Mick Jagger here,” says the unmistakable voice on the phone.
The Rolling Stones frontman is on vacation in the sunny Caribbean, but spares a few minutes to talk about an upcoming stop on the band’s current Licks World Tour 2002-2003 that doesn’t require a ticket.
On Saturday, HBO presents “Rolling Stones: Live From Madison Square Garden,” a 2-hour-and-15-minute concert event, part of a road show that launched on Sept. 3 in Boston and will take Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood around the United States, Europe, Australia and Asia. The tour coincides with the Oct. 1 release of “Forty Licks,” a two-CD collection featuring 36 classic Stones songs from the past four decades and four new tracks.
Although Jagger says the band has done pay-per-view shows before, this is the first live show for broadcast or cable. “It’s always good fun doing it live,” Jagger says. “The first one’s live, then later on you can always tidy up the bits and pieces that you don’t like, but on the day of, it’s live.”
Asked if he plans to change the lineup for the live show, Jagger jokes, “What, the guitar players? They can stand on different sides of the stage?”
But seriously, as to the songs the band plans to play … “Well, I don’t know what songs,” Jagger says. “I honestly haven’t even thought about the set list – trust you to provoke me into having to think about it while I’m on holiday.
“You’ve got two audiences to please. You’ve got the audience at home, but you’ve also got to please the audience in the Garden.”
In a recent episode of HBO’s “The Sopranos,” a priest counseling a mobster paraphrases from the Stones’ 1968 song “Sympathy for the Devil,” asking “Were you there when Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt and pain?” “That’s a good one, eh?” Jagger says. “We might do that (song on HBO). I’ll have to think about the set list. We’ll see, a mixture between the familiar and the not-so-familiar.”
As to whether he’ll include any solo songs (for example, from 2001’s “Goddess in the Doorway”), Jagger says, “Nope, probably not.” Asked if other band members know his songs, he chuckles. “Nope, probably not. No, it’ll be all Stones songs, but we’ve got a lot of songs that we rehearsed to choose from..”
The Licks World Tour mixes up venues, sometimes putting the Stones two or three times in the same city, in different size locations, from arenas to theaters. “That was fun,” Jagger says. “A lot of times you’ve got these songs, and you don’t get to do them. You do songs that aren’t very well-known in a big audience, and they fall flat. For you, they’re falling flat. It doesn’t mean the audience doesn’t like them, but they really don’t respond. You do those in a theater, and people really respond, and you go, ‘That really worked.’
“Certain songs are just better in an intimate setting, and some songs work great in a really big place.”
Some artists – such as Bruce Springsteen – are known for popping up unexpectedly in clubs while they’re on tour. “It’s fun to go and jam with other people in clubs,” Jagger says. “I haven’t really done that yet, but that is fun to do.”
