Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue

by Marc Spitz

  The Rutles’ creators astutely determined that their audience would be as steeped in Beatles iconography (A Hard Day’s Night’s running, Help’s hazy, cannabis-filtered tropical locales, John and Yoko’s avant-garde forays, the rooftop concert) and peripheral characters (Leggy Mountbatton, for late manager Brian Epstein, Ron Decline, played by a neckless John Belushi, for Allen Klein), and with each recognition they would find themselves breathing a bit more freely, like some elaborate, candy-colored exorcism.

  “It actually was the best, funniest, and most scratching [of all the Beatles-related films],” George Harrison later said. “But at the same time, it was done with the most love. The Rutles sort of liberated me from the Beatles in a way.”

  One cannot, after all, successfully skewer something one doesn’t first love and understand perfectly. The Beatle-like melodies were already such a part of Innes’ songwriting DNA that he didn’t have to relisten to any of them to turn the Ed Sullivan Show–Fab Four singles into “Hold My Hand” (complete with ad libs like McCartney’s “Woo hoo” at the end, pulled straight from “All My Loving”). The “Pre Fab Four” were Dirk, Stig, Barry, and Nasty (five if you count Leppo, “The Fifth Rutle.” These were crucially Rutles songs, sung and played in a universe where the Beatles never existed. “It was really like we were little kids playing cowboys and Indians—or some game that children can play,” Innes says. “They’re going to be pirates—we were going to be Rutles—and the Beatles did not exist. But Mick Jagger and Paul Simon did.”

  This is the second masterstroke. The Stones were no longer the Beatles’ greatest rival through the ’60s; they were now “the South’s answer to the Rutles,” as a gleeful Mick Jagger (the real Mick Jagger, two full decades before the real John Malkovich anchored Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich) describes his band. “It was hugely important to have Mick and Paul,” Innes says.

  Identified in a caption as “Mick Jagger: Rock Star,” Jagger, then thirty-five years old, doesn’t look remotely flamboyant. With shoulder-length hair and a clean button-up striped shirt, he calmly sits on a couch and gamely answers mock questions about the era he came to personify. “I thought, ‘He’s very good,’ ” says Gary Weiss, an S.N.L. short-film director who helped Idle make the film. “Then I realized he meant every word of it. All he was doing was placing Rutles instead of Beatles.”

  “The first time I met the Rutles,” Mick the “Rock Star” recalls, “they came down to see us at Richmond. We were just completing a number and suddenly they were just standing there in their black suits. They’d just come off a TV show and they were standing there checking us out—the opposition. And then they introduced themselves, you know Dirk, Stig, Nasty, Barry—they were very nice.”

  Mick proceeds to target certain key points in the Stones’ history. On the filthy Edith Grove apartment he shared with Keith Richards and Brian Jones while getting the Stones together (and still attending the London School of Economics): “We were living in squalor, didn’t have any money, there were the Rutles on TV with girls chasing them. We thought this can’t be that difficult so we thought we’d have a go ourselves.”

  On being offered and recording “I Wanna Be Your Man” in 1964 (written by John and Paul and soon to become the Stones’ first British Top 10 single): “They said ‘Do you want a song?’ We were really open for songs because we didn’t write our own and of course the Rutles were really well-known for their hit-making potential ability—and so they ran around the corner to the pub to write this song and came back with it and played it to us and—it was ’orrible and so we never bothered to record it.”

  On the Beatles playing Shea Stadium (or “Che Stadium” as it is referred to): “[They took] a helicopter back to the Warwick Hotel. Two birds each.”

  On exploring transcendental meditation in Bangor, India, with the Maharishi, which Jagger and Marianne Faithfull explored as well (in “All You Need Is Cash” this is Ouija-board-tapping “Bognor”) : “We were just as eager to find out what was going on with the board-tapping ‘Bognor’ as anybody.” Even the Stones’ notorious drug bust is mocked in a flash of newspaper headline during the segment when the Beatles and Stones fall under the influence of “tea”: “Stones arrested. Nude girl and teapot!” Altamont is not spared either, with Ron Wood appearing as a clueless Hells Angel. Mick is even given the last word. When asked by Idle’s journalist, “Why did the Rutles break up?” he responds, “Women. Just women. Getting in the way. Cherchez la femme.” “Do you think they’ll ever get back together?” Idle continues. “I ’ope not,” Mick replies.

