yeah he plays but you can always tell his from brian jones. jagger plays sloppier. wyman plays harp on miss you. mick bit the end of his toungue off and was concerned it would affect his singing. i dont know if that has anything to do with it. but if you play sloppy harp and your the lead singer you get girls old enough to be your great grand daughter.
I didn't know he played guitar. I heard they used Sugar Blue for Midnight Rambler, but I can't find any info to that effect. The recording sure sounds better than the live performance.
Last Edited by on Feb 25, 2012 3:30 AM
Back when Miss You came out I heard that one of the guys working as a roadie for the Stones had shortly before worked with Frank Zappa and had run across Sugar Blue busking in the Paris subway. He apparently raved to someone in the Stones about this great harmonica player and was dispatched forthwith to go find him and bring him to the studio. The rest, as they say, is history. ---------- LSC
Yes he can play Harp ! what do you think that is that he's playing a Flute ? I would rather hear Mick sing and play anyday over J R . Mick's got SOUL !!
I don't think Mick is a great harp player. He's pretty thin on tone for a start, but what he has miles of, is stage presence. He's an absolute master of this, and something I want to talk to my bands about. Sorely overlooked by most I'm afraid.
actually he does a great reading, the whole band really, on slim harpos hip shake from exile on main street. but he can be very inconsistent. there is a dylan tune on stripped (forgot which dylan tune) that is absolutely painful. ----------
MP doctor of semiotics and reed replacement.
"making the world a better place, one harmonica at a time"
I can't stand Jagger's harp playing. I nearly wet myself when Keef said in his autobiography that Jagger sometimes played like Little Walter. Keef must have taken some serious sh!t that day!
Brian Jones. Another one.
Keith Relf. Annoying Yardbirds frontman.
Crap tone, no embouchure, poor breathing. I hate it when you see old sixties footage and they're hunching their shoulders and squirting into an acoustic mike like they're having some kind of fit.
They annoy me more than Dylan. At least he has no pretensions. Jagger is nothing but a bad ambassador for the instrument.
Dylan does some interesting things on harp. Like the 4th position playing in natural minor on "All Along the Watchtower" which displays a more than casual familiarity with the instrument.
Jagger plays some cool stuff, but is, as MP said, inconsistent. He's probably not all that serious about harp and doesn't really need to be. He recorded with Sugar Blue and toured with Junior Wells as an opening act. I imagine if he were serious about harp, he could have picked up some useful tips about technique from those guys. But he has considerable other talents and his music has withstood the toughest test of all--the test of time.
It's kind of funny that everyone want's to bash Mick for his harp playing when that's not even his main thing .The guy is a singer /performer / entertainer /songwriter, And The stones are one of the best bands of our times !! Their concerts sell out in a day and they have played for millions of fans around the word ! Long Live Rock and Roll And the Rolling Stones !!
@hvyj: Awesome vid! Michelle Obama has certainly got her funk on! Got the full on pout, head bobs and everything. First Lady of gettin' her groove on.
@toddg: I love the Stones and Jagger is a rare case of consummate showman and songwriter, but his singing is bad, his guitar is mediocre, his dancing, if performed by anyone else is absurd and his harp playing sucks the big one.
But he can still stand on a stage and appear 100 feet tall. He is the perfect example of the whole being greater than the sum of parts, but like garry said, the question is whether he can play harp. If we're talking about playing harp well, I think it's a big no.
I was actually hopeful back in the 90's when the Voodoo Lounge album came out. He hadn't played harp in years on tracks slated as singles and took to a nicely overdriven sound and some tasteful licks. I thought he'd taken some lessons and I really liked Love Is Strong and hoped for more, but he seems to have gone back to his usual stuff.
yes the topic can jagger play harp.....Im so glad I dont have discriminating tastes like some who said clapton cant play guitar....he is maybe not the best but heard it on this forum that he really cant play
He really can't play. This is where I want to summon the spirit of Imus in the Morning. Horrible! HORRIBLE!! My dog just died, listening to that.
I have a sliding scale. Based on that bit of live playing--before the President of the United States, the First Lady, and B. B. King, no less--he's a solid advanced beginner.
It's just that after a career in showbusiness AND the fact that he has a concierge to switch out his guitar for a harp, mid-song--he really should be better than that. Or he should have the sense and good taste not to impose his harp playing on a command performance audience.
Actually, at 5:19, he does some licks that flirt with the Intermediate category. Maybe I've been too harsh.
In the clip posted in the thread-starting post, he's a bit better. There he is solidly in the intermediate category. He's passable. He's good enough. But at the White House, just just wasn't Good Enough.
It feels wonderful to be catty. Meow meow.
