Authors: Philip Norman
Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practice at Newlands, either in his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe “creasing up” with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training program. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practice session elsewhere, Joe called out, “Michael … don’t forget your weight training.” Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? “We all told him it made no difference,” Dick Taylor remembers. “But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.”
Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to the blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of “La Bamba,” whose sixteen-year-old singer-composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Spanish nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.
The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim, and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called “race” music—i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as “the father of the Chicago Blues” for tracks like “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and his theme song, “Rollin’ Stone.” His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.
In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis–born Charles Edward Anderson, aka Chuck Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat “King” Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterward, Berry made an effortless crossover from race music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as “Johnny B. Goode,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Memphis, Tennessee” that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.
After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered—if they ever materialized at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American stamps began arriving at Newlands. Some of the covers had been badly chewed up in transit and not all the music lived up to his expectations. But the albums in themselves were splendiferous status symbols. He took to carrying around three or four at once tucked under one arm, a fashion accessory as much as his gold-flecked jacket and moccasins. Alan Dow, who’d rejected him as a vocalist for Danny Rogers and the Realms, witnessed one such almost regal progress across the school playground.
In the summer of 1961, he sat his A-level exams, passing in English and history but, surprisingly, failing in French. He considered becoming a schoolteacher in his father’s—and grandfather’s—footsteps, and toyed with the idea of journalism and (unmentionably to his parents) disc-jockeying on Radio Luxembourg. Leafing through the pop music papers one week, he spotted an advertisement by a London record producer named Joe Meek, inviting would-be deejays to submit audition tapes. He clipped the ad and kept it, but—perhaps fortunately—didn’t follow it up. Meek later produced several British pop classics, all from his small north London flat, but was notorious for trying to seduce the prettier young men who crossed his path.
Instead, somewhat against expectations, Mike Jagger joined the 2 percent of Britain’s school leavers in that era who went on to university. Despite those clashes over uniform, his headmaster, Lofty Hudson, decided he was worthy of the privilege and, in December 1960, well before he had sat his A-levels, supplied a character reference putting the best possible gloss on his academic record. “Jagger is a lad of good general character,” it read in part, “although he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something. His interests are wide. He has been a member of several School Societies and is prominent in Games, being Secretary of our Basketball Club, a member of our First Cricket Eleven and he plays Rugby Football for his House. Out of school he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing, Music and is a member of the Local Historical Association … Jagger’s development now fully justifies me in recommending him for a Degree course and I hope you will be able to accept him.”
Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. “I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,” he would remember. “Economics seemed about halfway in between.”
At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus on Houghton Street, off Kingsway. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least, he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.
For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House—that would have been too perfect—but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed “the Village on the Heath” because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.
It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.
A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.
It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicized seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Belgian Congo’s Sharpeville Massacre and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument, his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. “That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,” Isaacson says. “I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.”
Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as “obviously extremely bright” and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke “like a nice middle-class boy … The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, ‘Jagger … if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!’ ”
Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties—though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans, and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, “bistros,” and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen, and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts, and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings, and radically short skirts.
Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theaters like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mold-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett, and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds—including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones, and Dartford’s Peter Blake—were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the U.S. Army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that race music was dead and buried.
Such rock idols as Britain had produced—Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard—had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was “Trad,” a homogenized version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s “I Love You, Samantha” and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “March of the Siamese Children.” The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.
In short, the danger seemed to have passed.
BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.