Mick Jagger
Mick Jagger
Philip Norman
A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex-appeal, and strutting talent . The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time. A musical genius with a career spanning over four decades. Mick Jagger is a testament at once to British glamour and sensual decline, the ultimate architect and demi-god of rock.Bestselling biographer Philip Norman offers an unparalleled account of the life of a living legend, Mick Jagger. From Home Counties schoolboy, to rebel without a cause to Sixties rock sensation and global idol, Norman unravels with astonishing intimacy the myth of the inimitable frontman of The Rolling Stones. MICK JAGGER charts his extraordinary journey through scandal-ridden conspiracy, infamous prison spell, hordes of female admirers and a knighthood while stripping away the colossal fame, wealth and idolatry to reveal a story of talent and promise unfulfilled.Understated yet ostentatious; the ultimate incarnation of modern man's favourite fantasy: 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll', yet blessed with taste and intelligence; a social chameleon who couldn't blend in if he tried; always moving with the Jagger swagger yet modest enough to be self-deprecating, Mick was a paradoxical energy that reconfigured the musical landscape.This revelatory tour de force is ample tribute to a flawed genius, a Casanova, an Antichrist and a god who, with characteristic nonchalance realised the dreams of thousands of current contenders and rocker pretenders, longevity, while coasting on a sea of fur rugs.
TO SUE, WITH LOVE
CONTENTS
Cover (#uf990933b-471c-5803-8e2d-19ba31dff337)
Title Page (#uce304b1c-2501-57e5-bde3-246e3bf91a84)
Dedication (#u1b6755a3-0b0e-5841-baf9-1649d30d2364)
Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil
PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’
ONE India-Rubber Boy
TWO The Kid in the Cardigan
THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’
FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’
FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’
SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’
SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’
EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway
NINE Elusive Butterfly
TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’
PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL
ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’
TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come
THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion
FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’
FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits
SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins
SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’
EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success
NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody
TWENTY Wandering Spirit
TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything
Postscript
Picture Section
List of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Also by Philip Norman
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
Sympathy for the Old Devil (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is not normally a controversial body, but in February 2009 it became the target of outraged tabloid headlines. To emcee its annual film awards – an event regarded as second only to Hollywood’s Oscars – BAFTA had chosen Jonathan Ross, the floppy-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show host who was currently the most notorious figure in UK broadcasting. A few weeks previously, Ross had used a peak-time BBC radio programme to leave a series of obscene messages on the answering machine of the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. As a result, he had been suspended from all his various BBC slots for three months while comedian Russell Brand, his fellow presenter and accomplice in the prank (who boasted on air about ‘shagging’ Sachs’s granddaughter) had bowed to pressure and left the corporation altogether. Since the 1990s, comedy in Britain has been known as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’; now here were two of its principal ornaments positively straining a gut to be as naughty as old-school rock stars.
On awards night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a celebrity-packed audience including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kevin Spacey and Kristin Scott-Thomas received two surprises outside the actual winners list. The first was that the bad language everyone had anticipated from Jonathan Ross came instead from Mickey Rourke on receiving the Best Actor award for The Wrestler. Tangle-haired, unshaven and barely coherent – since movie acting also lays urgent claim to being ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’ – Rourke thanked his director for this second chance ‘after fucking up my career for fifteen years’, and his publicist ‘for telling me where to go, what to do, when to do it, what to eat, how to dress, what to fuck . . .’
Having quipped that Rourke would pay the same penalty he himself had for ‘Sachsgate’ and be suspended for three months, Ross moderated his tone to one of fawning reverence. As presenter of the evening’s penultimate statuette, for Best Film, he called on ‘an actor and lead singer with one of the greatest rock bands in history’; somebody for whom this lofty red-and-gold-tiered auditorium ‘must seem like one of the smaller venues’ (and who, incidentally, could once have made the Sachsgate scandal look very small beer). Almost sacrilegiously, in this temple to pure acoustic Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, the sound system began chugging out the electric guitar intro to ‘Brown Sugar’, that 1971 rock anthem to drugs, slavery and interracial cunnilingus. Yes indeed, the award giver was Sir Mick Jagger.
Jagger’s entrance was no simple hop up to the podium but a lengthy red-carpet walk from the rear of the stage, to allow television viewers to drink in the full miracle. That still-plentiful hair, cut in youthful retro sixties mode, untainted by a single spark of grey. That understated couture suit, worn in deference to the occasion but also subtly emphasising the suppleness of the slight torso beneath and the springy, athletic step. Only the face betrayed the sixty-five-year-old, born at the height of the Second World War – the famous lips, once said to be able to ‘suck an egg out of a chicken’s arse’, now drawn in and bloodless; the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars.
The ovation that greeted him belonged less to the Royal Opera House or the British Association for Film and Television Arts than to some giant open-air space like Wembley or Dodger Stadium. Despite all the proliferating genres of ‘new’ rock ’n’ roll, everyone knows there is only one genuine kind and that Mick Jagger remains its unrivalled incarnation. He responded with his disarming smile, a raucous ‘Allaw!’ and an impromptu flash of Rolling Stone subversiveness: ‘You see? You thought Jonathan would do all the “fuck”-ing, and Mickey did it . . .’
The voice then changed, the way it always does to suit the occasion. For decades, Jagger has spoken in the faux-Cockney accent known as ‘Mockney’ or ‘Estuary English’, whose misshapen, elongated vowels and obliterated t consonants are the badge of youthful cool in modern Britain. But here, amid the cream of English elocution, his diction of every t was bell clear, every h punctiliously aspirated as he said what an honour it was to be here tonightt, then went on to reveal ‘how it all came aboutt’.
A neat little joke followed, perfectly pitched between mockery and deference. He was here, he said, under ‘the RMEP – the Rock Stars–Movie Stars Exchange Programme . . . At this moment, “Sir” Ben Kingsley [giving the title ironic emphasis even though he shared it] will be singing “Brown Sugar” at the Grammys . . . “Sir” Anthony Hopkins is in the recording studio with Amy Winehouse . . . “Dame” Judi Dench is gamely trashing hotel rooms somewhere in the US . . . and we hope that next week “Sir” Brad and the Pitt family will be performing The Sound of Music at the Brit Awards.’ (Cut to Kevin Spacey and Meryl Streep laughing ecstatically and Angelina explaining the joke to Brad.)
Opening the envelope, he announced that the Best Film award went Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – so very much what people used to consider him. But there was no doubt about the real winner. Jagger had scored his biggest hit since . . . oh . . . ‘Start Me Up’ in 1981. ‘It took a lot to out-glamour that place,’ one academician commented, ‘but he did it.’
Half a century ago, when the Rolling Stones ran neck and neck with the Beatles, one question above all used to be thrown at the young Mick Jagger in the eternal quest to get something enlightening, or even interesting, out of him: did he think he’d still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was thirty?
In those innocent early sixties, pop music belonged exclusively to the young and was thought to be totally in thrall to youth’s fickleness. Even the most successful acts – even the Beatles – expected a few months at most at the top before being elbowed aside by new favourites. Back then, no one dreamed how many of those seemingly ephemeral songs would still be being played and replayed a lifetime hence or how many of those seemingly disposable singers and bands would still be plying their trade as old-age pensioners, greeted with the same fanatical devotion for as long as they could totter back onstage.
In the longevity stakes, the Stones leave all competition far behind. The Beatles lasted barely three years as an international live attraction and only nine in total (if you discount the two they spent acrimoniously breaking up). Other bands from the sixties’ top drawer like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Who, if not fractured by alcohol or drugs, drifted apart over time, then re-formed, their terminal boredom with their old repertoire, and one another, mitigated by the huge rewards on offer. Only the Stones, once seemingly the most unstable of all, have kept rolling continuously from decade to decade, then century to century; weathering the sensational death of one member and the embittered resignations of two others (plus ongoing internal politics that would impress the Medicis); leaving behind generations of wives and lovers; outlasting two managers, nine British prime ministers and the same number of American presidents; impervious to changing musical fads, gender politics and social mores; as sexagenarians still somehow retaining the same sulphurous whiff of sin and rebellion they had in their twenties. The Beatles have eternal charm; the Stones have eternal edge.
Over the decades since their joint heyday, of course, pop music’s essentials have hardly changed. Each new generation of musicians hits on the same chords in the same order and adopts the same language of love, lust and loss; each new generation of fans seeks the same kind of male idol with the same kind of sex appeal, the same repertoire of gestures, attitudes and manifestations of cool.
The notion of a rock ‘band’ – young ensemble musicians enjoying fame, wealth and sexual opportunity undreamed of by their historic counterparts in military regiments or northern colliery towns – was well established by the time the Stones got going, and has not changed one iota since. It remains as true that, even though the pop industry mostly is about illusion, exploitation and hype, true talent will always out, and always endure. From the Stones’ great rabble-rousing hits like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’ to obscure early tracks like ‘Off the Hook’ or ‘Play with Fire’, and the R&B cover versions that came before, their music sounds as fresh as if recorded yesterday.
They remain role models for every band that makes it – the pampered boy potentates, lolling ungraciously on a couch as flashbulbs detonate, the same old questions are shouted by reporters, and the same facetious answers thrown back. The kind of tour they created in the late sixties is what everyone still wants: the private jets, the limos, the entourages, the groupies, the trashed hotel suites. All the well-documented evidence of how soul-destroyingly monotonous it soon becomes, all Christopher Guest’s brilliant send-up of a boneheaded travelling supergroup in This Is Spinal Tap, cannot destroy the mystique of ‘going on the road’, the eternal allure of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’. Yet try as these youthful disciples may, they could never reproduce the swath which the on-road Stones cut through the more innocent world of forty-odd years ago, or touch remotely comparable levels of arrogance, self-indulgence, hysteria, paranoia, violence, vandalism and wicked joy.
Above all Mick Jagger, at any age, is inimitable. Jagger it was who, more than anyone, invented the concept of the ‘rock star’ as opposed to mere singer within a band – the figure set apart from his fellow musicians (a major innovation in those days of unified Beatles, Hollies, Searchers et al.) who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds. Keith Richards, Jagger’s co-figurehead in the Stones, is a uniquely talented guitarist, as well as the rock world’s most unlikely survivor, but Keith belongs in a troubadour tradition stretching back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Django Reinhardt, continuing on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Noel Gallagher and Pete Doherty. Jagger, on the other hand, founded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on. Among his rivals in rock showmanship, only Jim Morrison of the Doors found a different way to sing into a microphone, cradling it tenderly in both hands like a frightened baby bird rather than flourishing it, Jagger-style, like a phallus. Since the 1970s, many other gifted bands have emerged with vast international followings and indubitably charismatic front men – Freddie Mercury of Queen, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bono of U2, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Distinctive on record they might be, but when they took the stage they had no choice but to follow in Jagger’s strutting footsteps.
His status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph ‘the Sheik’ Valentino, the silent cinema star who aroused 1920s women to palpitant dreams of being thrown across the saddle of a horse and carried off to a Bedouin tent in the desert. With Jagger, the aura was closer to great ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces. The Stones were one of the first rock bands to have a logo and, even for the louche early seventies, it was daringly explicit – a livid-red cartoon of Jagger’s own mouth, the cushiony lips sagging open with familiar gracelessness, the tongue slavering out to slurp an invisible something which, very clearly, was not ice cream. This ‘lapping tongue’ still adorns all the Stones’ literature and merchandise, symbolic of who controls every department. To modern eyes, there could hardly be a cruder monument to old-fashioned male chauvinism – yet it finds its mark as surely as ever. The most liberated twenty-first-century females perk up at the sound of Jagger’s name while those he captivated in the twentieth still belong to him in every fibre. As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbour at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan simulates orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant. ‘Mick Jagger? Oh . . . yes! Yes, YES, YES!’
Sexual icons are notoriously prone to fall short of their public image in private; look at Mae West, Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. But in the oversexed world of rock, in the whole annals of show business, Jagger’s reputation as a modern Casanova is unequalled. It’s questionable whether even the greatest lotharios of centuries past found sexual partners in such prodigious number, or were so often saved the tiresome preliminaries of seduction. Certainly, none maintained his prowess, as Jagger has, through middle and then old age (Casanova was knackered by his mid-thirties). What Swift called ‘the rage of the groin’ is now known as sex addiction and can be cured by therapy, but Jagger has never shown any sign of considering it a problem.
Looking at that craggy countenance, one tries but fails to imagine the vast carnal banquet on which he has gorged, yet still not sated himself . . . the unending gallery of beautiful faces and bright, willing eyes . . . the innumerable chat-up lines, delivered and received . . . the countless brusque adjournments to beds, couches, heaped-up cushions, dressing room floors, shower stalls or limo back seats . . . the ever-changing voices, scents, skin tones and hair colour . . . the names instantly forgotten, if ever known in the first place . . . Old men are often revisited in dreams, or daydreams, by the women they have lusted after. For him, it would be like one of those old-style reviews of the Soviet army in Red Square. And at least one of the gorgeous foot soldiers is among his BAFTA audience tonight, seated not a million miles from Brad Pitt.
By rights, the scandals in which he starred during the 1960s should have been forgotten decades ago, cancelled out by the teeming peccadilloes of today’s pop stars, soccer players, supermodels and reality-TV stars. But the sixties have an indestructible fascination, most of all among those too young to remember them – the condition known to psychologists as ‘nostalgia without memory’. Jagger personifies that ‘swinging’ era for Britain’s youth, both its freedom and hedonism and the backlash it finally provoked. Even quite young people today have heard of his 1967 drug bust, or at least of the Mars bar which figured so lewdly in it. Few realise the extent of the British establishment’s vindictiveness during that so-called Summer of Love; how tonight’s witty, well-spoken knight of the realm was reviled like a long-haired Antichrist, led to court in handcuffs, subjected to a show trial of almost medieval grotesquerie, then thrown into prison.
He is perhaps the ultimate example of that well-loved show-business stereotype, the ‘survivor’. But while most rock ’n’ roll survivors end up as bulgy old farts in grey ponytails, he is unchanged – other than facially – from the day he first took the stage. While most others have long since addled their wits with drugs or alcohol, his faculties are all intact, not least his celebrated instinct for what is fashionable, cool and posh. While others whinge about the money they lost or were cheated out of, he leads the biggest-earning band in history, its own survival achieved solely by his determination and astuteness. Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968; from a gang of scruffball outsiders, he turned them into a British national treasure as legitimate as Shakespeare or the White Cliffs of Dover.
Yet behind all the idolatry, wealth and superabundant satisfaction is a story of talent and promise consistently, almost stubbornly, unfulfilled. Among all his contemporaries endowed with half a brain, only John Lennon had as many opportunities to move beyond the confines of pop. Though undeniably an actor, as Jonathan Ross introduced him to BAFTA, with both film and TV roles to his credit, Jagger could have developed a parallel screen career as successful as Presley’s or Sinatra’s, perhaps even more so. He could have used his sway over audiences to become a politician, perhaps a leader, such as the world had never seen – and still has not. He could have extended the (often overlooked) brilliance of his best song lyrics into poetry or prose, as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have done. At the very least, he could have become a first-echelon performer in his own right instead of merely fronting a band. But, somehow or other, none of it came to pass. His film-acting career stalled in 1970 and never restarted in any significant way, despite the literally dozens of juicy screen roles he was offered. He did no more than toy with the idea of politics and has never shown any signs of wanting to be a serious writer. As for going solo, he waited until the mid-eighties to make his move, creating such ill-feeling among the other Stones, especially Keith, that he had to choose between continuing or seeing the band implode. As a consequence, he is still only their front man, doing the same job he was at eighteen.
There is also the puzzle of how someone who fascinates so many millions, and is so clearly super-intelligent and perceptive, manages to make himself so very unfascinating when he opens those celebrated lips to speak. Even since the media first began pursuing Jagger, his on-the-record utterances have had the kind of non-committal blandness associated with British royalty. Look into any of the numerous ‘Rolling Stones in their own words’ compilations published in the past four decades and you’ll find Mick’s always the fewest and most anodyne. In 1983, he signed a contract with the British publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write his autobiography for the then astounding sum £1 million. It should have been the show-business memoir of the century; instead, the ghostwritten manuscript was pronounced irremediably dull by the publishers and the entire advance had to be returned.
His explanation was that he ‘couldn’t remember anything’, by which of course he didn’t mean his birthplace or his mother’s name but the later personal stuff for which Weidenfeld had stumped up £1 million and any publisher today would happily pay five times as much. That has been his position ever since, when approached to do another book or pressed by interviewers for chapter and verse. Sorry, his phenomenal past is all just ‘a blur’.
This image of a man whose recall disappeared thirty years ago like some early-onset Alzheimer’s victim’s is pure nonsense, as anyone who knows him can attest. It’s a handy way of getting out of things – something he has always had down to a fine art. It gets him out of months boringly closeted with a ghostwriter, or answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to ‘forget’, say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London Times editorial or ditching Allen Klein or standing up to homicidal Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival or getting married in front of the world’s massed media in Saint-Tropez or being fingerprinted in Rhode Island or making Steven Spielberg fall on his knees in adulation or having Andy Warhol as a child-minder or being stalked by naked women with green pubic hair in Montauk or persuading a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to shut up and listen to a poem by Shelley?
Such is the enduring paradox of Mick: a supreme achiever to whom his own colossal achievements seem to mean nothing, a supreme extrovert who prefers discretion, a supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself. Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, and the one least affected by all the madness, put it best: ‘Mick doesn’t care what happened yesterday. All he ever cares about is tomorrow.’
So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.
PART I (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
CHAPTER ONE (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
India-Rubber Boy (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
To become what we call ‘a star’, it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.
Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars, from Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf to Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, have fulfilled some if not all of these criteria. How, then, to account for Mick Jagger, who fulfils none of them?
Jagger bucked the trend with his very first breath. We expect stars to be born in unpromising locales that make their later rise seem all the more spectacular . . . a dirt-poor cabin in Mississippi . . . a raffish seaport . . . the dressing room of a seedy vaudeville theatre . . . a Parisian slum. We do not expect them to be born in thoroughly comfortable but unstimulating circumstances in the English county of Kent.
Southern England has always been the wealthiest, most privileged part of the country, but clustered around London is a special little clique of shires known rather snootily as ‘the Home Counties’. Kent is the most easterly of these, bounded in the north by the Thames Estuary, in the south by Dover’s sacred white cliffs and the English Channel. And, rather like its most famous twentieth-century son, it has multiple personalities. For some, this is ‘the Garden of England’ with its rolling green heart known as the Weald, its apple and cherry orchards and hop fields, and its conical redbrick hop-drying kilns or oast houses. For others, it conjures up the glory of Canterbury Cathedral, where ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas à Becket met his end, or stately homes like Knole and Sissinghurst, or faded Victorian seaside resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. For others, it suggests county cricket, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, or ultra-respectable Royal Tunbridge Wells, whose residents are so famously addicted to writing to newspapers that the nom de plume ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ has become shorthand for any choleric elderly Briton fulminating against modern morals or manners. (‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ will play no small part in the story that follows.)
In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar’s Roman legions waded ashore on Walmer Beach, Kent has mainly been a place that people pass through – Chaucer’s pilgrims ‘from every shire’s ende’ trudging towards Canterbury, armies bound for European wars, present-day traffic to and from the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone and the Chunnel. As a result, the true heart of the county is difficult to place. There certainly is a distinctive Kentish burr, subtly different from that of neighbouring Sussex, varying from town to town, even village to village, but the predominant accent is dictated by the metropolis that blends seamlessly into its northern margins. The earliest linguistic colonisers were the trainloads of East End Cockneys who arrived each summer to help bring in the hop harvest; since then, proliferating ‘dormitory towns’ for city office workers have made London-speak ubiquitous.
Jagger is neither a Kentish name nor a London one – despite the City lawyer named Jaggers in Dickens’s Great Expectations – but originated some two hundred miles to the north, around Halifax in Yorkshire. Although its most famous bearer (in his ‘Street Fighting Man’ period) would relish the similarity to jagged, claiming that it once meant ‘knifer’ or ‘footpad’, it actually derives from the Old English jag for a ‘pack’ or ‘load’, and denotes a carter, peddler or hawker. Pre-Mick, it adorned only one minor celebrity, the Victorian engineer Joseph Hobson Jagger, who devised a successful system for winning at roulette and may partly have inspired a famous music-hall song, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. The family could thus claim a precedent for hitting the jackpot.
No such mercenary aims possessed Mick’s father, Basil Fanshawe Jagger – always known as Joe – who was born in 1913 and raised in an atmosphere of clean-living altruism. Joe’s Yorkshireman father, David, was a village school headmaster in days when all the pupils would share a single room, sitting on long wooden forms and writing on slates with chalk. Despite a small, slender build, Joe proved a natural athlete, equally good at all track-and-field sports, with a special flair for gymnastics. Given his background and idealistic, unselfish temperament, it was natural he should choose a career in what was then known as PT – physical training. He studied at Manchester and London universities and, in 1938, was appointed PT instructor at the state-run East Central School in Dartford, Kent.
Situated in the far north-west of the county, Dartford is practically an east London suburb, barely thirty minutes by train from the great metropolitan termini of Victoria and Charing Cross. It lies in the valley of the River Darent, on the old pilgrims’ way to Canterbury, and is known to history as the place where Wat Tyler started the Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II’s poll tax in 1381 (so rabble-rousers in the blood, then). In modern times, almost its only invocation – albeit hundreds of times each day – is in radio traffic reports for the Dartford Tunnel, under the Thames, and adjacent Dartford–Thurrock Crossing, the main escape route from London for south-coast-bound traffic. Otherwise it is just a name on a road sign or station platform, its centuries as a market and brewing town all but obliterated by office blocks, multiple stores and even more multiple commuter homes. From the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, traffic funnelled to Dartford was not only vehicular; an outlying village with the serendipitous name of Stone contained a forbidding pile known as the East London Lunatic Asylum until a more tactful era renamed it ‘Stone House’.
Early in 1940, Joe Jagger met Eva Ensley Scutts, a twenty-seven-year-old as vivacious and demonstrative as he was understated and quiet. Eva’s family originally came from Greenhithe, Kent, but had emigrated to New South Wales, Australia, where she was born in the same year as Joe, 1913. Towards the end of the Great War, her mother left her father and brought her and four siblings home to settle in Dartford. Eva was always said to be a little ashamed of her birth ‘Down Under’ and to have assumed an exaggeratedly upper-class accent to hide any lingering Aussie twang. The truth was that in those days all respectable young girls tried to talk like London débutantes and the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Eva’s work as an office secretary, and later a beautician, made it a professional necessity.
Joe’s courtship of Eva took place during the Second World War’s grim first act, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s all-conquering armies in France and the Führer could be seen gazing across the Channel towards the White Cliffs of Dover as smugly as if he owned them already. With summer came the Battle of Britain, scrawling the sunny Kentish skies with white vapour-trail graffiti as British and German fighters duelled above the cornfields and oast houses and gentle green Weald. Though Dartford possessed no vital military installations, it received a constant overspill from Luftwaffe raids on factories and docks in nearby Chatham and Rochester and on London’s East End. The fact that many falling bombs were not aimed at Dartford, but jettisoned by German planes heading home, made the toll no less horrendous. One killed thirteen people in the town’s Kent Road; another hit the county hospital, wiping out two crowded women’s wards.
Joe and Eva were married on 7 December 1940 at Holy Trinity Church, Dartford, where Eva had sung in the choir. She wore a dress of lavender silk rather than traditional bridal white, and Joe’s brother, Albert, acted as best man. Afterwards there was a reception at the nearby Coneybeare Hall. This being wartime – and Joe wholeheartedly committed to the prevailing ethos of frugality and self-sacrifice – only fifty guests attended, drinking to the newlyweds’ health in brown sherry and munching dainty sandwiches of Spam or powdered egg.
Joe’s teaching job and work in resettling London evacuee children exempted him from military call-up, so at least there was no traumatic parting as he was sent overseas or to the opposite end of the country. Nor, conversely, was there the urgency to start a family felt by many service people briefly home on leave. Joe and Eva’s first child did not arrive until 1943, when they were both aged thirty. The delivery took place at Dartford’s Livingstone Hospital on 26 July, the birthday of George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, and the baby boy was christened Michael Philip. As a possibly more significant omen, the town’s State Cinema that week was showing an Abbott and Costello film entitled Money for Jam.
His babyhood saw the war gradually turn in the Allies’ favour and Britain fill with American soldiers – a glamorous breed, provided with luxuries the British had almost forgotten, and playing their own infectious dance music – preparatory to the reconquest of Fortress Europe. Defeated though Nazism was, it possessed one last ‘vengeance weapon’ in the pilotless V-1 flying bombs or doodlebugs, launched from France, that inflicted heavy damage and loss of life on London and its environs during the war’s final months. Like everyone in the Dartford area, Joe and Eva spent many tense nights listening for the whine of the V-1’s motor that cut out just before it struck its target. Later, and even more terrifyingly, came the V-2, a jet-propelled bomb that travelled faster than the speed of sound and so gave no warning of its approach.
Michael Philip, of course, remained blissfully unaware as a bombed, battered and stringently rationed nation realised with astonishment that it had not only survived but prevailed. One of his earliest memories is watching his mother remove the heavy blackout curtains from the windows in 1945, signifying no more nighttime fear of air raids.
By the time his younger brother, Christopher, arrived in 1947, the family was living at number 39 Denver Road, a crescent of white pebble-dashed houses in Dartford’s genteel western quarter. Joe had exchanged day-to-day PT teaching for an administrative job with the Central Council of Physical Recreation, the body overseeing all amateur sports associations throughout Britain. Accomplished track-and-field all-rounder though he still was, his special passion was basketball, a seemingly quintessential American sport that nonetheless had been played in the UK since the 1890s. To Joe, no game was better at fostering the sportsmanship and team spirit to which he was dedicated. He devoted many unpaid hours to encouraging and coaching would-be local teams, and in 1948 launched the first Kent County Basketball League.
Tolstoy observes at the beginning of Anna Karenina that, whereas unhappy families are miserable in highly original and varied ways, happy families tend to be almost boringly alike. Our star, the future symbol of rebellion and iconoclasm, grew up in just such fortunate conformity. His quiet, physically dynamic father and ebullient, socially aspirational mother were a thoroughly compatible couple, devoted to each other and their children. In contrast with many postwar homes, the atmosphere at 39 Denver Road was one of complete security, with meals, bath- and bedtimes at prescribed hours, and values in their correct order. Joe’s modest stipend and personal abstinence – he neither drank nor smoked – were enough to keep a wife and two boys in relative affluence as wartime rationing gradually disappeared and meat, butter, sugar and fresh fruit became plentiful once more.
There is an idealised image of a little British boy in the early 1950s, before television, computer games and too-early sexualisation did away with childhood innocence. He is dressed, not like a miniature New York street-gangster or jungle guerrilla but unequivocally as a boy – porous white Aertex short-sleeved shirt, baggy khaki shorts, an elasticised belt fastening with an S-shaped metal clasp. He has tousled hair, a broad, breezy smile and eyes unclouded by fear or premature sexuality, squinted against the sun. He is Mike Jagger, as the world then knew him, aged about seven, photographed with a group of classmates at his first school, Maypole Infants. The name could not be more atmospheric in its suggestion of springtime and kindly fun, of pure-hearted lads and lasses dancing round a beribboned pole to welcome the darling buds.
At Maypole he was a star pupil, top of the class or near it in every subject. As was soon evident, he possessed his father’s all-round aptitude for sports, dominating the school’s miniature games of soccer and cricket and its egg-and-spoon or sack-racing athletics. One of his teachers, Ken Llewellyn, would remember him as the most engaging as well as brightest boy in his year, ‘an irrepressible bundle of energy’ whom it was ‘a pleasure to teach’. In this seven-year-old paragon, however, there was already a touch of the subversive. He had a sharp ear for the way that grown-ups talked, and could mould his voice into an impressive range of accents. His imitations of teachers like the Welsh Mr Llewellyn went down even better with classmates than his triumphs on the games field.
At the age of eight he moved on to Wentworth County Primary, a more serious place, not so much about maypole dancing as surviving in the playground. Here he met a boy born at Livingstone Hospital like himself but five months later; an ill-favoured little fellow with the protruding ears and hollow cheeks of some Dickensian workhouse waif, though he came from a good enough home. His name was Keith Richards.
For British eight-year-olds in this era, the chief fantasy figures were American cowboy movie heroes like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, whose Western raiment was flashingly gorgeous, and who would periodically sheathe their pearl-handled six-shooters and warble ballads to their own guitar accompaniment. In the Wentworth playground one day, Keith confided to Mike Jagger that when he grew up he wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the self-styled ‘King of the Cowboys’, and play a guitar.
Mike was indifferent to the King of the Cowboys – he was already good at being indifferent – but the idea of the guitar, and of this little imp with sticky-out ears strumming one, did pique his interest. However, their acquaintanceship did not ripen: it would be more than a decade before they explored the subject further.
At the Jaggers’, like every other British household, music was constantly in the air, pumped out of bulky valve-operated radio sets by the BBC’s Light Programme in every form from dance bands to operetta. Mike enjoyed mimicking American crooners he heard – like Johnnie Ray blubbing through ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’ and ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’ – but did not attract any special notice in school singing lessons or in the church choir to which he and his brother Chris both belonged. Chris, at that stage, seemed more of a natural performer, having won a prize at Maypole Infants School for singing ‘The Deadwood Stage’ from the film Calamity Jane. The musical entertainments that appealed most to Mike were the professional Christmas pantomimes staged at larger theatres in the area – corny shows based on fairy tales like Mother Goose or ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, but with an intriguing whiff of sex and gender blurring, the rouged and wisecracking ‘dame’ traditionally played by a man, the ‘principal boy’ by a leggy young woman.
In 1954, the family moved from 39 Denver Road and out of Dartford entirely, to the nearby village of Wilmington. Their house now had a name, ‘Newlands’, and stood in a secluded thoroughfare called The Close, a term usually applied to cathedral precincts. There was a spacious garden where Joe could give his two sons regular PT sessions and practise the diverse sports in which he was coaching them. The neighbours grew accustomed to seeing the grass littered with balls, cricket stumps, and lifting weights, and Mike and Chris swinging like titchy Tarzans from ropes their father had tied to the trees.
For the Jaggers, as for most British families, it was a decade of steadily increasing prosperity, when luxuries barely imaginable before the war became commonplace in almost every home. They acquired a television set, whose minuscule screen showed a bluish rather than black-and-white picture, allowing Mike and Chris to watch Children’s Hour puppets like Muffin the Mule, Mr Turnip and Sooty, and serials like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. They took summer holidays in sunny Spain and the South of France rather than Kent’s own numerous, cold-comfort resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. But the boys were never spoiled. Joe in his quiet way was a strict disciplinarian and Eva was equally forceful, particularly over cleanliness and tidiness. From their youngest years, Mike and Chris were expected to do their share of household chores, set out in a school-like timetable.
Mike pulled his weight without complaint. ‘[He] wasn’t a rebellious child at all,’ Joe would later remember. ‘He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother.’ Indeed, the only shadow on his horizon was that Chris seemed to be his mother’s favourite and he himself never received quite the same level of affection and attention from her. It made him slow to give affection in his turn – a lifelong trait – and also self-conscious and shy in front of strangers, and mortified with embarrassment when Eva pushed him forward to say ‘hello’ or shake hands.
The year of the family’s move to Wilmington, he sat the Eleven Plus, the exam with which British state education pre-emptively sorted its eleven-year-olds into successes and failures. The bright ones went on to grammar schools, often the equal of any exclusive, fee-paying institutions, while the less bright went to secondary-moderns and the dullards to ‘technical schools’ in hope of at least acquiring some useful manual trade. For Mike Jagger, there was no risk of either of these latter options. He passed the exam easily and in September 1954 started at Dartford Grammar School on the town’s West Hill.
His father could not have been better pleased. Founded in the eighteenth century, Dartford Grammar was the best school of its kind in the district, aspiring to the same standards and observing the same traditions that cost other parents dear at establishments like Eton and Harrow. It had a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Ora et Labora (Pray and Work); it had ‘masters’ rather than mere teachers, clad in scholastic black gowns; most important for Joe, it placed as much emphasis on sports and physical development as on academic achievement. Its alumni included the Indian Mutiny hero Sir Henry Havelock, and the great novelist Thomas Hardy, originally an architect, had worked on one of its nineteenth-century extensions.
In these new surroundings, however, Mike did not shine nearly as brightly as before. His Eleven Plus results had put him into the ‘A’ stream of specially promising pupils, headed for good all-round results in the GCE O-level exams, followed by two years in the sixth form and probable university entrance. He was naturally good at English, had something of a passion for history (thanks to an inspirational teacher named Walter Wilkinson), and spoke French with an accent superior to most of his classmates’. But science subjects, like maths, physics and chemistry, bored him, and he made little or no effort with them. In the form order, calculated on aggregate marks, he usually figured about half way. ‘I wasn’t a swot and I wasn’t a dunce,’ he would recall of himself. ‘I was always in the middle ground.’
At sports, despite his father’s comprehensive coaching, he was equally inconsistent. Summer was no problem, as Dartford Grammar played cricket, something he loved to watch as well as play, and under Joe’s coaching he could shine in athletics, especially middle-distance running and javelin. But the school’s winter team game was upper-class rugby football rather than proletarian soccer. Fast runner and good catcher that Mike was, he easily made every school rugger side up to the First Fifteen. But he hated being tackled – which often meant crashing onto his face in squelching mud – and would do everything he could to avoid receiving a pass.
The headmaster, Ronald Loftus Hudson, sarcastically known as ‘Lofty’, was a tiny man who nonetheless could reduce the rowdiest assembly to pin-drop silence with little more than a raised eyebrow. Under his regime there were myriad petty regulations about dress and conduct, the sternest relating to the fully segregated but tantalisingly near-at-hand Dartford Grammar School for Girls. Boys were forbidden to talk to the girls, even if they happened to meet out of school hours at places like bus stops. The head also used corporal punishment, as most British educators then did, without legal restraint or fear of parental protest – between two and six strokes on the backside with a stick or gym shoe. ‘You had to wait outside [his] study until the light went on, and then you’d go in,’ the Jagger of the future would remember. ‘And everybody else used to hang about on the stairs to see how many he gave and how bad it was that morning.’
All the male teachers could administer formal beatings in front of the whole class and most, in addition, practised a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, ‘sweet, gentle Mr Brandon’) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. ‘There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,’ he would recall. ‘There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.’ So that line from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back,’ may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.
At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. ‘There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,’ Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his ‘quiet authority’, created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pick-up game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision allow them to practise a few throws.
Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and his conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master – and a celebrated local cricketer – was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favour to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.
Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to give coaching in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of ‘cool’. He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.
Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as ‘an India-rubber character’ who could ‘bend every way to stay out of trouble’.
By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair – American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British ‘officer types’ such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish colour, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretching from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and colour that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips – kept in top condition by the amount she talked – but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologise, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonisingly conscious of their clothes, grooming and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles and whispered discussions behind his back. ‘Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,’ Alan Etherington remembers. ‘A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.’
At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate – his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that – but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called colour bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilised and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar ‘the N-word’, for ‘nigger’, was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s – and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the sixties – recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary modern and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: ‘Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?’
Like Spanish influenza forty years previously, it struck in two stages, the second infinitely more virulent than the first. In 1955, a song called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets topped the sleepy British pop music charts and caused outbreaks of rioting in proletarian dance halls, but was plausibly written off by the national media as just another short-lived transatlantic novelty. A year later, Elvis Presley came along with a younger, more dangerous spin on Haley’s simple exuberance and the added ingredient of raw sex.
As a middle-class grammar school boy, Mike was just an onlooker in the media furore over Presley – the ‘suggestiveness’ of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smoulder of his features, the (literally) incontinent hysteria to which he aroused his young female audiences. While adult America’s fear and loathing were almost on a par with the national Communist phobia, adult Britain reacted more with amusement and a dash of complacency. A figure like Presley, it was felt, could only emerge from the flashy, hyperactive land of Hollywood movies, Chicago gangsters and ballyhooing political conventions. Here in the immemorial home of understatement, irony and the stiff upper lip, a performer in any remotely similar mode was inconceivable.
The charge of blatant sexuality levelled against all rock ’n’ roll, not merely Presley, was manifestly absurd. Its direct ancestor was the blues – black America’s original pairing of voice with guitar – and the modern, electrified, up-tempo variant called rhythm and blues or R&B. The blues had never been inhibited about sex; rock and roll were separate synonyms for making love, employed in song lyrics and titles (‘Rock Me, Baby’, ‘Roll with Me, Henry’, etc.) for decades past, but heard only on segregated record labels and radio stations. Presley’s singing style and incendiary body movements were simply what he had observed on the stages and dance floors of black clubs in his native Memphis, Tennessee. Most rock ’n’ roll hits were cover versions of R&B standards by white vocalists, purged of their earthier sentiments or couched in slang so obscure (‘I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store’) that no one realised. Even this sanitised product took the smallest step out of line at its peril. When the white, God-fearing Pat Boone covered Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’, he was criticised for disseminating what was seen as a contagiously vulgar ‘black’ speech idiom.
As a Dartford Grammar pupil, the appropriate music for Mike Jagger was jazz, in particular the modern kind with its melodic complexities, subdued volume and air of intellectualism. Even that played little part in daily school life, where the musical diet was limited to hymns at morning assembly and traditional airs like ‘Early One Morning’ or ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ (the latter another pointer to Mike’s remarkable future). ‘There was a general feeling that music wasn’t important,’ he would recall. ‘Some of the masters rather begrudgingly enjoyed jazz, but they couldn’t own up to it . . . Jazz was intelligent and people who wore glasses played it, so we all had to make out that we dug Dave Brubeck. It was cool to like that, and it wasn’t cool to like rock ’n’ roll.’
This social barrier was breached by skiffle, a short-lived craze peculiar to Britain which nonetheless rivalled, even threatened to eclipse, rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle had originally been American folk (i.e., white) music, evolved in the Depression years of the 1930s; in this new form, however, it drew equally on blues giants of the same era, notably Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. Leadbelly songs like ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie’, set mostly around cotton fields and railroads, had rock ’n’ roll’s driving beat and hormone-jangling chord patterns, but not its sexual taint or its power to cause disturbances among the proles. Most crucially, skiffle was an offshoot of jazz, having been revived as an intermission novelty by historically minded bandleaders like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Its biggest star, Tony Donegan, formerly Barber’s banjo player, had changed his first name to Lonnie in honour of bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
British-made skiffle was to have an influence far beyond its barely two-year commercial life span. In its original American form, its poor white performers often could not afford conventional instruments, so would use kitchen utensils like washboards, spoons and dustbin lids, augmented by kazoos, combs-and-paper and the occasional guitar. The success of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘skiffle group’ inspired youthful facsimiles to spring up throughout the UK, rattling and plunking on homespun instruments (which actually never featured in Donegan’s line-up). The amateur music-making tradition, in long decline since its Victorian heyday, was superabundantly reborn. Buttoned-up British boys, never previously considered in the least musical, now boldly faced audiences of their families and friends to sing and play with abandon. Overnight, the guitar changed from obscure back-row rhythm instrument into an object of young-manly worship and desire surpassing even the soccer ball. Such were the queues outside musical-instrument shops that, evoking not-so-distant wartime austerities, the Daily Mirror reported a national guitar shortage.
Here Mike Jagger was ahead of the game. He already owned a guitar, a round-hole acoustic model bought for him by his parents on a family trip to Spain. The holiday snaps included one of him in a floppy straw hat, holding up the guitar neck flamenco-style and miming cod-Spanish words. It would have been his passport into any of the skiffle groups then germinating at Dartford Grammar and in the Wilmington neighbourhood. But mastering even the few simple chord shapes that covered most skiffle numbers was too much like hard work, nor could he be so uncool as to thump a single-string tea-chest ‘bass’ or scrabble at a washboard. Instead, with the organisational flair already given to programming basketball fixtures, he started a school record club. The meetings took place in a classroom during lunch hour and, he later recalled, had the atmosphere of an extra lesson. ‘We’d sit there . . . with a master behind the desk, frowning while we played Lonnie Donegan.’
