Jagger and the Rolling Stones, 50 years on

When the phone rang one afternoon last week, a familiar voice was on the line. It belonged to the prancing front man of the band that throughout its illustrious and sometimes sinister history defined what rock-and-roll is better than any other in the music's history.

"Is this Dan?," he asked, then introduced himself. "Hi, Dan, it's Mick," he said, pausing for a half-beat and adding, "Jagger." He was phoning from somewhere in the West Indies: "I'm away from everything, doing pre-prep for the tour rehearsals. It's very nice. But I'm working away."

The tour in question is the Rolling Stones' 50 & Counting concert trek that's a little late in marking the anniversary of the first gig by the teenage American-blues-and-rock-and-roll-loving Brits at London's Marquee Club in July 1962.

50 & Counting starts in Los Angeles early next month and will arrive at its final stop at the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia on June 18. Tickets go on sale Monday morning, which explains why the 69-year-old singer from Dartford, Kent, was on the line. He spends a few minutes talking about the death of Margaret Thatcher. "It's big in the English press, it's everywhere."

He expounds on Thatcher as a Cold Warrior, and seems ready to bring his London School of Economics knowledge to bear on the Iron Lady's domestic policies before he can be reeled in. Can we talk about the Rolling Stones, Mick?

"Nope, sorry," he says. "Bye, now. Thank you for talking about the tour!"

Such a joker, that Mick Jagger.

But seriously, Jagger says, he and his fellow Stones - Keith Richards, 69, Charlie Watts, 71, and Ron Wood, 65, the core four who are now older on average than the members of the U.S. Supreme Court - decided to do a small number of shows in 2012 before embarking on a full-length anniversary tour.

At the one I caught in Newark, N.J., the band sounded clean, crisp, and tight, with drummer Watts still elegantly swinging after all these years. The singer heard it that way, too: "Definitely. We sort of worked our way up to that point. It didn't feel like it was unrehearsed, but it still felt relaxed."

Jagger remains a dynamo on stage. "If I'm going to do this really well, I have to do quite a lot of preparation," he says. "I have to do things vocally, and things physically. Because it's quite a physical show. You have to build up to that . . . you can't really burn a candle at both ends for that tour period. Or, at least, I can't."

The Stones wound up their last tour in 2007. In the interim, Keith Richards' autobiography, Life, called Jagger "unbearable" and claimed he had a "tiny todger."

Does that kind of sniping ever threaten the Stones' survival? Or does Jagger shrug it off? "That's kind of a long subject I don't want to go into on this interview," he says politely.

Fair enough. What about ticket prices? They run as high as $600 for the Wells Fargo show, but there are some $85 ducats which might land lucky fans in the "Tongue Pit." Does Jagger worry he's pushing prices too high? "I don't know. There are low prices, too," he says. "I think there are different prices for different pockets."

The 2012 greatest-hits set, GRRR!, included two new songs produced by Don Was. Will the Stones record again? "I'm working all the time, doing songs and writing. I hope there will be another Stones album. It would be good if there was."

Five decades on, the Stones still draw from their original inspirations. At the Newark show, they pulled out Chuck Berry's "Around and Around." Do his original heroes still give Jagger a thrill?

"Oooh," he says. "I think I always like Little Richard, because he was a really energetic performer. I liked his records before I was with the Stones. I used to do songs that he did when I was a singer when I was kid. And I always like Muddy Waters, though he's a different kind of performer. But his records still hold up, really, as I do think Richard's records hold up. And some of the best of them have this fantastic energy to them.

"Which is part of what I think rock and roll is about. Energy. It jumps out at you, even if you haven't heard it for ages. I put it on in the studio and it just leapt out of the speakers, just amazing, some alternate take of Little Richard. And I think that James Brown was really a great performer and his music still stands up. Those people are really outstanding."

Richards has often talked about going out as his blues heroes such as Waters did, on a chair on stage till the bitter end. Mick sees it differently than Keef.

"He only did that because he got into a car crash," Jagger says of Waters, who died in 1983. "If you watched Muddy at Newport, he was all over the stage. . . . One remembers him, as Keith says, as the guy in the chair, but he really wasn't that a lot of his career."

"But you know, rock-and-roll is different than the blues," says the archetypal rock-and-roll front man. "It's not the same thing at all. Blues played in a chair is fine, but rock-and-roll is not really meant to be played in a chair."

So, will there come a time when a wizened Jagger will while away his days, moaning the blues when he can no longer strut his stuff? "Probably not. I don't think so. I might do it to amuse myself, but I don't see it happening. But then you never know what's going to happen to you, do you?"