The main problem was that after the Stones’ career got going, Mick was unable to recall almost any dates and possessed no diaries or letters from which a narrative could be constructed. To jog his memory, the New York Times’s rock critic and Rolling Stone specialist Robert Palmer was hired as a supplementary interviewer. A personal letter also went to Bill Wyman, who had kept a detailed diary and preserved almost every piece of paper relating to the band’s career since its earliest days. In a respectful tone Bill was hardly used to, Mick asked him to talk to John Ryle, adding, “You can say what you like.” A handwritten footnote asked for access to his archive to fill in the book’s many yawning chronological gaps. But Bill had no particular reason to want to help Mick, and in any case was planning to write his own autobiography, so sent back a brusque refusal.
Whatever was tried, nothing seemed able to flesh out the taped interviews flowing from the Barclay Intercontinental across the Atlantic to Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The only fleshing out was in the ghostwriter, who, after months of living on room service at Mick’s expense, had lost his formerly lissome, boyish appearance. Michael O’Mara had a few meetings with the interviewee but was never able to communicate his growing anxiety.
Despite being a year Mick’s junior, he felt he was dealing with “an eighteen-year-old.” Sometimes he would land in New York, phone Mick at home, and be told to come right over. When he arrived, Jerry, by now heavily pregnant, would open the door and tell him Mick was out. “I’d sit around and wait for him, trying to make conversation with Jerry, but he never came. I had the strong feeling he was hiding upstairs all the time. When I did manage to talk to him, he’d just tell me not to worry, the book would be fine. He just seemed to think the right words would arrange themselves on the page like magic. But Jerry seemed to realize already something was going badly wrong.”
Finally, after something like nine months, a complete manuscript was submitted. Unlike the ghostwriter by now, it was curiously slim, weighing in at around eighty thousand words, half the normal size of a blockbuster biography. And it exceeded O’Mara’s worst fears. Mick had not only failed to tell all, he came across as not much less bland and evasive than in his press conferences. Towering figures from his past were dismissed in throwaway lines—Marianne Faithfull, for instance, as “a girl I used to know” or words to that effect. And sex, as O’Mara recalls, “didn’t get a look-in . . . It wasn’t just dull, it was heart-stoppingly dull. I thought we should call it The Diary of a Nobody.”
He made an appointment to see Mick, anticipating the most awkward moment of his career. But for once the eternal eighteen-year-old was wholly adult and pragmatic. “This isn’t working, is it?” Mick said before they had even sat down.
George Weidenfeld was mortified to lose such a prize and various ideas for saving it were suggested (including O’Mara’s brief notion of marketing it as unexpectedly “subtle”). But Mick’s interest in the project, perhaps never great, had waned, and there were now other, more urgent forms of self-expression on his agenda. So the £1 million contract was canceled and the first installment already paid by Weidenfeld had to be returned. As O’Mara recalls, it took some time and effort to get the check from Prince Rupert.
ON JULY 26, 1983, that dreaded fortieth birthday finally arrived. The many media salutations included one in The Times by Pete Townshend, currently on sabbatical from the Who and working for publishers Faber & Faber under the aegis of Mick’s old London School of Economics classmate Matthew Evans. With tongue only slightly in cheek, Townshend paid tribute to “a complete exhibitionist . . . a name dropper . . . whose beauty is its owner’s greatest joy . . . who will still be beautiful when he’s 50 [and whose] talent will still be as strong at 50.”
The difference between Mick and other rock stars—indeed, stars of any kind—was pithily summed up by this most intelligent of his contemporaries, John Lennon apart. “His ambition,” wrote Townshend, “is not dependent on his youth, his songwriting is not dependent on his own suffering and his desire to be popular and loved not dependent on his personal insecurity . . . Jagger was into rock ’n’ roll before me but, unlike me, he still lives for it.”
