Sir Mick is rolling in it and that’s how he likes it
AS AN Englishman I’ve been celebrating this year one of the most important anniversaries in our country’s post-war history. I have raised a glass — or three — to an institution which through the years of economic decline, industrial strife and political buffoonery, through the loss of empire and the unending search for new markets for arms exports, has remained indestructible. Its leading figures, now in the autumn of their lives, enjoy unimaginable luxury and comfort, but like many ordinary families, they have been tested by controversy, personal misfortunes, jealousies and bitter feuds, and they have endured.
There have been parties, I’ve noticed, to mark the Queen’s Jubilee, but pull on those Lapping Tongue t-shirts and put out even more flags, I say, for The Rolling Stones. The planet’s greatest rock group, and its pre-eminent white blues band, made its first public appearance 50 years ago — in Jul 1962 — at Soho’s Marquee Club.
That 50-minute set — led by the band’s founder, the outstandingly talented but doomed guitarist Brian Jones — was unpromising. Their playlist was pure, stripped down blues and R&B — almost wholly covers of Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James and Jimmy Reed classics — while the Marquee in the early 1960s was a leading jazz venue.
“I hope”, said the nervous vocalist, Mick Jagger, “they don’t think we’re a rock n’ roll outfit”. They did. It was, though, the start of an enterprise which, as Philip Norman notes in the introduction to his unauthorised yet meticulously detailed biography of Jagger, was to last far longer than any band around then or since.
As an unassailable music brand, it stands alongside those of the great philharmonic orchestras in Berlin, Vienna, London, and New York, wherein lies at least one clue to its survival. The Stones, runs the familiar complaint, always do the same stuff: their great rock anthems, and pure Chicago and Delta blues — genres to which many Americans were introduced by the band. Treatments change over the years — toying with southern country, country and &western, soul ballads, gospel, a version of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ that’s, well, dare I say it, better than Bob Dylan’s — but where’s the innovation, the boundary-pushing? Good question, and the answer is that there isn’t any.
The Berlin Phil is still in business precisely because it sticks to what it knows and does best — Mozart and Mahler and the rest — which is what the Stones have been doing unashamedly for half a century, and almost always — in studios, clubs and arenas — impeccably. At their two ‘Shine A Light’ concerts at Manhattan’s Beacon Theatre in 2006 — filmed by Martin Scorsese and featuring a Buddy Guy-Jagger duet on Champagne and &Reefer — the unique sound and spirit were much as they were in 1962, despite line-up changes, the addition of backing singers and squads of saxophonists, and the inescapable toll of the years.
Norman records and examines every twist and turn in Jagger’s life, from a happy, middle class Dartford, Kent, childhood shared off and on with Keith Richards from the rough end of the town, through the rock n’ roll years, the drug busts, the wives (two) and other women (who knows how many?), the children and grandchildren (11) to a 69-year-old senior sitting on a fortune estimated at €237 something million and fending off not noticeably successfully the wrinkles with a brand of face cream quite small jars of which sell for €1,570.
The seemingly rebellious, long-haired London School of Economics drop-out the British establishment appeared determined to destroy emerges as such a conservative, if libertarian, figure that his acceptance of a knighthood fails to surprise, though it appalled for quite different reasons both Richards and, reportedly, the Queen.
Having rescued the Stones from financial disaster and a parasitical manager in 1971, he took detailed control of the band’s music, tour management and merchandising … and the money which now pours into a web of Netherlands-registered companies reporting to a partnership comprising Jagger, Richards, Charlie Watts and Ronnie Wood. Who gets how much from worldwide album sales estimated at €200m isn’t known. While clearly not short of a bob or two, his Mustique mansion — Stargroves — is on the holiday rentals market for several months each year. Jagger vets applicants, and excludes rock stars: he says they make too much mess. The weekly rent is €12,500, if you’re interested.
Jagger is an intellectual with a long-established taste for the company of the wealthy — preferably titled. He’s articulate but he chooses to say as little as possible in public, and he’s well-read. He opened the free 1969 Hyde Park concert, two days after the death of Brian Jones in Sussex swimming pool, with a reading from Shelley’s elegiac Adonais.
The on-stage cockney accent was as fake as the Dixie inflections in the vocals. Bill Wyman — a working- class Londoner hired chiefly because he owned a guitar amp the band needed — was a butt of jokes for Jagger and Jones, both well-spoken grammar school boys.
Despite — or perhaps because of — a suggestion of bisexuality in his stage persona and a marked misogynistic strain in his lyrics, Jagger’s seismic appeal to many women has been undeniable. He has form as a heartless lover, an incurably unfaithful husband and a good father. At least two of his women — Chrissie Shrimpton and Marianne Faithfull — made suicide attempts. Faithfull’s first weak words when she came out of a six-day coma and saw Jagger at her bedside were: “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away.” The song was for her.
He has looked after his seven children and four grandchildren well — school fees, showing up for birthdays and graduations, lavish holidays — but his lawyers dealt with pay-offs to all of his women with forensic detachment. Marsha Hunt had to book herself into hospital to have their daughter, Karis. Mick sent her £200. The Jagger wallet has never been opened without difficulty. His current girlfriend is ex-model turned fashion designer L’Wren Scott. Taller than him (6ft 3in) and 23 years younger, she is the adopted daughter of a Utah Mormon. They’ve been an item for ten years. A third marriage seems unlikely, unless there are compelling tax advantages. Having tried it twice, Jagger describes wedlock as a “a cliché … a fantasy”.
If 60 is the new 40, how is Jagger dealing with his middle years? His personal trainer puts him through daily running, Pilates, yoga, and gym routines. When he reached 50, he began studying closely the stage moves of younger rock stars. Our bodies, of course, are temples. He’s a wholefood — plus vitamin supplements — man now.
He’s a hands-on film producer — Enigma told the story of Britain’s Second World War Bletchley Park code-breakers, one of whose machines he owns; he indulges his passion for cricket; and keeping an eye on Stones’ corporate empire keeps him busy.
Norman’s history is a must-read for those who, like me, early on in the ’60s declared their allegiance in England’s other north-south divide — The Beatles or Stones; syrupy pop songs or visceral blues and rock. It doesn’t, though, provide a clue to the central Jagger puzzle, best described by a filmmaker who spent most of 2001 travelling with him: “A lot of the time he seemed no different from someone you’d meet in a golf club in Hampshire. But whenever he walked into a recording studio, it was as if he was inhabited by a different spirit. He just changed into a blues singer from Mississippi.”
Perhaps only he can explain it, but on this — as on much else — those hallmark lips are closed.
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