by Marc Spitz
One night in mid-June 1992, Rubin placed a call to the Red Devils and told them to be at Ocean Way Studios the next day to record with Mick Jagger. “Everybody was excited, obviously—and nervous,” says Size. Mick showed up with a collection of LPs, which he began playing for the band. “Mick was extremely happy. I thought he was stoned. He was in a genuinely good mood. Thrilled to be doing all these songs. He picked all the songs he’d never gotten to record in the Rolling Stones.” The musicians sat and listened to each one once through, then picked up their gear and played along, and finally, with Rubin at the board, did a few takes of their own versions. The entire session lasted about seven hours, and then Mick picked up his records and left in a waiting car, leaving the Red Devils high on adrenaline but unsure of the strange events that just took place. Was this going to be Mick’s solo album? Were they his backing band now? “I was under the impression we were making a record. Everybody thought it was gonna come out; definitely gonna come out. [We] waited and waited; of course it never did.”
For their troubles, the Red Devils were paid two hundred dollars each. “They gave us a tip,” Size says. The Red Devils were put out on the road, playing club dates in London, including one for Mick’s birthday that July, but the pressure and the drugs soon got to them and they began to corrode. Only one song, “Checkin’ Up on My Baby,” ever formally saw the light of day on an anthology of Mick’s solo hits, The Very Best of Mick Jagger, released more than a decade later. The inclusion of a never-before-heard song was designed to make an album of Mick’s solo hits seem a bit more commercially viable (the rare Lennon-Jagger jam “Too Many Cooks” appears as well). Mick immediately returned his attention to Wandering Spirit, which was released the following year to great reviews. It’s widely considered the finest of all the Stones’ solo efforts, but like everything since She’s the Boss, it was not a big commercial hit, and by the end of the year, Mick was again writing Jagger-Richards compositions with Keith for the next Rolling Stones album, Voodoo Lounge . . . and the next megatour.
One wonders, with the advent of the White Stripes, how a straight Mick Jagger blues album would have been received, especially now that it’s become such a model. Ahmet Ertegün, a blues expert, loved what he’d heard of the Red Devils sessions and encouraged Mick to release it, but it never saw the light of day beyond being a much-traded bootleg, the result of a burned CD of the master recordings allegedly smuggled out of Rubin’s possession. Some of the tracks like Howlin’ Wolf’s “Evil” sound a bit thin (but then it’s a hard task, copying Howlin’ Wolf, whose voice alone seems like a Wall of Sound). Still the listener can certainly imagine the good time had recording them, and the tom cat lament “One Way Out,” on which Mick is almost unrecognizable, allowing his black blues mimicry to run wild, and the throbbing “Ain’t Your Business” are brilliant. Ultimately what might have been missing despite the genuinely liberating energy was the King King. “We didn’t capture that essence in the studio,” says Paul Size. “I think because there wasn’t the crowd there—the feedback and the live energy. It was the beginning of the end of certain things.” Rubin hired members of the Red Devils to play on his next history-making project, applying his tested Jagger formula to Johnny Cash’s American Records debut. The Red Devils soon returned to obscurity, minus their leader. “I was living with Lester,” Size says. “I got sucked into all of that with him.” Lester Butler died from a drug overdose in 1998 at just thirty-eight. Size is back in Texas, playing guitar. He saw the writing on the wall with Rubin and holds no real bitterness. “I remember seeing him one day driving a Rolls-Royce and I was on a bicycle. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’ He waved at me.” He’s since discovered the ramshackle brilliance of the Stones at their peak. “I went back and learned about them after that,” he says today. “I realized they loved everything I loved. I just heard Exile on Main Street, in fact, and I was like ‘Holy shit. These guys are amazing!’ ”
20
“A Knight of the Realm”
