Mick Jagger (16 page)

Nonetheless, “Come On” proved a rallying cry in vain. After the muddle over the recording, Decca seemed to lose interest, spending almost nothing on promotion and publicity. Reviews in the music trades were no more than tepid. “A bluesy, commercial group who could make the charts in a small way,” commented Record Mirror. Writing as guest reviewer in Melody Maker, fellow singer Craig Douglas was scathing about Mick’s vocal: “Very ordinary. I can’t hear a word [he’s] saying. If there were a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere.”

The national press failed to pick up on the Thank Your Lucky Stars furor and would have ignored the Stones altogether but for the unflagging generosity of the manager they had just rudely dumped. Giorgio Gomelsky knew the tabloid Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop correspondent, Patrick Doncaster, and persuaded Doncaster to devote his whole column to the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones, and a new young band named the Yardbirds whom Gomelsky had found to take his ungrateful protégés’ place. The good turn backfired when the beer brewery that owned the Station Hotel read of the wild rites jeopardizing its mirror-lined function room and evicted the Crawdaddy forthwith.

In 1963, the procedure for getting a single onto the Top 20 charts published by the half-dozen trades, and broadcast each Sunday on the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was quite straightforward. The listings were based on sales by a selection of retailers throughout the country. Undercover teams would tour these key outlets and buy up the ten thousand or so copies needed to push a record onto the charts’ lower reaches and to pole position on radio playlists. At that point, in most cases, public interest kicked in and it continued the climb unaided.

Decca being unwilling to activate this mechanism for “Come On,” Andrew Oldham had no choice but to do it himself. To help him, he brought in a young freelance promotion man named Tony Calder who had worked on the Beatles’ first single, “Love Me Do,” and who, as a former Decca employee, knew the whole hyping routine backward. But even with Calder’s bulk-buying teams behind it, “Come On” could be winched no higher than No. 20 on the New Musical Express’s chart. To blues-unaware pop-record buyers, the name “Rolling Stones,” with its echo of schoolroom proverbs, struck almost as bizarre a note as “the Beatles” initially had. And Mick’s overaccelerated vocal removed the crucial element of danceability.

He was never to make that mistake again.

OUTSIDE OF MUSIC, Chrissie Shrimpton occupied Mick’s whole attention. They had been going out for more than six months and were now “going steady,” in this era the recognized preliminary to engagement and marriage—though steady was the least appropriate word for their relationship.

Chrissie, now eighteen, had left secretarial college and moved up to London, ostensibly to work but really to provide a place where she and Mick could find some privacy. With her friend Liz Gribben, she lived in a succession of bed-sitting rooms which, though “very grim,” were still more conducive to romance than 102 Edith Grove. However, she still could not break it to her parents that she was sleeping with Mick; on their visits home to Buckinghamshire to stay with Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, they continued virtuously to occupy separate bedrooms.

One of Chrissie’s first secretarial jobs was at Fletcher and Newman’s piano warehouse in Covent Garden—at that time still the scene of a raucous daily fruit and vegetable market. “It was only a few minutes’ walk from the London School of Economics and Mick would come and meet me for lunch. One day as we walked through the market, a stall holder threw a cabbage at his head and shouted, ‘You ugly fucker.’ ”

In fact, he hugely enjoyed showing Chrissie off to his fellow LSE students, not only as a breathtakingly beautiful “bird” but as sister of the famous model Jean. Only Matthew Evans, the future publisher and peer, went out with anyone on the same level, a girl named Elizabeth Mead. “That amused Mick,” Evans recalls. “We used to sit and discuss how similar Elizabeth and Chrissie were.”

When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument—this only a couple of weeks after they met. “We were always together,” Chrissie says, “and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault—like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights—though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.”

Though she found him “a sweet, loving person,” his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. “We’d be walking down the street … and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.” Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when—as often happened—Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house, and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, “Mrs. Shrimpton … where is she?”

With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson and Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realized he went there at all. “I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,” Calder remembers. “But with Mick, it was never an issue.”

By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities—and the career that would follow—to plunge into the unstable, unsavory, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.

One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving LSE. “I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonized very much about it,” she remembers. “He certainly didn’t discuss it with me—but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that ‘Joe is very upset.’ ”

The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a “surprisingly easy” interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones, he could always come back and complete his degree.

It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multigenerational psychosis, “Beatlemania.” Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair—for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal—they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences, and the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, “She Loves You.” Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analyzed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of “top people’s paper” The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.

For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticize or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.

While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional debutante ball, for fees between twenty-five and fifty pounds. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that—rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters—combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:

How fab can anyone be! … I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me—I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it—& I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me—I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good—my ears are still buzzing.

One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground—the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home—a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its copresenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on August 26.

Ready Steady Go! was a mold-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mold breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits—“The Weekend Starts Here.” Coincidentally, the program was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.

The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless debut single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform—leather waistcoats, black pants, white shirts, and ties—and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route, across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.

Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland—not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia—through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned, and long-haired Londoners were gawked at like just-landed aliens.

The gig might be at a cinema, a theater, a Victorian town hall, or a corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being “too noisy,” then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.

At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytizing zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” the Stones knew Berry’s entire oeuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, “turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage.” That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: “They didn’t seem to be copying anybody—and they didn’t give a fuck.”