Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Similarly in Keith, the Stones once had a quite possible alternative vocalist. You can hear him, back in Come On days, before tobacco, and worse, spoiled the perfect pitch of an angelic English choirboy. There are private tapes by Keith which hint at what the band has lost through Jagger’s pre-eminence, and his own odd, unexpected self-effacement. Lost for good and all, it now seems. His performance of his song Little T and A, from Tattoo You, is such a mess of thunderous chords and steel-wool syllables that Jagger actually walks offstage, back to the place, behind Charlie Watts’s drums, where a urinal is discreetly positioned. The stadium, by contrast, demurs less than in the preceding half-hour. Mick is an idol, but Keith is a hero. From his tattered head to his tattered boots, with all his tattered life in between, they love him.

  In the backstage enclosure, conditions have slightly relaxed. The press, and those who have passed themselves off as press, stand unmolested under the rear apron, gazing avidly up at the noise through the proscenium, in some cases showing their kinship with the Stones, and the principle of wildness, by doing self-consciously frantic little solo dances. The intro to Start Me Up acts like a sudden air raid warning. A line of security guards, the seven-foot TULSA POLICE frightener among them, moves across slantwise, pushing and jabbing all superfluous onlookers back into the empty rear grandstand. Four identical yellow minibuses with blackened windows have appeared below the stage-ramp, their side doors slid back wide. Subdued panic and paranoia once more take hold. Only an hour remains before the Stones must make their getaway.

  This final hour is an unbroken run of the malign two-minute classics whose opening chords, heard in however modern a disco, still bring the whole clientele boogieing out under the lights. Street Fighting Man, from dear old cosy, militant ’68; Honky Tonk Women, with its clopping cowbell, from Hyde Park ’69. Tumbling Dice, Brown Sugar: sex in a gambler’s throw, a sweet tooth. To stir up memories of two countries’ conjoined outrage, Jagger has wrapped himself in a big robe made of the British and the American flag. ‘… Ah laid a divorc-ay in New Yawk Cit-a-ay …’ The difference is that in the wings, his ten-year-old daughter, Jade, is watching him. ‘… Ah just cain’t seem to drink you off mah mind …’ Jade looks bored but tries to hide it, as ten-year-olds do on formal grown-up occasions.

  The stadium roars louder as the golden oldies keep coming: there are sirens in the distance, mixed up with police car whirligigs. Backstage, the condition is Red Alert. A dozen or so guards plunge amid the stage supports to reinforce their colleagues on the frontal barrier-system. Four of them return, carrying a boy who has managed to climb over. The boy, aged about fourteen, looks draggled and exhausted, as if just rescued from the surf at Malibu. The guards carry him off, restraining him by the arms, legs and windpipe.

  The finale – there can be no other – is Jumpin’ Jack Flash. The anthem to the Stones as Devil agents, the vicious black midnight of the sunshiny Sixties, summons its dancing demon even on an overcast afternoon near Philadelphia. Jagger is still enough of a blues man to know that if you hit a groove, you stay there. This version lasts twenty minutes and takes him writhing and rotating down both catwalks. He runs back to the right-hand tower, climbs into the cab of the cherry picker, is cranked up and swung out, thirty feet above the crowd, still hunched like a hag, singing, ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas … Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas …’ Rock ’n’ roll can have produced no stranger sight, nor one more removed from its origins, than this figure in knee-breeches, suspended before a huge blue and yellow Japanese mural, repeating ‘It’s a gas’ in a 10,000-watt whisper, and pelting the faces below with long-stemmed carnations.

  One encore – a perfunctory Satisfaction – and it is over. The Stones, swaddled in white towels, flee down the backstage ramp to their four waiting yellow trucks. Behind them, the acclaim is unmistakably tinged with reproach. Jade and Jerry Hall are already in the lead vehicle when Jagger reaches it. Out in the stadium, his voice continues to agree and exhort, ‘Aw-right! Aw-ri-i-ight!’ He is speaking through a radio-controlled microphone. He has no intention of going back on stage.

  The heavy compound gate swings open. The motorcade bumps through in clouds of dust. Beyond the balloons, a $12,000 firework display cracks and rackets in the disappointed sky. Stage-hands fall on the Japanese garden, flattening it like a cardhouse, rolling up the artificial grass, packing into hampers the sodden T-shirts and towels which Jagger, in less careful days, might have tossed out among his audience.