There’s a scene toward the end of Martin Scorsese’s gangster epic Goodfellas when Robert DeNiro’s Jimmy the Gent and Ray Liotta’s Henry Hill wait excitedly while Joe Pesci’s Tommy is about to get made. “I never saw Jimmy so happy,” Henry says in the voiceover. “You’d think he was being made. Jimmy and I could never be made because we had Irish blood. To become a member of a crew you’ve got to be 100 percent Italian so they can trace all your relatives back to the old country. It’s the highest honor they can give you. It means you belong to a family and a crew. It means that nobody can fuck around with you. It also means you can fuck around with anybody just as long as they aren’t also a member. It’s like a license to steal. It’s a license to do anything. As far as Jimmy was concerned, with Tommy being made it was like we were all being made. We would now have one of our own as a member.” It didn’t work out so well for Tommy, and depending on who you ask, the knighting of Mick Jagger, who the British establishment once tried to destroy, was either a triumph of rebellion or a tragedy on par with getting shot in the face so your mother can’t even bury you in an open casket. Mick Jagger, who became a knight of the realm on December 12, 2003, was not the first rock and roller to receive knighthood, but he was certainly the most raw. When the announcement was made, it instantly polarized the country, as well as the Stones’ fan community and the rock and roll world in general. In this way, it was the last truly controversial act he’d commit to date. His acceptance of the honor divided the nation and got people talking in a way that a Rolling Stone had not done since 1965. Was it good for England ? Was it the final insult to a crumbling empire and a laughingstock monarchy? Was it then prime minister Tony Blair’s attempt to win back the rock and rollers who helped him get into office, then turned on him once he aligned himself with George W. Bush? Was Mick a pawn? Was he a poser, obsessed with class, who was vying for the title all along? Was he in on the joke?
There had been artists who’d been honored for their contribution to the arts. Mostly actors, but a few musicians. Mick’s contribution to British music and culture was not in question. Forty years into their career, the mere idea of the Rolling Stones stirred feelings of great patriotism for generations of British people, but the public perception of the soon-to-be Sir Mick was that he was tight. Since his marriage to Jerry Hall hit the rocks in 1999, the British press had a field day with daily reports about his efforts to hold on to his fortune (reportedly in the neighborhood of 150 million pounds). Whether or not he gave money to charity privately, there were certainly other artists who were more publicly committed to philanthropy. Following Live Aid, Bob Geldof was knighted: the first rocker to receive the honor and, to date, the youngest. Paul McCartney followed. Elton John, who’d pledged the proceeds of every one of his singles throughout the ’80s and ’90s to AIDS research and helped the nation grieve the loss of Princess Diana in 1997 by retooling his 1973 Marilyn Monroe elegy “Candle in the Wind,” was knighted the following year.
The line on Mick was that money was his only concern. In 1997, when the Stones were recording their twenty-first album, Bridges to Babylon, Britpop underdogs the Verve scored their first hit single with “Bittersweet Symphony.” The track looped an orchestral version of the Stones’ early hit “The Last Time” (credited to the Andrew Oldham Orchestra). Allen Klein still owned the rights to “The Last Time”; lawyers for his ABKCO firm swiftly informed the Verve that this was not their song (despite the fact that all of the lyrics were lead singer Richard Ashcroft’s and dozens of hip-hop singles were still getting away with using obscure vinyl for sampling and looping). When Mick and Keith’s names were added to the songwriting credits, and 100 percent of the song’s royalties were rerouted to the Stones, it only strengthened Mick’s image as rock’s greatest miser, obsessed with pecuniary detail. The aching, youthful sentiment of the Verve’s lyrics, coupled with the freshness of the music, made them seem true, whereas the Stones, as they did in the late ’70s, seemed cynical and tired. Ironically, Mick and K
eith were in the same boat as Ashcroft, paying the bulk of the proceeds from their greatest hits to Allen Klein. While he was famous for quipping that “ ‘Bittersweet Symphony’ was the best song Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had written in twenty years,” today, Ashcroft is philosophical. “I never had any ill will towards the band,” he says. “They were one of the pivotal reasons I got in a band.” Still outraged Verve fans booed when he dedicated the song to Mick and Keith, and when the track licensed to Nike for their aggressively inspirational “I can!” sneaker ad, all of the musicians simply had to take it. “We were in the same boat,” Ashcroft says. “The same boat as George Harrison and John Lennon. I was in pretty good company as far as situations with Allen Klein.”
