Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The UK edition came out early in 1984 under the Elm Tree imprint. It reached number 6 in the Sunday Times bestsellers and was well reviewed, notably by Pete Townshend, then taking a sabbatical from The Who to work in publishing. Townshend opined that the Stones were ‘lucky’ to have me as a biographer, though I’m not sure they themselves ever felt that. In a television interview, Mick called me ‘a journalist on the make’, which I thought rich coming from him. My favourite comment was Vogue’s, that the book would appeal to ‘anyone with a scrap of naughtiness in them’.

  In America, where it was re-titled Symphony for the Devil (a mistake), the critical response was more muted. There, unfortunately, it came out at the same time as The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth, who had accompanied the band in a semi-official status on their ’69 US tour and taken the next fourteen years to write it up. Although Booth’s narrative focused mainly on his efforts to get Mick and Keith to sign his publisher’s contract, with long digressions on his personal drug-use, The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones was inevitably reviewed alongside my book: in a metaphor never more apt, it muddied the waters. Newsweek magazine gave me a rave review, dismissing Booth in the same piece. But the New York Times’s Robert Palmer (not the Robert Palmer, by a very long way) declared that, spiritually speaking, the Stones were an American band, so their story could only be told properly by an American. Presumably, he meant one named R. Palmer.

  In 1984, the accepted wisdom was that ‘not many people who like the Stones read books’. I’m glad this one proved the exception by staying in print continuously for 28 years – and still being around to mark their half-century.

  PART ONE

  ONE

  ‘I WAS SCHOOLED WITH A STRAP RIGHT ACROSS MY BACK’

  When the black man was alone and destitute, he played the blues. With a roof over his head, however leaky, he played rhythm and blues. The difference is as great as between the country and the city; between Southern cotton fields and Eastern ghettoes; between fatalistic old age and vigorous, upwardly mobile youth. It is the difference between a guitar powered only by its own mournful echo, and a guitar belligerently amplified, played with aggressive slides and swoops along the fretboard by a switchblade knife or broken bottle neck. It is the difference between bleak, dusty, desperate noontide and pulsating, pleasure-seeking night.

  While the blues stretch back into vague infinities of work gangs and prison cells, rhythm and blues can be given an approximate time and place of genesis. It grew up first during and just after the Second World War, amid the mass redistribution of American blacks into their country’s war machine. Its sound was of newly explored streets and unfamiliar alleys; of cheap neon, soda-fountain sugar and wafting gasoline; of the old, sleepy twelve-bar blues reacting in astonishment, delight – and sometimes fury – to all the varied stimuli of big-city life.

  Nowadays, there are expensively illustrated books to familiarize us with r & b’s golden postwar age. There are the photographs of Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Otis Rush or T-Bone Walker, in their white shirts and gabardine trousers, singing against heavy silver microphones, perspiring over huge guitars with pearled fretboards, in clubs, bar lounges or juke joints, some tropic Forties night below the Mason-Dixon line. There are the show bills – usually from the Apollo Theatre in Harlem – which depict the young B.B. King, Bo Diddley or Fats Domino, wearing demure tuxedos and tiny bow ties, and smiling with a strained, reassuring politeness.

  The smile of an r & b artist circa 1949 was the smile of someone expecting to be beaten up at any moment. The blues – stigmatized since the Twenties as ‘race’ or ‘specialty’ music – had been generally too esoteric for whites to understand. Rhythm and blues, with its flash suits, flaunted saxes and unrepressed sexuality, seemed to offer the most blatant threat to respectable – that is to say, all-white – society. It was denounced as lewd, ungodly, demented, a corrupter of children. Its clubs were raided and wrecked by white vigilantes; its performers attacked and, in not a few cases, lynched. Up to 1956 or so, every blues band travelling in its own country was a band on the run.

