Mick Jagger (17 page)

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 School of Art 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 theater. 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 color 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 outta 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 theater 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 September 6, 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 September 15, they were opening on 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 monthlong 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 five-pound-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 catalog, 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 July 15 revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choices. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously canceled 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 October 7, 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 November 1, 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 humor, 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,” patronized 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 on the very first program, 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.

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 twenty pounds 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 of 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 honor 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 leash.

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 molding day by day.