As bland white vocalists grew famous with cleaned-up R&B songs, the original black performers mostly stayed in the obscurity to which they were long accustomed. One notable exception was Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a former dishwasher from Macon, Georgia, whose repertoire of window-shattering screams, whoops and falsetto trills affronted grown-up ears worse than a dozen Presleys. While obediently parroting rock ’n’ roll’s teenage gaucheries, Richard projected what none had yet learned to call high camp with his gold suits, flashy jewellery and exploding liquorice-whip hair. Indeed, his emblematic song, ‘Tutti Frutti’, ostensibly an anthem to ice cream, had started out as a graphic commentary on gay sex (its cry of ‘Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!’ representing long-delayed ejaculation). He was the first rock ’n’ roller who made Mike Jagger forget all middle-class, grammar school sophistication and detachment, and surrender to the sheer mindless joy of the music.
The numerous media Cassandras who predicted rock ’n’ roll would be over in weeks rather than months found speedy corroboration in Little Richard. Touring Australia in 1958, he saw Russia’s Sputnik space satellite hurtle through the sky, interpreted it as a summons from the Almighty, threw a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour and announced he was giving up music to enter the ministry. When the story reached the British press, Mike asked his father for six shillings and eight pence (about thirty-eight pence) to buy ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ because Richard was ‘retiring’ and this must be his farewell single. But Joe refused to stump up, adding, ‘I’m glad he’s retiring,’ as if it would be a formal ceremony complete with long-service gold watch.
In America, a coast-to-coast network of commercial radio stations, motivated solely by what their listeners demanded, had made rock ’n’ roll ubiquitous within a few months. But for its British constituency, to begin with, the problem was finding it. The BBC, which held a monopoly on domestic radio broadcasting, played few records of any kind, let alone this unsavoury one, in its huge daily output of live orchestral and dance-band music. To catch the hits now pouring across the Atlantic, Mike and his friends had to tune their families’ old-fashioned valve wireless sets to Radio Luxembourg, a tiny oasis of teen tolerance deep in continental Europe whose nighttime English language service consisted mainly of pop record shows. Serving the occupying forces braced for nuclear attack by Communist Russia, there were also AFN, the American Forces Network, and the US government’s ‘Voice of America’, both of which sweetened their propaganda output with generous dollops of rock and jazz.
Seeing American rock ’n’ rollers perform in person was even more problematic. Bill Haley visited Britain only once (by ocean liner) and was greeted by cheering multitudes not seen since the coronation three years earlier. Elvis Presley was expected to follow hard on his heels but, inexplicably, failed to do so. For the overwhelming majority of UK rock ’n’ roll fans, the only way to experience it was on the cinema screen. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had originally been a soundtrack (to a film about juvenile delinquency, naturally). No sooner was Presley launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such ‘exploitation’ flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole, and The Girl Can’t Help It, featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: ‘I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, “Well, I can do this.”’
Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theatres and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose ‘That’ll Be the Day’ topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.
His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of 14 March. Mike Jagger – already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect – was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favourite number was the B-side of ‘Oh Boy!’, Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called ‘Not Fade Away’, whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humour previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (‘My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back . . .’). This, Mike realised, was not just someone to copy, but to be.
Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran or Britain’s first home-grown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries, and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.
The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. ‘I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our school mates,’ Dow recalls. ‘I said I’d rather he didn’t.’
He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right – and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.
His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programmes to encourage sports among children and teenagers – implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport. Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the programme with his brother Chris and other hand-picked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.
A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquises droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends ‘ordinary gym shoes . . . like the kind Mike is wearing’. Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare – and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips – say it all.
At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts were somewhere infinitely more glamorous and amusing. ‘Too easily distracted’, ‘attitude rather unsatisfactory’ and other such faint damnations recurred through his end-of-term reports. In the summer of 1959 he took his GCE O-level exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of 100 rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49) and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take A-level English, history and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was ‘unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them’.
He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright posture to a rebellious slouch and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, ‘ducks’ arses’ and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle- and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button ‘drape’ jackets and Slim Jim ties.
Mike was not one to go too far – his mother would never have allowed it – but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale ‘shorty’ raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr Bennett afterwards, which ended with the teacher lashing out – as teachers then could with impunity – and Mike sprawled out on the ground.
Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their own, only to have it derided by adult society in general. A few months from now, this feeling of persecuted brotherhood would initiate, or rather revive, the most important relationship of Mike’s life. The prologue, as it were, took place in his last two years at school when, somewhat surprisingly, the genteel kid from Wilmington chummed up with a plumber’s son from Bexleyheath named Dick Taylor.
Dick’s consuming passion was not rock ’n’ roll but blues, the black music that had preceded it by something like half a century and provided its structure, its chords and its rebellious soul. For this esoteric taste he had to thank his older sister Robin, a hard-core blues fan while her friends swooned over white crooners like Frankie Vaughan and Russ Hamilton. Robin knew all its greatest exponents and, more important, knew where to find it on AFN or Voice of America, where the occasional blues record was played for the benefit of black GIs helping to defend Europe from communism. Dick, in turn, passed on the revelation to a small coterie at Dartford Grammar that included Mike Jagger.
This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing – but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of ‘nigger brown’ shoe polish and dogs routinely named ‘Blackie’, ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nigger’. Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronising awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to first-class cricket matches.
There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shanty towns and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different – standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicised contempt for the cosiness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that ‘there are no good, brave causes left’. To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in pre-war rural America was more than cause enough.
But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement – an empathy – he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humour and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furore over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘All Shook Up’ with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed ‘Careless Love’ or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priapic ‘Black Snake Moan’. And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?
Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following – mostly ‘intellectual’ types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship – charity, some might say – of traditional jazz bandleaders like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. ‘Humph’ had been bringing Big Bill Broonzy over as a support attraction since 1950, while every year or so the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee attracted small but ardent crowds to Colyer’s Soho club, Studio 51. After helping give birth to skiffle, Barber had become a stalwart of the National Jazz League, which strove to put this most lackadaisical of the arts on an organised footing and had its own club, the Marquee in Oxford Street. Here, too, from time to time, some famous old blues survivor would appear onstage, still bewildered by his sudden transition from Chicago or Memphis.
Finding the blues on record was almost as difficult. It was not available on six-shilling and fourpenny singles, like rock and pop, but only on what were still known as ‘LPs’ (long-players) rather than albums, priced at a daunting thirty shillings (£1.50) and up. To add to the expense, these were usually not released on British record labels but imported from America in their original packaging with the price in dollars and cents crossed out and a new one in pounds, shillings and pence substituted. Such exotica was, of course, not stocked by record shops in Dartford or even in large neighbouring towns such as Chatham or Rochester. To find it, Mike and Dick had to go to up to London and trawl through the racks at specialist dealers like Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road.
Their circle at Dartford Grammar School included two other boys with the same recondite passion. One was a rather quiet, bookish type from the arts stream named Bob Beckwith; the other was Mike’s Wilmington neighbour, the science student Alan Etherington. In late 1959, during Mike’s first term in the sixth form, the four decided to form a blues band. Bob and Dick played guitar, Alan (a drummer and bugler in the school cadet force) played percussion on a drum kit donated by Dick’s grandfather, and Mike was the vocalist.
Their aim was not to earn money or win local fame, like Danny Rogers and the Realms, nor even to pull girls. Mike in particular – as Alan Etherington recalls – already had all the ardent female followers he could wish for. The idea was simply to celebrate the blues and keep it alive amid the suffocating tides of commercial rock and pop. From first to last, they never had a single paid gig or performed to any audience larger than about half a dozen. Dartford Grammar gave them no opportunities to play or encouragement of any kind, even though they were effectively studying a byway of modern American history; Alan Etherington recalls ‘a stand-up row’ with the school librarian after requesting a book by blues chronicler Paul Oliver as background reading for the quartet. They existed in a self-created vacuum, making no effort to contact kindred spirits in Kent or the wider world – hardly even aware that there were any. In Dick Taylor’s words, ‘We thought we were the only people in Britain who’d ever heard of the blues.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
The Kid in the Cardigan (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
Mike Jagger seemed living proof of the unnamed band’s determination to go nowhere. He remained firm in his refusal to play a guitar, instead just standing there in front of the other three, as incomplete and exposed without that instantly glamorising, dignifying prop as if he’d forgotten to put on his trousers. The singing voice unveiled by his prodigious lips and flicking tongue was likewise an almost perverse departure from the norm. White British vocalists usually sang jazz or blues in a gravelly, cigarette-smoky style modelled – vainly – on Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. Mike’s voice, higher and lighter in tone, borrowed from a larger, more eclectic cast; it was a distillation of every Deep Southern accent he’d ever heard, white as much as black, feminine as much as masculine; Scarlett O’Hara, plus a touch of Mammy from Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire as much as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Boy Williamson.
Unencumbered by a guitar – mostly even by a microphone – he had to do something while he sang. But the three friends, accustomed to his cool, non-committal school persona, were amazed by what he did do. Blues vocalists traditionally stood or, more often, sat in an anguished trance, cupping one ear with a hand to amplify the sonic self-flagellation. When Mike sang the blues, however, his loose-limbed, athletic body rebutted the music’s melancholic inertia word by word: he shuffled to and fro on his moccasins, ground his hips, rippled his arms and euphorically shook his shaggy head. Like his singing, it had an element of parody and self-parody, but an underlying total conviction. A song from his early repertoire, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, summed up this metamorphosis: ‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out . . .’
Practice sessions for the non-existent gigs were mostly held at Dick Taylor’s house in Bexleyheath or at Alan Etherington’s, a few doors along from the Jaggers. Alan owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Philips ‘Joystick’ (so named for its aeronautical-looking volume control) on which the four could preserve and review their first efforts together. The Etherington home boasted the further luxury of a Grundig ‘radiogram’, a cabinet radio-cum-record-player with surround sound, an early form of stereo. Dick and Bob Beckwith did not have custom-built electric guitars, only acoustic ones with metal pickups screwed to the bodies. Beckwith, the more accomplished player of the two, would plug his guitar into the radiogram, increasing its volume about thirtyfold.
At Dick’s, if the weather was fine, they would rehearse in the back garden – the future lord of giant alfresco spaces and horizonless crowds surveying a narrow vista of creosoted wood fences, washing lines and potting sheds. Dick’s mum, who sometimes interrupted her housework to watch, told Mike from the start that he had ‘something special’. However small or accidental the audience, he gave them his all. ‘If I could get a show, I would do it,’ he would remember. ‘I used to do mad things . . . Get on my knees and roll on the floor . . . I didn’t have inhibitions. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.’
Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practise at ‘Newlands’, in either his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe ‘creasing up’ with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training programme. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practise session elsewhere, Joe called out, ‘Michael . . . don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? ‘We all told him it made no difference,’ Dick Taylor remembers. ‘But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.’
Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of ‘La Bamba’, whose sixteen-year-old singer–composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Latino nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.
The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called ‘race’ music – i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as ‘the father of the Chicago Blues’ for tracks like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and his theme song, ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.
In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis-born Charles Edward Anderson – aka Chuck – Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterwards Berry made an effortless crossover from ‘race’ music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.
After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered – if they ever materialised at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American stamps began arriving at ‘Newlands’. Some of the covers had been badly chewed up in transit and not all the music lived up to his expectations. But the albums in themselves were splendiferous status symbols. He took to carrying around three or four at once tucked under one arm, a fashion accessory as much as his gold-flecked jacket and moccasins. Alan Dow, who’d rejected him as a vocalist for Danny Rogers and the Realms, witnessed one such almost regal progress across the school playground.
In summer 1961, he sat his A-level exams, passing in English and history but, surprisingly, failing in French. He considered becoming a schoolteacher in his father’s – and grandfather’s – footsteps, and toyed with the idea of journalism and (unmentionably to his parents) disc-jockeying on Radio Luxembourg. Leafing through the pop music papers one week, he spotted an advertisement by a London record producer named Joe Meek, inviting would-be deejays to submit audition tapes. He clipped the ad and kept it, but – perhaps fortunately – didn’t follow it up. Meek later produced several British pop classics, all from his small north London flat, but was notorious for trying to seduce the prettier young men who crossed his path.
Instead, somewhat against expectations, Mike Jagger joined the 2 per cent of Britain’s school leavers in that era who went on to university. Despite those clashes over uniform, his headmaster, Lofty Hudson, decided he was worthy of the privilege and, in December 1960, well before he had sat his A-levels, supplied a character reference putting the best possible gloss on his academic record. ‘Jagger is a lad of good general character,’ it read in part, ‘although he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something. His interests are wide. He has been a member of several School Societies and is prominent in Games, being Secretary of our Basketball Club, a member of our First Cricket Eleven and he plays Rugby Football for his House. Out of school he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing, Music and is a member of the Local Historical Association . . . Jagger’s development now fully justifies me in recommending him for a Degree course and I hope you will be able to accept him.’
Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. ‘I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,’ he would remember. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’
At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus in Houghton Street, off Kings-way. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.
For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House – that would have been too perfect – but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed ‘the Village on the Heath’ because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.
It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.
A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.
It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicised seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. ‘That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,’ Isaacson says. ‘I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.’
Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as ‘obviously extremely bright’ and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke ‘like a nice middle-class boy . . . The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, “Jagger . . . if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!”’
Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties – though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, ‘bistros’ and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings and radically short skirts.
Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theatres like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mould-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds – including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones and Dartford’s Peter Blake – were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the US army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that ‘race’ music was dead and buried.
Such rock idols as Britain had produced – Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard – had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was ‘Trad’, a homogenised version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You, Samantha’ and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘March of the Siamese Children’. The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.
In short, the danger seemed to have passed.
BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.
The second most important partnership in rock music history might never have happened if either of them had got out of bed five minutes later, missed a bus, or lingered to buy a pack of cigarettes or a Mars bar. It took place early one weekday on the ‘up’ platform at Dartford railway station as they waited for the same train, Mike to get to Charing Cross in London and Keith to Sidcup, four stops away, where he was now at art college.
Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.
As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.
Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’
The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.
Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.
An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’
Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.
Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.
As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.
At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.
After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’
Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.
Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.
With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.
Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.
Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.
Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.
While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.
*
ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.
The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.
As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters – which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harbouring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents and recording studios – plus almost all the live venues that mattered – among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar shops and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched on the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a centre of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where ‘pure’ jazz enthusiasts gathered – nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognised as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements – the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton – Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate and almost wholly ‘white’ residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios – maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico – and for having a ‘Broadway’ rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the north west of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on 17 March. But the following Saturday the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.
First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as ‘trainspotters who needed somewhere to go . . . just a bunch of anoraks . . . and the girls were very thin on the ground’.
Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the line-up, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards), were attired conventionally in white shirts with sober ties, baggy grey flannel trousers and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’
Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson – but not this one. By the age of twenty he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them – motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake – there was Brian Jones.
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings – but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and super-socialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, ‘by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something’. Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even ‘paw’ at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivalled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway – and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs – Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly programme, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on 19 May.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but – atypically nice man that he was – hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. ‘I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,’ Bobbie Korner recalls. ‘He said, “Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.”’
Disc magazine made the announcement, a first droplet of newsprint oceans to come: ‘Nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer Mick Jagger has joined the Alexis Korner group Blues Incorporated and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates in Ealing and at their Thursday sessions at the Marquee.’
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose centre of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in Jazz News, the most serious of all London’s music trades, inviting prospective sidemen to audition in the upstairs function room of a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square. When its management caught him pilfering from the bar, he was forced to relocate to another pub, the Bricklayers Arms on Broadwick Street.
His original plan had been to poach the two most talented members of a well-regarded band called Blues by Six, lead guitarist Geoff Bradford and vocalist Brian Knight. Soon after the move to the Bricklayers Arms, however, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turned up, accompanied by the other most serious musician from the Blue Boys, Dick Taylor. There was nothing to stop Mick singing with Brian’s band as well as Blues Incorporated if he chose, but that spot already seemed to have been taken by Brian Knight. Fortunately for him, the instrumental mix as it stood simply did not work. Geoff Bradford wished only to play the authentic blues of Muddy Waters and his ilk and was offended by Keith’s Chuck Berry licks – as well as nervous of Brian’s kleptomania. After a couple of practice sessions, Bradford bowed out, loyally accompanied by his friend Knight, so leaving the way open for Mick and Keith.
The only other worthwhile recruit was a burly, pugnacious-looking youth named Ian Stewart, a shipping clerk with the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation who arrived unpromisingly wearing too-brief leather cycling shorts and munching a pork pie, but who could play stride and barrelhouse piano as if he’d grown up around the New Orleans bordellos rather than in Ewell, Surrey. Just as appealing were his plain-spoken manner, dry wit and refusal to show his prospective bandmates the slightest reverence. ‘Stu’ was not only welcomed into the line-up but recognised as a natural friend and ally even by the cautious Mick – in his case, perhaps the only one who would always talk to him as an equal, refuse to flatter him and be unafraid to tell him the truth.
Brian had now filled every spot in his blues band except that of drummer. It was the vital ingredient for any kind of ‘beat’ music, marking out the serious from the strum-along amateur. Drummers tended to be slightly older men with daytime jobs well paid enough for them to afford the £60 which a new professional kit could cost. Even mediocre players were as sought after as plumbers during burst pipe season and could take their pick from among the best Trad or rock ’n’ roll bands. Although Soho had a whole street of drummers for hire (Archer Street, where pro and semi-pro musicians congregated seeking work), none was likely to be tempted by a gaggle of young blues apostles without money, management or prospects. The Bricklayers Arms auditions did produce one promising candidate in Mick Avory, who sat in with the line-up a couple of times and seemed to fit in well enough. But he could see no future in playing behind this other Mick, and refused to commit himself permanently.
There was also the question of what to name the band. Brian, whose prerogative it was, had endlessly agonised about it, rejecting all suggestions from Mick and Keith while thinking of nothing suitable himself. The problem was only resolved when he decided to advertise for gigs in Jazz News and had to come up with a name while dictating the small ad over the telephone. His impromptu choice of ‘the Rolling Stones’ was a further debt to Muddy Waters – not only Waters’s 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’ but a lesser-known EP track, ‘Mannish Boy’, which includes the line ‘Oh, I’m a rollin’ stone.’
To British ears it was an odd choice, less evocative of a blues master’s raunchy potted autobiography than of the sententious proverb recommending stagnation over adventure: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Mick, Keith, Stu and Dick all protested that it made them sound halfway between a classical string quartet and an Irish show band, but the die was cast – and, after all, it was Brian’s group.
Their big break was the end result of a rather brutal slap in the face for Mick. Alexis Korner’s success at the Marquee Club had by now not only galvanised Soho but come to the notice of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Portland Place, three-quarters of a mile to the north. As a result, completing Korner’s sense of vindication, Blues Incorporated were offered a live appearance on BBC radio’s Thursday night Jazz Club programme on 12 July. It was an opportunity not to be missed, even though it clashed with the band’s regular weekly show at the Marquee. So as not to disappoint their club audience, Long John Baldry, the Ealing Club’s queenly blond giant, was lined up to deputise for them.
For this hugely important exposure on national radio, Korner did not want Mick to be his band’s sole vocalist but to perform in alternation with Art Wood, elder brother of the still-unknown schoolboy Ronnie. However, the parsimonious BBC would not pay for two singers on top of five instrumentalists. So Korner, figuring that Mick’s appeal was more visual than vocal, and thus of doubtful impact on radio, decided to drop him in favour of Art Wood. (In the end Art did not appear either, and the vocals were left to Cyril Davis.)
As a consolation prize for Mick, Korner arranged that the band in which he’d been moonlighting should play their first-ever gig on the same night as the broadcast, filling the Marquee’s intermission spot between Long John Baldry’s sets for a £20 fee. They even received a mention in Jazz News’s preview section, on equal terms with all Soho’s most illustrious jazz names, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer and the like.
By rights, the paper should have sought details from the loquacious and articulate Brian, but instead, because of the Korner connection, it contacted Mick. Consequently, he rather than Brian seemed like the leader of the band as he listed its personnel and showed a twinge of unease lest its new name should offend the Marquee’s purist blues audience. Brian, for some reason, had decided to revert to his slide-guitar alter ego for the occasion, so was not even identified: ‘Mick Jagger, R&B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig. Called “The Rolling Stones” [“I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit,” said Mick], the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), “Stu” (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).’
So that night of 12 July 1962, under the pink-and-white canvas awning of the Marquee stage, Mick sang with the Rolling Stones for the very first time. To set off his cord trousers, he wore a horizontally striped matelot jersey, common enough among young men in the South of France but in London chiefly identified with girls or sexually ambiguous ‘chorus boys’ in West End musicals. As blues-singing attire, it was as daring as the white frilly dress he would select for an open-air show at the other end of Oxford Street seven years later.
The hour-long set consisted mostly of irreproachable blues and R&B standards by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Billy Boy Arnold, with the odd Chuck Berry like ‘Down the Road Apiece’ and ‘Back in the USA’ (‘New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearn for you . . .’). As Mick Avory did not, after all, play drums that night, the sound had considerably less attack than usual. Even so, many hard-core blues Marqueesards could not dissociate the word stones from rock; the applause was muted and at times almost drowned by whistles and boos.
Among the crowd that night was Charlie Watts, the drummer who occasionally played for Blues Incorporated but more regularly for Blues by Six, the band that was supposed to have given the Rolling Stones both a lead guitarist and a vocalist. Charlie was the epitome of the superior drummer class, immaculately dressed and barbered, with the almost tragically serious face of a latter-day Buster Keaton. True to form, he showed no outward emotion as the stripe-jerseyed figure onstage blew the ‘harp’ passages in Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ as if it were an erotic rite rather than a religious one. But, as he would recall, the highly esteemed blues and jazz musicians of his acquaintanceship all suddenly seemed like ‘eccentric old men’ compared with Mick.
Afterwards, collecting their £4 apiece (enough in these days to buy three LPs, dinner for two at an Angus Steakhouse or a pair of boots from the modish Regent Shoe store), Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick and Stu felt they had connected with the Marquee crowd at least enough to be offered further regular work there. But Harold Pendleton still considered them to be infected with rock ’n’ roll virus, if not in their repertoire then in the energy of their sound and the body language and flying hair of their front man. He would use them only as an interval band and with the worst possible grace, muttering that they were ‘bloody rockers’ and their R&B idols were ‘rubbish’.
Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and the Flamingo in Wardour Street – the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.
Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, travelling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart – and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: ‘Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings [20p]’.
At this stage, Mick’s organisational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).
While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never ‘sell out’ to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Close Together’, Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover’ and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s ‘Soon Forgotten’.
The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organisation, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: ‘A great band,’ Decca’s letter said, ‘but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
The Rollin’ Stones’ far-flung work schedule was making it increasingly hard for Mick to get back to his own bed in Dartford each night. Besides, at nineteen he was too old to be ordered to do washing up or weight training any longer. So in the autumn of 1962 he left his spotless, well-regulated home and moved up to London to share a flat with Brian Jones at number 102 Edith Grove in the World’s End district of Chelsea. Originally, the ménage also included Brian’s girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and their toddler son, Julian, but after a few days Pat and Julian departed without explanation, and Keith Richards moved in instead.
Chelsea at this time was a backwater whose days as a resort of hard-drinking, drug-taking artists and bohemians seemed long gone. Situated at the western extremity of King’s Road, on the frontier with romance-free Fulham, World’s End was a sleepy area of still mainly working-class homes, shops, cafés and pubs. Edith Grove ranked as perhaps its least attractive thoroughfare, terraced by shabby mid-Victorian houses with pilastered front porches, and shaken by traffic to and from Knightsbridge and the West End.
The flat, which came already furnished, was on the first floor of number 102. The rent was £16 per week excluding electricity, which had to be paid for as it was used by inserting one-shilling coins into a battleship-grey iron meter. Mick shared the only designated bedroom with Keith, while Brian slept on a divan in the living room. There was an antiquated bathroom with a chipped and discoloured tub and basin and taps that yielded a reluctant, rusty dribble. The only toilet was a communal one on the floor below.
Deeply unattractive to begin with, the place quickly descended into epic squalor that would later be unwittingly re-created in the classic British film Withnail and I. Beds stayed permanently unmade; the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty dishes and empty milk bottles encrusted with mould. The ceilings were blackened by candle smoke and covered with drawings and graffiti, while the windows were so thick with grime that casual visitors thought they had heavy curtains, permanently closed. When an extra flatmate materialised in a young printer named James Phelge, his surname proved curiously anagrammatic: he won the others’ approval by his skill at ‘gobbing’, or spitting gobbets of phlegm up the wall to form a horrible pattern in lieu of wallpaper.
It might be wondered how the famously fastidious Mick could ever have endured such conditions. But in most nineteen-year-olds, the urge to react against parental values tends to be overwhelming. There was also the sense of roughing it like a real bluesman, even though few of these might have been spotted in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Kings Road. Besides, while enthusiastically joining in the trashing of the flat, he was never personally squalid but – like Brian – remained conspicuously neat and well groomed, just as young officers in the Great War kept their buttons bright amid Flanders mud. Brian somehow managed to wash and dry his fair hair every single day, while Mick (so Keith would later recall in one of their recurrent periods of mutual bitchiness) went through ‘his first camp period . . . wandering around in a blue linen housecoat . . . He was on that kick for about six months.’
All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by cheque and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank cheque: ‘Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.’
He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways – stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighbouring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as ‘pins’. Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offence) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.
Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as ‘very bright, highly motivated layabouts’. In Stu’s day job at ICI the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting co-workers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as ‘the rhythm-and-blues singer’.
Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the non-musician flatmate James Phelge to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late between their foetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been ‘bloody awful’ and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smouldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.
It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.
As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s ‘gobbing’, Brian gave each a name according to its colour – ‘Yellow Humphrey’, ‘Green Gilbert’, ‘Scarlet Jenkins’, ‘Polka-Dot Perkins’. He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a ‘Morgan Morgan’. Any male conspicuously devoid of their own cool and savoir faire was an ‘Ernie’. The local greasy-spoon café – whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or ‘nancy boys’ – was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as ‘the Offers’ after Mick described them as ‘a bit off’. Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.
Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as ‘the First American Folk-Blues Festival’, featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled ‘Little Red Rooster’.
Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.
If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.
He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.
THE WINTER OF 1962–3 turned into Britain’s worst for one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theatres and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy ‘shorty’ overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.
At the end of each week, Mick, Brian and Keith bought, borrowed or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’. Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called ‘Love Me Do’ by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.
In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.
The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semi-pro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.
Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex-grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.
He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior – especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. ‘[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget – it looked like it was bomb-damaged,’ he would recall. ‘The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it . . . permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere . . . I could never understand why they carried on like this . . . It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.’
Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realised that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was – if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like ‘a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it’ and had ‘no plans to work’, and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. ‘He hated being called Mick,’ Bill remembers. ‘In his own eyes he was still Mike.’
He was keeping up his LSE studies despite the late nights and distractions, and that previous June had sat part one of his BSc degree, achieving just-respectable C grades in the compulsory subjects of economics, economic history and British government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institutions. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, ‘The Basketball Coach’, written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, ‘must definitely possess . . . a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm’. Without these qualities, the team would be ‘an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table . . .’ The coach must train himself to develop ‘a keen analytical sense’ and view each game as ‘an endless succession of tactics’ dictated solely by him. ‘The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability . . . He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players . . .’
The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies – and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good clean-up). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether ‘Michael’, as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public-school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.
At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. ‘He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.’
WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them – and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.
Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a long-time affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist and television pundit Dr Jacob Bronowski.
Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female back-up singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.
The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.
She and Jean were their most faithful followers – groupies would be too crude – trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti-rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street. ‘Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,’ Cleo recalls. ‘But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.’
She and Mick began dating with all the conventionality – and chasteness – that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones and the Stones’ nightlife. ‘We’d go to the cinema,’ Cleo remembers. ‘Once, Mick got tickets for the theatre, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.’ Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their break-up was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, ‘When you next see Mick, give him that for me.’
Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers ‘quite heavy’ discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humour and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting ‘Mind the doors!’ ‘Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.’ The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. ‘He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.’
He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. ‘My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbours used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practise his stage moves in front of our mirror.’ Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove – and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is ‘trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles’.
Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. ‘Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,’ Cleo recalls. ‘When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, “Get outa my house, white man,” took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.’
Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). ‘At the interval,’ she recalls, ‘I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. “’Ow much?” he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick – though I didn’t know his name then – said “Okay.”’
The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art – which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting ‘something like four hours’ – featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an ‘interval band’ (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a ‘prefab’ rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared with scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.
From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non- or half-Britishers to whom the Stones – Mick especially – would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.
Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were the, to his mind, far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was £1 each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.
In the event, they astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same ‘abominable’ performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelising for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience – Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.
Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: ‘Rockers’ in black leather and motorcycle boots; ‘Mods’ in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from back streets and council estates; and always girls, girls and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annexe, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.
The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, ‘Do the Crawdaddy’ and ‘Pretty Thing’, spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multi-mirrored walls suffering not even a crack.
Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music programme, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded ‘too coloured’. However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew – still broadcasting in the twenty-first-century – denies ever having been party to such a judgement; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound ‘coloured’.
Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC in Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (‘crawdaddy’ is Deep Southern slang for crayfish or langoustine), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognisable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton – at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down – and a raspy-voiced trainee gravedigger from north London named Rod Stewart.
Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre début single with a smash hit, ‘Please Please Me’, and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When ‘Please Please Me’ became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.
Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off – and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.
Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared with their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll-obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’. When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored ‘Pop Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.
MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.
But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage – and men – having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. ‘I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,’ she recalls. ‘It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.’
The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ (‘let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .’), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.
Her name was Christine – aka Chrissie – Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician – more fifties, in fact, than sixties – Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.
Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared – and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realise his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.
While fashion modelling took her sister Jean steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college – her third – on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.
The various printed accounts of their first meeting are always set at the Windsor Ricky-Tick, with seventeen-year-old Chrissie – who sometimes cleared away glasses there in exchange for free admission – brazenly taking the initiative. In one version, she accepts a dare from a girlfriend to go up to Mick on the bandstand and ask him to kiss her; in another, the place is so packed that she can reach him only by crawling across the decorative fishing nets above the dance floor, helped along by people below in an early instance of crowd surfing.
Chrissie herself is unsure now whether the two of them first seriously locked eyes at the Ricky-Tick, at a nearby pub where the Stones sometimes played upstairs on Sunday afternoons, or at a place called the International Club, frequented by foreign au pair girls in nearby Maidenhead. ‘I was attracted to Mick originally because he looked like an actor named Doug Gibbons,’ she remembers. ‘At least, Doug was a prettier version of Mick. And I remember that when we first spoke his Cockney accent was so thick I could hardly understand him.’
After serenading her with Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ a few times, he asked her for a date, naming an afternoon the following week and suggesting Windsor, with its castle and fluttering Royal Standard, as their most convenient common ground. ‘It was the day of my grandmother’s silver wedding party, and I explained I’d have to go to that first. I remember meeting Mick on the street in Windsor because that was when I first saw him in daylight and realised one of his eyes was two colours – the left one was brown and green.’
For their next date, he took her down to Dartford by train, as she thought, to meet his family. After her father’s substantial Buckinghamshire farm, the Jagger family home struck her as ‘very ordinary’. Neither Mick’s parents nor his brother turned out to be there, and Chrissie realised he was hoping – or, rather, expecting – to have sex with her. But the seeming wild child was not the pushover he expected. ‘I was very worried about it and I wouldn’t stay,’ she recalls. ‘So I had to come back again on the train on my own.’
Mick forgave the rebuff, however, and a week or so later, after an early-ending gig, Chrissie took him home to Burnham by train to meet her parents, Ted and Peggy, also inviting Charlie Watts and her friend Liz Gribben, to whom Charlie had taken a shine. ‘My parents were slightly appalled by the way Mick looked, but they were impressed by the fact that he went to LSE, and my dad liked him because he was so bright and into money. I don’t think my mother ever really liked him – even before everything that happened – but Dad could always see how sharp he was and what a success he was going to be, whatever he ended up doing.’
Mick became a regular overnight visitor at the Shrimptons’, always occupying a separate room from Chrissie’s, as any well-brought-up young man in that era would be expected to do. After breakfast he would catch the same 8:42 commuter train from Burnham that Chrissie took to her secretarial school. ‘My sister Jean by that time was going around with a lot of debby Vogue types who’d sometimes be on the same train,’ she remembers. ‘I used to hear them whispering “Poor Chrissie . . . her boyfriend’s so ugly.”’
Chrissie, by contrast, spent little time in the bosom of the Jagger family, though that was a consequence of Mick’s desire to get away from home more than any mutual antipathy. She remembers her surprise on discovering that, unlike their elder son, neither Joe nor Eva had any trace of a Cockney accent and that both were ‘quite intellectual people, which my parents weren’t, though we had more money. Mick’s mother was quite simply a domestic slave, devoted to looking after the males of the household. She was one of those garrulous women, and Mick was often very irritated by her and very dismissive of her. And his father was very formal and – to me – charmless and rather alarming. But I did get on very well with his brother, Chris, who at that time was mostly away at school. We were the two Chrisses, the younger siblings of the more successful older ones.’
Very soon after that initial refusal, Chrissie began sleeping with Mick – something that for a genteelly raised, convent-educated seventeen-year-old in 1963 was still far from routine. The first time was at the Shrimpton family home while her parents were away, since she couldn’t bring herself to enter his bed at the squalid flat he shared with Keith, Brian and the ‘gobbing’ printer Phelge at 102 Edith Grove. ‘I hated it . . . it was so dirty,’ she recalls. ‘The spitting and the Nankering . . . and they’d got notes that girls had sent them pinned up all over the wall. It was an all-blokes place, where I was always made to feel like an intruder.’
Keith she remembers as ‘just a weedy little boy, who was very sweet and shy and upset about his parents having recently got divorced . . . Brian was very bright, and it was obvious that he and Mick didn’t get on at all. He tried to pull me a couple of times, but only to spite Mick. When it happened I can remember thinking “This is ridiculous because you’re half my size.”’
Mick had been seeing Chrissie only about two weeks when – out of nowhere – the Stones’ fortunes suddenly began to improve. A whole-page feature article on the Crawdaddy Club in the local Richmond and Twickenham Times gave them a laudatory plug. Then Giorgio Gomelsky persuaded a leading music trade journalist, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror – who had filed the first-ever national story on the Beatles – to come to the Station Hotel on a Sunday lunchtime and watch the Stones while Gomelsky shot further documentary footage of them onstage. ‘I met them in the bar, before they started playing,’ Jones remembers. ‘Mick was amiable and well spoken, but he stayed pretty much in the background. I thought Brian was the leader because he was the pushiest one, waving their single press cutting under my nose.’
Peter Jones was ‘knocked out’ by the set that followed, but cautiously said he wanted his paper’s in-house R&B enthusiast, Norman Jopling, to give a more knowledgeable assessment. Nineteen-year-old Jopling turned up at the Crawdaddy’s next Sunday session, but without great expectations. ‘British bands who tried to play the blues all had this kind of worthy, post-Trad feel, so I expected them to be rubbish. But as soon as Mick opened his mouth, I realised how wrong I was. All I remember thinking as the Stones played was “This stuff doesn’t only belong to black guys in the States any more. White kids in Britain can play it just as well.”’
When the band talked to Jopling afterwards, Brian again took the lead, quizzing him at length about what he could do for them in print. Mick was ‘a bit distant’, as if he resented his colleague’s assertiveness. ‘He knew Brian had started the band and was the leader, but he knew he was the guy people were looking at.’ Later, Jopling rode with them in Stu’s van to the house of a record producer, where Keith initiated an earnest discussion about Motown music and how disappointing Mary Wells’s latest single had been. ‘I remember that there were a lot of musical instruments lying around, Brian was picking them up and just playing them with that instinctive talent of his. But Mick was playing some, too – and I don’t mean only percussion instruments.’
Jopling’s article in the next week’s Record Mirror was the stuff of which careers are made:
As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments heave a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R&B clubs that have sprung up is nothing short of fantastic . . . At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves around to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad. And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t. But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if that scene continues to flourish . . .
After engineering such a triumph, Giorgio Gomelsky might have expected formal ratification as the band’s manager in time to handle the consequent surge of interest from record companies and talent agents. But all Gomelsky’s unselfish work on their behalf was suddenly forgotten. Before the Norman Jopling article had even appeared, Brian asked Jopling’s Record Mirror senior Peter Jones whether he’d consider taking on the Stones’ management. Jones was not interested – but once again proved a crucial catalyst. A couple of days later, he happened to run into a business acquaintance, a young freelance PR man whose naked ambition was a byword throughout the music trade press. If the young PR man cared to check out the Crawdaddy Club’s house band, Peter Jones suggested, he might find something of interest. And until the Record Mirror’s rave appeared, the field would be clear. When Mick had played Jimmy Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’ to his new Beatle friend John Lennon, he little imagined how prophetic the title would be.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
Long before the Rolling Stones turned into a new kind of band and Mick into a new kind of singer, Andrew Loog Oldham was a totally new kind of manager.
Before Oldham, managers of pop acts – a pool of talent then 99.9 per cent male – had been older men with no interest in the music beyond what it might earn them, and no empathy with their young charges or with teenagers generally. Most in addition were homosexuals, which explains why so many early boy rock ’n’ rollers had the same rough-trade fantasy look of flossy blond hair, black leather, tight jeans and high-heeled boots. Andrew Oldham was the first manager to be the same age as his charges, to speak their language, share their outlook, mirror their rampant heterosexuality and seem motivated by their collective ideals as much as by financial gain. While engineering managerial coups that, at the outset, seemed little short of magical, he was naturally and undisputedly one of the band.
Managers of the traditional kind had been content to stay in the shadows, counting their percentages. Oldham, however, craved stardom in his own right and, from the earliest age, possessed all the drive, ruthlessness and shamelessness necessary to win it. He was ahead of his time in nurturing such ambition despite possessing no abilities whatsoever as either a performer or musician and, indeed, no quantifiable talent in any direction. The talent he did have – one of the very highest order – would emerge only when he began managing the Stones, which at the outset he saw primarily as a means of projecting himself into the spotlight.
The other two most celebrated managers in pop history, Colonel Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, both had little real comprehension of the artists under their control. With the Stones – particularly their singer – Oldham very quickly realised exactly what he had found and what to do with it. In all the annals of huckstering and hype, no one has possessed a shrewder understanding of both his product and his customers.
It is a familiar music-business cliché to give the name ‘Svengali’ to any manager who radically remoulds a performer’s appearance or persona. Svengali is one of the scarier figures in Victorian gothic literature, a music teacher with a black beard and a hypnotic stare, combining the auras of Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera. In George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the eponymous heroine, an innocent young artist’s model, allows Svengali to take her over, heart and soul, in exchange for transforming her into a world-famous operatic diva.
The analogy is always made with both Colonel Parker and Epstein, even though the managerial reshaping of Presley and the Beatles was purely cosmetic, impermanent, and reached neither their hearts nor their souls. In pop’s premier league, the Svengali–Trilby scenario has actually been played out just once: when Andrew Loog Oldham met Mick Jagger.
When it happened, it would stir yet more foreign influences into the making of Mick. Oldham’s arrestingly hybrid name commemorated his father Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American air-force lieutenant, shot down and killed while serving in Britain during the last years of the Second World War. His mother, born Cecelia Schatkowski, was the daughter of a Russian Ashkenazi Jew who, like Mick’s mother’s family, had emigrated to New South Wales in Australia. After arriving in Britain aged four – the same age Eva Jagger did – Cecelia became known as Celia and, like Eva, preferred to draw a veil of pukka Englishness over her origins.
Born in 1944, after his father’s death and out of wedlock, Oldham grew up in the literary-bohemian north London suburb of Hampstead and attended a first-rank private school, Wellingborough. Like his future Trilby, he possessed a keen intelligence but resolutely refused to live up to his academic promise, instead hungering for glamour and style and choosing the unlikeliest possible role models for a boy of his background. In Oldham’s case, these were not venerable blues musicians but the amoral young hustlers who swindled and finger-snapped their way through late 1950s cinema – Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the sleazy Broadway press agent in Sweet Smell of Success; Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson, the prototype ‘bent’ British pop manager in Expresso Bongo.
When London first began to swing, Andrew Loog Oldham – by now a strawberry-blond nineteen-year-old with an educated accent and a killer line in suits and tab-collared shirts – was perfectly placed to hop aboard the pendulum. He became an odd-job boy at Mary Quant’s Bazaar boutique while working nights as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club (where he could easily have sighted Mick but somehow never did). Given his mania for attention seeking, it was inevitable he should end up in public relations, a field until then also dominated by much older men and therefore largely uncomprehending of teenage music and culture.
