Mick Jagger (20 page)

With so many readers—or, at least, readers’ offspring—converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say while also recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and “dirtiness.” And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. “They look,” said the Daily Express, “like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom … five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair … but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.” Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard—who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles—wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: “They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years … they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.”

The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles—without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté—as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm, and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness, and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it “cut neatly like the Beatles’.”

The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skillfully fed the paper: “WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE?” The Express helpfully amplified this to “WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?” thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.

On the road—traveling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive—the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs, and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served predinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backward. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.

“Not Fade Away” ramped up the mayhem at Stones concerts—a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.

British pop’s notional North-South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a “Mad Mod Ball,” televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers, and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The setup terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that some people might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.

After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counterriot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South, over those and all other rivals but one. “In mass popularity,” wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, “the Stones are second only to the Beatles.”

THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as “Not Fade Away” and—such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism—keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.

Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny,” the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy,” Barrett Strong’s “Money,” and Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On,” the latter always introduced by Mick as “our slow one” and sung in an atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still “piss off.” Produced in small 45-rpm format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.

The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.

Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualized himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon-McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a “covers band”—and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.

In February, he had grandiosely informed Record Mirror that by autumn he would be “Britain’s most powerful independent record producer.” Since the Stones alone did not justify his assuming that title, he was actively scouting round for other artists to shape in the recording studio à la Spector—and had already found one. This was Cleo Sylvestre, who had auditioned as a backup singer with the Stones eighteen months earlier, then gone on to have a platonic love affair with Mick which he took with so much the greater seriousness. Mick, in fact, recommended her to Oldham as a potential talent, even though he was still too upset by their breakup to be friends with her.

Oldham recorded Cleo singing the old Teddy Bears hit “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” which had been Phil Spector’s first writing and producing success. The B-side was an instrumental entitled “There Are but Five Rolling Stones,” played by the Stones but grandiosely credited to “The Andrew Oldham Orchestra.” Cleo’s pop-singing career failed to take off, but she went on to an award-winning career as an actress, notably with a one-woman show about Mary Seacole, the Crimean War’s “black Florence Nightingale.”

The domestic arrangements at 33 Mapesbury Road—and Brian’s absence in Windsor—meant that the songwriters within the Stones more or less had to be Mick and Keith. Likewise, Keith’s skill at playing hypnotic chords—as on “Not Fade Away”—and Mick’s verbal fluency dictated which of them would write the lyrics and which the tune. Both agreed it was a good idea, but were too much intimidated by the competition all around to sit down and try. Oldham exerted every fiber of PR persuasiveness to change their minds, insisting that it could not be that difficult—witness the speed at which John and Paul had dashed off “I Wanna Be Your Man” that afternoon at Ken Colyer’s club—and spinning extravagant visions (hugely underestimated, it would turn out) of the publishing royalties they could earn. Even that could not tempt Mick to have a go.

Finally, one November night in 1963, Oldham resorted to simple coercion, locking the pair in the flat’s kitchenette, having previously removed all food and drink from it, then going off to spend the evening with his mother in Hampstead. If they wanted to eat that night, he shouted, they’d better have written a song when he came back. Returning a couple of hours later, he opened the front door quietly, tiptoed halfway upstairs, and heard them hard at work. He went down again, slammed the door, and shouted “What have you got?” A resentful, hungry Mick—those lips long unstoked—“told me they’d written this fucking song and I’d better fucking like it.”

That first effort, unconsciously reflecting Oldham’s pressure, was entitled “It Should Be You” and sounded enough like a real song to make them try again—and again. Fortuitously, the Stones were just leaving on a third national tour—this one including British pop’s only other ex–college student, Mike Sarne—which provided live models to copy and hours of boredom, backstage or in Stu’s van, when thinking up tunes and lyrics came as a positive relief. In a short time, Mick and Keith had accumulated around half a dozen songs, the most promising of which they recorded as rough demos at Regent Sound during quick trips back to London. The whole batch showed a romantic, even feminine side to the composers which made them quite unsuitable as Stones tracks, some indeed being specifically targeted at female artists: “My Only Girl,” “We Were Falling in Love,” “Will You Be My Lover Tonight?” To hold their copyrights and receive any royalties they might earn, Oldham set up a publishing company called Nanker Phelge Music, a name as deliberately grotesque as the Beatles’ Northern Songs company was quietly traditional. A Nanker was Brian Jones’s name for his Lucky Jim facial contortions while Phelge was the Edith Grove flatmate who used to “gob” so colorfully up the walls.

Oldham’s search for artists to cover these first Jagger-Richard songs was confined to the lower reaches of British pop and even there met with only modest success. “Will You Be My Lover Tonight?” was recorded by a mutual friend of Oldham and the Stones named George Bean and released on Decca in January 1964, sinking without a trace. “Shang A Doo Lang,” an unashamed knockoff of the Crystals’ “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” went to a sixteen-year-old newcomer named Adrienne Posta and was produced by Oldham with Spectoresque Wall of Sound effects. By far the most prestigious catch was Gene Pitney, a major American name whose fondness for London pop low life had led him to play backup percussion at the boozy “Not Fade Away” session. Pitney, it so happened, needed a follow-up to his recent massive hit with Bacharach and David’s “24 Hours from Tulsa.” Oldham persuaded him to make it Jagger and Richard’s “My Only Girl,” retitled “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.” Though Pitney substantially rewrote the song, Mick and Keith’s credit survived when it made the UK Top 10 and even sneaked onto the U.S. Hot 100.

Adrienne Posta was the daughter of a wealthy furniture manufacturer who intended to make her a pop star by hook or by crook. When Decca released Adrienne’s version of Jagger and Richard’s “Shang A Doo Lang” in early March, Oldham persuaded Mr. Posta to hold a launch party at his flat on Seymour Place, Bayswater. The party was to witness a momentous meeting, though not the one Oldham originally had in mind. Deciding it was time Keith Richard “started going out with something other than a guitar,” Oldham asked his girlfriend, Sheila Klein, to bring along someone for Keith. She chose a friend with the happily coincidental name of Linda Keith, a former assistant at Vogue who had progressed to modeling.

Launch parties for records were unusual in 1964, and an impressive posse of Swinging London insiders turned up to wish Adrienne’s single Godspeed and partake of her father’s hospitality. They included Peter Asher from the singing duo Peter and Gordon, the latest act to benefit from Lennon-McCartney songs. Asher brought his actress sister Jane and her boyfriend, Paul McCartney, who lodged at the Asher family home on Wimpole Street, Marylebone. With them came an old Hampstead friend of Oldham’s named John Dunbar and his seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

The name that always seemed too perfect for the young woman it adorned—“Faithfull” with two l’s, suggesting a double portion of innocent steadfastness—was not a publicist’s invention, as many people later assumed. Marianne’s father was an academic named Robert Glynn Faithfull who served with British intelligence during the Second World War, then went on to receive a doctorate in psychology from Liverpool University. Nothing about this seemingly quintessential English rose hinted at a background that was also more exotically foreign than any of the crucial people in Mick’s life had been, or would be.