Mick Jagger (26 page)

Chrissie now worked for Andrew Oldham at his new offices, a flat on a Marylebone mansion block called Ivor Court. Here at the center of the Rolling Stones’ world—often putting through telephone calls from the office switchboard—she continued to hear troubling rumors about Oldham’s relationship with Mick. These were hardly assuaged when the pair appeared on Ready Steady Go! performing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” as a duet and stroking each other’s hair. According to Chrissie, an actual showdown once trembled briefly on the horizon, thanks to a young male TV star who had fallen in love with Oldham and felt bitter because his affections were unrequited. “Andrew came to me and warned me that—was going to tell me that he and Mick were having an affair. That never happened and I never knew anything for certain. But they were definitely in love. I can remember the two of them holding hands.”

Among Mick’s growing store of posh male friends, two in particular would make major contributions to his cultural development—and, coincidentally, both would be witnesses to the most traumatic episode of his life. The first was Robert Fraser, the twenty-eight-year-old son of a Scottish merchant banker who had become Swinging London’s foremost art dealer thanks to prescient sponsorship of American pop artists like Andy Warhol and Jim Dine. Fraser introduced Mick to his fellow Old Etonian Christopher Gibbs, a Chelsea antiques dealer whose uncle was the colonial governor of Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe) and whose social circle included the photographer, aesthete, and friend to Royalty Cecil Beaton. Meeting Mick at a party among the littered artworks of Fraser’s Mayfair flat, Gibbs was instantly captivated. “He was very charming, very funny, and he had a way of flirting with one that had no erotic charge but wasn’t the least bit patronizing either. And I’d never imagined a pop musician who could be so sharp and well informed. Here was someone who read the New Scientist every week and who could talk intelligently about everything in it.”

Mick had already told Fraser about his engagement to Chrissie and so far unsuccessful search for a marital home. “We must find this boy a house,” Fraser told Gibbs, though the “we” proved a misnomer: it was the good-natured Gibbs who scanned estate agents’ brochures and organized car trips to likely properties, some with Chrissie along, some tête-à-tête with Mick that became as much about visiting historical or architectural landmarks en route. “He was always a delightful companion, and interested in everything. If I said we’d got to go up that hill to look at a certain church, it was okay with him. He got a lot from his father, who was a bit of an antiquarian, particularly keen on Kentish history. I get very annoyed when I read stories that I ‘educated’ Mick. No one needed to do that.”

House hunting and church visiting with Christopher Gibbs was interrupted by the Stones’ third American tour in eleven months, this one spilling over for the first time into even more shockable Canada. Barely two months after “The Last Time,” Mick and Keith also had to come up with a new song to maintain their hard-won place on the U.S. singles charts. And, unlike the last time, there was no helpful old gospel song on hand to be topped and tailed and served up as their own work.

In Los Angeles, the Stones reappeared on Shindig!, the nationally popular TV show staged by the gifted British producer Jack Good. Again, the cast featured one of their great heroes, the bluesman Howlin’ Wolf (whom the punctilious ex–public schoolboy Good was uncertain whether to address as “Mr. Wolf” or just “Howlin’ ”). During a break from rehearsals came a moment destined to stay even in Mick’s sievelike memory: Howlin’ Wolf led him into the studio audience to meet a little, gnarled old man in faded blue denims, incongruously seated among a group of children. It was Son House, the seminal Delta bluesman whose version of “Little Red Rooster” had most influenced the Stones’—and who might have been expected to resent its conversion into a chart hit by upstart white boys. But instead, he was all graciousness. “Don’t you worry ’bout copying ‘Little Red Rooster,’ ” he told Mick, “ ’cause I wasn’t the first one to do it.”

The tour had reached Clearwater, Florida, when Keith woke up with a bass-string guitar riff running through his head—not unlike the one Brian had played on “The Last Time”—together with a line from Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days,” “If I don’t get no satisfaction from the judge …” He made a tape cassette of the riff, then passed it and the guide phrase “I can’t get no satisfaction” over to Mick, at this stage visualizing no more than a makeweight album track and intending his guitar intro to be played by a horn section.

For a time, Keith’s low opinion of the track seemed justified. When the Stones stopped off in Chicago to record it at Chess Studios, the usual Chess magic refused to work: they could manage only a vaguely folksy arrangement reminiscent of the Rooftop Singers’ “Walk Right In.” Not until they reached RCA Hollywood and engineer Dave Hassinger did the production come together, with Keith’s bass riff fed through a Gibson fuzz box that made it sound less like a guitar than some diabolic pipe organ.