Among Oldham’s earliest PR clients from the pop world, one left a lasting impression. This was America’s Phil Spector, the first record producer to become as famous as the acts he recorded, thanks to his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ technique, the total artistic control on which he insisted, and his already legendary egotism and neurosis. Most fascinating to his young English minder was the simultaneous image of a maestro and hoodlum Spector cultivated, wearing dark glasses whatever the weather or time of day, travelling in limousines with blacked-out windows, and surrounding himself with more bodyguards than most current heads of state. If being a backroom boy could be like that, who needed the front parlour?
Oldham’s primary ambition was to be working with the Beatles, whose records now instantly topped the UK charts on release and who were showing themselves to be far more than just another pop group with their Liverpudlian charm and wit. Their breakthrough had allowed their manager, Brian Epstein, to successfully launch a whole troupe of ‘Mersey Beat’ acts, so destroying London’s historic anti-northern snobbery at a stroke and becoming the most successful British pop impresario ever.
Oldham soon talked himself into a freelance PR role with Epstein’s NEMS organisation and forged a good personal relationship with all four Beatles. Ambition-wise, though, it was a blind alley, since the possessive Epstein handled all their PR himself in tandem with fellow Liverpudlian Tony Barrow, and would allow Oldham to publicise only second-rank NEMS names like Gerry and the Pacemakers. He had decided to move on and was just reviewing his not very numerous options when his Record Mirror contact Peter Jones advised him to check out the house band at the Richmond Station Hotel.
For Oldham, walking into the Stones’ jam-packed, mirror-multiplied lair was like seeing ‘rock ’n’ roll in 3-D and Cinerama for the very first time’. His cracklingly entertaining autobiography, Stoned, records the visual shock of their front rank like a James Joyce epiphany: Keith’s ‘black as night, hacked hair . . . atop a war-rationed baby body . . .’; Brian’s ‘pretty-ugly shining blond hair belied by a face that already looked as if it had a few unpaid bills with life . . .’; Mick, ‘the boy from the railway tow-path . . . the hors d’oeuvre, the dessert and meal in between . . .’ After the cute Liverpudlian harmonies currently clogging the Top 10, that raw, sour, southern solo voice was like a dash of icy water in the face. ‘It wasn’t just a voice, and it was much, much more than a rendition, a mere lead vocal . . . It was an instrument . . . a declaration, not backed by a band but a part of a band . . . their decree.’
Oldham, in fact, caught the Stones at a low-energy moment, when they had reverted to being serious bluesmen seated on a semicircle of bar stools. Even then, Mick ‘moved like an adolescent Tarzan plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes . . . a body still deciding what it was and what it wanted . . . He was thin, waistless, giving him the human form of a puma with a gender of its own . . . He gave me a look that asked me everything about myself in one moment – as in “What are you doing with the rest of my life?” The lips looked at me, seconding that emotion.’
In the brief interlude before Record Mirror’s story brought every London talent scout flocking to Richmond, Oldham persuaded the Stones he should be their manager. It was a pitch of finely tuned brilliance, in which the nineteen-year-old presented himself simultaneously as a street-smart metropolitan tycoon with more experience of life than all of them put together, and a kindred spirit who shared their love of the blues and sacred mission to preserve it. Actually, he would confess in Stoned, ‘[the blues] didn’t mean dick to me. If it had, I might have had an opinion about it and missed the totality of what had hit me.’ The clincher was the tenuous connection with Brian Epstein and the Beatles, now made to sound as if John, Paul, George and Ringo barely made a move without his say-so. The cautious Mick could not help but be as impressed as the fame-famished Brian. ‘Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery,’ he would recall, ‘and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.’
For all his hubris, Oldham was realistic. As a small-fry freelance PR, without even an office, he knew he was in no position to launch into management on his own. Bearing in mind the main plank of his sales pitch to the Stones, his first move was to approach Brian Epstein and offer Epstein a half share in them in return for office space and facilities. But Epstein, feeling he already had more than enough artists, declined the opportunity that would have put the two biggest bands of all time in his pocket. Trawling the lower reaches of West End theatrical agents, Oldham next hit on Eric Easton, a former professional organist whose middle-of-the-road musical clients included guitarist Bert Weedon and the pub pianist Mrs Mills, and who also hired out electronic organs to theatres, cinemas and holiday camps.
Despite being an archetypal ‘Ernie’, according to Mick and Brian’s private argot, Easton realised how the British pop market was exploding and readily agreed to become the Stones’ co-manager and financial backer. However, a potentially serious obstacle existed in Giorgio Gomelsky, who had given the band their Crawdaddy residency, got them eulogised by Record Mirror and was their manager in every way other than writing. Oldham brought an incognito Easton to the Station Hotel to see the Stones perform and meet their acknowledged leader, Brian Jones. A few days later – during Gomelsky’s absence in Switzerland following the sudden death of his father – Brian and Mick attended a meeting with Oldham and Easton at the latter’s office.
It was a scene that had already been played in hundreds of other pop-managerial sanctums, and would be in thousands more – the walls covered with signed celebrity photos, framed Gold Discs and posters; the balding, over-genial man at a desk cluttered by pictures of wife and children (and, in this case, electronic organs), telling the two youngsters in front of him that, of course, he couldn’t promise anything but, if they followed his guidance, there was every chance of them ending up rich and famous. The only difference was the sceptical look on one youngster’s face and the penetrating questions he put to both his older and younger would-be mentors. ‘Mick asked me to define this “fame” I kept talking about,’ Oldham recalls. ‘I breathed deeply and said, “This is how I see fame. Every time you go through an airport you will get your picture taken and be in the papers. That is fame and you will be that famous.”’
True to his altruistic nature, Giorgio Gomelsky made no trouble about having the Stones filched from him in this devious manner, sought no financial compensation for all he had done to advance them, and even continued to offer them bookings at the Crawdaddy. In May 1963, Brian Jones signed a three-year management contract with Oldham and Easton on behalf of the whole band, setting the duo’s commission at 25 per cent. During the grooming process, each Stone would receive a weekly cash retainer, modest enough but sufficient to lift the three flat-sharers out of their previous abject poverty. Unknown to Mick and Keith, Brian negotiated an extra £5 per week in his capacity as leader.
Svengali lost no time in setting to work, though his original aim was to package the Stones pretty much like other pop bands, i.e., as Beatle copies. Their piano player, Ian Stewart, was dropped because Oldham thought six too cumbersome a line-up in this age of the Fab Four – and besides, chunky, short-haired Stu looked ‘too normal’. Good friend as well as fine musician though he was, neither Mick nor Brian protested, and there was general relief when he agreed to stay on as roadie and occasional back-up player. Keith deeply disapproved of Stu’s treatment – as he had of Giorgio Gomelsky’s – but felt his subordinate position (‘a mere hireling’) did not entitle him to take a moral stand. He was equally docile when Svengali gave a moment of attention to him, ordering him to drop the s from ‘Richards’ to give it a more showbizzy sound, as in Cliff Richard.
As an experienced entertainment agent, as well as a substantial investor, Eric Easton had a voice that must also be heeded. And, so far as Easton was concerned, the Stones had one possibly serious weak link. He wondered whether Mick’s voice could stand the strain of nightly, often twice-nightly, appearances in the touring pop package shows that were every band’s most lucrative market. There was also the question of whether the crucially important BBC would still bar him for sounding ‘too coloured’. Group leader Brian Jones was brought into the discussion, and readily agreed with Easton that, if necessary, the Stones’ vocalist would have to go the same way as their pianist.
A couple of days after the contract signing, Oldham telephoned a young photographer friend named Philip Townsend and commissioned the Stones’ first-ever publicity shoot. The only brief Townsend received was to ‘make them look mean and nasty’. He posed them in various Chelsea locations: on a bench outside a pub, mingling with oblivious King’s Road shoppers, even sitting kindergarten-style on the road outside 102 Edith Grove, ferociously casual and cool with their corduroy jackets, polo necks and ever-smouldering cigarettes, but, to twenty-first-century eyes, not mustering a shred of meanness or nastiness between them. Mick stands out only for his lighter-coloured jacket with raglan lapels; if anyone seems the star of the group, it’s sleek, enigmatic-looking Charlie Watts.
Having been dubbed the next big thing by London’s most influential music trade paper, the Stones were as good as guaranteed a contract with a major record label. Theoretically, of course, they were still bound to IBC studios by the demo tape on which they had given Ian Stewart’s friend, Glyn Johns, a six-month option. Eric Easton’s advice was that the agreement would have no validity if they could get back the tape’s only copy. Adopting Brian’s habit of bare-faced lying, they therefore told Johns they’d decided to break up the band but would like to keep the tape as a souvenir. An unsuspecting Johns handed it over in exchange for its recording cost: £109.
Among Britain’s few record labels in 1963, the mighty Decca company was the Stones’ almost inevitable destination. Having dominated the UK music market for thirty years, Decca had seen its arch-rival, EMI, achieve the equivalent of a Klondike gold strike with the Beatles. To compound the agony, Decca’s head of ‘artists and repertoire’, Dick Rowe, had had first chance to sign the Liverpudlians but had passed on them. So desperate was Rowe to rescue his reputation that the Stones (whose demo tape his department had also rejected a few months earlier because of Mick’s vocals) walked into Decca without the customary studio audition.
A well-worn procedure now lay ahead, which even the otherwise mould-breaking Beatles had followed – and continued to follow. The new signees would go into their record company’s own studios in the charge of a staff producer, who would choose the material they recorded and specify how it should be performed. Though Rowe, in his thankfulness, offered a significantly higher royalty than EMI had given the Beatles (it could hardly have been lower), the Stones would still receive only a tiny fraction of the sale price of each record, and that at a far-distant date, after labyrinthine adjustments and deductions.
Andrew Oldham had other ideas, absorbed from his American entrepreneurial idol, Phil Spector. The artists who helped constitute Spector’s Wall of Sound were recorded privately by the producer at his own expense and free from any interference by third parties. The master tapes were then leased to the record company, which manufactured, distributed and marketed the product but had no say in its character or creative evolution and, crucially, did not own the copyright. In Britain’s cosily exploitative record business, a tape-lease deal was still a rarity. Such was Decca’s terror of losing another next big thing that they complied without a murmur.
Again following Spector’s lead, Oldham appointed himself the Stones’ record producer as well as co-manager, undaunted by his indifference to their sacred music – or by never having set foot in a recording studio other than as a PR minder. Decca were already agitating for a début single to catch the ever-rising tide of hysteria around the Beatles and beat groups generally. With no clue what that début should be, Oldham simply told his charges to pick out their five best R&B stage numbers and they would make the choice democratically between them. A session was booked at Olympic Sounds, one of central London’s only three or four independent studios, on 10 May. Mick arrived straight from a London School of Economics lecture with a pile of textbooks under one arm.
The decision about the single’s A-side – the one to be submitted for radio play and review in the trades – proved problematic. The Stones’ best live numbers were uncommercial blues like Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’ or Chuck Berry anthems like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, which by now had become the staple of many other bands, not least the Beatles. Finally they chose Berry’s ‘Come On’, a serio-comic lament about a lost girlfriend, a broken-down car, and being rudely awoken by a wrong number on the telephone. Released two years earlier as the B-side to ‘Go Go Go’, it had made little impact in Britain, and had a slightly more pop feel than Berry’s usual output.
There was little time for any radical reinterpretation of the track at Olympic Sound. Oldham, using Eric Easton’s money, had booked the studio for three hours at a special rate of £40, and was under strict orders from his co-manager not to run over time. That sense of haste and compromise permeated the Stones’ ‘Come On’; indeed, Berry’s languid vocal was so speeded up by Mick, it sounded more like some tongue-twisting elocution exercise. With an eye to the mass market, he also toned down the lyrics (an act of self-censorship never to be repeated), singing about ‘some stupid guy tryin’’ to reach another number rather than ‘some stupid jerk’. Brian Jones’s musicianship was limited to a harmonica riff in place of Berry’s lead guitar, and a falsetto harmony in the chorus. Even with a key change to spin it out, the track lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. For the unimportant B-side, the band could return to their comfort zone with Willie Dixon’s ‘I Want to Be Loved’.
The session wrapped in just under three hours, so sparing Eric Easton a £5 surcharge. As the participants left, the single engineer – whose services were included in the price – asked Oldham what he wanted to do about ‘mixing’. Britain’s answer to Phil Spector did not yet know this to be an essential part of the recording process. Still fearful of being charged overtime, he replied, ‘You mix it and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.’
Everyone involved realised how unsatisfactory the session had been, and there was neither surprise nor protest when Decca’s Dick Rowe judged both the tracks to be unreleasable in their present form and said they must be re-recorded at the company’s West Hampstead studios under the supervision of a staff producer, Michael Barclay. The wisest thing would have been for Mick to start afresh with a new A-side, but instead he continued trying to pummel some life into his hepped-up yet watered-down version of ‘Come On’. The infusion of technical expertise and extra time made so little audible difference that Decca’s bureaucracy decided to stick with the Olympic Sound version, and this was duly released on 7 June 1963.
To drum up advance publicity, Oldham took his new discoveries on an exhaustive tour of the newspaper and magazine offices to which he had easy access thanks to his former connection with the Beatles. As well as the trade press, these included magazines catering to a female teenage audience, like Boyfriend, whose Regent Street offices were just around the corner from Decca. ‘After Andrew first brought them in, the Stones just used to turn up – usually at lunchtime,’ recalls former Boyfriend writer Maureen O’Grady. ‘I remember Mick and Brian going round the office, trying to cadge a sandwich from our packed lunches. They were obviously ravenous.’
When it came to getting television exposure, the ‘Ernie’ Eric Easton proved to have his uses. Among Easton’s more conventional clients was Brian Matthew, the host of British television’s only significant pop performance show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Transmitted in black-and-white early each Saturday evening from ABC-TV’s Birmingham studios, it featured all the top British and American chart names lip-synching their latest releases and, in this era of only two UK television channels, pulled in a weekly audience of around 13 million. Six months earlier, while Mick, Brian and Keith were shivering at Edith Grove, the show had broken the Beatles nationally, sending their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, straight to No. 1.
Easton spoke to Brian Matthew, and as a result Thank Your Lucky Stars booked the Stones to perform ‘Come On’ on the show to be recorded on Sunday 7 July and aired nationally the following Saturday. The catch was that they would have to look like a conventional beat group, in matching black-and-white-checked bumfreezer jackets with black velvet collars, black trousers, white shirts and Slim Jim ties. Mick and Keith protested in outrage to Andrew Oldham their supposed soul mate, but to Oldham exposure on this scale far outweighed a little compromising clobber; if they wanted the spot, they must wear the check.
Thus did Britain receive its first sight of Mick Jagger – far down a bill headlined by the teenage songstress Helen Shapiro and introduced by Brian Matthew in the kind of cut-glass BBC tones that traditionally commentated on Royal funerals or Test cricket matches. By today’s standards, it was hardly a provocative début. The Stones in their little checked jackets appeared on a two-sided set formed of giant playing cards, with Mick standing on a low plinth to the rear of Brian and Bill, and Keith and Charlie shown in profile. Merely lip-synching ‘Come On’ removed any involvement Mick had ever felt with the song, reducing him to the same tailor’s-dummy inanimation as the other four. For nobodies like these, the track was not allowed even its pitifully short ninety-second running time, prematurely fading amid the (artificially induced) screams of the studio audience.
It was long enough to cause horror and revulsion in living rooms the length and breadth of Britain. Earlier that year, a nation that immemorially equated masculinity – and heterosexuality – with the army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’ had been appalled by the sight of four young Liverpudlians with hair slabbed over their foreheads like the twenties Hollywood vamp Louise Brooks. Closer inspection, however, had revealed the Beatles’ mop-tops to be no more than that, leaving their necks and ears as neatly shorn as any regimental sergeant major could wish. But here were pop musicians whose hair burst through those last frontiers of decorum and hygiene, curling over ears and brushing shirt collars; here in particular was a vocalist (if one could call him that), the blatant effeminacy of whose coiffure carried on into his marginally twitching torso and unsmiling, obscurely ungracious face.
Out there, of course, nobody knew who he was: almost no band members’ names were yet known but John, Paul, George and Ringo. The telephone calls that flooded ABC-TV’s switchboard were to protest about the ‘scruffy’ group who had disfigured Thank Your Lucky Stars, and to urge the producers never to invite them back.
Nonetheless, ‘Come On’ proved a rallying cry in vain. After the muddle over the recording, Decca seemed to lose interest, spending almost nothing on promotion and publicity. Reviews in the music trades were no more than tepid. ‘A bluesy, commercial group who could make the charts in a small way,’ commented Record Mirror. Writing as guest reviewer in Melody Maker, fellow singer Craig Douglas was scathing about Mick’s vocal: ‘Very ordinary. I can’t hear a word [he’s] saying. If there were a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere.’
The national press failed to pick up on the Thank Your Lucky Stars furore and would have ignored the Stones altogether but for the unflagging generosity of the manager they had just rudely dumped. Giorgio Gomelsky knew the tabloid Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop correspondent, Patrick Doncaster, and persuaded Doncaster to devote his whole column to the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young band named the Yardbirds whom Gomelsky had found to take his ungrateful protégés’ place. The good turn backfired when the beer brewery that owned the Station Hotel read of the wild rites jeopardising its mirror-lined function room and evicted the Crawdaddy forthwith.
In 1963, the procedure for getting a single into the Top 20 charts published by the half-dozen trades, and broadcast each Sunday on the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was quite straightforward. The listings were based on sales by a selection of retailers throughout the country. Undercover teams would tour these key outlets and buy up the 10,000 or so copies needed to push a record into the charts’ lower reaches and to pole position on radio playlists. At that point, in most cases, public interest kicked in and it continued the climb unaided.
Decca being unwilling to activate this mechanism for ‘Come On’, Andrew Oldham had no choice but to do it himself. To help him, he brought in a young freelance promotion man named Tony Calder who had worked on the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, and who, as a former Decca employee, knew the whole hyping routine backwards. But even with Calder’s bulk-buying teams behind it, ‘Come On’ could be winched no higher than No. 20 on the New Musical Express’s chart. To blues-unaware pop-record buyers, the name ‘Rolling Stones’, with its echo of schoolroom proverbs, struck almost as bizarre a note as ‘the Beatles’ initially had. And Mick’s over-accelerated vocal removed the crucial element of danceability.
He was never to make that mistake again.
OUTSIDE OF MUSIC, Chrissie Shrimpton occupied Mick’s whole attention. They had been going out for more than six months and were now ‘going steady’, in this era the recognised preliminary to engagement and marriage – though steady was the least appropriate word for their relationship.
Chrissie, now eighteen, had left secretarial college and moved up to London, ostensibly to work but really to provide a place where she and Mick could find some privacy. With her friend Liz Gribben, she lived in a succession of bed-sitting-rooms which, though ‘very grim’, were still more conducive to romance than 102 Edith Grove. However, she still could not break it to her parents that she was sleeping with Mick; on their visits home to Buckinghamshire to stay with Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, they continued virtuously to occupy separate bedrooms.
One of Chrissie’s first secretarial jobs was at Fletcher & Newman’s piano warehouse in Covent Garden – at that time still the scene of a raucous daily fruit and vegetable market. ‘It was only a few minutes’ walk from the London School of Economics and Mick would come and meet me for lunch. One day as we walked through the market, a stallholder threw a cabbage at his head and shouted, “You ugly fucker.”’
In fact, he hugely enjoyed showing Chrissie off to his fellow LSE students, not only as a breathtakingly beautiful ‘bird’ but as sister of the famous model Jean. Only Matthew Evans, the future publisher and peer, went out with anyone on the same level, a girl named Elizabeth Mead. ‘That amused Mick,’ Evans recalls. ‘We used to sit and discuss how similar Elizabeth and Chrissie were.’
When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument – this only a couple of weeks after they met. ‘We were always together,’ Chrissie says, ‘and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault – like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights – though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.’
Though she found him ‘a sweet, loving person’, his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. ‘We’d be walking down the street . . . and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.’ Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when – as often happened – Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, ‘Mrs Shrimpton . . . where is she?’
With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson & Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realised he went there at all. ‘I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,’ Calder remembers. ‘But with Mick, it was never an issue.’
By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities – and the career that would follow – to plunge into the unstable, unsavoury, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.
One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving the LSE. ‘I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonised very much about it,’ she remembers. ‘He certainly didn’t discuss it with me – but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that “Joe is very upset.”’
The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a ‘surprisingly easy’ interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones he could always come back and complete his degree.
It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multi-generational psychosis, ‘Beatlemania’. Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair – for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal – they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences and the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, ‘She Loves You’. Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analysed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of ‘top people’s paper’ The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.
For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticise or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.
While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional débutante ball, for fees between £25 and £50. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that – rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters – combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:
How fab can anyone be! . . . I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me – I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it – & I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me – I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good – my ears are still buzzing.
One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground – the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home – a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its co-presenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on 26 August.
Ready Steady Go! was a mould-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mould-breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits – ‘The Weekend Starts Here.’ Coincidentally, the programme was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.
The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless début single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform – leather waistcoats, black trousers, white shirts and ties – and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route, across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.
Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland – not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia – through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned and long-haired Londoners were gawped at like just-landed aliens.
The gig might be at a cinema, a theatre, a Victorian town hall or corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being ‘too noisy’, then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.
At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytising zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, the Stones knew Berry’s entire œuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, ‘turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage’. That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: ‘They didn’t seem to be copying anybody – and they didn’t give a fuck.’
The word that increasingly went ahead of them, based solely on the length of their hair, was dirty. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness, and one of those fortunate people who do not show dirt; Brian washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’; Bill Wyman as a small boy used to do his mother’s housework for her; the Hornsey Art School student Gillian Wilson, who had a fling with Charlie Watts, remembers his underwear being cleaner than hers. They had now given up any semblance of a stage uniform and went onstage in the same Carnaby motley in which they’d arrived at the theatre. Though all of them were clothes-mad and cutting-edge fashionable, this revolutionary break with tradition added a reek of BO to the implied dandruff and head lice. Their manager took every opportunity to circulate the double slander, adding a third for good measure: ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes. They don’t play nice-mannered music, but raw and masculine. People keep asking me if they’re morons . . .’
For Oldham had finally seen with the clarity of a divine vision where to take them – and, in particular, Mick. As the Beatles progressively won over the older generation and the establishment, and were unconditionally adulated by Fleet Street, many of their original young fans were feeling a sense of letdown. Where was the excitement – the rebellion – in liking the same band your parents or even grandparents did? He would therefore turn the Rolling Stones into anti-Beatles; the scowling flip side of the coin Brian Epstein was minting like a modern Midas. It was a double paradox, since the angelic Fab Four had a decidedly sleazy past in Hamburg’s red-light district, whereas the bad boys Oldham now proposed to create were utterly blameless, none more than their vocalist.
Indeed, the Jagger image at this point could well have gone in the very opposite direction. Early press stories on the Stones still gave his Christian name as Mike, resurrecting that bourgeois aura of Sunday-morning pubs, sports cars and driving gloves. There was also PR mileage to be extracted from his intellectual achievements. Until now, only one British pop star, Mike Sarne, had experienced further education (coincidentally also at London University).
As Tony Calder remembers, Mick was profoundly uneasy over the master plan that Oldham outlined to him – and not just for its gross misrepresentation of his character. ‘He said he’d bide his time and see if it worked out or not. But there were so many times when he’d turn up at the office, Andrew would call for two cups of tea and shut the door. He’d be in there alone with Mick for a couple of hours doing one thing – building up his confidence. Self-esteem? He didn’t have any. He was a wimp.’
A famous colour clip of the Stones onstage at the ABC cinema, Hull, filmed by one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, shows them playing ‘Around and Around’ for the umpteenth time, against a barrage of maniacal screams. They seem to be doing remarkably little to encourage this uproar: Bill playing bass in his odd vertical style, Keith lost in his chords, Brian almost street-mime motionless, with an odd new electric guitar shaped like an Elizabethan lute. Mick, in his familiar matelot-striped shirt – and almost glowing with cleanliness – seems least involved of all. Even in this paean to the liberating joy of music, his well-moistened lips barely stir, giving the words an edge of sarcasm (‘Rose outa my seat . . . I just had to daynce . . .’) reflected in his veiled eyes and occasional flamenco-style hand clap. In the guitar solo he does a stiff-legged dance with head thrust forward and posterior stuck out, ironically rather like the vaudeville ‘eccentric’ style, then still preserved by such veterans as Max Wall and Nat Jackley.
Since the onset of Beatlemania, young girls at pop shows had screamed dementedly whatever acts were served up to them, male or female, but until now had always stayed in their seats. With Rolling Stones concerts came a new development: they attacked the stage. These were the days when security at British pop concerts consisted of theatre staff checking tickets at the door, and the only barrier between performers and audience as a rule was an empty orchestra pit. During a performance in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 6 September, half a dozen demented girls began trying to tear off the band’s clothes and grabbing for souvenirs. (Bill later discovered a valuable ring had been wrenched off his finger.) Mick’s athleticism proved an unexpected asset: as one invader rushed at him, he swept her up in a fireman’s lift, carried her offstage, then returned to continue the number.
The next day brought a 200-mile drive from coastal Suffolk to Aberystwyth, north Wales, then another of 150 miles south to Birmingham for a second appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the bill was Craig Douglas, who had panned Mick’s ‘Come On’ vocal in Melody Maker. Before becoming a pop singer, Douglas had been a milkman on the Isle of Wight; in revenge for his hostile review – and with unendearing social snobbery – the Stones dumped a cluster of empty milk bottles outside his dressing room door.
On 15 September they were opening in a show called The Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the Beatles as top of the bill. Five months earlier, Mick, Keith and Brian had walked into the Albert Hall anonymously, disguised as Beatle roadies; now the Chelsea boot was well and truly on the other foot. The Stones’ support-band spot unleashed such pandemonium that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were seen peeping through the curtains, nervous of being upstaged for the first time since their Hamburg days. Boyfriend magazine was unequivocal in naming the night’s real stars: ‘Just one shake of [that] overgrown hair is enough to make every girl in the audience scream with tingling excitement.’
Two weeks later, the Stones set out on their first national package tour, as footnotes to a bill headed by three legendary American names, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. As a mark of respect to their third-biggest R&B hero – and perhaps a tacit admission that their singer was not as brazenly confident as he seemed – the band dropped all Bo Diddley songs from their stage act during the month-long tour. In fact, as well as being flattered by their reverence, Diddley was impressed by their musicianship, later using Bill and Charlie as his rhythm section on a BBC radio appearance. For Mick, the main benefit was seeing Diddley’s virtuoso sideman, Jerome Green, play lollipop-shaped maracas, two in each hand. From now on, he, too, shook maracas in the faster numbers, albeit only one per hand – and even that with a hint of irony.
Touring meant staying in hotels, which for such a bottom-of-the-bill act meant grim establishments with dirty net curtains, malodorous carpets and electricity coin meters in the bedrooms, all in all not much different from home back in Chelsea. It emerged, however, that one Edith Grove flatmate was not having to endure it. As well as his leader’s £5-per-week premium, Brian had secretly arranged with Eric Easton to stay in a better class of hotel than the others.
Before long, the tour’s American headliners were facing the Beatles’ recent problem at the Royal Albert Hall. Little Richard remained oblivious, entertaining his audience with an extended striptease, then going for a ten-minute walkabout through the auditorium with a forty-strong police guard. But the Everly Brothers’ tender harmonies became increasingly drowned out by chants of ‘We want the Stones!’ In the end, the emcee had to go out and plead for Mick’s heroes of yesteryear to be given a break.
By autumn, the Stones’ word-of-mouth reputation was sufficient for them to be voted Britain’s sixth most popular band in Melody Maker’s annual readers’ poll. Yet their future on record was anything but secure. Unless their inexperienced young manager–record producer could concoct a far bigger hit single than ‘Come On’, Decca would be looking for excuses to circumvent their contract and dump them. And the stock of likely hits in the R&B canon was shrinking all the time as other bands and solo singers dipped into it.
After a flick through R&B’s back catalogue, Andrew Oldham chose an overt novelty number, Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Poison Ivy’, originally recorded by the Coasters with voices teetering on the edge of goonery. As the B-side, weirdly, he prescribed another quasi-comedy song, Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’. For a time Mick seemed headed for exactly the vaudeville kind of pop he so despised. However, a recording session with Decca’s in-house producer, Michael Barclay, on 15 July revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choice. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously cancelled them.
Salvation came unexpectedly while Oldham and the Stones were at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Soho, trying out other potential A-sides and getting nowhere. Escaping outside for a breath of air, Oldham chanced to run into John Lennon and Paul McCartney, fresh from receiving awards as Show-Business Personalities of the Year at the Savoy Hotel. Told of the Stones’ problem, John and Paul good-naturedly offered a song of theirs called ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, so new that it wasn’t even quite finished. The duo accompanied Oldham back to Studio 51 and demo’d a Liverpudlian R&B pastiche that their rivals could cover without shame or self-compromise. Their gift thankfully accepted, they added the song’s final touches then and there, making it all look absurdly easy.
On 7 October the Stones went straight into Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn (just down the road from LSE), and recorded a version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ needing virtually no production and only a couple of takes. The B-side was a cobbled-up instrumental, based on Booker T. and the MG’s’ ‘Green Onions’ and entitled ‘Stoned’ – to most British ears, still only something that happened to adulterous women in the Bible.
‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was released on 1 November, three weeks before the Beatles’ own version, sung by Ringo Starr, appeared on their landmark second album, With the Beatles. While the northerners could not stop themselves adding harmony and humour, the Stones’ treatment was raw and basic, just Mick’s voice in alternation with Brian’s molten slide guitar; not so much sly romantic proposition as barefaced sexual attack. ‘Another group trying their chart luck with a Lennon-McCartney composition,’ patronised the New Musical Express. ‘Fuzzy and undisciplined . . . complete chaos,’ sniffed Disc. Indiscipline and chaos seemed to be just what Britain’s record buyers had been waiting for, and the single went straight to No. 12.
At year’s end, BBC television launched a new weekly music show called Top of the Pops, based solely on the week’s chart placings, that would run without significant change of format for the next forty years. The Stones featured in the very first programme, their vocalist adding a further twist to that un-Beatly Beatles song still rudely disrupting the Top 20. Motionless and in profile, buttoned into a tab collar as high as a Regency hunting stock, he seemed as detached and preoccupied as the lyric was hot and urgent. The downcast eyes and irritably drooping mouth suggested something rather tedious being spelled out to an unseen listener who was either slow-witted or deaf. To the studio audience surging round him, the clear message came straight from his recently aborted version of ‘Poison Ivy’: ‘You can look but you better not touch . . .’
Everyone knew now it was Mick, not Mike, and that – even though they might have attended the same seat of learning – he was nothing whatsoever like Mike Sarne.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself ’ (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
Saturday 14th December, 1963: Beatles at [Wimbledon] Palais, Stones at [the Baths] Epsom. Went down to Palais but saw nothing but police & more police. Got to Epsom early & when we saw ‘admission by ticket only’ thought we might as well go home. Stayed for a little while chatting to 2 mods however & then that darling DARLING doorman let us in. Got right to the front & wow! Leaning up on the stage gazing into the face of Mick and he looked at me – he did! Keith glanced once, Charlie never & I don’t know about Brian & Ghost [Bill Wyman]. Mick kind of looks at you in a funny way – shy? impersonal? sexy? cold? I don’t know but it’s certainly cool & calm . . . as usual [he] commanded all the attention. He was in a pink shirt, navy trousers, Cuban [heeled] Chelsea’s & brown Chelsea cord waistcoat with black onyx cufflinks. He looked thin, cool and haggard. His hair hung in long ginger waves & his sharp sideways glances down at the audience (no – me!) made him look even more fright [crossed out] aloof and somehow witchlike . . . After the Stones had gone off, the curtains were drawn across but we got underneath them & watched the Stones standing around at the side, talking . . . Couldn’t get backstage worst luck!
– from Jacqui Graham’s diary
Chelsea had lost Mick, for now anyway. Under Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton’s management, the Rolling Stones received around £20 each per week, the same as most top British soccer players of that era. The three Edith Grove flatmates therefore could move on from the squalid pad where they had frozen and half starved – but also shared an idealism and camaraderie that were never to be revived.
Treading his usual fine line between sex addict and sex offender, Brian Jones had impregnated yet another teenage girlfriend. The mother of this, his fourth child by different partners – due to arrive in summer 1964 – was a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser named Linda Lawrence. In a surprising reversal of his usual tactics, Brian did not instantly desert Linda but showed every sign of standing by her and the baby and, still more surprisingly, went to live with her at her family’s council house in Windsor, Berkshire, where Mick had first wooed Chrissie Shrimpton. So fond of this prospective son-in-law did the Lawrences become that they named the house ‘Rolling Stone’ in Brian’s honour and also gave board and lodging to a white goat he bought as a pet and liked to take out for walks through Windsor on a lead.
It went without saying that Mick and Keith would continue living together. However, treading his usual fine line between authority figure and honorary bandmate, Andrew Oldham put forward the idea, or instruction, that he should join them. Svengali needed to be as close as possible to the Trilby he was moulding day by day.
Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove – though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.
Rock musicians’ neighbours are usually condemned to purgatorial nuisance, but with Jagger and Richard, Mapesbury Road got off lightly. For much of the time the pair were away on tour, and when they returned they would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. Their fans had no idea where they were living, and none yet possessed the gumption to find out. There were no riotous all-night parties, no revving cars or motorbikes or onslaughts of deafening music, not even the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass. There was no drug taking whatsoever at this stage, or even very much drinking. ‘A half bottle of wine in that place,’ Oldham would remember, ‘was a big deal.’
Since Mick had been swept up into his new pop-star life, his parents back home in Dartford had hardly seen him and, apart from the increasingly unflattering stories they read in the press, had no idea where he was or what he was doing. When Oldham commandeered the Stones, he did not have to sell himself as a responsible manager to their respective families the way Brian Epstein had, painstakingly, to the Beatles’; Oldham, indeed, had not even met Joe and Eva Jagger, and initially left all dealings with the couple to his associate Tony Calder. ‘One day,’ Calder remembers, ‘a call came through to the office, and this very polite voice said, “My name’s Joe Jagger. I understand that my son is getting rather famous. If you need help of any kind, just let me know.” I took calls from so many angry, hysterical people every day . . . I couldn’t believe I’d just been talking to somebody who was polite.’
Liaison with Joe and Eva improved when Oldham employed seventeen-year-old Shirley Arnold, a long-time loyal Stones supporter around the club circuit, to organise their fast-growing national fan club. Shirley joined the small Oldham enclave inside Eric Easton’s office in a Piccadilly office block called Radnor House. Also among the staff was Easton’s elderly father-in-law, a Mr Boreham, who advised clients on long-term financial planning. Shirley remembers Mr Boreham’s amazement after a consultation session with Mick. ‘He said Mick had asked him what he thought the pound would be worth on the currency markets in a few years’ time. That was something no one in the music or entertainment business thought about in those days.’
Henceforward, Shirley kept Joe and Eva fully updated about their son, finding them ‘lovely people’ who never made the slightest demands on their own account or expected to profit from his success. ‘Eva was the dominant one in the marriage, very conscious of what other people thought, and to begin with she wasn’t sure what to make of all the headlines. But Mick’s dad was always totally laid-back about it all.’
Brian Jones might cut a dash with his pet goat on the streets of Windsor, but elsewhere he was finding it increasingly hard to win the attention he craved. Ironically, the Stones’ takeover by professional managers that he had wanted so desperately had eroded almost all his former power and status as the band’s founder, chief motivator and creative driving force. While they were still struggling to break through, Brian had a certain value to Oldham and Easton as an ally within their ranks, and so could wangle preferential treatment in pay or hotel accommodation. But now that they had made it his doom was effectively sealed.
Knowing in his own mind what a star he was, he could not understand why Oldham should be devoting such time and trouble to Mick, or why audiences responded to the results with such fervour. ‘Brian would come into the office to collect his fan mail,’ Tony Calder remembers, ‘and there it would be in a little pile, with a dirty great pile next to it. “Who’s that other lot for?” he’d say. “They’re for Mick,” I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.’
One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness – the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove – Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.
The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and – as an inveterate hypochondriac – too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). ‘If Andrew told Mick, “You’ve got two interviews today,” his response would always be “Are you sure they want me?”’ Tony Calder remembers. ‘Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.’ Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s news editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, sir.’
The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. ‘This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.’
At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. ‘Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,’ Tony Calder says. ‘But he’d expand it into twenty-five . . . then forty-five, then an hour.’ While other pop musicians fraternised with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones – and him. ‘I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day . . .’ It was a trick that never failed [in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words] ‘to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.’
But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963, and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could be often be extraordinarily close.
Jacqui’s diary greets 5 January as a ‘brilliant Stoning start to 1964’ after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his ‘lovely hair’, and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick ‘seem[s] not to be his usual bright self’ and is rather less ‘gorgeous’ than at Epsom three weeks before: ‘I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,’ the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. ‘He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!’
On 11 January, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. ‘Fabulous Keith’ with his ‘lovely, lean, intelligent face’, does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be ‘not looking madly happy’, and to have ‘a very clipped and well-spoken voice . . . and a lovely slow, tired smile’. Charlie is ‘dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined’ and Bill is ‘sweet, small, dark, very very helpful’. But Mick proves ‘a big disappointment & a big head . . . [he] thought he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still – although the worst – he is still fab! . . . then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.’
Friday, 24 January, which for the diarist ‘started off being puke’, turns into ‘the most fabulous day ever . . . Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING – yes REALLY TALKING TO US!’ With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick ‘very friendly . . . he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say’. Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his ‘secret wife’, Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an ad man who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. ‘He made crude remarks like “must cover me tits up” etc.,’ the diarist records, ‘but I liked him.’ She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.
By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologises that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:
MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Fate held in store a 15 min conversation in Mick’s hall.
We set off with the spirit of adventure strong within us & at great length found 33 Mapesbury Road NW2. Not knowing which bell to ring we knocked and asked for Mick Jagger. Several minutes passed & then this old woman appeared & behind her I could see Micky standing on the stairs, arms folded with a queer sort of smile on his face. He looked like a sort of pale blue pole in the dim light because he was in his pyjamas – pale blue, dark blue trimmings & white cord. The jacket was open & the pyjama trousers falling down but he seemed quite oblivious & stood there in his bare feet just looking. I felt incapable of walking in but we did & once more our conversation was friendly but I got the feeling he was faintly amused at us for his expression, a vague sort of genial smile, remained unchanged throughout.
This is a rough idea of the conversation:
SILENCE
J: ‘Good morning’
S: “ “
M: “ “
S: ‘We phoned you up’
J: ‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind us coming round here like this, you remember we phoned you up about that party.’
M: ‘Yes, I remember’
J: ‘Well, we went to it & then went to another one over at Blackheath – the second one was at Blackheath, wasn’t it?’
S: ‘Yes’
J: ‘Anyway, we landed up at Hampstead station this morning & we knew you lived round this way so we thought we’d pop in. I hope you don’t mind. I s’pose it’s a bit of a cheek really but it’s typical of us, we’re always doing mad things.’
M: ‘How did you know my address?’
J: ‘Oh we’ve known it for ages. I’ve forgotten who gave it to us.’
S: ‘Which is your bell, you haven’t got your name on it.’
M: (evading question) ‘Oh, we always put different funny names on it.’
J: ‘I think you thought we were Bridget before, you know, about the long skirts.’
M: ‘Oh, I knew you weren’t Bridget – I thought you might be some of her friends. Someone sent me 2 dolls the other day, with long skirts on – very nice. I appreciated it.’
Crosses over to mirror having got up from sitting on stairs.
‘I must look awful, haven’t shaved or anything. A bloke came to see me once & took a picture of me like this.’
Arranges hair.
‘Sent them to me afterwards. I looked terrible – it was the flash.’
J: ‘I’d kill anyone if they did that to me.’
M: ‘Oh, we’ve got to go away again soon.’
S: ‘Where to?’
M: ‘Oh, Sunbury or some stupid place like that. We’re playing at Greenford tonight.’
Comes over to us.
‘Gosh, aren’t I small? Why aren’t you at work or anything.’
J: ‘Oh we got the day off, hadn’t got much to do. Where’s Keith, is he upstairs?’
M: ‘Yes, he’s, uh, busy’ (laughs)
Phone rings
‘Excuse me.’
Answers it.
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo – press Button A – git. Hallo, who’s there?’
Puts it down
M: ‘You were saying?’
