The band spent two days in Chess’s studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, working with the label’s most-sought-after engineer, Ron Malo. (Having delivered them there, Oldham had the good sense not to put on airs as their producer, but stayed discreetly in the background.) Malo treated the awestruck young Britons like musicians as legitimate as any others; their response was to work hard and harmoniously, finishing fourteen tracks during the two daylong sessions.
Top of the list was that gift from Murray the K, “It’s All Over Now.” The Valentinos’ version had hovered on the edge of burlesque, with a hermaphrodite lead vocal and a tempo lifted from Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee.” Ron Malo turned it into a guitar-jangly pop track with a growling bass riff that was instant jukebox fodder, yet preserved the Stones’ essential roughness and hinted at the myriad influences of the blues mecca around them. While all the band sounded better than they ever had, the main advance was in Mick’s voice, now refined to a punk-Dixie snarl and hovering between self-pity (“Well, I used to wake ’n mawnin’, git ma brekfusst in ba-a-id . . .”) and yah-boo triumph (“Yes, I used to looeerve her, bu-u-rd it’s awl over now . . .”). Bobby Womack’s original lyric spoke of the errant girlfriend’s having “spent all my money . . . played the high-class game,” which Mick amended to “half-assed game.”
Marshall Chess was amused to see Mick, Brian, and Keith behave in the studio as they thought their blues masters did, “swigging Jack Daniel’s from the bottle, where our guys would’ve poured it into a glass and sipped it.” Partly, this was nerves; they expected real Chicago bluesmen to tear them to pieces for their presumption. But in fact, they were met with nothing but friendliness. During the first day’s session, two of their greatest heroes, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, both dropped by Malo’s studio to listen and bestow compliments and encouragement. On their second morning, they found themselves walking in through Chess’s front lobby beside an immaculately dressed man with the face of a merry black Toby Jug—none other than Muddy Waters, without whose catalog (not least “Rollin’ Stone”) they would never have got started. Muddy carried himself as regally as a king but, on seeing roadie Ian Stewart struggling with the Stones’ equipment, picked up an amp and carried it into the studio for them.
At the end of their second day, the great Chuck Berry himself drove in from his country-estate-cum-hotel, Berry Park, to take a look. Though never noted for philanthropy to young musicians, he could not but be softened by the Stones’ devotion—and the number of his songs they were covering that would pay him royalties. “Swing on, gentlemen,” he told them in flawless Berry-ese. “You are sounding most well, if I may say so.”
Keith was always to remember a beyond-brilliant Chess session musician named Big Red, a huge black albino with a Gibson guitar that looked “like a mandolin” in his hands. During breaks from their own session, Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Stu used to creep into the next-door studio and listen to Big Red, but could never pluck up courage to ask him to sit in with them. “We just thought we were terribly lucky to be there, so let’s learn what we can,” Keith would recall. “It was like being given extra tuition.”
And Mick? Before leaving Britain, he’d told an interviewer with unusual candor, and passion, that his main objective in America was to meet as many of his blues idols as possible, and that even “to see and hear them work in person will be a big thing for me.” What happened with Chuck and Muddy and Willie and Buddy and Big Red in Chicago was, by a long way, the most thrilling experience of his life thus far. But afterward it was to be swallowed up by all-enveloping Jagger amnesia. “I don’t remember going to Chess,” he would claim. “It’s just like something I read about in books.”
Back in New York, things decidedly improved with a better hotel, the Park Sheraton (albeit still in shared rooms), and two sold-out concerts, like the Beatles’, at the city’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. After the second show, there was a party at the hotel with guests including the New York Post pop correspondent, and Bob Dylan’s close friend, Al Aronowitz. “The first thing we saw when we walked in,” Aronowitz recalled, “was Mick sitting on a bed, surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks, fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body . . . Okay, Mick’d discovered room service.”
There was also a first glimpse of the Jagger attitude toward women that we will come to know so well. At one point, Gloria Stavers, the influential editor of 16 Magazine, approached him among his seraglio to tell him how much she’d enjoyed the show. “Should I be flattered?” he replied.
