Mick Jagger (11 page)

Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51, and the Flamingo on Wardour Street—the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.

Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, traveling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart—and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: “Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings (20p).”

At this stage, Mick’s organizational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).

While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never “sell out” to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s “Close Together,” Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s “Soon Forgotten.”

The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organization, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: “A great band,” Decca’s letter said, “but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.”

THE ROLLIN’ STONES’ far-flung work schedule was making it increasingly hard for Mick to get back to his own bed in Dartford each night. Besides, at nineteen he was too old to be ordered to do washing up or weight training any longer. So in the autumn of 1962, he left his spotless, well-regulated home and moved up to London to share a flat with Brian Jones at number 102 Edith Grove in the World’s End district of Chelsea. Originally, the ménage also included Brian’s girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and their toddler son, Julian, but after a few days Pat and Julian departed without explanation, and Keith Richards moved in instead.

Chelsea at this time was a backwater whose days as a resort of hard-drinking, drug-taking artists and bohemians seemed long gone. Situated at the western extremity of King’s Road, on the frontier with romance-free Fulham, World’s End was a sleepy area of still mainly working-class homes, shops, cafés, and pubs. Edith Grove ranked as perhaps its least attractive thoroughfare, terraced by shabby mid-Victorian houses with pilastered front porches, and shaken by traffic to and from Knightsbridge and the West End.

The flat, which came already furnished, was on the first floor of number 102. The rent was sixteen pounds per week excluding electricity, which had to be paid for as it was used by inserting one-shilling coins into a battleship-gray iron meter. Mick shared the only designated bedroom with Keith, while Brian slept on a divan in the living room. There was an antiquated bathroom with a chipped and discolored tub and basin and taps that yielded a reluctant, rusty dribble. The only toilet was a communal one on the floor below.

Deeply unattractive to begin with, the place quickly descended into epic squalor that would later be unwittingly recreated in the classic British film Withnail and I. Beds stayed permanently unmade; the kitchen sink overflowed with dirty dishes and empty milk bottles encrusted with mold. The ceilings were blackened by candle smoke and covered with drawings and graffiti, while the windows were so thick with grime that casual visitors thought they had heavy drapes, permanently closed. When an extra flatmate materialized in a young printer named James Phelge, his surname proved curiously anagrammatic: he won the others’ approval by his skill at “gobbing,” or spitting gobbets of phlegm up the wall to form a horrible pattern in lieu of wallpaper.

It might be wondered how the famously fastidious Mick could ever have endured such conditions. But in most nineteen-year-olds, the urge to react against parental values tends to be overwhelming. There was also the sense of roughing it like a real bluesman, even though few of these might have been spotted in the vicinity of Chelsea’s Kings Road. Besides, while enthusiastically joining in the trashing of the flat, he was never personally squalid but—like Brian—remained conspicuously neat and well groomed, just as young officers in the Great War kept their buttons bright amid Flanders mud. Brian somehow managed to wash and dry his fair hair every single day, while Mick (as Keith would later recall in one of their recurrent periods of mutual bitchiness) went through “his first camp period … wandering around in a blue linen housecoat … He was on that kick for about six months.”

All of them were in a state of dire poverty which the few pounds from Rollin’ Stones gigs barely alleviated. Brian had just lost yet another job, as a sales assistant at Whiteley’s department store, for thievery, while Keith’s only known shot at conventional employment, as a pre-Christmas relief postal worker, lasted just one day. The sole regular income among them was Mick’s student grant from Kent County Council; as the only one with a bank account, he paid the rent by check and the others gave him their share in cash. Once, he jokingly wrote on a blank check: “Pay the Rolling [sic] Stones £1 million.”

He and Keith survived mainly by adopting Brian’s little ways—stealing the pints of milk that were left on other people’s doorsteps each morning, shoplifting potatoes and eggs from the little local stores, sneaking into parties being given elsewhere in the house or in neighboring ones, and making off with French loaves, hunks of cheese, bottles of wine or beer in the new outsize cans known as “pins.” Brian doctored the electric meter (a criminal offense) so that it would work without shillings and the power would remain on indefinitely, rather than plunging them into darkness at the end of the usual costly brief span. A serious source of income was collecting empty beer bottles, the sale price of which included a two-penny deposit repaid when they were returned to the vendor.

Ian Stewart also played a part in supporting the trio he regarded as “very bright, highly motivated layabouts.” In Stu’s day job at Imperial Chemical Industries, the perks included luncheon vouchers: certificates exchangeable for basic restaurant meals. These he would buy up cheap from dieting coworkers and pass on gratis to the layabouts. However, Mick, who had always been notably fond of his stomach (as if those large lips needed stoking with food twice as often as normal-size ones) would frequently eat alone and at a slightly higher level than his flatmates. There was, for instance, a Wardour Street café, felicitously named the Star, which offered a superior set lunch for five shillings (twenty-five pence). Mick was a regular customer, known to staff only as “the rhythm-and-blues singer.”

Each morning, he would go off to LSE, and the nonmusician flatmate, James Phelge, to a printing works in Fulham, leaving Keith and Brian to sleep late under their fetid sheets. Their afternoons were spent mainly in guitar practice, with Brian coaching Keith. Often after a gig, the teacher would tell the pupil his playing had been “bloody awful” and, back at the flat, would make him go over his fretboard fluffs again and again until they were cured. Many was the night when the pair fell asleep where they sat, cigarettes still smoldering in their mouths or wedged in the top of their guitar fretboards. Brian also taught himself to play blues harp, taking only about a day to reach a level that had taken Mick months, then forging on ahead.