J & S: Inordinate mumbles
M: ‘I thought you were the bloke coming to see me s’morning about some script.’
J: ‘Oh, is that for the Rice Krispies advertisement?’
M: ‘No, but how did you know about that?’
J: ‘Oh we were there when that bloke asked you.’
S: ‘We were in your dressing room at Wimbledon.’
J: ‘Yes, it was Brian that wanted to do it, wasn’t it?!’
No answer. Various other topics of conversation, then
M: ‘What’s the time?’
J: ‘Twenty past twelve.’
M: ‘Oh, he’ll be here soon. I’ve got to go & have a bath & get some clothes on. I’d invite you up but it’s a bit awkward – you do understand.’
Giggles
J & S: ‘Yes, we understand.’
M: ‘And I’ve only got a little room to myself. Can’t very well invite you in there, people might get ideas.’
J & S: ‘Uh . . . yea.’
Shows us the door
M: ‘Oh well, give us a ring sometime, when we’re at a theatre or dance hall & come and see us.’ Mumble Mumble ‘Come into the dressing room. Cheerio.’
J & S: ‘Cheerio.’
Exit
Door slams shut.
We trail around Willesden miserably – we return to Wimbledon & make dinner at around 3.30. We feel choked up & a bit silly.
GOING OUT WITH Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister was not Mick’s automatic passport into the upper echelons of Swinging London. Jean had always done her best to keep Chrissie at arm’s length and, besides, was still far from certain about the ‘ugly’ young man who sometimes decorously occupied her bed at her parents’ home in Buckinghamshire while she was away. Far more important to Mick’s initial social rise was David Bailey, the East End photographer who had put Jean into Vogue, made them both international celebrities and was now going out with her. Bailey, indeed, was to become a friend outlasting the era of both Shrimpton sisters; perhaps his closest ever outside music.
When the two first met, they could not have been much more unequal, one a nineteen-year-old LSE student, the other five years older and at a seemingly unsurpassable peak of celebrity. Mick was frankly awestruck by the glamour and sophistication of Bailey’s lifestyle – the Lotus Elan sports cars, mews studios and cowboy boots he had made a photographer’s essential accessories in place of potted palms, black cloths and ‘watch the birdie!’ Of no small influence either was the delighted frisson Bailey’s unreformed (and totally genuine) Cockney accent created among the debs and high-born female magazine editors who lionised him. Such was Mick’s admiration that he even allowed Bailey to tease him, as few others dared to do openly, about his appearance. When Eva Jagger took him shopping as a boy, Bailey used to joke, there would have been no problem about going into places where small children weren’t welcome. She could leave him outside, securely clamped to the shop window by his lips.
Early in their friendship, rather like Pip with Herbert Pocket in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mick asked Bailey to take him to a posh restaurant and teach him how to conduct himself. They went to the Casserole on King’s Road, not far from the World’s End village where three hard-up Stones had so recently subsisted on stolen milk and stale fruit pies. Mick paid the bill – not an act to be much associated with him – but jibbed at Bailey’s suggestion that he should also leave a tip. Finally, he put down a pre-decimal ten-shilling (or ‘ten-bob’) note, equivalent to fifty pence today, with a 1964 purchasing power of £10. But as they left, Bailey saw him slip it back into his pocket.
Bailey soon picked up on Andrew Oldham’s influence over Mick, one that reminded him of a worldly-wise older brother with an awestruck younger one, and made his own moulding of Jean Shrimpton as a couture icon seem superficial by comparison. At the few Stones gigs he attended, he also found himself an uncomfortable witness to Brian Jones’s decreasing influence in the band and continual attempts to claw some power and status back. The photographer’s eagle eye for nuances noted that, while Mick was happy to zoom around with Jean and him in an unpretentious Mini-Minor, Brian drove a bulky Humber saloon, ‘the kind of car a vicar would use’. At the end of a gig, Bailey recalls, Mick and Keith would be like unkind children, playing an obviously habitual game of ‘let’s get away from Brian’.
Chrissie Shrimpton, too, recognised Oldham’s power over Mick, although at her tender age – she was still not yet nineteen – it represented unfathomably deep waters. Chrissie now spent most nights with Mick at 33 Mapesbury Road while officially sharing a bedsit with her friend Liz Gribben for the sake of appearances with her parents. When Jacqui Graham or other schoolgirl fans rang up the flat, a terse female voice would answer, discouraging them from further surprise appearances on the front doorstep.
For all the Stones’ growing fame, Mick still felt it a huge feather in his cap to be going out with Jean Shrimpton’s sister, even though Chrissie refused to capitalise on her surname or her own spectacular looks, and continued to work as a secretary, now at the Stones’ record company, Decca. ‘I still wanted to be with him all the time,’ she remembers. ‘The trouble was that my life was going on mostly in the daytime and Mick’s mostly went on at night.’ And Oldham’s rival stake in him was something she could only characterise as ‘powerful and frightening’.
The explosive, sometimes physically violent quarrels she and Mick had always had increased exponentially as the Stones’ fame did and he became more aware of himself as their star attraction and more prone to shove her out of sight whenever female fans materialised. Mortifyingly, to someone who valued coolness and self-possession above all, the blow-ups with Chrissie increasingly tended to happen in front of other people, at gigs, parties or new clubs like the Ad Lib. ‘They once had a terrible one at Eric Easton’s office,’ Shirley Arnold remembers. ‘It ended with Chrissie kicking Mick down the stairs.’
The fans who thought him so untouchable would have been astonished by his distress after Chrissie had stormed off into the night, and repeated phone calls to her mother could not locate her. Andrew Oldham would receive an anguished SOS and would go and meet him, usually at a bench on the Thames Embankment as far as possible from other prying eyes and ears. As Oldham recalls in Stoned, Mick would pour out his side of the story and almost tearfully recount how Chrissie had gone for him with her fists. (She herself now says firmly that she never used fists and ‘he wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse’.) The heart-to-hearts with Oldham would often last the rest of the night, ending at dawn with a walk through the deserted West End and breakfast at a taxi drivers’ café.
Oldham writes in Stoned that during this period he and Mick were ‘as close as two young men could probably become’ – and there has been endless speculation ever since about the extent of that closeness. Oldham certainly was not homosexual – indeed, had lately begun going out with a Hampstead girl named Sheila Klein (a surname to have large resonance in another context later in this story) whom he was soon to marry. At the same time, with his homing spirit for all outrage, he sought out the company of notable gay men in the music business – in particular the composer of Oliver!, Lionel Bart – and added their gestures and speech mannerisms to his repertoire of devices for amusing his friends and disconcerting his foes.
At all events, rumours began to fly around that in the extremely crowded quarters of 33 Mapesbury Road Mick and Oldham’s closeness extended to sharing the same bed. One must hasten to add that, in purer-minded 1964, that did not necessarily signify what it would today. Young men could still have platonic friendships in the Victorian mode, sharing flats, rooms and even beds (as pop band members often did on tour) without the slightest homoerotic overtones. Oldham’s own memoirs recall a night when the two of them ended up at his mother’s flat in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, and, rather than struggle home to Willesden, decided to crash out there. When Mrs Oldham looked into his room the next afternoon, she found them both squeezed into his single bed, still dead to the world.
According to Chrissie, Oldham’s soon-to-be fiancée, Sheila Klein, was also vexed by these rumours and – on a different occasion, at Mapesbury Road – suggested that the two of them should investigate for themselves. ‘[Sheila] got me to wait all night with her to see if Andrew and Mick slept in the same bed and they did . . . We found them asleep, facing the same way, and I can remember thinking how sweet they looked. Sheila said, “There, I knew they were!” and I still didn’t know what she meant.’
ON 7 FEBRUARY 1964 the Beatles had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, touching down in New York amid scenes of juvenile hysteria that made European Beatlemania seem muted by comparison and ending American dominance of pop music with a single appearance on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show. They were Britain’s most successful export since Shakespeare and Scotch whisky, ambassadors of seemingly boundless charm and good manners whose once-controversial hair was now regarded back home as a precious national asset. During a reception for them in Washington, DC, a woman guest produced some nail scissors and playfully snipped a lock or two from the back of Ringo Starr’s neck. For the attendant British media, it was an outrage tantamount to defacing the Crown Jewels.
While the Beatles conquered America, the Rolling Stones had to be content with conquering the American act meant to have headlined their second UK package tour. This was Phil Spector’s black female vocal trio the Ronettes, whose tumultuous ‘Be My Baby’ was a UK hit single currently far outselling ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They were also sexy in a way no female pop group had ever been, with their beehive hair, brazen eye makeup and slinky, chiffon-sleeved trouser suits. Even that could not save them from the same fate as the Everly Brothers, two months previously. Before the tour even began, the Stones replaced them as top of the bill.
Spector, the trio’s manager as well as record producer, was already fixated on lead singer Veronica – ‘Ronnie’ – Bennett (whom he would later subject to a gothic horror story of a marriage). Having received an advance character sketch of the top three Stones from his would-be British counterpart, Andrew Oldham, he sent them a stern collective telegram saying ‘Leave my girls alone’. This did not stop both Mick and Keith from making a beeline for Ronnie’s beehive at a party at deejay Tony Hall’s Mayfair flat which John Lennon and George Harrison also attended on the eve of their departure for America. Boyfriend magazine’s correspondent, Maureen O’Grady, remembers the atypical tension between the Dartford chums as they competed for Ronnie’s attention, and Mick’s sulky pique when she proved immune to his charms and went off with Beatle George.
With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ barely out of the Top 10, the insatiable pop music machine was already slavering for a third Rolling Stones single. And this time there would be no friendly Beatles to help out. Instead, the Stones looked beyond the over-ransacked R&B back catalogue to the one white American performer who counted as an equal influence on them all. The unanimous choice was ‘Not Fade Away’, the B-side to Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit ‘Oh Boy’, which Mick had seen Holly play live at the Woolwich Granada cinema during the one British tour he managed before his premature death. Serendipitously, the Stones–Ronettes show would appear at the same venue.
‘Not Fade Away’ was recorded at Regent Sound Studios during a brief interlude between early tour dates. To lighten an initially rather tired, grumpy atmosphere, Oldham turned the session into a booze-fuelled party, inviting various other pop personalities along to lend a hand. The American singer Gene Pitney, a former PR client of Oldham’s, contributed extra percussion and an outsize bottle of cognac. Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the (highly appropriate) Hollies dropped by to watch while the great Phil Spector, who had formerly produced Pitney’s records, shook maracas.
Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’ had been an almost hymn-like chant of a cappella voices, whose only beat was drumsticks tapping on a cardboard box. But the Stones’ cover version was as full-on and aggressive as ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, with Keith’s rhythm guitar turned up to maximum for the first – but not last – time in the staccato, seesaw beat invented by their late tour companion Bo Diddley. Mick’s vocal made no attempt to replicate Holly’s subtlety and charm, but stuck to the same snarling sexual challenge as before. In counterpoint to Keith’s rhythm-led chords, Brian supplied a throbbing harmonica bottom line that made the others, temporarily, forgive him everything. The result might not exactly be a Wall of Sound on the Phil Spector level, Andrew Oldham commented, but it certainly was a Wall of Noise.
With nothing to put on the B-side, and tipsiness now firmly in control, Spector and Mick together cobbled up a song called ‘Little by Little’, an outright copy of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’. At a later session, two further tracks were put on tape, both obviously unreleasable for commercial purposes. ‘And Mr Spector and Mr Pitney Came Too’ was a free-for-all instrumental featuring a wicked Mick take-off of Decca Records’ elderly boss Sir Edward Lewis. ‘Andrew’s Blues’ was a pornographic monologue by Phil Spector, dedicated to his British disciple-in-chief, featuring Allan Clarke and Graham Nash on back-up vocals.
When ‘Not Fade Away’ was released on 21 February few among the target audience even recognised it as a Buddy Holly homage. In its raw belligerence it seemed quintessentially Rolling Stones, which by now meant quintessentially Mick. For Jacqui Graham and her ilk, the accompanying vision was not of a bespectacled young Texan, dead too soon, but of ironic eyes and overstuffed, well-moistened lips slurring Holly’s original ‘A love for real will not fade away’ to a barely grammatical ‘Love is love and not fade away’; turning wistful hope into a sexual fait accompli. The single raced up every UK chart, peaking at No. 3, while Mick was still out on the road, upstaging, if not upending, Ronnie of the Ronettes.
With so many readers – or, at least, readers’ offspring – converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say as well as recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and ‘dirtiness’. And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom . . . five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair . . . but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’ Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard – who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles – wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: ‘They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years . . . they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.’
The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles – without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté – as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it ‘cut neatly like the Beatles’.
The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skilfully fed the paper: WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The Express helpfully amplified this to WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?, thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.
On the road – travelling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive – the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served pre-dinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.
‘Not Fade Away’ ramped up the mayhem at Stones’ concerts – a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.
British pop’s notional North–South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a ‘Mad Mod Ball’, televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The set-up terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that someone might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.
After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counter-riot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South over those and all other rivals but one. ‘In mass popularity,’ wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, ‘the Stones are second only to the Beatles.’
THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as ‘Not Fade Away’ and – such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism – keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.
Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, the latter always introduced by Mick as ‘our slow one’ and sung in atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still ‘piss off’. Produced in small 45-RPM format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.
The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.
Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.
In February, he had informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be ‘Britain’s most powerful independent record producer’. Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector – and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a back-up singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their break-up to be friends with her.
Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled ‘There Are but Five Rolling Stones’, played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to ‘The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’. Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s ‘black Florence Nightingale’.
The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road – and Brian’s absence in Windsor – meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords – as on ‘Not Fade Away’ – and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fibre of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult – witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ that afternoon at Ken Coyler’s club – and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.
Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted ‘What have you got?’ A resentful, hungry Mick – those lips long-unstoked – ‘told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it’.
That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled ‘It Should Be You’ and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again – and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour – this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne – which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: ‘My Only Girl’, ‘We Were Falling in Love’, ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to ‘gob’ so colourfully up the walls.
Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger– Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. ‘Shang a Doo Lang’, an unashamed knock-off of the Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play back-up percussion at the boozy ‘Not Fade Away’ session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’. Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s ‘My Only Girl’, retitled ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked into the US Hot 100.
Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s ‘Shang a Doo Lang’ in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr Posta to hold a launch party at his flat in Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard ‘started going out with something other than a guitar’, Oldham asked his girlfriend Sheila Klein to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modelling.
Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon– McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.
The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned – ‘Faithfull’ with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness – was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.
Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own name, ‘masochism’, to pleasure derived from self-inflicted pain. Brought up in Hapsburg grandeur, Eva had become an actress and dancer with the Max Reinhardt company in Vienna during the 1930s and, but for the war, might have followed Reinhardt to America and a career in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.
The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to – of all places – Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semi-charity terms at a Catholic convent school, St Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.
She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theatre or music – possibly both – and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folk singer around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball, and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones, and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. ‘Well, actually, yes,’ Dunbar replied.
At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright ‘dolly’ dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: ‘It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits. Andrew and Mick both said together, “I want to fuck her.” Both their girlfriends went, “What did you say?” Mick and Andrew went, “We said we want to record her.”’
Marianne at this point thought the Rolling Stones were ‘yobbish schoolboys . . . with none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney’. By her own later account, she wouldn’t have noticed Mick if he hadn’t been in the throes of yet another row with Chrissie, ‘who was crying and shouting at him . . . and in the heat of the moment, one of her false eyelashes was peeling off’. The person who most interested her was Andrew Oldham, especially when he came over (‘all beaky and angular, like some bird of prey’), brusquely asked his friend John Dunbar for her name – no female equality for years yet! – and, on learning it genuinely was Marianne Faithfull, announced that he intended to make her a pop star.
Within days, to her amazement, Marianne had a contract with the Stones’ label, Decca, and an appointment to record a single with Oldham as her producer. The A-side was to have been a Lionel Bart song, ‘I Don’t Know How (To Tell You)’, but when she tried it out it proved totally unsuited to her voice and to the persona her Svengali intended to create. Instead, Oldham turned to his in-house team of Jagger– Richard, giving them precise instructions as to the kind of ballad he required for Marianne: ‘She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows and no sex.’
Though the result bore a joint credit, Tony Calder remembers its conception to have been entirely Mick’s, working with session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. The monologue of a lonely, disillusioned older woman – harking back to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’ and foreshadowing the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it was a glimpse of the sensitivity and almost feminine intuition Mick was known to possess but so rarely showed. The original title, ‘As Time Goes By’, became ‘As Tears Go By’ to avoid confusion with pianist Dooley Wilson’s famous cabaret spot in the film Casablanca.
With hindsight, Marianne would consider ‘As Tears Go By’ ‘a Françoise Hardy song . . . Europop you might hear on a French jukebox . . . “The Lady of Shalott” to the tune of “These Foolish Things”’. She still concedes that for a songwriter so inexperienced it showed remarkable maturity – clairvoyance even. ‘It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened . . . it’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.’
For this second recording session, Marianne travelled up from Reading to London chaperoned by her friend Sally Oldfield (sister of the future Tubular Bells wizard, Mike). Oldham’s production stuck to the ‘high brick walls and no sex’ formula, toning down her usually robust mezzo-soprano to a wispy demureness, counterpointed by the mournful murmur of a cor anglais, or English horn. Mick and Keith watched the proceedings and afterwards gave the two girls a lift back to Paddington station by taxi. On the way, Mick tried to get Marianne to sit on his lap, but she made Sally do so instead. ‘I mean, it was on that level,’ she recalls. ‘“What a cheeky little yob,” I thought to myself. “So immature.”’
Within a month, ‘As Tears Go By’ was in the UK Top 20, finally peaking at No. 9. British pop finally had a thoroughly English female singer, or so it appeared, rather than just would-be American ones. And the media were confronted with a head-scratching paradox: two members of a band notorious for dirtiness, rawness and uncouthness had brought gentility – not to say virginity – into the charts for the very first time.
The success of ‘As Tears Go By’ might have been expected to start a wholesale winning streak for the Jagger– Richard songwriting partnership that would finally benefit their own band rather than ill-assorted outsiders. But, strangely, having their name on a No. 9 hit acted more like a brake. Mick had no idea where the song had come from and, after weeks of racking his brains with Keith, began to despair of writing anything else a fraction as good.
Certainly, when the Stones’ first album appeared, on 17 April, it was still far from clear that they had a would-be Lennon and McCartney in their ranks. Recorded at Regent Sound in just five days snatched from the Ronettes tour, this was almost completely made up of the cover versions from which Oldham had struggled to wean them – Chuck Berry’s ‘Carol’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona (I Need You Baby)’, Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, James Moore’s ‘I’m a King Bee’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walking the Dog’, Bobby Troup’s ‘Route 66’. The only Jagger– Richard track thought worthy of inclusion was ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’, an echoey ballad in faintly Merseybeat style. The album, in fact, was like a Stones live show (much as the Beatles’ first one had been), its immediacy heightened by Regent Sound’s primitive equipment and Andrew Oldham’s anguished eye on the clock. At the session for ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Mick realised he couldn’t remember all Marvin Gaye’s words, and neither could anyone else present. A hurried phone call had to be made to the song’s publishers on Savile Row for a copy of the lyrics to be hunted out and left in reception. The usefully athletic vocalist ran a half mile from Denmark Street to collect them, then back again. On the track he is still audibly breathless.
The album was entitled, simply, The Rolling Stones – in itself an act of extreme Oldham hubris. The Beatles’ first album had followed custom in bearing the name of a hit single, ‘Please Please Me’, and even their ground-breaking second, With the Beatles, still had a whiff of conventionality. But Oldham did not stop there. In defiance of Decca Records’ entire marketing department, he insisted that The Rolling Stones’ front cover showed neither name nor title – just a glossy picture of the five standing sideways with heavily shadowed, unsmiling faces turned to the camera. Mick was first, then dapper Charlie, a squeezed-in Bill and barely recognisable Keith, with Brian – the only one in their old stage uniform of leather waistcoat and shirtsleeves rather than varicoloured suits – symbolically at the back and out of line.
On its reverse, the cover returned to wordy normality, with track listings, studio credits and a pronouncement that seemed like yet more Oldham hubris: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group – they are a way of life.’ Little did even he imagine that, almost half a century later, at the BAFTA film awards, an audience of the world’s most glamorous people would still be hungering to lead it.
Advance orders for The Rolling Stones exceeded 100,000 as against only 6,000 for the Beatles’ album début, Please Please Me. Better still, as it climbed the UK album chart to No. 1 it passed With the Beatles, finally on the decline after six months in the Top 20. The Stones, Oldham crowed delightedly, had ‘knocked the Beatles off’ in their home market. Now for America.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_4ca3539f-4ebc-54ee-b7bb-9d9a4fb171d2)
‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ (#ulink_4ca3539f-4ebc-54ee-b7bb-9d9a4fb171d2)
For any British band, the supreme challenge, and greatest thrill, is to ‘crack’ America. And few have failed quite so comprehensively as the Rolling Stones on their first US tour, in June 1964. The country would notice Mick soon enough, for better or worse, but during most of this initial three-week visit he was a barely distinguishable face among five, taking his equal share of disappointment and humiliation.
The Stones were not only following the triumphal footsteps of the Beatles four months earlier; they were also well to the rear in the so-called British Invasion of other UK bands who had stampeded after John, Paul, George and Ringo across the Atlantic and into the US charts. On the American edition of their first album, they were billed as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, bracketing them with ‘soft’ pop acts they despised, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and the Dave Clark Five.
When the Beatles had arrived in New York in February, it was with an American No. 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. But the Stones could offer no such impressive calling card. Their Beatle-bestowed UK hit, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, had been released on the London label, Decca’s US affiliate, but then abruptly withdrawn because its B-side was called ‘Stoned’, which in America meant drunk. It had then been rereleased, coupled with ‘Not Fade Away’, but even in a market supposedly ravenous for all British bands had barely scraped into Billboard magazine’s Top 50.
Thanks to Andrew Oldham, their transatlantic hosts had been primed to welcome them like a new strain of herpes. ‘Americans, brace yourselves!’ warned the flash circulated to newspapers and broadcast media by the Associated Press. ‘In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting Britons is on the way . . . dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles . . .’ The Fab Four had flown off, carrying the whole nation’s hopes and even prayers like Neville Chamberlain bound for Munich or a Test cricket team for Australasia. Before the Stones left Heathrow Airport on 1 June an MP in the House of Commons expressed fears that they might do real harm to Anglo-American relations.
Even with this advance word-of-badmouth, it proved impossible for Oldham to whip up any major media coverage on the American side. Turndowns came from the NBC and CBS TV networks and, most slightingly, from The Ed Sullivan Show, which had clinched the Beatles’ conquest by beaming them to a national audience of more than 70 million. Paradoxically, the splashiest print coverage came from a quarter not normally interested in dirtiness and scruffiness – Vogue magazine. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue’s American edition, agreed to publish a David Bailey photograph of Mick that every British magazine had rejected, despite never having heard of him or his band. ‘I don’t care who he is,’ she told Bailey. ‘He looks great, so I’ll run it.’
While calling the Stones ‘scruffier and seedier than the Beatles’, Vogue summed them up more pithily than any UK publication thus far, and with a hint of ladylike moist gussets that probably did Mick’s image more good in the long run than NBC, CBS and Ed Sullivan put together: ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger, one of the five Rolling Stones, those singers [sic] who will set out to cross America by bandwagon in June. For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his teammates. To women he’s fascinating, to men a scare . . .’
Since the Beatles’ reception by three thousand banner-waving fans, spilling over observation terraces and buckling plate-glass windows, the arrival of British pop bands at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport had become a routine story to the city’s media. For the Stones, London Records laid on a markedly cut-price version of the now-familiar procedure, enlisting a few dozen teenage girls to scream dutifully as the band descended the aircraft steps after their economy-class flight, hiring a couple of Old English sheepdogs to represent kindred spirits, and providing a cake for Charlie Watts’s twenty-third birthday. At the press conference which followed, there was surprise, even some disappointment, when they proved to be politer and better spoken than most of the invaders who had come before. Who was the leader? one reporter asked. ‘We are . . . all of us,’ Mick lisped in his best LSE accent, without a frisson of Cockney.
The Beatles had spent their first New York landfall with their manager and considerable retinue in interconnecting luxury suites at the top of Manhattan’s grandest hotel, the Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The Stones spent theirs at the far-from-grand Hotel Astor in Times Square, bunking two to a poky room with their retinue (i.e., roadie Ian Stewart). To save money – an urgent consideration throughout the tour – Oldham slept on the office sofa of his friend and role model, Phil Spector.
Once his charges had checked into the Astor (which, miraculously, offered no objection), Oldham managed to feed the British press a story that, in true Beatle style, they had caused riots in midtown Manhattan and were imprisoned in their hotel by shrieking mobs. Unfortunately, agency photos which arrived home at the same time showed them exploring the Times Square district without a single hysteric in sight.
That is not to say that they went unnoticed. They had come to a land where every ‘manly’ man, from President Lyndon Johnson downwards, had hair cropped as close to the scalp as a convict’s but for a little toothbrushlike crest. The Beatles had been let off their hair because of some vague correlation with British classical theatre – Laurence Olivier as Richard III or Hamlet. But Rolling Stone hair meant only homosexuality, which – save in certain enlightened parts of Greenwich Village – was regarded as even more unnatural and detestable than it was in Britain. What should have been a magical first experience of New York for Mick and the others was marred by the typically forthright comments of passing New Yorkers: ‘Ya fuckin’ faggot!’ or ‘Look at that goddamn faggot!’ The fact that to English ears faggot still meant a rissole, or meat patty, did not make the experience any pleasanter.
The city’s welcome grew several degrees warmer after they met up with Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the WINS radio deejay who had generated huge publicity for his show, and himself, by hooking onto the Beatles back in February. Now he adopted the Stones in the same way, escorting them to nightspots like the Peppermint Lounge – where the Twist had been born and was now in its death throes – and introducing them to useful New York music-biz cronies like Bob Crewe, songwriter and producer to the Four Seasons.
The Stones privately thought Murray the K a ludicrous figure, but he did do them one huge favour. It happened at a party at Crewe’s apartment, in a gloomy Central Parkside pile known as the Dakota where, sixteen years later, the Beatles’ story would come to a horrific full stop. During the evening, Murray gave Andrew Oldham an R&B single, ‘It’s All Over Now’, written by Sam Cooke’s guitarist Bobby Womack and recorded by Womack and his three brothers as the Valentinos. It would be a perfect song for the Stones to cover, the deejay insisted. And the rights could be picked up here in New York from Womack’s manager, an accountant-turned-pop impresario named Allen Klein.
For Mick and Keith, the main point of being in New York was to visit the Apollo Theater, Harlem’s famous showplace for black music, which had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder among many others. Harlem was still a no-go area for unaccompanied whites, so they had to ask Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – on whom Keith still had a huge crush – to be their guide. Because of the difficulty of getting cabs back to Midtown late at night, which, anyway, they couldn’t afford, they had to sleep on the floor at Ronnie’s mother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem. In the morning, she would cook them bacon and eggs, and they would thank her with punctilious good manners.
To add to the thrill, it happened to be James Brown Week at the Apollo. Known as ‘the Godfather of Soul’, Brown had a mesmerising stage act that combined R&B and soul with Barnum-esque showmanship: backed by his vocal group the Famous Flames, he never stopped moving for a second, boogieing as if on an invisible Travelator (two decades before Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk), hurling himself onto his knees or into the splits, finally suffering a make-believe seizure, when two minders would rush from the wings, wrap him in a cloak and half carry him away. Four or five of these operatic cardiac arrests would be simulated before the curtain finally fell.
Such was Mick’s awe of the Godfather that he never had covered any of Brown’s great showstoppers: not ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, or ‘Please Please Please’ or even ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’, much as he might applaud the sentiment. Now, in the Apollo’s marijuana-scented dark, he took careful note of every dance move Brown made, to be practised later in front of a full-length mirror. When Ronnie sneaked him and Keith into Brown’s dressing room, he beheld an almost monarchical figure, surrounded by servants and sycophants, who took care of business as assiduously as he did music, watched every penny and imposed strict discipline on his musicians, fining anyone who was late or went onstage with dirty shoes. Here, too, were important lessons for the future.
From New York, the Stones flew to Los Angeles to make their one nationwide TV appearance. This was not on a prestigious show like Ed Sullivan’s, but Hollywood Palace, a mixed-bag variety programme emceed that week by Dean Martin. When they turned up at the studio, the producer was aghast that they weren’t in matching suits and, unavailingly, offered them money to go out and buy some. They did not meet the great ‘Dino’ himself during rehearsals, when a stand-in was used; only during transmission did they realise they had been set up as stooges to their host’s boozy humour. ‘Now here’s something for the youngsters,’ Martin announced with an air of intense long-suffering. ‘Five young musicians from England . . . the Rolling Stones. I’ve been rolled a few times when I was stoned myself. I dunno what they’re singin’ about, but here they are . . .’ A few moments of Mick singing ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, and their tuxedo-clad host was sniping at them again. ‘The Rolling Stones! Aren’t they great? [Exaggerated eye roll] People talk about these long-haired groups but it’s really an optical illusion. They just have smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.’
The tour that followed had been planned by the American agency GAC, seemingly with some of the same malevolence. There was a good opening show in San Bernardino, California, where a capacity crowd roared enthusiastic response to the name check their home town received in Mick’s version of ‘Route 66’. After that, a series of economy-class internal flights took the band on a transcontinental wander far off Route 66: San Antonio, Minneapolis, Omaha, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Their support was the American balladeer Bobby Vee, whose backing musicians wore matching mohair suits, collars and ties just like the ones they themselves had lately escaped. At some stops, they found themselves appearing at state fairs in company with carnival midways, rodeos and circus acts, including a baby elephant and a troupe of seals. Thanks to wildly uneven advance publicity, audience sizes varied between a rapturous two or three thousand and an apathetic few dozen among whom the dominant element were homophobic red-necked cowboys.
The Stones’ heyday as arrogant kings of the American road were still far in the future. Surrounded by gun-toting, crop-headed and resentful police, they all did their utmost not to step out of line. In one cheerless, raw-brick dressing room, Mick and Brian were drinking rum and Coca-Cola while Keith, atypically, made do with plain Coke. A policeman walked up and screamed at them to empty their glasses down the toilet. When Keith protested, the cop drew his gun. Also in contrast with later trans-American journeys, Keith would recall, ‘it was almost impossible to have sex . . . In New York or LA you can always find something, but when you’re in Omaha in 1964 and you suddenly feel horny, you’ve had it.’
The itinerary, however, included something of importance far outweighing these petty – and short-lived – setbacks. In Chicago, Oldham had booked the Stones to lay down some tracks (hopefully including their next British single) at Chess Records, the mythic label on which Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and just about every other major R&B and blues giant had transfigured Mick’s prim boyhood. Other than counselling him, against all his instincts, to become wicked, it was probably the greatest service his Svengali ever did him.
This nonpareil black music label had in fact been started by two white men, Polish immigrants named Leonard and Phil Chess, who had changed their surname from Czyz. Leonard’s twenty-two-year-old son, Marshall, had worked for the company since the age of thirteen and, during a spell in the postroom, used to send off albums to an unknown blues fanatic in England named Mike Jagger. Normally, Chess did not allow outsiders to record in its studio – especially young, white, British ones – but Marshall knew about the blues scene in London, so he persuaded his father and uncle to make an exception for them.
The band spent two days in Chess’s studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, working with the label’s most-sought-after engineer, Ron Malo. (Having delivered them there, Oldham had the good sense not to put on airs as their producer, but stayed discreetly in the background.) Malo treated the awestruck young Britons like musicians as legitimate as any others; their response was to work hard and harmoniously, finishing fourteen tracks during the two day-long sessions.
Top of the list was that gift from Murray the K, ‘It’s All Over Now’. The Valentinos’ version had hovered on the edge of burlesque, with a hermaphrodite lead vocal and a tempo lifted from Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. Ron Malo turned it into a guitar-jangly pop track with a growling bass riff that was instant jukebox fodder, yet preserved the Stones’ essential roughness and hinted at the myriad influences of the blues mecca around them. While all the band sounded better than they ever had, the main advance was in Mick’s voice, now refined to a punk-Dixie snarl and hovering between self-pity (‘Well, I used to wake ’n mawnin’, git ma brekfusst in ba-a-id . . .’) and yah-boo triumph (‘Yes, I used to looeerve her, bu-u-rd it’s awl over now . . .’). Bobby Womack’s original lyric spoke of the errant girlfriend’s having ‘spent all my money . . . played the high-class game’, which Mick amended to ‘half-assed game’.
Marshall Chess was amused to see Mick, Brian and Keith behave in the studio as they thought their blues masters did, ‘swigging Jack Daniel’s from the bottle, where our guys would’ve poured it into a glass and sipped it’. Partly, this was nerves; they expected real Chicago bluesmen to tear them to pieces for their presumption. But in fact they were met with nothing but friendliness. During the first day’s session two of their greatest heroes, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, both dropped by Malo’s studio to listen and bestow compliments and encouragement. On their second morning they found themselves walking in through Chess’s front lobby beside an immaculately dressed man with the face of a merry black Toby Jug – none other than Muddy Waters, without whose catalogue (not least ‘Rollin’ Stone’) they would never have got started. Muddy carried himself as regally as a king but, on seeing roadie Ian Stewart struggling with the Stones’ equipment, picked up an amp and carried it into the studio for them.
At the end of their second day, the great Chuck Berry himself drove in from his country-estate-cum-hotel, Berry Park, to take a look. Though never noted for philanthropy to young musicians, he could not but be softened by the Stones’ devotion – and the number of his songs they were covering that would pay him royalties. ‘Swing on, gentlemen,’ he told them in flawless Berry-ese. ‘You are sounding most well, if I may say so.’
Keith was always to remember a beyond-brilliant Chess session musician named Big Red, a huge black albino with a Gibson guitar that looked ‘like a mandolin’ in his hands. During breaks from their own session, Mick, Keith, Charlie and Stu used to creep into the next-door studio and listen to Big Red, but could never pluck up courage to ask him to sit in with them. ‘We just thought we were terribly lucky to be there, so let’s learn what we can,’ Keith would recall. ‘It was like being given extra tuition.’
And Mick? Before leaving Britain, he’d told an interviewer with unusual candour, and passion, that his main objective in America was to meet as many of his blues idols as possible, and that even ‘to see and hear them work in person will be a big thing for me’. What happened with Chuck and Muddy and Willie and Buddy and Big Red in Chicago was, by a long way, the most thrilling experience of his life thus far. But afterwards it was to be swallowed up by all-enveloping Jagger amnesia. ‘I don’t remember going to Chess,’ he would claim. ‘It’s just something I read about in books.’
Back in New York, things decidedly improved with a better hotel, the Park Sheraton (albeit still in shared rooms), and two sold-out concerts, like the Beatles’, at the city’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. After the second show, there was a party at the hotel with guests including the New York Post pop correspondent, and Bob Dylan’s close friend, Al Aronowitz. ‘The first thing we saw when we walked in,’ Aronowitz recalled, ‘was Mick sitting on a bed, surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks, fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body . . . Okay, Mick’d discovered room service.’
There was also a first glimpse of the Jagger attitude to women that we will come to know so well. At one point, Gloria Stavers, the influential editor of 16 Magazine, approached him among his seraglio to tell him how much she’d enjoyed the show. ‘Should I be flattered?’ he replied.
With the release of the Stones’ ‘Merseybeat’ song ‘Tell Me’ as a US single increasing album sales, and a general sense of making some headway at last, it was clearly vital for them to extend their visit beyond its scheduled three weeks. Instead – bafflingly to new American converts like Aronowitz and Murray the K – Oldham whisked them home as scheduled. The excuse he gave out was that they had to honour a booking to play at the summer ball of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth was that he couldn’t afford to keep them in America a moment longer. In contrast to later forays there, he calculated the tour had earned them ten old shillings, or fifty pence, each.
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Philip Norman
A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex-appeal, and strutting talent . The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time. A musical genius with a career spanning over four decades. Mick Jagger is a testament at once to British glamour and sensual decline, the ultimate architect and demi-god of rock.Bestselling biographer Philip Norman offers an unparalleled account of the life of a living legend, Mick Jagger. From Home Counties schoolboy, to rebel without a cause to Sixties rock sensation and global idol, Norman unravels with astonishing intimacy the myth of the inimitable frontman of The Rolling Stones. MICK JAGGER charts his extraordinary journey through scandal-ridden conspiracy, infamous prison spell, hordes of female admirers and a knighthood while stripping away the colossal fame, wealth and idolatry to reveal a story of talent and promise unfulfilled.Understated yet ostentatious; the ultimate incarnation of modern man's favourite fantasy: 'sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll', yet blessed with taste and intelligence; a social chameleon who couldn't blend in if he tried; always moving with the Jagger swagger yet modest enough to be self-deprecating, Mick was a paradoxical energy that reconfigured the musical landscape.This revelatory tour de force is ample tribute to a flawed genius, a Casanova, an Antichrist and a god who, with characteristic nonchalance realised the dreams of thousands of current contenders and rocker pretenders, longevity, while coasting on a sea of fur rugs.
TO SUE, WITH LOVE
CONTENTS
Cover (#uf990933b-471c-5803-8e2d-19ba31dff337)
Title Page (#uce304b1c-2501-57e5-bde3-246e3bf91a84)
Dedication (#u1b6755a3-0b0e-5841-baf9-1649d30d2364)
Prologue: Sympathy for the Old Devil
PART I: ‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’
ONE India-Rubber Boy
TWO The Kid in the Cardigan
THREE ‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’
FOUR ‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’
FIVE ‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself’
SIX ‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’
SEVEN ‘We Piss Anywhere, Man’
EIGHT Secrets of the Pop Stars’ Hideaway
NINE Elusive Butterfly
TEN ‘Mick Jagger and Fred Engels on Street Fighting’
PART II: THE TYRANNY OF COOL
ELEVEN ‘The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said’
TWELVE Some Day My Prince Will Come
THIRTEEN The Balls of a Lion
FOURTEEN ‘As Lethal as Last Week’s Lettuce’
FIFTEEN Friendship with Benefits
SIXTEEN The Glamour Twins
SEVENTEEN ‘Old Wild Men, Waiting for Miracles’
EIGHTEEN Sweet Smell of Success
NINETEEN The Diary of a Nobody
TWENTY Wandering Spirit
TWENTY-ONE God Gave Me Everything
Postscript
Picture Section
List of Searchable Terms
Acknowledgements
Also by Philip Norman
Copyright
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
Sympathy for the Old Devil (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
The British Academy of Film and Television Arts is not normally a controversial body, but in February 2009 it became the target of outraged tabloid headlines. To emcee its annual film awards – an event regarded as second only to Hollywood’s Oscars – BAFTA had chosen Jonathan Ross, the floppy-haired, foul-mouthed chat-show host who was currently the most notorious figure in UK broadcasting. A few weeks previously, Ross had used a peak-time BBC radio programme to leave a series of obscene messages on the answering machine of the former Fawlty Towers actor Andrew Sachs. As a result, he had been suspended from all his various BBC slots for three months while comedian Russell Brand, his fellow presenter and accomplice in the prank (who boasted on air about ‘shagging’ Sachs’s granddaughter) had bowed to pressure and left the corporation altogether. Since the 1990s, comedy in Britain has been known as ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’; now here were two of its principal ornaments positively straining a gut to be as naughty as old-school rock stars.
On awards night at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, a celebrity-packed audience including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Sir Ben Kingsley, Kevin Spacey and Kristin Scott-Thomas received two surprises outside the actual winners list. The first was that the bad language everyone had anticipated from Jonathan Ross came instead from Mickey Rourke on receiving the Best Actor award for The Wrestler. Tangle-haired, unshaven and barely coherent – since movie acting also lays urgent claim to being ‘the new rock ’n’ roll’ – Rourke thanked his director for this second chance ‘after fucking up my career for fifteen years’, and his publicist ‘for telling me where to go, what to do, when to do it, what to eat, how to dress, what to fuck . . .’
Having quipped that Rourke would pay the same penalty he himself had for ‘Sachsgate’ and be suspended for three months, Ross moderated his tone to one of fawning reverence. As presenter of the evening’s penultimate statuette, for Best Film, he called on ‘an actor and lead singer with one of the greatest rock bands in history’; somebody for whom this lofty red-and-gold-tiered auditorium ‘must seem like one of the smaller venues’ (and who, incidentally, could once have made the Sachsgate scandal look very small beer). Almost sacrilegiously, in this temple to pure acoustic Mozart, Wagner and Puccini, the sound system began chugging out the electric guitar intro to ‘Brown Sugar’, that 1971 rock anthem to drugs, slavery and interracial cunnilingus. Yes indeed, the award giver was Sir Mick Jagger.
