Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue

by Marc Spitz

  In Lord of the Flies, after all, the asthmatic Piggy is killed while trying to cling to the conch, crushed by falling rocks after making a last-ditch attempt to restore order. You can’t hold on to the conch and navigate the rocks at the same time. With the conch in pieces, the Stones camp returned to a state of savage anarchy. Mick and Keith used to be 100 percent for each other, and against the world: Mick devoted and deferring to Keith and Keith encouraging and protective of Mick. In the studio now, things had to be agreed on by both Mick and Keith, beginning a long period of debate which would produce masterpieces (Mick’s “Moonlight Mile,” which closed Sticky Fingers and is wholly Keith-free, and, of course, Exile on Main Street) but would ultimately account for a long and order-free “lost” period in the mid-’70s. Mick could not have known what long-term damage his decision to take the role of Turner would cause, essentially plunging Keith into a decade-long smack addiction and creating a tear in the tightly loomed fabric of the Rolling Stones. Keith, after all, already knew what it was like to sleep with Marianne, spending a night with her before she and Mick began dating seriously, and again, he admits in Life, as a sort of revenge fuck, which in itself is pretty provincial (and it takes a lot to make Keith Richards appear this way).

  As records of madness, decay, betrayal, and lust go, Performance stands alone. Mick, all lips and pale skin and dark hair, has never looked more beautiful, with his muscular arms exposed in a suit vest. In one scene, he dances while wielding a tube of pure, white light. “The only performance that really makes it is the one that achieves madness,” Jagger declares toward the film’s climax. While Jagger’s film career would never again reach such heights, his first time out, he really made it.

  9

  “All My Friends Are Junkies”

  Parse Mick’s lyrics from late ’69 and early 1970 and you will find the recurring theme of someone who’s had the hurtin’ put on him by life, someone in bad need of a new friend.

  “She said . . . you can rest your weary head on me,” Mick sings in “Let It Bleed,” the countrified title track of their follow-up to Beggars Banquet. “Gimme Shelter,” written largely by Keith, opens the album with a plea for sanctuary, sung without a mote of Mick’s usual ironic distance. “Nineteen sixty-nine was not a happy year for Mick,” says Sam Cutler, who would road manage their triumphant, then tragic North American tour in support of the forthcoming Let It Bleed.

  The Redlands scandal of ’67, the collapse of “Flower Power” into violence and hard drugs in ’68, and the inevitable decaying of Brian Jones’ body and soul left the Rolling Stones reeling and weary. Jones had stopped contributing to the group creatively, and soon wasn’t even pretending to be a factor by coming around the studio. On one occasion, he asked Mick, “What can I play?” as the Stones were preparing to run through a new song, and Mick famously quipped, “I don’t know. What can you play?” With a lucrative American tour in the works, it was both Mick and Keith who made the decision to fire Brian Jones. It was, as they say, just business. Allen Klein, the very man who promised to liberate them financially, and succeeded in elevating their royalty rate astronomically, had funneled the band’s publishing into an American dummy corporation with the same name as their English one, Nanker Phelge. They no longer owned “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” “Ruby Tuesday,” or any of their era-defining hit singles. But they still owed the taxes on their sales. Jones, gone flabby, was distracted by plans for renovating his new estate. He would loudly grumble at the direction the Stones were moving in and spoke frequently of splitting to form his own combo, one with a much stronger tether to the roots of rock and roll. The implication was that Mick and Keith had sold out, gone pop, and he was the once and future soul of the band. He was a liability, a potential competitor, and they required a soldier to help them kick against the pricks. He had to go. On the morning of June 8, 1969, a sheepish Mick, Keith, and Charlie Watts drove out to his farm to break the news. They’d already hired a replacement, teenage blues virtuoso Mick Taylor, and were prepared to offer Jones (who founded and named the band) a large (at the time) cash settlement. Jones took it with resignation, but it slowly began to rattle him.

