Mick Jagger (42 page)

Until now, Joe and Eva Jagger had preferred to stay mostly apart from his life in London. But the thought of her elder son having an office just a Stone’s throw from the Royal Academy, Burlington Arcade, and Fortnum & Mason gave the socially conscious Eva huge gratification. She took to coming up from Dartford regularly every week with Keith’s mum, Doris, like a pair of tweedy ladies from the shires to visit 46a Maddox Street, go shopping, and have lunch at Fortnum’s Fountain. Eva had retained her job as a part-time beautician and would bring with her a selection of creams and lipsticks to sell to the office secretaries. “She’d come around, showing us new products and advising us about our skins,” Shirley Arnold remembers. “When Mick found out he was furious and put a stop to it immediately.”

Even after Jo Bergman’s arrival as his PA, Mick continued to entrust Shirley with tasks of special delicacy, like buying his mother’s birthday and Christmas presents if he was away—usually knitwear from the White House on Bond Street—or tactfully suggesting to Keith, as no one else could, that he ought to get his terrible front teeth fixed. One day, she received an SOS from Mick’s brother, Chris, who had followed the hippie trail to Nepal and was now stuck in Kathmandu, flat broke. “Mick read the message, thought for a moment, and then said, ‘Send him fifty quid.’ ”

Shirley recalls that, despite his supreme authority in the office, he never played “the boss.” “I once said something to Mick about how I worked for him. ‘You don’t work for me,’ he said. ‘You work with me.’ ” And, moody, capricious, petulant, and changeable though he could be, she realized that, unlike Keith—so very unlike Keith—“he had no dark side.”

Everyone agreed on the Stones’ most urgent priority for 1968. They must make an album to bring them back from the electronic limbo into which they had strayed with Their Satanic Majesties Request. And even Mick accepted that their attempt to produce themselves had been a disaster and their chance of success depended largely on putting a professional back at the control desk. Rather than some star name with aspirations to be a second Andrew Oldham, they picked Jimmy Miller, a young New Yorker who had produced successful singles for the Spencer Davis Group but was junior enough to accept that his role would be primarily technical. Now that every other band had a non-instrument-playing vocalist, Mick started to learn the guitar in his garden room at Cheyne Walk, with help from British rock’s acknowledged maestro, Eric Clapton.

The way back from Satanic Majesties turned out not to be the long labor of an album, but was accomplished in a single jump. By Keith’s account, the idea was born at Redlands after he and Mick had been sitting up late and, too drunk or stoned to crawl to bed, crashed out on adjoining sofas. Early the next morning, they were roused by the sound of Keith’s gardener, Jack Dyer, stumping along the path outside. “What’s that?” Mick had mumbled. “Just Jack … Jumpin’ Jack,” Keith had mumbled back.

Another component was provided by Bill Wyman, that stubbornly creative second ranker, during rehearsals for the new album when yet again he found himself waiting around for the others. To pass the time, he picked out an intro riff on the organ, like the one on “Satisfaction” but harder and flatter. When Mick arrived, he liked the riff so much that he wrote a whole lyric to follow it.

With “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” he didn’t only come up with the perfect antidote to Their Satanic Majesties’s hippie wooziness. He also hit on an answer to the problem of being a songwriter who chose to reveal nothing of himself in his lyrics. This was to create a character he could assume like a role in a play, one that bore no resemblance to him—or any other member of the human race—yet was a perfect distillation of his public self in all its manic energy, sexual ambiguity, and sneering cool. If Keith’s gardener and Bill’s bass riff were the character’s starting point, it owed most to the British folk legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, a spectral giant with “a diabolic physiognomy and eyes like red balls of fire,” who could leap over buildings with a single bound. To make the casting still more perfect, this apparition was said to have “spoken like a gentleman,” worn all-over white leather in a literal jumpsuit, and possessed the power to make young women “fall to the ground in fits.”