With the release of the Stones’ “Merseybeat” song “Tell Me” as a U.S. single increasing album sales, and a general sense of making some headway at last, it was clearly vital for them to extend their visit beyond its scheduled three weeks. Instead—bafflingly to new American converts like Aronowitz and Murray the K—Oldham whisked them home as scheduled. The excuse he gave out was that they had to honor a booking to play at the summer ball of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth was that he couldn’t afford to keep them in America a moment longer. In contrast to later forays there, he calculated the tour had earned them ten old shillings, or fifty pence, each.
ARRIVING BACK IN Britain during the music press’s awards season did much to restore everyone’s self-esteem. In the New Musical Express readers’ poll, the Stones came second to the Beatles as Top British Vocal Group with “Not Fade Away” only just losing out to “She Loves You” as Year’s Best Single. Record Mirror named the Stones Top British Group and Mick—underlining his still unusual non-guitar-playing role—as Top British Group Member. Nor was it long before the American nightmare was totally vindicated. On June 26, “It’s All Over Now” was released, with advance orders of 150,000, and took only two weeks to become their first British No. 1.
No hype from Tony Calder was needed—nor even help from the amendment to the Valentinos’ original lyric which Andrew Oldham had expected to create such a furor. Rendered in Mick’s Dixie drawl, “half-assed game” was widely mistaken for “high, fast game,” as in some poker school on a Mississippi paddleboat. Anyway, ass is much less vulgar to British ears than the good old Anglo-Saxon arse. At all events, no objections were made and the single played uncensored on the BBC.
What made “It’s All Over Now” irresistible was its disheveled, slightly off-register sound, so unlike the high gloss of the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios, and glimpses of seamy real life compared to wholesome Beatle heaven: Mick getting his “brekfusst [and who knew what else] in ba-a-id,” his “achin’ ha-id” no doubt partly due to a hangover. It was not quite the first grown-up-sounding single ever to challenge the infantilism of the UK pop charts; the Animals had just got there first with “The House of the Rising Sun.” Its new dimension was the hint of loucheness—something that most British women didn’t yet know they liked.
The backlash came from fans of pure blues and R&B, especially those who had followed the Stones up through the clubs and now felt personally betrayed by what was seen as a sellout to commercial pop. (Only an enlightened few were aware that “It’s All Over Now” had been recorded at R&B’s epicenter, Chess Records, or that Bobby Womack and the Valentinos, its writer and original performers, were as “pure” as could be.) To make matters worse, the single it had booted from the No. 1 spot was “The House of the Rising Sun,” a classic blues song rendered in uncompromising blues style.
This was an era, unlike later, in which Mick was unafraid to stick his head above the parapet. When controversy erupted around “It’s All Over Now,” he was already in hot water for having publicly called a new group called the Zephyrs “a load of rubbish,” so violating an unwritten rule that British pop bands were always generous toward each other. Now he told Melody Maker intemperately (for the Stones knew the Animals well) that “people shouldn’t kid themselves ‘House of the Rising Sun’ is R&B . . . it’s no more R&B than how’s your father . . .” It brought him a stern reproof in the next week’s paper from reader Keith Temple of East Croydon: “Who is to bl
ame for this misconception of R&B? Mick Jagger. One and a half years ago, Jagger’s proud boast was that the Stones played pure R&B—the music they loved. On being accused of going commercial, Jagger denies this. Yet the Stones reached number one with ‘It’s All Over Now,’ a rock song. Don’t kid yourselves, readers, that there’s R&B in the chart with ‘It’s All Over Now.’ It’s no more R&B than ‘House of the Rising Sun.’ ”
The front-page lead in the same edition, accompanied by a caricature head of Mick, was an unwontedly humble and ingratiating apology for his previous rudeness about the Zephyrs: “I don’t want [them] to be angry or anything. I didn’t like their record but I didn’t mean to cause offence . . . In fact, [it] was no worse than our first record, ‘Come On’ . . . I’d like to meet ’em all and tell ’em how I feel personally.” “JAGGER ATTACKED AGAIN,” said a flash at the foot of the column, “See Letters, back page.” The letters page was headlined “R&B? NOT ON YOUR LIFE” below a strap line “IT’S ALL THAT JAGGER’S FAULT.”