Jagger’s entrance was no simple hop up to the podium but a lengthy red-carpet walk from the rear of the stage, to allow television viewers to drink in the full miracle. That still-plentiful hair, cut in youthful retro sixties mode, untainted by a single spark of grey. That understated couture suit, worn in deference to the occasion but also subtly emphasising the suppleness of the slight torso beneath and the springy, athletic step. Only the face betrayed the sixty-five-year-old, born at the height of the Second World War – the famous lips, once said to be able to ‘suck an egg out of a chicken’s arse’, now drawn in and bloodless; the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars.
The ovation that greeted him belonged less to the Royal Opera House or the British Association for Film and Television Arts than to some giant open-air space like Wembley or Dodger Stadium. Despite all the proliferating genres of ‘new’ rock ’n’ roll, everyone knows there is only one genuine kind and that Mick Jagger remains its unrivalled incarnation. He responded with his disarming smile, a raucous ‘Allaw!’ and an impromptu flash of Rolling Stone subversiveness: ‘You see? You thought Jonathan would do all the “fuck”-ing, and Mickey did it . . .’
The voice then changed, the way it always does to suit the occasion. For decades, Jagger has spoken in the faux-Cockney accent known as ‘Mockney’ or ‘Estuary English’, whose misshapen, elongated vowels and obliterated t consonants are the badge of youthful cool in modern Britain. But here, amid the cream of English elocution, his diction of every t was bell clear, every h punctiliously aspirated as he said what an honour it was to be here tonightt, then went on to reveal ‘how it all came aboutt’.
A neat little joke followed, perfectly pitched between mockery and deference. He was here, he said, under ‘the RMEP – the Rock Stars–Movie Stars Exchange Programme . . . At this moment, “Sir” Ben Kingsley [giving the title ironic emphasis even though he shared it] will be singing “Brown Sugar” at the Grammys . . . “Sir” Anthony Hopkins is in the recording studio with Amy Winehouse . . . “Dame” Judi Dench is gamely trashing hotel rooms somewhere in the US . . . and we hope that next week “Sir” Brad and the Pitt family will be performing The Sound of Music at the Brit Awards.’ (Cut to Kevin Spacey and Meryl Streep laughing ecstatically and Angelina explaining the joke to Brad.)
Opening the envelope, he announced that the Best Film award went Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire – so very much what people used to consider him. But there was no doubt about the real winner. Jagger had scored his biggest hit since . . . oh . . . ‘Start Me Up’ in 1981. ‘It took a lot to out-glamour that place,’ one academician commented, ‘but he did it.’
Half a century ago, when the Rolling Stones ran neck and neck with the Beatles, one question above all used to be thrown at the young Mick Jagger in the eternal quest to get something enlightening, or even interesting, out of him: did he think he’d still be singing ‘Satisfaction’ when he was thirty?
In those innocent early sixties, pop music belonged exclusively to the young and was thought to be totally in thrall to youth’s fickleness. Even the most successful acts – even the Beatles – expected a few months at most at the top before being elbowed aside by new favourites. Back then, no one dreamed how many of those seemingly ephemeral songs would still be being played and replayed a lifetime hence or how many of those seemingly disposable singers and bands would still be plying their trade as old-age pensioners, greeted with the same fanatical devotion for as long as they could totter back onstage.
In the longevity stakes, the Stones leave all competition far behind. The Beatles lasted barely three years as an international live attraction and only nine in total (if you discount the two they spent acrimoniously breaking up). Other bands from the sixties’ top drawer like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and the Who, if not fractured by alcohol or drugs, drifted apart over time, then re-formed, their terminal boredom with their old repertoire, and one another, mitigated by the huge rewards on offer. Only the Stones, once seemingly the most unstable of all, have kept rolling continuously from decade to decade, then century to century; weathering the sensational death of one member and the embittered resignations of two others (plus ongoing internal politics that would impress the Medicis); leaving behind generations of wives and lovers; outlasting two managers, nine British prime ministers and the same number of American presidents; impervious to changing musical fads, gender politics and social mores; as sexagenarians still somehow retaining the same sulphurous whiff of sin and rebellion they had in their twenties. The Beatles have eternal charm; the Stones have eternal edge.
Over the decades since their joint heyday, of course, pop music’s essentials have hardly changed. Each new generation of musicians hits on the same chords in the same order and adopts the same language of love, lust and loss; each new generation of fans seeks the same kind of male idol with the same kind of sex appeal, the same repertoire of gestures, attitudes and manifestations of cool.
The notion of a rock ‘band’ – young ensemble musicians enjoying fame, wealth and sexual opportunity undreamed of by their historic counterparts in military regiments or northern colliery towns – was well established by the time the Stones got going, and has not changed one iota since. It remains as true that, even though the pop industry mostly is about illusion, exploitation and hype, true talent will always out, and always endure. From the Stones’ great rabble-rousing hits like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’ to obscure early tracks like ‘Off the Hook’ or ‘Play with Fire’, and the R&B cover versions that came before, their music sounds as fresh as if recorded yesterday.
They remain role models for every band that makes it – the pampered boy potentates, lolling ungraciously on a couch as flashbulbs detonate, the same old questions are shouted by reporters, and the same facetious answers thrown back. The kind of tour they created in the late sixties is what everyone still wants: the private jets, the limos, the entourages, the groupies, the trashed hotel suites. All the well-documented evidence of how soul-destroyingly monotonous it soon becomes, all Christopher Guest’s brilliant send-up of a boneheaded travelling supergroup in This Is Spinal Tap, cannot destroy the mystique of ‘going on the road’, the eternal allure of ‘sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll’. Yet try as these youthful disciples may, they could never reproduce the swath which the on-road Stones cut through the more innocent world of forty-odd years ago, or touch remotely comparable levels of arrogance, self-indulgence, hysteria, paranoia, violence, vandalism and wicked joy.
Above all Mick Jagger, at any age, is inimitable. Jagger it was who, more than anyone, invented the concept of the ‘rock star’ as opposed to mere singer within a band – the figure set apart from his fellow musicians (a major innovation in those days of unified Beatles, Hollies, Searchers et al.) who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds. Keith Richards, Jagger’s co-figurehead in the Stones, is a uniquely talented guitarist, as well as the rock world’s most unlikely survivor, but Keith belongs in a troubadour tradition stretching back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Django Reinhardt, continuing on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Noel Gallagher and Pete Doherty. Jagger, on the other hand, founded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on. Among his rivals in rock showmanship, only Jim Morrison of the Doors found a different way to sing into a microphone, cradling it tenderly in both hands like a frightened baby bird rather than flourishing it, Jagger-style, like a phallus. Since the 1970s, many other gifted bands have emerged with vast international followings and indubitably charismatic front men – Freddie Mercury of Queen, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bono of U2, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Distinctive on record they might be, but when they took the stage they had no choice but to follow in Jagger’s strutting footsteps.
His status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph ‘the Sheik’ Valentino, the silent cinema star who aroused 1920s women to palpitant dreams of being thrown across the saddle of a horse and carried off to a Bedouin tent in the desert. With Jagger, the aura was closer to great ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces. The Stones were one of the first rock bands to have a logo and, even for the louche early seventies, it was daringly explicit – a livid-red cartoon of Jagger’s own mouth, the cushiony lips sagging open with familiar gracelessness, the tongue slavering out to slurp an invisible something which, very clearly, was not ice cream. This ‘lapping tongue’ still adorns all the Stones’ literature and merchandise, symbolic of who controls every department. To modern eyes, there could hardly be a cruder monument to old-fashioned male chauvinism – yet it finds its mark as surely as ever. The most liberated twenty-first-century females perk up at the sound of Jagger’s name while those he captivated in the twentieth still belong to him in every fibre. As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbour at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan simulates orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant. ‘Mick Jagger? Oh . . . yes! Yes, YES, YES!’
Sexual icons are notoriously prone to fall short of their public image in private; look at Mae West, Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. But in the oversexed world of rock, in the whole annals of show business, Jagger’s reputation as a modern Casanova is unequalled. It’s questionable whether even the greatest lotharios of centuries past found sexual partners in such prodigious number, or were so often saved the tiresome preliminaries of seduction. Certainly, none maintained his prowess, as Jagger has, through middle and then old age (Casanova was knackered by his mid-thirties). What Swift called ‘the rage of the groin’ is now known as sex addiction and can be cured by therapy, but Jagger has never shown any sign of considering it a problem.
Looking at that craggy countenance, one tries but fails to imagine the vast carnal banquet on which he has gorged, yet still not sated himself . . . the unending gallery of beautiful faces and bright, willing eyes . . . the innumerable chat-up lines, delivered and received . . . the countless brusque adjournments to beds, couches, heaped-up cushions, dressing room floors, shower stalls or limo back seats . . . the ever-changing voices, scents, skin tones and hair colour . . . the names instantly forgotten, if ever known in the first place . . . Old men are often revisited in dreams, or daydreams, by the women they have lusted after. For him, it would be like one of those old-style reviews of the Soviet army in Red Square. And at least one of the gorgeous foot soldiers is among his BAFTA audience tonight, seated not a million miles from Brad Pitt.
By rights, the scandals in which he starred during the 1960s should have been forgotten decades ago, cancelled out by the teeming peccadilloes of today’s pop stars, soccer players, supermodels and reality-TV stars. But the sixties have an indestructible fascination, most of all among those too young to remember them – the condition known to psychologists as ‘nostalgia without memory’. Jagger personifies that ‘swinging’ era for Britain’s youth, both its freedom and hedonism and the backlash it finally provoked. Even quite young people today have heard of his 1967 drug bust, or at least of the Mars bar which figured so lewdly in it. Few realise the extent of the British establishment’s vindictiveness during that so-called Summer of Love; how tonight’s witty, well-spoken knight of the realm was reviled like a long-haired Antichrist, led to court in handcuffs, subjected to a show trial of almost medieval grotesquerie, then thrown into prison.
He is perhaps the ultimate example of that well-loved show-business stereotype, the ‘survivor’. But while most rock ’n’ roll survivors end up as bulgy old farts in grey ponytails, he is unchanged – other than facially – from the day he first took the stage. While most others have long since addled their wits with drugs or alcohol, his faculties are all intact, not least his celebrated instinct for what is fashionable, cool and posh. While others whinge about the money they lost or were cheated out of, he leads the biggest-earning band in history, its own survival achieved solely by his determination and astuteness. Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968; from a gang of scruffball outsiders, he turned them into a British national treasure as legitimate as Shakespeare or the White Cliffs of Dover.
Yet behind all the idolatry, wealth and superabundant satisfaction is a story of talent and promise consistently, almost stubbornly, unfulfilled. Among all his contemporaries endowed with half a brain, only John Lennon had as many opportunities to move beyond the confines of pop. Though undeniably an actor, as Jonathan Ross introduced him to BAFTA, with both film and TV roles to his credit, Jagger could have developed a parallel screen career as successful as Presley’s or Sinatra’s, perhaps even more so. He could have used his sway over audiences to become a politician, perhaps a leader, such as the world had never seen – and still has not. He could have extended the (often overlooked) brilliance of his best song lyrics into poetry or prose, as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have done. At the very least, he could have become a first-echelon performer in his own right instead of merely fronting a band. But, somehow or other, none of it came to pass. His film-acting career stalled in 1970 and never restarted in any significant way, despite the literally dozens of juicy screen roles he was offered. He did no more than toy with the idea of politics and has never shown any signs of wanting to be a serious writer. As for going solo, he waited until the mid-eighties to make his move, creating such ill-feeling among the other Stones, especially Keith, that he had to choose between continuing or seeing the band implode. As a consequence, he is still only their front man, doing the same job he was at eighteen.
There is also the puzzle of how someone who fascinates so many millions, and is so clearly super-intelligent and perceptive, manages to make himself so very unfascinating when he opens those celebrated lips to speak. Even since the media first began pursuing Jagger, his on-the-record utterances have had the kind of non-committal blandness associated with British royalty. Look into any of the numerous ‘Rolling Stones in their own words’ compilations published in the past four decades and you’ll find Mick’s always the fewest and most anodyne. In 1983, he signed a contract with the British publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write his autobiography for the then astounding sum £1 million. It should have been the show-business memoir of the century; instead, the ghostwritten manuscript was pronounced irremediably dull by the publishers and the entire advance had to be returned.
His explanation was that he ‘couldn’t remember anything’, by which of course he didn’t mean his birthplace or his mother’s name but the later personal stuff for which Weidenfeld had stumped up £1 million and any publisher today would happily pay five times as much. That has been his position ever since, when approached to do another book or pressed by interviewers for chapter and verse. Sorry, his phenomenal past is all just ‘a blur’.
This image of a man whose recall disappeared thirty years ago like some early-onset Alzheimer’s victim’s is pure nonsense, as anyone who knows him can attest. It’s a handy way of getting out of things – something he has always had down to a fine art. It gets him out of months boringly closeted with a ghostwriter, or answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to ‘forget’, say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London Times editorial or ditching Allen Klein or standing up to homicidal Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival or getting married in front of the world’s massed media in Saint-Tropez or being fingerprinted in Rhode Island or making Steven Spielberg fall on his knees in adulation or having Andy Warhol as a child-minder or being stalked by naked women with green pubic hair in Montauk or persuading a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to shut up and listen to a poem by Shelley?
Such is the enduring paradox of Mick: a supreme achiever to whom his own colossal achievements seem to mean nothing, a supreme extrovert who prefers discretion, a supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself. Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, and the one least affected by all the madness, put it best: ‘Mick doesn’t care what happened yesterday. All he ever cares about is tomorrow.’
So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.
PART I (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
‘THE BLUES IS IN HIM’ (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
CHAPTER ONE (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
India-Rubber Boy (#uf7997d5a-a073-50fc-b55b-2677213b6dcb)
To become what we call ‘a star’, it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.
Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars, from Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf to Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, have fulfilled some if not all of these criteria. How, then, to account for Mick Jagger, who fulfils none of them?
Jagger bucked the trend with his very first breath. We expect stars to be born in unpromising locales that make their later rise seem all the more spectacular . . . a dirt-poor cabin in Mississippi . . . a raffish seaport . . . the dressing room of a seedy vaudeville theatre . . . a Parisian slum. We do not expect them to be born in thoroughly comfortable but unstimulating circumstances in the English county of Kent.
Southern England has always been the wealthiest, most privileged part of the country, but clustered around London is a special little clique of shires known rather snootily as ‘the Home Counties’. Kent is the most easterly of these, bounded in the north by the Thames Estuary, in the south by Dover’s sacred white cliffs and the English Channel. And, rather like its most famous twentieth-century son, it has multiple personalities. For some, this is ‘the Garden of England’ with its rolling green heart known as the Weald, its apple and cherry orchards and hop fields, and its conical redbrick hop-drying kilns or oast houses. For others, it conjures up the glory of Canterbury Cathedral, where ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas à Becket met his end, or stately homes like Knole and Sissinghurst, or faded Victorian seaside resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. For others, it suggests county cricket, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, or ultra-respectable Royal Tunbridge Wells, whose residents are so famously addicted to writing to newspapers that the nom de plume ‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ has become shorthand for any choleric elderly Briton fulminating against modern morals or manners. (‘Disgusted, Tunbridge Wells’ will play no small part in the story that follows.)
In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar’s Roman legions waded ashore on Walmer Beach, Kent has mainly been a place that people pass through – Chaucer’s pilgrims ‘from every shire’s ende’ trudging towards Canterbury, armies bound for European wars, present-day traffic to and from the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone and the Chunnel. As a result, the true heart of the county is difficult to place. There certainly is a distinctive Kentish burr, subtly different from that of neighbouring Sussex, varying from town to town, even village to village, but the predominant accent is dictated by the metropolis that blends seamlessly into its northern margins. The earliest linguistic colonisers were the trainloads of East End Cockneys who arrived each summer to help bring in the hop harvest; since then, proliferating ‘dormitory towns’ for city office workers have made London-speak ubiquitous.
Jagger is neither a Kentish name nor a London one – despite the City lawyer named Jaggers in Dickens’s Great Expectations – but originated some two hundred miles to the north, around Halifax in Yorkshire. Although its most famous bearer (in his ‘Street Fighting Man’ period) would relish the similarity to jagged, claiming that it once meant ‘knifer’ or ‘footpad’, it actually derives from the Old English jag for a ‘pack’ or ‘load’, and denotes a carter, peddler or hawker. Pre-Mick, it adorned only one minor celebrity, the Victorian engineer Joseph Hobson Jagger, who devised a successful system for winning at roulette and may partly have inspired a famous music-hall song, ‘The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. The family could thus claim a precedent for hitting the jackpot.
No such mercenary aims possessed Mick’s father, Basil Fanshawe Jagger – always known as Joe – who was born in 1913 and raised in an atmosphere of clean-living altruism. Joe’s Yorkshireman father, David, was a village school headmaster in days when all the pupils would share a single room, sitting on long wooden forms and writing on slates with chalk. Despite a small, slender build, Joe proved a natural athlete, equally good at all track-and-field sports, with a special flair for gymnastics. Given his background and idealistic, unselfish temperament, it was natural he should choose a career in what was then known as PT – physical training. He studied at Manchester and London universities and, in 1938, was appointed PT instructor at the state-run East Central School in Dartford, Kent.
Situated in the far north-west of the county, Dartford is practically an east London suburb, barely thirty minutes by train from the great metropolitan termini of Victoria and Charing Cross. It lies in the valley of the River Darent, on the old pilgrims’ way to Canterbury, and is known to history as the place where Wat Tyler started the Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II’s poll tax in 1381 (so rabble-rousers in the blood, then). In modern times, almost its only invocation – albeit hundreds of times each day – is in radio traffic reports for the Dartford Tunnel, under the Thames, and adjacent Dartford–Thurrock Crossing, the main escape route from London for south-coast-bound traffic. Otherwise it is just a name on a road sign or station platform, its centuries as a market and brewing town all but obliterated by office blocks, multiple stores and even more multiple commuter homes. From the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, traffic funnelled to Dartford was not only vehicular; an outlying village with the serendipitous name of Stone contained a forbidding pile known as the East London Lunatic Asylum until a more tactful era renamed it ‘Stone House’.
Early in 1940, Joe Jagger met Eva Ensley Scutts, a twenty-seven-year-old as vivacious and demonstrative as he was understated and quiet. Eva’s family originally came from Greenhithe, Kent, but had emigrated to New South Wales, Australia, where she was born in the same year as Joe, 1913. Towards the end of the Great War, her mother left her father and brought her and four siblings home to settle in Dartford. Eva was always said to be a little ashamed of her birth ‘Down Under’ and to have assumed an exaggeratedly upper-class accent to hide any lingering Aussie twang. The truth was that in those days all respectable young girls tried to talk like London débutantes and the royal princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Eva’s work as an office secretary, and later a beautician, made it a professional necessity.
Joe’s courtship of Eva took place during the Second World War’s grim first act, when Britain stood alone against Hitler’s all-conquering armies in France and the Führer could be seen gazing across the Channel towards the White Cliffs of Dover as smugly as if he owned them already. With summer came the Battle of Britain, scrawling the sunny Kentish skies with white vapour-trail graffiti as British and German fighters duelled above the cornfields and oast houses and gentle green Weald. Though Dartford possessed no vital military installations, it received a constant overspill from Luftwaffe raids on factories and docks in nearby Chatham and Rochester and on London’s East End. The fact that many falling bombs were not aimed at Dartford, but jettisoned by German planes heading home, made the toll no less horrendous. One killed thirteen people in the town’s Kent Road; another hit the county hospital, wiping out two crowded women’s wards.
Joe and Eva were married on 7 December 1940 at Holy Trinity Church, Dartford, where Eva had sung in the choir. She wore a dress of lavender silk rather than traditional bridal white, and Joe’s brother, Albert, acted as best man. Afterwards there was a reception at the nearby Coneybeare Hall. This being wartime – and Joe wholeheartedly committed to the prevailing ethos of frugality and self-sacrifice – only fifty guests attended, drinking to the newlyweds’ health in brown sherry and munching dainty sandwiches of Spam or powdered egg.
Joe’s teaching job and work in resettling London evacuee children exempted him from military call-up, so at least there was no traumatic parting as he was sent overseas or to the opposite end of the country. Nor, conversely, was there the urgency to start a family felt by many service people briefly home on leave. Joe and Eva’s first child did not arrive until 1943, when they were both aged thirty. The delivery took place at Dartford’s Livingstone Hospital on 26 July, the birthday of George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung and Aldous Huxley, and the baby boy was christened Michael Philip. As a possibly more significant omen, the town’s State Cinema that week was showing an Abbott and Costello film entitled Money for Jam.
His babyhood saw the war gradually turn in the Allies’ favour and Britain fill with American soldiers – a glamorous breed, provided with luxuries the British had almost forgotten, and playing their own infectious dance music – preparatory to the reconquest of Fortress Europe. Defeated though Nazism was, it possessed one last ‘vengeance weapon’ in the pilotless V-1 flying bombs or doodlebugs, launched from France, that inflicted heavy damage and loss of life on London and its environs during the war’s final months. Like everyone in the Dartford area, Joe and Eva spent many tense nights listening for the whine of the V-1’s motor that cut out just before it struck its target. Later, and even more terrifyingly, came the V-2, a jet-propelled bomb that travelled faster than the speed of sound and so gave no warning of its approach.
Michael Philip, of course, remained blissfully unaware as a bombed, battered and stringently rationed nation realised with astonishment that it had not only survived but prevailed. One of his earliest memories is watching his mother remove the heavy blackout curtains from the windows in 1945, signifying no more nighttime fear of air raids.
By the time his younger brother, Christopher, arrived in 1947, the family was living at number 39 Denver Road, a crescent of white pebble-dashed houses in Dartford’s genteel western quarter. Joe had exchanged day-to-day PT teaching for an administrative job with the Central Council of Physical Recreation, the body overseeing all amateur sports associations throughout Britain. Accomplished track-and-field all-rounder though he still was, his special passion was basketball, a seemingly quintessential American sport that nonetheless had been played in the UK since the 1890s. To Joe, no game was better at fostering the sportsmanship and team spirit to which he was dedicated. He devoted many unpaid hours to encouraging and coaching would-be local teams, and in 1948 launched the first Kent County Basketball League.
Tolstoy observes at the beginning of Anna Karenina that, whereas unhappy families are miserable in highly original and varied ways, happy families tend to be almost boringly alike. Our star, the future symbol of rebellion and iconoclasm, grew up in just such fortunate conformity. His quiet, physically dynamic father and ebullient, socially aspirational mother were a thoroughly compatible couple, devoted to each other and their children. In contrast with many postwar homes, the atmosphere at 39 Denver Road was one of complete security, with meals, bath- and bedtimes at prescribed hours, and values in their correct order. Joe’s modest stipend and personal abstinence – he neither drank nor smoked – were enough to keep a wife and two boys in relative affluence as wartime rationing gradually disappeared and meat, butter, sugar and fresh fruit became plentiful once more.
There is an idealised image of a little British boy in the early 1950s, before television, computer games and too-early sexualisation did away with childhood innocence. He is dressed, not like a miniature New York street-gangster or jungle guerrilla but unequivocally as a boy – porous white Aertex short-sleeved shirt, baggy khaki shorts, an elasticised belt fastening with an S-shaped metal clasp. He has tousled hair, a broad, breezy smile and eyes unclouded by fear or premature sexuality, squinted against the sun. He is Mike Jagger, as the world then knew him, aged about seven, photographed with a group of classmates at his first school, Maypole Infants. The name could not be more atmospheric in its suggestion of springtime and kindly fun, of pure-hearted lads and lasses dancing round a beribboned pole to welcome the darling buds.
At Maypole he was a star pupil, top of the class or near it in every subject. As was soon evident, he possessed his father’s all-round aptitude for sports, dominating the school’s miniature games of soccer and cricket and its egg-and-spoon or sack-racing athletics. One of his teachers, Ken Llewellyn, would remember him as the most engaging as well as brightest boy in his year, ‘an irrepressible bundle of energy’ whom it was ‘a pleasure to teach’. In this seven-year-old paragon, however, there was already a touch of the subversive. He had a sharp ear for the way that grown-ups talked, and could mould his voice into an impressive range of accents. His imitations of teachers like the Welsh Mr Llewellyn went down even better with classmates than his triumphs on the games field.
At the age of eight he moved on to Wentworth County Primary, a more serious place, not so much about maypole dancing as surviving in the playground. Here he met a boy born at Livingstone Hospital like himself but five months later; an ill-favoured little fellow with the protruding ears and hollow cheeks of some Dickensian workhouse waif, though he came from a good enough home. His name was Keith Richards.
For British eight-year-olds in this era, the chief fantasy figures were American cowboy movie heroes like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, whose Western raiment was flashingly gorgeous, and who would periodically sheathe their pearl-handled six-shooters and warble ballads to their own guitar accompaniment. In the Wentworth playground one day, Keith confided to Mike Jagger that when he grew up he wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the self-styled ‘King of the Cowboys’, and play a guitar.
Mike was indifferent to the King of the Cowboys – he was already good at being indifferent – but the idea of the guitar, and of this little imp with sticky-out ears strumming one, did pique his interest. However, their acquaintanceship did not ripen: it would be more than a decade before they explored the subject further.
At the Jaggers’, like every other British household, music was constantly in the air, pumped out of bulky valve-operated radio sets by the BBC’s Light Programme in every form from dance bands to operetta. Mike enjoyed mimicking American crooners he heard – like Johnnie Ray blubbing through ‘Just Walkin’ in the Rain’ and ‘The Little White Cloud That Cried’ – but did not attract any special notice in school singing lessons or in the church choir to which he and his brother Chris both belonged. Chris, at that stage, seemed more of a natural performer, having won a prize at Maypole Infants School for singing ‘The Deadwood Stage’ from the film Calamity Jane. The musical entertainments that appealed most to Mike were the professional Christmas pantomimes staged at larger theatres in the area – corny shows based on fairy tales like Mother Goose or ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, but with an intriguing whiff of sex and gender blurring, the rouged and wisecracking ‘dame’ traditionally played by a man, the ‘principal boy’ by a leggy young woman.
In 1954, the family moved from 39 Denver Road and out of Dartford entirely, to the nearby village of Wilmington. Their house now had a name, ‘Newlands’, and stood in a secluded thoroughfare called The Close, a term usually applied to cathedral precincts. There was a spacious garden where Joe could give his two sons regular PT sessions and practise the diverse sports in which he was coaching them. The neighbours grew accustomed to seeing the grass littered with balls, cricket stumps, and lifting weights, and Mike and Chris swinging like titchy Tarzans from ropes their father had tied to the trees.
For the Jaggers, as for most British families, it was a decade of steadily increasing prosperity, when luxuries barely imaginable before the war became commonplace in almost every home. They acquired a television set, whose minuscule screen showed a bluish rather than black-and-white picture, allowing Mike and Chris to watch Children’s Hour puppets like Muffin the Mule, Mr Turnip and Sooty, and serials like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. They took summer holidays in sunny Spain and the South of France rather than Kent’s own numerous, cold-comfort resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. But the boys were never spoiled. Joe in his quiet way was a strict disciplinarian and Eva was equally forceful, particularly over cleanliness and tidiness. From their youngest years, Mike and Chris were expected to do their share of household chores, set out in a school-like timetable.
Mike pulled his weight without complaint. ‘[He] wasn’t a rebellious child at all,’ Joe would later remember. ‘He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother.’ Indeed, the only shadow on his horizon was that Chris seemed to be his mother’s favourite and he himself never received quite the same level of affection and attention from her. It made him slow to give affection in his turn – a lifelong trait – and also self-conscious and shy in front of strangers, and mortified with embarrassment when Eva pushed him forward to say ‘hello’ or shake hands.
The year of the family’s move to Wilmington, he sat the Eleven Plus, the exam with which British state education pre-emptively sorted its eleven-year-olds into successes and failures. The bright ones went on to grammar schools, often the equal of any exclusive, fee-paying institutions, while the less bright went to secondary-moderns and the dullards to ‘technical schools’ in hope of at least acquiring some useful manual trade. For Mike Jagger, there was no risk of either of these latter options. He passed the exam easily and in September 1954 started at Dartford Grammar School on the town’s West Hill.
His father could not have been better pleased. Founded in the eighteenth century, Dartford Grammar was the best school of its kind in the district, aspiring to the same standards and observing the same traditions that cost other parents dear at establishments like Eton and Harrow. It had a coat of arms and a Latin motto, Ora et Labora (Pray and Work); it had ‘masters’ rather than mere teachers, clad in scholastic black gowns; most important for Joe, it placed as much emphasis on sports and physical development as on academic achievement. Its alumni included the Indian Mutiny hero Sir Henry Havelock, and the great novelist Thomas Hardy, originally an architect, had worked on one of its nineteenth-century extensions.
In these new surroundings, however, Mike did not shine nearly as brightly as before. His Eleven Plus results had put him into the ‘A’ stream of specially promising pupils, headed for good all-round results in the GCE O-level exams, followed by two years in the sixth form and probable university entrance. He was naturally good at English, had something of a passion for history (thanks to an inspirational teacher named Walter Wilkinson), and spoke French with an accent superior to most of his classmates’. But science subjects, like maths, physics and chemistry, bored him, and he made little or no effort with them. In the form order, calculated on aggregate marks, he usually figured about half way. ‘I wasn’t a swot and I wasn’t a dunce,’ he would recall of himself. ‘I was always in the middle ground.’
At sports, despite his father’s comprehensive coaching, he was equally inconsistent. Summer was no problem, as Dartford Grammar played cricket, something he loved to watch as well as play, and under Joe’s coaching he could shine in athletics, especially middle-distance running and javelin. But the school’s winter team game was upper-class rugby football rather than proletarian soccer. Fast runner and good catcher that Mike was, he easily made every school rugger side up to the First Fifteen. But he hated being tackled – which often meant crashing onto his face in squelching mud – and would do everything he could to avoid receiving a pass.
The headmaster, Ronald Loftus Hudson, sarcastically known as ‘Lofty’, was a tiny man who nonetheless could reduce the rowdiest assembly to pin-drop silence with little more than a raised eyebrow. Under his regime there were myriad petty regulations about dress and conduct, the sternest relating to the fully segregated but tantalisingly near-at-hand Dartford Grammar School for Girls. Boys were forbidden to talk to the girls, even if they happened to meet out of school hours at places like bus stops. The head also used corporal punishment, as most British educators then did, without legal restraint or fear of parental protest – between two and six strokes on the backside with a stick or gym shoe. ‘You had to wait outside [his] study until the light went on, and then you’d go in,’ the Jagger of the future would remember. ‘And everybody else used to hang about on the stairs to see how many he gave and how bad it was that morning.’
All the male teachers could administer formal beatings in front of the whole class and most, in addition, practised a casual, even jocular physical violence that today would instantly land them in court for assault. Any who showed weakness (like the English teacher, ‘sweet, gentle Mr Brandon’) were mercilessly ragged and aped by Jagger, the class mimic, behind their backs or to their faces. ‘There were guerrilla skirmishes on all fronts, with civil disobedience and undeclared war; [the teachers] threw blackboard rubbers at us and we threw them back,’ he would recall. ‘There were some who’d just punch you out. They’d slap your face so hard, you’d go down. Others would twist your ear and drag you along until it was red and stinging.’ So that line from ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘I was schooled with a strap right across my back,’ may not be as fanciful as it has always seemed.
At number 23 The Close lived a boy named Alan Etherington, who was the same age as Mike and also went to Dartford Grammar. The two quickly chummed up, biking to school together each morning and going to tea at each other’s house. ‘There was a standing joke with us that if Mike appeared, he was trying to get out of chores his parents had given him, like washing up or mowing the lawn,’ Etherington remembers. House-proud Eva could be a little intimidating, but Joe, despite his ‘quiet authority’, created an atmosphere of healthy fun. When Etherington dropped by, there would usually be a pick-up game of cricket or rounders or an impromptu weight-training session on the lawn. Sometimes, as a special treat, Joe would produce a javelin, take the boys to the open green space at the top of The Close, and under his careful supervision allow them to practise a few throws.
Having a father so closely connected to the teaching world meant that Mike’s daily release from school was not as complete as other boys’. Joe knew several of the staff at Dartford Grammar, and so could keep close watch on both his academic performance and his conduct. There also could be no shirking of homework: he would later remember getting up at 6 A.M. to finish some essay or exercise, having fallen asleep over his books the night before. But in other ways Joe’s links with the school were an advantage. Arthur Page, the sports master – and a celebrated local cricketer – was a family friend who gave Mike special attention in batting practice at the school nets. Likewise as a favour to his father, one of the mathematics staff agreed to help him with his weakest subject even though he wasn’t in the teacher’s usual set.
Eventually, Joe himself became a part-time instructor at Dartford Grammar, coming in each Tuesday evening to give coaching in his beloved basketball. And there was one game, at least, where Mike’s enthusiasm, and application, fully matched his father’s. In basketball one could run and weave and catch and shoot with no risk of being pushed into mud; best of all, despite Joe’s patient exposition of its long British history, it felt glamorously and exotically American. Its most famous exponents were the all-black Harlem Globetrotters, whose displays of almost magical ball control, to the whistled strains of ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’, gave Mike Jagger and countless other British boys their earliest inklings of ‘cool’. He became secretary of the school basketball society that evolved from Joe’s visits, and never missed a session. While his friends played in ordinary gym shoes, he had proper black-and-white canvas basketball boots, which not only enhanced performance on the court but were stunningly chic juvenile footwear off it.
Otherwise, he was an inconspicuous member of the school community, winning neither special distinction nor special censure, offering no challenge to the status quo, using his considerable wits to avoid trouble with chalk-throwing, ear-twisting masters rather than provoke it. His school friend John Spinks remembers him as ‘an India-rubber character’ who could ‘bend every way to stay out of trouble’.
By mid-1950s standards, he was not considered good-looking. Sex appeal then was entirely dictated by film stars, of whom the male archetypes were tall, keen-jawed and muscular, with close-cut, glossy hair – American action heroes such as John Wayne and Rock Hudson; British ‘officer types’ such as Jack Hawkins and Richard Todd. Mike, like his father, was slightly built and skinny enough for his rib cage to protrude, though unlike Joe he showed no sign of incipient baldness. His hair, formerly a reddish colour, was now mousy brown and already floppily unmanageable.
His most noticeable feature was a mouth which, like certain breeds of bull-baiting terriers, seemed to occupy the entire lower half of his face, making a smile literally stretching from ear to ear, and Cupid’s-bow lips of unusual thickness and colour that seemed to need double the usual amount of moistening by his tongue. His mother also had markedly full lips – kept in top condition by the amount she talked – but Joe was convinced that Mike’s came from the Jagger side of the family and would sometimes apologise, not altogether jokingly, for having passed them on to him.
As the boys in his year reached puberty (yes, in 1950s Britain it really was this late) and all at once became agonisingly conscious of their clothes, grooming and appeal to the opposite sex, small, scrawny, loose-mouthed Mike Jagger seemed to have rather little going for him. Yet in encounters with the forbidden girls’ grammar school he somehow always provoked the most smiles, blushes, giggles and whispered discussions behind his back. ‘Almost from the time I met Mike, he always had girls flocking around him,’ Alan Etherington remembers. ‘A lot of our friends seemed to be much better looking, but they never had anything like the success that he did. Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, he knew he never needed to be alone.’
At the same time, his maturing looks, especially the lips, could arouse strange antagonism in males; teasing and taunting from classmates, sometimes even physical bullying by older boys. Not for being effeminate – his prowess on the sports field automatically discounted that – but for something far more damning. This was a time when unreformed nineteenth-century racism, the so-called colour bar, held sway in even Britain’s most civilised and liberal circles. To grammar school boys, as to their parents, thick lips suggested just one thing and there was just one term for it, repugnant now but back then quite normal.
Decades later, in a rare moment of self-revelation, he would admit that during his time at Dartford Grammar ‘the N-word’, for ‘nigger’, was thrown at him more than once. The time was still far off when he would find the comparison flattering.
THOUSANDS OF BRITISH men who grew up in the 1950s – and almost all who went on to dominate popular culture in the sixties – recall the arrival of rock ’n’ roll music from America as a life-changing moment. But such was not Mike Jagger’s experience. In rigidly class-bound postwar Britain, rock ’n’ roll’s impact was initially confined to young people of the lower social orders, the so-called Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls. During its earliest phase it made little impression on the bourgeoisie or the aristocracy, both of whose younger generations viewed it with almost as much distaste as did their parents. Likewise, in the hierarchical education system, it found its first enraptured audience in secondary modern and technical schools. At institutions like Dartford Grammar it was, rather, a subject for high-flown sixth-form debates: ‘Is rock ’n’ roll a symptom of declining morals in the twentieth century?’
Like Spanish influenza forty years previously, it struck in two stages, the second infinitely more virulent than the first. In 1955, a song called ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and His Comets topped the sleepy British pop music charts and caused outbreaks of rioting in proletarian dance halls, but was plausibly written off by the national media as just another short-lived transatlantic novelty. A year later, Elvis Presley came along with a younger, more dangerous spin on Haley’s simple exuberance and the added ingredient of raw sex.
As a middle-class grammar school boy, Mike was just an onlooker in the media furore over Presley – the ‘suggestiveness’ of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smoulder of his features, the (literally) incontinent hysteria to which he aroused his young female audiences. While adult America’s fear and loathing were almost on a par with the national Communist phobia, adult Britain reacted more with amusement and a dash of complacency. A figure like Presley, it was felt, could only emerge from the flashy, hyperactive land of Hollywood movies, Chicago gangsters and ballyhooing political conventions. Here in the immemorial home of understatement, irony and the stiff upper lip, a performer in any remotely similar mode was inconceivable.
The charge of blatant sexuality levelled against all rock ’n’ roll, not merely Presley, was manifestly absurd. Its direct ancestor was the blues – black America’s original pairing of voice with guitar – and the modern, electrified, up-tempo variant called rhythm and blues or R&B. The blues had never been inhibited about sex; rock and roll were separate synonyms for making love, employed in song lyrics and titles (‘Rock Me, Baby’, ‘Roll with Me, Henry’, etc.) for decades past, but heard only on segregated record labels and radio stations. Presley’s singing style and incendiary body movements were simply what he had observed on the stages and dance floors of black clubs in his native Memphis, Tennessee. Most rock ’n’ roll hits were cover versions of R&B standards by white vocalists, purged of their earthier sentiments or couched in slang so obscure (‘I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store’) that no one realised. Even this sanitised product took the smallest step out of line at its peril. When the white, God-fearing Pat Boone covered Fats Domino’s ‘Ain’t That a Shame’, he was criticised for disseminating what was seen as a contagiously vulgar ‘black’ speech idiom.
As a Dartford Grammar pupil, the appropriate music for Mike Jagger was jazz, in particular the modern kind with its melodic complexities, subdued volume and air of intellectualism. Even that played little part in daily school life, where the musical diet was limited to hymns at morning assembly and traditional airs like ‘Early One Morning’ or ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ (the latter another pointer to Mike’s remarkable future). ‘There was a general feeling that music wasn’t important,’ he would recall. ‘Some of the masters rather begrudgingly enjoyed jazz, but they couldn’t own up to it . . . Jazz was intelligent and people who wore glasses played it, so we all had to make out that we dug Dave Brubeck. It was cool to like that, and it wasn’t cool to like rock ’n’ roll.’
This social barrier was breached by skiffle, a short-lived craze peculiar to Britain which nonetheless rivalled, even threatened to eclipse, rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle had originally been American folk (i.e., white) music, evolved in the Depression years of the 1930s; in this new form, however, it drew equally on blues giants of the same era, notably Huddie ‘Leadbelly’ Ledbetter. Leadbelly songs like ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘Midnight Special’ and ‘Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie’, set mostly around cotton fields and railroads, had rock ’n’ roll’s driving beat and hormone-jangling chord patterns, but not its sexual taint or its power to cause disturbances among the proles. Most crucially, skiffle was an offshoot of jazz, having been revived as an intermission novelty by historically minded bandleaders like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Its biggest star, Tony Donegan, formerly Barber’s banjo player, had changed his first name to Lonnie in honour of bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
British-made skiffle was to have an influence far beyond its barely two-year commercial life span. In its original American form, its poor white performers often could not afford conventional instruments, so would use kitchen utensils like washboards, spoons and dustbin lids, augmented by kazoos, combs-and-paper and the occasional guitar. The success of Lonnie Donegan’s ‘skiffle group’ inspired youthful facsimiles to spring up throughout the UK, rattling and plunking on homespun instruments (which actually never featured in Donegan’s line-up). The amateur music-making tradition, in long decline since its Victorian heyday, was superabundantly reborn. Buttoned-up British boys, never previously considered in the least musical, now boldly faced audiences of their families and friends to sing and play with abandon. Overnight, the guitar changed from obscure back-row rhythm instrument into an object of young-manly worship and desire surpassing even the soccer ball. Such were the queues outside musical-instrument shops that, evoking not-so-distant wartime austerities, the Daily Mirror reported a national guitar shortage.