  Even Bianca Jagger, whose lack of a sense of humor Keith was still puzzling over in 2010, gets in on the fun as one of the aforementioned rock wives (as McQuigley’s muse Martini, a French woman who spoke no English and very little French).

  “When I saw his footage, I remember thinking ‘This is coming over really well,’ ” Innes says. “He was happy to take the piss out of the myth of the ’60s. It’s why he came off so well.” Another reason is more elemental: Mick is naturally funny, perhaps the most gifted mimic and comedian of his rock and roll peers. “He had good timing. Very natural, yeah,” Weiss agrees. There’s an extended scene in Peter Whitehead’s 1965 tour documentary, Charlie Is My Darling, in which Jagger, standing at a piano with Richards, does a spot-on Elvis impersonation.

  Mick Jagger had been witty at press conferences perhaps, but he had not been funny on film before. He’d written some humorous lyrics about rock and roll as it was slowly becoming big business (“The Under Assistant West Coast Promo Man”) and was already a master at skewering the hypocrisy of his elders (“Mother’s Little Helper”), as well his own London-ruling hipoisie (“19th Nervous Breakdown”). In the year that All You Need Is Cash aired, he would turn this keen eye on nearly bankrupt and punked-out Manhattan with “Shattered,” but up until that point, his ’60s, and certainly the Beatles’, ever the alpha to the Stones’ beta, were sacred. Michaels and the original Saturday Night Live crew and writers, many from the National Lampoon, had broken through by casting their critical eye on the generation in which they came of age, as they now struggled to make money and hold on to their ideals, and reckon with things like the breakup of the Beatles, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and Watergate. The humor as a result became tougher and harder, and on occasion crueler. It became less Beatles and more Stones in its essence, which is why Mick Jagger jibes perfectly with the zeitgeist, and in the ’70s takeover as the culture’s undisputed alpha band.

  Mick’s long association with Saturday Night Live and friendship with Lorne Michaels, its creator, begins with All You Need Is Cash. The Stones would perform on the show on October 7 of ’78 and Mick would appear as himself alongside Dan Aykroyd’s Tom Snyder.

  DAN AYKROYD (AS TOM SNYDER): “Get Off of My Cloud.” It was one of the best singles you guys ever did, and I’ll tell you why. I was working within Westinghouse Industries back in the fifties, not in the coaster division, in the broadcasting division. And there was a unit manager, he used to get me so teed off! I used to feel like saying to him, “Get the heck off my cloud!” You ever feel like saying, “Heck! I’m Mick Jagger, I’ve got a few hit records. I can afford to take some time off and do whatever the heck I want?”

  MICK JAGGER: I suppose I do. I mean, we did a tour that was really successful and I went crazy, I guess, a little crazy afterward—I put a barbecue and a swimming pool in the backyard.

  Over the years, Mick would parody Keith in both a Weekend Update sketch alongside Mike Myers’ “Mick,” and, at the start of the new century, he would again take the piss out of himself (on the opposite side of a Marx Brothers–style vanity “mirror” with Jimmy Fallon’s equally excellent Mick. (“Here we are S.N.L. again, what am I gonna do? Did it in the ’70s, the ’80s, the ’90s, now I’m doing it in whatever you call this decade.”) Tearing down youth culture idols is de rigueur, and by the end of the ’70s, Jagger, now pushing forty, had become the butt of such jokes. If you were inclined, you c
ould find a YouTube clip of now Senator Al Franken imitating Mick (with partner Tom Davis as Keith) on Solid Gold (doing a live lip-synch version of “Under My Thumb” in ’81 tour drag of yellow tank top and tight football pants). Richard Belzer’s Jagger impression (“a rooster on acid”) became one of his signature bits. Eddie Murphy observed in his breakthrough standup special Delirious: “Being a comic ain’t like being no singer—the singers get all the pussy. You don’t even have to look good—you can sing and get pussy. Mick Jagger is an ugly motherfucker with big ass lips. Mick Jagger’s lips so big, black people be going ‘You got some big ass lips.’ But he singing.” And yet, Jagger’s groundbreaking appearance as himself in All You Need Is Cash did it first, did it best, and in that small sitting, Jagger managed to liberate his generation for a second time. In playing himself, he also introduces the concept of meta-performance. Once they could laugh about it all, the ’60s finally had a context and its relics were if not a little bit younger, a lot more free. In Woody Allen’s 1989 dark comedy Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alan Alda’s pompous Lester lectures Woody Allen’s less successful filmmaker Cliff that comedy is nothing more than “tragedy plus time.” With blood on the ground in Benedict Canyon and at Altamont, there was nothing to do but wait.

