Album: Bridges to Babylon
Year: 1997
. . .
I’m sure there are people out there whose favorite Rolling Stones albums are Voodoo Lounge or Bridges to Babylon, and god bless those people. But both albums basically passed me by: I bought them when they came out, I listened to them a few times; put the songs I liked onto mixtapes, and filed them with the rest of my Stones records, knowing that when I wanted to listen to the Stones, I had any number of great records from which to choose. And all of those had Bill Wyman playing bass, Wyman having flown the coop after the Steel Wheels tours.
Which is not fair to either record, but here we are. I feel weird that Voodoo Lounge is the first album I completely skipped for this project — and certainly I considered writing about “You Got Me Rocking” or “Sparks Will Fly,” but I really had nothing to say about either song, which is one of the criteria of course for writing about a song.
That said, my favorite song on either record — and I guess, by extension, my favorite Stones song of the 1990s was Bridges to Babylon’s “Saint of Me,” a late-career piece of myth-making from Mick Jagger. Well, maybe not so much myth-making, but rather myth extension.
Saint Paul the persecutor
Was a cruel and sinful man
Jesus hit him with a blinding light
And then his life began
I said yes, I said yeah
Augustine knew temptation
He loved women, wine, and song
And all the special pleasures
Of doing something wrong
I said yes, I said yeah
With Billy Preston on the organ, “Saint of Me” calls back to both “Sympathy For The Devil” in terms of the historical references, and the gospel songs from Exile, like “Shine A Light,” though it really didn’t sound like a gospel song, as even Billy Preston’s organ is buried in the mix.
That said, I do like the contrast with the Saints mentioned in the song and the chorus.
I said yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah
You’ll never make a saint of me
Oh yeah, oh yeah
You’ll never make a saint of me
Like I said, myth-extension: even at 55, Michael Phillip Jagger was unrepentant. Also, that chorus is accompanied by some nice guitar hooks from Waddy Watchel, as Keith was nowhere to be found for this one. However, given that Watchel was at least Keith-adjacent, having provided guitar leads for all of Keith’s solo albums, as well as the live X-Pensive Wino shows.
And so, his guitar dominates the song from the chorus forward, and it’s one of the better guest guitar appearances on a Stones album, as he provides not just a solo, but a pretty good hook, as well.
“Saint of Me” was released as a single in both the U.S. and U.K., making up to 26 in the U.K. while barely scraping the top 100 in the U.K. One of the things that happened in the 1990s was that their singles fortunes flipped again: they started charting better in the U.K. than the U.S., though the never made the top 10 again in either country.
And finally, while they couldn’t make a Saint of Mick Jagger, they most certainly could make him a Knight. And in the early 2000s, Mick Jagger was knighted, which, as you can imagine pissed Keith off, but of course by that point, all they were going to do was snipe at each like the old married couple that they were.
“Saint of Me” Official Promo Video
“Saint of Me” live in 1998
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