Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue

by Marc Spitz

  Still, the media, which had abided by the Stones’ antics for more than a decade and seeing an opportunity to exact some revenge, embraced the idea that Mick was out and punk was in. You can see the seeds of this media-concocted war during the Pistols’ infamous appearance on the Today show on December 1, 1976. Introducing the assembled Sex Pistols and some of their outlandish entourage (including a pre-fame Siouxsie Sioux), an inebriated and un-amused Bill Grundy observes, “These aren’t the nice, clean Rolling Stones.” On cue, the Pistols proceed to curse and outrage, prompting screaming headlines (“Filthy lucre!”) the following morning. When writer Charles M. Young was in London in the summer of ’77 covering the Pistols for Rolling Stone, word came across the transatlantic lines that Elvis Presley had died. “Elvis Presley died? Makes you feel sad doesn’t it?” Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren (who ironically took his cues from Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham) quipped to Young. “Like your grandfather died. Yeah. It’s just too bad it couldn’t have been Mick Jagger.” It was excellent copy, as they say.

  The Pistols’ new bassist and the ultimate symbol of the new nihilism, Sid Vicious, weighed in as well: “I absolutely despise those turds,” he said with a sneer, lambasting the Stones and their generation. “The Stones should have quit in 1965. You never see any of those cunts walkin’ down the street. If it gets so you can’t see us that way, I don’t want it.”

  The street was key to the Stones counterattack. The album they were recording in Paris at the time of the Pistol’s Rolling Stone interview would contain countless references to the street, like 53rd and 3rd, Manhattan’s gay male hustler spot that the Ramones sing about on their self titled debut in “When the Whip Comes Down.” “Shattered” described a maggot-filled “Big Apple” full of two-faced hangers-on and people wearing garbage bags as “some kind of fashion.” Even “Miss You,” Jagger’s “disco song,” was raunchy, describing a late-night hang full of lots of wine (a whole case!) and some enthusiastic Puerto Rican girls. “We’re gonna mess and fool around, like we used to!” Mick cheers, conjuring the spirit of the old, bad Stones.

  Musically, Some Girls offered magnificent bluesy pop (“Beast of Burden”), camp country (“Far Away Eyes,” a showcase for Mick’s gift for mimicry), soul (a cover of the Temptations’ aching “Just My Imagination”), and the aforementioned disco, but it is dominated by short, punchy songs, not like the previous three albums, which were anchored by a lot of searching jam songs. “Lies,” was designed to be as brutal as anything by the Pistols or the Adverts or the Clash. On “Respectable,” Mick acknowledged the band’s standing with a quip: “We’re talking heroin with the president . . .” Did they pull it off? Yes, in that it’s hands-down the best Stones record since Exile on Main Street (a popular opinion because, well, it’s true). No, in that by the time they released it, punk had already started to become something else: post punk and new wave. Some Girls was a great album, but it was an old-fashioned album; the Stones were “good again,” but breaking no new ground, seeking nothing but a return to form, the very concept itself a hackneyed one. “The ‘punk’ songs were basically faster Stones songs,” Needs observes.

  The band was much more in tune with the times when it came to their association with Peter Tosh, who would open the North American tour in support of Some Girls. While West Indian culture had long been an important part of postwar England’s identity, seemingly overnight, the British youth had gone mad for reggae and dub. The Pistols disintegrated in the winter of ’78 while on tour in America. Rotten and his old friend Jah Wobble formed Public Image Limited along with guitarist Keith Levene and began setting more sophisticated and expansive songs of angst and anger to Wobble’s dub-inspired bass lines. The Clash had recorded a version of Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” on their debut. From the Midlands came Coventry’s the Specials, whose label logo, a skanking rude boy named Walt Jabsco, was a cartoon rendering of Tosh from an early ’60s album cover. Reggae and dub had always been the music that the punks listened to, thanks to the Roxy’s DJ Don Letts. “It was so early in the scene that there wasn’t any punk-rock records to play,” Letts told me during an interview for Spin in 2009. “So I played what I was into: Big Youth, Prince Far I, Toots and the Maytals. Lucky for me, the audience liked it as well. England had a long tradition of white, working-class youth gravitating toward black music. What were the Beatles and the Stones listening to but black music from the Mississippi Delta? The difference with the Jamaican music of the late ’70s was that kids were fascinated by a music and a culture that weren’t really removed from their day-to-day life.” Signing Peter Tosh to Rolling Stones Records in 1979, the year the Special’s “Gangsters,” Madness’ “Madness,” and the English Beat’s “Tears of a Clown” stormed the British charts, did more to return the Stones to the right track than anyone could have imagined. “I think they liked the mutual credibility,” music journalist Vivien Goldman says. “Both parties thinking they’re authentic together. Peter thought they were pretty interesting too. I guess they were squaring their authenticity by linking.”