  Throughout the Forties and early Fifties, its greatest creative period, the music remained segregated and submerged. Though r & b songs often appeared in the American hit parade, they were bowdlerized versions, purged of their sexual content by all-white crooners and dance bands. Roll With Me, Henry, an overt sexual challenge, for instance, became Dance With Me, Henry, an invitation to foxtrot. The original artists, with a few exceptions, were unknown to the general record-buying public. They could perform only in black clubs, record only on obscure black-owned labels, have their discs played only by the handful of radio stations controlled by blacks. When Bo Diddley finally got a booking on nationwide TV in 1958, it was stipulated that, to preserve decency, he must perform completely motionless. On camera, Diddley forgot his promise, lapsed into a shuffling pas seul and was docked his entire fee.

  ‘Help save the youth of America!’ – so ran one anti-r & b pamphlet of the early Fifties. ‘Don’t let your children buy or listen to these Negro records. The screaming, idiotic words and savage music are undermining the morals of our white American youth …’

  A prophecy of things to come if ever there was one.

  It is a journey further than any bluesman could imagine from Beale Street, Memphis, to Bexley in deepest Kent and the playground of Maypole infants’ school, where, one sunny day in 1950, teacher Ken Llewellyn called a group of his favourite pupils together for an informal photograph. The boys who assembled were the brightest and liveliest in Mr Llewellyn’s class. They included Robert Wallis and John Spinks and Michael Jagger, the least likely of all to stand still for a photograph. The others reined him in with arms around his shoulders, neck and waist. They stood together in their flannel shorts, their elastic school belts with metal S-clasps, English schoolboys at their apotheosis, laughing into the warm, safe, quiet Fifties sky.

  Kent as a county begins in London, south-east of the Thames, in ranks of suburbs barely distinguishable from one another, crossed by railway bridges, whose names are synonyms for dullness and decorum – Bexley, Bromley, Beckenham, Dartford, Sidcup, Sevenoaks and the rest. One must travel far on grubby trains, crossing many bridges, to discover what is still called ‘the Garden of England’, with its apple orchards, hop fields and oast houses. It is a large and bewilderingly imprecise county, ranging from the miles of drab dockland around Chatham and Rochester to the Regency splendours of Royal Tunbridge Wells; from the medieval majesty of Canterbury Cathedral to the faded Victorian seaside of Margate and Broadstairs, where Charles Dickens wrote Bleak House. Somewhere in the sprawling landscape is the field in which Mr Pickwick lost his hat while watching military manoeuvres, the bucolic landscape, bespoken by Alfred Jingle, of ‘apples, hops, cherries, women’.

  Least romantic of all Kentish suburbs is Dartford, where, on December 7, 1940, Basil Joseph Jagger married Eva Scutts. The bridegroom was a slight, quiet-looking man whose wiry frame betrayed his calling as physical-training teacher. The bride was a pretty young woman with a wide smile and that air of determined gentility which sometimes goes with slight foreignness. Eva, in fact, had been born in Australia and had emigrated to Britain with her family in her early teens. The best man was Basil’s more ebullient brother, Albert. Afterwards, there was a reception for fifty guests at the Coneybeare Hall.

  Basil – known as Joe to his family and friends – was not merely a drill sergeant in white singlet and gym shoes, exhorting local schoolchildren to lift up their knees and swing their arms. He subsequently became a lecturer in physical education at Strawberry Hill College, Twickenham. Horace Walpole’s sumptuous mock-Gothic mansion was – and still is – the nucleus of this teacher-training institute, run by a Catholic order, the Vincentians, to supply Catholic schools all over the world. Joe Jagger’s job was to give a grounding in physical education simple and comprehensive enough to be passed on to student priests or mission children in the wilds of Africa
or Asia.

  He also worked as a lecturer with the nascent British Sports Council. His speciality was basketball, an American sport not much in vogue in mid-Fifties Britain. Joe Jagger was among the pioneers of the British basketball movement and was the author of what remains the definitive book on the subject, published by Faber and Faber in 1962.

  His wife Eva was a lively and energetic person whose vivacity at times seemed to verge on the domineering. Eva had always been secretly rather ashamed of her Australian origin, with its implied stigma of roughness and unsophistication. Marriage to Joe, with his markedly superior social standing and education, increased her determination to show herself the equal of any true ‘Brit’. Their small house, in Denver Road, Dartford, was scoured by Eva into a spotless state the equal of any neighbour’s. Joe and Eva’s whole life as a young married couple was dictated by consideration of what those ever-vigilant neighbours might think.

