My Own Version Of You 15:  “And Mick can write!”

 

by Jochen Markhorst

XV       “And Mick can write!”

Can you tell me what it means to be or not to be
You won’t get away with fooling me
Can you help me walk that moonlight mile
Can you give me the blessings of your smile

The film is set in 1972, and the responsible art director and set designers have really gone to town. The street scenes, cars, hairstyles, the typewriter that Susan Sarandon is working on, smoking in the cafés, the posters in the office where Dustin Hoffman works… everything is right, all of it exists in 1972.

The same goes for the soundtrack. In the opening scene, as the funeral procession starts moving, Susan Sarandon, the mother of the murdered Diana, brusquely and resolutely turns up the car radio, and then Sly & The Family Stone’s “I Want To Take You Higher” (1969) blasts through the first follow car, the follow car with Diana’s parents and her boyfriend Jake Gyllenhaal. Over the corny final minute, we hear Van Morrison’s “Sweet Thing” (1968). And in the café, the atmosphere radically changes when Jake meddles with the jukebox and chooses the song after which the 2002 film is named: The Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” (1971).

 

Anachronisms are neatly avoided throughout the rest of the soundtrack as well. Herb Alpert’s “So What’s New” from 1966, Gary Glitter, Jethro Tull, the completely unknown Ziggy Stardust outtake “Sweet Head” from 1971, and a good dozen other song snippets. Only once do the director and/or music supervisor allow themselves a “mistake”. After the catharsis of the courtroom scene follows the far too long (fourteen minutes) bittersweet finale in which we see the main characters turning the page to a life without Diana. Mother Susan Sarandon can suddenly write again, for example. And while her fingers begin to dance over the keys of her 1947 Royal KMM typewriter, Dylan’s “Buckets Of Rain” swells on the soundtrack. And continues to play for another minute and a half, so it is also the music under the footage showing the father, Dustin Hoffman, pulling himself together, turning his gaze to new horizons.

“Buckets Of Rain” was recorded in New York on 19 September 1974, and only released in January 1975 – thus creating an anachronism in a film set in 1972. What director Brad Silberling and music director Tom Carlson undoubtedly know, given the precision with which they selected the other 18 songs. But apparently, in this one case, the importance of allowing Dylan’s song to add a bittersweet touch to the finale outweighs historical accuracy. The bycatch being that the filmmakers essentially forged the Dylan – Moonlight Mile connection twenty years before Dylan himself does.

It is a weightless connection, though. The choice of “Moonlight Mile” is actually quite random; screenwriter Silberling prefers The Beatles and initially has the main character Jake select “Baby’s In Black” on the jukebox, a second working title is Goodbye Hello, and he only decides on the 70s and The Stones in the third revision. Still, dramatically a much better choice; the overwhelming change of atmosphere in the busy café is much more fitting and aligns better with “Moonlight Mile”. It certainly works more naturally than it would have with the Beatles’ tearjerker “Baby’s In Black” or with the catchy, but somewhat silly “Hello Goodbye”.

“Moonlight Mile” is an exceptional song and the name check in Dylan’s song is gallant – not only because of the fact itself, but also seeing the placement; in the same bridge-like quatrain as the Shakespeare reference to be or not to be. The acknowledgement is quite universal. Marianne Faithfull, who amusingly and maliciously seasons her autobiography Faithfull (1994) with playful jabs at Jagger, must concede: “Let It Bleed is my favourite Stones record. All those great songs: “You Got the Silver”, “Moonlight Mile”, “Salt of the Earth” (…),” where we may assume that she places the song on the wrong album to tease Jagger (“Moonlight Mile” is the closing track of Sticky Fingers), but that she genuinely means “great song” – La Faithfull never jokes about great songs.

More weight has the more or less official elevation to the nobility in the Wall Street Journal, in the splendid article series Anatomy of a Song (2011-16) by Marc Myers, in which he thoroughly examines 45 classic songs, focusing on their origins, usually with the help of the songwriter and/or fellow musicians. “Moonlight Mile” is number 26, following Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz” and preceding Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May”. In the accompanying interview, Jagger once again disputes that the song has anything to do with cocaine (line 2: “With a head full of snow”), asserting that it truly pertains to his exhaustion, nostalgia, and sense of loss as an endlessly touring rock star. “Looking forward to returning from a foreign place while looking out the window of a train and the images of the railway line going by in the moonlight,” as Jagger states.

The credits state, as usual, “written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richard” (still without the ‘s’ in 1971), but Keith had nothing to do with the creation of the song. Which he freely acknowledges in his memoirs:

Moonlight Mile was all Mick’s. As far as I can remember, Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it. And Mick can write! It’s unbelievable how prolific he was. Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy. I’m not complaining.”
(Keith Richards and James Fox, Life, 2010)

Whether “the whole idea” is Mick’s, is not entirely undisputed, by the way. The song came about during a night session with only Jagger, Mick Taylor and Charlie Watts, and Taylor has since hinted more than once that this is one of those songs for which he really should have received a songwriting credit. Still, the lyrics were indeed already finished.

Jagger himself generally adopts a somewhat dismissive attitude towards his lyrics, usually claiming he is no Dylan. He admires Dylan immensely. Not only in so many words, but also in practice; since about 1965 we clearly see Dylan’s influence descending into Jagger’s lyrics. A sycophantic reporter attempting to flatter him is elegantly rebuffed:

What other group ever wrote a song like “19th Nervous Breakdown,” or “Mother’s Little Helper”?
Well, Bob Dylan.
That’s not really the same thing.
Dylan once said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man.’”
He said that to you?
No, to Keith.
What did he mean? He wasn’t putting you down was he?
Oh yeah, of course he was. But that was just funny, it was great. That’s what he’s like. It’s true but I’d like to hear Bob Dylan sing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”
(Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott, 1968)

Interviewer Cott does not see the connection that Jagger almost literally shoves in his face when pointing to Dylan re “Mother’s Little Helper”. For the Upper Stone knows full well what he owes that song to: the liner notes of Dylan’s Another Side Of (1964), the third poem from Some Other Kind Of Poems, the surprising collection of poems on the back of the album cover. Nameless poems, but for convenience, we’ll call Poem 3 “Everything Crawls.” A bunch of women sneak little white tablets into shoes, stockings, hats and other hiding places, Mick reads there, and

junkie nurse home heals countless
common housewives strung out
fully on drugstore dope, legally
sold t’ help clean the kitchen.

… which does not detract from the fact that Jaggers’ adaptation of this fragment into “Mother’s Little Helper” has its own unique poetic power and is a Dylan-worthy amalgam of Rhyme, Rhythm and Reason;

“Kids are different today,” I hear every mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill, there's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of her mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day

 

… just like the lyrics of “Moonlight Mile”, which Keef says is one of those lyrics that flow from Jagger like water from a tap, don’t give reason to be dismissive either;

The sound of strangers sending nothing to my mind
Just another mad, mad day on the road
I am just living to be lying by your side
But I'm just about a moonlight mile on down the road

Resounding and intriguing, beautiful, bittersweet one-liners like just living to be lying by your side and the evocative power of the metaphor “moonlight mile”… powerful enough to earn a tip of the hat from maestro Dylan fifty years later.

———–

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 16: Your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten

 

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

 

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