Talk Is Cheap: The Poisoned Dart That Saved the Rolling Stones

 

In the early 1980s, Mick Jagger, the Rolling Stones’ frontman, became obsessed with launching a solo career. He watched solo artists like David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson, and Bruce Springsteen become superstars. Jagger began to believe that the Stones were no longer relevant and that to connect with a younger audience he needed a career of his own. His 1985 solo debut, She’s the Boss, irritated the Stones. The band felt that Jagger’s solo work would be a distraction and pull focus away from them. The band’s albums from that period reflected the growing distance. Dirty Work (1986) ended up as one of the worst records in their history. But Jagger’s solo career fared no better. His voice, one of the most iconic in rock and roll, was impossible to separate from the Stones. The public perceived Jagger’s solo album as a weak effort precisely because it didn’t sound like the Stones.

Jagger’s unavailability gave the rest of the band free time, and Keith Richards began getting together with other musicians just to keep playing. The result was Talk Is Cheap, Keith’s first solo album, released in 1988. Richards wanted to distance himself from the overly polished, programmed sound of the 1980s. He wanted a record that felt spontaneous and garage like. Jagger saw him as the one responsible for the Stones’ stagnation. In reality, Richards was trying to preserve the legendary band’s sound and keep them from losing their essence. But as a solo artist he experienced a freedom he had never had before. Drummer Steve Jordan became his main musical ally, and together they began forging a new identity. Richards stopped making music for Jagger and, for the first time, made music for himself, and that shows in every track on the album.

Richards sounds free on Talk Is Cheap. The musical clichés of the Stones are absent. Jordan is a very different drummer from Charlie Watts. Richards is a very different vocalist from Jagger. And most surprisingly: outside the Stones, Richards reveals himself as a guitarist with far more range than many had credited him with. He was joined by bassist Bootsy Collins, keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and saxophonist Maceo Parker, the cream of 1970s funk, who helped create a more colorful, rhythmic universe for his songs, something immediately apparent on “Big Enough.”

Unlike Jagger’s solo albums, Talk Is Cheap was regarded as the best album the Stones hadn’t dared to make in the 1980s. “Take It So Hard”, “Struggle” and "How I Wish", could easily have been the Stones’ strongest songs of that decade. It was a hard blow to Jagger’s ego. With that album Richards recovered some of the subversive spirit of the legendary Exile on Main St., the band’s last great record. Talk Is Cheap was an almost lethal dart that forced Jagger to react. Without meaning to, Richards proved he could command respect outside the Stones and that he might no longer need the band. Jagger responded by making the Stones his priority once again. Richards made it clear that he could preserve the Stones’ own identity while simultaneously having a personal identity that, at that moment, felt more relevant than the band’s.