  14

  “Punker Than Punk, Ruder Than Rude”

  On a promotional flyer from a concert at the Whisky a Go Go in Hollywood dated June 8, 1978, the bill features art brats the Weirdos and the Dils, led by the near militant Kinman Brothers. It depicts Mick Jagger, long-haired, imperious; his bedroom eyes looking askance occupied the center. Someone has drawn a Fu Manchu mustache and goatee on him with what looks like a Sharpie marker, like Marcel Duchamp’s Dada-defacing of the I. The Rolling Stones’ fourteenth album, Some Girls, designed to restore them to good rebel standing, would be released the following day. They had a lot of work to do.

  How did the Stones lose their edge and menace? Where’d the teeth go? When did discerning listeners stop believing what they were hearing? Through the mid-’70s, the riffs were still frequently punchy (“If You Can’t Rock Me” and “Dance Little Sister,” off It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, “Crazy Mama,” on Black and Blue). Ron Wood, who replaced Mick Taylor in 1975, had been the guitarist in the Faces, whose albums were great, boozy fun, hardly the stuff of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, or Genesis. Kids could play these riffs. But none of the new breed wanted to know the Rolling Stones.

  I decided it wasn’t about the music at all. Why had a band whose first manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, built their fame almost entirely on a bad-boy image, become so reviled by an entire generation of rebels on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean? It was about the friction, or in the case of Mick, Keith, Bill, Charlie, and Ronnie, lack of friction. Perhaps the Rolling Stones simply got too big to be an oppositional band. You can’t own English country estates that you’re only allowed to visit three months a year by law, vacation homes in Mustique, and a pad or two in upper Manhattan (as Mick did) and lay claim to be an oppositional band. And it’s fine to not be one. Who doesn’t love Paul McCartney’s ’70s band, Wings? Or Led Zeppelin for that matter? The problem with the Stones, why they inspired vandalism among punk-rock gigflyer designers, was that they claimed to still be oppositional.

  Pete Townsend got a punk pass because he was self-deprecating; listen to the lyrics on the Who’s final album with Keith Moon, ’78s Who Are You. They’re ale-sodden, miserable, and true. The punks determined it would be uncouth to kick Pete when he was doing it himself so successfully. Freddie Mercury of Queen would just sass them right back. He didn’t care about punk cred. He cared about midgets with silver tray hats. He’d play Sun City. Nothing was going to keep him from a stage. John Lennon went into hiding, stripping off his radical-chic garments and learning to bake bread. David Bowie went to Berlin and started returning Iggy Pop’s calls again. Mick Jagger became the main target. He assumed people would appreciate that he wasn’t only penthouse, he was pavement too. It got him far through the late ’60s, and early ’70s, but a seventeen-year-old kid on speed doesn’t see subtlety. He or she just sees a thirty-five-year-old millionaire in a white disco suit. Someone should commend Mick for having the balls to stay and fight; to insist that he was still punk, still oppositional, still relevant. It was tremendous chutzpah and he nearly pulled it off.