The song was pure pantomime, Mick at one moment bawling out a ludicrously apocalyptic life story (“Ah was bawn in a crawss-fire hurr’cayne …”), at the next simpering into bathos (“But it’s a-a-awl right now, in fact it’s a gas …”). As he could never be bothered to write out fair copies of his lyrics, Shirley Arnold did it from a rough cut of the record. “When I was given ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ it happened to be one of the days when his mum was coming up on her weekly visit,” she recalls. “I remember copying out ‘I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag’ and thinking, ‘I hope Mrs. Jagger doesn’t see this.’ ”

Added to that was a sound more lustily malevolent even than “Satisfaction”: naked bass that segued into the full, vicious intro at Mick’s cry of “Watchit!”; the preposterous King Lear storm in each verse undercut by a tinkly country guitar descant in the chorus. A promotional color film clip showed the band with faces daubed in gold and silver, like statues from some ancient Egyptian tomb, while Jumpin’ Jack Flash in person cavorted before them, all leering lips and black eyeliner. Fans and pop critics heaved a sigh of relief. The Stones weren’t just back to pre–Satanic Majesties form, but wilder, wickeder, and (though the song itself was actually quite sexless) raunchier than ever.

By June 22, they were at No. 1 in Britain, reaching No. 3 in America a few weeks later. It really did seem to be a-a-awl right now.

AFTER MICK’S WORLD IN ACTION appearance, there were further attempts to persuade him to be the voice of his generation. Britain’s political parties in the sixties were obsessed by the need to engage with young people and counteract their general apathy and cynicism toward politicians. It was a special preoccupation of Harold Wilson’s Labour government, which had come to power with a promise of youthful dynamism but which, behind the Swinging Britain facade, was beset by industrial troubles and financial crises leading to the devaluation of the pound in 1967. With a passion for gimmickry scarcely rivaled by its New Labour successors thirty years later, Wilson’s government thought of a seemingly surefire way to attract youth to its banner. In 1968, unofficial overtures were made to see whether Mick would consider standing for Parliament.

The intermediary was Tom Driberg, MP for Barking, former chairman of the Labour Party—and, by coincidence, godfather to Mick’s first love, Cleo Sylvestre. For Driberg, however, more than political considerations were in play. A notorious predatory homosexual, he had been repeatedly arrested for cottaging, or soliciting in men’s public toilets, but had always been saved from disgrace by his powerful friends in government and on Fleet Street.

Mick never had any serious intention of becoming a parliamentary candidate, well knowing how much tedious and thankless work would be involved—and also that Keith would never stand for it. But he was amused by Driberg’s overt infatuation and stories of being a Fleet Street gossip columnist in the thirties. The drooling politico and flirtatiously noncommittal rock star would meet for lunch at the Gay Hussar, a Hungarian restaurant in Soho (gay in its old sense of “carefree”) where the socialist intelligentsia was wont to gather over cold pike mayonnaise and wild cherry soup.

Eventually Driberg visited 48 Cheyne Walk, as he thought, to reel in this vote-winning catch for his party, accompanied by (also gay) American beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Like all visitors, the cottage-loving MP and the author of Howl were invited to join Mick and Marianne seated cross-legged on Moroccan cushions strewn about the eighteenth-century wood floor. But, as Marianne recalls, the sight of Mick’s tautened velvet crotch was too much for Driberg, who blurted out, “What an enormous basket you have!”

By 1968, in any case, politics had ceased to be the exclusive preserve of politicians, and young people needed no PR trickery to get them involved. In reaction to the previous year’s carefree Summer of Love, a wave of unrest was engulfing Europe’s student population, fueled equally by moral outrages abroad and material grievances at home. The main catalyst had been Czechoslovakia’s short-lived Prague Spring when young Czechs had taken the lead in trying to free their country from Soviet Russian dominance and had been mercilessly crushed. Since then, left-wing student marches and rallies of increasing violence and destructiveness were being reported from West Germany, Holland, and, particularly, France under the faltering presidency of wartime leader Charles de Gaulle. For the first time since Russia’s Bolshevik coup in 1917, the dread word revolution was heard across Europe—now, though, not meaning internal conflagration in a single country but a cross-border forest fire.

Britain’s young were as eager as any to obey this clarion call to radicalism. The problem was that they had almost nothing to rise up against, living as they did in a country which adulated youth and, by and large, treated them with extraordinary indulgence. In Britain, the insurrectionary movement was known as the Underground after Europe’s Second World War anti-Nazi resistance and London’s metro system. Despite these overtones of fighting tyranny and lurking in deep cover, it existed openly and without the least danger, demanding the overthrow of capitalism and worshipping totalitarian communism while enjoying all the benefits of a democratic consumer society.