Townshend was wrong about the insecurity, however: it always lurked inside Mick the performer, if not the person, and was never stronger than in his forty-first year. After a decade of seeking a young band worthy to be the next Beatles, the music industry had been stormed from left field by the little boy who used to front Motown’s putative black Beatles, the Jackson 5. Michael Jackson’s Thriller album was on its way to becoming the biggest-selling of all time, generating seven Top 10 hits from its nine tracks and winning eight Grammy Awards. Jackson had in effect become a black one-man Beatles, just as his loucher rival, Prince, had become a black one-man Rolling Stones. But it was primarily as a dancer of stunning inventiveness, mixing elements of punk, hip-hop, Rocky Horror, and moonwalking astronaut, that he’d seized the throne as pop’s number one thriller from its twenty-year incumbent. And to cap it all, he had to be called Michael.
That August, the Stones parted from Atlantic Records and signed a deal with the American CBS label, guaranteeing them $24 million for four albums. Mick also signed a separate deal to make three solo albums. CBS’s top brass had convinced him that on his own he could be as big as Michael Jackson, and were promising a huge advertisement and promotion budget to help it to happen.
The other Stones knew nothing about the solo-albums deal until Mick announced he’d be starting the first after the release of Undercover. “The Rolling Stones cannot be, at my age and after all these years, the only thing in my life,” he said. “I certainly have earned the right to express myself in another way.” It was hardly new for someone in a famous band, or even in the Stones, to make a solo album; Bill Wyman had already released three. But the underhanded way the deal was done (so reminiscent of Brian Jones) put everyone’s back up. In later years, Keith would describe it as “a betrayal” and the starting point of the bitterest, most nearly fatal internecine war between the Glimmer Twins.
For now, however, no further shots were fired, and by December, relations between the two had stabilized sufficiently for Mick to be best man when Keith married Patti Hansen in Mexico on his own, unproblematic fortieth birthday. It was from a very different, wholly unexpected quarter that the first serious anti-Mick eruption would come.
Since the Stones began, Charlie Watts had never shown the least egotism or temperament, accepting his place in the second rank with almost Zen-like stoicism, absorbing his undeserved equal share of all the trouble and notoriety without complaint, staying faithful to his wife, Shirley, in the face of all temptation, injecting a note of common sense, humor, or humanity when the madness threatened to become overwhelming, staying friends with all the others and helping them to stay friends—in every way fitting the definition of the ideal drummer as “the cement that holds the band together.”
For some years past, in fact, Keith’s riffs had been the cement and Charlie the only drummer in rock whose job was to follow the rhythm guitarist. Despite all the wealth and celebrity, he still regarded joining the band as a disastrous wrong turning in his life; while grinding out the same juvenile backbeat in giant open-air arenas, he secretly pined to be playing jazz with kindred spirits in some smoky little Soho club. It was said of him that wherever in the world he found himself with the Stones, he always longed to catch the next plane home.
Of all the band, he was the one Mick respected most, treated best, and listened to with the most attention. When Adam Mars-Jones auditioned to be Mick’s word engineer, Charlie had been the only other Stone sitting in, and Mars-Jones had sensed that he needed to be won over every bit as much as the biographee. And this esteem appeared fully reciprocated. During Mars-Jones’s visit, a courier had delivered Charlie’s housewarming present to Mick for his new French château, a small oil painting of a horse. Mick had at first been flippant, putting on a joke Jerry-Texan accent (“Oh, Ah’m so tickled! . . . Ah’m so grateful!�
�), but had changed his tune when he learned the painting was worth £15,000.
Latterly, however, after all those years of self-containment and self-control, drink and drugs had started to catch up with Charlie. And after years of unsullied monogamy amid the others’ orgies, his marriage to Shirley was also showing signs of strain. It was against this background that his seemingly infinite tolerance of Mick finally ran out.
Toward the end of 1984, the Stones met in Amsterdam, Holland, now the center of the business structure Prince Rupert had built around them. Mick had a bridge-building evening out with Keith, for which he borrowed the jacket Keith had worn to marry Patti. When they returned to the hotel, everyone gathered in Mick’s suite except Charlie. Mick picked up the phone, dialed Charlie’s room, and made the same quip he had in front of Adam Mars-Jones at the Savoy, on that occasion without giving offense: “Where’s my drummer?”
