Mick Jagger (24 page)

Whereas England’s Newest Hitmakers had slipped into Manhattan almost unnoticed, Europe’s Newest Shitmakers received a welcome from an American fan club, now numbering fifty-two thousand, that made the Beatles’ look almost tame by comparison. Mindful of recent events in The Hague, Brussels, and Paris, New York’s police department had forbidden any mass demonstration when they returned to JFK Airport; even so, some five hundred shrieking, banner-waving girls were waiting, corralled by an almost equal number of cops and security men. Dozens broke through barriers and human cordons, but were restrained with a ferocity at which even Parisian gendarmes might have balked. That was nothing to the scenes at the Stones’ hotel, where a task force of police and Pinkerton detectives had been unable to prevent mass infiltration from the howling masses outside. To reach their ritually uninformative press conference, the band had to be brought down from their rooms in a service elevator, then ushered through the hotel kitchens by guards who looked considerably more threatening than any intruder.

The visit kicked off with two live shows at the New York Academy of Music, staged by the Beatles’ promoter Sid Bernstein. Among the more conventional reviews was one by “Baby” Jane Holzer, a bohemian socialite whose reputation as the “muse” of Andy Warhol could hardly have been a faster track into Mick’s presence. “They look divine!” gushed Baby Jane. “You know what Mick said to me? He said ‘Come on, love, give us a kiss.’ How can one express it? Look at [him] at the center of the stage, a short, thin boy with a sweatshirt on, the neck of his shirt almost falling over his shoulders, they are so narrow. All this surmounted by this enormous head with hair puffing down over the forehead and ears. This boy has exceptional lips, particularly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pore over the horde and then close. Then the lips start spreading into the most languid, confidential, wettest, most labial, concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana!”

This time, there was no question of their not appearing on CBS’s Ed Sullivan Show, which, for the Beatles and Elvis before them, had been the gateway to a transcontinental audience. After the Stones’ booking became public, CBS tried to take antiriot measures, refusing to allocate places in the studio audience to unaccompanied teenagers, but a sizable contingent got around the ban simply by making their parents apply for tickets on their behalf. With crowds also besieging CBS’s Broadway studios, the Stones were cooped up there for ten hours, rehearsing in the afternoon, then doing the single live transmission that evening.

Their two brief spots (first with “Around and Around,” then “Time Is on My Side”) have passed into legend for the hysteria they supposedly unleashed on the studio floor—wilder than either the Beatles or Elvis had caused before them—and for the horrific spectacle of shaggy surliness they brought to America’s hearth and home. But the grainy video record tells a different story. Sullivan, notorious for mangling his guests’ names, announces, “The first appearance by … the Rollingstones!” then throws up both arms as if physically beating them off. The Stones, all in dapper jackets and ties but for Bill’s leather waistcoat and Mick’s crewneck sweater, play it utterly straight and poker-faced. Mick himself (his hair admittedly lanker and greasier-looking than the others’) does Irma Thomas with maximum soul but minimum theatrics. Cutaways to the audience show mainly grown-up faces, set in slightly glassy smiles, though here and there, a proscribed female fan breaks cover, bobbing up and down in her seat, half screaming, half weeping and stuffing a fist or handkerchief into her mouth to avoid attracting the ushers’ attention.

Innocuous as it all looks now, CBS’s switchboard that night lit up with viewer complaints from coast to coast. With the insecurity that haunts so many of television’s great ones, Sullivan disclaimed all responsibility for booking the Stones, blaming his production staff and saying he’d expected nice, clean-cut types like the Dave Clark Five. “It took me seventeen years to build this show and I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks,” he fulminated to a Canadian journalist. “I promise you they’ll never be back.”

On the West Coast, the Stones were booked for further recording sessions at RCA Studios and an appearance in a filmed pop concert for cinema release called Teenage Awards Music International, or TAMI, shot at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and billed as “the Greatest, Grooviest, Wildest, Most Exciting Beat Blast Ever to Pound the Screen.” Out here five months ago, Mick had competed for audience attention with tractors and trained seals; now he and the band found themselves headlining over top American acts, both black and white: the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Jan and Dean, the Supremes, Lesley Gore, Marvin Gaye, and James Brown.

