by Marc Spitz
MARC: When did Mick cease to be a rebel hero? Keith still is. But Keith cashes the same checks that Mick does. And Keith almost torpedoed the band with his drug problem but he gets credit for being the real deal. The soul of the band. What’s the story?
NICK: Anyone who’s read a Mick Jagger interview knows how evasive he is. He’s not someone who is forthcoming.
MARC: Does he not care?
NICK: He likes to play games with journalists. He’s been doing interviews for fifty years. He can’t help being jaded about the process and at the same time he knows “I’m doing this because there’s a record to promote or a tour to promote. I will give you three or four sentences but most of the time I will just give you one.” But Keith Richards, if you sit down with him, he’ll talk until you get a feeling of the man. He doesn’t filter his opinions through this kind of “Should I say this to a journalist. How is this going to look. Will this look bad?”—he just lets loose. He doesn’t really care. And deals with the consequence whether it’s running down Elton John or saying how he once snorted his father, which is outrageous and impossible to do, by the way. Anyway, Keith plays the media like a harp.
When I posed a similar question to Marianne Faithfull, Mick’s iconic ’60s lover and creative partner, also during an interview for Vanity Fair’s site, she seemed somewhat amused by the notation. “I think people know he’s pretty cool.”
MARC: But they’ve turned against him over the years. His cool has waxed and waned, whereas nobody’s ever turned against Keith, or you. Unlike Mick, you’ve always been cool. Why do you suppose that is?
MARIANNE: I don’t know. I’m very lucky. I think they know my intentions are pure.
I’m not in it for crap reasons. I’m not in it to get laid. Not in it for them money. I’m in it for different reasons.
MARC: And a young generation can identify that. And respect it.
MARIANNE: They know I’m not taking. They can feel it. They know I’m giving.
I’m not sure generosity, of spirit or anything else, is what we think of when we think of Mick. Unlike Faithfull, or other permacool, aging musicians (Leonard Cohen, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Scott Walker, Lee “Scratch” Perry), he’s no longer on the list of icons that each new generation feels compelled to explore and welcome as one of their own; one of the forever young.
We, the interested journalists, besotted, like Candy Slice, with that young Mick that we loved, the Mick who rocked us, want an hour. We get twenty minutes. What to do with the remaining forty? We indulge the idea of Brenda. Every vacuum must be filled and so we riff. Mick is an insecure Peter Pan figure. A rock and roll Bob Hope or Dick Clark, one who doesn’t know when to call it a career and disappear with dignity and restraint. A miser, obsessed with the pecuniary details of every aspect of Rolling Stones Inc: the lapping Kali tongue logo on credit cards, power ties, coffee mugs, and key chains. We want Mick to be warm because the music of the Rolling Stones, especially on that perfect four-LP run, from 1968’s Beggars Banquet through ’69’s Let It Bleed, ’71’s Sticky Fingers, and the 1972 double album Exile on Main Street, is so rootsy and loose, smoky and true. It makes us feel sweaty and sexy and . . . warm. How can that guy singing those tunes, every time we dial them up, how can he be such a cold fish? Did he get tired of our love? Our grandmothers and mothers and aunts screaming at him, throwing their panties, and fainting back in the early ’60s? All those record company sleazes, the Jerry Aldinis, and the dealers and hangers on, the snitches in the late ’60s, coming around and flattering, flattering, flattering? Did he close up then? “Everybody wanted a piece,” Keith recalled in Life, harkening to the mid-’60s when Mick, and not Keith himself or the rapidly retreating Brian Jones, was the sole lightning rod. “You start to slowly treat everybody in that defensive way—not just strangers but friends. He used to be a lot warmer but not for many, many years. He put himself in the fridge.” True enough there are people closely associated with the Stones, mostly during the ’70s and ’80s, who attest to this arch aloofness. “Twenty minutes in six years,” one of them e-mailed me, explaining that the sum total of interaction that they shared with Mick.
