Jumping Jack Smash

By JAY COCKS

PERFORMER: MICK JAGGER

ALBUM: WANDERING SPIRIT

LABEL: ATLANTIC

THE BOTTOM LINE: Third time's the charm: the solo excursion fans have been waiting for and Jagger's been looking for.

There is a certain overtone of good-humored complaint here that can't have been idly considered. The performer is in a season of discontent: stature secure in pop history, but history threatening to leave him behind. All those powerhouse rock bands from the Pacific Northwest pumping out chords that sound so often like unacknowledged devotionals to the Rolling Stones. All those rancid rock memoirs (the most recent by Angela Bowie) detailing decadences of years past -- sometimes decades past -- that grow drearier with each retelling, antique outrages that have lost the power to shock. Longevity in rock is an elusive thing, and predictability is one sure way to short-circuit it; academic respectability is another.

Michael Philip Jagger, as he is called in the 16th edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, where he is generously represented, has been playing footsie with these problems for years without gaining much advantage. His first two solo albums, objects of great expectation and grand promotion, took a commercial pummeling. He continues to be the front man and guiding light of the Rolling Stones. If he has any identity apart from that, it is as a pop icon, one who wears his accumulating years and history with panache -- an Annie Leibovitz picture of Dorian Gray. No wonder, on this third solo attempt, he can put so much weight and irony into these lines from I've Been Lonely for So Long: "Everybody's throwin' rocks in my bed/ Just can't seem to get ahead in life/ Nothin' I do seems to turn out right/ Somebody help me now!"

Help comes to those who help themselves. Wandering Spirit takes a couple of tunes to fully kick in, but by the third song, Out of Focus, you know Jagger has done himself proud. Not outdone himself exactly: although Wandering Spirit has all the shiftless heft of a prime Stones album, there are few trails blazed here. This is a record of reconsolidations and reconsiderations -- Sticky Fingers with a manicure. It sounds tough, ornery and smoothly unsprung, barbed on top and tenderhearted at the quick.

Jagger, so busy keeping naughty, is not widely noted for his skill with ballads, but he has packed in a few humdingers here, including songs of love in advancing age (Evening Gown) and against tall odds (Hang On to Me Tonight). Most surprising of all, Wandering Spirit closes with an unexpected knockout combination of two low-key tunes: Angel in My Heart, which has instrumental echoes of the Stones' classic Lady Jane, and Handsome Molly, a traditional folk song that gives the record a coda that lingers like the end of a ghostly love story.

This should not suggest, however, that Jagger has taken up lyre and goose quill to compose tremulous anthems for broken hearts. Wandering Spirit cooks and boils in Jagger's chosen area of expertise: shin-splitting, butt-kicking rock 'n' roll. Out of Focus, the self-mocking Put Me in the Trash and the stops-out title cut show conclusively that old Jumping Jack Flash may be showing his age, but he's not slowed by it. Time, all of a sudden, is on his side again.