Mick Jagger (5 page)

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 the 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 furor over Presley—the “suggestiveness” of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smolder 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 leveled 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 realized. Even this sanitized 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 criticized 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 rivaled, 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 “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Lead Belly 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 “trad” 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 honor 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 lineup). 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 an 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 neighborhood. 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 organizational 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 jewelry, and exploding licorice-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 Harbor, 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 unsavory 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 U.S. 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 theaters 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 cowrote 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 March 14. 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 favorite 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 humor 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 realized, 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 homegrown 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 Rogers 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 schoolmates,” 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 programs 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 program with his brother, Chris, and other handpicked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.