Mick Jagger (8 page)

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 London–Charing Cross 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 downtown 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, recognizing 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-colored shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.

Keith instantly recognized 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 afterward 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 semiprofessional 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 those 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 to make Keith ever 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, Pete 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. 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 realized 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 the 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 their 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 lineup 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-colored 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 toward 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 doglike devotion.

Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cozy, 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 practice 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 takeoffs 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 analyzed 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 MARCH 15, 1962, Little Boy Blue and his bandmates 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.