Better Check Your Baggage

My question for the fortysomething mother and her teenage son at a recent family gathering was simple: Did they want to hear the new Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger solo albums?

The mom frowned, aware of the many mediocre solo projects by the two. The son yawned.

The youngster showed interest in the Jagger album only after hearing that Bono, Lenny Kravitz and Rob Thomas guest on it. The only name that would have made the mom curious was Keith Richards, who doesn’t.

But she was intrigued by the McCartney album after being told that it features songs about Linda and Heather. The teenager’s reaction: Who are Linda and Heather?

Ideally, critics should listen to albums in a vacuum. Musicians should neither benefit from nor be penalized for the music they’ve made over the years. But that’s not possible in an art form as populist as rock ‘n’ roll.

One of the music’s great strengths is the way artists speak so directly to their audience. The question in the case of McCartney and Jagger in 2001 is: Which audience do we mean? The listening experience with each album is far different depending on whether you’re a longtime fan of these artists or whether you are just coming to them.

Personal qualities count when we listen to McCartney’s music because the ex-Beatle has shared so many of his feelings with us over the years, in songs and in interviews. We feel close to him, so we respond when he sings on the new “Driving Rain” about moving on after losing Linda, his wife of almost 30 years, to breast cancer in 1998.

Knowing that McCartney is engaged to model and activist Heather Mills, there’s no way his fans aren’t going to be touched when they hear a tender “I do” in a love song on the new album.

For the teenager who doesn’t know McCartney’s history, however, “I Do” may well sound like just another silly love song.

The infinitely more private Jagger hasn’t let us care about him except as a great rock ‘n’ roll performer. At his best with the Rolling Stones, his goal is merely to start us up. He has given us songs of romantic tension and regret, but they never seemed especially autobiographical. The lyrics are framed in generic, melodramatic terms. What made the tunes memorable was the soulfulness of the music.

All this works for and against McCartney and Jagger in these new collections. The more you know about McCartney the more you’ll care about “Driving Rain,” while the less you know about Jagger’s music with the Stones, the more you’ll probably be attracted to “Goddess in the Doorway.”

“Driving Rain,” already in stores, is a warm, personal affair whose melodies are as good as you’d expect from one of rock’s master tunesmiths. It’s not, however, a very ambitious or striking record.

With the Beatles, Wings and on his own, McCartney has shown considerable charm as a rocker, but his real strength has been comforting or inspiring us, whether with the gentleness of “Yesterday” or the epic sweep of “Hey Jude.”

The new album opens with “Lonely Road,” a ballad about romantic rediscovery that offers some of the joyful declaration of “Maybe I’m Amazed,” which he wrote early in his relationship with Linda. Its lyrics’ underlying fear of getting hurt the second time around seems to be about his new relationship.

Several of the album’s other songs, including the mostly instrumental “Heather,” also speak in autobiographical terms. “From a Lover to a Friend” is about the deepening of a relationship, and most listeners will again think of McCartney and Mills, given such lines as, “Let me love again/Now that you turned out to be/Someone I can trust/Someone I believe.”

The high point for longtime fans is likely to be “I Do,” a love song in the sweet, straightforward tradition of Cole Porter’s “True Love,” which Bing Crosby sang to Grace Kelly in the 1956 film “High Society.”

The album stumbles when McCartney moves to more neutral turf. The title track is a good-natured rock workout, although so tame by contemporary standards that young listeners might not think it’s rock ‘n’ roll at all.

Most of the rest of “Driving Rain” are like many of McCartney’s modest earlier albums. Several tracks seem like works in progress, the kind of material that’s set aside to be turned into something more memorable and then ends up as “previously unreleased tracks” on boxed sets.

McCartney’s lack of selectivity has often led critics to ask why he doesn’t guard his reputation more carefully by limiting his output to collections that showcase the best side of him, like 1973’s “Band on the Run.”

“Yes, you’d think I’d be more careful, but you need some distance before you can see [the quality of] a record,” he once told me. “It doesn’t matter how big you are or how little you are. You do your bit and you put it out. I’m not that precious with it.”

In “Driving Rain,” McCartney shows he hasn’t changed his philosophy.

Jagger wants us to feel he is opening up in “Goddess in the Doorway,” which will be released Tuesday. In the press material for the album, he says, “These are all very personal songs.... If you wanted to, you could sing these songs in a kitchen more or less with an acoustic guitar.” Two of his daughters, Elizabeth and Georgia May, join the backing vocals on one tune.

The themes do frequently touch on vulnerability and commitment in ways that are rare for the Rolling Stones, although Jagger feels so uncertain in this role that the comments are often cloaked in humorous or mocking tones. In “Gun,” this man with the reputation for being a heartbreaker is so wounded that he invites a tormenting lover to put him out of his misery with a bullet through the heart.

Several of the other songs offer the kind of tortured imagery that worked in the vague, mysterious terrain of the Stones, but seems frequently clumsy in this supposedly more open and heartfelt context.

Jagger long seemed to operate outside the law and mock all social institutions, including religion, so it’s interesting that the album’s two most winning tracks have spiritual undercurrents.

“Joy,” is the kind of uplifting celebration that would make you think of U2 even if Bono didn’t share the lead vocal, and “God Gave Me Everything” is a statement of thanks that you’d never expect from the co-writer of “Sympathy for the Devil.” Co-written by Kravitz and Jagger, it speaks about seeing God’s hand in “a clear blue sky ... in a woman’s eyes ... in your baby’s cries.”

But Jagger is too competitive to actually record an intimate “lo-fi” album. To make sure this collection gets noticed in the marketplace, he has brought in such figures as his big-name guests (including hip-hop star Wyclef Jean) to lend seasoning and a bit of contemporary name identification. All too often, however, the results feel ill-defined.

Jagger and his new team bring his music up to date, but they too often substitute competency for raw electricity. Still, this is Jagger’s best batch of songs in years, and some of them seem tailor-made for the Stones. If the best of them find their way into the set list on the band’s 40th anniversary tour next year, we may get to hear how they should really sound.

*

Robert Hilburn, the Times pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.