  It surely must have galled Mick that the Stones virtually handed the punks a musical blueprint. Devo stripped the iconic “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” down to a syncopated, barely recognizable herky jerk, wresting it from the oldies bin. It’s not unaffectionate or unfaithful, but it’s a radical revamping that nearly claimed the song for their own. The previous year, the San Francisco art rockers the Residents recorded their own muted, nightmarish, hilarious version of the song. The Strand, an early band featuring future Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock, guitarist Steve Jones, and drummer Paul Cook, built their rehearsal set around’60s classics by the Stones, the Who, and the Small Faces. Punks on both sides of the Atlantic drew their inspiration from the Nuggets soundtrack, which basically featured American bands copying their British Invasion heroes (listen to the Stones’ “She Said Yeah,” and you more or less have American garage rock in less than three minutes). In his classic punk treatise England’s Dreaming, writer Jon Savage observes: “In ignorance of the music that was on their doorstep, most of these groups were copying white British pop groups—like the Rolling Stones or the Yardbirds—that were themselves attempting to capture the spirit of black American R&B—this double refraction resulted in a purely white, blue-collar style in which any black rhythmic influence was bleached out in favor of pure noise and texture.” The sensational punk trio the Jam even dressed like a streamlined version of the ’60s mod Stones. They, of course, no longer dressed this way. If they had, ironically, they might have been rewarded for their sartorial stasis. Look at the way the Ramones or Motörhead’s Lemmy (or Keith Richards for that matter) are held up as bastions of integrity, largely because their iconic look has given them a dependable, action-hero air. You could draw Lemmy. Mick was too slippery. He changed clothes, looks, sounds. Like the punks, he was very easily bored.

  Watch any documentary on the advent of the Sex Pistols, like Julien Temple’s excellent The Filth and the Fury, and you will see sounds and images of social strife, racism, and economic repression (and indifference on the part of the government and the monarchy). The Pistols formed out of desperation, a product of their environment, like N.W.A. and Nirvana after them. When Malcolm McLaren took three major labels for healthy advances, it felt like Robin Hood returning to Sherwood Forest. When the Stones took money for lackluster albums like Black and Blue and shambolic tours, hobbled by Keith’s hit-or-miss presence, it was the wrong kind of rock and roll swindle. Around this time, Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren, his then partner Vivienne Westwood, and future Clash manager Bernie Rhodes designed a T-shirt bearing a manifesto of sorts. It was headed with the slogan: “You’re going to wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on.” Beneath it there were two lists, which divided people and things into Loves and Hates; i.e., icons both approved and reviled by the punks. Marianne Faithfull appears midway down the “loves” list under Joe Orton, Lenny Bruce, would be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanis and “zoot suits and dreadlocks.” Mick nearly tops the “hate” list, coming in at number two, just under “Television (not the group).”

  “The straw that broke the camel’s back and galvanized the punks was the Earls Court run in 1975,” says veteran British music writer Kris Needs, referring to the Stones decadent tour in support of It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll, which climaxed with the band playing “Star, Star,” as a giant, inflatable penis was erected by a wind machine. “It was attended by Clash and Sex Pistols. The sound was poor, the band sluggish, and the vanity overwhelming as Mick straddled a blow-up knob. Tacky.”

  By ’77, Keith had bigger problems than irrelevance. He was kicking heroin, again, only this time it was mandatory. After bei
ng busted in Canada with enough of the drug to land him in prison for seven years, he finally began to get his act together, open his eyes, and have a good look at the lay of the land for the first time in a good half decade. To Keith, punk was just the flavor of the month; the same old chords, dolled up in torn T-shirts, safety pins, and bondage pants. “Punk was built to alarm Mick but inspire Keith, who saw it as another trend to beat at its own game. With the punk bands, he just saw himself fifteen years before,” says Needs today. But then nobody asked Keith about punk.

  Everybody asked Mick. A rumor had spread that Mick had dipped into Sex, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s notorious bondage couture boutique on the Kings Road, intent to kit himself out in the new drag, only to be told to “Fuck off ” by Johnny Rotten, the Sex Pistols’ iconoclastic singer and lyricist.

  “Just complete and utter fantasy,” Mick countered, dismissing the rumor bluntly in an interview the following year. “Nobody ever slams the door on me in the Kings Road. They all know I’m the only one who’s got any money to spend on their crappy clothes . . . though even I would draw the line on spending money on torn T-shirts.” Perhaps he’d seen the McLaren/ Westwood/ Rhodes–designed shirt? Rotten clearly had no patience for the likes of Mick. Years later, in his memoir, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, he recalled: “I saw a lot of old rock stars—and lots of jealous rock stars too. One of the most verbal instances was Mick Jagger. ‘The Sex Pistols are awful, and they can’t play!’ Shame on you Mick. The Stones were one of the most notoriously inept bands in music, and here was this old coke hag pointing fingers and calling us disgusting. The Stones were into patting themselves on the backs and being self-congratulatory like many of those old timers. The Pistols were an absolute threat to that nice little world they had all built for themselves.”