Most of the criticism was defused, however, by a second Stones EP, Five by Five, containing a quintet of irreproachably R&B tracks from the Chess sessions, including Jay McShann’s “Confessin’ the Blues” and Wilson Pickett’s “If You Need Me,” and with liner notes by Andrew Oldham, pointing out that the Stones’ first album, packed with authentic R&B, had stayed at No. 1 on the UK chart for thirty weeks (it had actually been twelve). Purist Stones fans breathed easier, reassured that Keith’s growly rock tremolo and the glimpse into Mick’s bedroom had been a momentary aberration.
By midsummer of 1964, a surfeit of real-life attempts to see Mick’s bedroom had broken up the flat-sharing ménage at 33 Mapesbury Road. The fans who had followed Jacqui Graham’s pioneer trail to his Willesden hideaway possessed little of Jacqui’s considerateness, staking out number 33’s front gate around the clock, ringing the doorbell at all hours, and invading the garden to peer through windows and steal flowers, even blades of grass, as souvenirs. The three original flat sharers’ personal circumstances had also changed, with Oldham now married to Sheila Klein and Keith going steady with the Vogue model Linda Keith, as Mick was with Vogue supermodel Jean Shrimpton’s sister, Chrissie.
While Oldham set up home with Sheila, Mick and Keith moved together to 10a Holly Hill, Hampstead, a sought-after area then, as now, where every other house seems to bear a blue plaque commemorating some former resident celebrated in the arts or sciences. Their flat, in estate agent’s language, was “chalet-style with a long living room and a sunken bedroom,” and (farewell, Edith Grove!) enjoyed the regular services of a cleaner. Chrissie Shrimpton moved in with Mick, though, for appearances’ sake with her family, she kept on her bed-sitting room with her friend Liz in Olympia, west London.
Outed as Mick’s steady girlfriend some months previously, Chrissie was regularly pictured by his side with her flicked-up, Alice-banded hair, enormous black eyes, and matching full-lipped pout, her famous surname giving that intriguing extra twist to his own accelerating fame. Along with Paul McCartney’s similarly “classy bird,” Jane Asher, she was the envy of almost every young woman in Britain.
In reality, Chrissie hated the life she now found herself leading as the consort of a fast-rising star. “The fans used to attack me and throw things at me, and it was often really frightening. I can remember being in cars and having to hold the roof up because there were girls piling on the roof and we thought we were going to be crushed.” Under her wild-child exterior was a deeply conventional person who had slept with Mick as a seventeen-year-old only because she genuinely believed she would marry him and start a family. “As far as I was concerned, it was total love and I’d be with him for the rest of my life. I hated all the fan hysteria stuff and I wasn’t really interested in running around the clubs and everything rock chicks are supposed to do. All I wanted was to have babies and be normal.”
Still resolutely refusing to be drawn into the couture world after Jean, Chrissie continued to work as a secretary, latterly with the Stones’ record company, Decca, and thus to have a daytime routine out of synch with Mick’s nocturnal one of performing, recording, and partying. Even after her existence became known to his female followers, Oldham still felt it unadvisable to parade her too much at Stones gigs and public appearances. “As a girl in those days, you were a second-class citizen. You were on your honor to stay in the background and keep your mouth shut.”
Just as her sister kept her at arm’s length from the Bailey-Vogue set, so she met few of the musicians with whom Mick consorted, on the road or at their chosen club, the Ad Lib. One exception was “the Duchess,” the glamorous young black woman in a skintight gold lamé catsuit who played guitar in Bo Diddley’s band. Another was Mickie Most, the young singer-turned-producer responsible for the Animals’ “The House of the Rising Sun” that Mick had so ungraciously slagged off. “Mickie’s wife was also named Chrissie, so we were two Mickie-and-Chrissies.”
Her main ally within the Stones’ circle was Charlie Watts’s steady girlfriend, Shirley Shepherd, a sculpture student at the Royal College of Art, to whom Charlie became engaged in April 1964. A strong-willed, outspoken character, in utter contrast to his mildness and politeness, Shirley refused to accept the vow of anonymity imposed on Chrissie and other Stones’ women. Since Mick found Charlie the most restful of all his bandmates and Chrissie got on well with Shirley, the four went on holiday together to Ibiza during a brief respite from touring that summer. When they arrived at their hotel, Shirley found she and Chrissie were expected to register separately so that lurking paparazzi would not link them with the two Stones. “A photographer tried to take a picture of our names in the hotel register,” Chrissie remembers. “So Mick hit him. And when we left, Shirley and I were told we had to come home on different flights from Mick and Charlie. I went along with it, of course, but Shirley absolutely refused to be bullied by Mick.”
