Mick Jagger (23 page)

No hype from Tony Calder was needed—nor even help from the amendment to the Valentinos’ original lyric which Andrew Oldham had expected to create such a furor. Rendered in Mick’s Dixie drawl, “half-assed game” was widely mistaken for “high, fast game,” as in some poker school on a Mississippi paddleboat. Anyway, ass is much less vulgar to British ears than the good old Anglo-Saxon arse. At all events, no objections were made and the single played uncensored on the BBC.

What made “It’s All Over Now” irresistible was its disheveled, slightly off-register sound, so unlike the high gloss of the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios, and glimpses of seamy real life compared to wholesome Beatle heaven: Mick getting his “brekfusst [and who knew what else] in ba-a-id,” his “achin’ ha-id” no doubt partly due to a hangover. It was not quite the first grown-up-sounding single ever to challenge the infantilism of the UK pop charts; the Animals had just got there first with “The House of the Rising Sun.” Its new dimension was the hint of loucheness—something that most British women didn’t yet know they liked.

The backlash came from fans of pure blues and R&B, especially those who had followed the Stones up through the clubs and now felt personally betrayed by what was seen as a sellout to commercial pop. (Only an enlightened few were aware that “It’s All Over Now” had been recorded at R&B’s epicenter, Chess Records, or that Bobby Womack and the Valentinos, its writer and original performers, were as “pure” as could be.) To make matters worse, the single it had booted from the No. 1 spot was “The House of the Rising Sun,” a classic blues song rendered in uncompromising blues style.

This was an era, unlike later, in which Mick was unafraid to stick his head above the parapet. When controversy erupted around “It’s All Over Now,” he was already in hot water for having publicly called a new group called the Zephyrs “a load of rubbish,” so violating an unwritten rule that British pop bands were always generous toward each other. Now he told Melody Maker intemperately (for the Stones knew the Animals well) that “people shouldn’t kid themselves ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is R&B … it’s no more R&B than how’s your father …” It brought him a stern reproof in the next week’s paper from reader Keith Temple of East Croydon: “Who is to blame for this misconception of R&B? Mick Jagger. One and a half years ago, Jagger’s proud boast was that the Stones played pure R&B—the music they loved. On being accused of going commercial, Jagger denies this. Yet the Stones reached number one with ‘It’s All Over Now,’ a rock song. Don’t kid yourselves, readers, that there’s R&B in the chart with ‘It’s All Over Now.’ It’s no more R&B than ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ ”

The front-page lead in the same edition, accompanied by a caricature head of Mick, was an unwontedly humble and ingratiating apology for his previous rudeness about the Zephyrs: “I don’t want [them] to be angry or anything. I didn’t like their record but I didn’t mean to cause offence … In fact, [it] was no worse than our first record, ‘Come On’ … I’d like to meet ’em all and tell ’em how I feel personally.” “JAGGER ATTACKED AGAIN,” said a flash at the foot of the column, “See Letters, back page.” The letters page was headlined “R&B? NOT ON YOUR LIFE” below a strap line “IT’S ALL THAT JAGGER’S FAULT.”

Most of the criticism was defused, however, by a second Stones EP, Five by Five, containing a quintet of irreproachably R&B tracks from the Chess sessions, including Jay McShann’s “Confessin’ the Blues” and Wilson Pickett’s “If You Need Me,” and with liner notes by Andrew Oldham, pointing out that the Stones’ first album, packed with authentic R&B, had stayed at No. 1 on the UK chart for thirty weeks (it had actually been twelve). Purist Stones fans breathed easier, reassured that Keith’s growly rock tremolo and the glimpse into Mick’s bedroom had been a momentary aberration.

By midsummer of 1964, a surfeit of real-life attempts to see Mick’s bedroom had broken up the flat-sharing ménage at 33 Mapesbury Road. The fans who had followed Jacqui Graham’s pioneer trail to his Willesden hideaway possessed little of Jacqui’s considerateness, staking out number 33’s front gate around the clock, ringing the doorbell at all hours, and invading the garden to peer through windows and steal flowers, even blades of grass, as souvenirs. The three original flat sharers’ personal circumstances had also changed, with Oldham now married to Sheila Klein and Keith going steady with the Vogue model Linda Keith, as Mick was with Vogue supermodel Jean Shrimpton’s sister, Chrissie.