After a lengthy interval, there was a knock at the door and Charlie entered, dressed with extreme dapperness, even for him, and smelling strongly of cologne. He walked up to the seated Mick, hauled him to his feet by his (or, rather, Keith’s) jacket lapels, and hit him so hard that he toppled into a platter of smoked-salmon sandwiches. “Don’t ever call me ‘your’ drummer again,” Charlie growled, “you’re my fuckin singer,” then exited before Mick had time to say a word.
When Mick had recovered his equilibrium, he tried to laugh off the incident, saying that Charlie had been drunk and, in his generally confused state nowadays, hadn’t known what he was doing. This diagnosis seemed confirmed a few minutes later when Charlie rang down to say he was returning. “He’s coming to apologize,” Mick announced. Instead, Charlie walked in and walloped him again, “Just so you don’t forget.”
MICK’S DEBUT SOLO album, She’s the Boss, mustered formidable resources, as CBS had promised. To help him produce it, he had two of the best young American talents, Bill Laswell and Nile Rodgers. Pete Townshend was wooed away from reading manuscripts at Faber & Faber to join an immense roster of star session musicians including guitar maestro Jeff Beck and jazz-rock organist Herbie Hancock. Two of the tracks, “Just Another Night” and “Lucky in Love,” were co-credited to Mick and Carlos Alomar, the Puerto Rican composer-guitarist best known for his work with David Bowie.
Apart from the Performance soundtrack album, backing Carly Simon, and messing around with John Lennon, it was the first time Mick had ever recorded away from the Stones. Yet what should have been a liberating experience had a tentative, almost nervous atmosphere, one former CBS executive recalls, “as if he didn’t feel he had the same rock ’n’ roll credentials as Keith.”
Early in 1985, the Stones reconvened in Paris to begin a new album with the gloriously appropriate title Dirty Work. Keith had had time to brood about Mick’s dirty work with CBS, and turned up with a fistful of new songs whose titles seemed to make his feelings menacingly clear: “Had It with You,” “One Hit (To the Body),” “Fight.” The atmosphere in the studio was so bad that both Charlie and Bill stayed away for extended periods. But it proved a boon for Ronnie Wood; there was so little good Jagger-Richards material available that Woody snuck an unprecedented four of his songs onto the playlist.
She’s the Boss was released in February, preceded by the Jagger-Alomar song “Just Another Night.” With the single came a video of Mick in a club with a gorgeous young black woman (strangely like Marsha Hunt ten years earlier), being cajoled by her into performing and wowing her with his utter brilliance. In an echo of that recent, so much less than routine night in Amsterdam (at least, the admissible part), he borrowed a glittery jacket, grabbed a guitar, and was transformed into an eerie replica of Keith.
“Just Another Night” was a strong commercial single and the album as a whole an impressive effort, as it could hardly fail to be with such talented auxiliaries. Keith was privately scathing at the time and later, in his autobiography, compared it to Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Everybody has a copy but no one listened to it.” Actually, the single made No. 1 on the U.S. mainstream rock chart and No. 12 on the U.S. pop chart, while the second Jagger-Alomar collaboration, “Lucky in Love,” reached the Top 40. Following the old adage “Where there’s a hit there’s a writ,” a Jamaican reggae singer named Patrick Alley came forward to claim—unsuccessfully—that “Just Another Night” had plagiarized a composition by him. That was something else the Führer never experienced.
Mick’s defection from the Stones seemed to trigger a general exodus in that summer of 1985. Bill put together a band called Willie and the Poor Boys to raise funds for research into multiple sclerosis, whose victims included the former Faces bass player Ronnie Lane. Charlie and Woody both joined the lineup, along with Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, and a successful album and tour resulted. Charlie was also playing regularly in a boogie-woogie instrumental band called Rocket 88 with Ian Stewart and Mick’s old Ealing Club mentor, Alexis Korner.
On July 13, the foremost names in British and American pop, past and present, came together for Live Aid, a mammoth fund-raising concert for victims of the famine then devastating Ethiopia. Two simultaneous televised shows, one from London’s Wembley, the other from Philadelphia’s JFK Stadium, presented an extraordinary lineup including Paul McCartney, David Bowie, the Who, Queen, Madonna, U2, Status Quo, Phil Collins, Duran Duran, Alison Moyet, and Bob Dylan. The Stones were asked to take part, but declined on the grounds they were “no longer a band.”