The Stones felt uncomfortable to be given seniority over so many of their own musical heroes, Mick as much as anyone, and steeled themselves for heavy resentment backstage. But the very opposite happened. Chuck Berry proved as friendly as in Chicago, while Marvin Gaye—the supercool Motown star, destined to be shot dead by his own father—was paternal in a thoroughly good way, almost patting Mick’s head as he advised them not to be nervous but just to go out there and do their best.

Most disquietingly, their spot in the TAMI film came immediately after James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, at whose feet Mick and Keith had worshipped at the Harlem Apollo back in June. The Godfather could not have failed to note how many of his stage moves Mick had absorbed in the meantime, and was on record as saying once he’d done with them on TAMI, “the Rolling Stones will wish they’d never come to America.”

Because of the filming process, there was a half-hour interval between each act, so the Stones did not have to try to compete with Brown’s soul heart attack. When they finally struck up, a British journalist in the wings rather cringed to see Mick follow “the Godfather” with his “paraplegic funky chicken” routine. But by his final song, aptly entitled “I’m Alright,” he’d found his feet again. As the other artists came onstage for the finale, Brown was first in line to shake his hand and congratulate him.

MICK’S TROUBLES WITH the law began in November 1964, when he was pulled over for three minuscule traffic offenses while driving his car near Tettenhall, Staffordshire. He attended the court hearing in person, wearing a sober dark suit, white shirt, and tie, to plead guilty and be fined a total of sixteen pounds. His solicitor pleaded that the length of his hair should not be an aggravating factor in the case, pointing out that in the eighteenth century shoulder-length, curly wigs had been the norm for British noblemen, including the nation’s greatest military commander: “The Duke of Marlborough had hair longer than my client’s and he won several battles. His hair was powdered, I think because of fleas. My client has no fleas …”

Trivial though the proceedings were, they had the essential features of far graver ones, three years ahead. Here was first articulated the idea, contrary to every principle of British justice, that Mick’s being a shaggy, disreputable Rolling Stone could make him liable to harsher penalties than usually prescribed for the offense in question. Here, too, deployed in his defense, was the same condescending facetiousness that would later characterize his prosecution.

On record, by contrast, he continued to get away with murder. The Stones’ UK follow-up single to “It’s All Over Now,” released that same month, was Willie Dixon’s “Little Red Rooster.” Already famously covered by Howlin’ Wolf and Son House, it seemed like an apology to the purist followers they had recently so offended; it also happened to be the most overtly phallic blues song since Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” in the 1920s. Against a muted, somnolent beat, broken only by shivering thrusts of Brian Jones’s slide guitar, Mick’s vocal made every trouser-snake metaphor unmissable. “I am the little red rooster … too la-a-azy to crow for days … Keep ever’thing in the farmyard … upset in ever’ way …”

This seemingly perverse return to unashamed niche music after a pop smash like “It’s All Over Now” dismayed everyone around the Stones—excepting the manager who usually preached commercialism like an evangelist. Not that Andrew Oldham cared “dick” for blues music any more now than when he first met them. To Oldham, “Little Red Rooster” was a demonstration of the band’s power, under his tutelage, to make the punters buy anything they chose to put out. As with “half-assed games,” the massed censors of British broadcasting proved strangely unalert, totally missing the connection between rooster, red, cock, and the Top 20’s supposed arch-cocksman (though in America the track was refused radio airplay and the less suggestive “Heart of Stone” was released instead). Thanks mainly to loyal bulk buying by the Stones’ fan club, the single made No. 1, for just a week, in December 1964. Mick had thus finally fulfilled his boyhood ambition to bring the blues to Britain the way Saint Augustine had once brought Christianity.

If Britain’s moral custodians were deaf to the nuances of “Little Red Rooster,” American TV producers proved quicker on the uptake. Mick’s performance on the Shindig! pop show in May 1965 was an erotic black-and-white horror movie in miniature, with scary overture music and mock-medieval gates creaking open to reveal him in his lair, a proto-punk Dracula, twirling a silver mouth organ in one hand as if to heighten the beat’s mesmeric spell. On a rival U.S. show, Shivaree, that same month, the camera zoomed in on his face until only the lips remained in vision, like the disembodied mouth that narrates Samuel Beckett’s play-monologue Not I. When the time came for his harp solo (actually played by Brian Jones on the record), it was not blown so much as fellated.