“Satisfaction” was released in America in June 1965, almost three months ahead of Britain. In six weeks, it jumped sixty-seven places on the Billboard chart to become the Stones’ first U.S. No. 1 single.

Before a note had been heard, the song created the greatest scandal since Elvis Presley had first curled his lip and swiveled his hips exactly a decade earlier. “Satisfaction” may once have been what young noblemen sought by fighting duels at dawn, but by 1965 its meaning had become explicitly sexual—and implicitly solitary. What else could those thrice-dreadful Rolling Stones have contrived, therefore, but a hymn to masturbation, vocalized by the one among them seemingly least in need of it? “Ah try … and Ah try … and Ah TRY … and Ah TRY!” The “vice” still believed by many to cause blindness, heart disease, and hair to sprout on the palms was being blatantly advocated, even simulated, on a million rotating vinyl discs.

Its sexual daring apart, “Satisfaction” was a pop musical landmark as significant as Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”—more so than any Beatles track yet. Over the previous couple of years, the charts had increasingly featured so-called protest songs against nuclear bombs, racial persecution in the American South, and the accelerating horrors of the Vietnam War. Whereas pop had once given young people only intoxicating noise, it now gave them a voice which, to adult ears, was becoming ever louder and more threatening. The opening riff of “Satisfaction” was its most ominous manifestation to date.

Not that any hint of morality or altruism leaked into this particular protest song. It was about nothing but the singer himself; not his failure to achieve orgasm but his frustration and ennui with a life palpably mirroring Mick’s own, “ridin’ round the world, doin’ this and signin’ that,” while the electronic media and advertising industry competed in fatuity for his attention and his money. If the title wasn’t enough, its third verse contained the first direct reference to sex in any pop song (“tryin’ to make some girl”) and the first indirect one to menstruation (“Baby, better come back, maybe next week / ’Cause you see I’m on a losin’streak.”). Pure blues fans would be outraged, of course, but in a way this was a blues song, albeit turned upside down; a cri de coeur from the luxury penthouse, a lament for having just too damned much of every-bloody-thing.

No song was ever more perfectly matched to a voice—or, rather, a mouth—from the almost girlish cooing of those four scandalous syllables at its start to the raucous “Hey! Hey! Hey! That’s what I say!” at its multiple climax. Nor was a voice ever more perfectly in synch with a body in performance as this one with the moves recently appropriated from James Brown—the tossing head, the rippling arms, the staring eyes and Travelator feet; the employment of a heavy stand microphone with a trailing lead like the mute partner in a ballet or Apache dance, grabbed around the neck and dragged down almost to the floor or tilted vertically into the air.

Andrew Oldham’s associate Tony Calder has three separate memories of cracking America at last, and for good. The first is driving on L.A.’s Pacific Coast Highway with Oldham and Mick in a red Ford Mustang, punching all five buttons of its radio in turn and getting “Satisfaction” every time.

The second is flying back to New York with the pair and being buttonholed in the first-class cabin by a young woman with some “useless information” that came as news to all of them. “You guys smoke dope, right?” she said. “That bit in the song where Mick sings ‘Hay! Hay! Hay!’ he’s really talking about grass.”

The third is walking with Oldham, Mick, and Keith along Broadway near the CBS theater—where of course The Ed Sullivan Show had now welcomed back the Stones with open arms. “As we passed this bloke on the sidewalk, he spat at Mick and Keith. ‘That’s just what we want,’ Andrew said. ‘That means we’ve really made it over here.’ Dead chuffed he was.”

ON JUNE 12, 1965, the Beatles gained total acceptance by the British establishment when each was awarded a minor decoration, the MBE (Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Three weeks later, a case at East Ham magistrates’ court in east London brought home yet again the difference between this national treasure and an ever-worsening national disgrace.

Charles Keeley, manager of the Francis petrol station in nearby Romford, testified that, late in the evening of March 18, a chauffeur-driven limousine had pulled onto his forecourt and a “shaggy-haired monster” (Bill Wyman) had got out and asked “in disgusting language” if he could use the toilet. When Mr. Keeley refused, “a group of eight or nine youths and girls” including Mick Jagger and Brian Jones had emerged from the car, and Mick had allegedly pushed him aside, saying, “We piss anywhere, man.” The others had echoed the words in “a gentle chant” with one of the females swaying in time. As a climax to this drunken scene straight out of A Clockwork Orange, Mick, Bill, and Brian were said to have urinated in a row against the forecourt wall.