Let’s say that Jagger is indeed in cold storage. All brain, no heart. When exactly did this happen? When did Mick lose his connection to us? When did he stop being one of the people? Was it Altamont? Certainly when one watches Gimme Shelter, Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin’s documentary on the band’s North American tour of ’69, there is indeed a moment where perhaps you can imagine Mick Jagger’s very rebel soul leaving his body forever. One minute he’s open; the next, closed for keeps. Mick sits in an editing room with Albert and David Maysles watching footage from the free concert. He is twenty-seven years old, the age that all great rock stars are supposed to check out. He is haggard. His fingernails are dirty. One year earlier, he almost believed in the revolution (more on that later as well). The violence of the concert is revisited; then the monitor that Mick is watching goes to white. He stands, utters a flat, faint, “Thank you,” and the part of him that we still hunger for is, possibly, gone for all time, replaced by an aggressive privacy and the worst public image in rock history; replaced by Brenda.
Or was it? The only reason we even have this moment to cite is because Mick Jagger has permitted it. He’s signed off, along with Keith, on releasing all the footage that would become Gimme Shelter—footage that captures him onstage at Altamont at his most powerless, frightened, and disillusioned. He could have burned it all. “I lost respect for Jagger in one instance,” the musician, writer, and radical Mick Farren told me during another long distance phone conversation. Before we even began a formal interview, Farren warned me that he considers Mick Jagger “the Fredo Corleone of the Stones.” In The Godfather, Fredo was the one who wanted to be a great leader, but was tragically corruptible and ended up selling out the whole “family.” Farren, too, believes you can see it all in Gimme Shelter. “When faced with some real Satanic majesty, Mick turned into basically a kind of a flapping old drag queen. ‘Oh, people, why are we fighting. Oh. Brothers and sisters.’ This is the moment when you assert your authority. To a degree, Keith did. ‘Listen, you bastards, if it doesn’t stop, we’re out of here.’ Cut-and-dried old rocker. Fuck this shit. That’s what I expected from Jagger and that’s what I didn’t get. It was an emperor’s-new-clothes kind of moment.”
Still, we would not have that moment to form a solid opinion if Mick, the “brain” of the Stones, had decided to scheme.
Perhaps the very instant where some believe that Mick Jagger ceases to be of the people, ceases to give, and ceases to be warm is contained within perhaps his most unguarded and raw offering. When a rock and roll star gives up his cool, well, sometimes that’s all he’s got. We are dealing with a vast gray area when we deal with Mick: a complex, difficult, and troubling subject that has been, all too often, rendered in black-and-white. “When we finished the film and showed it to him, he couldn’t at first bring himself to give us a release,” codirector Albert Maysles tells me. “That took another six months. Fortunately, neither he nor the other Stones asked for any changes at all. So the film remained totally as we intended it to be. They asked that the scenes of violence never be shown apart from the film and we agreed wholly with that.”
Without the release of Gimme Shelter, Meredith Hunter might have otherwise been completely forgotten by history. His remains currently reside in an unmarked grave in a Vallejo, California, cemetery. There’s a sad, short 2006 documentary by Sam Green that concerns Hunter’s death and very lonely, final resting place entitled simply Lot 63, Grave C.
“To me it importantly signaled Mick’s caring and thoughtfulness with regard to what happened,” Maysles says.
“People were just asking for it,” Keith later said of Altamont. “They had those victim’s faces.” But Mick’s face, frozen in time as he gets up from the edit bay and stares straight into the camera, is a victim’s face as well. Keith, the ideologue who operates
in black-and-white, is, crucially, never the victim. He’s invested millions of dollars in medical-quality narcotics, lawyers, and handlers to create a certain impenetrable armor while holding on to some kind of warm energy; sometimes it’s powered by a simple, boyish smile. This, as much as anything, is why young people still want to be like him. It just seems easier, cleaner, more fun, and, ultimately, although we never dwell on the millions required to insure it, safer. During the course of writing this book, the question became a kind of saloon Rorschach test; a parlor game for my rocksnob friends and peers. It’s a simple question but the answer reveals everything (I believe; some might say nothing at all) about where you are at in your own life.
“Who would you rather be,” the question goes, “Mick or Keith?”
