Mick Jagger (30 page)

Not long afterward, she met the Stones in Scotland for a Rave photo shoot during their current tour with the Hollies. Unable to afford the plush Gleneagles Hotel, where the band was staying, she asked her photographer to find her a cheap local B&B. The photographer reported back that nothing was available, whereupon Mick offered her the spare bedroom in his suite. “I said ‘no thank you’ and went out and found a perfectly nice place nearby,” Maureen remembers. “Later, the photographer told me that Mick had asked him to say there were no B&Bs in the neighborhood so that I’d have no alternative but to stay in his suite. It made things even more difficult for me that I knew Chrissie … in fact, she phoned me while we were there to check on what Mick was up to.”

For her own peace of mind, Chrissie did not inquire too deeply into what went on on the road and, in this era before paparazzi and tabloid kiss-and-tell, could remain—mostly—in blissful ignorance. “I think I only knew he was unfaithful to me about three times, though I know there must have been many more times when I didn’t find out. And when I did, he would be so regretful. I remember him playing ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,’ the first time I heard that beautiful song—which I still find hard to listen to—after I’d found out about something. And I can remember him lying on the floor and crying all over my feet because I’d threatened to leave him.”

His long absences on tour in America brought the worst such forebodings, despite his blizzards of phone calls, letters, and telegrams. Nor were matters really helped when she would be flown across to meet him at some stop on the tour route, usually New York or Los Angeles. “I think I’ve still got a list he made for me of things I had to do when I was going to the airport … ‘Don’t speak to any reporters … Have you got your passport? Make sure you keep it in your handbag …’ I have to say I rather liked all that.” But joining Mick in the bosom of the Stones was always horribly uncomfortable. “They’d obviously been up to loads of things that the girlfriends weren’t supposed to know about. It felt like coming into a room when you know people have just been talking about you and everything suddenly goes quiet.”

Despite all those evenings alone at the Scotch of St. James, she was unfaithful to Mick only once, before the move to Harley House, with a performer briefly notorious for even tighter trousers and sexuality far more blatant than his. This was P. J. Proby, a fruity-voiced Texan with a Tom Jones ponytail whose performances included the ritual splitting of his velveteen breeches. While Mick was away, she received a rhyming telegram from Proby which she can still recite by heart: “I’m sitting here, drinking beer
Wishing that old Mick was queer
If he was, I wouldn’t fret / ’Cause he might forget you yet.”

At the time Chrissie was back at her former bedsit staying with her friend Liz Gribben, as she often did for company while Mick was overseas. When she returned there after spending the night with Proby, she found Mick had sent her the white Mini-Minor car mentioned by Rave magazine—even though she hadn’t yet learned to drive. “Liz said, ‘He’s been phoning and phoning from America, you’re in trouble … and there’s a new white Mini outside.’ ”

Another time when she was at Proby’s house, a pair of heavies turned up with expressions promising to split more than his trousers. “These two blokes said, ‘Mick wants you’—so I just went,” Chrissie remembers. “I was taken away and put on a plane to join him in Ireland.”

Chrissie was only aware of LSD insofar as Mick, in his controlling, almost paternalistic way, told her she mustn’t try it. “Just around that time, the Beatles were first getting into acid. I remember Paul McCartney coming round to see Mick at Harley House … because he brought me a sweetheart plant as a present. The way he talked about acid worried me because I didn’t think he and the others knew what they were getting into or what effect it would have on the people who regarded them as role models. I felt he should have thought about it more.”

That spring of 1966 brought a blue-blooded social event to delight Mick’s heart. Chrissie’s posh friend Camilla, who also worked for Andrew Oldham, knew Tara Browne, fourth son of Lord Oranmore and Browne and the Irish brewing heiress Oonagh Guinness. Mick, Chrissie, Brian, and others from the Stones’ inner circle were invited to Tara’s twenty-first-birthday party at his family home, Luggala Castle, high in the Wicklow Mountains. Before the year’s end, this seemingly most blessed of young men would die when, for no apparent reason—but probably on an acid trip—he ran a Chelsea red light in his Lotus Elan sports car and crashed into a truck, afterward gaining immortality as “the lucky man who made the grade” in John Lennon’s song “A Day in the Life.”