Shirley was also one of the few around Mick who ever dared find fault with his appearance. “Neither of our boyfriends looked good on the beach,” Chrissie recalls. “Mick was terribly skinny and Charlie had a fat tummy and used to keep his socks on when he sunbathed. I remember Shirley saying ‘They don’t show up well in the sun. They look better in the evening.’ ”
From that point, Shirley defied the diktats that streamed from Mick and Oldham almost on principle. “The firm rule was always ‘no girls on tour,’ but Shirley would nearly always go because Charlie simply refused to get up or wash if she didn’t,” says Chrissie. “We weren’t supposed to go into the studio while the band was recording, but she decided she was going and took me with her. Mick was absolutely furious and ordered us out, but Shirley hissed at me, ‘Don’t move!’ So we just sat there with Mick pulling Nankers [faces] at us through the control room glass. If he ever came into the dressing room and found girlfriends there, he’d glare so much that the girls did Nazi salutes and went ‘Heil Jagger!’ ”
Although Chrissie’s parents in Buckinghamshire believed her to be leading a life of barely imaginable decadence, it mostly wasn’t at all like that. Drugs, for instance, still barely figured in the UK pop scene. The Stones had always taken (quite legal) amphetamine uppers to stay awake and in America had already been offered marijuana, historically the narcotic of choice for blues and jazz musicians, but only Brian and Keith indulged in either to any serious degree. Mick certainly drank, but had no real head for alcohol; after one Bo Diddley concert at Hammersmith, he was so far gone that Chrissie needed help from one of Diddley’s musicians to keep him on his feet. However, an image of hard drinking had to be cultivated as part of the Stones’ outlawry. One day, Mick’s old Dartford Grammar School friend and fellow Blue Boy Alan Etherington happened to bump into him in central London. “He had a Ford Zephyr car with a bottle of whiskey in the back,” Etherington remembers. “I said, ‘That’s not like you, Mick,’ and he muttered something about it being just for publicity.”
As Chrissie discovered, he had a conventional, even old-fashion
ed side that very much reflected the values of his father, Joe. “He was very, very strict with me. I was always being told how to behave and what to say. There was one of my girlfriends who was known to be promiscuous and Mick didn’t like me having anything to do with her.”
She was in effect going out with two people: the public, image-conscious Mick who hastily dropped her hand and strode ahead whenever any fans appeared, and the utterly different, often endearing private one. “He wasn’t horrible to me. A lot of the time he was very nice to me. We had a very ordinary life in spite of his other life. We spent a lot of time, if you can believe it, sitting in bed, doing crosswords, or Mick reading James Bond books. I always had strong opinions and I think originally that was what he liked because we used to talk a lot and discuss things. He was always very interested in sociology and economic issues like monopolies and capitalism—I remember him talking once about the monopoly of the ice creams sold in cinemas. That’s what he wanted with me: I was his security. He used to say he was only at home when he was with me.”
Such interludes grew more infrequent as Mick and the Stones prepared for a return American tour that would wipe away the bad taste of the first, and meanwhile concentrated on jeopardizing Britain’s relations with some closer neighbors. European countries that were traditionally a sluggish market for UK pop now witnessed the worst outbreaks of youth violence since Bill Haley and the Comets had first brought rock ’n’ roll from America a decade earlier. In The Hague, Holland, an opera house where the Stones played was almost rent apart; in Belgium, the interior minister unsuccessfully tried to ban their appearance at the Brussels World’s Fair ground, and later had the dubious satisfaction of saying “I told you so” in both French and Flemish; after their show at L’Olympia theater in Paris (where the Beatles had been booed), rioting youths fought street battles with gendarmes, breaking shop windows, overturning pavement café tables, and vandalizing newspaper kiosks.
Mick Jagger Page 18