  Their first son, Michael Philip, was born on July 26, 1943. The tide of the Second World War had long since turned in the Allies’ favour, but Britain was still an embattled redoubt of air-raid precautions, white-helmeted wardens, clothing coupons and butcher-shop queues. Though the RAF nightly pounded Hamburg and Essen in ‘thousand-bomber raids’, attacks by the German Luftwaffe on London continued. The Kent suburbs heard the distant thunder and saw the horizontal flashes as the poor old East End caught it from the sky again.

  Michael Jagger was a child of absolutely conventional beauty, with chubby cheeks, guileless eyes and hair that assumed a reddish tinge. As a toddler, he proved amiable and obedient, though prone to boisterous spirits that could sometimes go too far. Once, on holiday at the seaside, his mother remembers, he marched along the beach, deliberately kicking down every other child’s sandcastle in his path. His reign as an adored only child lasted until 1947, when Eva presented him with a younger brother, Christopher.

  Home life for the Jagger brothers was pervaded by their mother’s house-proud fastidiousness and their father’s devotion to physical fitness. Their Denver Road neighbours were accustomed to seeing the small back garden of the Jagger house littered with sports equipment – weight-training barbells, cricket stumps and archery targets. Other children asked home to tea by Mike or Chris were somewhat intimidated by the schoolmasterly regimen, which included Grace before meals and a system of fixed penalties and punishments for misbehaviour.

  Mike’s physical prowess showed through early at Maypole infants’ school and afterwards at Wentworth County Primary, to which his Maypole teacher, Ken Llewellyn, an expatriate Welshman, had also transferred. Mr Llewellyn remembers him fondly as one of an outstanding junior class whose ascent to grammar school and university seemed assured. ‘It was a joy to teach them. They were full of life, full of all sorts of questions. I took them for games as well. Mike was already looking like a useful cricketer. If I remember him at all, it’s running in from the playground with both knees grazed and a great big smile on his face.’

  John Spinks lived in Heather Drive, Dartford, not far from the Jaggers in Denver Road. He was Mike’s playmate in the sandpit that lay between their houses. When Mike accidentally impaled a hand on a spiked metal railing, it was John Spinks who, with praiseworthy coolness, pulled it free. To John, he seemed at times almost too conventionally law-abiding and obedient. ‘I always thought he was a bit of a mother’s boy. He did everything he was told at home. He was an indiarubber character, really. He could bend any way to stay out of trouble.’

  Even as a small boy, his other friend Robert Wallis remembers, he had a strangely remote, abstracted quality – a sense of being preoccupied with matters far weightier than their schoolboy games together. Joe Jagger was currently acting as adviser to a commercial TV programme called Seeing Sport, designed to promote physical fitness in children. Once a week, he would take his elder son with him to the studios, to act as model for instruction about athletics or camping. ‘Mike is going to show you how to light the fire,’ the voiceover would say, or: ‘Here’s Mike, getting into the tent.’ ‘He became a bit of a star for doing that,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘He always had some interest outside the ones we had as a group. He gave the idea the he’d sooner be somewhere else than with us, doing far more glamorous things.’

  Robert, John and Mike took the eleven-plus exam together, passing it as effortlessly as Ken Llewellyn had predicted. This crucial step determined whether they would go on to receive a mundane basic education at a secondary modern or be admitted to the far superior privileges of Dartford Grammar. Eva Jagger had every reason to be proud of her boy in his smart new uniform of gold-trimmed maroon blazer and cap.

  Dartford Grammar School, when Mike Jagger arrived there in the early Fifties, possessed most features of an English public school – masters in gowns, house captains, societies, ceremonial Speech Days, ritualized athletics and sport. As its school magazine, The Dartfordian, attests, scholarship was generally excellent, yielding an unusually large annual export to Britain’s redbrick universities. Prominent in the school curriculum was the Army Cadet Force, designed to cushion the shock of the two years’ compulsory National Service each boy would face before embarking on his chosen career.