  This was a time of furious planning, recording, and tour organizing; they were mounting an assault that would restore the band to fighting weight and speed. They would debut the lean, mean Stones mach-two in front of the largest rock concert England had ever seen in Hyde Park on July 5. Two days before Jones got sacked, Mick had attended a massive gathering for Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, and Steve Winwood’s new super group, Blind Faith, in the park and wagered the Stones could draw more. Blind Faith threw a gauntlet of sorts by performing a rendition of Mick and Keith’s own “Under My Thumb” but they were prone to long jams. The Stones were a full live experience, with Mick as a peerless showman.

  The band was recording a B-side (their mighty take on Stevie Wonder’s pained “I Don’t Know Why I Love You”) at Olympic Studios on the night of July 3 when they were informed that Brian Jones had been found at the bottom of his swimming pool by a girlfriend and a construction worker and hanger-on named Frank Thorogood (who later made a dubious deathbed confession that he’d murdered the troubled star).

  The Hyde Park show was going to go on as planned, but now it would be a wake for the their late founder. Cardboard cutouts of Jones were ordered (the ones used were from the promotional photo shoot for Beggars Banquet and showed Jones at his drugfuzzy worst, but it was the thought that counted). Mick also requested a thousand white cabbage butterflies after doves were considered then rejected. This would be, as devised, both the Stones explosive return to live performance and a poignant requiem for their founder; it would end up being neither. As if the pressure weren’t high enough, they’d entered into an agreement with the TV network Granada to film a documentary on it. Logistically there was a lot that had to go perfectly, and nobody was really together.

  On the day of the concert, the crowd was there, but by most accounts, the groove was not. Mick’s reappearance as a live attraction was a strange one. First of all, he wore a white puffy shirt (not unlike the one from the classic 1993 Seinfeld episode) and garish drag queen makeup. Only his long dark hair seems princely, but otherwise, he did not present as a formidable leader. In a horrible foreshadowing of events to come, he scolded the crowd, attempting to quiet them so he could recite a poem for Brian Jones. “Are you gonna be quiet or not?” he whined, then attempted to read “Adonais,” Percy Shelley’s eulogy for John Keats. The crowd simply wanted to rock. The dark irony that Shelley, like Jones, was a victim of drowning, was not even on the communal transom. Mick got through the recital, but it’s hard to gauge what emotions if any he brought to the party. Mick did not attend Jones’ funeral, and commented to reporters that he had no intention to “walk the hills” dressed in black, because he didn’t believe that death was the end of existence.

  It rendered his grieving suspect, but he’d become, overnight, the band’s de facto manager; once again the class prefect, only now the stakes were enormous.

  Faithfull can be seen beaming in footage from Hyde Park, but it’s misleading. Convinced that she’d seen a premonition of Jones’ demise, she was unraveling mentally as fast, if not faster than even he did. After seven months of pregnancy, they lost their unborn daughter. “The miscarriage did both of us in,” she has said. Faithfull indicates that Mick seemed to handle the tragedy better than she did. As he had when Robert Kennedy was shot, Mick the songwriter and band leader simply worked his way through it. The unhappy event even found its way into his lyrics. While Donald Cammell was editing Performance, Mick was finishing its musical centerpiece, “Memo from Turner,” without any input from Keith. “The baby’s dead, my lady said,” became a part of the song’s chilling, closing line.

  Her own musical career had stalled in the years following the Redlands bust. Frustrated by the prospect of spending eternity as Miss X, the woman with the Mars bar (or at best, a sexual and creative second banana to Mick), she wa
s, by ’69, easing her pain over the miscarriage and frustration with her standing with smack. It worked faster and more completely than the pills and liquor that she’d initially turned to. Heroin use had gone quickly from an acceptable dalliance among the decadent Chelsea scene to a fullblown habit. Still recognizable as the angelic ingénue of “As Tears Go By,” she had, spiritually, become a harder, darker creature entirely, one who’d come to resent her role as the already indelible Stones myth. “Being the kept plaything of a great rock star wasn’t my destiny,” she would later confess. To this day, Faithfull bristles at her inability to escape the larger Stones myth. When I spoke to her for Vanity Fair’s site, she complained, “Most of it’s lies. It’s the tabloid version of me. And that’s just not me. You know that. If you know my work, you must know that. It hasn’t been good for my career at all. What was good for it was ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Sister Morphine,’ but the tabloid aspect was not good and that’s how I’m remembered unfortunately by thousands of people. As ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, blah blah blah.”