  Bob Marley had broken in America, selling out arenas after splitting with Tosh, who’d become bitter and jealous that the man he considered his “student” had surpassed him. He’d already alienated one label (Columbia, which had released the excellent Legalize It and its also even stronger follow-up Equal Rights). It was decided that the best way to reach a larger audience was to record a duet with Mick. In their early years, Tosh, Marley, and (third Wailer) Bunny Wailer had recorded a sweet, rocksteady version of the Temptations’ 1965 hit “(You Got to Walk and) Don’t Look Back,” penned by Smokey Robinson.

  Tosh was invited to perform on Saturday Night Live after the release, and footage from the duet shows both the esteem the two held for each other and the uneasiness of this partnership of convenience. Mick looks stiff. He dances nervously, and lapses occasionally into reggae mimicry, something he so skillfully avoided on those early blues albums but, often it seemed, for his own amusement, he would indulge in later in his career. Occasionally the men smile at each other warmly, but Tosh literally and figuratively dwarfs Mick, the much bigger star, and one gets the feeling there’s a different kind of clash they now have to reckon with. “Peter was a man with a massive ego. You need that if you’re gonna be a messiah and he was very messianic,” says Goldman, who wrote extensively about both Tosh and Bob Marley. “He was very much of an alpha male and I’m sure things like the Rolling Stones daring to tell him that he hadn’t sold, he would not be a happy camper and that would strike him to the core. He was very proud.”

  Sid Vicious was already gone by the time the Stones began work on Emotional Rescue, their follow-up to Some Girls. Tosh returned to Jamaica to live in Keith’s vacation home, Point of View, in Ocho Rios until a dispute over the actual ownership of the residence (which has since passed into Stones legend) ended that as well. Ironically, he scored one of his biggest hits after his association with the Stones, on a Chuck Berry cover, no less. In 1983, his reggae version of Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode,” was heavily rotated on MTV. His final album, No Nuclear War, released in 1987, won the Best Reggae Album Grammy, but Tosh died violently, murdered in a mysterious home-invasion robbery by an associate.

  If Mick took anything away from his war with the young punks and his all-too-brief alliance with the rudest rude boy of them all, it was that perhaps being “bad,” like being on the right side of the barriers in ’68, was not really worth the sacrifice. Bad boys die young. The ’80s were drawing near and Mick was about to choose life in a big way.

  15

  “It’s Nice to Have a Chick Occasionally”

  The “chick” in question was 1969 tour opener Tina Turner. In Gimme Shelter, Mick delivers the potentially sexist line with a perfect sense of camp that renders it instantly inoffensive. It’s a decent metaphor for his entire modus operandi with regard to the pursuit of the opposite sex. Warren Beatty wasn’t camp. Neither was Wilt Chamberlain. Gene Simmons was camp bu
t didn’t realize that he was camp. Of all the legendary ladies’ men of the postpill /pre-AIDS era, Mick Jagger was the only one who had that out: “It’s all a laugh. I don’t really mean it.” Irony may redeem some of his behavior, which, when conducted without a wink, could be and has been construed as pretty abhorrent.

  Like the time Mick supposedly lured eighteen-year-old Mackenzie Phillips, daughter of his old friend John Phillips, away from a cocktail party and into his kitchen with the pretense of fixing a few tuna fish sandwiches for everyone. According to Mackenzie, Mick asked John to go out to fetch some mayonnaise (he had run out). While John Phillips was shopping, Mick allegedly took Mackenzie to the bed he shared with Jerry Hall and had his way with her. “My dad came back and started knocking on the door, yelling, ‘You’ve got my daughter in there!’ ” she recalled. How about the time when “sex mad” Mick emerged from the shower of a Brussels hotel room, stark naked, to introduce himself to the new nanny, hired to look after his and Hall’s kids. “I didn’t know where to put my eyes,” the nanny told UK tabloid the Daily Mirror. “The next thing I knew he put out his hand and said, ‘Hi, I’m Mick.’ To be honest, I didn’t know which hand to shake!”