  At Dartford Grammar, Mike Jagger’s academic promise – and his buoyant enthusiasm – mysteriously evaporated. From the first form to the fifth he merely coasted, doing only enough work to stay out of trouble. It became a sore provocation to the several teachers in whose subjects he was obviously gifted. The senior languages master, Dr Bennett, particularly resented his indifference, for – aided by unusual powers of mimicry – he showed all the signs of a first-class linguist. ‘There was one occasion when I spoke to him about his attitude very severely,’ Dr Bennett says. ‘He was so deliberately insulting that I simply knocked him down.’

  His apathy extended even to sport. He seemed to lose interest in cricket after discovering he was not the deadly spin bowler he had supposed himself at Wentworth. The only sport he played regularly was basketball, his father’s speciality. Joe Jagger, in fact, introduced the sport to Dartford Grammar and helped coach the Basketball Society, of which Mike was Hon. Sec. ‘He was most keen on that, I think, because it was American,’ Robert Wallis says. ‘Mike was the one who had real American basketball boots to play in when the rest of us only had gym shoes.’

  His appearance, from the age of fourteen onward, seemed to reflect his slack and insubordinate attitude. The chubby, laughing schoolboy of Ken Llewellyn’s class had grown into an adolescent whose skinny frame, hovering on the edge of effeteness, caused uniform distaste among his teachers. Likewise his face, with its somnolent eyes, its retroussé nose; most of all, the wide, sagging lips, set in what seemed a permanent grimace of either scorn or dumb insolence.

  As he moved higher in the school, he became adept at flouting its dress regulations. Instead of the prescribed black lace-up shoes, he would arrive for class in French slip-on moccasins. In place of his blazer, he acquired a black, gold-threaded ‘Teddy boy’ jacket, which, to Dr Bennett’s annoyance, he wore even to the annual Founder’s Day ceremony.

  He was already a source of much discussion at the nearby girls’ grammar school, where opinion as to his attractiveness remained sharply divided. In terms of conventional handsomeness he was obviously a non-starter. Yet some of the very girls who dismissed him as ugly or ‘a weed’ still looked for him in the after-school swarm and made bold attempts to talk to him – since he seemed uninterested in talking to them. It became almost a competition to pierce that scornful reserve and bring forth that rare smile which could split open the sullen face, making him look still the happy schoolboy who had laughed into the sun.

  In 1955 came the plague called rock ’n’ roll. Bill Haley and the Comets invaded Britain’s sleepy hit parade with Rock Around the Clock, See You Later, Alligator, Everybody Razzle Dazzle and Rockin’ Through the Rye. Britain’s regimented teenage boys awoke to the sound of a braying sax, a slapping, spinning double bass, a voice that did not croon but jerked and
jogged and hiccupped and jumped. What Haley was in fact playing was black rhythm and blues, purged of its bite and wit and wrapped in a swing or country-western beat. The very phrase ‘rock and roll’ was black slang for energetic fucking. Even in America, its origin had scarcely been realized. In Britain it was simply the most exciting noise that ever confused an adolescent’s glands. A British tour by Haley and the Comets in 1956 left a trail of wrecked theatres and slashed cinema seats. Music became, for the first time, a source of conflict between the young, who adored this outrageous new noise, and their parents, who loathed it and strove to extinguish it by every possible means.

  A few months earlier, the British Decca label had released a record which, though quieter than Haley’s joyous gibberish, was destined to transform many lives more permanently. The record – one of the newfangled ‘long playing’ kind – was New Orleans Joys, by the Chris Barber Jazz Band.

  Barber, twenty-five, led Britain’s most commercially successful Dixieland band. He remained, however, principally an archivist, devoted to keeping alive sources and style that might otherwise have been overlooked in the current ‘Trad’ boom. His New Orleans Joys LP included two blues songs played in the ‘skiffle’ style evolved in the Depression years, when musicians were often reduced to instruments extemporized from household utensils. The songs, Rock Island Line and John Henry, were performed by a primitive rhythm section of double bass, kitchen washboard and banjo, the last played by a skinny Glaswegian named Tony Donegan who had changed his name to Lonnie in honour of the American bluesman Lonnie Johnson.