Mick Jagger (47 page)

Yet despite this triumph on the transatlantic album charts, and their determined public show of unity, the Stones had internal problems by now far worse than just Brian Jones. Mick’s apparent switch of focus to film acting, and the awkwardness with Keith over his sex scenes with Anita, seemed to have halted the Jagger-Richard partnership in its tracks. During the seven months since their last performance together (a surprise appearance at the NME’s annual Pollwinners’ Concert), Bill and Charlie had begun to wonder if they still were a band at all. In the continuing absence of any definite tour plans, something was urgently needed to restore a sense of unity and, especially, make Mick and Keith best mates again.

The answer came from Performance’s producer, Sandy Lieberson, in his other role as film and television agent for the whole band. Lieberson suggested they should make a one-hour TV Christmas special, thereby in one stroke reaching as many fans as they would by months on the road. The idea had instant appeal to Mick because the previous Christmas the Beatles had appeared in just such a special, Magical Mystery Tour, which turned out to be the most resounding flop of their career. True, the Stones would be accused of following the Beatles yet again, but this could be a first chance to trump them.

Rather than seek finance from the BBC or one of the commercial companies and be subject to interference or censorship, the Stones themselves put up £50,000 for an independent production which could then be syndicated worldwide. To direct, Mick approached Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whom he had known since the Ready Steady Go! days and who’d shot the riveting “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” promo (as well as sequences for the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” and “Revolution”). Together they searched for a theme from the same well of 1950s nostalgia as motor-coach mystery tours. “I kept doodling circles on a notepad,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “Then it suddenly came to me, ‘The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus.’ I called Mick and said just those seven words, and he got it immediately.”

The idea was as simple and contained as Magical Mystery Tour’s had been vague and picaresque. The Stones would perform in the setting of a circus big top which, Mick specified, should not be “glamorous Ringling Barnum & Bailey but like some tatty little European circus.” Their supporting cast would be other rock acts who were friends or whom they admired, interspersed with circus turns of amusing kitschness. Getting the other musical big names, Lindsay-Hogg remembers, was the easiest part. “Mick just took out his little address book and called people up. There were no managers or agents involved. They were a community. It made me think of the time in France, when all the Impressionist painters were still friends, before they became corrupted by fame and money.”

In this fraternal spirit, one of Mick’s first calls was to Pete Townshend of the Who, the band that had most publicly supported Keith and himself after the Redlands bust. Though the Stones had never seemed much interested in fostering young talent, it was also decided to give a spot to an up-and-coming band. The newly formed Led Zeppelin were rejected in favor of Jethro Tull, wacky folk rockers whose lead singer-flautist, Ian Anderson—sporting hair longer and wilder than any Stone’s had ever been—liked to perform standing on one leg like a stork. At Keith’s insistence, a spot was reserved for the American bluesman with the most un-American of names, Taj Mahal. To lighten the male atmosphere—and reintroduce another voice long absent from the pop scene—Marianne was also invited to take part.

Another Lindsay-Hogg idea was to feature a one-night-only supergroup made up of stars from other bands in the fashion then just starting. As vocalist he thought of Stevie Winwood and Paul McCartney, but decided the idea would most appeal to John Lennon, especially in view of Lennon’s distance from the other Beatles since becoming involved with Yoko Ono. Also in the lineup were Eric Clapton, drummer Mitch Mitchell from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, and Keith on bass guitar, with the Israeli violin virtuoso Ivry Gitlis as a surprise walk-on. Their name—a Lennonesque reference to the grubby raincoats, or mackintoshes, associated with sexual perverts—was the Dirty Mac.

Rehearsals and filming took just two days, December 10 and 11, on a scaled-down circus set at London’s Intertel Studios. To maintain continuity and add a surrealistic touch, the audience wore bright yellow, blue, or orange ponchos and floppy-brimmed felt hats. The rock sets were punctuated by clowns, acrobats, a fire-eater, and a rather elderly male-and-female trapeze act. There was also to have been a pair of boxing kangaroos, but at the last moment Yoko Ono came to Lindsay-Hogg and told him that if the kangaroos appeared, Lennon wouldn’t. Otherwise, the director suffered little interference. “Allen Klein was hardly in evidence at all,” he remembers. “If I needed clearance on anything, which usually meant spending more money, I just asked Mick.” Shooting began around noon on December 11, with a grand procession of the cast into the circus ring to the strains of Fucˇík’s “Entry of the Gladiators.” Mick was ringmaster (a role originally intended for Brigitte Bardot) in scarlet tailcoat and tipped-back top hat, using his most irony-laden Cockney to announce “sights and sounds and marvels to delight your eyes and ears.” Around him the others Stones in Beggars Banquet–y fancy dress mimed playing trumpets and tubas like a second, less amiable Sgt. Pepper band. Brian stood out gorgeously in a floor-length blue-and-gold caftan, but his face looked blank and prematurely aged and his once-gleaming eighteen-carat hair was lank and grubby.

