Mick Jagger, one of rock's legendary salesmen, says Donald Trump has been using the wrong Rolling Stones song at his campaign rallies. Back in June, the Stones' song publishers threatened the Trump campaign with a lawsuit over the unauthorized use of the band's 1969 classic, “You Can't Always Get What You Want.”
Jagger, who was promoting a new theater run of his recent movie, The Burnt Orange Heresy, spoke about Trump's odd choice for a campaign song, telling The Los Angeles Times: “I mean the question is do they choose the music anyway? Is there some DJ or PR person that does that? I don't really know the answer to that. I mean, Angela Merkel used 'Angie' a lot when she was campaigning. It's just that people really do, believe it or not, even though you say, 'Oh, I'm not really affiliated with this political campaign,' when they hear it on the TV, they think you really did want it to be there. So I think it's good that people, if they want to use something like that in a political context, they should ask. I think that's fair enough.”
Last month, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were among the dozens of songwriters who signed an open letter as part of the Artist Rights Alliance (ARA), which demanded “politicians on both sides get clearance on the music they plug at their events and in advertisements.” The letter was addressed to “the Democratic and Republican National, Congressional, and Senatorial committees.”
Jagger went on to say, that the story behind “You Can't Always Get What You Want” seems somewhat illogical as a campaign song used to fire up voters: “It does seem an odd choice to me, too. If I was the DJ, I wouldn't be choosing that one. I might be doing 'Start Me Up' or something as my playout music. I don't know, it’s just weird. But that's neither here nor there.”
It seems ridiculous to imagine a Presidential candidate back in 1968 or 1972 EVER choosing a Rolling Stones tune for a campaign song. 55 years after being pegged the bad boys of rock, Mick Jagger admits that the Rolling Stones were particularly mellow seeing as how crazy the rock world became by the end of the 1960's: “In those days, what the press portrayed as wild, was actually in our world now, quite tame, y'know? But, for those days people were very easily shocked. You've got to remember it was still a very shockable society there wasn't the kind of scandal mongering quite in this way as there is now, which is kind sort of scandal on a daily basis — there's a stable diet of it, I think. But they love scandal, of course, the newspapers, so they used to play it up a lot. So even though we didn't do that many shocking things in the early days (laughs) people were easily shocked.”
