Mick Jagger – Very Best Of Mick Jagger – Amazon.com Music

The Very Best of Mick Jagger is a very bad title for this particular CD, because, of course, most of the very best music Mick Jagger has done has been with the Rolling Stones. A better title would have been The Very Best of Mick Jagger’s Solo Work. Or, even better, they could have called it The Very Best of Mick Jagger’s Non-Rolling Stones Music–that way they could have included one of my favorites: State of Shock (technically, a Jacksons song).

For me, a dream collection from Jagger would also include Say You Will and War Baby from Primitive Cool, several Superheavy songs (which weren’t yet recorded at the time this disk was issued), more of his songs with the Red Devils (heck, since this is just a dream disk, let’s go ahead and have a whole album of Red Devils stuff), and Hard Woman and the Title Song from She’s the Boss, and Brand New Set of Rules from Goddess in the Doorway–but, I suppose I can make my own collection on iTunes.

Still, this disk has some treasures on it: (You’ve got to Walk and) Don’t Look Back w/ Peter Tosh, Checkin’ Up on My Baby (With the Red Devils), Old Habits Die Hard, and Joy. I had never liked Memo from Turner or the film it came from, but it holds up better than I thought it would. There is a previously unreleased track called Too Many Cooks, with a nice groove to it as well.

Certainly there were a few songs I would he left off, too. None of this sounds anything like The Rolling Stones–which I guess is the whole point of doing solo work, but also the reason the fans never picked up on it more than they did. That and Keith Richards having practically made a second career of telling everyone how Mick’s solo work is all total crap and a threat to the Rolling Stones.

Not only is this not crap, much of it is better and more interesting than most of what The Stones have recorded from the 1990’s to the present. The same is true of many of Keith Richards’ solo and side projects.

Of course, none of it reaches the level of The Stones best work (when The Glimmer Twins were so in synch that they could finish each-other’s sentences and the entire band sounded like one instrument), hence my disagreement with the title. Still, I hope Jagger keeps doing solo and side projects whenever he feels inspired to do so, that fans will listen to it with open minds, and that maybe one of these days an amazing boxed set will be released.