It clearly could only benefit the band, and Brian was equally willing to help bring on Mick’s instrumental skills, showing him new harmonica riffs, even persuading him finally to take a few cautious steps on guitar. But Mick felt uneasy about the bond being forged between Brian and Keith during the day. In the evening when he returned, he would sulk or pointedly not speak to Keith while showing overweening friendliness to Brian.

As well as immeasurably raising the others’ musical game, Brian kept them laughing when there might not seem much to laugh about. Like Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, his response to moments of stress was to pull a grotesque face he called a Nanker. The flat’s walls being now spattered with the marks of Phelge’s gobbing, Brian gave each a name according to its color—“Yellow Humphrey,” “Green Gilbert,” “Scarlet Jenkins,” “Polka-Dot Perkins.” He and Mick competed in coining supercilious nicknames for their fellow World’s Enders. Their flat was owned by a Welshman who operated a small grocery shop, so a Lyons Individual Fruit Pie bought (or filched) from him was known as a “Morgan Morgan.” Any male conspicuously devoid of his own cool and savoir faire was an “Ernie.” The local greasy-spoon café—whose clientele marked them down at once as gays, or “nancy boys”—was The Ernie. The flat above theirs belonged to a hostile elderly couple known as “the Offers” after Mick described them as “a bit off.” Brian discovered where the Offers kept a spare latchkey and, one day while they were out, led a raiding party into their flat to ransack the fridge.

Despite their poverty, Mick, Brian, and Keith managed to make the two-hundred-mile journey north to Manchester that October for what was billed as “the First American Folk-Blues Festival,” featuring Memphis Slim, John Lee Hooker, T-Bone Walker, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. The trio made the long trip north in a beaten-up van with a group of fellow fanatics from Ealing and Eel Pie Island (including a boy guitarist named Jimmy Page, one day to become the co-godhead of Led Zeppelin). Mick took along a copy of Howlin’ Wolf’s Rocking Chair album, hoping that Wolf’s songwriter Willie Dixon would autograph it. One track in particular obsessed him: a flagrant piece of sexual imagery entitled “Little Red Rooster.”

Amid the Victorian splendor of Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, he saw all his greatest idols finally made flesh: tall, austere John Lee Hooker singing “Boogie Chillun,” the song that could have been describing that former well-spoken Dartford schoolboy (“The blues is in him … and it’s got to come out”); dapper Memphis Slim with a skunk’s-tail streak of white through his hair; Willie Dixon, the blues’ great backroom boy, almost as big and bulky as his stand-up bass; jokey T-Bone Walker, playing his guitar behind his head in the way Jimi Hendrix would “invent” a few years later. There was no security in the modern sense, and afterward the bluesmen were freely accessible to their fans, onstage below the hall’s massive pipe organ. One of the lesser names, “Shaky Jake” Harris, presented the London boys with a harmonica, which became the proud centerpiece of a blues singsong on the long drive home. Mick, Keith, and Brian were supposed to reimburse the van’s owner, Graham Ackers, for petrol and other incidental costs—amounting to 10s,6d, or about 52p each—but never did.

If the Rollin’ Stones’ gigs still paid only peanuts, there was another reward which their blues masters in Manchester had never known. Increasingly, after the night’s performance, they found themselves being mobbed by teenage girls, whose excitement their faithful interpretation of John Lee or T-Bone only partially explained. Most sought only autographs and flirtation, but a good few made it clear—clearer than young British women had done since the bawdy eighteenth century—that a deeper level of musical appreciation was on offer. Though Mick and Brian were the main objectives, Keith, Stu, Dick Taylor, even Phelge, as their occasional assistant roadie, shared in the unexpected dividends. Most nights, a bevy of these proto-groupies would accompany them back to 102 Edith Grove for what, due to space restrictions, was a largely open-plan sex session. Some were deemed worthy of a second invitation, for example a pair of identical twins named Sandy and Sarah partial to Mick and Phelge—neither of whom could tell one from the other, or bothered to try.

He would later become legendary for his apparent callousness toward females—yet among the Edith Grove flatmates it was Mick who showed the most awareness of how far too young many of their visitors were to be with older men so late at night. One girl, after having had sex with Phelge and Brian and then with Phelge again, broke the news that she’d run away from home and the police were looking for her. The others were all for getting rid of her as soon as possible, before police officers came knocking at the door. But Mick, showing himself his father’s son once again, took the trouble to talk to the runaway at length about her problems at home, finally persuading her to telephone her parents and arrange for them to come and collect her.

THE WINTER OF 1962–1963 turned into Britain’s worst in one hundred years, with arctic temperatures setting in long before Christmas and London hit as heavily by snow as the remotest Scottish Highlands. At 102 Edith Grove, it was almost as cold inside as out. Mick could escape to centrally heated lecture theaters and libraries at LSE, but Brian and Keith had to spend all day huddled over one feeble electric fire in skimpy shorty overcoats, rubbing their hands and blowing their fingernails like penurious Dickensian clerks. The household was further enlarged by a Cheltenham friend of Brian’s named Richard Hattrell, a simple soul who did everything Brian told him and believed everything he said. One night when the Stones were out on a gig, Hattrell crept into Brian’s bed to snatch a little warmth and rest. Brian awoke him, brandishing two amplifier leads and threatening to electrocute him. The credulous Hattrell fled into the snow wearing only underpants. Not until he started to turn blue from exposure would the others let him back inside.