“Little Red Rooster” was hardly less a starring vehicle for Brian than for Mick. Both his harmonica and slide-guitar playing won him praise throughout the British music press and admiration from musicians in rival bands, even the cerebral, supercool Manfred Mann. Its chart success also stemmed—for the present—his complaint that Mick and Keith were diverting the Stones from their blues roots and toward commercial pop. But unfortunately, Brian on an upswing was even more of a liability to the band than Brian on a downer.

Whatever the aggravation they faced from the outside world—either engineered by Andrew Oldham or wholly genuine and spontaneous—Brian always managed to ratchet it up a few more notches. His costardom on “Little Red Rooster” rekindled his delight in goading already crazed audiences, with little tambourine shakes or air kisses from his choirboy mouth, to a pitch of aggression that Mick’s more obvious moves never could. He was agreed to have been the main instigator of the Stones’ worst-ever British concert riot, in Blackpool, when an audience consisting largely of drunken Glaswegians on holiday had begun spitting at them en masse as they played. After Keith retaliated by sinking a pointed boot toe into a gobbing stage-front face, they were lucky to escape with their lives.

The band’s schedule was continually disrupted by Brian’s health problems, many just hypochondriacal attention seeking but some spectacularly real. As a chronic asthmatic, he had chosen the worst possible work environment; a performance in a hall or cinema drained of oxygen by thousands of overworked lungs would leave him gasping, wheezing, and fumbling for the inhalator he always carried. During the Stones’ second U.S. tour, he missed three shows after suffering an attack of acute bronchitis and was rushed to the hospital, where he became delirious and had to be fed intravenously. His absence from the stage lineup provoked rumors that he intended to leave the band, or had already left.

His reckless consumption of alcohol, amphetamines—and now marijuana—fed his long-festering grievance about the way, so he believed, the band he’d created had been taken over. He was always complaining to Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, or anyone else who would listen, that Mick and Keith, with Oldham’s connivance, were plotting to undermine him or oust him altogether. At the same time he would alienate Bill and Charlie with displays of pop-star petulance that had not yet even crossed Mick’s mind. When they were traveling by road in the States and stopped to eat at a wayside diner, Brian would say he wasn’t hungry and stay in the car. Then, when the others came back and the convoy was ready to move off, he’d say he was hungry now, stroll into the diner, and consume a steak or burger at a deliberate snail’s pace.

Once, his behavior goaded the monumentally patient and good-humored roadie Ian Stewart to pick him up by the throat and shake him. “Why do you always want to drag everyone down, you little bag of shit?” bellowed Stu in rhythm with the shakes. “Why? Why?” At the same time he could still be irresistibly well mannered and charming, especially to fans, elderly people, and Andrew Oldham’s office staff. “We all used to love it whenever we saw Brian’s beautiful golden hair,” Shirley Arnold remembers. “It was like the sun coming out.”

The greatest potential trouble lay in a carnal appetite far larger than the public’s most lurid conception of Mick’s. For behind the golden fringe and lisping faux-naif charm lay complex sexual hang-ups and a strain of sadomasochism which booze and drug-fueled insecurity and paranoia could bring out in highly unpleasant ways. At one American stopover, the young girl who’d spent the night with Brian emerged from their motel cabin the next morning with a blackened eye and a face covered in bruises. A member of Eric Easton’s staff traveling with the Stones was so incensed that he gave Brian a retaliatory beating up, which cracked two of his ribs and obliged him to wear a remedial corset for some days afterward. A story was given to the press that he’d hurt himself while “practicing karate” with his bandmates beside the pool.

Witnesses from the time all agree that Mick felt no personal animosity toward Brian, but was simply concerned about the effects of his unreliability and instability on the Stones’ increasingly big business. If Mick and Oldham did “conspire” against him at this stage, it was in damage limitation for the good of the whole band. According to Bill Wyman, at the height of the 1964–1965 media tsunami, yet another young woman came forward claiming to be pregnant by Brian and threatening to sell the story to the newspapers. Oldham and Mick dealt with the complainant without reference to Brian, drafting a lawyer’s letter in which she agreed to drop her allegations for a one-off payment of £700. The money was then deducted from Brian’s wages without his knowledge.