Tara’s twenty-first was a sumptuous bash featuring a private performance by the Lovin’ Spoonful and all the acid a young rock star or Irish noble could desire. At one point during the revels, the Stones’ photographer friend Michael Cooper went into hallucinations so extreme that he was terrified by the sound of an Alka-Seltzer tablet fizzing in a glass of water.

According to Chrissie, it was here that Mick sampled acid for the first time, taking a “sparkle” with unusual incaution just before driving her and Camilla down the narrow winding mountain roads from the castle to the airport. The trip set in during the journey, and he became convinced that a medieval pike had materialized inside the car and the Duke of Edinburgh’s severed head was grinning at him from the end of it. At the time a sheer drop of several hundred feet yawned below; as Chrissie recalls, “Camilla and I kept very quiet and just went along with what he was saying in case he ran the car over the edge.”

APRIL 1966 BROUGHT the first Rolling Stones album to dispense with cover versions and consist entirely of Jagger-Richard songs, so completing their metamorphosis from idealistic bluesmen to the most mercenary rock band the world would ever know. The collection’s original title, Could You Walk on the Water?, had been vetoed by Decca as a sacrilegious reference to the most spectacular of Christ’s miracles; it was left to John Lennon to equate his band with Jesus and unleash a worldwide storm of protest and abuse. Instead, the Stones’ album was named Aftermath, the very thing from which their God-fearing record bosses may well have saved them.

Aftermath and the Beatles’ Revolver are the two albums that most vividly evoke Swinging London at its apotheosis, during the uncharacteristically glorious summer of ’66, which culminated with England’s victory against West Germany in the final of the soccer World Cup. Musically, too, it was the one and only time when the Stones seriously competed with the Beatles and—now and again—even surpassed them.

Mick’s lyrics showed him still experimenting with different personae like someone trying on a succession of outfits at a Carnaby Street boutique. For “Lady Jane,” he transformed himself into a virginal, deferential Elizabethan pageboy, serenading a succession of mistresses in the old, noncarnal sense of the word, as if butter wouldn’t melt even in that capacious mouth. “Paint It Black” (on the album’s U.S. version only) was funereally self-flagellating with its unlikely vision of the singer turning away from young girls “until my darkness goes” like some tortured young seminarian in James Joyce’s Ireland. “Mother’s Little Helper” was a satire about amphetamine addiction among those whom it was still permissible to call “housewives,” as sociologically spot-on as anything being written at the same time by the Kinks’ Ray Davies.

In 1966, the term male chauvinist was still three years way from being coined, and laddish triumphalism had been part of every rock idol since Elvis; nonetheless, the streak of contemptuous condescension toward women running through Mick’s Aftermath songs was noticed by everyone with half a brain cell who reviewed the album, and terminally alienated several important female pop columnists, notably the London Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave.

There had been a foretaste back in February with the single “19th Nervous Breakdown,” his mocking psychoanalysis of the pushy yet neurotic (and usually upper-class) females who were always coming on to him at parties. In Maureen Cleave’s subsequent interview piece for the Standard, gussets stayed resolutely dry. “For some unaccountable reason, Mick Jagger is considered the most fashionable, modish man in London, the voice of today. Cecil Beaton paints him and says he reminds him of Nijinsky. Mick is also reported to be a friend of Princess Margaret. He has said nothing—apart from a few words on the new single—to suggest he is of today, yesterday or any other day. He remains uncommunicative, unforthcoming, uncooperative …”

Now here was Aftermath with a track called “Stupid Girl” (chorus: “Looka’ that stoopid ge-erl!”). Here was “Out of Time,” with a patronizing sympathy that was somehow even more objectionable: “Yaw obsolete, mah baby … mah paw old-fashioned bay-buh …” Here was “Under My Thumb” with its clear reference to Chrissie, the former sharp-clawed “Siamese cat of a girl,” now “the sweetest pet in the world” who “does just what she’s told” and “talks when she’s spoken to.”

