by Marc Spitz
Mick seemed destined for a full scholarship and easy entry into respectability and prosperity without detour or distraction. However, in March of 1958, when Mick was just fifteen, he and schoolmate Dick Taylor purchased tickets to a Buddy Holly concert in Manchester. “We were into Buddy Holly very early,” Dick Taylor recalls. “After that we started playing.” British teens of the late ’50s looked to American rock stars (Elvis, Fats Domino, Little Richard) for inspiration, but they picked up their instruments and learned to play because of the local-born skiffle bands, who, in a proto-punk fashion, made that often intimidating leap from being a fan to being a player seem easy. “Homegrown music was quite the thing. ‘If you can’t play the guitar, play the washboard,’ ” Taylor says. “Learn three chords and that was it. We wanted to do it, and whether or not we thought we had the ability to do it was secondary. And so we soon started playing guitars and plastic ukuleles.”
Technique, given Mick’s natural sense of discipline, was easier to master than the spiritual overhaul that came with the advent of rock and roll. To his father’s dismay, by the end of the ’50s the boy had transformed into a precocious teenage philosopher-prince obsessed with rock and roll and girls, and, worse, became suspicious of uniforms and obedience. At the same time, London itself was changing. Mod culture was on the rise; teens who had buying power for the first time were now investing in sharp suits and dresses, scooters, and piles and piles of records. Mandatory military service would soon be phased out; birth control pills became readily available; and the austerity of the war years was replaced by a flaming desire for more: more experience, more life, louder, crazier sounds. Unspoken but unmistakable, this new wave of energy swept through England, alarming parents and inspiring kids. “We weren’t rebelling in a vacuum,” says Dick Taylor. “And it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t a rebellion against anyone specifically. It was a general rebellion against the stuffier aspects of English society at the time.” Rock and roll, such a part of the establishment today, was viewed as impossibly crude fifty years ago, a kind of disease that somehow trickled into the local water supply and required immediate and aggressive filtration. “My parents were extremely disapproving of it all,” Jagger has said. “This was for very low-class people, remember. Rock and roll singers weren’t educated people.”
Before long, rock and roll, as a sound, a rebel philosophy, had more sway over the pubescent Mick Jagger than his father’s old-fashioned regimen could hope to. Again, there is photographic evidence of this available. During an episode of the BBC show Seeing Sport from the fall of 1957, Mick, then fourteen; Joe; and two others boys dutifully climbed a sandstone wall in suburban Royal Tunbridge Wells to demonstrate the proper footwear for such an exercise. “Here’s Michael wearing a pair of ordinary gym shoes,” Joe states, then picks up his boy’s little foot and twists it toward the camera. The live audience laughs as Joe, the presenter, turned the boy into a sort of showroom mannequin. Mick, face full with baby fat, smirks and flashes the older man an amused but vaguely contemptuous sneer that would, a half decade or so onward, become an icon of unimpressed youth. Well into puberty, he was still abiding by his father’s intellectual and spiritual model at an age when most boys had sex and only sex on their minds. “I never got to have a raving adolescence,” Jagger recalled to the N.M.E. in 1973. He would, as the 1960s took off, truly begin to make up for lost time.
Joe Jagger was not relinquishing his hold on his eldest boy so easily and had what he thought was a secret weapon, another American import, equally fascinating as guitar, bass, and drums: basketball. Despite its relative lack of popularity in Britain, Joe had, by the decade’s end, established and coached the basketball program at Dartford Grammar. He made Mick the team captain and even supplied his students with the proper sneakers, imported from America. It was around this time that Mick first heard the blues. He backtracked, by chance, from rock and roll to its older and purer foundation. “I worked on an American army base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction—because I was good at it,” Mick said. “There was a black cat there named Jose, a cook who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music.”