Mick had the only real speaking part, a bantering exchange with John Lennon as “Michael” and “Winston” in the schmaltzy accents of American chat-show hosts. All four of the other Stones took a turn at introducing the acts, though when the film was eventually released, both Brian’s and Bill’s contributions had been cut. Under the band’s internal class system, neither Bill’s new Swedish girlfriend, Astrid Lundström, nor Shirley Watts was invited to join the audience.

First onstage were Jethro Tull, followed by the Who with a mini-opera entitled “A Quick One (While He’s Away)” whose references to having sex with young girls troubled 1968 ears no more than Mick’s “Stray Cat Blues.” Taj Mahal had been filmed on the previous day, so next in the running order, announced by a reverent-looking Charlie, was “the lovely Miss Marianne Faithfull.” Seated alone in the sawdust ring, Marianne sang “Something Better,” a Goffin-Mann ballad somewhat like “As Tears Go By,” but with plangent echoes of what had befallen since (“It is absurd to live in a cage / You know there’s got to be something better”). Amid the jokey glitter, she was an interlude of loveliness, classiness, and pent-up sadness, as out of place in her elegant purple gown as an amethyst in a tub of popcorn.

By the time John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and bass-playing Keith were ready for their one-off appearance as the Dirty Mac, it was past 10 P.M. As Lennon sang his apocalyptic “Yer Blues” from the Beatles’ White Album, Michael Lindsay-Hogg noticed a black sack to one side of the stage. When the song ended, Yoko emerged from the sack, joined Lennon at the microphone, and, with his encouragement, began to shriek and ululate just as Ivry Gitlis appeared for the scheduled violin recital. Gitlis played an accompaniment to this “singing” with as much good grace as he could muster, and Clapton and Keith followed suit. The sequence was later titled “Whole Lotta Yoko” as if it had been intended all along. Lennon’s rock-star pals thus seemed to be saying that, whatever brickbats others might throw, his new love and creative partnership was fine with them.

The French film cameras Lindsay-Hogg was using began to give trouble and, what with one thing and another, weren’t ready for the Stones’ seven-song finale until almost 2 A.M. “Keith was in a thoroughly bad temper by that time,” the director recalls. “The crew had been working for twelve hours, the audience were tired … It was going to be up to Mick to hold everything together.”

The set featured the pick of Beggars Banquet, “Sympathy for the Devil,” “Parachute Woman,” “No Expectations,” and “Salt of the Earth,” plus “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the just-written “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and an old favorite, “Route 66.” For this return to the spotlight after so long, Mick chose a surprisingly modest outfit of orange hipsters and a skimpy scarlet T-shirt that crept above his navel, plus the full maquillage he had worn in Performance. (Even Keith had by now succumbed to the habit, brooding over his guitar with eyes as mascara-thick as some Hollywood silent-movie vamp’s.) Thanks to Mick’s perfectionism and Lindsay-Hogg’s problematic cameras, each song needed several retakes. It took until almost 4 A.M. to get four in the can, among them what would be Brian’s last-ever solo with the band, playing slide guitar just as he had on his first-ever one.

“We still had ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ to do—the moment everybody had been looking forward to,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “We did two takes, but one wasn’t right for the cameraman and the other wasn’t right for the band. By that time, everyone was totally exhausted. Between four-thirty and five, I had a meeting with Mick and Sandy Lieberson, and we discussed breaking there and coming back to finish up the next evening. But we decided it would be too expensive to keep the set in place, and the next evening people would still be tired. So Mick went back to the Stones and told them, ‘We’ve got to do it one more time, and it’s got to be right.’ ”

Despite his exhaustion, he gave his diabolic Bayeux Tapestry the most extraordinary interpretation it had ever had, or would have, galvanizing his sleepy audience awake in their colored ponchos, daring the temperamental cameras to miss so much as a millisecond, focusing even Brian’s beclouded features into a trance of ecstatic approval. By the end, the “mayne of wealth and taste” had turned into a sacrificial victim, kneeling low before the camera as if for the headman’s ax, then tugging off his red T-shirt to reveal that skinny yet well-muscled physique, tattooed across chest and biceps with black magical faces and designs. “It was the first time I realized the sheer force of Mick’s will when he wanted something to happen,” Lindsay-Hogg says. “He just wouldn’t be denied.”

