RETRO: Mick Jagger, ‘Goddess in the Doorway’ (2001)
One muggy Pittsburgh morning, I sat down next to Mia, a girl I kinda-sorta knew, at the day’s first session of our summer RA training. (Yes, I was one of those killjoys that kept you from having too much fun in college.) She was humming a song; I asked what it was.
“Oh, you probably don’t know it,” she said, not snarkily like a hipster would, but simply.
“Try me,” I replied.
“It’s a Mick Jagger song called ‘Don’t Call Me Up.’ I heard it on the radio this morning. I love it.”
My jaw hit the concrete. If my brain weren’t already melting from the heat, it would have liquidized from pure astonishment. “No way,” I said. “I fucking love Goddess in the Doorway” and began to ramble about not only how much I loved that song, but how damn-near perfect the rest of the album was. To my surprise, she responded in kind. We’re still friends today.
Goddess in the Doorway: the friend-maker? Not if you ask Mick’s better-half, who’s been known to call it Dogshit In the Doorway to press, fans, and pretty much everyone else who’s listening. Is Keef upset that Jagger took a pile of would-be Stones tracks and re-purposed them into what was his most highly praised album in decades? (Here’s the Rolling Stone review in which Jann Wenner’s lips are glued to Mick Jagger’s ass — take it for what it’s worth.) That, on Goddess, Jagger managed to woo contemporary hit-makers like Lenny Kravitz and Bono into helping him craft something both modern and true to his rock/R&B roots? All possibilities — or maybe he just hated the album.
Last week, we took a trip back to 2001 with Paul McCartney’s Driving Rain album, which was released exactly a week before Goddess. I don’t need to set the scene again; it’s obvious the world 13 years ago was a vastly different place, with dumbphones, Gateway desktops, and CD players. “Dubya” was sitting in the Oval Office, and the dust had barely settled from 9/11.
The number one song on the charts on November 19, the day Goddess came out, was Alien Ant Farm’s cover of Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal.” Some of the hottest musical stars were Kravitz, Wyclef Jean, U2, Rob Thomas, Joe Perry (especially after Aerosmith’s Just Push Play peaked at #7 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier that year and spawned a slew of hit singles), and Pete Townshend (who, with Roger Daltrey, had just performed at McCartney’s Concert for New York City at Madison Square Garden). And, wouldn’t you know, they all contributed to Mick Jagger’s Goddess In the Doorway.
Me, I was a sophomore in high school, and, as luck would have it, 2001 was the year I started caring about music. I mean, really caring about it. I religiously watched the VH1 video countdowns and could probably still name off the Top 10 Videos of the Week for an arbitrary week in May. And, this was probably the only period where I felt a significant connection to music of my generation, probably because bands like Aerosmith and rock stars like Jagger were sharing the charts with Fuel, Lifehouse, and the Calling — all bands that I’d love to say I didn’t love, but that I really did. (Fuel’s “Hemorrhage”? I could rock out to that shit all day.)
So, when I heard that Mick Jagger was coming out with a new album, I snapped it up the very day of its release and played the hell out of it. In fact, I played the hell out of two copies. Have you ever seen a CD flake before? It was pathetic. Silver specks everywhere. And, boy, my mom was pissed I now needed another copy of an album she already bought me. (Parents, amirite?)
Besides being a sonic revelation for me, since it combined the music I liked with the music my peers deemed acceptable and not “old” (the worst slight in the world when you’re 15), Goddess in the Doorway was also a triumph for Jagger on a personal level. While different than McCartney’s romantic re-birth on Driving Rain, Goddess was simply Mick Jagger proving he was still cool, that he could still run with the young cats. (Okay, maybe “old” is a slight when you’re 60-something also.) The notion of Jagger needing to prove his coolness is preposterous; no matter how much we Rolling Stones fans love to jab at his idiosyncrasies, would we really have him any other way?
Opener “Visions of Paradise” is very much in the 2001 vein, probably because Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas was a co-writer. Jagger even incorporates a little of Thomas’ obnoxious sneer on the vocals. Thomas, however, doesn’t appear on the track; the honor of Goddess‘s first co-star is Bono on “Joy,” a jubilant, if a little light-handed pop track that name checks deities from Jesus to Buddha to an ambiguous four-wheel drive.
If Goddess were a concert, the first trio of tracks would likely be an opening act. They’re okay, but the real show is yet to come. Funnily, the album hits its rock ceiling early with the Kravitz-driven “God Gave Me Everything,” aka, the only song you know if you don’t know the album. Its ear-worminess and Kravitz’s superstardom at the turn of the century ensured it hit radio waves and video countdowns. Cut at Kravitz’s home studio in Miami, the backing track is performed almost solely by Kravitz himself, a process documented in the television special about the making of Goddess entitled Being Mick. (Which also features a behind-the-scenes look at its video, which takes Mick Jagger to a handful of places he’s never been before: a grocery store, a laundromat, a Dave & Buster’s… I kid.) “God Gave Me Everything” remains one of my personal favorites from the album and really whets the appetite for what follows.
Was it intentional that the album’s eponymous tune came two tracks later? What’s up with the “god” and “goddess” juxtaposition, Mick? Between the two are the aforementioned “Hide Away,” a funky collaboration with Wyclef Jean and the aforementioned “Don’t Call Me Up,” which is really just Jagger kindly saying “fuck off.” “Goddess” itself is a little underwhelming but does have an twinge of mystical beauty to it that makes it possible to believe that Jagger is “in the basement lookin’ for the truth.”
Luckily, the album is a strong finisher. The fuzz guitars bleed through “Lucky Day,” “Everybody Getting High” (an “I can be a cool kid, too!” anthem if I’ve ever heard one), and the racy and controversial “Gun,” in which Jagger literally invites someone — presumably a woman — to get a gun and “shoot it through this heart of mine.” (Thankfully, none of his ex-wives took him up on the offer.)
But it’s “Too Far Gone” that 15-year-old Allison found the most intriguing. Like most kids, I was left scared and baffled by 9/11. I’d always treated death with a more scientific approach, trying to figure out the point of it all in a way I could understand. War and terrorism were no different. So, when I heard Mick Jagger, a voice I knew, loved, and might follow blindly into the abyss, sing “This was once the country, now it’s our town / What was once the tallest spire, just a building crumbling down,” I was convinced that he was singing about September 11. Think about it: the universal coming togetherness, the I heart NY sentiment of making New York City everyone’s city, the image of tall buildings falling. Only… Goddess was recorded in the spring of 2001. Did Mick Jagger predict 9/11?
Obviously, this Allison knows better, but it’s still an intriguing coincidence, even if the song is really about changing times and how bullshit it is that no one in 2001 turned off the damn television or computer and looked up at the stars at night. Thank goodness things are different now!
Unfortunately, because Goddess is Jagger’s last solo effort to date, we may never find out if his “Brand New Set of Rules” in the closing track (“I will be kind, won’t be so cruel / I will be sweet, I will be true”) paid off. But, to me, Goddess in the Doorway definitely did. Listening now, it’s almost like a time capsule of what was on Top 40 radio in 2001, except translated in a way that gives it a timeless feel. It’s a solid album, if not totally cohesive, and probably features a more honest snapshot of Jagger than on many of his previous solo efforts, probably because Jagger did exactly what he set out to do: validate his coolness, one hip, happenin’ collaborator at a time.