The perceived lack of philanthropy however, was a minor issue when compared with Mick the potential knight’s assumed lack of chivalry. Both McCartney and Elton John were in committed relationships, Paul to Linda and Elton in an openly gay but monogamous relationship with David Furnish. Mick Jagger, newly divorced at the time and linked to big-eyed, voluptuous model and writer Sophie Dahl, two decades his junior, was not exactly Sir Lancelot or Sir Perceval.
Unlike the other elder statesmen of pop, Mick had not grown out of his rock and roll lifestyle, gallivanting with models and party-hopping all over the world. The offer came in while he was on tour in 2002. Unlike McCartney and John, he was still the feline and lithe frontman, shaking his ass. Every night he went out there in front of thousands of people in sports arenas all over the world and sang about “tricks with fruit” that “keep your pussy clean” (“Star Star”) and “Puerto Rican girls who are just dying to meet you” (“Miss You”) from Hong Kong to Milan to Washington, D.C. Then there was his history. This was, unlike Paul McCartney, a former radical. When the Beatles became Members of the British Empire in 1965, the Stones were being groomed by Andrew Loog Oldham as their polar opposites, committed bad boys who’d just as soon storm the palace. When John Lennon returned his M.B.E. medal in 1970, in protest of the Vietnam War (and “Cold Turkey” slipping in the charts), even Mick cheered in the press. “At last. He should have returned it as soon as he got it.” But 1970 was a long time ago. There were still lines dividing the establishment and the outsiders. Or were there? Keith still saw them.
It presented an instant quandary. If Mick had declined, what measure of outrage would it have produced? Let’s say he refused, citing England’s alignment with Bush in Iraq, a partnership that would remove any of that new cool from Blair. Surely people would snipe that it was a publicity stunt and take him to task for his political opportunism. Yes there’s a history of artists declining knighthood, including the writer Alan Bennett and the actor Albert Finney.
As expected, Mick’s accepting the honor produced more angry letters from the establishment than refusing it might have. Subjects of the empire flooded the newspapers with angry letters and took to the Internet to express their outrage. “Perhaps he should go in for a bit of charity. What about unwed mothers?” said Charles Mosley of Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage. “That’s good charity. One that’s very close to his heart.”
Then there was the issue of what the other Stones and those close to the band would think. Predictably, the decision drew mixed reaction. Some, like Marshall Chess, were bemused. “Mick was always drawn to royalty. His biggest dream was becoming Sir Mick. Who knows what he had to do to get that? You have to work to get that.” Charlie Watts was impressed by Mick’s ability to charm the higher-ups and carry on caddishly. “Anybody else would be lynched: eighteen wives and twenty children and he’s knighted, fantastic!” Charlie Watts laughed. The loudest gripes, of course, came not from the British establishment but from Keith Richards. Keith never forgot or forgave the Courts for putting him in Wormwood Scrubs in ’67. “I thought it was ludicrous to take one of those gongs from the establishment when they did their very best to throw us in jail,” Richards told Uncut magazine, adding, “I told Mick it’s a paltry honor. It’s not what the Stones is about, is it?” More than vexing Keith, Mick accepted in part, surely, because his father, Joe, was still alive. Mick’s mother, Eva, had passed away at the age of eighty-seven in 2000. Joe was turning ninety. Mick was about to turn sixty. It would also be a chance to take his children to the palace. He shrugged off his bandmate’s comments as sour grapes, telling reporters, “It’s like being given an ice cream—one gets one and they all want one.” He informed Blair that once he got off tour, he would happily accept the honor. He would become Sir Mick.
Ultimately, rebellion and revolution are two different things, and the latter is more focused and lasting. The idea of bringing the establishment to you, if that is what Mick did, is noble. It’s imprinting your surroundings, opening the world up for the better; tearing away the unrealistic fantasy images of perfect leaders and heroes who only let you down when examined more closely. This was the rock and roll equivalent of progress.