While Oldham set up home with Sheila, Mick and Keith moved together to 10a Holly Hill, Hampstead, a sought-after area then, as now, where every other house seems to bear a blue plaque commemorating some former resident celebrated in the arts or sciences. Their flat, in estate agent’s language, was “chalet-style with a long living room and a sunken bedroom,” and (farewell, Edith Grove!) enjoyed the regular services of a cleaner. Chrissie Shrimpton moved in with Mick, though, for appearances’ sake with her family, she kept on her bed-sitting room with her friend Liz in Olympia, west London.

Outed as Mick’s steady girlfriend some months previously, Chrissie was regularly pictured by his side with her flicked-up, Alice-banded hair, enormous black eyes, and matching full-lipped pout, her famous surname giving that intriguing extra twist to his own accelerating fame. Along with Paul McCartney’s similarly “classy bird,” Jane Asher, she was the envy of almost every young woman in Britain.

In reality, Chrissie hated the life she now found herself leading as the consort of a fast-rising star. “The fans used to attack me and throw things at me, and it was often really frightening. I can remember being in cars and having to hold the roof up because there were girls piling on the roof and we thought we were going to be crushed.” Under her wild-child exterior was a deeply conventional person who had slept with Mick as a seventeen-year-old only because she genuinely believed she would marry him and start a family. “As far as I was concerned, it was total love and I’d be with him for the rest of my life. I hated all the fan hysteria stuff and I wasn’t really interested in running around the clubs and everything rock chicks are supposed to do. All I wanted was to have babies and be normal.”

Still resolutely refusing to be drawn into the couture world after Jean, Chrissie continued to work as a secretary, latterly with the Stones’ record company, Decca, and thus to have a daytime routine out of synch with Mick’s nocturnal one of performing, recording, and partying. Even after her existence became known to his female followers, Oldham still felt it unadvisable to parade her too much at Stones gigs and public appearances. “As a girl in those days, you were a second-class citizen. You were on your honor to stay in the background and keep your mouth shut.”

Just as her sister kept her at arm’s length from the Bailey-Vogue set, so she met few of the musicians with whom Mick consorted, on the road or at their chosen club, the Ad Lib. One exception was “the Duchess,” the glamorous young black woman in a skintight gold lamé catsuit who played guitar in Bo Diddley’s band. Another was Mickie Most, the young singer-turned-producer responsible for the Animals’ “The House of the Rising Sun” that Mick had so ungraciously slagged off. “Mickie’s wife was also named Chrissie, so we were two Mickie-and-Chrissies.”

Her main ally within the Stones’ circle was Charlie Watts’s steady girlfriend, Shirley Shepherd, a sculpture student at the Royal College of Art, to whom Charlie became engaged in April 1964. A strong-willed, outspoken character, in utter contrast to his mildness and politeness, Shirley refused to accept the vow of anonymity imposed on Chrissie and other Stones’ women. Since Mick found Charlie the most restful of all his bandmates and Chrissie got on well with Shirley, the four went on holiday together to Ibiza during a brief respite from touring that summer. When they arrived at their hotel, Shirley found she and Chrissie were expected to register separately so that lurking paparazzi would not link them with the two Stones. “A photographer tried to take a picture of our names in the hotel register,” Chrissie remembers. “So Mick hit him. And when we left, Shirley and I were told we had to come home on different flights from Mick and Charlie. I went along with it, of course, but Shirley absolutely refused to be bullied by Mick.”

Shirley was also one of the few around Mick who ever dared find fault with his appearance. “Neither of our boyfriends looked good on the beach,” Chrissie recalls. “Mick was terribly skinny and Charlie had a fat tummy and used to keep his socks on when he sunbathed. I remember Shirley saying ‘They don’t show up well in the sun. They look better in the evening.’ ”

From that point, Shirley defied the diktats that streamed from Mick and Oldham almost on principle. “The firm rule was always ‘no girls on tour,’ but Shirley would nearly always go because Charlie simply refused to get up or wash if she didn’t,” says Chrissie. “We weren’t supposed to go into the studio while the band was recording, but she decided she was going and took me with her. Mick was absolutely furious and ordered us out, but Shirley hissed at me, ‘Don’t move!’ So we just sat there with Mick pulling Nankers [faces] at us through the control room glass. If he ever came into the dressing room and found girlfriends there, he’d glare so much that the girls did Nazi salutes and went ‘Heil Jagger!’ ”

Although Chrissie’s parents in Buckinghamshire believed her to be leading a life of barely imaginable decadence, it mostly wasn’t at all like that. Drugs, for instance, still barely figured in the UK pop scene. The Stones had always taken (quite legal) amphetamine uppers to stay awake and in America had already been offered marijuana, historically the narcotic of choice for blues and jazz musicians, but only Brian and Keith indulged in either to any serious degree. Mick certainly drank, but had no real head for alcohol; after one Bo Diddley concert at Hammersmith, he was so far gone that Chrissie needed help from one of Diddley’s musicians to keep him on his feet. However, an image of hard drinking had to be cultivated as part of the Stones’ outlawry. One day, Mick’s old Dartford Grammar School friend and fellow Blue Boy Alan Etherington happened to bump into him in central London. “He had a Ford Zephyr car with a bottle of whiskey in the back,” Etherington remembers. “I said, ‘That’s not like you, Mick,’ and he muttered something about it being just for publicity.”