  At the time, like Pallenberg, she selected a handful of film roles designed to carve out some kind of submyth within the Stones’ universe, a cinematic identity to afford her some independence and self-respect. Girl on a Motorcycle, one of these films, is certainly kitschy—one of those ’60s fetishes that’s best left to a dorm room wall—but its theme, tone, and script articulated Faithfull’s real-life frustration. She stars as the titular “Girl,” a sexually frustrated wife of a professor. At night, while he sleeps, she creeps out of bed naked, zips herself into a skintight leather one-piece suit, and rides the countryside straddling a snorting hog and recalling a tryst with the French film icon Alain Delon, who is almost as pretty as she is. Full of blunt innuendo (the nozzle of the gas pump going slowly into the open cycle tank), pop philosophy (“Rebellion is the only thing that keeps you alive”), and pulpy come-ons (“Your body is like a violin in a velvet case”), it somehow manages to capture Faithfull’s fragile, emotionally hemorrhaging state and flirtation with death (motor girl indeed meets her maker in the windshield of an oncoming pickup, James Dean style).

  She also appeared in a London production of Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and starred as the doomed Ophelia in Hamlet, hitting her marks and reciting her iambic pentameter while smack ingested backstage coursed through her bloodstream. She, too, had become bad news, only Mick could not bring himself to leave her. He still adored her and hoped to start a family. He’d had a happy childhood and as he grew older and the decadence started to feel repetitive, he’d fostered a strong urge to become a parent and lavish the same love, care, and wisdom on his progeny that Joe and Eva did on him and his brother. But he couldn’t get Marianne to clean up.

  There was no culture of intervention in 1969. Drugs were still seen as tools for enlightenment, and as a consequence, rock stars and artists would soon be dying left and right: Hendrix, Joplin, Morrison . . . Jones. Unable to save his lover, Mick turned his tension inward and channeled his emotions into the Stones, using modern blues and little else as a catharsis. “I’m a flea-bit peanut monkey!” Mick would write in “Monkey Man,” another key track from this fertile period. “All my friends are junkies!” It was true in spades and it was starting to suck out all the fun of being a star. “I don’t find it easy dealing with people with drug problems,” Mick told Rolling Stone in 1995. “It helps if you’re all taking drugs, all the same drugs. But anyone taking heroin is thinking about taking heroin more than they’re thinking about anything else. That’s the general rule about most drugs. If you’re really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.”

  Faithfull’s son with John Dunbar, Nicholas, was now in school. Mick had come to consider the boy a part of his own family, and leaving Faithfull would be tantamount to losing touch with her son as well. Hoping some time outside of London might be helpful, they kept their plans to fly to Australia for the Ned Kelly shoot (Faithfull had been cast by director Tony Richardson as Kelly’s beloved sister). It would be a working vacation, a getaway from the scene, and the specter of Brian Jones. This was the fresh start they needed at the close of a tumultuous decade. Jones’ ghost would not be calmed, however. That very night, jet-lagged and sedated, Marianne Faithfull attempted to join Brian Jones in the abyss. She woke up and went to the bathroom in their hotel room, stared at herself in the mirror, and imagined she saw Brian staring back at her. “Welcome to Death,” the fallen Rolling Stone supposedly greeted her. She kept swallowing pills to calm her nerves, and after a point, she knew she was taking a potentially fatal amount, but did not stop. She lay down to go to sleep and in her dreams, she was walking with Jones through purgatory. “I had my overdose in Australia and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me,” Faithfull writes.

  American-born Marsha Hunt, then twenty-three, was the face of British fashion in ’69, all big brown eyes and a full afro. She was an actress and aspiring pop singer in addition to her career as a model, and had been romantically involved with a pre-glitter Marc Bolan. She was also, relative to Faithfull at the time, sane. Mick had noticed Hunt from a nude photo session she shot with David Bailey and sent word that she would be perfect as the model for the sleeve of the Stones’ upcoming single “Honky Tonk Women.” “The picture was going to be of a girl dressed like a sleazebag standing in a bar with the Stones and they wanted me to be the girl,” Hunt writes in her memoir, Real Life. She had misgivings. “The last thing we needed was for me to denigrate us by dressing up like a whore among a band of white renegades, which was an underlying element of the Stones’ image. I tried to get in touch with Jagger to say, ‘Thank you, but no thank you.’ He returned my call very late and suggested I come around.”