  The New York Times speaks for all in comparing the Stones’ performance to that of ‘a teenage garage band’. Not even Rolling Stone, with all its special privileges at stake, can pretend that the JFK Stadium show, and another the following day, have been anything more than tortuous tuning up. Time calls the tour ‘a floating World’s Series’, calculatedly fobbing off its public with empty spectacle instead of the excitement for which some $15 million has already been paid. The ‘major financial involvement’ of Jovan Perfumes is sarcastically noted – a whiff of cheap scent replacing what once smelled only raw and sulphurous. ‘For anyone interested in resisting the social pressures when the Stones pass through town,’ Time continues acidly, ‘the following reasons are offered as a public service …’

  Buffalo is the nearest the Stones can get to Canada since 1977, when Keith Richards was arrested for heroin smuggling in Toronto, and Mick Jagger featured in an erotic scandal with the prime minister’s wife. Buffalo’s chief autumn feature is a dishmop-grey sky which, for all its apparent listlessness, harbours sudden rain squalls and gales of eccentric ferocity. There is such a sky today as the cars and pickups and plastered microbuses come streaming across the Canadian border, past clumps and pickets of police in broad-brimmed Mountie hats, and the numerous misty slip-roads to Niagara Falls.

  Behind the Amherst-Marriott Hotel the four yellow vans that fled JFK Stadium three days ago stand innocently in an almost empty parking lot. Beside the first van, half a dozen teenage boys squat on the grass verge, gazing up at a top-floor picture window whose brown, red and orange curtains have yet to be drawn back. From time to time, the same boy advances, cups his hands and bellows, ‘C’mon out, Jagger!’

  At Rich Stadium, twenty-five miles away, the wind scuds down the empty stands at a steady forty miles per hour. The Stones’ pink and purple stage set takes shape at the westerly end, in conditions that force its scaffolders to cling on aloft like sailors working an Indiaman round Cape Horn. By noon, the wind has almost toppled the right-hand tower backwards, and buffeted both Japanese side-screens to colourless shreds. There is, even so, no question of cancelling the afternoon’s concert. Printed on each $15 ticket under the Stones’ name, and that of Jovan Perfumes, is the blithe assurance that it is an ‘all weather’ show.

  The wind rises to gale force as Rich Stadium fills with its audience of 65,000. The Canadian contingent gather round the stage with red and white national flags and old-fashioned hippy hair which from a distance, en masse, has the look of good quality manure. The support band plays almost inaudibly, amid a skirl of balloons and orange frisbees, bobbing on capricious up-draughts. The Stones are even better hidden than at JFK Stadium; bunkered deep under the back bleachers with their banquets and their bars. When the press sees them, it is for the briefest instant, running to the stage across an elevated drawbridge. They clearly had no idea before this moment that a storm was in progress.

  The headwind hits Jagger first, catching the radio-controlled mike in his hand and whirling it up to bump his mouth with such force it loosens the diamond filling in one of his upper front teeth. The others, less hale and well protected, battle their way out into the applause, gripping guitars like imperilled umbrellas, their trouser cuffs flapping madly around their built-up heels. Jagger’s voice comes only in patches through the juddering breeze ‘… under ma thumb … gurl … just changed her ways …’ The stage gives no protection from the head-on squalls. The shredded side-panels flap insanely. It is too windy for Woody to skylark, or Bill
to hold a cigarette in his mouth. The only thing they can do is stand there. They cannot hear their audience, and can hardly hear themselves. The wind gulps the vast kilowattage, carrying it off with balloons and frisbees, up over the stadium-rim and away to vanish in the fogs and white uproar that hang eternally above Niagara Falls.

  For all that, the five fragile remnants of an endangered species, panoramically revealed by their half-destroyed set, have suddenly begun playing like the Rolling Stones of old. They are playing, in the teeth of this ludicrous gale, like the band of young tearaways who could wreck a cinema or transfix a half-million hippies. They are playing with percussion of inspired lawlessness, smashing the high hats and policemen’s helmets; a bass-line below it, groping up the little girls’ skirts. They are playing with one heartless heart, one vicious voice, one thin, bare arm pumping a pale driftwood guitar with renewing force as light steams back into the vampire’s red-rimmed eyes. The Human Riff is awake at last. The World’s Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band is in business again. The Rolling Stones are back in the bloodstream.