In many ways, the Underground reflected the pop music culture that had recently obsessed so many of its members to the exclusion of almost all else. The political factions within it were as numerous as rock bands, with followings as fanatical and mutually hostile as those who once disputed the rival merits of Beatles and Stones. (Are you Anarchist or Workers Revolutionary Party?) It threw up youthful demagogues, notably the Punjab-born Oxford graduate Tariq Ali, with the crowd-swaying charisma of pop stars; it supplied posters of Communist icons like Lenin, Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-tung to displace those of Mick Jagger and Scott Walker on bedroom walls; it published newspapers and magazines full of impassioned, not always very coherent polemics that were as avidly read as Top 20 charts used to be. Above all, it worshipped rock stars, if possible even more than had the unthinking teenyboppers of 1963, and numbered the leading ones among its chief figureheads.

Despite the Underground’s best efforts, the only outrage which roused youthful passion across all factions and classes was one happening on the far side of the world, and without any British involvement—America’s bloody, unwinnable Vietnam War. The biggest antiwar “demo” yet took place in London on March 17, 1968, when ten thousand people gathered in Trafalgar Square to hear speeches by Tariq Ali and the actress Vanessa Redgrave, then marched on the U.S. embassy in Grosvenor Square, chanting the name of America’s arch-demon, North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh. Outside the embassy they were met by a phalanx of police without special riot gear but supplemented by mounted officers. Initial good humor turned into an ugly scrimmage in which dozens on both sides were injured, police horses were ridden directly at demonstrators, and riders dragged from their saddles and trampled on. So Mayfair’s posh heartland finally witnessed the Domesday prophecy of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell of “acts of violence in Grosvenor Square.”

The pop star most likely to have heeded the call to take part was John Lennon, but he and his fellow Beatles were in India, studying with the Maharishi. Mick sidestepped an invitation to march alongside Vanessa Redgrave (“Just didn’t feel like it,” he recalled later) but was in Grosvenor Square when the violence erupted, and narrowly escaped the police’s cavalry charge. An American demonstrator named Robert Hewson, then studying at Cambridge, recalls seeing him “standing coolly on the steps of a house in the square, surveying the chaos.”

Keenly aware of the zeitgeist as always, Mick was quite happy to be a hero of the Underground, even though its vision of Britain as a Communist utopia wasn’t exactly his. A few days after the Grosvenor Square riot, he did a Q&A session with its leading newspaper, the International Times, running about ten times the length of any he’d ever allowed Disc or Melody Maker. The IT did not ask awkward questions about his love life, but allowed him to ramble on unedited for column after column about the history of European civilization, astronomy, and economics. He did, however, put his finger on the difficulty of bringing revolution to a peaceful, phlegmatic society where Grosvenor Square was seen as a one-off aberration. “We can’t be guerrillas … We haven’t got enough violence, we’ve no opportunity … There’s nothing … It’s a whole drag … the army’s all over! There’s no guerrillas … well, there’s the Welsh Nationalists. You can go and join them, but what a joke … I mean, there’s nothing in this country.” Thanks to the Underground press’s mania for psychedelic graphics, the text was printed in green on a red background and so almost indecipherable.

Fired up by what he had seen on March 17, Mick wrote a song for the Stones’ album in progress that was recorded under the elliptical title “Did Everybody Pay Their Dues?,” then dropped in favor of a renamed, very different version, based on Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 Motown hit “Dancing in the Street.” “Ev’rywhere Ah hear the sound of marchin’, chargin’ feet, boy,” it began. “ ’Cause summer’s here and the time is right for fight-tin’ in the street, boy …” Months before John Lennon found nerve enough, it went on to utter the word that had every European government in a panic, rhymed and scanned as meticulously as Lennon would later do it: “Hey … think the time is right for palace revo-loo-shun / But where I live the game to play is compromise so-loo-shun.”

In “Street Fighting Man,” he seemed to come down off the fence at long last, declaring solidarity with the Grosvenor Square demonstrators and all other youthful insurgents across Europe, champing at the bit to join them on the streets and exulting in the prospect of violence and destruction. Actually it was just another role: the street-fighting man wasn’t Mick, but Tariq Ali, while the “revo-loo-shun” had a vaguely Arthurian sound in its not very dire threat to “kill the king and rail at all his servants.” (Even the resourceful Lennon never used the archaic verb to rail, meaning to shout insults.) As in “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” fire-and-brimstone verses alternated with a cop-out chorus, which was about the lyricist but dodged into the third person to justify his nonappearance on the barricades. “Sleepy London town” just couldn’t produce a riot good enough to be worth his while. So what was “a poor boy” to do, he asked disingenuously, but “sing in a rock-roll band”?