As Chrissie discovered, he had a conventional, even old-fashioned side that very much reflected the values of his father, Joe. “He was very, very strict with me. I was always being told how to behave and what to say. There was one of my girlfriends who was known to be promiscuous and Mick didn’t like me having anything to do with her.”

She was in effect going out with two people: the public, image-conscious Mick who hastily dropped her hand and strode ahead whenever any fans appeared, and the utterly different, often endearing private one. “He wasn’t horrible to me. A lot of the time he was very nice to me. We had a very ordinary life in spite of his other life. We spent a lot of time, if you can believe it, sitting in bed, doing crosswords, or Mick reading James Bond books. I always had strong opinions and I think originally that was what he liked because we used to talk a lot and discuss things. He was always very interested in sociology and economic issues like monopolies and capitalism—I remember him talking once about the monopoly of the ice creams sold in cinemas. That’s what he wanted with me: I was his security. He used to say he was only at home when he was with me.”

Such interludes grew more infrequent as Mick and the Stones prepared for a return American tour that would wipe away the bad taste of the first, and meanwhile concentrated on jeopardizing Britain’s relations with some closer neighbors. European countries that were traditionally a sluggish market for UK pop now witnessed the worst outbreaks of youth violence since Bill Haley and the Comets had first brought rock ’n’ roll from America a decade earlier. In The Hague, Holland, an opera house where the Stones played was almost rent apart; in Belgium, the interior minister unsuccessfully tried to ban their appearance at the Brussels World’s Fair ground, and later had the dubious satisfaction of saying “I told you so” in both French and Flemish; after their show at L’Olympia theater in Paris (where the Beatles had been booed), rioting youths fought street battles with gendarmes, breaking shop windows, overturning pavement café tables, and vandalizing newspaper kiosks.

For the return to New York just two days later, on October 23, there was no more “England’s Newest Hitmakers” claptrap or niche marketing in Vogue. The advance publicity picture showed all five Stones in a state of (entirely cosmetic) scruffiness and unshavenness, with the superfastidious Mick affecting to scratch under one arm like a baboon. “The Rolling Stones, who haven’t washed for a week …” began the accompanying press release.

Paradoxically, back in Britain they seemed to be making a move toward family friendliness with their first TV commercial, the one for Kellogg’s Rice Krispies of which Jacqui Graham had received an early inkling. However, they provided only its soundtrack, with Mick giving the product’s child-appealing “snap, crackle, and pop” the same sarcastic edge he did to faithless girls who played half-assed games: “Wake up in the morning there’s a snap around the place … wake up in the morning there’s a crackle in your face … wake up in the morning there’s a pop that really says … Rice Krispies for you … and you … and you!”

To follow up on “It’s All Over Now”—which had just left Billboard’s Top 100 after peaking at No. 26—a second American album, 12 x 5, had been put together for release on the day of their first New York concert. Its cover was a David Bailey shot of the band in close-up, moody and hirsute but now sartorially irreproachable. Brian Jones’s gold fringe and immensely deep-collared blue shirt dominated the foreground, with Mick slightly craning his neck at the back. Bailey had put him there deliberately to avoid any accusations of favoritism.

As well as recycling “It’s All Over Now,” the album contained everything from their British EP, Five by Five, plus other material from the Chess sessions and two Jagger-Richard compositions, “Grown Up Wrong” and “Congratulations”—the second not in any way to be confused with the Cliff Richard song later ceremonially performed on Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother’s birthday. The standout track was Irma Thomas’s “Time Is on My Side,” a yearningly soulful Mick vocal, slightly marred by a talking bit which seemed to metamorphose him into the scolding black housekeeper in Tom and Jerry cartoons: “And I know … I KNOW … like I tol’ you so many times BEFAW … you’re gonna come back, baby, ’cause I KNOW … yeah, knockin’ right on my DAW!” Ad-libbing would never be his forte.