Instead, Mick went on alone at JFK Stadium, making his first live appearance since the Tattoo You tour and his first ever as a solo. His five-song allotment included two duets with Tina Turner—that most vital of his early role models—the second an extended, raunchy “It’s Only Rock & Roll,” which revived whispers of a long-ago affair between them, especially at the end when he pulled her dress off. Keith appeared in the next, and climactic, segment, backing Bob Dylan on acoustic guitars with Woody.
Live Aid’s worldwide audience of 1.9 billion was thus privy to the vast gulf now yawning between the Glimmer Twins. Mick in his trainers and blue T-shirt—still showing that schoolgirlie flash of bare midriff—looked youthful and current, while tattered, emaciated, cigarette-drooping Keith was the Stone Age unrepentant.
As well as benefiting Ethiopia’s famine victims by around £150 million and giving pop a new aura of nobility, Live Aid raised Mick’s solo career another notch. Part of the day’s program was a video of David Bowie and him performing the old Martha and the Vandellas hit “Dancing in the Street,” the inspiration for “Street Fighting Man.” The duet was meant to have figured in the live concert with one of them in London and the other in Philly, but technical problems proved insurmountable. So it had been filmed in advance in London’s Docklands area; the two encountering each other at night with no one else around in what inevitably somewhat resembled a gay tryst.
Bowie, in a long camouflage overcoat, looked the more stylish, although Mick worked his still-tiny butt off, trumpeting his lips (“Cawlin’ awl aroun’ the world . . .”) and dilating his eyes as ferociously as a Maori warrior. Halfway through, just to show who was still the coolest and who still didn’t give a fuck, he picked a canned drink off the ground and sipped from it. The resulting single spent four weeks at No. 1 in the UK and the video was one of that year’s most popular on MTV.
December brought a temporary armistice within the Stones when Ian Stewart died suddenly of a heart attack, aged forty-seven. Stu undoubtedly was the cement that held the band together: since being dropped from the lineup by Andrew Oldham for looking too normal, he had been their indefatigable roadie, driver, protector, and impartial friend. Latterly, he had rejoined them onstage as backup pianist—the square-jawed family man from Surrey a match for the bluesiest black Chicagoan—but his musical taste and uncompromising standards had always kept the others on their toes. “Stu was the guy we tried to please,” Mick said, meaning every word.
On February 23, 1986, the band took the stage together for the first time in four years to pay tribut
e to Stu at the 100 Club on London’s Oxford Street, just along from the old Marquee. Playing blues covers with longtime friends like Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton rekindled a glimmer, if only a faint one, between the sundered twins. A further show of unity was required two days later when the Stones received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Grammys. Mick voiced their appreciation of this “great honor” even though, like writing an autobiography, it implied one’s best days were past.
Hostilities were resumed on a far more vicious scale later in the year over Mick’s second solo album, and transparent self-definition, Primitive Cool. Buoyed by the success of She’s the Boss, he had only one coproducer, Keith Diamond, rather than the previous two, and dropped the itinerant cast of thousands in the studio, instead relying mainly on guitarists Jeff Beck and Dave Stewart (no relation to Stu) from the Eurythmics. The album was recorded mainly in New York with supplementary sessions in Holland and Barbados—the latter the scene of a traumatic adventure for Jerry. Arriving at Grantley Adams Airport to collect some sweaters she’d had air-freighted from America, she was arrested and charged with possessing twenty pounds of marijuana. It proved to be a mix-up by customs; Jerry’s name had been put on the wrong incoming consignment and she was soon pronounced innocent and freed. But for Mick, it was all a highly unpleasant dose of déjà vu.
Primitive Cool looked like a calculated affront to Keith, not just in subtext-heavy track titles like “Kow Tow” and “Shoot Off Your Mouth” (Lennon and McCartney at war had been just beginners at this game) but also the serial flaunting of a rival guitar hero like Jeff Beck. Even more galling was Mick’s unabashed focus on his own interests at the expense of his band’s. A new Stones album, Dirty Work, was due in March 1986. Mick refused to go on the road to promote it because he planned a solo tour when Primitive Cool came out the following year.
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