Here Mike Jagger was ahead of the game. He already owned a guitar, a round-hole acoustic model bought for him by his parents on a family trip to Spain. The holiday snaps included one of him in a floppy straw hat, holding up the guitar neck flamenco-style and miming cod-Spanish words. It would have been his passport into any of the skiffle groups then germinating at Dartford Grammar and in the Wilmington neighbourhood. But mastering even the few simple chord shapes that covered most skiffle numbers was too much like hard work, nor could he be so uncool as to thump a single-string tea-chest ‘bass’ or scrabble at a washboard. Instead, with the organisational flair already given to programming basketball fixtures, he started a school record club. The meetings took place in a classroom during lunch hour and, he later recalled, had the atmosphere of an extra lesson. ‘We’d sit there . . . with a master behind the desk, frowning while we played Lonnie Donegan.’
As bland white vocalists grew famous with cleaned-up R&B songs, the original black performers mostly stayed in the obscurity to which they were long accustomed. One notable exception was Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a former dishwasher from Macon, Georgia, whose repertoire of window-shattering screams, whoops and falsetto trills affronted grown-up ears worse than a dozen Presleys. While obediently parroting rock ’n’ roll’s teenage gaucheries, Richard projected what none had yet learned to call high camp with his gold suits, flashy jewellery and exploding liquorice-whip hair. Indeed, his emblematic song, ‘Tutti Frutti’, ostensibly an anthem to ice cream, had started out as a graphic commentary on gay sex (its cry of ‘Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!’ representing long-delayed ejaculation). He was the first rock ’n’ roller who made Mike Jagger forget all middle-class, grammar school sophistication and detachment, and surrender to the sheer mindless joy of the music.
The numerous media Cassandras who predicted rock ’n’ roll would be over in weeks rather than months found speedy corroboration in Little Richard. Touring Australia in 1958, he saw Russia’s Sputnik space satellite hurtle through the sky, interpreted it as a summons from the Almighty, threw a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbour and announced he was giving up music to enter the ministry. When the story reached the British press, Mike asked his father for six shillings and eight pence (about thirty-eight pence) to buy ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ because Richard was ‘retiring’ and this must be his farewell single. But Joe refused to stump up, adding, ‘I’m glad he’s retiring,’ as if it would be a formal ceremony complete with long-service gold watch.
In America, a coast-to-coast network of commercial radio stations, motivated solely by what their listeners demanded, had made rock ’n’ roll ubiquitous within a few months. But for its British constituency, to begin with, the problem was finding it. The BBC, which held a monopoly on domestic radio broadcasting, played few records of any kind, let alone this unsavoury one, in its huge daily output of live orchestral and dance-band music. To catch the hits now pouring across the Atlantic, Mike and his friends had to tune their families’ old-fashioned valve wireless sets to Radio Luxembourg, a tiny oasis of teen tolerance deep in continental Europe whose nighttime English language service consisted mainly of pop record shows. Serving the occupying forces braced for nuclear attack by Communist Russia, there were also AFN, the American Forces Network, and the US government’s ‘Voice of America’, both of which sweetened their propaganda output with generous dollops of rock and jazz.
Seeing American rock ’n’ rollers perform in person was even more problematic. Bill Haley visited Britain only once (by ocean liner) and was greeted by cheering multitudes not seen since the coronation three years earlier. Elvis Presley was expected to follow hard on his heels but, inexplicably, failed to do so. For the overwhelming majority of UK rock ’n’ roll fans, the only way to experience it was on the cinema screen. ‘Rock Around the Clock’ had originally been a soundtrack (to a film about juvenile delinquency, naturally). No sooner was Presley launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such ‘exploitation’ flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole, and The Girl Can’t Help It, featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: ‘I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, “Well, I can do this.”’
Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theatres and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose ‘That’ll Be the Day’ topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or co-wrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.
His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of 14 March. Mike Jagger – already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect – was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favourite number was the B-side of ‘Oh Boy!’, Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called ‘Not Fade Away’, whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humour previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (‘My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back . . .’). This, Mike realised, was not just someone to copy, but to be.
Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran or Britain’s first home-grown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries, and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.
The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. ‘I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our school mates,’ Dow recalls. ‘I said I’d rather he didn’t.’
He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right – and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.
His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programmes to encourage sports among children and teenagers – implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport. Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the programme with his brother Chris and other hand-picked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.
A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquises droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends ‘ordinary gym shoes . . . like the kind Mike is wearing’. Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare – and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips – say it all.
At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts were somewhere infinitely more glamorous and amusing. ‘Too easily distracted’, ‘attitude rather unsatisfactory’ and other such faint damnations recurred through his end-of-term reports. In the summer of 1959 he took his GCE O-level exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of 100 rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49) and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take A-level English, history and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was ‘unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them’.
He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright posture to a rebellious slouch and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, ‘ducks’ arses’ and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle- and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button ‘drape’ jackets and Slim Jim ties.
Mike was not one to go too far – his mother would never have allowed it – but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale ‘shorty’ raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founder’s Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr Bennett afterwards, which ended with the teacher lashing out – as teachers then could with impunity – and Mike sprawled out on the ground.
Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their own, only to have it derided by adult society in general. A few months from now, this feeling of persecuted brotherhood would initiate, or rather revive, the most important relationship of Mike’s life. The prologue, as it were, took place in his last two years at school when, somewhat surprisingly, the genteel kid from Wilmington chummed up with a plumber’s son from Bexleyheath named Dick Taylor.
Dick’s consuming passion was not rock ’n’ roll but blues, the black music that had preceded it by something like half a century and provided its structure, its chords and its rebellious soul. For this esoteric taste he had to thank his older sister Robin, a hard-core blues fan while her friends swooned over white crooners like Frankie Vaughan and Russ Hamilton. Robin knew all its greatest exponents and, more important, knew where to find it on AFN or Voice of America, where the occasional blues record was played for the benefit of black GIs helping to defend Europe from communism. Dick, in turn, passed on the revelation to a small coterie at Dartford Grammar that included Mike Jagger.
This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing – but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of ‘nigger brown’ shoe polish and dogs routinely named ‘Blackie’, ‘Sambo’ and ‘Nigger’. Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronising awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to first-class cricket matches.
There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shanty towns and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different – standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicised contempt for the cosiness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that ‘there are no good, brave causes left’. To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in pre-war rural America was more than cause enough.
But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement – an empathy – he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humour and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furore over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of ‘Teddy Bear’ and ‘All Shook Up’ with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed ‘Careless Love’ or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priapic ‘Black Snake Moan’. And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?
Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following – mostly ‘intellectual’ types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship – charity, some might say – of traditional jazz bandleaders like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. ‘Humph’ had been bringing Big Bill Broonzy over as a support attraction since 1950, while every year or so the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee attracted small but ardent crowds to Colyer’s Soho club, Studio 51. After helping give birth to skiffle, Barber had become a stalwart of the National Jazz League, which strove to put this most lackadaisical of the arts on an organised footing and had its own club, the Marquee in Oxford Street. Here, too, from time to time, some famous old blues survivor would appear onstage, still bewildered by his sudden transition from Chicago or Memphis.
Finding the blues on record was almost as difficult. It was not available on six-shilling and fourpenny singles, like rock and pop, but only on what were still known as ‘LPs’ (long-players) rather than albums, priced at a daunting thirty shillings (£1.50) and up. To add to the expense, these were usually not released on British record labels but imported from America in their original packaging with the price in dollars and cents crossed out and a new one in pounds, shillings and pence substituted. Such exotica was, of course, not stocked by record shops in Dartford or even in large neighbouring towns such as Chatham or Rochester. To find it, Mike and Dick had to go to up to London and trawl through the racks at specialist dealers like Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road.
Their circle at Dartford Grammar School included two other boys with the same recondite passion. One was a rather quiet, bookish type from the arts stream named Bob Beckwith; the other was Mike’s Wilmington neighbour, the science student Alan Etherington. In late 1959, during Mike’s first term in the sixth form, the four decided to form a blues band. Bob and Dick played guitar, Alan (a drummer and bugler in the school cadet force) played percussion on a drum kit donated by Dick’s grandfather, and Mike was the vocalist.
Their aim was not to earn money or win local fame, like Danny Rogers and the Realms, nor even to pull girls. Mike in particular – as Alan Etherington recalls – already had all the ardent female followers he could wish for. The idea was simply to celebrate the blues and keep it alive amid the suffocating tides of commercial rock and pop. From first to last, they never had a single paid gig or performed to any audience larger than about half a dozen. Dartford Grammar gave them no opportunities to play or encouragement of any kind, even though they were effectively studying a byway of modern American history; Alan Etherington recalls ‘a stand-up row’ with the school librarian after requesting a book by blues chronicler Paul Oliver as background reading for the quartet. They existed in a self-created vacuum, making no effort to contact kindred spirits in Kent or the wider world – hardly even aware that there were any. In Dick Taylor’s words, ‘We thought we were the only people in Britain who’d ever heard of the blues.’
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
The Kid in the Cardigan (#ulink_6cddda4e-4cbd-52e1-8a60-3a2fcf210dec)
Mike Jagger seemed living proof of the unnamed band’s determination to go nowhere. He remained firm in his refusal to play a guitar, instead just standing there in front of the other three, as incomplete and exposed without that instantly glamorising, dignifying prop as if he’d forgotten to put on his trousers. The singing voice unveiled by his prodigious lips and flicking tongue was likewise an almost perverse departure from the norm. White British vocalists usually sang jazz or blues in a gravelly, cigarette-smoky style modelled – vainly – on Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. Mike’s voice, higher and lighter in tone, borrowed from a larger, more eclectic cast; it was a distillation of every Deep Southern accent he’d ever heard, white as much as black, feminine as much as masculine; Scarlett O’Hara, plus a touch of Mammy from Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire as much as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Boy Williamson.
Unencumbered by a guitar – mostly even by a microphone – he had to do something while he sang. But the three friends, accustomed to his cool, non-committal school persona, were amazed by what he did do. Blues vocalists traditionally stood or, more often, sat in an anguished trance, cupping one ear with a hand to amplify the sonic self-flagellation. When Mike sang the blues, however, his loose-limbed, athletic body rebutted the music’s melancholic inertia word by word: he shuffled to and fro on his moccasins, ground his hips, rippled his arms and euphorically shook his shaggy head. Like his singing, it had an element of parody and self-parody, but an underlying total conviction. A song from his early repertoire, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, summed up this metamorphosis: ‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out . . .’
Practice sessions for the non-existent gigs were mostly held at Dick Taylor’s house in Bexleyheath or at Alan Etherington’s, a few doors along from the Jaggers. Alan owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Philips ‘Joystick’ (so named for its aeronautical-looking volume control) on which the four could preserve and review their first efforts together. The Etherington home boasted the further luxury of a Grundig ‘radiogram’, a cabinet radio-cum-record-player with surround sound, an early form of stereo. Dick and Bob Beckwith did not have custom-built electric guitars, only acoustic ones with metal pickups screwed to the bodies. Beckwith, the more accomplished player of the two, would plug his guitar into the radiogram, increasing its volume about thirtyfold.
At Dick’s, if the weather was fine, they would rehearse in the back garden – the future lord of giant alfresco spaces and horizonless crowds surveying a narrow vista of creosoted wood fences, washing lines and potting sheds. Dick’s mum, who sometimes interrupted her housework to watch, told Mike from the start that he had ‘something special’. However small or accidental the audience, he gave them his all. ‘If I could get a show, I would do it,’ he would remember. ‘I used to do mad things . . . Get on my knees and roll on the floor . . . I didn’t have inhibitions. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.’
Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practise at ‘Newlands’, in either his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe ‘creasing up’ with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training programme. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practise session elsewhere, Joe called out, ‘Michael . . . don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? ‘We all told him it made no difference,’ Dick Taylor remembers. ‘But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.’
Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of ‘La Bamba’, whose sixteen-year-old singer–composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Latino nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.
The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called ‘race’ music – i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as ‘the father of the Chicago Blues’ for tracks like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and his theme song, ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.
In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis-born Charles Edward Anderson – aka Chuck – Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterwards Berry made an effortless crossover from ‘race’ music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.
After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered – if they ever materialised at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American stamps began arriving at ‘Newlands’. Some of the covers had been badly chewed up in transit and not all the music lived up to his expectations. But the albums in themselves were splendiferous status symbols. He took to carrying around three or four at once tucked under one arm, a fashion accessory as much as his gold-flecked jacket and moccasins. Alan Dow, who’d rejected him as a vocalist for Danny Rogers and the Realms, witnessed one such almost regal progress across the school playground.
In summer 1961, he sat his A-level exams, passing in English and history but, surprisingly, failing in French. He considered becoming a schoolteacher in his father’s – and grandfather’s – footsteps, and toyed with the idea of journalism and (unmentionably to his parents) disc-jockeying on Radio Luxembourg. Leafing through the pop music papers one week, he spotted an advertisement by a London record producer named Joe Meek, inviting would-be deejays to submit audition tapes. He clipped the ad and kept it, but – perhaps fortunately – didn’t follow it up. Meek later produced several British pop classics, all from his small north London flat, but was notorious for trying to seduce the prettier young men who crossed his path.
Instead, somewhat against expectations, Mike Jagger joined the 2 per cent of Britain’s school leavers in that era who went on to university. Despite those clashes over uniform, his headmaster, Lofty Hudson, decided he was worthy of the privilege and, in December 1960, well before he had sat his A-levels, supplied a character reference putting the best possible gloss on his academic record. ‘Jagger is a lad of good general character,’ it read in part, ‘although he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something. His interests are wide. He has been a member of several School Societies and is prominent in Games, being Secretary of our Basketball Club, a member of our First Cricket Eleven and he plays Rugby Football for his House. Out of school he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing, Music and is a member of the Local Historical Association . . . Jagger’s development now fully justifies me in recommending him for a Degree course and I hope you will be able to accept him.’
Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. ‘I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,’ he would remember. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’
At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus in Houghton Street, off Kings-way. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.
For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House – that would have been too perfect – but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed ‘the Village on the Heath’ because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.
It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.
A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.
It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicised seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. ‘That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,’ Isaacson says. ‘I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.’
Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as ‘obviously extremely bright’ and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke ‘like a nice middle-class boy . . . The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, “Jagger . . . if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!”’
Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties – though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, ‘bistros’ and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings and radically short skirts.
Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theatres like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mould-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds – including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones and Dartford’s Peter Blake – were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the US army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that ‘race’ music was dead and buried.
Such rock idols as Britain had produced – Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard – had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was ‘Trad’, a homogenised version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You, Samantha’ and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘March of the Siamese Children’. The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.
In short, the danger seemed to have passed.
BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.
The second most important partnership in rock music history might never have happened if either of them had got out of bed five minutes later, missed a bus, or lingered to buy a pack of cigarettes or a Mars bar. It took place early one weekday on the ‘up’ platform at Dartford railway station as they waited for the same train, Mike to get to Charing Cross in London and Keith to Sidcup, four stops away, where he was now at art college.
Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.
As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.
Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’
The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.
Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.
An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’
Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.
Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.
As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.
At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.
After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’
Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.
Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.
With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.
Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.
Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.
Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.
While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.
*
ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.
The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.
As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters – which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harbouring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents and recording studios – plus almost all the live venues that mattered – among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar shops and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched on the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a centre of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where ‘pure’ jazz enthusiasts gathered – nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognised as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements – the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton – Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate and almost wholly ‘white’ residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios – maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico – and for having a ‘Broadway’ rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the north west of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on 17 March. But the following Saturday the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.
First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as ‘trainspotters who needed somewhere to go . . . just a bunch of anoraks . . . and the girls were very thin on the ground’.
Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the line-up, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards), were attired conventionally in white shirts with sober ties, baggy grey flannel trousers and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’
Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson – but not this one. By the age of twenty he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them – motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake – there was Brian Jones.
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings – but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and super-socialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, ‘by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something’. Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even ‘paw’ at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivalled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway – and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs – Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly programme, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on 19 May.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but – atypically nice man that he was – hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. ‘I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,’ Bobbie Korner recalls. ‘He said, “Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.”’
Disc magazine made the announcement, a first droplet of newsprint oceans to come: ‘Nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer Mick Jagger has joined the Alexis Korner group Blues Incorporated and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates in Ealing and at their Thursday sessions at the Marquee.’
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose centre of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in Jazz News, the most serious of all London’s music trades, inviting prospective sidemen to audition in the upstairs function room of a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square. When its management caught him pilfering from the bar, he was forced to relocate to another pub, the Bricklayers Arms on Broadwick Street.
His original plan had been to poach the two most talented members of a well-regarded band called Blues by Six, lead guitarist Geoff Bradford and vocalist Brian Knight. Soon after the move to the Bricklayers Arms, however, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turned up, accompanied by the other most serious musician from the Blue Boys, Dick Taylor. There was nothing to stop Mick singing with Brian’s band as well as Blues Incorporated if he chose, but that spot already seemed to have been taken by Brian Knight. Fortunately for him, the instrumental mix as it stood simply did not work. Geoff Bradford wished only to play the authentic blues of Muddy Waters and his ilk and was offended by Keith’s Chuck Berry licks – as well as nervous of Brian’s kleptomania. After a couple of practice sessions, Bradford bowed out, loyally accompanied by his friend Knight, so leaving the way open for Mick and Keith.
The only other worthwhile recruit was a burly, pugnacious-looking youth named Ian Stewart, a shipping clerk with the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation who arrived unpromisingly wearing too-brief leather cycling shorts and munching a pork pie, but who could play stride and barrelhouse piano as if he’d grown up around the New Orleans bordellos rather than in Ewell, Surrey. Just as appealing were his plain-spoken manner, dry wit and refusal to show his prospective bandmates the slightest reverence. ‘Stu’ was not only welcomed into the line-up but recognised as a natural friend and ally even by the cautious Mick – in his case, perhaps the only one who would always talk to him as an equal, refuse to flatter him and be unafraid to tell him the truth.
Brian had now filled every spot in his blues band except that of drummer. It was the vital ingredient for any kind of ‘beat’ music, marking out the serious from the strum-along amateur. Drummers tended to be slightly older men with daytime jobs well paid enough for them to afford the £60 which a new professional kit could cost. Even mediocre players were as sought after as plumbers during burst pipe season and could take their pick from among the best Trad or rock ’n’ roll bands. Although Soho had a whole street of drummers for hire (Archer Street, where pro and semi-pro musicians congregated seeking work), none was likely to be tempted by a gaggle of young blues apostles without money, management or prospects. The Bricklayers Arms auditions did produce one promising candidate in Mick Avory, who sat in with the line-up a couple of times and seemed to fit in well enough. But he could see no future in playing behind this other Mick, and refused to commit himself permanently.
There was also the question of what to name the band. Brian, whose prerogative it was, had endlessly agonised about it, rejecting all suggestions from Mick and Keith while thinking of nothing suitable himself. The problem was only resolved when he decided to advertise for gigs in Jazz News and had to come up with a name while dictating the small ad over the telephone. His impromptu choice of ‘the Rolling Stones’ was a further debt to Muddy Waters – not only Waters’s 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’ but a lesser-known EP track, ‘Mannish Boy’, which includes the line ‘Oh, I’m a rollin’ stone.’
To British ears it was an odd choice, less evocative of a blues master’s raunchy potted autobiography than of the sententious proverb recommending stagnation over adventure: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Mick, Keith, Stu and Dick all protested that it made them sound halfway between a classical string quartet and an Irish show band, but the die was cast – and, after all, it was Brian’s group.
Their big break was the end result of a rather brutal slap in the face for Mick. Alexis Korner’s success at the Marquee Club had by now not only galvanised Soho but come to the notice of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Portland Place, three-quarters of a mile to the north. As a result, completing Korner’s sense of vindication, Blues Incorporated were offered a live appearance on BBC radio’s Thursday night Jazz Club programme on 12 July. It was an opportunity not to be missed, even though it clashed with the band’s regular weekly show at the Marquee. So as not to disappoint their club audience, Long John Baldry, the Ealing Club’s queenly blond giant, was lined up to deputise for them.
For this hugely important exposure on national radio, Korner did not want Mick to be his band’s sole vocalist but to perform in alternation with Art Wood, elder brother of the still-unknown schoolboy Ronnie. However, the parsimonious BBC would not pay for two singers on top of five instrumentalists. So Korner, figuring that Mick’s appeal was more visual than vocal, and thus of doubtful impact on radio, decided to drop him in favour of Art Wood. (In the end Art did not appear either, and the vocals were left to Cyril Davis.)
As a consolation prize for Mick, Korner arranged that the band in which he’d been moonlighting should play their first-ever gig on the same night as the broadcast, filling the Marquee’s intermission spot between Long John Baldry’s sets for a £20 fee. They even received a mention in Jazz News’s preview section, on equal terms with all Soho’s most illustrious jazz names, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer and the like.
By rights, the paper should have sought details from the loquacious and articulate Brian, but instead, because of the Korner connection, it contacted Mick. Consequently, he rather than Brian seemed like the leader of the band as he listed its personnel and showed a twinge of unease lest its new name should offend the Marquee’s purist blues audience. Brian, for some reason, had decided to revert to his slide-guitar alter ego for the occasion, so was not even identified: ‘Mick Jagger, R&B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig. Called “The Rolling Stones” [“I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit,” said Mick], the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), “Stu” (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).’
So that night of 12 July 1962, under the pink-and-white canvas awning of the Marquee stage, Mick sang with the Rolling Stones for the very first time. To set off his cord trousers, he wore a horizontally striped matelot jersey, common enough among young men in the South of France but in London chiefly identified with girls or sexually ambiguous ‘chorus boys’ in West End musicals. As blues-singing attire, it was as daring as the white frilly dress he would select for an open-air show at the other end of Oxford Street seven years later.
The hour-long set consisted mostly of irreproachable blues and R&B standards by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Billy Boy Arnold, with the odd Chuck Berry like ‘Down the Road Apiece’ and ‘Back in the USA’ (‘New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearn for you . . .’). As Mick Avory did not, after all, play drums that night, the sound had considerably less attack than usual. Even so, many hard-core blues Marqueesards could not dissociate the word stones from rock; the applause was muted and at times almost drowned by whistles and boos.
Among the crowd that night was Charlie Watts, the drummer who occasionally played for Blues Incorporated but more regularly for Blues by Six, the band that was supposed to have given the Rolling Stones both a lead guitarist and a vocalist. Charlie was the epitome of the superior drummer class, immaculately dressed and barbered, with the almost tragically serious face of a latter-day Buster Keaton. True to form, he showed no outward emotion as the stripe-jerseyed figure onstage blew the ‘harp’ passages in Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ as if it were an erotic rite rather than a religious one. But, as he would recall, the highly esteemed blues and jazz musicians of his acquaintanceship all suddenly seemed like ‘eccentric old men’ compared with Mick.
Afterwards, collecting their £4 apiece (enough in these days to buy three LPs, dinner for two at an Angus Steakhouse or a pair of boots from the modish Regent Shoe store), Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick and Stu felt they had connected with the Marquee crowd at least enough to be offered further regular work there. But Harold Pendleton still considered them to be infected with rock ’n’ roll virus, if not in their repertoire then in the energy of their sound and the body language and flying hair of their front man. He would use them only as an interval band and with the worst possible grace, muttering that they were ‘bloody rockers’ and their R&B idols were ‘rubbish’.
Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and the Flamingo in Wardour Street – the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.
Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, travelling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart – and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: ‘Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings [20p]’.
At this stage, Mick’s organisational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).
While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never ‘sell out’ to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Close Together’, Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover’ and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s ‘Soon Forgotten’.
The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organisation, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: ‘A great band,’ Decca’s letter said, ‘but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.’
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
‘Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts’ (#ulink_3391c66d-f213-5b5f-beaa-cdd24b99d778)
The Rollin’ Stones’ far-flung work schedule was making it increasingly hard for Mick to get back to his own bed in Dartford each night. Besides, at nineteen he was too old to be ordered to do washing up or weight training any longer. So in the autumn of 1962 he left his spotless, well-regulated home and moved up to London to share a flat with Brian Jones at number 102 Edith Grove in the World’s End district of Chelsea. Originally, the ménage also included Brian’s girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and their toddler son, Julian, but after a few days Pat and Julian departed without explanation, and Keith Richards moved in instead.
Chelsea at this time was a backwater whose days as a resort of hard-drinking, drug-taking artists and bohemians seemed long gone. Situated at the western extremity of King’s Road, on the frontier with romance-free Fulham, World’s End was a sleepy area of still mainly working-class homes, shops, cafés and pubs. Edith Grove ranked as perhaps its least attractive thoroughfare, terraced by shabby mid-Victorian houses with pilastered front porches, and shaken by traffic to and from Knightsbridge and the West End.
The flat, which came already furnished, was on the first floor of number 102. The rent was £16 per week excluding electricity, which had to be paid for as it was used by inserting one-shilling coins into a battleship-grey iron meter. Mick shared the only designated bedroom with Keith, while Brian slept on a divan in the living room. There was an antiquated bathroom with a chipped and discoloured tub and basin and taps that yielded a reluctant, rusty dribble. The only toilet was a communal one on the floor below.
Deeply unattractive to begin with, the place quickly descended into epic squalor that would later be unwittingly re-created in the classic British film Withnail and I. Beds stayed permanently unmade; the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty dishes and empty milk bottles encrusted with mould. The ceilings were blackened by candle smoke and covered with drawings and graffiti, while the windows were so thick with grime that casual visitors thought they had heavy curtains, permanently closed. When an extra flatmate materialised in a young printer named James Phelge, his surname proved curiously anagrammatic: he won the others’ approval by his skill at ‘gobbing’, or spitting gobbets of phlegm up the wall to form a horrible pattern in lieu of wallpaper.
It might be wondered how the famously fastidious Mick could ever have endured such conditions. But in most nineteen-year-olds, the urge to react against parental values tends to be overwhelming. There was also the sense of roughing it like a real bluesman, even though few of these might have been spotted in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Kings Road. Besides, while enthusiastically joining in the trashing of the flat, he was never personally squalid but – like Brian – remained conspicuously neat and well groomed, just as young officers in the Great War kept their buttons bright amid Flanders mud. Brian somehow managed to wash and dry his fair hair every single day, while Mick (so Keith would later recall in one of their recurrent periods of mutual bitchiness) went through ‘his first camp period . . . wandering around in a blue linen housecoat . . . He was on that kick for about six months.’
All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by cheque and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank cheque: ‘Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.’
He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways – stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighbouring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as ‘pins’. Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offence) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.
Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as ‘very bright, highly motivated layabouts’. In Stu’s day job at ICI the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting co-workers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as ‘the rhythm-and-blues singer’.
Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the non-musician flatmate James Phelge to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late between their foetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been ‘bloody awful’ and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smouldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.
It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.
As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s ‘gobbing’, Brian gave each a name according to its colour – ‘Yellow Humphrey’, ‘Green Gilbert’, ‘Scarlet Jenkins’, ‘Polka-Dot Perkins’. He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a ‘Morgan Morgan’. Any male conspicuously devoid of their own cool and savoir faire was an ‘Ernie’. The local greasy-spoon café – whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or ‘nancy boys’ – was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as ‘the Offers’ after Mick described them as ‘a bit off’. Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.
Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as ‘the First American Folk-Blues Festival’, featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled ‘Little Red Rooster’.
Amid the Victorian splendour of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing ‘Boogie Chillen’’, the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out’); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would ‘invent’ a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterwards the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, ‘Shaky Jake’ Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centrepiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs – amounting to 10s 6d, or about 52p each – but never did.
If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear – clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century – that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge – neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.
He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness towards females – yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how young and often vulnerable many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with two of his flatmates in succession, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.
THE WINTER OF 1962–3 turned into Britain’s worst for one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theatres and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy ‘shorty’ overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.
At the end of each week, Mick, Brian and Keith bought, borrowed or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’ and Little Eva’s ‘The Locomotion’. Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called ‘Love Me Do’ by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.
In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.
The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semi-pro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.
Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex-grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.
He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior – especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. ‘[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget – it looked like it was bomb-damaged,’ he would recall. ‘The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it . . . permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere . . . I could never understand why they carried on like this . . . It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.’
Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realised that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was – if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like ‘a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it’ and had ‘no plans to work’, and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. ‘He hated being called Mick,’ Bill remembers. ‘In his own eyes he was still Mike.’
He was keeping up his LSE studies despite the late nights and distractions, and that previous June had sat part one of his BSc degree, achieving just-respectable C grades in the compulsory subjects of economics, economic history and British government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institutions. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, ‘The Basketball Coach’, written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, ‘must definitely possess . . . a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm’. Without these qualities, the team would be ‘an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table . . .’ The coach must train himself to develop ‘a keen analytical sense’ and view each game as ‘an endless succession of tactics’ dictated solely by him. ‘The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability . . . He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players . . .’
The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies – and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good clean-up). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether ‘Michael’, as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public-school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.
At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. ‘He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.’
WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them – and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.
Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a long-time affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist and television pundit Dr Jacob Bronowski.
Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female back-up singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.
The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.
She and Jean were their most faithful followers – groupies would be too crude – trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti-rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street. ‘Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,’ Cleo recalls. ‘But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.’
She and Mick began dating with all the conventionality – and chasteness – that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones and the Stones’ nightlife. ‘We’d go to the cinema,’ Cleo remembers. ‘Once, Mick got tickets for the theatre, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.’ Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their break-up was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, ‘When you next see Mick, give him that for me.’
Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers ‘quite heavy’ discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humour and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting ‘Mind the doors!’ ‘Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.’ The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. ‘He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.’
He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. ‘My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbours used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practise his stage moves in front of our mirror.’ Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove – and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is ‘trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles’.
Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. ‘Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,’ Cleo recalls. ‘When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, “Get outa my house, white man,” took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.’
Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). ‘At the interval,’ she recalls, ‘I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. “’Ow much?” he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick – though I didn’t know his name then – said “Okay.”’
The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art – which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting ‘something like four hours’ – featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an ‘interval band’ (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a ‘prefab’ rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared with scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.
From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non- or half-Britishers to whom the Stones – Mick especially – would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.
Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were the, to his mind, far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was £1 each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.
In the event, they astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same ‘abominable’ performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelising for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience – Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.
Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: ‘Rockers’ in black leather and motorcycle boots; ‘Mods’ in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from back streets and council estates; and always girls, girls and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annexe, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.
The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, ‘Do the Crawdaddy’ and ‘Pretty Thing’, spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multi-mirrored walls suffering not even a crack.
Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music programme, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded ‘too coloured’. However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew – still broadcasting in the twenty-first-century – denies ever having been party to such a judgement; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound ‘coloured’.
Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC in Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (‘crawdaddy’ is Deep Southern slang for crayfish or langoustine), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognisable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton – at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down – and a raspy-voiced trainee gravedigger from north London named Rod Stewart.
Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre début single with a smash hit, ‘Please Please Me’, and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When ‘Please Please Me’ became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.
Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off – and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.
Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared with their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll-obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’. When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored ‘Pop Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.
MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.
But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage – and men – having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. ‘I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,’ she recalls. ‘It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.’
The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ (‘let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .’), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.
Her name was Christine – aka Chrissie – Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician – more fifties, in fact, than sixties – Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.
Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared – and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realise his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.
While fashion modelling took her sister Jean steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college – her third – on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.
The various printed accounts of their first meeting are always set at the Windsor Ricky-Tick, with seventeen-year-old Chrissie – who sometimes cleared away glasses there in exchange for free admission – brazenly taking the initiative. In one version, she accepts a dare from a girlfriend to go up to Mick on the bandstand and ask him to kiss her; in another, the place is so packed that she can reach him only by crawling across the decorative fishing nets above the dance floor, helped along by people below in an early instance of crowd surfing.
Chrissie herself is unsure now whether the two of them first seriously locked eyes at the Ricky-Tick, at a nearby pub where the Stones sometimes played upstairs on Sunday afternoons, or at a place called the International Club, frequented by foreign au pair girls in nearby Maidenhead. ‘I was attracted to Mick originally because he looked like an actor named Doug Gibbons,’ she remembers. ‘At least, Doug was a prettier version of Mick. And I remember that when we first spoke his Cockney accent was so thick I could hardly understand him.’
After serenading her with Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ a few times, he asked her for a date, naming an afternoon the following week and suggesting Windsor, with its castle and fluttering Royal Standard, as their most convenient common ground. ‘It was the day of my grandmother’s silver wedding party, and I explained I’d have to go to that first. I remember meeting Mick on the street in Windsor because that was when I first saw him in daylight and realised one of his eyes was two colours – the left one was brown and green.’
For their next date, he took her down to Dartford by train, as she thought, to meet his family. After her father’s substantial Buckinghamshire farm, the Jagger family home struck her as ‘very ordinary’. Neither Mick’s parents nor his brother turned out to be there, and Chrissie realised he was hoping – or, rather, expecting – to have sex with her. But the seeming wild child was not the pushover he expected. ‘I was very worried about it and I wouldn’t stay,’ she recalls. ‘So I had to come back again on the train on my own.’
Mick forgave the rebuff, however, and a week or so later, after an early-ending gig, Chrissie took him home to Burnham by train to meet her parents, Ted and Peggy, also inviting Charlie Watts and her friend Liz Gribben, to whom Charlie had taken a shine. ‘My parents were slightly appalled by the way Mick looked, but they were impressed by the fact that he went to LSE, and my dad liked him because he was so bright and into money. I don’t think my mother ever really liked him – even before everything that happened – but Dad could always see how sharp he was and what a success he was going to be, whatever he ended up doing.’
Mick became a regular overnight visitor at the Shrimptons’, always occupying a separate room from Chrissie’s, as any well-brought-up young man in that era would be expected to do. After breakfast he would catch the same 8:42 commuter train from Burnham that Chrissie took to her secretarial school. ‘My sister Jean by that time was going around with a lot of debby Vogue types who’d sometimes be on the same train,’ she remembers. ‘I used to hear them whispering “Poor Chrissie . . . her boyfriend’s so ugly.”’
Chrissie, by contrast, spent little time in the bosom of the Jagger family, though that was a consequence of Mick’s desire to get away from home more than any mutual antipathy. She remembers her surprise on discovering that, unlike their elder son, neither Joe nor Eva had any trace of a Cockney accent and that both were ‘quite intellectual people, which my parents weren’t, though we had more money. Mick’s mother was quite simply a domestic slave, devoted to looking after the males of the household. She was one of those garrulous women, and Mick was often very irritated by her and very dismissive of her. And his father was very formal and – to me – charmless and rather alarming. But I did get on very well with his brother, Chris, who at that time was mostly away at school. We were the two Chrisses, the younger siblings of the more successful older ones.’
Very soon after that initial refusal, Chrissie began sleeping with Mick – something that for a genteelly raised, convent-educated seventeen-year-old in 1963 was still far from routine. The first time was at the Shrimpton family home while her parents were away, since she couldn’t bring herself to enter his bed at the squalid flat he shared with Keith, Brian and the ‘gobbing’ printer Phelge at 102 Edith Grove. ‘I hated it . . . it was so dirty,’ she recalls. ‘The spitting and the Nankering . . . and they’d got notes that girls had sent them pinned up all over the wall. It was an all-blokes place, where I was always made to feel like an intruder.’
Keith she remembers as ‘just a weedy little boy, who was very sweet and shy and upset about his parents having recently got divorced . . . Brian was very bright, and it was obvious that he and Mick didn’t get on at all. He tried to pull me a couple of times, but only to spite Mick. When it happened I can remember thinking “This is ridiculous because you’re half my size.”’
Mick had been seeing Chrissie only about two weeks when – out of nowhere – the Stones’ fortunes suddenly began to improve. A whole-page feature article on the Crawdaddy Club in the local Richmond and Twickenham Times gave them a laudatory plug. Then Giorgio Gomelsky persuaded a leading music trade journalist, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror – who had filed the first-ever national story on the Beatles – to come to the Station Hotel on a Sunday lunchtime and watch the Stones while Gomelsky shot further documentary footage of them onstage. ‘I met them in the bar, before they started playing,’ Jones remembers. ‘Mick was amiable and well spoken, but he stayed pretty much in the background. I thought Brian was the leader because he was the pushiest one, waving their single press cutting under my nose.’
Peter Jones was ‘knocked out’ by the set that followed, but cautiously said he wanted his paper’s in-house R&B enthusiast, Norman Jopling, to give a more knowledgeable assessment. Nineteen-year-old Jopling turned up at the Crawdaddy’s next Sunday session, but without great expectations. ‘British bands who tried to play the blues all had this kind of worthy, post-Trad feel, so I expected them to be rubbish. But as soon as Mick opened his mouth, I realised how wrong I was. All I remember thinking as the Stones played was “This stuff doesn’t only belong to black guys in the States any more. White kids in Britain can play it just as well.”’
When the band talked to Jopling afterwards, Brian again took the lead, quizzing him at length about what he could do for them in print. Mick was ‘a bit distant’, as if he resented his colleague’s assertiveness. ‘He knew Brian had started the band and was the leader, but he knew he was the guy people were looking at.’ Later, Jopling rode with them in Stu’s van to the house of a record producer, where Keith initiated an earnest discussion about Motown music and how disappointing Mary Wells’s latest single had been. ‘I remember that there were a lot of musical instruments lying around, Brian was picking them up and just playing them with that instinctive talent of his. But Mick was playing some, too – and I don’t mean only percussion instruments.’
Jopling’s article in the next week’s Record Mirror was the stuff of which careers are made:
As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments heave a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R&B clubs that have sprung up is nothing short of fantastic . . . At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves around to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad. And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t. But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if that scene continues to flourish . . .
After engineering such a triumph, Giorgio Gomelsky might have expected formal ratification as the band’s manager in time to handle the consequent surge of interest from record companies and talent agents. But all Gomelsky’s unselfish work on their behalf was suddenly forgotten. Before the Norman Jopling article had even appeared, Brian asked Jopling’s Record Mirror senior Peter Jones whether he’d consider taking on the Stones’ management. Jones was not interested – but once again proved a crucial catalyst. A couple of days later, he happened to run into a business acquaintance, a young freelance PR man whose naked ambition was a byword throughout the music trade press. If the young PR man cared to check out the Crawdaddy Club’s house band, Peter Jones suggested, he might find something of interest. And until the Record Mirror’s rave appeared, the field would be clear. When Mick had played Jimmy Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’ to his new Beatle friend John Lennon, he little imagined how prophetic the title would be.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
Long before the Rolling Stones turned into a new kind of band and Mick into a new kind of singer, Andrew Loog Oldham was a totally new kind of manager.
Before Oldham, managers of pop acts – a pool of talent then 99.9 per cent male – had been older men with no interest in the music beyond what it might earn them, and no empathy with their young charges or with teenagers generally. Most in addition were homosexuals, which explains why so many early boy rock ’n’ rollers had the same rough-trade fantasy look of flossy blond hair, black leather, tight jeans and high-heeled boots. Andrew Oldham was the first manager to be the same age as his charges, to speak their language, share their outlook, mirror their rampant heterosexuality and seem motivated by their collective ideals as much as by financial gain. While engineering managerial coups that, at the outset, seemed little short of magical, he was naturally and undisputedly one of the band.
Managers of the traditional kind had been content to stay in the shadows, counting their percentages. Oldham, however, craved stardom in his own right and, from the earliest age, possessed all the drive, ruthlessness and shamelessness necessary to win it. He was ahead of his time in nurturing such ambition despite possessing no abilities whatsoever as either a performer or musician and, indeed, no quantifiable talent in any direction. The talent he did have – one of the very highest order – would emerge only when he began managing the Stones, which at the outset he saw primarily as a means of projecting himself into the spotlight.
