(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Fri 8 August 2025 16:30, UK
When charting the evolution of the modern rock frontman, it’s hard to deny Mick Jagger’s foundational legacy.
Before Iggy Pop’s self-mutilation and Jim Morrison’s dark magnetism, The Rolling Stones had landed in the American pop charts just behind The Beatles’ ushering of the great British invasion, storming Billboard after a decade of rock and roll domination. Endearing themselves to US teens by lifting the country’s blues and R&B and adding a little English grit to their early Chuck Berry and Howlin’ Wolf covers, the Stones’ raucous sound required a singer of effortless cool and rebel ooze to mark a more dangerous counter to the clean-cut Fab Four.
Luckily, they had Mick Jagger as their frontman. Hailing from the unremarkable Dartford suburbs of a lower-middle-class family, just where the sometime London School of Economics student’s natural stage presence was captured is difficult to discern. Yet, before he’d even hit his 20s, Jagger and the Stones were pulling the 1960s’ pop infancy toward the counterculture more than anything from the Lennon-McCartney songbook, revelling in their uncouth and seductive image, keenly promoted by manager Andrew Loog Oldham.
Even Jagger had his heroes, however. Setting the stage on fire since the 1950s, Southern gospel force turned R&B whirlwind, James Brown towered over any of America’s big names by the early 1960s, famed for his animated presence and livewire shows. Keenly owning a copy of his Live at the Apollo record, Jagger had been taking notes.
“I copied all his moves,” he confessed to Time in 2014. “I used to do [James’] slide across the stage. I couldn’t do the splits, so I didn’t even bother. Everyone did the microphone trick, where you pushed the microphone, then you put your foot on it, and it comes back…but in the end, it hit me in the face too many times, and I gave it up. So, of course, I copied his moves.”
If you’re gonna steal, steal from the best. Jagger would take Brown’s moves toward more alchemic levels of swagger across the decade, but ‘Mr Dynamite’s’ influential template is always present, even in the Stones’ shows today.
Jagger had first met Brown at the site of his previous epochal live record backstage at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre in 1964, reportedly so nervous when Ronnie Spector introduced the two, she thought he’d have a heart attack there and then. Brown would stand as an eternal well of fascination for the then-young singer, going as far as producing and developing the respective Say It Loud and Get On Up documentary and biopic in recent years.
Stones guitarist Keith Richards held a cooler assessment of their time with Brown. Featured on 1964’s TAMI Show concert film along with Brown, Richards supposedly labelled their performance after him as one of the worst mistakes of their career due to simply being unable to match his and the Famous Flames backing band’s bottle-rocket energy.
While Jagger has always detailed a generous and magnanimous relationship between him and Brown, the latter’s one-time manager, Charles Bobbit, claimed, “He had no love for Mick Jagger”. Whatever the case, he owes all his frontman charisma to the soul, R&B, and funk maestro.
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