It’s not difficult to deduce what the young Mick Jagger found appealing about the blues. In staid, leafy Dartford, listening to songs about gambling, running around with good-time women, and a cosmic, doomed sense of “my time here ain’t long” fate were akin to a cowboy or gangster movie that one could play and replay, losing oneself in the lurid details. Blues was essentially storytelling, and it transported, working its magic on the listener in the same way that singing it transported the black sharecropper from his cruel and straining work under the sun. Whether swampy, acoustic Delta sounds or the spiffed-up electric R&B out of Chicago, the blues was a boredom-killer. Often lyrically hilarious and always hypnotic, it came with a beat one could play on a kitchen pan or the back of a schoolbook. “It was the sound that got us,” Dick Taylor says. “When you first hear Howlin’ Wolf or Chuck Berry—the sound is incredible. And for Mick it was the language. Chuck Berry was an incredible poet. The language was very rich. Mick got into his words. He would listen and write them down. We’d spend a lot of time spinning those records and trying to get the words exactly right. And I know we got a lot of them wrong.” R&B was essentially a new, fast, and smart slang, a mod way to communicate. For a few mostly white British kids of the early ’60s raised in painfully quiet households and physically reprimanded for talking out of turn at school, it was finally (if oddly, given its African heritage) an idiom of their own. “It’s a language that expresses the whole range of emotions, from sadness to blind hatred to sheer, crazed lust,” wrote the late music writer Robert Palmer in his excellent study of the form, Deep Blues. “The slurs and rasps in the singing, the bending of the notes, the deliberate fluctuations in rhythm and tempo—all these blues techniques are designed to unlock and unleash emotions. The heavier the rasp, the more pronounced the bend, the deeper the feeling—a legacy of the music’s roots in Africa, where spoken language is rich in tone, and the lower one pitches a phrase, the more feeling it conveys.”
In the same bins where the American pop and rock imports were racked, Mick and Dick Taylor found blues LPs from independent R&B labels like Chess and Specialty. Fascinated by the covers, they’d pick up a Jimmy Reed or Howlin’ Wolf record along with the new Chuck Berry, whom Mick had been fascinated by after seeing Bert Stern’s 1958 documentary, Jazz on a Summer’s Day, in which Berry sings “Sweet Little Sixteen,” shot in profile like a president on a coin, or from the floorboards, giving him the appearance of a giant, which he may as well have been. “You could also get hold of records directly from Chess Records in Chicago,” said Jagger. “I had come across a mailing address for them in some magazine or another. And when I had the money I would send off for records from them. They were really quite expensive for those days, because American record prices were higher than they were in England, and also to actually get them mailed out across the Atlantic cost a lot.”
“He’d send money orders. I worked in the shipping room,” says Marshall Chess, son of the label’s cofounder Leonard Chess, today. “I remember sending boxes of records to England. Filling out the customs forms. That first wave of blues lovers wanted those Chess albums.” Marshall Chess would meet Mick Jagger when the Rolling Stones passed through Chicago on their first U.S. tour in 1964, and at the dawn of the 1970s, after Chess was sold, he would formally join the fold and help launch Rolling Stones Records. At the time, however, he was just a kid, helping his father during summer break from school. And Mick was merely one of a few hundred misfit English kids going mad for this then esoteric noise, someone who today would be referred to affectionately as a “record geek.” “It was rare. It wasn’t an everyday thing, to get an order from England,” Chess recalls.
The product would often take weeks to arrive, causing great anticipation and excitement, unimaginable by today’s split-second downloaders. “You didn’t even know if you we
re going to like the record when it arrived,” Mick recalled. If you didn’t you could always trade it. “We’d have a reel-to-reel recorder hooked up,” Taylor said, “and we’d rig them up so we could tape the records and swap them. We’d also tape records off the radio. We were real fan boys. Pretty obsessed with the whole thing.” Mick would remain a “record geek” even after he’d started making singles and albums himself. “I remember visiting his house on Cheyne Walk,” Chess says, “And he had a long table in the living room. At the end of it, there was a turntable, with stacks and stacks of records. He had some Zydeco, blues. Some deep cool shit on that table. Not a lot of white people knew about Zydeco. He put on this Clifton Chenier song. ‘Black Snake Blues.’ It was a rare thing. I never saw a white guy other than maybe a Cajun who would have that side.”
Blues music was also extremely sexy. It made the heart race; one jumped to it and surrendered composure to it. The lyrics, even to a student, were teaming with readily decipherable double entendre.
