Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  Dedication

  TO SUE, WITH LOVE

  Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE | Sympathy for the Old Devil

  PART ONE: “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”

  Photographs

  PART TWO: THE TYRANNY OF COOL

  ELEVEN | “The Baby’s Dead, My Lady Said”

  TWELVE | Someday 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

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by Philip Norman

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Acknowledgments

  THE GREAT NINETEENTH-CENTURY painter James McNeill Whistler was once asked how long a certain canvas had taken him to complete. “All my life,” replied Whistler, meaning the years of training and dedication that had given him his abilities. Likewise, I could be said to have worked on this portrait of Mick Jagger since I first interviewed him, for a small north of England evening newspaper, in 1965. Our conversation took place on the cold back stairs of the ABC cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, where the Stones were appearing in what used to be called a pop “package show.” Mick wore a white fisherman’s knit sweater, drank Pepsi-Cola from the bottle and between answering my questions in a not very interested way, made desultory attempts to chat up a young woman somewhere behind me. That one detail, at least, would never change.

  In later years, our paths crossed again from time to time, particularly when I was writing about pop music for The Times and Sunday Times of London during the 1970s. But it never occurred to me that I might be collecting material for a future book. There was, for instance, the time I found myself in Rod Stewart’s dressing room at the State theater in north London when Mick dropped by after the show. Though he was living apart from Bianca, and clearly at loose ends, that night with Stewart did not turn out as one might have expected. Rock’s two greatest Lotharios stood around a piano, chorusing sentimental Cockney songs like “My Old Dutch.”

  I didn’t become a conscious Jagger watcher until 1982 when for a Sunday Times article (later the prologue to my Rolling Stones biography) I joined the band on tour in America and was granted my first formal interview with Mick since Stockton-on-Tees in 1965. This time it happened at the Orlando, Florida, Tangerine Bowl while he was doing his customary preshow warm-up on his backstage jogging track. Even before going out to perform to eighty thousand people for two hours, however, the Jagger business brain never switched off. Without pausing in his workout, he told me he’d just read my Beatles biography, Shout!, then proceeded to correct a minor point of fact relating to Allen Klein, the manager the Beatles and the Stones used to share. So much for that often repeated claim that he “can’t remember anything” about his astounding career.

  It hardly needs saying that this is not an authorized biography. When I accepted the commission in 2009, I made two approaches to the now Sir Mick for cooperation, first privately through a high-level personal friend of his, then publicly through Baz Bamigboye’s show-business column in the London Daily Mail. I thought that possibly my credentials as a biographer, most recently of his old friend John Lennon, might at least arouse his curiosity. But when no response came back, I can’t say I was surprised. Sir Mick talks to writers only when he has something to sell. And then the palpitating hack—for, female or male, old or young, they all palpitate—can be relied on to churn out the same old clichés. As his one official biographer discovered, he sees no percentage in telling the truth or having it told, even where it reflects most positively on himself. The millions are all in the mythology. And the millions always come first.

  So this has had to be a work of investigation and reconstruction, drawing on sources I’ve acquired during thirty years of writing about the Stones and the Beatles—who in fact constitute one single, epic story. My thrifty side was tickled to be using the same contacts book in 2009–2011 that I had for my Stones biography in 1981–1983. Inevitably, I reviewed the many hours of interview I had all those years ago with Andrew Loog Oldham, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, Bill Wyman, Ronnie Wood, Paul Jones, Eric Clapton, Robert Fraser, Donald Cammell, Alexis Korner, Giorgio Gomelsky, and others. But, as I did with my John Lennon biography, I promised myself never simply to recycle the group portrait into the solo one. Indeed, it will be seen that I’ve revised my view of Mick even more than I did of John.

  I must record my indebtedness to Peter Trollope, a superb researcher who opened many doors—not least on the mystery of “Acid King David” Snyderman and the sinister background of the Redlands drugs bust of 1967 which put Mick briefly (but still terrifyingly) behind bars. It was through Peter, too, that I made contact with Maggie Abbott, who turned out not only to have been a friend of the elusive Acid King but also Mick’s film agent in the era when he might have become as big in movies as in rock. Maggie was endlessly helpful and patient, and the section on Mick’s wooing by Hollywood, and all those missed acting opportunities, would have been thin without her.

  Special thanks go to Chrissie Messenger, formerly Shrimpton, and Cleo Sylvestre, whose recollections of the young Mick differ so greatly from the image he was given in his late teens. One great stroke of biographer’s luck came through Jacqui Graham, whom I first met when she was publicity director at Pan Macmillan publishers and I was one of her authors. Quite by chance, Jackie mentioned that in the early sixties she’d been an avid Stones fan and had kept a diary—a hilarious one, as it turned out—about following them around their early London gigs, on one occasion doorstepping Mick at home in his pajamas. My other piece of luck was being contacted by Scott Jones, a British filmmaker who has devoted years to investigating Brian Jones’s death in 1969. Brian’s mysterious drowning and the Redlands drugs raid both took place in the county of Sussex, and some local police officers were involved in both incidents. Scott generously put me in touch with two of the bobbies who collared Mick and Keith.

  My gratitude to Alan Clayson, Martin Elliott, and Andy Neill for fact-checking the manuscript; to Shirley Arnold, who knows better than most that the real Mick “has no dark side”; to Tony Calder for vignettes of life with Mick and Andrew Oldham; to Maureen O’Grady for memories of Mick and Rave! magazine; to Laurence Myers for background to the Stones’ 1965 Decca deal; to Christopher Gibbs, for guidance as invaluable here as in my Stones book; to Michael Lindsay-Hogg for the backstage story of The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus; to Sam Cutler for the new perspective on the Altamont festival; to Sandy Lieberson for the saga of Performance; to Bobby Keys for recalling “one hell of a whopper of a good time” as the Stones’ sax player; to Marshall Chess for enlightenment on the Rolling Stones Records and Cocksucker Blues era; to fellow biograp
her Andrew Morton for insights on Mick and Angelina Jolie; to Dick Cavett, America’s last great talk-show host, for chatting so vividly about being Mick and Bianca’s next-door neighbor in Montauk; to Michael O’Mara for his recollections of Mick’s aborted memoirs; to Gillian Wilson for the observation about Charlie Watts’s underwear.

  Grateful thanks also to Keith Altham, Mick Avory, Dave Berry, Geoff Bradford, Alan Dow, John Dunbar, Alan Etherington, Matthew Evans, Richard Hattrell, Laurence Isaacson, Peter Jones, Norman Jopling, Judy Lever, Kevin Macdonald, Chris O’Dell, Linda Porter (formerly Keith), Don Rambridge, Ron Schneider, and Dick Taylor.

  Finally, my continuing appreciation goes to my agents and dear friends Michael Sissons in London and Peter Matson in New York; to Dan Halpern at Ecco, New York, Carole Tonkinson at HarperCollins UK, and Tim Rostron at Random House, Canada, for their support and encouragement; to Rachel Mills and Alexandra Cliff at PFD for selling this book in other territories with such enthusiasm; to Louise Connolly for her photo research; to my daughter Jessica for the author photo—and so very much more.

  —Philip Norman, London, 2012

  Prologue

  Sympathy for the Old Devil

  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, foulmouthed 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 program 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 gray. That understated couture suit, worn in deference to the occasion but also subtly emphasizing 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 Academy of 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 unrivaled 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 honor 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 Program . . . 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 U.S. . . . 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 favorites. 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 sulfurous 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 win 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 fatuous 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 traveling 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.