Mick Jagger (27 page)

If all this were not enough to be going on in one twenty-one-year-old, there was also the extravagant campness (a word only just entering general British usage) that kept rumors about his relationship with Mick constantly simmering. It was not only his habit of addressing males and females alike as “darling” or “dear” and his fascination with celebrity mega-queens like Lionel Bart. His office staff always contained a high quotient of pretty young men, the most likely recipients of expensive suede jackets; even his bodyguard, the sinister Reg the Butcher, was a predatory gay with tastes verging on the pedophilic.

In fact, no one around Oldham thought for a second that he was genuinely homosexual. Some speculated that because London’s other foremost pop managers were, like the Beatles’ Brian Epstein and the Who’s Kit (aka “Kitty”) Lambert, he felt it gave him more credibility; others saw it merely as another symptom of “being Andrew,” never happy unless shocking people and living on the edge. But while camping it up among colleagues and friends, he tolerated no slur on his heterosexuality from outsiders. Once when he was lunching with David Bailey, a man at a nearby table wolf-whistled at them. Oldham went over, grabbed the whistler’s head, and rammed it down into his plate.

Despite his oft-expressed notion of pop management as first and foremost a cultural crusade, no one on the London music scene was hungrier for profit or more adept at wringing it from the unlikeliest sources. When he was producing Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” the B-side Oldham had chosen was “Greensleeves,” which not only suited Marianne’s virginal image but (having been written by King Henry VIII five centuries earlier) was also comfortably out of copyright. A few slight changes thus turned it into an “original” composition on which he now controlled the publishing. On the Stones’ live EP Got Live If You Want It, one track consisted only of a theater audience chanting “We want the Stones!” This, too, Oldham listed as a song, eligible for royalties from radio play and available for cover versions.

In 1964 had come a typical act of hubris and hopeful revenue raising, the so-called Andrew Oldham Orchestra, which went on to release four all-instrumental albums on Decca. The Orchestra recruited London’s best classical session musicians; individual Stones—including Mick—played anonymously in its ranks; and Oldham himself took the baton, wearing a black beret like some punk Stravinsky. The repertoire combined easy-listening versions of Jagger-Richard songs like “The Last Time” with the bereted maestro’s self-written mini-symphonies: “Funky and Fleopatra,” “There Are 365 Rolling Stones,” and “Theme for a Mod Summer Night’s Ball.”

And yet somehow, after two hit-studded years in these hyperactive hands, the Stones’ capital worth still came nowhere near that of their main rivals. For the Beatles’ next American tour, kicking off at New York’s Shea Stadium, $1 million was known to be on the table. The Stones, by contrast, had received only £10,000 into their collective company, Rolling Stones Ltd. for the year ending June 1965, and still had not been paid for their UK tour the previous year. When Oldham could not extract the money from the tour’s promoter, Robert Stigwood, Keith Richard confronted Stigwood at the Scotch of St. James club and beat him up in front of a sizable crowd including the NME journalist Keith Altham. “Why do you keep hitting him, Keith?” Altham asked. “Because he keeps getting up,” Keith replied.

By far the greatest obstacle to affluence was Decca Records, which had signed the Stones for a reasonable enough royalty—roughly three times the pitiful rate the Beatles first received from EMI—but which settled accounts with elephantine slowness, two years or more in arrears. The band’s contract with Decca was due to expire in July 1965; their co-manager Eric Easton had convinced them to re-sign with the same label and was in the process of negotiating new and significantly better terms: 24 percent of wholesale price or the equivalent of four pence on every record sold. The deal was all but done when Allen Klein happened along.

Klein was a thirty-three-year-old New York accountant-turned-entrepreneur who specialized in obtaining large advance payments for recording artists—a concept still unknown in Britain—as well as ferreting out royalties that had been withheld from them, either through inefficiency or guile, and freeing them from oppressive contracts. His success in combating previously complacent and unchallengeable record companies on behalf of put-upon performers like Buddy Knox, Bobby Vinton, and Sam Cooke had earned him the nickname “the Robin Hood of Pop” (though some in retrospect would consider the beady-eyed Sheriff of Nottingham a better comparison). The popularity of British bands in America brought him to London, where he signed up Mick and Keith’s friend Mickie Most, an astute talent spotter as much as a producer. As a result, Most’s whole roster, including major names like the Animals and Herman’s Hermits, passed into Allen Klein’s control.

