Mick Jagger (43 page)

All these shifting poses and evasions faded into irrelevance in the studio, when Keith provided a rampaging acoustic intro guitar that opened up the most explicit vista of shop windows being smashed and cars torched. The track’s title alone was incendiary enough, but world events through that Summer of Non-Love would give it an infamy akin to Nero’s lyre recital as Rome burned.

When the final mix was completed in May, Paris’s street battles had reached such a pitch that it couldn’t be released as a UK single lest this gratuitous further incitement should carry across the Channel like the noise of big guns in World War I. Yet for Britain’s Underground, the very existence of a Stones track called “Street Fighting Man,” even with its residual element of fence-sitting man, was propaganda beyond price. Tariq Ali planned a second march on Grosvenor Square for October 27 and, to swell recruitment, asked permission to print the lyrics in his magazine, Black Dwarf. The same issue carried an article about Marx’s cofounder of communism, Friedrich Engels, whose best-known maxim was “an ounce of action is worth a ton of thought.” Black Dwarf’s cover line read “MICK JAGGER AND FRED ENGELS ON STREET FIGHTING.”

In any case, something more potentially significant than a mere pop record was to turn Mick into a poster boy for France’s new revolutionaries. Late in May, the great film director Jean-Luc Godard, then aged thirty-seven, asked the Stones to appear in an English production, half documentary, half feature, he was about to begin shooting in London. Mick had revered Godard since striped-scarf student days at LSE, and instantly jumped at the chance even though baffled, as all the rest of the band were, by the director’s stated aim “to destroy the idea of Culture [because] Culture is an alibi of Imperialism.” At the beginning of June, Godard spent several days at Olympic Studios with a film crew, shooting the evolution of a new song for the album in progress, from first rehearsal to finished track.

This third, and most notorious, of Mick’s roles on record in as many months had a long history among the musicians who were still his greatest heroes. Blues had always been known as “the devil’s music” and, indeed, rather reveled in its identification with evil eyes and cloven hooves. The immortal Robert Johnson reputedly owed his talent to a pact with Satan and, as if in corroboration, went on to write “Me and the Devil Blues” (including the line “I’m gonna beat my woman till I get satisfied”).

But in fact the idea had come to Mick after reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita, another in the library of esoteric literature he had acquired through Marianne. One of the few satirists to flourish in Stalin’s Russia, Bulgakov depicts the devil as a sophisticated, even sensitive figure, visiting Moscow in the 1930s and being appalled by its stifling bureaucracy and philistinism. The fantasy also has a sequence recreating what Christians regard as Satan’s ultimate triumph, Pontius Pilate’s weak-kneed refusal to save Jesus from the cross. Its climax is a “Spring Ball” given by the devil, at which “all the dark celebrities of history” pour out of hell’s open gates.

Mick’s lyric, originally titled “The Devil Is My Name,” borrowed Bulgakov’s device of having Satan introduce himself with silky urbanity as “a man of wealth and taste,” then went on to review all the human catastrophe he had engineered down the centuries, from Pilate’s refusal to reprieve Christ through the Bolsheviks’ murder of the Russian royal family (“Anastasia screamed in vain”) to Nazism, John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and the modern age, where “every cop is a criminal and all the sinners saints.” With an economy that more serious versifiers might have envied, the devil’s orchestration of Hitler’s mechanized onslaught and the Holocaust was compressed into: “Rode a tank / Held a general’s rank / While the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank.”

What he had written was one of the tiny number of epic pop lyrics, worthy to rank alongside Lennon’s “A Day in the Life” and Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue.” But at the time he felt far from confident about taking such a step. “I knew it was a good song,” he would recall. “It had its poetic beginning and then it had historical references and then philosophical jottings and so on … It’s all very well to write that in verse but to make it into a pop song is something different. Especially in England—you’re skewered on the altar of pop culture if you become pretentious.”

As the track neared completion under its new title, “Sympathy for the Devil,” with Jean-Luc Godard still filming, a new triumph for the forces of darkness needed to be chalked up. John F. Kennedy’s younger brother Robert, now himself a presidential candidate, was assassinated in a kitchen corridor of the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles, after a midnight speech which had seemed to set him on course for the White House. Mick accordingly updated the line “killed Kennedy” to “killed the Kennedys.” On the final night of shooting, the hot film lights set the studio’s ceiling ablaze and the fire brigade had to be called while producer Jimmy Miller, helped by Bill Wyman, scrambled to rescue the precious tapes. Nor would it be the last time that playing the song seemed to have unpredictable and unpleasant results.

