Authors: Philip Norman
A neat little joke followed, perfectly pitched between mockery and deference. He was here, he said, under “the RMEP—the Rock Stars–Movie Stars Exchange Program … At this moment, ‘Sir’ Ben Kingsley [giving the title ironic emphasis even though he shared it] will be singing ‘Brown Sugar’ at the Grammys … ‘Sir’ Anthony Hopkins is in the recording studio with Amy Winehouse … ‘Dame’ Judi Dench is gamely trashing hotel rooms somewhere in the U.S… . and we hope that next week ‘Sir’ Brad and the Pitt family will be performing The Sound of Music at the Brit Awards.” (Cut to Kevin Spacey and Meryl Streep laughing ecstatically and Angelina explaining the joke to Brad.)
Opening the envelope, he announced that the Best Film award went Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire—so very much what people used to consider him. But there was no doubt about the real winner. Jagger had scored his biggest hit since … oh … “Start Me Up” in 1981. “It took a lot to out-glamour that place,” one academician commented, “but he did it.”
Half a century ago, when the Rolling Stones ran neck and neck with the Beatles, one question above all used to be thrown at the young Mick Jagger in the eternal quest to get something enlightening, or even interesting, out of him: did he think he’d still be singing “Satisfaction” when he was thirty?
In those innocent early sixties, pop music belonged exclusively to the young and was thought to be totally in thrall to youth’s fickleness. Even the most successful acts—even the Beatles—expected a few months at most at the top before being elbowed aside by new favorites. Back then, no one dreamed how many of those seemingly ephemeral songs would still be being played and replayed a lifetime hence or how many of those seemingly disposable singers and bands would still be plying their trade as old-age pensioners, greeted with the same fanatical devotion for as long as they could totter back onstage.
In the longevity stakes, the Stones leave all competition far behind. The Beatles lasted barely three years as an international live attraction and only nine in total (if you discount the two they spent acrimoniously breaking up). Other bands from the sixties’ top drawer like Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and the Who, if not fractured by alcohol or drugs, drifted apart over time, then reformed, their terminal boredom with their old repertoire, and one another, mitigated by the huge rewards on offer. Only the Stones, once seemingly the most unstable of all, have kept rolling continuously from decade to decade, then century to century; weathering the sensational death of one member and the embittered resignations of two others (plus ongoing internal politics that would impress the Medicis); leaving behind generations of wives and lovers; outlasting two managers, nine British prime ministers, and the same number of American presidents; impervious to changing musical fads, gender politics, and social mores; as sexagenarians still somehow retaining the same sulfurous whiff of sin and rebellion they had in their twenties. The Beatles have eternal charm; the Stones have eternal edge.
Over the decades since their joint heyday, of course, pop music’s essentials have hardly changed. Each new generation of musicians hits on the same chords in the same order and adopts the same language of love, lust, and loss; each new generation of fans seeks the same kind of male idol with the same kind of sex appeal, the same repertoire of gestures, attitudes, and manifestations of cool.
The notion of a rock “band”—young ensemble musicians enjoying fame, wealth, and sexual opportunity undreamed of by their historic counterparts in military regiments or northern colliery towns—was well established by the time the Stones got going, and has not changed one iota since. It remains as true that, even though the pop industry mostly is about illusion, exploitation, and hype, true talent will always win out, and always endure. From the Stones’ great rabble-rousing hits like “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or “Street Fighting Man” to obscure early tracks like “Off the Hook” or “Play with Fire,” and the R&B cover versions that came before, their music sounds as fresh as if recorded yesterday.
They remain role models for every band that makes it—the pampered boy potentates, lolling ungraciously on a couch as flashbulbs detonate, the same old fatuous questions are shouted by reporters, and the same facetious answers thrown back. The kind of tour they created in the late sixties is what everyone still wants: the private jets, the limos, the entourages, the groupies, the trashed hotel suites. All the well-documented evidence of how soul-destroyingly monotonous it soon becomes, all Christopher Guest’s brilliant send-up of a boneheaded traveling supergroup in This Is Spinal Tap, cannot destroy the mystique of “going on the road,” the eternal allure of “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.” Yet try as these youthful disciples may, they could never reproduce the swath which the on-road Stones cut through the more innocent world of forty-odd years ago, or touch remotely comparable levels of arrogance, self-indulgence, hysteria, paranoia, violence, vandalism, and wicked joy.