His first dealings with Andrew Oldham had been over the Stones’ cover version of “It’s All Over Now,” written by his client Bobby Womack and controlled by his company, ABKCO. That minor publishing transaction led to talks about the Stones’ poor financial yield, despite having had so many hits, and their still-to-be-finalized new recording contract with Decca. Klein’s real ambition was to bag the Beatles, but until he could pull off that supreme coup, he saw no harm in bagging the Beatles’ main rivals. He offered to take Oldham on as a client, becoming the hard-nosed moneyman in the background that he already was for Mickie Most while the young genius concentrated on being creative. And, as a first priority, he would sort out the Stones’ finances the way he had those of so many grateful chart toppers in America. Needless to say, no role was envisaged for Oldham’s present management partner, Eric Easton.

Initially, only Mick and Keith out of the five Stones were let in on the plan and called to meet Klein at the Scotch of St. James club. Though Klein’s background was devoutly Jewish, his strong-arm negotiating style with formidable American record bosses, like the Roulette label’s Morris Levy, had inspired rumors of connections to the Mafia. That, indeed, was his main appeal to Oldham: a boardroom Reg the Butcher. But while Keith was equally amenable to the notion, Mick presented a serious obstacle. With two hugely overblown and humiliating court appearances already on his record, he would scarcely fall over himself to embrace organized crime. Besides, Klein was so comprehensively not Mick’s type: a podgy man who still combed his hair into a greasy fifties cowlick, wore none-too-clean white turtleneck sweaters, talked like Leo Gorcey from the Bowery Boys films, and smoked a malodorous pipe.

At the meeting, however, Klein played his hand perfectly, not only spinning visions of the vast wealth the Stones would enjoy under his protection but showing a mastery of percentages and high-multiple mental arithmetic that held the former economics student transfixed. In addition, he knew all the Stones’ music by heart and proved as adept at flattery as a Japanese geisha. While keeping the Mafia act going for Oldham and Keith, since that was what they transparently wanted, he massaged Mick’s ego—one bystander would later recall—“like a chick.” By the evening’s end, Mick was in Klein’s pocket along with the other two.

The whole band then met Klein at the brand-new London Hilton hotel on July 26, coincidentally Mick’s twenty-second birthday. Brian, Bill, and Charlie were similarly dazzled by Klein’s promises, but balked at the idea of dropping Eric Easton, who had backed them financially when no other agent would and whom, in spite of his desperate naffness, they all rather liked. But the Oldham-Jagger-Richard axis prevailed. The next day, without any prior warning, Oldham informed Easton that he should no longer consider himself the Stones co-manager, and simply walked away from their joint company, Impact Sound. The Stones’ affairs were transferred to Klein’s London accountants, Goodman Myers, and, as a taste of the riches to come, Oldham received a Rolls-Royce Phantom V.

The new contract with Decca currently on the table had been negotiated by Easton with the company’s financial department. But Klein announced he would talk only to Decca’s chairman, and major stockholder, Sir Edward Lewis. As Laurence Myers, one of the Stones’ newly appointed accountants, recalls, the elderly, gentlemanly Sir Edward was totally unprepared for what followed. When Klein arrived for the meeting, all five Stones—Mick included—followed him into the room like trustful ducklings. “Good afternoon, Mr. Klein” was Sir Edward’s courteous opening. “Would you like some tea?” Klein ignored both greeting and question, then dismissed the Stones—Mick included—and barked, “The Rolling Stones won’t be recording for Decca anymore.” “But we have a contract,” Sir Edward protested. “You may or may not have a contract,” Klein replied, “but the Stones won’t be recording for you anymore. Now I’ll have some tea.”

By the end of that brief meeting, a dazed Sir Edward had committed Decca to pay the Stones $1.25 million in advance royalties—about £3 million by modern values. It was not only the first advance ever paid to a British pop act, but also, by some way, larger than any Klein had previously extracted from an American label. Press reports of the deal (which in those days included no informed financial analysis or investigation) put the band’s collective earnings over the next five years as high as $3 million. Klein’s 20 percent commission might be double what British managers usually received, but even Mick had to admit that on the strength of his performance so far he looked like being well worth it.

