years?

It’s much the same as anywhere else. The more you get used to places the easier it is to live in them, the more you know. I used to live all the time in London, but I feel just as much at home as, say, the Caribbean or Paris. It’s just those little things you take for granted that make you feel at home—if you’re at one with the civilization or city that you’re in, knowing where to go for this, what to do for that. After traveling that much, you just get a knack of it. I like America a lot, but I’m European, so I like to go back there. Do you pay attention to the politics of wherever you’re at?

Yeah. If you read the newspapers, you always find out about it. In England it’s very political for such a small country. In France they’re very political—all they talk about is socialism. In the Caribbean you can talk about the local coup forever. There’s always high unemployment or whatever.

You can just turn it off, too. Some places, like the Caribbean, don’t have very many newspapers, you don’t listen to their radio stations, you don’t listen to their news. I listen to the BBC news once a day, and that’s your only contact. You’re so far behind, you don’t know about all these things like whether Watt’s going to retire or whether he’s going to get kicked out. That kind of thing doesn’t reach you, so it doesn’t affect you, you know, you’re not interested in it. You just get the big picture.

So you don’t ever see yourself setting up residence in the Philippines then?

(laughs) No. I mean, that’s a very dangerous situation.

You’ve mentioned that you want to do another movie. Do videos give you a better showcase for your acting skills that might be better screen tests than something like Performance or Ned Kelly?

The videos are now a lot more interesting than they used to be. You can act a lot in a video, if you want. It doesn’t give you a lot of exposure—you’re not going to do the whole album. I don’t really think I’d want to do that...

It depends, if somebody would give me the money. Under our next contract, we’ve got all this money for doing videos. All the old stuff we really had to pay for ourselves. You can really go over on these things. The acting career obviously hasn’t been as successful as the singing career. Would you like it to be, or would that detract from the music too much?

I want to be successful in everything, but you can’t. So I’ve settled on being successful in one. You just have to learn to live with those things. I have to go out and try for a part tomorrow. I don’t know if I’ll get it. I’ll go in with all the other people and get in front and do my best. That’s the way it is.

You can start doing a lot of financing of your own stuff. All that really fun stuff, the big studio parts, no one really gives them away to people like me, or to David Bowie. You get into some more independent pictures, that kind of stuff. To get into really large pictures, you’re not going to do that for a while, so you really might start financing yourself. I’d rather do that than spend another 50 grand on a video.

(Gary Graff regularly covers rock ’n’ roll for the Detroit Free Press.)