Look at the leap from Bill Clinton saying he didn’t inhale to Barack Obama admitting he smoked pot and did a little blow when he had the money. Never again will a good man be denied the presidency because of something he did when he was young and foolish and having fun. Knights were, since the Middle Ages, obliged to be chivalrous. What then of the author of “Under My Thumb,” “Stupid Girl,” and “Out of Time”? “I don’t think the establishment as we knew it exists anymore,” Mick keenly observed when pressed on what his knighthood would mean for the good fight, the one Keith was still fighting every day. When told that didn’t make Keith happy, he quipped, “He’s not a happy person.” The attention might have been what Keith was envious of. What does a Keith mean if there’s no establishment to rage against. It’s like being a superhero without having an archenemy. Superman without Lex Luthor; Batman without the Joker.
Perhaps the more fascinating question is what did the monarchy gain by bestowing knighthood on Mick Jagger? Would it make the royal family’s own scandalous behavior, the Diana situation, the carryings-on of the Duchess of York, Charles’ affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, seem less outrageous by comparison? Mick Jagger would humanize the whole lot. Certain political pundits pointed out this very thing. “For exhibiting virtues of nobility,” one said, “like my son Charles.”
As it turned out, it was Charles, not the Queen, who did the honors. Her Majesty was, at the time, recovering from surgery. And so, on December 12, 2003, Mick Jagger, tax exile but otherwise loyal subject, woke up, put on his coat (black leather) and a suit and tie. In the company of two of his grown daughters, Karis (whose mother was Marsha Hunt) and Elizabeth (whose mother was Jerry Hall), and his father, he took a limo to the palace, and Sir Mick was born.
In the intervening years, Sir Mick has become something of an affectionate joke, and Jagger, unlike, say, Ben Kingsley, has never indicated that he’s been affected one way or the other by the honor. Still, Keith has never let it go. It’s now a permanent bête noire that he can point to, and in nearly a decade since has still not let it go; is still fighting the fight. “Sir Mick,” Keith, who’d always found Mick’s perceived class-consciousness tedious, told an interviewer. “Here’s a guy who went to the London School of Economics for Christ’s sake. He’s not one for the hierarchy. I thought he should hang out for a Peerage. I thought it was a cheap shot. The damned knighthood. You should be lord. I thought it was a shoddy award—I wouldn’t let that family near me with a sharp stick, let alone a sword.” To date, the honor has not been extended to Sir Mick’s partner.
21
“Who Wants Yesterday’s Papers?”
Mick is perhaps the least sentimental of rock stars, and one gets the feeling that trafficking in nostalgia in any way is painful to his psyche, even as the Stones catalog only strengthens each year, from LPs to eight-tracks, to cassettes, CDs, and now digital downloads. “Mick’s not a great lover of yesterday,” Charlie Watts put it with typical succinctness. His sole reaction to Keith’s memoir was to take it to task for wading into the past for mercenary purposes is implied. “Perso
nally, I think it’s really quite tedious tracking over the past. Mostly people only do it for the money.” Jagger himself took a large advance some years back to tell his own story but decided against it. Popular opinion is that he found he couldn’t remember anything, and even turned to Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones’ self-appointed archivist (and author of multiple interesting books on the band, including the memoir Stone Alone), only to be told where he can go.
Most likely, Mick didn’t want to reckon with the past. It was tedious and painful, a constant reminder of mistakes and lost friends. Ahmet Ertegün had recently passed away after taking a tumble backstage at the Stones’ show at the Beacon Theater in 2006 (during the concert that Scorsese filmed for his Shine a Light documentary). He was only the latest ally to depart. And yet, canny businessman that he is, he knows that it’s the past that has the most currency. The Stones have released their share of compilations ; a few of them, like Hot Rocks and More Hot Rocks, have taken on the patina of classics (that great Hot Rocks cover of the band stacked on top of each other in profile has become an icon). But going through the past darkly or otherwise seems anathema to Mick. So why, forty years on, did the Rolling Stones revisit the source of perhaps their greatest myth, their most legendary album, and get fully behind an Exile on Main Street media blitz of the spring and summer of 2010? What made looking back palatable, interesting, and new for someone as easily bored and dismissive of laurel resting as Mick Jagger?