The other two most celebrated managers in pop history, Colonel Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, both had little real comprehension of the artists under their control. With the Stones – particularly their singer – Oldham very quickly realised exactly what he had found and what to do with it. In all the annals of huckstering and hype, no one has possessed a shrewder understanding of both his product and his customers.
It is a familiar music-business cliché to give the name ‘Svengali’ to any manager who radically remoulds a performer’s appearance or persona. Svengali is one of the scarier figures in Victorian gothic literature, a music teacher with a black beard and a hypnotic stare, combining the auras of Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera. In George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the eponymous heroine, an innocent young artist’s model, allows Svengali to take her over, heart and soul, in exchange for transforming her into a world-famous operatic diva.
The analogy is always made with both Colonel Parker and Epstein, even though the managerial reshaping of Presley and the Beatles was purely cosmetic, impermanent, and reached neither their hearts nor their souls. In pop’s premier league, the Svengali–Trilby scenario has actually been played out just once: when Andrew Loog Oldham met Mick Jagger.
When it happened, it would stir yet more foreign influences into the making of Mick. Oldham’s arrestingly hybrid name commemorated his father Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American air-force lieutenant, shot down and killed while serving in Britain during the last years of the Second World War. His mother, born Cecelia Schatkowski, was the daughter of a Russian Ashkenazi Jew who, like Mick’s mother’s family, had emigrated to New South Wales in Australia. After arriving in Britain aged four – the same age Eva Jagger did – Cecelia became known as Celia and, like Eva, preferred to draw a veil of pukka Englishness over her origins.
Born in 1944, after his father’s death and out of wedlock, Oldham grew up in the literary-bohemian north London suburb of Hampstead and attended a first-rank private school, Wellingborough. Like his future Trilby, he possessed a keen intelligence but resolutely refused to live up to his academic promise, instead hungering for glamour and style and choosing the unlikeliest possible role models for a boy of his background. In Oldham’s case, these were not venerable blues musicians but the amoral young hustlers who swindled and finger-snapped their way through late 1950s cinema – Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the sleazy Broadway press agent in Sweet Smell of Success; Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson, the prototype ‘bent’ British pop manager in Expresso Bongo.
When London first began to swing, Andrew Loog Oldham – by now a strawberry-blond nineteen-year-old with an educated accent and a killer line in suits and tab-collared shirts – was perfectly placed to hop aboard the pendulum. He became an odd-job boy at Mary Quant’s Bazaar boutique while working nights as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club (where he could easily have sighted Mick but somehow never did). Given his mania for attention seeking, it was inevitable he should end up in public relations, a field until then also dominated by much older men and therefore largely uncomprehending of teenage music and culture.
Among Oldham’s earliest PR clients from the pop world, one left a lasting impression. This was America’s Phil Spector, the first record producer to become as famous as the acts he recorded, thanks to his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ technique, the total artistic control on which he insisted, and his already legendary egotism and neurosis. Most fascinating to his young English minder was the simultaneous image of a maestro and hoodlum Spector cultivated, wearing dark glasses whatever the weather or time of day, travelling in limousines with blacked-out windows, and surrounding himself with more bodyguards than most current heads of state. If being a backroom boy could be like that, who needed the front parlour?
Oldham’s primary ambition was to be working with the Beatles, whose records now instantly topped the UK charts on release and who were showing themselves to be far more than just another pop group with their Liverpudlian charm and wit. Their breakthrough had allowed their manager, Brian Epstein, to successfully launch a whole troupe of ‘Mersey Beat’ acts, so destroying London’s historic anti-northern snobbery at a stroke and becoming the most successful British pop impresario ever.
Oldham soon talked himself into a freelance PR role with Epstein’s NEMS organisation and forged a good personal relationship with all four Beatles. Ambition-wise, though, it was a blind alley, since the possessive Epstein handled all their PR himself in tandem with fellow Liverpudlian Tony Barrow, and would allow Oldham to publicise only second-rank NEMS names like Gerry and the Pacemakers. He had decided to move on and was just reviewing his not very numerous options when his Record Mirror contact Peter Jones advised him to check out the house band at the Richmond Station Hotel.
For Oldham, walking into the Stones’ jam-packed, mirror-multiplied lair was like seeing ‘rock ’n’ roll in 3-D and Cinerama for the very first time’. His cracklingly entertaining autobiography, Stoned, records the visual shock of their front rank like a James Joyce epiphany: Keith’s ‘black as night, hacked hair . . . atop a war-rationed baby body . . .’; Brian’s ‘pretty-ugly shining blond hair belied by a face that already looked as if it had a few unpaid bills with life . . .’; Mick, ‘the boy from the railway tow-path . . . the hors d’oeuvre, the dessert and meal in between . . .’ After the cute Liverpudlian harmonies currently clogging the Top 10, that raw, sour, southern solo voice was like a dash of icy water in the face. ‘It wasn’t just a voice, and it was much, much more than a rendition, a mere lead vocal . . . It was an instrument . . . a declaration, not backed by a band but a part of a band . . . their decree.’
Oldham, in fact, caught the Stones at a low-energy moment, when they had reverted to being serious bluesmen seated on a semicircle of bar stools. Even then, Mick ‘moved like an adolescent Tarzan plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes . . . a body still deciding what it was and what it wanted . . . He was thin, waistless, giving him the human form of a puma with a gender of its own . . . He gave me a look that asked me everything about myself in one moment – as in “What are you doing with the rest of my life?” The lips looked at me, seconding that emotion.’
In the brief interlude before Record Mirror’s story brought every London talent scout flocking to Richmond, Oldham persuaded the Stones he should be their manager. It was a pitch of finely tuned brilliance, in which the nineteen-year-old presented himself simultaneously as a street-smart metropolitan tycoon with more experience of life than all of them put together, and a kindred spirit who shared their love of the blues and sacred mission to preserve it. Actually, he would confess in Stoned, ‘[the blues] didn’t mean dick to me. If it had, I might have had an opinion about it and missed the totality of what had hit me.’ The clincher was the tenuous connection with Brian Epstein and the Beatles, now made to sound as if John, Paul, George and Ringo barely made a move without his say-so. The cautious Mick could not help but be as impressed as the fame-famished Brian. ‘Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery,’ he would recall, ‘and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.’
For all his hubris, Oldham was realistic. As a small-fry freelance PR, without even an office, he knew he was in no position to launch into management on his own. Bearing in mind the main plank of his sales pitch to the Stones, his first move was to approach Brian Epstein and offer Epstein a half share in them in return for office space and facilities. But Epstein, feeling he already had more than enough artists, declined the opportunity that would have put the two biggest bands of all time in his pocket. Trawling the lower reaches of West End theatrical agents, Oldham next hit on Eric Easton, a former professional organist whose middle-of-the-road musical clients included guitarist Bert Weedon and the pub pianist Mrs Mills, and who also hired out electronic organs to theatres, cinemas and holiday camps.
Despite being an archetypal ‘Ernie’, according to Mick and Brian’s private argot, Easton realised how the British pop market was exploding and readily agreed to become the Stones’ co-manager and financial backer. However, a potentially serious obstacle existed in Giorgio Gomelsky, who had given the band their Crawdaddy residency, got them eulogised by Record Mirror and was their manager in every way other than writing. Oldham brought an incognito Easton to the Station Hotel to see the Stones perform and meet their acknowledged leader, Brian Jones. A few days later – during Gomelsky’s absence in Switzerland following the sudden death of his father – Brian and Mick attended a meeting with Oldham and Easton at the latter’s office.
It was a scene that had already been played in hundreds of other pop-managerial sanctums, and would be in thousands more – the walls covered with signed celebrity photos, framed Gold Discs and posters; the balding, over-genial man at a desk cluttered by pictures of wife and children (and, in this case, electronic organs), telling the two youngsters in front of him that, of course, he couldn’t promise anything but, if they followed his guidance, there was every chance of them ending up rich and famous. The only difference was the sceptical look on one youngster’s face and the penetrating questions he put to both his older and younger would-be mentors. ‘Mick asked me to define this “fame” I kept talking about,’ Oldham recalls. ‘I breathed deeply and said, “This is how I see fame. Every time you go through an airport you will get your picture taken and be in the papers. That is fame and you will be that famous.”’
True to his altruistic nature, Giorgio Gomelsky made no trouble about having the Stones filched from him in this devious manner, sought no financial compensation for all he had done to advance them, and even continued to offer them bookings at the Crawdaddy. In May 1963, Brian Jones signed a three-year management contract with Oldham and Easton on behalf of the whole band, setting the duo’s commission at 25 per cent. During the grooming process, each Stone would receive a weekly cash retainer, modest enough but sufficient to lift the three flat-sharers out of their previous abject poverty. Unknown to Mick and Keith, Brian negotiated an extra £5 per week in his capacity as leader.
Svengali lost no time in setting to work, though his original aim was to package the Stones pretty much like other pop bands, i.e., as Beatle copies. Their piano player, Ian Stewart, was dropped because Oldham thought six too cumbersome a line-up in this age of the Fab Four – and besides, chunky, short-haired Stu looked ‘too normal’. Good friend as well as fine musician though he was, neither Mick nor Brian protested, and there was general relief when he agreed to stay on as roadie and occasional back-up player. Keith deeply disapproved of Stu’s treatment – as he had of Giorgio Gomelsky’s – but felt his subordinate position (‘a mere hireling’) did not entitle him to take a moral stand. He was equally docile when Svengali gave a moment of attention to him, ordering him to drop the s from ‘Richards’ to give it a more showbizzy sound, as in Cliff Richard.
As an experienced entertainment agent, as well as a substantial investor, Eric Easton had a voice that must also be heeded. And, so far as Easton was concerned, the Stones had one possibly serious weak link. He wondered whether Mick’s voice could stand the strain of nightly, often twice-nightly, appearances in the touring pop package shows that were every band’s most lucrative market. There was also the question of whether the crucially important BBC would still bar him for sounding ‘too coloured’. Group leader Brian Jones was brought into the discussion, and readily agreed with Easton that, if necessary, the Stones’ vocalist would have to go the same way as their pianist.
A couple of days after the contract signing, Oldham telephoned a young photographer friend named Philip Townsend and commissioned the Stones’ first-ever publicity shoot. The only brief Townsend received was to ‘make them look mean and nasty’. He posed them in various Chelsea locations: on a bench outside a pub, mingling with oblivious King’s Road shoppers, even sitting kindergarten-style on the road outside 102 Edith Grove, ferociously casual and cool with their corduroy jackets, polo necks and ever-smouldering cigarettes, but, to twenty-first-century eyes, not mustering a shred of meanness or nastiness between them. Mick stands out only for his lighter-coloured jacket with raglan lapels; if anyone seems the star of the group, it’s sleek, enigmatic-looking Charlie Watts.
Having been dubbed the next big thing by London’s most influential music trade paper, the Stones were as good as guaranteed a contract with a major record label. Theoretically, of course, they were still bound to IBC studios by the demo tape on which they had given Ian Stewart’s friend, Glyn Johns, a six-month option. Eric Easton’s advice was that the agreement would have no validity if they could get back the tape’s only copy. Adopting Brian’s habit of bare-faced lying, they therefore told Johns they’d decided to break up the band but would like to keep the tape as a souvenir. An unsuspecting Johns handed it over in exchange for its recording cost: £109.
Among Britain’s few record labels in 1963, the mighty Decca company was the Stones’ almost inevitable destination. Having dominated the UK music market for thirty years, Decca had seen its arch-rival, EMI, achieve the equivalent of a Klondike gold strike with the Beatles. To compound the agony, Decca’s head of ‘artists and repertoire’, Dick Rowe, had had first chance to sign the Liverpudlians but had passed on them. So desperate was Rowe to rescue his reputation that the Stones (whose demo tape his department had also rejected a few months earlier because of Mick’s vocals) walked into Decca without the customary studio audition.
A well-worn procedure now lay ahead, which even the otherwise mould-breaking Beatles had followed – and continued to follow. The new signees would go into their record company’s own studios in the charge of a staff producer, who would choose the material they recorded and specify how it should be performed. Though Rowe, in his thankfulness, offered a significantly higher royalty than EMI had given the Beatles (it could hardly have been lower), the Stones would still receive only a tiny fraction of the sale price of each record, and that at a far-distant date, after labyrinthine adjustments and deductions.
Andrew Oldham had other ideas, absorbed from his American entrepreneurial idol, Phil Spector. The artists who helped constitute Spector’s Wall of Sound were recorded privately by the producer at his own expense and free from any interference by third parties. The master tapes were then leased to the record company, which manufactured, distributed and marketed the product but had no say in its character or creative evolution and, crucially, did not own the copyright. In Britain’s cosily exploitative record business, a tape-lease deal was still a rarity. Such was Decca’s terror of losing another next big thing that they complied without a murmur.
Again following Spector’s lead, Oldham appointed himself the Stones’ record producer as well as co-manager, undaunted by his indifference to their sacred music – or by never having set foot in a recording studio other than as a PR minder. Decca were already agitating for a début single to catch the ever-rising tide of hysteria around the Beatles and beat groups generally. With no clue what that début should be, Oldham simply told his charges to pick out their five best R&B stage numbers and they would make the choice democratically between them. A session was booked at Olympic Sounds, one of central London’s only three or four independent studios, on 10 May. Mick arrived straight from a London School of Economics lecture with a pile of textbooks under one arm.
The decision about the single’s A-side – the one to be submitted for radio play and review in the trades – proved problematic. The Stones’ best live numbers were uncommercial blues like Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’ or Chuck Berry anthems like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, which by now had become the staple of many other bands, not least the Beatles. Finally they chose Berry’s ‘Come On’, a serio-comic lament about a lost girlfriend, a broken-down car, and being rudely awoken by a wrong number on the telephone. Released two years earlier as the B-side to ‘Go Go Go’, it had made little impact in Britain, and had a slightly more pop feel than Berry’s usual output.
There was little time for any radical reinterpretation of the track at Olympic Sound. Oldham, using Eric Easton’s money, had booked the studio for three hours at a special rate of £40, and was under strict orders from his co-manager not to run over time. That sense of haste and compromise permeated the Stones’ ‘Come On’; indeed, Berry’s languid vocal was so speeded up by Mick, it sounded more like some tongue-twisting elocution exercise. With an eye to the mass market, he also toned down the lyrics (an act of self-censorship never to be repeated), singing about ‘some stupid guy tryin’’ to reach another number rather than ‘some stupid jerk’. Brian Jones’s musicianship was limited to a harmonica riff in place of Berry’s lead guitar, and a falsetto harmony in the chorus. Even with a key change to spin it out, the track lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. For the unimportant B-side, the band could return to their comfort zone with Willie Dixon’s ‘I Want to Be Loved’.
The session wrapped in just under three hours, so sparing Eric Easton a £5 surcharge. As the participants left, the single engineer – whose services were included in the price – asked Oldham what he wanted to do about ‘mixing’. Britain’s answer to Phil Spector did not yet know this to be an essential part of the recording process. Still fearful of being charged overtime, he replied, ‘You mix it and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.’
Everyone involved realised how unsatisfactory the session had been, and there was neither surprise nor protest when Decca’s Dick Rowe judged both the tracks to be unreleasable in their present form and said they must be re-recorded at the company’s West Hampstead studios under the supervision of a staff producer, Michael Barclay. The wisest thing would have been for Mick to start afresh with a new A-side, but instead he continued trying to pummel some life into his hepped-up yet watered-down version of ‘Come On’. The infusion of technical expertise and extra time made so little audible difference that Decca’s bureaucracy decided to stick with the Olympic Sound version, and this was duly released on 7 June 1963.
To drum up advance publicity, Oldham took his new discoveries on an exhaustive tour of the newspaper and magazine offices to which he had easy access thanks to his former connection with the Beatles. As well as the trade press, these included magazines catering to a female teenage audience, like Boyfriend, whose Regent Street offices were just around the corner from Decca. ‘After Andrew first brought them in, the Stones just used to turn up – usually at lunchtime,’ recalls former Boyfriend writer Maureen O’Grady. ‘I remember Mick and Brian going round the office, trying to cadge a sandwich from our packed lunches. They were obviously ravenous.’
When it came to getting television exposure, the ‘Ernie’ Eric Easton proved to have his uses. Among Easton’s more conventional clients was Brian Matthew, the host of British television’s only significant pop performance show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Transmitted in black-and-white early each Saturday evening from ABC-TV’s Birmingham studios, it featured all the top British and American chart names lip-synching their latest releases and, in this era of only two UK television channels, pulled in a weekly audience of around 13 million. Six months earlier, while Mick, Brian and Keith were shivering at Edith Grove, the show had broken the Beatles nationally, sending their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, straight to No. 1.
Easton spoke to Brian Matthew, and as a result Thank Your Lucky Stars booked the Stones to perform ‘Come On’ on the show to be recorded on Sunday 7 July and aired nationally the following Saturday. The catch was that they would have to look like a conventional beat group, in matching black-and-white-checked bumfreezer jackets with black velvet collars, black trousers, white shirts and Slim Jim ties. Mick and Keith protested in outrage to Andrew Oldham their supposed soul mate, but to Oldham exposure on this scale far outweighed a little compromising clobber; if they wanted the spot, they must wear the check.
Thus did Britain receive its first sight of Mick Jagger – far down a bill headlined by the teenage songstress Helen Shapiro and introduced by Brian Matthew in the kind of cut-glass BBC tones that traditionally commentated on Royal funerals or Test cricket matches. By today’s standards, it was hardly a provocative début. The Stones in their little checked jackets appeared on a two-sided set formed of giant playing cards, with Mick standing on a low plinth to the rear of Brian and Bill, and Keith and Charlie shown in profile. Merely lip-synching ‘Come On’ removed any involvement Mick had ever felt with the song, reducing him to the same tailor’s-dummy inanimation as the other four. For nobodies like these, the track was not allowed even its pitifully short ninety-second running time, prematurely fading amid the (artificially induced) screams of the studio audience.
It was long enough to cause horror and revulsion in living rooms the length and breadth of Britain. Earlier that year, a nation that immemorially equated masculinity – and heterosexuality – with the army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’ had been appalled by the sight of four young Liverpudlians with hair slabbed over their foreheads like the twenties Hollywood vamp Louise Brooks. Closer inspection, however, had revealed the Beatles’ mop-tops to be no more than that, leaving their necks and ears as neatly shorn as any regimental sergeant major could wish. But here were pop musicians whose hair burst through those last frontiers of decorum and hygiene, curling over ears and brushing shirt collars; here in particular was a vocalist (if one could call him that), the blatant effeminacy of whose coiffure carried on into his marginally twitching torso and unsmiling, obscurely ungracious face.
Out there, of course, nobody knew who he was: almost no band members’ names were yet known but John, Paul, George and Ringo. The telephone calls that flooded ABC-TV’s switchboard were to protest about the ‘scruffy’ group who had disfigured Thank Your Lucky Stars, and to urge the producers never to invite them back.
Nonetheless, ‘Come On’ proved a rallying cry in vain. After the muddle over the recording, Decca seemed to lose interest, spending almost nothing on promotion and publicity. Reviews in the music trades were no more than tepid. ‘A bluesy, commercial group who could make the charts in a small way,’ commented Record Mirror. Writing as guest reviewer in Melody Maker, fellow singer Craig Douglas was scathing about Mick’s vocal: ‘Very ordinary. I can’t hear a word [he’s] saying. If there were a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere.’
The national press failed to pick up on the Thank Your Lucky Stars furore and would have ignored the Stones altogether but for the unflagging generosity of the manager they had just rudely dumped. Giorgio Gomelsky knew the tabloid Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop correspondent, Patrick Doncaster, and persuaded Doncaster to devote his whole column to the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young band named the Yardbirds whom Gomelsky had found to take his ungrateful protégés’ place. The good turn backfired when the beer brewery that owned the Station Hotel read of the wild rites jeopardising its mirror-lined function room and evicted the Crawdaddy forthwith.
In 1963, the procedure for getting a single into the Top 20 charts published by the half-dozen trades, and broadcast each Sunday on the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was quite straightforward. The listings were based on sales by a selection of retailers throughout the country. Undercover teams would tour these key outlets and buy up the 10,000 or so copies needed to push a record into the charts’ lower reaches and to pole position on radio playlists. At that point, in most cases, public interest kicked in and it continued the climb unaided.
Decca being unwilling to activate this mechanism for ‘Come On’, Andrew Oldham had no choice but to do it himself. To help him, he brought in a young freelance promotion man named Tony Calder who had worked on the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, and who, as a former Decca employee, knew the whole hyping routine backwards. But even with Calder’s bulk-buying teams behind it, ‘Come On’ could be winched no higher than No. 20 on the New Musical Express’s chart. To blues-unaware pop-record buyers, the name ‘Rolling Stones’, with its echo of schoolroom proverbs, struck almost as bizarre a note as ‘the Beatles’ initially had. And Mick’s over-accelerated vocal removed the crucial element of danceability.
He was never to make that mistake again.
OUTSIDE OF MUSIC, Chrissie Shrimpton occupied Mick’s whole attention. They had been going out for more than six months and were now ‘going steady’, in this era the recognised preliminary to engagement and marriage – though steady was the least appropriate word for their relationship.
Chrissie, now eighteen, had left secretarial college and moved up to London, ostensibly to work but really to provide a place where she and Mick could find some privacy. With her friend Liz Gribben, she lived in a succession of bed-sitting-rooms which, though ‘very grim’, were still more conducive to romance than 102 Edith Grove. However, she still could not break it to her parents that she was sleeping with Mick; on their visits home to Buckinghamshire to stay with Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, they continued virtuously to occupy separate bedrooms.
One of Chrissie’s first secretarial jobs was at Fletcher & Newman’s piano warehouse in Covent Garden – at that time still the scene of a raucous daily fruit and vegetable market. ‘It was only a few minutes’ walk from the London School of Economics and Mick would come and meet me for lunch. One day as we walked through the market, a stallholder threw a cabbage at his head and shouted, “You ugly fucker.”’
In fact, he hugely enjoyed showing Chrissie off to his fellow LSE students, not only as a breathtakingly beautiful ‘bird’ but as sister of the famous model Jean. Only Matthew Evans, the future publisher and peer, went out with anyone on the same level, a girl named Elizabeth Mead. ‘That amused Mick,’ Evans recalls. ‘We used to sit and discuss how similar Elizabeth and Chrissie were.’
When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument – this only a couple of weeks after they met. ‘We were always together,’ Chrissie says, ‘and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault – like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights – though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.’
Though she found him ‘a sweet, loving person’, his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. ‘We’d be walking down the street . . . and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.’ Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when – as often happened – Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, ‘Mrs Shrimpton . . . where is she?’
With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson & Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realised he went there at all. ‘I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,’ Calder remembers. ‘But with Mick, it was never an issue.’
By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities – and the career that would follow – to plunge into the unstable, unsavoury, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.
One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving the LSE. ‘I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonised very much about it,’ she remembers. ‘He certainly didn’t discuss it with me – but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that “Joe is very upset.”’
The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a ‘surprisingly easy’ interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones he could always come back and complete his degree.
It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multi-generational psychosis, ‘Beatlemania’. Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair – for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal – they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences and the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, ‘She Loves You’. Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analysed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of ‘top people’s paper’ The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.
For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticise or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.
While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional débutante ball, for fees between £25 and £50. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that – rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters – combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:
How fab can anyone be! . . . I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me – I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it – & I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me – I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good – my ears are still buzzing.
One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground – the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home – a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its co-presenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on 26 August.
Ready Steady Go! was a mould-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mould-breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits – ‘The Weekend Starts Here.’ Coincidentally, the programme was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.
The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless début single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform – leather waistcoats, black trousers, white shirts and ties – and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route, across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.
Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland – not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia – through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned and long-haired Londoners were gawped at like just-landed aliens.
The gig might be at a cinema, a theatre, a Victorian town hall or corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being ‘too noisy’, then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.
At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytising zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, the Stones knew Berry’s entire œuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, ‘turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage’. That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: ‘They didn’t seem to be copying anybody – and they didn’t give a fuck.’
The word that increasingly went ahead of them, based solely on the length of their hair, was dirty. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness, and one of those fortunate people who do not show dirt; Brian washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’; Bill Wyman as a small boy used to do his mother’s housework for her; the Hornsey Art School student Gillian Wilson, who had a fling with Charlie Watts, remembers his underwear being cleaner than hers. They had now given up any semblance of a stage uniform and went onstage in the same Carnaby motley in which they’d arrived at the theatre. Though all of them were clothes-mad and cutting-edge fashionable, this revolutionary break with tradition added a reek of BO to the implied dandruff and head lice. Their manager took every opportunity to circulate the double slander, adding a third for good measure: ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes. They don’t play nice-mannered music, but raw and masculine. People keep asking me if they’re morons . . .’
For Oldham had finally seen with the clarity of a divine vision where to take them – and, in particular, Mick. As the Beatles progressively won over the older generation and the establishment, and were unconditionally adulated by Fleet Street, many of their original young fans were feeling a sense of letdown. Where was the excitement – the rebellion – in liking the same band your parents or even grandparents did? He would therefore turn the Rolling Stones into anti-Beatles; the scowling flip side of the coin Brian Epstein was minting like a modern Midas. It was a double paradox, since the angelic Fab Four had a decidedly sleazy past in Hamburg’s red-light district, whereas the bad boys Oldham now proposed to create were utterly blameless, none more than their vocalist.
Indeed, the Jagger image at this point could well have gone in the very opposite direction. Early press stories on the Stones still gave his Christian name as Mike, resurrecting that bourgeois aura of Sunday-morning pubs, sports cars and driving gloves. There was also PR mileage to be extracted from his intellectual achievements. Until now, only one British pop star, Mike Sarne, had experienced further education (coincidentally also at London University).
As Tony Calder remembers, Mick was profoundly uneasy over the master plan that Oldham outlined to him – and not just for its gross misrepresentation of his character. ‘He said he’d bide his time and see if it worked out or not. But there were so many times when he’d turn up at the office, Andrew would call for two cups of tea and shut the door. He’d be in there alone with Mick for a couple of hours doing one thing – building up his confidence. Self-esteem? He didn’t have any. He was a wimp.’
A famous colour clip of the Stones onstage at the ABC cinema, Hull, filmed by one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, shows them playing ‘Around and Around’ for the umpteenth time, against a barrage of maniacal screams. They seem to be doing remarkably little to encourage this uproar: Bill playing bass in his odd vertical style, Keith lost in his chords, Brian almost street-mime motionless, with an odd new electric guitar shaped like an Elizabethan lute. Mick, in his familiar matelot-striped shirt – and almost glowing with cleanliness – seems least involved of all. Even in this paean to the liberating joy of music, his well-moistened lips barely stir, giving the words an edge of sarcasm (‘Rose outa my seat . . . I just had to daynce . . .’) reflected in his veiled eyes and occasional flamenco-style hand clap. In the guitar solo he does a stiff-legged dance with head thrust forward and posterior stuck out, ironically rather like the vaudeville ‘eccentric’ style, then still preserved by such veterans as Max Wall and Nat Jackley.
Since the onset of Beatlemania, young girls at pop shows had screamed dementedly whatever acts were served up to them, male or female, but until now had always stayed in their seats. With Rolling Stones concerts came a new development: they attacked the stage. These were the days when security at British pop concerts consisted of theatre staff checking tickets at the door, and the only barrier between performers and audience as a rule was an empty orchestra pit. During a performance in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 6 September, half a dozen demented girls began trying to tear off the band’s clothes and grabbing for souvenirs. (Bill later discovered a valuable ring had been wrenched off his finger.) Mick’s athleticism proved an unexpected asset: as one invader rushed at him, he swept her up in a fireman’s lift, carried her offstage, then returned to continue the number.
The next day brought a 200-mile drive from coastal Suffolk to Aberystwyth, north Wales, then another of 150 miles south to Birmingham for a second appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the bill was Craig Douglas, who had panned Mick’s ‘Come On’ vocal in Melody Maker. Before becoming a pop singer, Douglas had been a milkman on the Isle of Wight; in revenge for his hostile review – and with unendearing social snobbery – the Stones dumped a cluster of empty milk bottles outside his dressing room door.
On 15 September they were opening in a show called The Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the Beatles as top of the bill. Five months earlier, Mick, Keith and Brian had walked into the Albert Hall anonymously, disguised as Beatle roadies; now the Chelsea boot was well and truly on the other foot. The Stones’ support-band spot unleashed such pandemonium that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were seen peeping through the curtains, nervous of being upstaged for the first time since their Hamburg days. Boyfriend magazine was unequivocal in naming the night’s real stars: ‘Just one shake of [that] overgrown hair is enough to make every girl in the audience scream with tingling excitement.’
Two weeks later, the Stones set out on their first national package tour, as footnotes to a bill headed by three legendary American names, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. As a mark of respect to their third-biggest R&B hero – and perhaps a tacit admission that their singer was not as brazenly confident as he seemed – the band dropped all Bo Diddley songs from their stage act during the month-long tour. In fact, as well as being flattered by their reverence, Diddley was impressed by their musicianship, later using Bill and Charlie as his rhythm section on a BBC radio appearance. For Mick, the main benefit was seeing Diddley’s virtuoso sideman, Jerome Green, play lollipop-shaped maracas, two in each hand. From now on, he, too, shook maracas in the faster numbers, albeit only one per hand – and even that with a hint of irony.
Touring meant staying in hotels, which for such a bottom-of-the-bill act meant grim establishments with dirty net curtains, malodorous carpets and electricity coin meters in the bedrooms, all in all not much different from home back in Chelsea. It emerged, however, that one Edith Grove flatmate was not having to endure it. As well as his leader’s £5-per-week premium, Brian had secretly arranged with Eric Easton to stay in a better class of hotel than the others.
Before long, the tour’s American headliners were facing the Beatles’ recent problem at the Royal Albert Hall. Little Richard remained oblivious, entertaining his audience with an extended striptease, then going for a ten-minute walkabout through the auditorium with a forty-strong police guard. But the Everly Brothers’ tender harmonies became increasingly drowned out by chants of ‘We want the Stones!’ In the end, the emcee had to go out and plead for Mick’s heroes of yesteryear to be given a break.
By autumn, the Stones’ word-of-mouth reputation was sufficient for them to be voted Britain’s sixth most popular band in Melody Maker’s annual readers’ poll. Yet their future on record was anything but secure. Unless their inexperienced young manager–record producer could concoct a far bigger hit single than ‘Come On’, Decca would be looking for excuses to circumvent their contract and dump them. And the stock of likely hits in the R&B canon was shrinking all the time as other bands and solo singers dipped into it.
After a flick through R&B’s back catalogue, Andrew Oldham chose an overt novelty number, Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Poison Ivy’, originally recorded by the Coasters with voices teetering on the edge of goonery. As the B-side, weirdly, he prescribed another quasi-comedy song, Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’. For a time Mick seemed headed for exactly the vaudeville kind of pop he so despised. However, a recording session with Decca’s in-house producer, Michael Barclay, on 15 July revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choice. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously cancelled them.
Salvation came unexpectedly while Oldham and the Stones were at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Soho, trying out other potential A-sides and getting nowhere. Escaping outside for a breath of air, Oldham chanced to run into John Lennon and Paul McCartney, fresh from receiving awards as Show-Business Personalities of the Year at the Savoy Hotel. Told of the Stones’ problem, John and Paul good-naturedly offered a song of theirs called ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, so new that it wasn’t even quite finished. The duo accompanied Oldham back to Studio 51 and demo’d a Liverpudlian R&B pastiche that their rivals could cover without shame or self-compromise. Their gift thankfully accepted, they added the song’s final touches then and there, making it all look absurdly easy.
On 7 October the Stones went straight into Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn (just down the road from LSE), and recorded a version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ needing virtually no production and only a couple of takes. The B-side was a cobbled-up instrumental, based on Booker T. and the MG’s’ ‘Green Onions’ and entitled ‘Stoned’ – to most British ears, still only something that happened to adulterous women in the Bible.
‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was released on 1 November, three weeks before the Beatles’ own version, sung by Ringo Starr, appeared on their landmark second album, With the Beatles. While the northerners could not stop themselves adding harmony and humour, the Stones’ treatment was raw and basic, just Mick’s voice in alternation with Brian’s molten slide guitar; not so much sly romantic proposition as barefaced sexual attack. ‘Another group trying their chart luck with a Lennon-McCartney composition,’ patronised the New Musical Express. ‘Fuzzy and undisciplined . . . complete chaos,’ sniffed Disc. Indiscipline and chaos seemed to be just what Britain’s record buyers had been waiting for, and the single went straight to No. 12.
At year’s end, BBC television launched a new weekly music show called Top of the Pops, based solely on the week’s chart placings, that would run without significant change of format for the next forty years. The Stones featured in the very first programme, their vocalist adding a further twist to that un-Beatly Beatles song still rudely disrupting the Top 20. Motionless and in profile, buttoned into a tab collar as high as a Regency hunting stock, he seemed as detached and preoccupied as the lyric was hot and urgent. The downcast eyes and irritably drooping mouth suggested something rather tedious being spelled out to an unseen listener who was either slow-witted or deaf. To the studio audience surging round him, the clear message came straight from his recently aborted version of ‘Poison Ivy’: ‘You can look but you better not touch . . .’
Everyone knew now it was Mick, not Mike, and that – even though they might have attended the same seat of learning – he was nothing whatsoever like Mike Sarne.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself ’ (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
Saturday 14th December, 1963: Beatles at [Wimbledon] Palais, Stones at [the Baths] Epsom. Went down to Palais but saw nothing but police & more police. Got to Epsom early & when we saw ‘admission by ticket only’ thought we might as well go home. Stayed for a little while chatting to 2 mods however & then that darling DARLING doorman let us in. Got right to the front & wow! Leaning up on the stage gazing into the face of Mick and he looked at me – he did! Keith glanced once, Charlie never & I don’t know about Brian & Ghost [Bill Wyman]. Mick kind of looks at you in a funny way – shy? impersonal? sexy? cold? I don’t know but it’s certainly cool & calm . . . as usual [he] commanded all the attention. He was in a pink shirt, navy trousers, Cuban [heeled] Chelsea’s & brown Chelsea cord waistcoat with black onyx cufflinks. He looked thin, cool and haggard. His hair hung in long ginger waves & his sharp sideways glances down at the audience (no – me!) made him look even more fright [crossed out] aloof and somehow witchlike . . . After the Stones had gone off, the curtains were drawn across but we got underneath them & watched the Stones standing around at the side, talking . . . Couldn’t get backstage worst luck!
– from Jacqui Graham’s diary
Chelsea had lost Mick, for now anyway. Under Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton’s management, the Rolling Stones received around £20 each per week, the same as most top British soccer players of that era. The three Edith Grove flatmates therefore could move on from the squalid pad where they had frozen and half starved – but also shared an idealism and camaraderie that were never to be revived.
Treading his usual fine line between sex addict and sex offender, Brian Jones had impregnated yet another teenage girlfriend. The mother of this, his fourth child by different partners – due to arrive in summer 1964 – was a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser named Linda Lawrence. In a surprising reversal of his usual tactics, Brian did not instantly desert Linda but showed every sign of standing by her and the baby and, still more surprisingly, went to live with her at her family’s council house in Windsor, Berkshire, where Mick had first wooed Chrissie Shrimpton. So fond of this prospective son-in-law did the Lawrences become that they named the house ‘Rolling Stone’ in Brian’s honour and also gave board and lodging to a white goat he bought as a pet and liked to take out for walks through Windsor on a lead.
It went without saying that Mick and Keith would continue living together. However, treading his usual fine line between authority figure and honorary bandmate, Andrew Oldham put forward the idea, or instruction, that he should join them. Svengali needed to be as close as possible to the Trilby he was moulding day by day.
Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove – though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.
Rock musicians’ neighbours are usually condemned to purgatorial nuisance, but with Jagger and Richard, Mapesbury Road got off lightly. For much of the time the pair were away on tour, and when they returned they would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. Their fans had no idea where they were living, and none yet possessed the gumption to find out. There were no riotous all-night parties, no revving cars or motorbikes or onslaughts of deafening music, not even the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass. There was no drug taking whatsoever at this stage, or even very much drinking. ‘A half bottle of wine in that place,’ Oldham would remember, ‘was a big deal.’
Since Mick had been swept up into his new pop-star life, his parents back home in Dartford had hardly seen him and, apart from the increasingly unflattering stories they read in the press, had no idea where he was or what he was doing. When Oldham commandeered the Stones, he did not have to sell himself as a responsible manager to their respective families the way Brian Epstein had, painstakingly, to the Beatles’; Oldham, indeed, had not even met Joe and Eva Jagger, and initially left all dealings with the couple to his associate Tony Calder. ‘One day,’ Calder remembers, ‘a call came through to the office, and this very polite voice said, “My name’s Joe Jagger. I understand that my son is getting rather famous. If you need help of any kind, just let me know.” I took calls from so many angry, hysterical people every day . . . I couldn’t believe I’d just been talking to somebody who was polite.’
Liaison with Joe and Eva improved when Oldham employed seventeen-year-old Shirley Arnold, a long-time loyal Stones supporter around the club circuit, to organise their fast-growing national fan club. Shirley joined the small Oldham enclave inside Eric Easton’s office in a Piccadilly office block called Radnor House. Also among the staff was Easton’s elderly father-in-law, a Mr Boreham, who advised clients on long-term financial planning. Shirley remembers Mr Boreham’s amazement after a consultation session with Mick. ‘He said Mick had asked him what he thought the pound would be worth on the currency markets in a few years’ time. That was something no one in the music or entertainment business thought about in those days.’
Henceforward, Shirley kept Joe and Eva fully updated about their son, finding them ‘lovely people’ who never made the slightest demands on their own account or expected to profit from his success. ‘Eva was the dominant one in the marriage, very conscious of what other people thought, and to begin with she wasn’t sure what to make of all the headlines. But Mick’s dad was always totally laid-back about it all.’
Brian Jones might cut a dash with his pet goat on the streets of Windsor, but elsewhere he was finding it increasingly hard to win the attention he craved. Ironically, the Stones’ takeover by professional managers that he had wanted so desperately had eroded almost all his former power and status as the band’s founder, chief motivator and creative driving force. While they were still struggling to break through, Brian had a certain value to Oldham and Easton as an ally within their ranks, and so could wangle preferential treatment in pay or hotel accommodation. But now that they had made it his doom was effectively sealed.
Knowing in his own mind what a star he was, he could not understand why Oldham should be devoting such time and trouble to Mick, or why audiences responded to the results with such fervour. ‘Brian would come into the office to collect his fan mail,’ Tony Calder remembers, ‘and there it would be in a little pile, with a dirty great pile next to it. “Who’s that other lot for?” he’d say. “They’re for Mick,” I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.’
One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness – the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove – Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.
The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and – as an inveterate hypochondriac – too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). ‘If Andrew told Mick, “You’ve got two interviews today,” his response would always be “Are you sure they want me?”’ Tony Calder remembers. ‘Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.’ Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s news editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, ‘Nice to meet you, sir.’
The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. ‘This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.’
At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. ‘Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,’ Tony Calder says. ‘But he’d expand it into twenty-five . . . then forty-five, then an hour.’ While other pop musicians fraternised with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones – and him. ‘I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,’ he told Melody Maker. ‘I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day . . .’ It was a trick that never failed [in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words] ‘to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.’
But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963, and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could be often be extraordinarily close.
Jacqui’s diary greets 5 January as a ‘brilliant Stoning start to 1964’ after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his ‘lovely hair’, and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick ‘seem[s] not to be his usual bright self’ and is rather less ‘gorgeous’ than at Epsom three weeks before: ‘I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,’ the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. ‘He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!’
On 11 January, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. ‘Fabulous Keith’ with his ‘lovely, lean, intelligent face’, does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be ‘not looking madly happy’, and to have ‘a very clipped and well-spoken voice . . . and a lovely slow, tired smile’. Charlie is ‘dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined’ and Bill is ‘sweet, small, dark, very very helpful’. But Mick proves ‘a big disappointment & a big head . . . [he] thought he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still – although the worst – he is still fab! . . . then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.’
Friday, 24 January, which for the diarist ‘started off being puke’, turns into ‘the most fabulous day ever . . . Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING – yes REALLY TALKING TO US!’ With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick ‘very friendly . . . he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say’. Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his ‘secret wife’, Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an ad man who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. ‘He made crude remarks like “must cover me tits up” etc.,’ the diarist records, ‘but I liked him.’ She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.