However questionable their sentiments, most of the songs were at a technical level Mick and Keith had never previously reached. But none would have worked half so well without Brian Jones’s uncanny ability to pick up almost any musical instrument and immediately coax a tune from it. His self-confidence on an upswing again thanks to Anita—and getting Keith back in his gang—Brian contributed a bravura range of instrumental effects to Aftermath. On “Paint It Black” and “Mother’s Little Helper,” he played Indian sitar with a brio that made George Harrison on the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” sound fumbly. On “Lady Jane,” he complemented Mick’s pageboy innocence with the lute-like rippling of an Appalachian dulcimer. On “Under My Thumb,” he played marimba (African xylophone) in a slightly off-register, soft-pawed descant that would keep it on radio playlists long after its words had become the height of political incorrectness.

Some months earlier, in another seeming step away from wholehearted commitment to the Stones, Andrew Oldham had set up his own independent record label. It was called Immediate (something its creator required all forms of gratification to be) and, in tune with the new hippie love-and-peace ethos, loftily declared itself “Happy to Be a Part of the Industry of Human Happiness.” In no time, the new label’s performance lived up to its name: it struck gold by UK-releasing an American smash-hit single, the McCoys’ “Hang on Sloopy,” and acquired a roster of soon-to-be brilliant new acts including Fleetwood Mac, Rod Stewart, the Nice, and the Small Faces.

Bound as the Stones were by that million-dollar Decca contract, they could not sign up with Immediate. But they were umbilically linked with the label, not least because its headquarters and their management office were both in Oldham’s Marylebone flat. A visitor remembers getting lost in the warren of little rooms and opening a door to find Mick in front of a mirror practicing his James Brown moves. “He just said hi and continued, like a stick insect in some weird mating dance.”

If the Stones were not available to Immediate, the Jagger-Richard songwriting partnership was. Also in the label’s first batch of signings was Chris Farlowe, a big-voiced young blues singer looking to make a Jagger-like transition into mainstream pop. Oldham’s answer was to hand him “Out of Time” from Aftermath and get Mick to produce it—one of the few times a recording artist has supervised a cover of his original track. Far from diluting its misogyny, the version he concocted with Farlowe pumped up the contempt for that “obsolete” and “poor old-fashioned baby” almost to the point of nausea. It reached No. 1 in the cloudless July week when England’s soccer players triumphantly proved themselves not out of time, snatching the World Cup from West Germany with two goals in extra time.

In August, after barely three years as a world-class stadium attraction, the Beatles gave up touring and withdrew into the recording studio to concentrate their creative energies wholly on making albums. That left the Stones as kings of the live performance circuit, a position they still have not yielded half a century later.

The band’s fifth American tour that summer of 1966 was across a country much changed from the one to which they had followed the Beatles so dispiritingly in 1964. The escalating Vietnam War had led to mass conscription, and this in turn to wholesale unrest in the nation’s immemorially tranquil schools and colleges and conversion to the hippie creed of pacifism, long hair, and drugs. It was a genuine revolution, but one strangely without leaders or demagogues; instead, to articulate their fury and stiffen their resolve, the insurgents turned to music. So, in medieval times, might Holy Land crusaders have taken their cue not from Richard the Lionheart but from Blondin, his lute-plucking minstrel.

Spurred on by the Beatles, American pop music had taken huge strides, and there were now many fine domestic bands standing shoulder to shoulder with the hippies and bringing the protest song coruscatingly up-to-date. Yet somehow, wherever young Americans vandalized their alma mater, burned their military draft cards, or obliterated their once clean-cut faces with apostle-length hair and beards, the only possible mental soundtrack was “The Last Time,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” or maybe that extraordinary six-minute name check from the revolution’s troubadour in chief, Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” wrote the radical journalist Tom Wolfe, “but the Stones want to burn your town,” and hundreds of thousands were ready to line up behind them with extra kerosene.

No matter that the Beatles in earlier times had not been averse to a little arson, whereas the only matches that ever tempted the Stones were cricket ones. No matter that, via their cautious mega-mouthpiece, they never uttered a word calculated to whip up antiwar or antigovernment feeling or threaten public order in any way. On the contrary, for the rampaging boys who now competed with screaming girls as their core audience, narcissistic self-absorption—personified by Mick above all—was precisely what gave them overwhelming superiority to preachier American bands like the Byrds or Buffalo Springfield. The Stones were about nothing but being the Stones, just as their music boiled down at last to the bulge in their singer’s trousers. Their only crusade was against the norms of good taste and restraint; their only cause that of having a good time and not giving a fuck.