Godard’s film turned out to be an unintelligible Marxist-Maoist rant in which the great auteur seemed to forget his own maxim that “cinema is the truth twenty-four times per second.” There were baffling scenes of American-accented Black Power figures brandishing firearms in what was all too obviously a south London scrap yard, hostages in a newspaper shop being humiliated by children, and—a recurrent motif—young women enduring highly unpleasant acts of persecution and violence. A succession of voice-overs read from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, droned far-left dogma, irrelevantly pastiched American detective fiction, or delivered weighty aphorisms such as “Orgasm is the only moment when you can’t cheat life.”

After viewing the film in rough cut, the producers realized their only hope of putting bums on cinema seats. The documentary scenes of the Stones at Olympic Studios were given equal prominence to the “fictitious” ones and Godard’s title. One Plus One was changed to that of the track they were recording. Whereas Godard had intended to show the “Sympathy for the Devil” as a work still in progress, its finished version in soundtrack now rounded off the film. Godard himself had no idea how drastically his work had been reedited until its premiere at the London Film Festival four months later. He was so enraged that he threw a punch at one of the producers in the cinema foyer.

The Stones’ sequences, however—Godard evidently believing them to be a political statement needing no elucidation—were shot in a style as simple and straightforward as the rest of the filmy was tricksy, without voice-overs or arty cuts and employing long stretches of real time. Sympathy for the Devil the movie thus has enduring fascination as a window on the band in its most turbulent era and the creation of Mick’s only masterpiece through the most presumptuous of all his masquerades.

Here he is dressed in a white smock with matching trousers, seated among the studio’s hardboard room dividers and dirty teacups—for Olympic resembles nothing so much as a low-grade government office—playing the song over for Keith to his own, more than adequate guitar accompaniment. He originally intended “a sort of Bob Dylan feel,” and one early version has a churchy organ motif by session musician Nicky Hopkins. Then Keith suggests playing it to a souped-up samba beat, adding an African drummer, Rocky Dijon. Mick, whose childhood mimic’s repertoire always featured lots of animal noises, goes off to practice screeching like a parrot for the intro, to suggest witch doctors and voodoo. There are unkindly lingering shots of Brian Jones, an isolated figure whose part in the song looks minimal, even though off camera he is still bedeviling Mick and Keith’s every effort to go straight. Indeed, the FBI hardly needed Acid King David Snyderman to ensure that the Stones never reentered America, but could simply have left it to Brian. On March 20, he had been questioned by police after an unsuccessful suicide attempt by Linda Keith at his flat while he was out. On May 21, Scotland Yard’s drugs squad had busted him again, this time allegedly finding forty-four grains of cannabis inside a ball of brown wall. He was currently on £2,000 bail and waiting trial at Inner London Sessions on that charge plus a further one of breaching his probation order of the previous December.

Shot from behind in his hardboard booth, the onetime instrumental virtuoso merely strums a guitar—often appears only to pretend to strum it. His hair is oddly dark, as if its much-shampooed blondness has drained away along with his golden talent. The only time he’s seen leaving his gimcrack cell is to join an improvised vocal group, including both his ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and his current one, Suki Poitier, for the witch-coven chorus of “woo-woo, woo-woo!” toward the end.

In the course of numerous takes, Mick’s voice assumes the character it will have forever afterward. By now, the Deep South impersonation has become so extreme as to be almost unrecognizable as such, but instead seems the unique dialect of Planet Jagger. Its low is almost Uriah Heep–ishly soft and sibilant: “Pleeze ’lau me to interdooce mahself … Ah’m a ma-yne of wealth and tay-yeast …” Its high is a glottal bellow that occasionally creates an entirely new vowel sound: “Pleezed to meechu … hope you guess mah NOERME!”

Sympathy for the Devil leaves no doubt as to who is now running the whole diabolic show, and includes a moment that will be repeated many times over the next forty years in hotel suites, dressing rooms, and backstage enclosures across the world. A member of the support staff deferentially sidles up to Mick and murmurs a question in his ear: is it okay if this happens … is he cool with so-and-so doing such and such? He considers for a moment, then nods.

