When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument—this only a couple of weeks after they met. “We were always together,” Chrissie says, “and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault—like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights—though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.”
Though she found him “a sweet, loving person,” his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. “We’d be walking down the street . . . and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.” Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when—as often happened—Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house, and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, “Mrs. Shrimpton . . . where is she?”
With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson and Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realized he went there at all. “I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,” Calder remembers. “But with Mick, it was never an issue.”
By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities—and the career that would follow—to plunge into the unstable, unsavory, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.
One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving LSE. “I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonized very much about it,” she remembers. “He certainly didn’t discuss it with me—but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that ‘Joe is very upset.’ ”
The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a “surprisingly easy” interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones, he could always come back and complete his degree.
It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multigenerational psychosis, “Beatlemania.” Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair—for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal—they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences, and the “yeah yeah yeah” chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, “She Loves You.” Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analyzed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of “top people’s paper” The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.
For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticize or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.
While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional debutante ball, for fees between twenty-five and fifty pounds. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that—rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters—combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:
How fab can anyone be! . . . I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me—I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it—& I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me—I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good—my ears are still buzzing.
One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground—the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home—a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its copresenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on August 26.
Ready Steady Go! was a mold-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mold breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits—“The Weekend Starts Here.” Coincidentally, the program was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.
The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless debut single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform—leather waistcoats, black pants, white shirts, and ties—and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route,
across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.
Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland—not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia—through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned, and long-haired Londoners were gawked at like just-landed aliens.
The gig might be at a cinema, a theater, a Victorian town hall, or a corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being “too noisy,” then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.
At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytizing zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven,” the Stones knew Berry’s entire oeuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, “turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage.” That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: “They didn’t seem to be copying anybody—and they didn’t give a fuck.”
The word that increasingly went ahead of them, based solely on the length of their hair, was dirty. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness, and one of those fortunate people who do not show dirt; Brian washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him “Mister Shampoo”; Bill Wyman as a small boy used to do his mother’s housework for her; the Hornsey School of Art student Gillian Wilson, who had a fling with Charlie Watts, remembers his underwear being cleaner than hers. They had now given up any semblance of a stage uniform and went onstage in the same Carnaby motley in which they’d arrived at the theater. Though all of them were clothes-mad and cutting-edge fashionable, this revolutionary break with tradition added a reek of BO to the implied dandruff and head lice. Their manager took every opportunity to circulate the double slander, adding a third for good measure: “They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes. They don’t play nice-mannered music, but raw and masculine. People keep asking me if they’re morons . . .”
For Oldham had finally seen with the clarity of a divine vision where to take them—and, in particular, Mick. As the Beatles progressively won over the older generation and the establishment, and were unconditionally adulated by Fleet Street, many of their original young fans were feeling a sense of letdown. Where was the excitement—the rebellion—in liking the same band your parents or even grandparents did? He would therefore turn the Rolling Stones into anti-Beatles; the scowling flip side of the coin Brian Epstein was minting like a modern Midas. It was a double paradox, since the angelic Fab Four had a decidedly sleazy past in Hamburg’s red-light district, whereas the bad boys Oldham now proposed to create were utterly blameless, none more than their vocalist.
Indeed, the Jagger image at this point could well have gone in the very opposite direction. Early press stories on the Stones still gave his Christian name as Mike, resurrecting that bourgeois aura of Sunday-morning pubs, sports cars, and driving gloves. There was also PR mileage to be extracted from his intellectual achievements. Until now, only one British pop star, Mike Sarne, had experienced further education (coincidentally also at London University).
As Tony Calder remembers, Mick was profoundly uneasy over the master plan that Oldham outlined to him—and not just for its gross misrepresentation of his character. “He said he’d bide his time and see if it worked out or not. But there were so many times when he’d turn up at the office, Andrew would call for two cups of tea and shut the door. He’d be in there alone with Mick for a couple of hours doing one thing—building up his confidence. Self-esteem? He didn’t have any. He was a wimp.”