  When they met, Hunt was shocked to find Mick was not the cocksure rock star that his public image might have suggested. His complexion was bad, his hair dirty, and he seemed tired and undernourished. “To think that he was the same person who had such a wide-boy image intrigued me, because there was nothing of this wrangling poseur about him,” she writes. Mick began an affair with Hunt while Brian Jones was still alive. She was at Hyde Park, famously clad in a white leather suit. Their affair was a secret carried out in Hunt’s modest flat in St. John’s Wood, but when Faithfull finally discovered it, she made sure that her revenge affair with Italian photographer Mariano Schifrino was public.

  One day, while waiting for a shot to be set up, Mick, in period dress as the Victorian-era outlaw, stood in a field strumming his guitar, when he came up with a riff. He played it over and over and soon started writing lyrics. “Black pussy,” they went. “How come you taste so good?” At first they made him laugh, but the riff was strong, and soon he was taking the song seriously, writing allegorical lyrics about the slave trade. He changed the title, a sort of double entendre addressed at Keith, Marianne, Anita, and all of his friends who’d willingly given up their lives to heroin: “Brown sugar, how come you taste so good?” It perfectly taps into the “Black Is Beautiful” zeitgeist but is politically incorrect and raw enough (even with the altered title) to keep with the Stones’ new, hard model.

  As with integrated relationships, planned parenting between unmarried young men and women was also popular at the end of the decade, and Mick and Marsha Hunt were certainly in vogue as they discussed the idea of conception, but once it was too late, Mick found himself torn. This was a classic rebound situation following his serious relationship with Faithfull, after all. “He vacillated between approval and disapproval of the oncoming birth,” Hunt recalled. “It was too late for reconsideration, as I reminded him, but it alerted me for the first time that he was already forgetting that the baby was his idea.” Mick would question whether or not the child was his, ordering a paternity test. Following the baby’s birth (a girl named Karis), Hunt would take him to court for failure to pay child support. Eventually he settled into the role as loving and available fath
er, but at the time, love and availability were met with suspicion and aloofness. He’d been hurt badly.

  America had changed in the three years since the Stones had last toured the country. It was hungrier for more substantial distractions after assassinations and nightly footage of the Vietnam War. The business changed as a result. During their early British Invasion tours, all the band had to do was make it to the venue on time, play twenty minutes, and collect their pay. The white noise of fifteen thousand screaming girls drowned out the P.A.s that couldn’t really overpower them anyway. Now they had to actually perform for two hours and the crowd could hear every botched note or missed cue, every breakdown of time: everything that made them less than perfect. “It was like learning how to play again,” Richards recalled.

  Once the darlings of the underground press, they were now under fire for the price of their tickets, as they tried to replenish their purloined fortunes. The pressure from all sides was enormous as they prepped a return to the road, while continuing to record and mix Let It Bleed, their follow-up to Beggars Banquet due out around the Christmas season. If it failed, the Stones could have easily become, for all their talent and charisma, a band of the’60s, buried in time like the Beatles, who only made it a few months into the ’70s before breaking up.

  The band convened in Southern California in October after Mick’s Australian experience shooting Ned Kelly and splitting with Faithfull. They piled into a rented Laurel Canyon mansion called “Oriole House.” The property belonged to Stephen Stills, late of Buffalo Springfield and now a member of Crosby, Stills and Nash (who’d played Woodstock). They rehearsed in the Oriole House basement but the set didn’t come together. “We’d been in America for two weeks and although everyone realized the band wasn’t in good shape, no one had actually played together yet,” tour manager Cutler later wrote in his memoir, You Can’t Always Get What You Want. Sensing some urgency, they moved operations to a soundstage at Warner Brothers studios in Burbank to rehearse in an environment more like the giant venues they were now filling. The stage had been used in the upcoming Sydney Pollack film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? starring Jane Fonda, and the dance-contest clock still hung above as if to remind them that they didn’t have forever to find the magic.