By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologises that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:
MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Fate held in store a 15 min conversation in Mick’s hall.
We set off with the spirit of adventure strong within us & at great length found 33 Mapesbury Road NW2. Not knowing which bell to ring we knocked and asked for Mick Jagger. Several minutes passed & then this old woman appeared & behind her I could see Micky standing on the stairs, arms folded with a queer sort of smile on his face. He looked like a sort of pale blue pole in the dim light because he was in his pyjamas – pale blue, dark blue trimmings & white cord. The jacket was open & the pyjama trousers falling down but he seemed quite oblivious & stood there in his bare feet just looking. I felt incapable of walking in but we did & once more our conversation was friendly but I got the feeling he was faintly amused at us for his expression, a vague sort of genial smile, remained unchanged throughout.
This is a rough idea of the conversation:
SILENCE
J: ‘Good morning’
S: “ “
M: “ “
S: ‘We phoned you up’
J: ‘Yes, I hope you don’t mind us coming round here like this, you remember we phoned you up about that party.’
M: ‘Yes, I remember’
J: ‘Well, we went to it & then went to another one over at Blackheath – the second one was at Blackheath, wasn’t it?’
S: ‘Yes’
J: ‘Anyway, we landed up at Hampstead station this morning & we knew you lived round this way so we thought we’d pop in. I hope you don’t mind. I s’pose it’s a bit of a cheek really but it’s typical of us, we’re always doing mad things.’
M: ‘How did you know my address?’
J: ‘Oh we’ve known it for ages. I’ve forgotten who gave it to us.’
S: ‘Which is your bell, you haven’t got your name on it.’
M: (evading question) ‘Oh, we always put different funny names on it.’
J: ‘I think you thought we were Bridget before, you know, about the long skirts.’
M: ‘Oh, I knew you weren’t Bridget – I thought you might be some of her friends. Someone sent me 2 dolls the other day, with long skirts on – very nice. I appreciated it.’
Crosses over to mirror having got up from sitting on stairs.
‘I must look awful, haven’t shaved or anything. A bloke came to see me once & took a picture of me like this.’
Arranges hair.
‘Sent them to me afterwards. I looked terrible – it was the flash.’
J: ‘I’d kill anyone if they did that to me.’
M: ‘Oh, we’ve got to go away again soon.’
S: ‘Where to?’
M: ‘Oh, Sunbury or some stupid place like that. We’re playing at Greenford tonight.’
Comes over to us.
‘Gosh, aren’t I small? Why aren’t you at work or anything.’
J: ‘Oh we got the day off, hadn’t got much to do. Where’s Keith, is he upstairs?’
M: ‘Yes, he’s, uh, busy’ (laughs)
Phone rings
‘Excuse me.’
Answers it.
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo – press Button A – git. Hallo, who’s there?’
Puts it down
M: ‘You were saying?’
J & S: Inordinate mumbles
M: ‘I thought you were the bloke coming to see me s’morning about some script.’
J: ‘Oh, is that for the Rice Krispies advertisement?’
M: ‘No, but how did you know about that?’
J: ‘Oh we were there when that bloke asked you.’
S: ‘We were in your dressing room at Wimbledon.’
J: ‘Yes, it was Brian that wanted to do it, wasn’t it?!’
No answer. Various other topics of conversation, then
M: ‘What’s the time?’
J: ‘Twenty past twelve.’
M: ‘Oh, he’ll be here soon. I’ve got to go & have a bath & get some clothes on. I’d invite you up but it’s a bit awkward – you do understand.’
Giggles
J & S: ‘Yes, we understand.’
M: ‘And I’ve only got a little room to myself. Can’t very well invite you in there, people might get ideas.’
J & S: ‘Uh . . . yea.’
Shows us the door
M: ‘Oh well, give us a ring sometime, when we’re at a theatre or dance hall & come and see us.’ Mumble Mumble ‘Come into the dressing room. Cheerio.’
J & S: ‘Cheerio.’
Exit
Door slams shut.
We trail around Willesden miserably – we return to Wimbledon & make dinner at around 3.30. We feel choked up & a bit silly.
GOING OUT WITH Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister was not Mick’s automatic passport into the upper echelons of Swinging London. Jean had always done her best to keep Chrissie at arm’s length and, besides, was still far from certain about the ‘ugly’ young man who sometimes decorously occupied her bed at her parents’ home in Buckinghamshire while she was away. Far more important to Mick’s initial social rise was David Bailey, the East End photographer who had put Jean into Vogue, made them both international celebrities and was now going out with her. Bailey, indeed, was to become a friend outlasting the era of both Shrimpton sisters; perhaps his closest ever outside music.
When the two first met, they could not have been much more unequal, one a nineteen-year-old LSE student, the other five years older and at a seemingly unsurpassable peak of celebrity. Mick was frankly awestruck by the glamour and sophistication of Bailey’s lifestyle – the Lotus Elan sports cars, mews studios and cowboy boots he had made a photographer’s essential accessories in place of potted palms, black cloths and ‘watch the birdie!’ Of no small influence either was the delighted frisson Bailey’s unreformed (and totally genuine) Cockney accent created among the debs and high-born female magazine editors who lionised him. Such was Mick’s admiration that he even allowed Bailey to tease him, as few others dared to do openly, about his appearance. When Eva Jagger took him shopping as a boy, Bailey used to joke, there would have been no problem about going into places where small children weren’t welcome. She could leave him outside, securely clamped to the shop window by his lips.
Early in their friendship, rather like Pip with Herbert Pocket in Dickens’s Great Expectations, Mick asked Bailey to take him to a posh restaurant and teach him how to conduct himself. They went to the Casserole on King’s Road, not far from the World’s End village where three hard-up Stones had so recently subsisted on stolen milk and stale fruit pies. Mick paid the bill – not an act to be much associated with him – but jibbed at Bailey’s suggestion that he should also leave a tip. Finally, he put down a pre-decimal ten-shilling (or ‘ten-bob’) note, equivalent to fifty pence today, with a 1964 purchasing power of £10. But as they left, Bailey saw him slip it back into his pocket.
Bailey soon picked up on Andrew Oldham’s influence over Mick, one that reminded him of a worldly-wise older brother with an awestruck younger one, and made his own moulding of Jean Shrimpton as a couture icon seem superficial by comparison. At the few Stones gigs he attended, he also found himself an uncomfortable witness to Brian Jones’s decreasing influence in the band and continual attempts to claw some power and status back. The photographer’s eagle eye for nuances noted that, while Mick was happy to zoom around with Jean and him in an unpretentious Mini-Minor, Brian drove a bulky Humber saloon, ‘the kind of car a vicar would use’. At the end of a gig, Bailey recalls, Mick and Keith would be like unkind children, playing an obviously habitual game of ‘let’s get away from Brian’.
Chrissie Shrimpton, too, recognised Oldham’s power over Mick, although at her tender age – she was still not yet nineteen – it represented unfathomably deep waters. Chrissie now spent most nights with Mick at 33 Mapesbury Road while officially sharing a bedsit with her friend Liz Gribben for the sake of appearances with her parents. When Jacqui Graham or other schoolgirl fans rang up the flat, a terse female voice would answer, discouraging them from further surprise appearances on the front doorstep.
For all the Stones’ growing fame, Mick still felt it a huge feather in his cap to be going out with Jean Shrimpton’s sister, even though Chrissie refused to capitalise on her surname or her own spectacular looks, and continued to work as a secretary, now at the Stones’ record company, Decca. ‘I still wanted to be with him all the time,’ she remembers. ‘The trouble was that my life was going on mostly in the daytime and Mick’s mostly went on at night.’ And Oldham’s rival stake in him was something she could only characterise as ‘powerful and frightening’.
The explosive, sometimes physically violent quarrels she and Mick had always had increased exponentially as the Stones’ fame did and he became more aware of himself as their star attraction and more prone to shove her out of sight whenever female fans materialised. Mortifyingly, to someone who valued coolness and self-possession above all, the blow-ups with Chrissie increasingly tended to happen in front of other people, at gigs, parties or new clubs like the Ad Lib. ‘They once had a terrible one at Eric Easton’s office,’ Shirley Arnold remembers. ‘It ended with Chrissie kicking Mick down the stairs.’
The fans who thought him so untouchable would have been astonished by his distress after Chrissie had stormed off into the night, and repeated phone calls to her mother could not locate her. Andrew Oldham would receive an anguished SOS and would go and meet him, usually at a bench on the Thames Embankment as far as possible from other prying eyes and ears. As Oldham recalls in Stoned, Mick would pour out his side of the story and almost tearfully recount how Chrissie had gone for him with her fists. (She herself now says firmly that she never used fists and ‘he wasn’t a victim of domestic abuse’.) The heart-to-hearts with Oldham would often last the rest of the night, ending at dawn with a walk through the deserted West End and breakfast at a taxi drivers’ café.
Oldham writes in Stoned that during this period he and Mick were ‘as close as two young men could probably become’ – and there has been endless speculation ever since about the extent of that closeness. Oldham certainly was not homosexual – indeed, had lately begun going out with a Hampstead girl named Sheila Klein (a surname to have large resonance in another context later in this story) whom he was soon to marry. At the same time, with his homing spirit for all outrage, he sought out the company of notable gay men in the music business – in particular the composer of Oliver!, Lionel Bart – and added their gestures and speech mannerisms to his repertoire of devices for amusing his friends and disconcerting his foes.
At all events, rumours began to fly around that in the extremely crowded quarters of 33 Mapesbury Road Mick and Oldham’s closeness extended to sharing the same bed. One must hasten to add that, in purer-minded 1964, that did not necessarily signify what it would today. Young men could still have platonic friendships in the Victorian mode, sharing flats, rooms and even beds (as pop band members often did on tour) without the slightest homoerotic overtones. Oldham’s own memoirs recall a night when the two of them ended up at his mother’s flat in Netherhall Gardens, Hampstead, and, rather than struggle home to Willesden, decided to crash out there. When Mrs Oldham looked into his room the next afternoon, she found them both squeezed into his single bed, still dead to the world.
According to Chrissie, Oldham’s soon-to-be fiancée, Sheila Klein, was also vexed by these rumours and – on a different occasion, at Mapesbury Road – suggested that the two of them should investigate for themselves. ‘[Sheila] got me to wait all night with her to see if Andrew and Mick slept in the same bed and they did . . . We found them asleep, facing the same way, and I can remember thinking how sweet they looked. Sheila said, “There, I knew they were!” and I still didn’t know what she meant.’
ON 7 FEBRUARY 1964 the Beatles had crossed the Atlantic for the first time, touching down in New York amid scenes of juvenile hysteria that made European Beatlemania seem muted by comparison and ending American dominance of pop music with a single appearance on the nationwide Ed Sullivan TV show. They were Britain’s most successful export since Shakespeare and Scotch whisky, ambassadors of seemingly boundless charm and good manners whose once-controversial hair was now regarded back home as a precious national asset. During a reception for them in Washington, DC, a woman guest produced some nail scissors and playfully snipped a lock or two from the back of Ringo Starr’s neck. For the attendant British media, it was an outrage tantamount to defacing the Crown Jewels.
While the Beatles conquered America, the Rolling Stones had to be content with conquering the American act meant to have headlined their second UK package tour. This was Phil Spector’s black female vocal trio the Ronettes, whose tumultuous ‘Be My Baby’ was a UK hit single currently far outselling ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’. They were also sexy in a way no female pop group had ever been, with their beehive hair, brazen eye makeup and slinky, chiffon-sleeved trouser suits. Even that could not save them from the same fate as the Everly Brothers, two months previously. Before the tour even began, the Stones replaced them as top of the bill.
Spector, the trio’s manager as well as record producer, was already fixated on lead singer Veronica – ‘Ronnie’ – Bennett (whom he would later subject to a gothic horror story of a marriage). Having received an advance character sketch of the top three Stones from his would-be British counterpart, Andrew Oldham, he sent them a stern collective telegram saying ‘Leave my girls alone’. This did not stop both Mick and Keith from making a beeline for Ronnie’s beehive at a party at deejay Tony Hall’s Mayfair flat which John Lennon and George Harrison also attended on the eve of their departure for America. Boyfriend magazine’s correspondent, Maureen O’Grady, remembers the atypical tension between the Dartford chums as they competed for Ronnie’s attention, and Mick’s sulky pique when she proved immune to his charms and went off with Beatle George.
With ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ barely out of the Top 10, the insatiable pop music machine was already slavering for a third Rolling Stones single. And this time there would be no friendly Beatles to help out. Instead, the Stones looked beyond the over-ransacked R&B back catalogue to the one white American performer who counted as an equal influence on them all. The unanimous choice was ‘Not Fade Away’, the B-side to Buddy Holly’s 1957 hit ‘Oh Boy’, which Mick had seen Holly play live at the Woolwich Granada cinema during the one British tour he managed before his premature death. Serendipitously, the Stones–Ronettes show would appear at the same venue.
‘Not Fade Away’ was recorded at Regent Sound Studios during a brief interlude between early tour dates. To lighten an initially rather tired, grumpy atmosphere, Oldham turned the session into a booze-fuelled party, inviting various other pop personalities along to lend a hand. The American singer Gene Pitney, a former PR client of Oldham’s, contributed extra percussion and an outsize bottle of cognac. Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the (highly appropriate) Hollies dropped by to watch while the great Phil Spector, who had formerly produced Pitney’s records, shook maracas.
Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ ‘Not Fade Away’ had been an almost hymn-like chant of a cappella voices, whose only beat was drumsticks tapping on a cardboard box. But the Stones’ cover version was as full-on and aggressive as ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, with Keith’s rhythm guitar turned up to maximum for the first – but not last – time in the staccato, seesaw beat invented by their late tour companion Bo Diddley. Mick’s vocal made no attempt to replicate Holly’s subtlety and charm, but stuck to the same snarling sexual challenge as before. In counterpoint to Keith’s rhythm-led chords, Brian supplied a throbbing harmonica bottom line that made the others, temporarily, forgive him everything. The result might not exactly be a Wall of Sound on the Phil Spector level, Andrew Oldham commented, but it certainly was a Wall of Noise.
With nothing to put on the B-side, and tipsiness now firmly in control, Spector and Mick together cobbled up a song called ‘Little by Little’, an outright copy of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Shame Shame Shame’. At a later session, two further tracks were put on tape, both obviously unreleasable for commercial purposes. ‘And Mr Spector and Mr Pitney Came Too’ was a free-for-all instrumental featuring a wicked Mick take-off of Decca Records’ elderly boss Sir Edward Lewis. ‘Andrew’s Blues’ was a pornographic monologue by Phil Spector, dedicated to his British disciple-in-chief, featuring Allan Clarke and Graham Nash on back-up vocals.
When ‘Not Fade Away’ was released on 21 February few among the target audience even recognised it as a Buddy Holly homage. In its raw belligerence it seemed quintessentially Rolling Stones, which by now meant quintessentially Mick. For Jacqui Graham and her ilk, the accompanying vision was not of a bespectacled young Texan, dead too soon, but of ironic eyes and overstuffed, well-moistened lips slurring Holly’s original ‘A love for real will not fade away’ to a barely grammatical ‘Love is love and not fade away’; turning wistful hope into a sexual fait accompli. The single raced up every UK chart, peaking at No. 3, while Mick was still out on the road, upstaging, if not upending, Ronnie of the Ronettes.
With so many readers – or, at least, readers’ offspring – converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say as well as recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and ‘dirtiness’. And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom . . . five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair . . . but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’ Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard – who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles – wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: ‘They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years . . . they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.’
The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles – without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté – as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it ‘cut neatly like the Beatles’.
The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skilfully fed the paper: WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The Express helpfully amplified this to WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?, thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.
On the road – travelling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive – the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served pre-dinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.
‘Not Fade Away’ ramped up the mayhem at Stones’ concerts – a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.
British pop’s notional North–South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a ‘Mad Mod Ball’, televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The set-up terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that someone might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.
After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counter-riot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South over those and all other rivals but one. ‘In mass popularity,’ wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, ‘the Stones are second only to the Beatles.’
THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as ‘Not Fade Away’ and – such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism – keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.
Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, the latter always introduced by Mick as ‘our slow one’ and sung in atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still ‘piss off’. Produced in small 45-RPM format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.
The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.
Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.
In February, he had informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be ‘Britain’s most powerful independent record producer’. Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector – and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a back-up singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their break-up to be friends with her.
Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears’ hit ‘To Know Him Is to Love Him’, which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled ‘There Are but Five Rolling Stones’, played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to ‘The Andrew Oldham Orchestra’. Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s ‘black Florence Nightingale’.
The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road – and Brian’s absence in Windsor – meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords – as on ‘Not Fade Away’ – and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fibre of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult – witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ that afternoon at Ken Coyler’s club – and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.
Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted ‘What have you got?’ A resentful, hungry Mick – those lips long-unstoked – ‘told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it’.
That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled ‘It Should Be You’ and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again – and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour – this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne – which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: ‘My Only Girl’, ‘We Were Falling in Love’, ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to ‘gob’ so colourfully up the walls.
Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger– Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. ‘Will You Be My Lover Tonight?’ was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. ‘Shang a Doo Lang’, an unashamed knock-off of the Crystals’ ‘He’s Sure the Boy I Love’, went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play back-up percussion at the boozy ‘Not Fade Away’ session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s ‘24 Hours from Tulsa’. Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s ‘My Only Girl’, retitled ‘That Girl Belongs to Yesterday’. Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked into the US Hot 100.
Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s ‘Shang a Doo Lang’ in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr Posta to hold a launch party at his flat in Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard ‘started going out with something other than a guitar’, Oldham asked his girlfriend Sheila Klein to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modelling.
Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon– McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home in Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.
The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned – ‘Faithfull’ with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness – was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.
Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own name, ‘masochism’, to pleasure derived from self-inflicted pain. Brought up in Hapsburg grandeur, Eva had become an actress and dancer with the Max Reinhardt company in Vienna during the 1930s and, but for the war, might have followed Reinhardt to America and a career in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.
The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to – of all places – Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semi-charity terms at a Catholic convent school, St Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.
She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theatre or music – possibly both – and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folk singer around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball, and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones, and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. ‘Well, actually, yes,’ Dunbar replied.
At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright ‘dolly’ dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: ‘It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits. Andrew and Mick both said together, “I want to fuck her.” Both their girlfriends went, “What did you say?” Mick and Andrew went, “We said we want to record her.”’
Marianne at this point thought the Rolling Stones were ‘yobbish schoolboys . . . with none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney’. By her own later account, she wouldn’t have noticed Mick if he hadn’t been in the throes of yet another row with Chrissie, ‘who was crying and shouting at him . . . and in the heat of the moment, one of her false eyelashes was peeling off’. The person who most interested her was Andrew Oldham, especially when he came over (‘all beaky and angular, like some bird of prey’), brusquely asked his friend John Dunbar for her name – no female equality for years yet! – and, on learning it genuinely was Marianne Faithfull, announced that he intended to make her a pop star.
Within days, to her amazement, Marianne had a contract with the Stones’ label, Decca, and an appointment to record a single with Oldham as her producer. The A-side was to have been a Lionel Bart song, ‘I Don’t Know How (To Tell You)’, but when she tried it out it proved totally unsuited to her voice and to the persona her Svengali intended to create. Instead, Oldham turned to his in-house team of Jagger– Richard, giving them precise instructions as to the kind of ballad he required for Marianne: ‘She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows and no sex.’
Though the result bore a joint credit, Tony Calder remembers its conception to have been entirely Mick’s, working with session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. The monologue of a lonely, disillusioned older woman – harking back to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’ and foreshadowing the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it was a glimpse of the sensitivity and almost feminine intuition Mick was known to possess but so rarely showed. The original title, ‘As Time Goes By’, became ‘As Tears Go By’ to avoid confusion with pianist Dooley Wilson’s famous cabaret spot in the film Casablanca.
With hindsight, Marianne would consider ‘As Tears Go By’ ‘a Françoise Hardy song . . . Europop you might hear on a French jukebox . . . “The Lady of Shalott” to the tune of “These Foolish Things”’. She still concedes that for a songwriter so inexperienced it showed remarkable maturity – clairvoyance even. ‘It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened . . . it’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.’
For this second recording session, Marianne travelled up from Reading to London chaperoned by her friend Sally Oldfield (sister of the future Tubular Bells wizard, Mike). Oldham’s production stuck to the ‘high brick walls and no sex’ formula, toning down her usually robust mezzo-soprano to a wispy demureness, counterpointed by the mournful murmur of a cor anglais, or English horn. Mick and Keith watched the proceedings and afterwards gave the two girls a lift back to Paddington station by taxi. On the way, Mick tried to get Marianne to sit on his lap, but she made Sally do so instead. ‘I mean, it was on that level,’ she recalls. ‘“What a cheeky little yob,” I thought to myself. “So immature.”’
Within a month, ‘As Tears Go By’ was in the UK Top 20, finally peaking at No. 9. British pop finally had a thoroughly English female singer, or so it appeared, rather than just would-be American ones. And the media were confronted with a head-scratching paradox: two members of a band notorious for dirtiness, rawness and uncouthness had brought gentility – not to say virginity – into the charts for the very first time.
The success of ‘As Tears Go By’ might have been expected to start a wholesale winning streak for the Jagger– Richard songwriting partnership that would finally benefit their own band rather than ill-assorted outsiders. But, strangely, having their name on a No. 9 hit acted more like a brake. Mick had no idea where the song had come from and, after weeks of racking his brains with Keith, began to despair of writing anything else a fraction as good.
Certainly, when the Stones’ first album appeared, on 17 April, it was still far from clear that they had a would-be Lennon and McCartney in their ranks. Recorded at Regent Sound in just five days snatched from the Ronettes tour, this was almost completely made up of the cover versions from which Oldham had struggled to wean them – Chuck Berry’s ‘Carol’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona (I Need You Baby)’, Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, James Moore’s ‘I’m a King Bee’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walking the Dog’, Bobby Troup’s ‘Route 66’. The only Jagger– Richard track thought worthy of inclusion was ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’, an echoey ballad in faintly Merseybeat style. The album, in fact, was like a Stones live show (much as the Beatles’ first one had been), its immediacy heightened by Regent Sound’s primitive equipment and Andrew Oldham’s anguished eye on the clock. At the session for ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Mick realised he couldn’t remember all Marvin Gaye’s words, and neither could anyone else present. A hurried phone call had to be made to the song’s publishers on Savile Row for a copy of the lyrics to be hunted out and left in reception. The usefully athletic vocalist ran a half mile from Denmark Street to collect them, then back again. On the track he is still audibly breathless.
The album was entitled, simply, The Rolling Stones – in itself an act of extreme Oldham hubris. The Beatles’ first album had followed custom in bearing the name of a hit single, ‘Please Please Me’, and even their ground-breaking second, With the Beatles, still had a whiff of conventionality. But Oldham did not stop there. In defiance of Decca Records’ entire marketing department, he insisted that The Rolling Stones’ front cover showed neither name nor title – just a glossy picture of the five standing sideways with heavily shadowed, unsmiling faces turned to the camera. Mick was first, then dapper Charlie, a squeezed-in Bill and barely recognisable Keith, with Brian – the only one in their old stage uniform of leather waistcoat and shirtsleeves rather than varicoloured suits – symbolically at the back and out of line.
On its reverse, the cover returned to wordy normality, with track listings, studio credits and a pronouncement that seemed like yet more Oldham hubris: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group – they are a way of life.’ Little did even he imagine that, almost half a century later, at the BAFTA film awards, an audience of the world’s most glamorous people would still be hungering to lead it.
Advance orders for The Rolling Stones exceeded 100,000 as against only 6,000 for the Beatles’ album début, Please Please Me. Better still, as it climbed the UK album chart to No. 1 it passed With the Beatles, finally on the decline after six months in the Top 20. The Stones, Oldham crowed delightedly, had ‘knocked the Beatles off’ in their home market. Now for America.
CHAPTER SIX (#ulink_4ca3539f-4ebc-54ee-b7bb-9d9a4fb171d2)
‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’ (#ulink_4ca3539f-4ebc-54ee-b7bb-9d9a4fb171d2)
For any British band, the supreme challenge, and greatest thrill, is to ‘crack’ America. And few have failed quite so comprehensively as the Rolling Stones on their first US tour, in June 1964. The country would notice Mick soon enough, for better or worse, but during most of this initial three-week visit he was a barely distinguishable face among five, taking his equal share of disappointment and humiliation.
The Stones were not only following the triumphal footsteps of the Beatles four months earlier; they were also well to the rear in the so-called British Invasion of other UK bands who had stampeded after John, Paul, George and Ringo across the Atlantic and into the US charts. On the American edition of their first album, they were billed as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, bracketing them with ‘soft’ pop acts they despised, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and the Dave Clark Five.
When the Beatles had arrived in New York in February, it was with an American No. 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. But the Stones could offer no such impressive calling card. Their Beatle-bestowed UK hit, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, had been released on the London label, Decca’s US affiliate, but then abruptly withdrawn because its B-side was called ‘Stoned’, which in America meant drunk. It had then been rereleased, coupled with ‘Not Fade Away’, but even in a market supposedly ravenous for all British bands had barely scraped into Billboard magazine’s Top 50.
Thanks to Andrew Oldham, their transatlantic hosts had been primed to welcome them like a new strain of herpes. ‘Americans, brace yourselves!’ warned the flash circulated to newspapers and broadcast media by the Associated Press. ‘In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting Britons is on the way . . . dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles . . .’ The Fab Four had flown off, carrying the whole nation’s hopes and even prayers like Neville Chamberlain bound for Munich or a Test cricket team for Australasia. Before the Stones left Heathrow Airport on 1 June an MP in the House of Commons expressed fears that they might do real harm to Anglo-American relations.
Even with this advance word-of-badmouth, it proved impossible for Oldham to whip up any major media coverage on the American side. Turndowns came from the NBC and CBS TV networks and, most slightingly, from The Ed Sullivan Show, which had clinched the Beatles’ conquest by beaming them to a national audience of more than 70 million. Paradoxically, the splashiest print coverage came from a quarter not normally interested in dirtiness and scruffiness – Vogue magazine. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue’s American edition, agreed to publish a David Bailey photograph of Mick that every British magazine had rejected, despite never having heard of him or his band. ‘I don’t care who he is,’ she told Bailey. ‘He looks great, so I’ll run it.’
While calling the Stones ‘scruffier and seedier than the Beatles’, Vogue summed them up more pithily than any UK publication thus far, and with a hint of ladylike moist gussets that probably did Mick’s image more good in the long run than NBC, CBS and Ed Sullivan put together: ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger, one of the five Rolling Stones, those singers [sic] who will set out to cross America by bandwagon in June. For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his teammates. To women he’s fascinating, to men a scare . . .’
Since the Beatles’ reception by three thousand banner-waving fans, spilling over observation terraces and buckling plate-glass windows, the arrival of British pop bands at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport had become a routine story to the city’s media. For the Stones, London Records laid on a markedly cut-price version of the now-familiar procedure, enlisting a few dozen teenage girls to scream dutifully as the band descended the aircraft steps after their economy-class flight, hiring a couple of Old English sheepdogs to represent kindred spirits, and providing a cake for Charlie Watts’s twenty-third birthday. At the press conference which followed, there was surprise, even some disappointment, when they proved to be politer and better spoken than most of the invaders who had come before. Who was the leader? one reporter asked. ‘We are . . . all of us,’ Mick lisped in his best LSE accent, without a frisson of Cockney.
The Beatles had spent their first New York landfall with their manager and considerable retinue in interconnecting luxury suites at the top of Manhattan’s grandest hotel, the Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The Stones spent theirs at the far-from-grand Hotel Astor in Times Square, bunking two to a poky room with their retinue (i.e., roadie Ian Stewart). To save money – an urgent consideration throughout the tour – Oldham slept on the office sofa of his friend and role model, Phil Spector.
Once his charges had checked into the Astor (which, miraculously, offered no objection), Oldham managed to feed the British press a story that, in true Beatle style, they had caused riots in midtown Manhattan and were imprisoned in their hotel by shrieking mobs. Unfortunately, agency photos which arrived home at the same time showed them exploring the Times Square district without a single hysteric in sight.
That is not to say that they went unnoticed. They had come to a land where every ‘manly’ man, from President Lyndon Johnson downwards, had hair cropped as close to the scalp as a convict’s but for a little toothbrushlike crest. The Beatles had been let off their hair because of some vague correlation with British classical theatre – Laurence Olivier as Richard III or Hamlet. But Rolling Stone hair meant only homosexuality, which – save in certain enlightened parts of Greenwich Village – was regarded as even more unnatural and detestable than it was in Britain. What should have been a magical first experience of New York for Mick and the others was marred by the typically forthright comments of passing New Yorkers: ‘Ya fuckin’ faggot!’ or ‘Look at that goddamn faggot!’ The fact that to English ears faggot still meant a rissole, or meat patty, did not make the experience any pleasanter.
The city’s welcome grew several degrees warmer after they met up with Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the WINS radio deejay who had generated huge publicity for his show, and himself, by hooking onto the Beatles back in February. Now he adopted the Stones in the same way, escorting them to nightspots like the Peppermint Lounge – where the Twist had been born and was now in its death throes – and introducing them to useful New York music-biz cronies like Bob Crewe, songwriter and producer to the Four Seasons.
The Stones privately thought Murray the K a ludicrous figure, but he did do them one huge favour. It happened at a party at Crewe’s apartment, in a gloomy Central Parkside pile known as the Dakota where, sixteen years later, the Beatles’ story would come to a horrific full stop. During the evening, Murray gave Andrew Oldham an R&B single, ‘It’s All Over Now’, written by Sam Cooke’s guitarist Bobby Womack and recorded by Womack and his three brothers as the Valentinos. It would be a perfect song for the Stones to cover, the deejay insisted. And the rights could be picked up here in New York from Womack’s manager, an accountant-turned-pop impresario named Allen Klein.
For Mick and Keith, the main point of being in New York was to visit the Apollo Theater, Harlem’s famous showplace for black music, which had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder among many others. Harlem was still a no-go area for unaccompanied whites, so they had to ask Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – on whom Keith still had a huge crush – to be their guide. Because of the difficulty of getting cabs back to Midtown late at night, which, anyway, they couldn’t afford, they had to sleep on the floor at Ronnie’s mother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem. In the morning, she would cook them bacon and eggs, and they would thank her with punctilious good manners.
To add to the thrill, it happened to be James Brown Week at the Apollo. Known as ‘the Godfather of Soul’, Brown had a mesmerising stage act that combined R&B and soul with Barnum-esque showmanship: backed by his vocal group the Famous Flames, he never stopped moving for a second, boogieing as if on an invisible Travelator (two decades before Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk), hurling himself onto his knees or into the splits, finally suffering a make-believe seizure, when two minders would rush from the wings, wrap him in a cloak and half carry him away. Four or five of these operatic cardiac arrests would be simulated before the curtain finally fell.
Such was Mick’s awe of the Godfather that he never had covered any of Brown’s great showstoppers: not ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, or ‘Please Please Please’ or even ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’, much as he might applaud the sentiment. Now, in the Apollo’s marijuana-scented dark, he took careful note of every dance move Brown made, to be practised later in front of a full-length mirror. When Ronnie sneaked him and Keith into Brown’s dressing room, he beheld an almost monarchical figure, surrounded by servants and sycophants, who took care of business as assiduously as he did music, watched every penny and imposed strict discipline on his musicians, fining anyone who was late or went onstage with dirty shoes. Here, too, were important lessons for the future.
From New York, the Stones flew to Los Angeles to make their one nationwide TV appearance. This was not on a prestigious show like Ed Sullivan’s, but Hollywood Palace, a mixed-bag variety programme emceed that week by Dean Martin. When they turned up at the studio, the producer was aghast that they weren’t in matching suits and, unavailingly, offered them money to go out and buy some. They did not meet the great ‘Dino’ himself during rehearsals, when a stand-in was used; only during transmission did they realise they had been set up as stooges to their host’s boozy humour. ‘Now here’s something for the youngsters,’ Martin announced with an air of intense long-suffering. ‘Five young musicians from England . . . the Rolling Stones. I’ve been rolled a few times when I was stoned myself. I dunno what they’re singin’ about, but here they are . . .’ A few moments of Mick singing ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, and their tuxedo-clad host was sniping at them again. ‘The Rolling Stones! Aren’t they great? [Exaggerated eye roll] People talk about these long-haired groups but it’s really an optical illusion. They just have smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.’
The tour that followed had been planned by the American agency GAC, seemingly with some of the same malevolence. There was a good opening show in San Bernardino, California, where a capacity crowd roared enthusiastic response to the name check their home town received in Mick’s version of ‘Route 66’. After that, a series of economy-class internal flights took the band on a transcontinental wander far off Route 66: San Antonio, Minneapolis, Omaha, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Their support was the American balladeer Bobby Vee, whose backing musicians wore matching mohair suits, collars and ties just like the ones they themselves had lately escaped. At some stops, they found themselves appearing at state fairs in company with carnival midways, rodeos and circus acts, including a baby elephant and a troupe of seals. Thanks to wildly uneven advance publicity, audience sizes varied between a rapturous two or three thousand and an apathetic few dozen among whom the dominant element were homophobic red-necked cowboys.
The Stones’ heyday as arrogant kings of the American road were still far in the future. Surrounded by gun-toting, crop-headed and resentful police, they all did their utmost not to step out of line. In one cheerless, raw-brick dressing room, Mick and Brian were drinking rum and Coca-Cola while Keith, atypically, made do with plain Coke. A policeman walked up and screamed at them to empty their glasses down the toilet. When Keith protested, the cop drew his gun. Also in contrast with later trans-American journeys, Keith would recall, ‘it was almost impossible to have sex . . . In New York or LA you can always find something, but when you’re in Omaha in 1964 and you suddenly feel horny, you’ve had it.’
The itinerary, however, included something of importance far outweighing these petty – and short-lived – setbacks. In Chicago, Oldham had booked the Stones to lay down some tracks (hopefully including their next British single) at Chess Records, the mythic label on which Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and just about every other major R&B and blues giant had transfigured Mick’s prim boyhood. Other than counselling him, against all his instincts, to become wicked, it was probably the greatest service his Svengali ever did him.
This nonpareil black music label had in fact been started by two white men, Polish immigrants named Leonard and Phil Chess, who had changed their surname from Czyz. Leonard’s twenty-two-year-old son, Marshall, had worked for the company since the age of thirteen and, during a spell in the postroom, used to send off albums to an unknown blues fanatic in England named Mike Jagger. Normally, Chess did not allow outsiders to record in its studio – especially young, white, British ones – but Marshall knew about the blues scene in London, so he persuaded his father and uncle to make an exception for them.
The band spent two days in Chess’s studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, working with the label’s most-sought-after engineer, Ron Malo. (Having delivered them there, Oldham had the good sense not to put on airs as their producer, but stayed discreetly in the background.) Malo treated the awestruck young Britons like musicians as legitimate as any others; their response was to work hard and harmoniously, finishing fourteen tracks during the two day-long sessions.
Top of the list was that gift from Murray the K, ‘It’s All Over Now’. The Valentinos’ version had hovered on the edge of burlesque, with a hermaphrodite lead vocal and a tempo lifted from Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. Ron Malo turned it into a guitar-jangly pop track with a growling bass riff that was instant jukebox fodder, yet preserved the Stones’ essential roughness and hinted at the myriad influences of the blues mecca around them. While all the band sounded better than they ever had, the main advance was in Mick’s voice, now refined to a punk-Dixie snarl and hovering between self-pity (‘Well, I used to wake ’n mawnin’, git ma brekfusst in ba-a-id . . .’) and yah-boo triumph (‘Yes, I used to looeerve her, bu-u-rd it’s awl over now . . .’). Bobby Womack’s original lyric spoke of the errant girlfriend’s having ‘spent all my money . . . played the high-class game’, which Mick amended to ‘half-assed game’.
Marshall Chess was amused to see Mick, Brian and Keith behave in the studio as they thought their blues masters did, ‘swigging Jack Daniel’s from the bottle, where our guys would’ve poured it into a glass and sipped it’. Partly, this was nerves; they expected real Chicago bluesmen to tear them to pieces for their presumption. But in fact they were met with nothing but friendliness. During the first day’s session two of their greatest heroes, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, both dropped by Malo’s studio to listen and bestow compliments and encouragement. On their second morning they found themselves walking in through Chess’s front lobby beside an immaculately dressed man with the face of a merry black Toby Jug – none other than Muddy Waters, without whose catalogue (not least ‘Rollin’ Stone’) they would never have got started. Muddy carried himself as regally as a king but, on seeing roadie Ian Stewart struggling with the Stones’ equipment, picked up an amp and carried it into the studio for them.
At the end of their second day, the great Chuck Berry himself drove in from his country-estate-cum-hotel, Berry Park, to take a look. Though never noted for philanthropy to young musicians, he could not but be softened by the Stones’ devotion – and the number of his songs they were covering that would pay him royalties. ‘Swing on, gentlemen,’ he told them in flawless Berry-ese. ‘You are sounding most well, if I may say so.’
Keith was always to remember a beyond-brilliant Chess session musician named Big Red, a huge black albino with a Gibson guitar that looked ‘like a mandolin’ in his hands. During breaks from their own session, Mick, Keith, Charlie and Stu used to creep into the next-door studio and listen to Big Red, but could never pluck up courage to ask him to sit in with them. ‘We just thought we were terribly lucky to be there, so let’s learn what we can,’ Keith would recall. ‘It was like being given extra tuition.’
And Mick? Before leaving Britain, he’d told an interviewer with unusual candour, and passion, that his main objective in America was to meet as many of his blues idols as possible, and that even ‘to see and hear them work in person will be a big thing for me’. What happened with Chuck and Muddy and Willie and Buddy and Big Red in Chicago was, by a long way, the most thrilling experience of his life thus far. But afterwards it was to be swallowed up by all-enveloping Jagger amnesia. ‘I don’t remember going to Chess,’ he would claim. ‘It’s just something I read about in books.’
Back in New York, things decidedly improved with a better hotel, the Park Sheraton (albeit still in shared rooms), and two sold-out concerts, like the Beatles’, at the city’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. After the second show, there was a party at the hotel with guests including the New York Post pop correspondent, and Bob Dylan’s close friend, Al Aronowitz. ‘The first thing we saw when we walked in,’ Aronowitz recalled, ‘was Mick sitting on a bed, surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks, fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body . . . Okay, Mick’d discovered room service.’
There was also a first glimpse of the Jagger attitude to women that we will come to know so well. At one point, Gloria Stavers, the influential editor of 16 Magazine, approached him among his seraglio to tell him how much she’d enjoyed the show. ‘Should I be flattered?’ he replied.
With the release of the Stones’ ‘Merseybeat’ song ‘Tell Me’ as a US single increasing album sales, and a general sense of making some headway at last, it was clearly vital for them to extend their visit beyond its scheduled three weeks. Instead – bafflingly to new American converts like Aronowitz and Murray the K – Oldham whisked them home as scheduled. The excuse he gave out was that they had to honour a booking to play at the summer ball of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth was that he couldn’t afford to keep them in America a moment longer. In contrast to later forays there, he calculated the tour had earned them ten old shillings, or fifty pence, each.
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Philip Norman
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex-appeal, and strutting talent . The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time. A musical genius with a career spanning over four decades. Mick Jagger is a testament at once to British glamour and sensual decline, the ultimate architect and demi-god of rock.Bestselling biographer Philip Norman offers an unparalleled account of the life of a living legend, Mick Jagger. From Home Counties schoolboy, to rebel without a cause to Sixties rock sensation and global idol, Norman unravels with astonishing intimacy the myth of the inimitable frontman of The Rolling Stones. MICK JAGGER charts his extraordinary journey through scandal-ridden conspiracy, infamous prison spell, hordes of female admirers and a knighthood while stripping away the colossal fame, wealth and idolatry to reveal a story of talent and promise unfulfilled.Understated yet ostentatious; the ultimate incarnation of modern man′s favourite fantasy: ′sex, drugs and rock ′n′ roll′, yet blessed with taste and intelligence; a social chameleon who couldn′t blend in if he tried; always moving with the Jagger swagger yet modest enough to be self-deprecating, Mick was a paradoxical energy that reconfigured the musical landscape.This revelatory tour de force is ample tribute to a flawed genius, a Casanova, an Antichrist and a god who, with characteristic nonchalance realised the dreams of thousands of current contenders and rocker pretenders, longevity, while coasting on a sea of fur rugs.