Mick’s early sexual experimentations were likely in keeping with the gender segregation of the times. Boys at British public schools examined and explored their changing bodies together with a mixture of fascination and fear. ”I think that’s true of almost every boy,” he has said. At age fourteen, he was still awkward and pimply, all ears and grin, his features yet to settle into the strange, somehow regal handsomeness of his early twenties, but R&B made him feel attractive inside, largely thanks to an uncanny ability to imitate the mostly black vocalists, sounding much like a man from the American South. “He had a gift for mimicry,” Dick Taylor says. “He got really immersed in memorizing all the words and singing in all those accents.” Even Joe was impressed by how he applied the same focus of sports and study to music: “I’ve never known a youngster with such an analytical approach to things,” he said. “If he copied a song, he was able to capture the sound exactly.” To the local teenage girls, Mick became newly fascinating, a sort of surrogate figure capable of conjuring the sounds and energy and sex of the new sounds on command. Black music gave him a kind of confidence that sports could not. “It attracted the girls,” Taylor says. “If you could play and sing, you had a better chance. You could pull a tasty girl.”
As the early ’60s progressed, Mick went from collecting discs with haphazard fervor to slowly developing the refined taste of a collector to keeping a list of favorite tracks based on what he could sing well. When he and Taylor and another schoolmate, Bob Beckwith, finally decided to make the leap from fans to actual blues band, Mick was the natural choice to sing. By the time his first band, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, made its public debut at Dartford’s Church Hall in the summer of 1960, seventeen-year-old Mick was a long way from Clarksdale, Mississippi, but whether he knew it or not, his feet were firmly planted at the crossroads.
Mick had aced his A-levels, an advanced standardized test, and been accepted to the prestigious London School of Economics, which bred holders of high political office and wealthy bankers. This appealed to his parents. The philosophy of the L.S.E. suited the inquisitive, questioning teen perfectly. “Rerum cognoscere causas” was the school motto: “To know the cause of things.” Everything was economics: social order, wealth, poverty. It wasn’t pure math or tutelage in how to make the most money, as many disparagers of Jagger have cited: “He went to the London School of Economics, for God’s sake!” The L.S.E. would become a hotbed for radicalism by the end of the ’60s for a reason. That said, there was no reason to believe that anything would keep Mick from thriving in the City. There were certainly no high career aspirations when it came to Little Boy Blue, despite how great it felt to play the blues for people. “We were a teenage band,” Taylor recalls. “We weren’t thinking in terms of a career. We were thinking in terms of ‘Let’s just do it.’ It wasn’t about how or where it was all going.” Mick lived at home at the time and dutifully took the train into London to study.
Ironically, it would be a trip home from the school’s Houghton Street campus in the early fall of 1961 that would push Mick down the road to becoming a full-time musician. Mick was standing on the platform, as usual, carrying his beloved albums, including the Chess imports of Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters, when a rough-looking kid in a purple Western-style shirt and cowboy boots approached him. Mick instinctively held his records close, sensing trouble. As the kid drew closer, he relaxed. It was his old friend Keith, now seventeen, expelled from Dartford Tech and attending Sidcup Art College, which he would also soon leave. Keith had come to the blues the same way Mick had—backward via rock and roll—and had a natural affinity for the sound as well. He’d already swapped his cowboy acoustic for a Hofner electric. As they rode the train together, Mick informed Keith that he’d been singing with Taylor. Keith admired the records and Mick allowed him to inspect them, fetish objects that they were; he felt proud that his harder-edged childhood friend was, as a young adult, now approaching him as an equal, if not the more culturally correct of the two. “I got a few more albums like these,” Mick said. Keith asked Mick over to his house. “So I invited him up to my place for a cup of tea,” he said. “He started playing me these records, and I really turned on to it.” Keith told Mick about his guitar playing. Mick owned a guitar but couldn’t really play. “What can you do?” Keith asked excitedly. Mick had an idea, one encouraged by his mother when he was a child; one that could never, ever be anything more than a trifle around the living room. “I dig to sing,” he said.