Above all Mick Jagger, at any age, is inimitable. Jagger it was who, more than anyone, invented the concept of the “rock star” as opposed to mere singer within a band—the figure set apart from his fellow musicians (a major innovation in those days of unified Beatles, Hollies, Searchers, et al.) who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds. Keith Richards, Jagger’s co-figurehead in the Stones, is a uniquely talented guitarist, as well as the rock world’s most unlikely survivor, but Keith belongs in a troubadour tradition stretching back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Django Reinhardt, continuing on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Noel Gallagher, and Pete Doherty. Jagger, on the other hand, founded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on. Among his rivals in rock showmanship, only Jim Morrison of the Doors found a different way to sing into a microphone, cradling it tenderly in both hands like a frightened baby bird rather than flourishing it, Jagger-style, like a phallus. Since the 1970s, many other gifted bands have emerged with vast international followings and indubitably charismatic front men—Freddie Mercury of Queen, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bono of U2, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Distinctive on record they might be, but when they took the stage they had no choice but to follow in Jagger’s strutting footsteps.
His status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph “the Sheik” Valentino, the silent cinema star who aroused 1920s women to palpitant dreams of being thrown across the saddle of a horse and carried off to a Bedouin tent in the desert. With Jagger, the aura was closer to great ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces. The Stones were one of the first rock bands to have a logo and, even for the louche early seventies, it was daringly explicit—a livid-red cartoon of Jagger’s own mouth, the cushiony lips sagging open with familiar gracelessness, the tongue slavering out to slurp an invisible something which, very clearly, was not ice cream. This “lapping tongue” still adorns all the Stones’ literature and merchandise, symbolic of who controls every department. To modern eyes, there could hardly be a cruder monument to old-fashioned male chauvinism—yet it finds its mark as surely as ever. The most liberated twenty-first-century females perk up at the sound of Jagger’s name while those he captivated in the twentieth still belong to him in every fiber. As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbor at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in When Harry Met Sally where Meg Ryan simulates orgasm in the middle of a crowded restaurant. “Mick Jagger? Oh … yes! Yes, YES, YES!”
Sexual icons are notoriously prone to fall short of their public image in private; look at Mae West, Marilyn Monroe, or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. But in the oversexed world of rock, in the whole annals of show business, Jagger’s reputation as a modern Casanova is unequaled. It’s questionable whether even the greatest lotharios of centuries past found sexual partners in such prodigious number, or were so often saved the tiresome preliminaries of seduction. Certainly, none maintained his prowess, as Jagger has, through middle and then old age (Casanova was knackered by his mid-thirties). What Swift called “the rage of the groin” is now known as sex addiction and can be cured by therapy, but Jagger has never shown any sign of considering it a problem.
Looking at that craggy countenance, one tries but fails to imagine the vast carnal banquet on which he has gorged, yet still not sated himself … the unending gallery of beautiful faces and bright, willing eyes … the innumerable chat-up lines, delivered and received … the countless brusque adjournments to beds, couches, heaped-up cushions, dressing room floors, shower stalls, or limo backseats … the ever-changing voices, scents, skin tones, and hair color … the names instantly forgotten, if ever known in the first place … Old men are often revisited in dreams, or daydreams, by the women they have lusted after. For him, it would be like one of those old-style reviews of the Soviet army in Red Square. And at least one of the gorgeous foot soldiers is among his BAFTA audience tonight, seated not a million miles from Brad Pitt.
