Mick Jagger (12 page)

At the end of each week, Mick, Brian, and Keith bought, borrowed, or stole the music trades and scanned the pop charts, never thinking for one second they might ever figure there. America’s immemorial dominance was maintained by white solo singers like Neil Sedaka, Roy Orbison, and Del Shannon. Black artists scored mainly by pandering to the white audience, as in novelty dance numbers like Chubby Checker’s “Let’s Twist Again” and Little Eva’s “The Locomotion.” Britain seemed capable of producing only limp cover versions and wildly uncool Trad jazz. The one exception was an oddball minor hit called “Love Me Do” by a Liverpool group with funny, fringed haircuts and the almost suicidally bizarre name of the Beatles. Rather than the usual slick studio arrangement, it had a rough R&B feel, with harmonica riffs very much like those Brian and Mick played in the clubs every night. They felt like their pockets had been picked by these insectoid upstarts from the unknown far north.

In October, Dick Taylor, the last of Mick’s old school friends still playing with him, had won a place at the Royal College of Art and decided to leave the band. There was some idea that Richard Hattrell might take over on bass guitar, but a course of lessons with their Ealing Club colleague Jack Bruce showed Hattrell to be totally unmusical. He returned to Tewkesbury and, worn down by his life with the Stones (a syndrome to be oft-repeated in the future) suffered a burst appendix and almost died. At the same time, their latest temporary drummer, Carlo Little, moved on to a better gig with Screaming Lord Sutch’s backing band, the Savages. There were thus two vacancies to be filled, this time with Mick and Keith as Brian’s co-judges. Auditions took place on a cold, slushy December day at a Chelsea pub called the Wetherby Arms.

The first spot was quickly filled by Tony Chapman, an experienced drummer with a successful semipro band called the Cliftons, who’d become bored by their conventional rock repertoire. Having got the gig, Chapman suggested that the Cliftons’ bass guitarist should also come and audition at the Wetherby Arms. He was a hollow-cheeked, unsmiling Londoner, even shorter and bonier than Mick, who held his instrument at an odd near-vertical angle. He had been born William Perks but used the stage name Bill Wyman.

Here, the fit seemed more problematic. At twenty-six, Bill was seven years older than Mick and Keith, a married man with a small son and steady day job on the maintenance staff of a department store. Furthermore, he lived in Penge, a name which British sophisticates find eternally amusing, along with Neasden, Wigan, and Scunthorpe. Added to his seeming advanced age, archaic backswept hairstyle, and south London accent, it instantly condemned him in Mick’s and Brian’s eyes as an Offer and an Ernie. He possessed one major saving grace, however, in the form of a spare amplifier, roughly twice as powerful as the band’s existing ones, which he told them they were free to use. So, notwithstanding the satirical nudges and Nanker grimaces of the ex–grammar school duo behind his back, working-class Wyman was in.

He for his part had serious misgivings about joining a group of scruffy arty types so much his junior—especially after seeing their domestic arrangements. “[The flat] was an absolute pit which I shall never forget—it looked like it was bomb-damaged,” he would recall. “The front room overlooking the street had a double bed with rubbish piled all round it [and] I’ve never seen a kitchen like it … permanently piled high with dirty dishes and filth everywhere … I could never understand why they carried on like this … It could not just have been the lack of money. Bohemian angst most likely.”

Despite having left school at the age of sixteen, Bill was just as intelligent and articulate as Mick or Brian. He soon realized that although the Rollin’ Stones might not be going anywhere in particular, their singer definitely was—if not necessarily in music. While Keith merely seemed like “a Teddy Boy who’d spit in his beer to ensure nobody drank it” and had “no plans to work,” and Brian regarded music as an irreplaceable vocation, Mick talked often of becoming a lawyer or perhaps a journalist, as the LSE graduate Bernard Levin had done with spectacular success. At times, he did not even seem quite comfortable with his new first name. “He hated being called Mick,” Bill remembers. “In his own eyes he was still Mike.”

He was keeping up his LSE studies despite the late nights and distractions, and that previous June had sat part one of his BSc degree, achieving just-respectable C grades in the compulsory subjects of economics, economic history, and British government and the optional ones of political history and English legal institution. Behind the mask of coolness and indifference, he worried that he was not making the most of his opportunities or justifying the investment that Kent County Council had made in him. His vague hankering for some kind of literary career was sharpened, that autumn, when his father became the Jagger family’s first published author. As the country’s leading authority on the sport, Joe edited and partially wrote a manual entitled Basketball Coaching and Playing in a series of how-to books issued by the prestigious house of Faber & Faber (which Mick’s fellow economics student Matthew Evans would one day run). B. Jagger’s opening chapter, “The Basketball Coach,” written in simple but forceful prose, set out principles his son would later employ in a somewhat different context. The successful coach, wrote B. Jagger, “must definitely possess … a sense of vocation, a dedication to the game, faith in his own ability, knowledge and enthusiasm.” Without these qualities, the team would be “an ordinary run-of-the-mill affair, rising to no great heights and probably keeping warm the lower half of some league table …” The coach must train himself to develop “a keen analytical sense” and view each game as “an endless succession of tactics” dictated solely by him. “The players are for the whole time examples of [his] skill and ability … He must quickly eradicate weaknesses and use to the full the strong points of his players …”

The greatest pressure on Mick, as always, came from his mother. Eva Jagger still could not take his singing seriously, and protested with all her considerable might at its deleterious effect on his studies—and the high-level professional career that was supposed to follow. The Edith Grove flat so appalled her that she couldn’t bear to set foot inside it (unlike Keith’s down-to-earth mum, who came in regularly to give it a good cleanup). When Mick remained obdurate about continuing with the Stones, Eva telephoned Alexis Korner and in her forthright way demanded whether “Michael,” as she firmly continued to call him, really was anything special as a singer. Korner replied that he most definitely was. The unexpectedly public school voice at the other end of the line pacified Eva but still did not convince her.

At LSE, Mick’s absences from lectures and tutorials were becoming more frequent, his need to copy fellow student Laurence Isaacson’s notes more urgent. Though only dimly aware of his other life with the Rollin’ Stones, Isaacson could not but notice the changes coming over that once-typical middle-class student. “He was still very quiet and unobtrusive when he did appear at college. But one day when he turned up, he’d had his hair streaked. He was the first bloke I ever knew who did that.”

WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them—and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.

Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a longtime affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist, and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist, and television pundit Dr. Jacob Bronowski.

Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female backup singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.

The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.

She and Jean were their most faithful followers—groupies would be too crude—trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti–rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 club on Great Newport Street. “Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,” Cleo recalls. “But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.”

She and Mick began dating, with all the conventionality—and chasteness—that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones, and the Stones’ nightlife. “We’d go to the cinema,” Cleo remembers. “Once, Mick got tickets for the theater, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.” Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their breakup was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, “When you next see Mick, give him that for me.”

Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers “quite heavy” discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humor and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting “Mind the doors!” “Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.” The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. “He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.”

He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. “My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbors used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practice his stage moves in front of our mirror.” Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove—and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is “trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles.”

Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. “Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,” Cleo recalls. “When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, ‘Get outa my house, white man,’ took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.”

Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). “At the interval,” she recalls, “I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. ‘’Ow much?’ he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick—though I didn’t know his name then—said ‘okay.’ ”

The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art—which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting “something like four hours”—featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an “interval band” (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a “prefab” (utility prefabricated bungalow) rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared to scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.

From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non-or half Britishers to whom the Stones—Mick especially—would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy, and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.