Mick Jagger (86 page)

Since 1989, the Rolling Stones have earned an estimated £2 billion gross from records, song rights, merchandising, touring, and sponsorship, while the Lapping Tongue brand appears on around fifty products, including a range of lingerie by Agent Provocateur. Mick’s mouth, the New Yorker recently noted, is “a brand as recognizable on the corporate landscape as McDonald’s golden arches.” Over the same period, Jagger-Richard’s songs are calculated to have earned in excess of $56 million, a significant tranche of this from the computer industry. Microsoft paid $4 million to use “Start Me Up” to launch its Windows 95 software, and Apple, an undisclosed but hardly lesser sum for “She’s a Rainbow” to market colored Macs.

All of this flows into a nest of companies, based in Holland for its advantageous tax rules, with low-key names like Promopub, Promotone, and Musidor at the top, rather like some blue-chip law firm with a partnership comprising Sir Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Ronnie. America’s Fortune magazine recently tried to discover if every partner received an equal share, but, after extensive quizzing of their financial advisers, had to report that “no one will go there.”

On the London Sunday Times 2011 Rich List, Sir Mick stood at number eight in the entertainers category with an estimated £190 million, just behind Elton John and just ahead of Sting. Yet Stargroves, his house on Mustique, is available for rent during part of each year. According to the rental agent, the place is left just as it was during his occupancy, with family pictures and possessions still on view. Sir Mick personally vets each application and automatically excludes rock stars because of the mess they make.

Under his personal trainer, the famous Norwegian Torje Eike, he maintains as strenous a fitness regimen as ever, with daily running, swimming, cycling, gym work, yoga, and Pilates. He drinks a great deal less than formerly, and exercises those once omnivorous lips on a sensible diet of whole-grain bread, rice, beans, pasta, chicken, and fish. He also takes numerous supplements, vitamins A, C, D, and E as well as B complexes, cod liver oil, ginseng, and ginkgo biloba. In an age when even celebrity chefs beat a path to the plastic surgeon’s door, he rather impressively sticks to the face he was born with, relying instead on antiaging creams and moisturizers—including the £350-per-bottle Crème de la Mer—to soften the Mount Rushmore gullies and crevasses. In other words, the show goes on.

Rumors about a new Rolling Stones tour began circulating in 2010 and strengthened the following year when U2 broke A Bigger Bang’s $558 million record. In 2011, there was talk of the Stones headlining at the Glastonbury Festival, the last major gap in their CV (although Chris Jagger has appeared on a fringe stage there with his band Atcha, loyally cheered on by nieces Elizabeth and Georgia May and nephew James, but almost no one else). Media opinion was that with the Stones’ fiftieth anniversary coming in 2012, Sir Mick would have to end his quarrel with “the Human Riff”—or should that now be “Rift”?—over Life and take the Stones out for a final farewell withdrawal from the biggest cash point in the universe.

Then it emerged that Sir Mick put together another breakaway band, named SuperHeavy, and comprising his friend Dave Stewart, the Bollywood composer-producer A. R. Rahman, Bob Marley’s son Damian, and the serendipitously named chanteuse Joss Stone. For two years past, in conditions of MI5-like secrecy, they had been working on a debut album with a no-expenses-spared rehearsal and recording schedule in L.A., Jamaica, Greece, Italy, India, and Miami, and aboard Microsoft chief Paul Allen’s mega-yacht. It was a project, or journey, as people say nowadays, of possibly even greater symbolism for Sir Mick than his earlier solo albums. To preview SuperHeavy, he chose the Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine for its young audience on the borderline of music and fashion. Yet even here, his young female interviewer reported that getting anything quotable out of him was “like trying to grasp mercury.”

SuperHeavy’s eponymous debut album and a single, “Miracle Worker,” appeared in September 2011, two months before a rerelease of the Stones’ 1978 Some Girls album. The single, said the Guardian, was “not all that bad—pop-reggae brightened by an agreeably preposterous Jagger performance, so OTT you can hear the spittle flying from his lips … To his credit, Jagger doesn’t entirely dominate the proceedings, although—as when he provided backing vocals on Carly Simon’s ‘You’re So Vain’—you’re somehow always very aware Mick Jagger is in the room.”

As July 2012 approached—the fiftieth anniversary of the first-ever Rolling Stones gig, at Soho’s Marquee club—it was revealed that Sir Mick and Keith had gotten together in New York and were on speaking terms again. Sir Mick conceded that Keith might have felt left out of running the band during the eighties and, if so, it had been “a pity.” Whether Keith in turn apologized for the todger reference was not recorded.

