Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. “I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,” he would remember. “Economics seemed about halfway in between.”

  At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus on Houghton Street, off Kingsway. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least, he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.

  For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House—that would have been too perfect—but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed “the Village on the Heath” because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.

  It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.

  A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.

  It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicized seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Belgian Congo’s Sharpeville Massacre and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.

  On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument, his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. “That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,” Isaacson says. “I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.”

  Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as “obviously extremely bright” and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke “like a nice middle-class boy . . . The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, ‘Jagger . . . if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!’ ”

  Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties—though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans, and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, “bistros,” and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen, and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts, and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings, and radically short skirts.

  Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theaters like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mold-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds—including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones, and Dartford’s Peter Blake—were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.

  Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the U.S. Army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that race music was dead and buried.

  Such rock idols as Britain had produced—Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard—had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was “Trad,” a homogenized version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s “I Love You, Samantha” and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “March of the Siamese Children.” The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come t
o a respectful halt during drum solos.

  In short, the danger seemed to have passed.

  BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.

  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.