  As for Jagger, the sprawling pink stage and two long catwalks now seem too small to contain him. He dances down to the left, high-kicking like a drum majorette, taunting and beckoning all 20,000 along that curve. He sprints back up the right-hand catwalk, leaps to the scaffolding, climbs six feet and hangs there, leaning out as far as his fingertips will reach. Before Rich Stadium can touch hands with him, he jumps down, rolls over, struts to the front and stands there, yellow ski jacket slanted into the storm as his body beats time with each syllable. ‘Yuh can’t always git what yuh want. No, yuh can’t always git what yuh wa-hant …

  ‘Okay …’ his voice says among the wind-swallowed cheers. ‘Good aftahnoon, Buffalo … Yeah it’s nice to be back. We’re gonna ’ave a good time, awright? Aw-ri-i-ight!’

  The first of two concerts at the 60,000-seat Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Florida, happens to coincide with Bill Wyman’s forty-fifth birthday. The other Stones plot vaguely to buy him a naff Goblin bedside teamaker, but settle for a party in his honour, cruising in a riverboat up and down the lake at nearby Disney World.

  There is also a singing telegram, delivered to Bill backstage at the Tangerine Bowl by a girl in a tailcoat and black net stockings, wearing a toy monkey that claps two cymbals fitfully in time. The girl, seeing her big chance, stretches her song of greeting to almost a quarter of an hour. After a while, a belly-dancer comes into the garden to join her. The girl steps back, clapping her hands, clashing her monkey’s cymbals and honking a motor horn concealed in her bosom.

  Jerry Hall has again flown in from New York to see Mick. In T-shirt and jeans and bereft of make-up, she has taken Jade and assorted other children for a full day at Disney World. ‘A lot of freeloaders, aren’t they?’ Jagger pants as he jogs round his artificial lawn. ‘All they came here for was Disney World.’

  ‘Mick doesn’t approve of Disney,’ his publicist said.

  ‘It’s not that I don’t approve of it,’ Jagger said. ‘I just don’t want all the fuss of going there. I do like a good Big Dipper …’

  There is delay owing to the late arrival, yet again, of Woody and Keith. Two Lear jets have been chartered to bring them from their separate hotels in Palm Beach. They reel in at last, with the usual ragged entourage. ‘What time do you call this then?’ several colleagues enquire.

  Ian Stewart, the faithful roadie and back-up pianist, looks into the humid, balloon-filled Florida sky.

  ‘I’d give anything for a good pint at my local now,’ he says wistfully. ‘A nice pint of Directors’. Even Watney’s would be all right.’

  In the main backstage area, security arrangements have been entrusted to Dr Daniel K. Pai, Grand Master or ‘White Dragon’ of the Pai Lun system of martial arts. Dr Pai is a squat Chinese gentleman in a baby-blue tracksuit, from one sleeve of which dangles a small, steel-edged fan. ‘The fan,’ one of his disciples explains, ‘is the emblem of the White Dragon in our order. It’s a handy tool in this heat. And it is – er – a weapon.’

  Dr Pai is on guard next afternoon also, with sundry disciples, outside the Stones’ sequestered block of the Hyatt-Orlando Hotel. He sits in the alley on a folding chair, still in his baby-blue tracksuit, still holding his killer fan. Occasionally he rises, assumes a fighting stance and pensively lunges and slices at the unthreatening air.

  A black man stripped to the waist, his huge muscles shrouded in the corridor twilight, forms a second line of defence. This is Mick Jagger’s personal bodyguard and gym partner. He taps on his master’s door, just once, very lightly, then inclines his great, smoky neck in an attitude of intense listening.

  The door opens on a sitting room in twilight and chaos. Clothes, room service dishcovers, hi-fi, cigarette packs, shoes and papers lie strewn over every surface. Heavy drapes shut out the mid-afternoon Florida sun. Amid the disorder, Jerry Hall stands, Vogue-cover fresh, gazing with amusement at a battery shaver whirring softly in her hand. ‘Can you believe that?’ she says. ‘None of us can git it to stop.’

  Jagger comes from the bedroom, pulling on his trousers. ‘Let’s go out in the garden,’ he says. Behind him, two lines of defence still await all comers. He pushes through the curtains, stepping out unguarded on to the motel’s public poolside lawn.