Speculation about a commemorative tour or show was heightened still further after Keith invited Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor to a jam session, seemingly prefiguring some onstage reunion of all surviving Stones past and present. To buy more time, the official anniversary date was set for January 2013, marking Charlie Watts’s final, reluctant absorption into the lineup. But Sir Mick continued to keep his lips firmly sealed and to enforce the same order on the band’s second rank. When Ronnie Wood innocently observed in earshot of a journalist that a reunion gig might be nice, he was hauled up before the CO and ordered to write a letter of apology to Keith and Charlie. As it was, the July 12 anniversary was marked by a brief photo op with the band, posing against a mock-up of the old Marquee facade.

Nowadays, it is a rare interviewer whose memory stretches even halfway back through Sir Mick’s career. In a recent Q & A with his old ally The Times, he was asked whether the fiftieth anniversary tempted him to write an autobiography as Keith had done. The interviewer had no idea that he’d already had a shot at it almost thirty years earlier, and he himself thought it not worth mentioning. His answer headlined the page: “I DON’T WANT TO RUMMAGE THROUGH MY PAST.”

In fact, he had recently announced yet another return to the cinema screen which, indirectly, would revisit his past’s most lurid and terrifying episode. He was both to produce and star in a film called Tabloid, portraying a media mogul based on Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sunday tabloid News of the World which in 1967—before Murdoch acquired it—had set out to destroy him. The pre-Murdoch News of the World had, of course, been deeply implicated in the establishment dirty tricks that led to Sir Mick’s trial, public pillorying, and imprisonment, and so nearly broke a butterfly on a wheel. Now the paper was gone, shut down by Murdoch in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, and the indestructible “butterfly” was to morph into a tabloid tycoon. The wheel had come full circle indeed.

WE STARTED THIS rummage through his past at the BAFTA awards in 2009. Let us end it with his appearance at the 2011 Grammy Awards, watched by new sensations like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, young enough to be his grandchildren.

His performance was a tribute to Solomon Burke, the four-hundred-pound bluesman who had recently died after losing all mobility (but continuing to sing right to the very end, seated on a throne). In 2002, Burke had passed on the mantle of blues sovereignty to Sir Mick by wrapping him in a cloak; now Mick emerged from a rather smaller one to sing Burke’s classic “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” that long-ago show opener for the wild young Stones of suburban Surrey.

In his sixty-eighth year, the turquoise-jacketed torso was still as slight and hyperactive as ever, the hair as modishly cut and unrelievedly brown, the stomach as awesomely flat, the eyes as starey and the lips as trumpety, the voice still beamed straight from Planet Jagger: “Ever-baw-deah … wawnts some-baw-deah … someone to lerve … someone to ke-ass …” Another innocent vowel was murdered as he stood before the rapturous kindergarten, stabbing a forefinger by turns at the front stalls, the back stalls, the balcony, and the gods: “Ah need youw, youw, youw! … an’ Ah need youw, youw, youw!”

Though the accent might be as fake as ever, he’d never sung truer words.

Postscript

SCENE: THE CROWDED, sweltering carriage of a London tube train at rush hour on the Northern Line. Just after Camden Town, the connecting door from the next carriage—a means of access shunned by all normal people—is violently wrenched open and a busker appears. He’s in his late thirties, with the lank-haired, grimy-bearded sixties-hippie look common to buskers old or young; around his neck hangs a steel-strung Spanish guitar lacquered black and festooned in dingy red ribbons. Although busking has been legalized at tube stations, there remain a maverick breed who work the trains, usually emitting horrible sounds, and not much more welcome than muggers or pickpockets. So now everyone down this section of the carriage hastily looks the other way; hands move instinctively to protect bags and wallets; ears brace themselves to be offended.

But this isn’t the usual cacophonous nuisance; he’s positively charming as he offers a deal—“a song for twenty pence.” “Here’s one I wrote with Mick Jagger,” he says, then starts to beat out chords which even on a crap Spanish guitar, after half a century, have lost none of their wicked joy: “Duh-duh duh-duh-duh da-duh-duh …” And even in this most unpromising of arenas, their effect is the same as always. Spirits suddenly lift; fingers begin to tap on armrests; bums to shift on seats; lips, of whatever nationality, to follow the master’s:

“Ah cain’t git no … Sa-tis-fack-shern!”