  Mick Jagger is a go-er, but his beauty is both male and female, and since the ’60s, he’s appealed to both sexes equally. There’s that famous line from Milos Forman’s adaptation of the musical Hair, where the blond Woof is interrogated by a prison shrink. “You have any sexual attraction toward men?” he’s asked. “Well, I wouldn’t kick Mick Jagger out of my bed but I’m not a homosexual.” Young, male music fans were attracted to Mick for a different reason than the one that attracted them to Keith. It was a seduction, by someone telegraphing absolute sexual confidence. Humor—camp humor—isa keyingredienttothishighlyappealing energy. In writer Christopher Isherwood’s recently published’60s diaries, he recounts a moment where Mick confides in him that the true reason that the Beatles left the Maharishi’s ashram abruptly was because the holy man allegedly made a pass at one of them (and not, as has been widely reported, the actress Mia Farrow’s sister Prudence). “They’re simple, north-country lads; they’re terribly uptight about all that.” With the exception of his very early sexual encounters and the urban legend of Angie Bowie catching him in bed with her husband, David, there’s really not much to suggest that Mick has been anything but a chaser of skirts. And yet, even while living in Edith Grove in the very early’60s with Keith and Brian, he would sometimes astound them with acts of extremely camp prancing; puzzling when one ponders the very long list of beautiful women he has pursued, sometimes loved, and sometimes hurt. Brigitte Bardot, Marianne, Patti D’Arbanville (muse of Cat Stevens and Warhol star), Marsha Hunt, Bianca, Pamela Des Barres, Bebe Buell (muse of Todd Rundgren and Elvis Costello), and in middle age, Angelina Jolie and Sophie Dahl.

  Maybe Mick’s failure to commit to sincere emotion when it comes to relations with significant others accounts for his occasionally painful and certainly pain-inducing lack of fidelity.

  Has it always been this way, since his first serious girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, had to reckon with screaming fans and road affairs? Certainly the Stones’ witty blues track “The Spider and the Fly” plays upon what was, by 1965, already a questionable reputation. “Keep fidelity in your head,” Mick sings with camp lasciviousness, as if to convey to the listener “Yeah, there’s no way that’s gonna happen.” In his memoir, Keith talks about how his shirt was wet from all the girls who came to him, cried on his shoulder, and asked him to explain Mick. If women didn’t understand Mick, part of his arsenal was a seemingly effortless appreciation for them. “Most men aren’t very good at feelings,” his ex-wife Jerry Hall has said. “Mick had a talent for it.”

  “I think his lyrics are the lyrics of a conflicted man,” says musician Liz Phair, who responded to Mick’s lyrics on Exile on Main Street with her own Exile in Guyville, now regarded as an indierock classic. “Which is what makes him so timeless. Like he’s one of those misogynists that loves women too. He’s the prototypical. He gets us completely. Those lyrics. I don’t think anyone could ever understand me as well as Mick understands me. And yet I don’t think he’s going to treat me well at the same time.”

  Indeed, lyrically, Mick has a penchant for berating a woman trying to control him: See “Slave” off Tattoo You. Or how about the title track from his solo debut, She’s the Boss: “When I first met you, you looked so soft . . . What a fool I was.” It’s interesting to read into his lyrics if only because they frequently counter the public perception of Mick as the one who does dirty. If you believe what you read on the sheet, it’s Mick who’s heartbroken; hence the “put-down” songs, as Keith calls them, that they manage to put out at least once a decade: “Tell Me” in the ’60s to “I Got the Blues” in the ’70s to “Worried About You” in the ’80s to “Anybody Seen My Baby” in the ’90s and “Streets of Love” in the 2000s. Women think he’s tasty but they always try to waste him. His first marriage, to Bianca, was marked by public infidelity on both sides; Mick initiating counterattacks from Bianca, who would take care to be photographed on the arm of handsome movie stars like Ryan O’Neal and the German matinee idol Helmut Berger. They would divorce in ’78.

  In Andrew Morton’s 2010 unauthorized biography of Angelina Jolie, he recounts numerous, often hilarious instances of a lustcrazed and dignity-challenged Mick pursuing the then up-and-coming actress all over the world. Jolie stars in the video for the above-mentioned “Anybody Seen My Baby” and later sings a tone-deaf version of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” while reporting from a picket line in the little seen 2001 romantic comedy Life or Something Like It (“I don’t know if you’re aware of a popular song by a little band called The Rolling Stones,” she asks the angry crowd, “but it talks about these very same issues and it goes something like this . . .”). The actress’s late mother, Marcheline, was smitten with Mick since the ’60s and reportedly wanted them to get married. If Morton is to be believed, Jagger, still married to Jerry Hall when they met, was willing to give up anything for her. Instead, she toyed with his emotions and led him on, perhaps exacting revenge for her entire gender.