Photographs

Mick at Dartford Grammar School; already cooler than any of his classmates and a magnet to girls. © Alan Gibson/Rex Features

The India Rubber Boy, dressed for cricket; it would remain a lifelong passion. © Times Newspapers/Rex Features

Mick’s parents, Joe and Eva. How could such nice, normal people have produced a rock superstar? © LFI/Photoshot

The unknown Stones, just after Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton took them over, sitting in the road outside Mick, Keith, and Brian’s squalid flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea. The photographer was under instructions to make them look “nasty.” © Philip Townsend/Camera Press

Onstage at Soho’s Studio 51 club. © Philip Townsend/Camera Press

Backstage photo with Mick just getting a look-in. In those days, many regarded Brian as the band’s star. © Allstar

Posing in the matching houndstooth-check jackets they wore for their first UK TV appearance. Clean-cut as they look now, the studio switchboard was jammed with complaints. © Philip Townsend/Camera Press

Black-leather-clad poster boys for Beat magazine. Brian still looks like their leader. © Image courtesy of The Advertising Archives

Mick and Keith in early studio days with Andrew Oldham and their friend and supporter Gene Pitney, one of the first to cover a Jagger-Richards song. © Philip Townsend/Camera Press

Mick and Chrissie Shrimpton at the Shrimpton family farm after announcing their engagement. Courtesy of Chrissie Messenger

Mick and Marianne arrive in Australia in July 1969 for the filming of Ned Kelly. In a few hours, Marianne will try to kill herself. © Zuma Press/Eyevine

Hair-netted Mick being prepped for a TV appearance. © Terry O’Neill/Rex Features

Mick in the era when every rock star’s home resembled a Moroccan souk. © Cecil Beaton/Camera Press

Stones-mania USA. One American fan described them as “so ugly, they’re attractive.” © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Mick chats to Cathy McGowan on the set of Ready, Steady Go!, the TV show that gave him his best early (and surly) exposure. © Dezo Hoffman/Rex Features

Keith with Anita Pallenberg, the bewitching—some said, witching—model and actress who started out with Brian and later made love to Mick on the cinema screen. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Manacled Mick en route to Brixton Prison after his conviction. © Keystone USA/Eyevine

Robert Fraser, the art dealer who was busted along with Mick and Keith—but did not have their get-out-of-jail card. © Topfoto

Keith with “Acid King David” Snyderman on the beach at West Wittering, shortly before Snyderman shopped him and Mick to the Sussex police. © Michael Cooper/Raj Prem Collection

Mick and Michèle Breton in the pot-in-the-bath scene from Performance. The film’s horrified distributor complained that “even the bathwater is dirty.” © Goodtimes Entertainment/Cinetext/Allstar

The execution scene from Ned Kelly (which the film critics also slaughtered). © SNAP/Rex Features

Mick in the Performance–Rock ’n’ Roll Circus era. © Keystone Pictures USA/Alamy

The Stones–Beatles entente lasted throughout the sixties. Here John Lennon and Yoko Ono appear as a support act in the Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus—a virtuoso Jagger appearance destined not to be seen for decades afterward. © David Magnus/Rex Features

Publicity shot for Beggars Banquet, the album that restored the Stones’ reputation after Mick’s misguided detour into psychedelia with Their Satanic Majesties Request. © Michael Cooper/JBA/Camera Press

After Brian Jones’s mysterious death in 1969, Mick introduces the band’s new lead guitarist, the cherubic (but not for long) Mick Taylor. © Alan Messer/Rex Features

One of the career highs Mick prefers not to recognize: making 250,000 people at the Brian Jones memorial concert shut up and listen to poetry. © C. Walter/Photofeatures/Retna/Photoshot

Hell’s Angels run amok at the ghastly Altamont festival, for which Mick took much of the blame. In fact, he behaved with great courage. © 20th Century Fox/Michael Ochs Archives/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Bianca on the road with Mick. She hated and feared his entourage, calling it “the Nazi state.” ©Retna UK/Photoshot

Mick with Lou Reed and David Bowie. His relationship with Bowie provoked endless gossip. © Mick Rock/Retna/Photoshot

Mick marries Bianca in Saint-Tropez. He said he never wanted it to be “a circus.” © Keystone USA/Eyevine