As well as yielding matchless performance footage, the Rock ’n’ Roll Circus had achieved its object of stabilizing Mick and Keith’s relationship. Directly afterward, they set off with Anita, Marianne, and Nicholas for an extended holiday in Brazil, which Mick had visited with Marianne in the flush of first love a year earlier. They traveled from Lisbon to Rio on a cruise liner whose largely British passengers were ocean voyagers of the old school, playing deck quoits and shuffleboard and dressing for dinner. No one apart from the younger crew members recognized them, and the archaic daily routine of organized games and endless meals proved oddly relaxing.

They spent three weeks traveling around Brazil incognito and seldom recognized, staying in conditions far more spartan than they were accustomed to and smoking industrial amounts of maconha, the local grass. The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Mato Grosso, the country’s western prairie region, where gauchos herded cattle like movie cowboys—a sight that spurred Jagger-Richard’s songwriting into action again. The plan had also been to witness voodoo rites, or macumba, but at the one ceremony they stumbled on, with Nicholas in tow, the locals were not welcoming. Nicholas would remember it as the one time when the grown-ups’ being stoned meant having actual stones thrown at them.

But if the boys were all serene again, Marianne still felt “jangled” by the rumors about Mick and Anita that had reached her from the Performance set as well as by her miscarriage. Suffering from a bad throat and elaborately shielded from the sun in “hats with veils, long dresses that trailed on the ground and high red boots,” she struggled around after the others, feeling like “an apparition with a persistent cough.” As though seeking solace for little lost Corrina, Mick was even more fatherly than usual to Nicholas, carrying him uncomplainingly when he was tired, ensuring he always wore sandals on the beach in case of sharp stones.

Yet Marianne could never banish a suspicion that whatever flame had flared up during Performance wasn’t yet extinguished, and Mick was still “continually whispering come-ons into Anita’s ear.” In fact, despite the passionate intimacy they had recently shared before the camera, Anita was back to treating him with her old indifference bordering on contempt. Indeed, she showed herself to be Keith’s “one-guy girl” (though not in a way to give Marianne much comfort) by returning from the holiday pregnant again.

Surprisingly, that most uncool of sea voyages to Rio would leave its watermark on Rolling Stones history. Among Mick and Keith’s fellow passengers were a middle-aged British couple who realized the pair were celebrities of some kind and quizzed them continually during the ten days afloat, but without ever figuring out who they were or what they did for a living. “Go on,” the couple used to plead, unavailingly, “give us a clue … just a glimmer.”

In memory of those flummoxed shipmates, Mick christened Keith and himself “the Glimmer Twins”—a neat enough paradox, considering their strobe-lit lives, but also tacit acknowledgment of being all but joined at the hip.

THROUGHOUT POP MUSIC history, most artists who decided to fire a powerful manager and run their own career have landed themselves in the most almighty mess. Lawsuits from their vengeful former protector have crippled them financially for years to come, while the attempt to run their own career has only run it into the ground. Such stories traditionally end with a humiliating admission of defeat and hasty rehire of conventional management to pick up the pieces. The most famous exception the music industry has seen over six decades was Mick’s jettisoning of Allen Klein and skillful handling of a resultant financial crisis which made the Beatles’ cash troubles look petty by comparison. Yet even for him the victory was not total.

In so many ways, the stocky New Yorker with his greasy cowlick and malodorous pipe had been just what the Stones needed. The $1.25 million advance Klein bludgeoned out of Decca in 1965 had put them into a financial league far above any other British rock band, the Beatles included. It also had transformed the economics of an industry in which record companies were accustomed to calling the shots and even the most celebrated performers accepted miserly royalty rates and dubious accounting practices simply for the honor and glory of being associated with them. From then on, power moved from the labels to the artists.