  Ultimately it’s not women who need to administer payback. Mick’s “this isn’t really happening” camp abandon has given him tacit permission to ruin the lives of just as many men. It’s one thing to have your girl stolen by a macho man, but probably doubly maddening to watch her slink off with an eye-rolling, androgynous rock and roll cuckhold maker. Among his fellow musicians, the guy is universally regarded as dangerous.

  In the early ’60s, according to Keith, he slept with Brian Jones’ girlfriend.

  “Mick had come back drunk one night to visit Brian, found he wasn’t there, and screwed his old lady,” Keith recalled. “This caused a seismic tremble. Upset Brian very badly.” We’ve already covered his dalliance with Pallenberg. Also in the late ’60s, he stole famous groupie Des Barres away from Jimmy Page, making out with her in the corner of the Whiskey a Go Go for all to see. In the late ’70s, Margaret Trudeau, the young trophy wife of Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau, glommed onto the Stones as they were recording parts of the live release Love You Live at Toronto’s El Mocambo nightclub. In truth Trudeau just wanted close proximity to the band, a “groupie” as Keith later dismissed her, but the press made it seem like Jagger stole her away from the politician. In the late ’80s, he stole the future first lady of France, Carla Bruni, from Eric Clapton. By then, he had such a reputation that Clapton dreaded bringing Bruni to a stop on the Steel Wheels world tour. “We went to the show and afterward I took her backstage to meet the guys,” Clapton remembered in his autobiography. “I remember saying to Jagger, ‘Please Mick not this one. I think I’m in love.’ In the past he had made several unsuccessful passes at Patti, and I knew Carla would appeal to his eye. For all my pleadings, it was only a matter of days before they started a clandestine affair.”

  Even his relationship with Jerry Hall, the longest of his life, beg
an with a cock block.

  Even aggrieved guys need to give Jagger credit for one of these acts, as it’s something that heretofore seemed impossible: He actually stole a woman away from Bryan Ferry, the most debonair and tasteful gentleman in rock. When Ferry was introducing himself in the recording studio, he couldn’t have known that the devil would one day slink in and steal his woman. Although he had his omens. The Texas-born Jerry Hall, then a sought-after fashion model (and once the Paris roommate of Grace Jones) appears on the cover of Roxy Music album Siren. Ferry approached the big, blond, loud, and fun-loving Hall as an art project. He altered her. She devoured the books in his library. “Getting the education that I had missed by not going to university,” she writes in her memoir, Jerry Hall’s Tall Tales. Ferry suggested she dress in tweed suits and enjoy afternoon tea. When her inner Mesquite came through, she’d get drunk on tequila and punctuate loud stories with “fatter than a hog on a fence.” Ferry was horrified, according to Hall. “Bryan always seemed to have two sides to him too. Part of him liked it that I was a model. He thought I was glamorous and funny. And then there was this other side of him that wanted a wholesome, aristocratic country life and wanted me to be a different kind of girl.” They certainly looked great together.

  In 1976, flush from Siren’s success, he offered up “Let’s Stick Together,” a soul-powered remake of the old Wilbert Harrison track. Hall appears in the video, and she and Bryan began appearing in the British tabloids a lot. This is probably where Mick saw her.

  That year, the Stones were touring Europe in support of their Black and Blue album. Mick called up Ferry and asked him to see one of the band’s six sold-out shows at London’s Earls Court (the very engagement that, according to Kris Needs, drew and severely disappointed the Sex Pistols). After the show, Hall joined Ferry, Mick, and Ahmet Ertegün (who’d also signed Ferry) at an after-party at the Ritz hotel. As was his method, Mick flirted openly with Hall, right in front of the flustered Ferry. Camp. “This isn’t really happening.” Ferry was too polite to say anything and burned silently. Their relationship was never the same after that. They continued to live together but Mick stayed on Jerry’s mind. Ferry went on tour of the Pacific Rim (where Hall maintains that he had an affair with an Asian model). Hall left London to visit friends in New York. There, on May 21, 1977, she ran into Mick at a dinner party thrown by the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo, and that was that.