2
“Preaching the Blues”
The Dartforders were becoming real Londoners. It started gradually; Mick, trustworthy and cautious, had use of the family automobile on occasion and had started taking Keith, Dick Taylor, Bob Beckwith, and the occasional girlfriend on trips into the city and as far as Manchester to see blues shows. Meeting Keith was an electrifying accident, and both boys’ ardor for R&B was now barely containable. “It was great meeting someone else who was that enthusiastic,” Dick Taylor says. “There’s strength in numbers.” They didn’t look sharp like the jazzers who’d monopolized the clubs of London. They were scruffy students with bad skin and torn sweaters, but Mick and Keith afforded each other a confidence that neither boy owned only a few months earlier. They excited each other, challenged each other, and that eventually produced an air of sophistication that emboldened both to soon leave Dartford for good.
Alexis Korner did look sharp. Korner was a trim, goateed, half-Greek, half-Austrian guitarist with a dandified wardrobe; a camp, antiquated manner of speech; and a tireless commitment to the blues. He had joined forces with a stocky, balding Londoner named Cyril Davies to infiltrate the city’s jazz venues and turn as many people as possible onto the other great American form. Davies played his mouth harp until his round face flushed a deep and mad red. The strange duo had, by 1961, built their reputation as arbiters of the new music scene by actually backing Muddy Waters at their “blues night” at the Roundhouse Pub in the late ’50s.
The Ealing Club was the main attraction for the young blues enthusiast. Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys had visited during one of their blues-seeking sorties to London and up north. Now they were going every weekend without fail and slowly growing emboldened enough to imagine actually playing on the small stage. Each Saturday they’d hit the Ealing to study Korner and Davies’ band, known as Blues Incorporated. Mick, who aspired to play the blues harp himself, often focused solely on Davies, watching from the wet floor as the elder blues enthusiast performed. “It was full of all these trainspotters who needed somewhere to go, just a bunch of anoraks,” he recalled. “The audience was mainly guys—most of whom were pretty terrible—and the girls were very thin on the ground.”
None of these Englishmen could hope to really be like Muddy Waters, but twenty-year-old Elmo Lewis, aka Brian Jones of Cheltenham, was certainly giving it a shot. Shortly after Mick and Keith had started frequenting the dilapidated Ealing, its poorly ventilated walls sweating, they met Jone
s and his friend, the conservatively dressed Ian Stewart, lantern jawed and only twenty-five, but boasting the air of a much older gentleman. Brian, like Mick and Keith, had become an evangelical blues fan in his teens, but while Mick was doing pull-ups in Dartford and Keith was floundering in art college, Brian Jones carried on like a moonshineabetted hoochie-coochie man despite his flaxen hair, milky complexion, and generally angelic visage. Brian was already the father of two illegitimate children. He was such a character at the Ealing, exuding natural musical ability, that he’d been invited to sit in regularly with Blues Incorporated, something Mick and Keith, in their wool sweaters and corduroy blazers, could only fantasize about at the time. Occasionally, they would be asked up to fill in with a song or two while Korner and Davies took five, but Jones was a made guy. Both boys considered Brian a hero, his gift, attitude, and style something to envy and aspire to.
As he got more serious about this other area of nonformal study, Mick borrowed money from Joe and Eva to outfit Little Boy Blue with better equipment. Once inside, they wanted respect. They knew they had to bring a lot to get noticed among this crowd of serious fans. The whole scene was only about two hundred strong in 1962, but it was an intense two hundred, one that demanded Mick take Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson as seriously as Marx, Engels, and Keynes.
“Like the revivalists before them, the Stones and their peers felt themselves part of a crusade,” George Melly writes in his pop treatise Revolt into Style. “They were going to preach the blues and they were going to live the blues too. But what were the blues about?” This was the subject of constant, lager-fueled, fish-andchips-fortified, late-night discussions. These impressionable young Mods, armed with nothing but their instruments, a dozen import records, a few shillings, and an expanding array of emulated, mostly sexual experience, they analyzed the form, the clothes, the behavior, and even the politics of southern and urban blues, with no tutor or mentor—only their own rigid ethics to keep them going. “Serious, very serious,” Jagger has said. “When we discussed it, we were like students. You know how students get serious about things?”