A famous color clip of the Stones onstage at the ABC cinema, Hull, filmed by one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, shows them playing “Around and Around” for the umpteenth time, against a barrage of maniacal screams. They seem to be doing remarkably little to encourage this uproar: Bill playing bass in his odd vertical style, Keith lost in his chords, Brian almost street-mime motionless, with an odd new electric guitar shaped like an Elizabethan lute. Mick, in his familiar matelot-striped shirt—and almost glowing with cleanliness—seems least involved of all. Even in this paean to the liberating joy of music, his well-moistened lips barely stir, giving the words an edge of sarcasm (“Rose outta my seat . . . I just had to daynce . . .”) reflected in his veiled eyes and occasional flamenco-style hand clap. In the guitar solo, he does a stiff-legged dance with head thrust forward and posterior stuck out, ironically rather like the vaudeville “eccentric” style, then still preserved by such veterans as Max Wall and Nat Jackley.
Since the onset of Beatlemania, young girls at pop shows had screamed dementedly whatever acts were served up to them, male or female, but until now had always stayed in their seats. With Rolling Stones concerts came a new development: they attacked the stage. These were the days when security at British pop concerts consisted of theater staff checking tickets at the door, and the only barrier between performers and audience as a rule was an empty orchestra pit. During a performance in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on September 6, half a dozen demented girls began trying to tear off the band’s clothes and grabbing for souvenirs. (Bill later discovered a valuable ring had been wrenched off his finger.) Mick’s athleticism proved an unexpected asset: as one invader rushed at him, he swept her up in a fireman’s lift, carried her offstage, then returned to continue the number.
The next day brought a 200-mile drive from coastal Suffolk to Aberystwyth, north Wales, then another of 150 miles south to Birmingham for a second appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the bill was Craig Douglas, who had panned Mick’s “Come On” vocal in Melody Maker. Before becoming a pop singer, Douglas had been a milkman on the Isle of Wight; in revenge for his hostile review—and with unendearing social snobbery—the Stones dumped a cluster of empty milk bottles outside his dressing room door.
On September 15, they were opening on a show called The Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the Beatles as top of the bill. Five months earlier, Mick, Keith, and Brian had walked into the Albert Hall anonymously, disguised as Beatle roadies; now the Chelsea boot was well and truly on the other foot. The Stones’ support-band spot unleashed such pandemonium that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were seen peeping through the curtains, nervous of being upstaged for the first time since their Hamburg days. Boyfriend magazine was unequivocal in naming the night’s re
al stars: “Just one shake of [that] overgrown hair is enough to make every girl in the audience scream with tingling excitement.”
Two weeks later, the Stones set out on their first national package tour, as footnotes to a bill headed by three legendary American names, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, and Bo Diddley. As a mark of respect to their third-biggest R&B hero—and perhaps a tacit admission that their singer was not as brazenly confident as he seemed—the band dropped all Bo Diddley songs from their stage act during the monthlong tour. In fact, as well as being flattered by their reverence, Diddley was impressed by their musicianship, later using Bill and Charlie as his rhythm section on a BBC radio appearance. For Mick, the main benefit was seeing Diddley’s virtuoso sideman, Jerome Green, play lollipop-shaped maracas, two in each hand. From now on, he, too, shook maracas in the faster numbers, albeit only one per hand—and even that with a hint of irony.
Touring meant staying in hotels, which for such a bottom-of-the-bill act meant grim establishments with dirty net curtains, malodorous carpets, and electricity coin meters in the bedrooms, all in all not much different from home back in Chelsea. It emerged, however, that one Edith Grove flatmate was not having to endure it. As well as his leader’s five-pound-per-week premium, Brian had secretly arranged with Eric Easton to stay in a better class of hotel than the others.
Before long, the tour’s American headliners were facing the Beatles’ recent problem at the Royal Albert Hall. Little Richard remained oblivious, entertaining his audience with an extended striptease, then going for a ten-minute walkabout through the auditorium with a forty-strong police guard. But the Everly Brothers’ tender harmonies became increasingly drowned out by chants of “We want the Stones!” In the end, the emcee had to go out and plead for Mick’s heroes of yesteryear to be given a break.
Mick Jagger Page 13