In vain did the Stones’ solicitor offer a less drooglike scenario: on the night in question, they were returning from a show at Romford’s Odeon cinema, where rioting fans had necessitated a quick escape without any chance to use the backstage facilities. At the service station, Bill had made his request politely, but Mr. Keeley had gone berserk and started screaming, “Get off my forecourt!” None of the car’s passengers had drunk anything all evening but tea and Coca-Cola, and the urinating had not taken place on the floodlit forecourt but some way up a dark side road.

Once again, no credibility could be given to shaggy-haired monsters: Mick, Brian, and Bill were found guilty of “insulting behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace,” fined £5 each with 15 guineas (£15.75) costs, and reprimanded, as if it were the mid-nineteenth rather than mid-twentieth century, for “behavior not becoming young gentlemen.” An additional charge against Bill of using insulting language was not pursued.

The police had not been involved on the night of the incident and showed little interest, until Keeley and an onlooker with the suitably fragrancing name Eric Lavender threatened to bring a private prosecution if there were no official one. A judicious groveling apology to the two outraged citizens might easily have smoothed everything over; instead, Andrew Oldham and his associate Tony Calder had fed the story to Britain’s two main news agencies (each receiving a fee as freelance journalists, according to Calder) with the result that police action had to follow.

However, Oldham’s creation of an anti-Beatle Antichrist demanded one major tweak to the facts. The only person in the group actually taken short had been Bill and the only one to provoke the garage manager (with mock-hysteric cries of “Get off my foreskin!”) had been Brian. The notion of supercautious Mick elbowing someone aside and saying “We piss anywhere” was as far-fetched as that of superfastidious Mick publicly unzipping and doing it against a wall. Yet somewhere between Messrs. Keely and Lavender’s complaint and the formal summons, Oldham managed, in his own words, to “[transfer] the credit as piss-artist from the bass line to the lead vocalist.”

Oldham himself at the time would have been a far more unwelcome visitor to any garage forecourt. As Britain’s answer to Phil Spector—that is, combining the auras of a recording genius and a gangster—Oldham now employed a permanent bodyguard to drive him around in his white American Lincoln Continental, shield him from the crush at the Stones’ concerts, and wreak summary vengeance on anyone who aroused his displeasure. The bodyguard in question was a blond young Cockney named Reg King, known as “Reg the Butcher” for an alleged prowess with flick knives and razors (though his offensive weapon of choice was actually a walking stick). What was known as “that side of Andrew” worried friends like John Dunbar. “If another driver even cut across them in traffic,” Dunbar recalls, “Reg would take off after him.”

On one level, Oldham seemed quite happy to be closer to his “boys” than any other manager ever had been or would be; the undisputed sixth Stone who went everywhere with them, roomed, ate, got drunk and laid with them, bore the insults hurled at them, and (with or without Reg the Butcher’s help) joined in the physical confrontations that often followed. On the road, he had the same fuck-’em-all attitude that Keith did and Mick so conspicuously didn’t: when the Stones visited Ireland in January 1965, Oldham and Keith each bought a handgun and shoulder holster which they wore under their jackets on the flight home and through UK Immigration.

At the same time the only-just ex–“teenage tycoon-shit” regarded himself as the star and the Stones, along with a growing roster of other acts and projects, as mere pawns in the heady game he was playing with the music business, the media, and the public. To be sure, in his egotism, arrogance, grandiosity, self-indulgence, and lack of self-control, he was far more like a modern rock star than any of them, Mick especially.

His excesses and eccentricities were becoming the stuff of legend: how on visits to Los Angeles he kept two limos on standby around the clock … how he’d once got the Stones out of trouble in a British roadside greasy spoon full of threatening lorry drivers by having a fried egg served to every customer, so the truculent truckers had no choice but to smile and say thank you … how on one day he might impulsively give an expensive suede jacket he was wearing to a young employee, and on the next personally trash the office of another employee he wanted to be rid of … how he’d bought a whole-page ad in the NME to praise Phil Spector’s latest production, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” by the Righteous Brothers, despite having had no financial interest in promoting it … how the only way he could come down from his permanent high on drink, pills, and success was to disappear to a north London clinic and be put to sleep for a couple of days … how he’d taken against an American producer offering lucrative new business because at lunch the man cut his bread roll with a knife.