By rights, the scandals in which he starred during the 1960s should have been forgotten decades ago, canceled out by the teeming peccadilloes of today’s pop stars, soccer players, supermodels, and reality-TV stars. But the sixties have an indestructible fascination, most of all among those too young to remember them—the condition known to psychologists as “nostalgia without memory.” Jagger personifies that “swinging” era for Britain’s youth, both its freedom and hedonism and the backlash it finally provoked. Even quite young people today have heard of his 1967 drug bust, or at least of the Mars bar which figured so lewdly in it. Few realize the extent of the British establishment’s vindictiveness during that so-called Summer of Love; how tonight’s witty, well-spoken knight of the realm was reviled like a long-haired Antichrist, led to court in handcuffs, subjected to a show trial of almost medieval grotesquerie, then thrown into prison.
He is perhaps the ultimate example of that well-loved show-business stereotype, the “survivor.” But while most rock ’n’ roll survivors end up as bulgy old farts in gray ponytails, he is unchanged—other than facially—from the day he first took the stage. While most others have long since addled their wits with drugs or alcohol, his faculties are all intact, not least his celebrated instinct for what is fashionable, cool, and posh. While others whinge about the money they lost or were cheated out of, he leads the biggest-earning band in history, its own survival achieved solely by his determination and astuteness. Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968; from a gang of scruffball outsiders, he turned them into a British national treasure as legitimate as Shakespeare or the White Cliffs of Dover.
Yet behind all the idolatry, wealth, and superabundant satisfaction is a story of talent and promise consistently, almost stubbornly, unfulfilled. Among all his contemporaries endowed with half a brain, only John Lennon had as many opportunities to move beyond the confines of pop. Though undeniably an actor, as Jonathan Ross introduced him to BAFTA, with both film and TV roles to his credit, Jagger could have developed a parallel screen career as successful as Presley’s or Sinatra’s, perhaps even more so. He could have used his sway over audiences to become a politician, perhaps a leader, such as the world had never seen—and still has not. He could have extended the (often overlooked) brilliance of his best song lyrics into poetry or prose, as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have done. At the very least, he could have become a first-echelon performer in his own right instead of merely fronting a band. But, somehow or other, none of it came to pass. His film-acting career stalled in 1970 and never restarted in any significant way, despite the literally dozens of juicy screen roles he was offered. He did no more than toy with the idea of politics and has never shown any signs of wanting to be a serious writer. As for going solo, he waited until the mid-eighties to make his move, creating such ill-feeling among the other Stones, especially Keith, that he had to choose between continuing or seeing the band implode. As a consequence, he is still only their front man, doing the same job he did at eighteen.
There is also the puzzle of how someone who fascinates so many millions, and is so clearly superintelligent and perceptive, manages to make himself so very unfascinating when he opens those celebrated lips to speak. Even since the media first began pursuing Jagger, his on-the-record utterances have had the kind of noncommittal blandness associated with British royalty. Look into any of the numerous “Rolling Stones in their own words” compilations published in the past four decades and you’ll find Mick’s words always the fewest and most anodyne. In 1983, he signed a contract with the British publisher Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write his autobiography for the then astounding sum £1 million. It should have been the show-business memoir of the century; instead, the ghostwritten manuscript was pronounced irremediably dull by the publisher and the entire advance had to be returned.
His explanation was that he “couldn’t remember anything,” by which of course he didn’t mean his birthplace or his mother’s name but the later personal stuff for which Weidenfeld had stumped up £1 million and any publisher today would happily pay five times as much. That has been his position ever since, when approached to do another book or pressed by interviewers for chapter and verse. Sorry, his phenomenal past is all just “a blur.”
This image of a man whose recall disappeared thirty years ago like some early-onset Alzheimer’s victim’s is pure nonsense, as anyone who knows him can attest. It’s a handy way of getting out of things—something he has always had down to a fine art. It gets him out of months boringly closeted with a ghostwriter, or answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to “forget,” say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London Times editorial or ditching Allen Klein or standing up to homicidal Hell’s Angels at the Altamont festival or getting married in front of the world’s massed media in Saint-Tropez or being fingerprinted in Rhode Island or making Steven Spielberg fall on his knees in adulation or having Andy Warhol as a child minder or being stalked by naked women with green pubic hair in Montauk or persuading a quarter of a million people in Hyde Park to shut up and listen to a poem by Shelley?