Last Edited by on Feb 27, 2012 7:59 PM
if you can sit in with a band without hitting a trainwreck you can play. a harmonicist can sight read sheet music a harmonica player cant. im a guitar player not a guitarist. open G forever baby!
The thread makes no sense other to Bash Mick's harp playing ! If You don't like someone's harp playing and their main role in the band is singing and songwriting ,why even start it ?
I could understand people bashing his playing if he played harp on every song ! I have a few Stones DVDs and Mick plays harp on one or two songs at most !
I guess all you better players feel he should never pick up the harp again , now start bashing Van Morrison for his harp playing !!
Last Edited by on Feb 28, 2012 1:48 AM
MrV: "At the end of the day, Jagger's proved his worth in terms of record sales. He doesn't have to answer to any armchair critics does he?"
Of course he does! This is the MBH forum damn it! Anybody that's ever picked up a harmonica and had their effort recorded and accessible has to answer to us.
@toddG: We're bashing his playing HERE. He's playing a command performance at The White House with B. B. King as his audience, for god's sake. He is representing the blues--and the blues harmonica--in a highly public setting. Many people who have never heard of ANY of the players in this website's top-10 and second-10 greatest all time roster have not only heard of Jagger (duh!), but think of what he's doing as playing blues on the harmonica. So what we're doing here, as far as I'm concerned, is summoning up an important sort of critical consciousness. We're reminding ourselves of what does, and doesn't, constitute an adequate public representation of the best--or even the middling--that the instrument and the idiom have to offer.
Jagger is a rock guy who started off in a blues cover band named after one of Muddy Waters's songs. I'm happy to stipulate that he's a gifted rock singer. He helped CREATE rock singing--as Richards helped create rock guitar. No argument with that. Top-10 all time, etc.
But this was a blues-specific event held during Black History Month. And the face of blues harmonica at the event--or one of the main faces; I don't know the full lineup--was Mick Jagger. We on this forum would be remiss, laggardly, and criminally negligent if we failed to point out, in an equally public way, that he's not really the best guy for that particular job.
I care more about objectivity than animus. I was happy to point out that several other clips on this thread show him delivering a slightly-to-somewhat better facsimile of blues harmonica playing. But given what he did at the White House, I would have preferred, for example, to have Billy Boy Arnold--a good Chicagoan--playing the solo. Or Sugar Blue. Heck.
Last Edited by on Feb 28, 2012 6:05 AM
I agree Adam on his statement about the White House,and thought to myself when first seeing it was, what in the hell is Jagger doing there with some of the blues elite.It would have been nice to have had a true blues harp player there to represent our great instrument,but all in all I guess he tried his best.With the president singing as of late maybe Jagger was there to teach the prez a few new dance steps to add to his trick bag.
Last Edited by on Feb 28, 2012 6:14 AM
In all honesty, I think Jagger's sole significant contribution to the world of harp was his bass-saturated droning in Gimme Shelter. I like Mick. He's a great showman and singer, and for a guy who's pushing 70 years old he can still bust a move with the best of them. But I agree with y'all. If you're gonna play for the most powerful man on the planet, stick to your strong suits and don't deviate into something you KNOW you aren't that great at.
In my books, he falls into that category of old rockers who probably COULD have been great harp players had they worked at it a little harder. Jagger, Fogerty, Petty, Plant, Cooper, Lennon...all of them really could've been great had they focused on brushing it up a bit.
Is it just me, or would they have been better off inviting Steven Tyler instead of Jagger? (At least on the harp anyways, not too sure about his voice anymore after the national anthem brouhaha.) ---------- Hawkeye Kane
I always thought the harp on "Gimme Shelter" and on the rest of LET IT BLEED album was midrange-saturated. Interesting timbre whatever it is. I think Jagger's best harp playing is probably on that album.
On another note, relating to rockers who coulda gotten better...
As much as I love the guy, I think Roger Daltrey was better at harp way back when The Who was first starting out and in their brief stint as The High Numbers. Anyone ever seen some of the old footage of them doing blues tunes? He let his harp skills deteriorate as Townshend's songwriting got more rock oriented over the years, to the point of Roger only doing the Baba O'Riley coda. ---------- Hawkeye Kane
Last Edited by on Feb 28, 2012 8:57 AM
@MP: "but he can be very inconsistent. there is a dylan tune on stripped (forgot which dylan tune) that is absolutely painful."
"Like a rolling stone." For a guy who´s at that point been playing some 30 years it´s perfectly awful -- no matter how many millions of records he´s sold.
Oh I didn't know the thread was about who should have been playing harp at the white house ? I thought it was about people bashing Mick for playing harp on a few songs once in a while ?
I agree maybe they should have invited harp players like Kim Wilson or Jerry Portnoy ETC !!
Do you think Jason R should have been invited ?
Last Edited by on Feb 28, 2012 10:02 PM