Almost nobody wants to be Mick when this game is played (when was the last time you saw him smile?). When pop star Ke$ha sings about kicking dudes to the curb “unless they look like Mick Jagger” on her 2009 chart topping single “TiK ToK,” we assume it’s the Mick of old (whereas the “P. Diddy” that she references earlier in the song is age appropriate). And if Ghostface Killah didn’t first deduce the rhyme and Kanye West didn’t popularize it on the 2008 hit duet “Swagga Like Us” with Jay-Z and T.I., that blueprint wouldn’t have even been consulted. In America, Mick is almost never name-checked outside of the British tabloids and the New York Post’s Page Six (which inevitably marvels at his spry dancing at some fashion show after-party). Forget that Mick had a diamond-encrusted tooth before the term “bling” was invented. A few years ago, I too would have reflexively answered “Keith,” no contest, but if you explore the facts and hear the stories beyond the public images, it’s Mick in a blink. Mick Jagger is who you want to be when you’re an adult. “I can’t untie the threads of how much I played up to the part that was written for me,” Keith bravely admits in his memoir. “I mean the skull ring and the broken tooth and the kohl, is it half and half? I think in a way your persona, your image as it used to be known, is like a ball and chain.”
This isn’t an anti-Keith book. I’ve stressed as much in the letters and requests I’ve sent to some of the subjects. I for one still love that Keith myth. I certainly respect the die-hard nature of the proudly dissipated dandy visage of his late twenties and even believe that Keith wears it with remarkable, improbable grace. I am fascinated by Keith’s deformed fingers, the swollen joints and hardened tips, and that aforementioned skull ring, the constantly burning cigarette and vodka and orange drink consumption, which seems to mock death itself. I respect how he outlived Keithacolytes like Johnny Thunders and laughed at every morbid “next to go,” celebrity-death-list makers who’d placed him at the top. Have a listen to “Keith Don’t Go” by E Street Band guitarist Nils Lofgren and wonder if Nils feels like Chicken Little in a headband today. With each year Keith survives, each fannish boy he buries, each gigantic check he cashes, it’s more fanfare for the common man.
But Mick Jagger, for all his jet-setting, is that common man: vulnerable, searching, skeptical, never fully pledged to something as monolithic as rock and roll. The Rolling Stones are a covenant for Keith and they are a covenant for us. For Mick, they subsidize and sometimes impede a philosophical life-search. “Ian Stewart once said to me, ‘If Mick ever finds his true identity, it’d be the end of the Rolling Stones,’ ” Keith Altham told me. Altham was referring to the band’s founding pianist and de facto conscience, the Scottish “Stu” demoted to roadie by their then manager Andrew Loog Oldham and the second Stone to die (at forty-seven back in 1985). “The whole Rolling Stones thing in a way is a search by him for his own character.” If Mick Jagger is playing, then he’s still looking, and if he’s still figuring out who he is, then it’s up to us to avoid the temptation to come up with easy answers like “Brenda.” There’s a famous photo from the mid-’70s of Mick standing in front of a T-shirt that reads “Who the Fuck Is Mick Jagger?” His expression is inscrutable. If the Stones are indeed touring by the time you read this (and a fiftieth-anniversary outing is reportedly in the works), then the answer is still out there somewhere and will likely never truly be found. Hopefully this book will offer a few new possibilities: rebel, rocker, rambler, rogue.... Rethought.
MARC SPITZ
NEW YORK CITY—MAY 2011
1
“I Dig to Sing”
Phil Spector, the deeply troubled but frequently sage-like producer and music industry pioneer, once said, “I believe that the English kids have soul . . . they say soul comes through suffering. Slavery for the blacks. And getting your ass bombed off is another way of getting some soul legitimately.” If that’s true, then Dartford, the area where both Mick and Keith came of age in the late ’50s, bred the most soulful English kids going. About twenty minutes from London proper by rail, the suburb had been a constant target for Nazi bombs during World War II. By the time Michael Philip Jagger was born on July 26, 1943, the brutal raids were slowly becoming less frequent, the direction of the war effort moving in the Allied forces’ favor. Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party were ousted from power the day before Mick came into the world. If you’re looking for a good, early, Mick vs. Keith metaphor, the childhood home of Mick (then “Mike”) managed to escape destruction, whereas the home of Bert and Doris Richards was nearly obliterated in the summer of ’44, when Keith, an only child, was not quite two. From there, housing in Dartford was often makeshift. Many residents, like the Richards family, moved into hastily erected replacement homes among the broken bricks and twisted metal of the bomb sites. “Everyone was displaced,” Keith said of his preteens. “They were still building it and already there were gangs everywhere.” The sense of impermanence toughened Keith up and remains the source of his hard-edge image. Mick by contrast was raised in what Keith dismissed (perhaps a bit enviously) as “Posh Town,” but the stalwart nature of the place informed both their personalities.