  At thirty-eight, he looks boyish and, in a strange way, virginal. The years, the parties, the scandals, the scouring camera lenses have left no visible scar, or even blemish. Outside his performing self, he becomes the person one imagines he must have been before it all began. His shirt is still untucked from his trousers. His feet are bare. His voice is quiet, almost deferential. His only ornamentation is a businesslike wristwatch and, sparkling like frost on one upper tooth, that tiny chip of diamond.

  He is saying that what he really misses about England after all these years is the cricket. When he comes over, it is usually in the hope of spending a day or two at Lord’s with his father. He likes, if he can, to see a match played by his own county. ‘I’ve always been fond of the Kent county ground, right in the middle of Canterbury …’ He pauses, almost wistfully. ‘Right next to Boots.’

  Jagger frequently seems to pine for Kent. He chose his chateau in France partly because the country around Amboise, in the Loire Valley, looks a little Kentish. ‘There’s lots of fruit trees – apples lying round everywhere. The French are into the countryside the way the English used to be. My next-door neighbour at Amboise breeds wild boars.’

  There is also New York, where Jagger now lives with Jerry in Jerry’s apartment, and leads an offstage life he likes to characterize as that of ‘dilettante Englishman’. ‘… It means being interested in lots of things in a casual way,’ he explains. ‘Doing other things than going round to clubs and making a fool of yourself.’

  Jerry’s apartment is only a couple of blocks from the Dakota Building, where Jagger’s old friend John Lennon once sought similar anonymity. Since Lennon’s murder, it has been widely speculated that, of all New York’s rock star emigrés, cautious Jagger would be among the first to choose some safer adopted city. He insists it did not cross his mind. ‘New York’s still the place where I mostly want to be. In fact, I can’t wait to get back there for a few days next week.’

  Jerry’s beneficial impact has been widely noticed. Her attraction for Jagger – even more than her thoroughbred beauty – is her resolute independence. He speaks admiringly of her separate income, and the horse ranch she owns. Before this tour, Jerry told him he need not go on singing if he dreaded it: her modelling could easily support them both.

  He stays in close touch with his father, the former physical training instructor he has come to resemble in so many ways. Joe Jagger recently toured America, giving some lectures. ‘“Physical Training from the Renaissance to the Present Day”,’ his son quotes with rather paternal pride.

  The strict father has become, as so often, an indulgent grandfather. ‘It amazes me when I see him with Jade,’ Jagger says. ‘He lets Jade get away w
ith anything. If I’d done the same when I was her age, I’d have got a thump or a task to do as a punishment. When I tell him so, he says: “Was I really as hard a father as all that?”’

  We turn to Jagger’s Loire chateau built in 1710 (‘the same year as my Cheyne Walk house’) which, he insists, is not really large as chateaux go. ‘Well it is a big ’ouse. Some of those chateaux that were built for people’s mistresses are minute. Too feminine for me. My house is big but it’s airy. It wasn’t ever fortified or anything like an English castle. And the interesting thing is, it’s got no servants’ staircase. So, for some mysterious reason, it had no indoor servants.’

  He smiles tolerantly, fingering the heavy wristwatch. He has been asked a question whose banality is designed to pierce this vast unassumingness. What are his greatest pleasures? If you are Mick Jagger, is pleasure still something the body registers?

  ‘Reading’s a pleasure. Eating. I ate everyone else’s dinner in the restaurant last night.’

  He ponders.

  ‘Sex is a pleasure. It gets better and better. Whereas’ – he grins, with a sparkle of diamond in an upper tooth – ‘chocolate biscuits do tend to pall.’

  He walks barefoot over the synthetic grass, back to his untidy motel room, his recalcitrant electric shaver, his Texan princess and Dr Pai. Only half of America left to go. Only another million or so people wanting him.

  SEVENTEEN

  ‘THEN THERE WERE FOUR’

  On an overcast morning in April 1994, Bill Wyman could be observed at his London restaurant, Sticky Fingers, hanging out with the least likely of all companions for an ex-Rolling Stone. One would have expected Eric Clapton, Peter Townshend or Phil Collins. One might even have expected Sir David Frost, Ken Follett or Gary Lineker. But one would hardly have expected His Grace the 11th Duke of Marlborough. Paparazzi gathered outside, eager to see the heir of Britain’s great seventeenth-century military commander hobnob with the composer of the bass-guitar riff in Jumpin’ Jack Flash.