“That was the mistake the Stones made,” says Laurence Myers, their accountant for the next couple of years. “They thought they were giving Allen 20 percent of theirs. They didn’t find out until years later that in reality he was giving them 80 percent of his.”

KLEIN HAD MOVED in at a fortuitous moment, just when “Satisfaction” was topping the American charts and climbing toward eventual sales of 1.5 million. Before the ink on his contract was dry, he hastened to capitalize on the situation, ordering the rush release on July 30 of the Stones’ fourth American album, Out of Our Heads. Though little more than a remarketing of “Satisfaction” bulked out by blues and soul covers, it took only days to become their first No. 1 album in the United States. A month later, the scandalous single itself finally went on sale in Britain, having been held back since June by the negotiations with Decca. On home ground, too, it juddered instantly into the No. 1 spot, selling 250,000 copies and nauseating almost everyone over thirty.

The media’s outrage at its lyrics and condemnation of the mouth that uttered them were fueled further by—of all nonmasturbatory things—a wedding. In the week of its release, David Bailey married the young French film star Catherine Deneuve, with Mick as his best man. Though the ceremony took place at a London register office, tradition demanded that the two male principals should dress with a certain formality: instead, Bailey turned up in a crewneck sweater and Mick in an open-necked button-down shirt. The fact that the bride (who smoked throughout the ceremony) had recently starred in a film called Repulsion was, for Fleet Street’s headline writers, the rancid icing on the cake.

Having given Decca a mauling, Klein applied himself to making the Stones a cinema attraction like their arch-competitors. The Beatles had already made two critically acclaimed feature films, A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, which, while not earning them much as actors, had each spun off a hugely profitable soundtrack album. Filmmaking was still regarded as an essential step for flimsy pop stars whose success on the charts might evaporate at any moment. In Mick, it wasn’t hard to see someone whom the film camera would love as ardently as did his concert audiences and who could redefine the screen idol for the sixties as radically as he’d redefined the pop idol one. Besides, in his present role didn’t he prove himself a brilliant actor almost every hour of every day?

The problem was that the happy-go-lucky on-screen romps that usually constituted a pop film would not do for the Stones, Mick least of all. Thus far, the most interesting alternative had been offered by David Bailey, who, having reached the pinnacle of still photography, now hankered to try film producing and directing. Bailey spent much time and effort in trying to set up a screen version of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, starring his erstwhile best man as the vicious, amoral (but finally prison-tamed) lead droog, Alex. Bailey’s efforts came to nothing, even though Burgess himself commended Mick for the role as “the quintessence of delinquency.”

Rumors of a Stones film appeared periodically in the music press, but nothing definite ever seemed to happen while the Beatles mopped up at the box office and lesser chart acts like the Dave Clark Five made successful screen debuts. Earlier in 1965, Keith had told the NME of yet another project, not so far scripted or titled: “Mick will play Ernie who’s a kind of hero and I play his right hand buddy …” Klein had no sooner joined Oldham in the driving seat, and seized the wheel, than it was announced the Stones would make “five feature films over the next three years” with funding to be provided largely by Decca (which turned out to be news to Decca).

Klein fancied himself as a movie mogul in the David O. Selznick mold, and already had a seemingly ideal first project in his desk drawer. This was a novel entitled Only Lovers Left Alive by a north country schoolteacher named Dave Wallis, portraying a nightmare vision (not a million miles from A Clockwork Orange) of a world inhabited only by warring, vandalous, and promiscuous teenagers (not a million miles from a Stones audience). “SMASHING, LOOTING, KILLING, LOVING—THE TEENAGERS TAKE OVER THE WORLD!” said the book’s cover in unconscious echo of Andrew Oldham’s liner notes for The Rolling Stones No. 2. “A NOVEL EVEN MORE SHATTERING THAN LORD OF THE FLIES.”

Mick was strongly attracted to the project and, together with Oldham, met several leading British film directors, including Michael Winner and Bryan Forbes, to discuss how they might handle it. There was also an unhappy encounter with Nicholas Ray, who had directed James Dean, the first and everlasting icon of rebellious youth, in Rebel Without a Cause exactly a decade earlier. Now in his sixties, Ray claimed never to have heard of the Stones or Mick and was patronizing and dismissive; as they left the meeting, Mick told Oldham never again to put him through such an experience. So no Jimmy Dean for the sixties came to pass.