Mick and Keith were both middle-class kids with hardworking parents, but within the English middle class, as with the Americans, there were sublevels. If you were “posh,” like Mick, it most likely meant that you were slightly upper-middle class with a house that was “semidetached” as opposed to virtually connected to your neighbors. You had the suggestion of a yard and a strand of individuality but were still looked down upon as provincial by Londoners proper (a prejudice that some insist Mick has overcompensated for). Dartford was divided by a railway. Keith literally lived on the other side of the tracks, a section on the border of a deep, wooded area marked by gothic factories, hospitals, and other industrial edifice. Mick lived on the slightly prettier side, but both were born at the right time in the wrong place. The advent of rock and roll would soon redirect them.
On paper, it would seem that Keith alone was built for rock. His war-veteran father was distant. “It wasn’t possible to be that close to him,” Keith said of Bert. “He didn’t know how to open himself up.” Mick and his father shared a strong bond. Basil Jagger, whom everyone called Joe, was a star athlete as a child and had carved out a respectable career for himself as a motivational purveyor of physical fitness. Father and son looked alike, with lean but extremely strong musculature, jutting ears, knowing brown eyes, and, most famously, pronounced, fleshy lips, thick and uncommonly rouged. He saw a lot of himself in Mick and processed the child accordingly with a caring but tough regimen of physical fitness and worked on sharpening the quick-witted boy’s mental acuity. His creative side was encouraged by his mother. Eva Jagger, whose family immigrated from Australia, was determined to raise the perfect English family and embraced tradition. One particular interest was a love of in-home performing, resonating with her firstborn. “Performing . . . is something that children have or they haven’t got,” Mick told Rolling Stone in 1995. “In the slightly post-Edwardian, pre-television days, everybody had to do a turn at family gatherings. You might recite poetry, and Uncle Whatever would play the piano and sing, and you all had something to do. And I was just one of those kids [who loved it].” M
ick’s gift for song endeared him to his mother, and his skill and discipline as a young athlete filled his father with pride. When Mick was born, Joe Jagger was the physical education professor at a local college called Strawberry Hill but, thanks to an inborn determination, had already established a series of affiliations with national boards like the British Sports Council. He took his work home with him, creating a specific, regular physical regimen of calisthenics and weight training for Mick and his younger brother, Christopher. It was designed to build character and resolve: an aggressively healthy structure. No one would have expected, at that time, any backlash.
Whereas Mick could have been anything, and soon chose to be a rocker, Keith literally had no other option and very little to lose. He was, as a teen, beaten regularly by the local toughs who came to patrol the still-broken streets on his side of the tracks. Too young to become a loud, dandy Teddy Boy, Britain’s pre-Elvis strain of juvenile delinquent culture, Keith rebelled quietly in his cowboy shirt and tight trousers, absorbing American rock and roll that was broadcast on Radio Luxembourg. Mick listened to the same station, fascinated by the sounds of Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and Buddy Holly and the Crickets.
At Wentworth Primary School, Mick and Keith were acquaintances but not best friends as some have assumed. The different circumstances in their upbringing soon found them separated. Mick went on to Dartford Grammar School for Boys while Keith enrolled in Dartford Tech, where most students ended up learning skills designed to funnel them into the workforce. Mick drew high marks in grammar, English literature, French, and Latin. A natural leader, he was even made a student prefect, with charge over his classmates. It proved such a positive experience that decades later, a middle-aged Mick not only returned to his alma mater but funded a music education adjunct, The Mick Jagger Centre, to tutor local children.