A few months later, BBC Radio 4 celebrates its long-running Desert Island Discs program by asking its audience rather than the usual celebrities to choose eight pieces of music they would choose to take with them if cast away on that theoretical desert island. As a trailer, a random selection of voices is heard on the air, saying which piece would top their list. One sound bite comes from a typical conservative-sounding R4 listener, a woman whose crisply authoritarian tones might belong to a duchess, a private school headmistress, a judge, or perhaps a former director of MI5.

So what record, above all, would she depend on to brighten her solitude whenever she played it? Mozart … Beethoven … Elizabethan plainsong? “Mick Jagger’s ‘Satisfaction,’ ” replies this voice of the establishment, “because it’s the story of my life.”

Such is stardom.

Index

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.

Abbott, Maggie, 264, 265, 474–78, 499, 501, 538–40, 572, 575

ABKCO, 182, 326, 328, 329, 362

Acid King David (Snyderman), 225–26, 293, 435

and drug bust, 227, 231–33, 238, 243, 250, 262–66, 274, 539

Aftermath (album), 203–4, 205, 207, 220, 397

Aguilera, Christina, 583, 593

“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” 467, 585

Aitken, Jonathan, 254, 257

Alexander, Arthur, 134

Alfie (film remake), 581

Ali, Tariq, 257, 287, 289, 290

“All About You,” 523

“All Down the Line,” 432

Allen, Paul, 592, 595

Alley, Patrick, 535

Alomar, Carlos, 534, 535

Altamont festival, 10, 375–88, 412, 436, 439, 443, 512, 582

Altham, Keith, 181, 489

Anderson, Ian (Jethro Tull), 273, 318, 319

Andrews, Eamonn, 224

Andrews, Pat, 69, 196

Anger, Kenneth, 333, 364, 411

“Angie,” 462

Animals, 152, 153, 155, 182, 244

Annenberg, Walter, 471

“Anybody Seen My Baby?,” 560

Apollo Theater, Harlem, 146–47, 161

Apple computers, 594

Apple organization, 328–29, 331

Apted, Michael, 478, 574

Armstrong, Louis “Satchmo,” 39

Arnold, Billy Boy, 53, 58, 67

Arnold, Shirley, 127, 165, 257, 398, 445, 452

and Brian, 275, 344, 345, 349

and Mick/Bianca wedding, 418, 420, 421, 424

and Mick’s parents, 118, 421

and Stones’ office, 282, 283, 361

Arnstein, Bobbie, 440–41

Aronowitz, Al, 151

“Around and Around,” 53, 57, 111, 160

Ashby, Hal, 475

Asher, Jane, 138, 154, 245

Asher, Peter, 137–38

Ashley, Ted, 402–3

“As Tears Go By,” 140–41, 169, 170, 180, 189, 208, 209, 213, 270, 320, 335

Atlantic label, 392–95, 401, 406, 414, 417, 427, 463, 531

Australia, Stones’ tour to, 165–66

Avory, Mick, 65, 66, 67

baby boomers, 508, 558, 565, 581

Bachardy, Don, 360

Backstreet Boys, 582

Bacon, Francis, 314

BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), 1–4, 7, 8, 142, 560, 566, 597

Bailey, David, 125–26, 503

and Deneuve, 185, 188

and film production, 185

as photographer, 86, 144, 158, 167, 170, 185, 199, 298, 462, 542

Baker, Ginger, 81, 346

Baldry, Long John, 61, 65–66, 79, 337

Balin, Marty, 381

Bamigboye, Baz, 551

Bancroft, Anne, 568

Band, the, 300, 302

Bangs, Lester, 463

Barber, Chris, 28, 36, 60, 66

Barbuscia, Lisa, 547

Barclay, Eddie, 406, 407–8, 423

Barclay, Michael, 101, 114

Bardot, Brigitte, 421, 591

Barrett, Syd, 50

Barrow, Tony, 95

Bart, Lionel, 128, 139, 170, 172, 180, 197

Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 490

Battle of Britain, 16–17

Baud, Father Lucien, 420, 423

BBC, 30, 65–66, 98, 113, 115, 152, 268, 546, 580, 599–600

Beach Boys, 161

Beacon Theater, New York, 582–83

Bean, George, 137, 282

“Beast of Burden,” 498, 582

Beatles

breakup of, 415

comparisons with, 4, 5, 84, 98, 103, 107, 115, 132, 134, 136, 139, 142, 144–46, 151, 152, 159, 171, 175, 178, 203, 206–7, 219, 244, 254, 271, 276, 303, 324, 345, 354, 434, 559

competition with, 4, 120, 142, 187, 189, 220, 254, 278, 287, 302, 316, 531

and drugs, 202, 222, 257, 270

fan reactions to, 112, 129, 132