Mick Jagger (13 page)

Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were, to his mind, the far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was one pound each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.

In the event, they astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same “abominable” performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelizing for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience—Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.

Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: rockers in black leather and motorcycle boots; Mods in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from backstreets and council estates; and always girls, girls, and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annex, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.

The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, “Do the Crawdaddy” and “Pretty Thing,” spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multimirrored walls suffering not even a crack.

Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music program, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded “too colored.” However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew—still broadcasting in the twenty-first century—denies ever having been party to such a judgment; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound “colored.”

Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC on Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.

Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (crawdaddy is Deep Southern slang for “crawfish” or “langoustine”), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognizable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton—at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down—and a raspy-voiced trainee grave digger from north London named Rod Stewart.

Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre debut single with a smash hit, “Please Please Me,” and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When “Please Please Me” became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.

Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off—and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian, and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.

Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared to their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll–obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s “I’ll Change My Style.” When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored “Pop Prom” at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith, and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.

MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright, and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre, nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.

But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage—and men—having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. “I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,” she recalls. “It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.”

The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s “Pretty Thing” (“let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing …”), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.

Her name was Christine—aka Chrissie—Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician—more fifties, in fact, than sixties—Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face, and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.

Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared—and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realize his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.

While fashion modeling took her sister, Jean, steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college—her third—on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.

The various printed accounts of their first meeting are always set at the Windsor Ricky-Tick, with seventeen-year-old Chrissie—who sometimes cleared away glasses there in exchange for free admission—brazenly taking the initiative. In one version, she accepts a dare from a girlfriend to go up to Mick on the bandstand and ask him to kiss her; in another, the place is so packed that she can reach him only by crawling across the decorative fishing nets above the dance floor, helped along by people below in an early instance of crowd surfing.

Chrissie herself is unsure now whether the two of them first seriously locked eyes at the Ricky-Tick, at a nearby pub where the Stones sometimes played upstairs on Sunday afternoons, or at a place called the International Club, frequented by foreign au pair girls in nearby Maidenhead. “I was attracted to Mick originally because he looked like an actor named Doug Gibbons,” she remembers. “At least, Doug was a prettier version of Mick. And I remember that when we first spoke, his Cockney accent was so thick I could hardly understand him.”

After serenading her with Bo Diddley’s “Pretty Thing” a few times, he asked her for a date, naming an afternoon the following week and suggesting Windsor, with its castle and fluttering Royal Standard, as their most convenient common ground. “It was the day of my grandmother’s silver wedding party, and I explained I’d have to go to that first. I remember meeting Mick on the street in Windsor because that was when I first saw him in daylight and realized one of his eyes was two colors—the left one was brown and green.”

For their next date, he took her down to Dartford by train, as she thought, to meet his family. After her father’s substantial Buckinghamshire farm, the Jagger family home struck her as “very ordinary.” Neither Mick’s parents nor his brother turned out to be there, and Chrissie realized he was hoping—or, rather, expecting—to have sex with her. But the seeming wild child was not the pushover he expected. “I was very worried about it and I wouldn’t stay,” she recalls. “So I had to come back again on the train on my own.”

Mick forgave the rebuff, however, and a week or so later, after an early-ending gig, Chrissie took him home to Burnham by train to meet her parents, Ted and Peggy, also inviting Charlie Watts and her friend Liz Gribben, to whom Charlie had taken a shine. “My parents were slightly appalled by the way Mick looked, but they were impressed by the fact that he went to LSE, and my dad liked him because he was so bright and into money. I don’t think my mother ever really liked him—even before everything that happened—but Dad could always see how sharp he was and what a success he was going to be, whatever he ended up doing.”

Mick became a regular overnight visitor at the Shrimptons’, always occupying a separate room from Chrissie’s, as any well-brought-up young man in that era would be expected to do. After breakfast he would catch the same 8:42 commuter train from Burnham that Chrissie took to her secretarial school. “My sister, Jean, by that time was going around with a lot of debby Vogue types who’d sometimes be on the same train,” she remembers. “I used to hear them whispering, ‘Poor Chrissie … her boyfriend’s so ugly.’ ”

Chrissie, by contrast, spent little time in the bosom of the Jagger family, though that was a consequence of Mick’s desire to get away from home more than any mutual antipathy. She remembers her surprise on discovering that, unlike their elder son, neither Joe nor Eva had any trace of a Cockney accent and that both were “quite intellectual people, which my parents weren’t, though we had more money. Mick’s mother was quite simply a domestic slave, devoted to looking after the males of the household. She was one of those garrulous women, and Mick was often very irritated by her and very dismissive of her. And his father was very formal and—to me—charmless and rather alarming. But I did get on very well with his brother, Chris, who at that time was mostly away at school. We were the two Chrisses, the younger siblings of the more successful older ones.”