Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Chapter 1 - “I Dig to Sing”

  Chapter 2 - “Preaching the Blues”

  Chapter 3 - “Stone of Hope”

  Chapter 4 - “As Tears Go By”

  Chapter 5 - “We Piss Anywhere, Man”

  Chapter 6 - “Under the Influence of Bail”

  Chapter 7 - “I Went Down to the Demonstration”

  Chapter 8 - “So, Remember Who You Say You Are . . .”

  Chapter 9 - “All My Friends Are Junkies”

  Chapter 10 - “The New Judy Garland”

  Chapter 11 - “Infamous”

  Chapter 12 - “The Ballad of a Vain Man”

  Chapter 13 - “The South’s Answer to the Rutles”

  Chapter 14 - “Punker Than Punk, Ruder Than Rude”

  Chapter 15 - “It’s Nice to Have a Chick Occasionally”

  Chapter 16 - “State of Shock”

  Chapter 17 - “Look in My Eyes, What Do You See?”

  Chapter 18 - “An Evil Face”

  Chapter 19 - “The Red Devils’ Blues”

  Chapter 20 - “A Knight of the Realm”

  Chapter 21 - “Who Wants Yesterday’s Papers?”

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

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  Published by Gotham Books, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, September 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by Marc Spitz

  All rights reserved

  Photo research by Hal Horowitz

  Gotham Books and the skyscraper logo are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Spitz, Marc.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-55213-1

  1. Jagger, Mick. 2. Rock musicians—England—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.J22S65 2011

  782.42166092—dc22

  [B] 2011009851

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  For Brendan Mullen,

  who loved a good argument

  INTRO

  “Brenda”

  Most people don’t remember “Rock Against Yeast.” As far as Saturday Night Live’s musical parodies go, it’s not nearly as iconic as John Belushi’s Joe Cocker impression or the Christopher Walken–anchored Blue Oyster Cult Behind the Music send-up (known to all simply as “More Cowbell”). Still, within this mostly forgotten sketch, which aired during the show’s February 17, 1979, episode (hosted by the teen idol and television star turned country rocker Rick Nelson), you will find the basis for this book. “Rock Against Yeast” perfectly articulates the current Mick Jagger Problem : Can we continue to worship and desire a man whom we don’t really like anymore? The Mick Jagger Problem leads us to question whether we ever really did like him. If the answer is no, then how did this guy remain a constant presence in popular culture for fifty years and not, for one instance in that half century, seem like . . . our pal? After all, his songwriting partner, business partner, and sometime nemesis Keith Richards has been everyone’s cool older brother since Lyndon B. Johnson was president of the United States.

  Back to “Rock Against Yeast.” In this sketch, the late Gilda Radner portrays Candy Slice, a Patti Smith manqué with a rooster shag haircut, white tank top, black stick legs, sneakers, unshaven armpits, and a chemically ruined equilibrium. She is participating in a superstar benefit concert featuring Bob Marley (Garrett Morris), Dolly Parton (Jane Curtin), Olivia Newton-John (Laraine Newman), and a fat and thin Elvis tribute band known as the Elvii (John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd), as well as Nelson himself. Bill Murray, as his recurring rock industry, satin-baseball-jacketed sleazeball Jerry Aldini (of “Polysutra Records”), pulls a beer-swigging, belching Candy out of her oxygen tent long enough to participate in the above-mentioned benefit concert, where she debuts, along with her band, the Candy Slice Group, a garage rock number entitled “Gimme Mick.” It’s a complicated ode to both her attraction and repulsion to a then thirty-six-year-old Mick Jagger. “Mick Jagger, if you’re out there, this is for you,” Candy slurs.

  “Gimme Mick! Gimme Mick!” she later shouts in the chorus. “Baby’s hair, bulgin’ eyes, lips so thick! Are you woman? Are you man? I’m your biggest funked-up fan. So rock and roll me till I’m sick,” Candy raps. The group soon takes it to the bridge, where Candy, having confessed her attraction to Mick, launches into a Patti Smith–esque stream of consciousness that seems to equivocate it. “You, Mick Jagger, actually continue to perform at a concert where someone got knifed and killed during the ’60s,” she raps, dredging the specter of the then decade-old concert at the Altamont Speedway in San Francisco where eighteen-year-old fan Meredith Hunter was killed by a furious Hells Angel while the Stones performed “Under My Thumb,” bad acid raged in thousands of nervous systems, and the love era supposedly ended (more on that later).

  “You, Mick Jagger, are English and go out with a model and get an incredible amount of publicity!” Jagger had recently stolen the willowy Texan model Jerry Hall away from fellow rock and roll gentleman Bryan Ferry of Roxy Music (more on that later as well). “You, Mick Jagger, don’t keep regular hours!” This was the Studio 54 era, when danceable new wave and disco ruled and Mick’s frequent late nights out made him a constant target for paparazzi like Ron Galella and gave him a permanent air of blearyeyed decadence. And finally: “You, Mick Jagger, have the greatest rock and roll band in the history of rock and roll and you don’t even play an instrument yoursel
f!”

  Here we go. This is where we find the disconnect; the point where the Mick Jagger Problem achieves liftoff. The joke goes over with the studio audience, of course, largely because of Gilda’s charisma, genius, and conviction; but the accusation itself (affectionate as it clearly is) could not be more baseless. The joke works because it suits an idea of Mick Jagger that even thirty-two years ago was starting to metastasize. Inside of a half decade, it would almost completely take over the way we view Mick Jagger and obscure many of the facts. He has played instruments. He’s been the Rolling Stones’ harmonica player since vying for the position with the late Brian Jones in 1962. Listen to the malevolent solo at the end of the live version of “Midnight Rambler” (which you will find on Get Your Ya Ya’s Out) if you want to hear the sound of an instrument being played by someone born to do it, a musician. Even Keith Richards has praised Mick’s natural ability to play the blues harp. “He’s not thinking when he’s playing harp,” Keith famously said years later. “It comes from inside him; he always played like that, from the early days on.” There’s also the not so small matter of the riff to the Stones’ 1971 No. 1 single “Brown Sugar.” It’s probably playing in your head right now. It started as soon as you read the song title on this page. I’d place it in the top, let’s say, fifty, ever written, not just by the Stones but by anyone. And it’s Mick’s invention. Again, even Keith, who literally invents indelible riffs like “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in his sleep, admits that this riff was the one that traveled across the rock and roll cosmos and took up residence in the head of the other guy. Not that it matters: Most people think Keith wrote it anyway. Mick’s far too intellectual to create something so basic, primal, and gritty, after all.

  When we consider the Rolling Stones, we think of the heart and we think of the groin. We don’t dwell on the brain. “Keith is the heart,” the veteran New Musical Express journalist turned music publicist Keith Altham remarked to me during an early morning telephone interview. “Mick is the brain.” The heart and the brain. They must function together to survive, but in all matters of poetry and cool, we credit the heart. The heart pumps. The brain schemes. This idea of a manipulative Mick Jagger has caused us to put the finger on him for a laundry list of culture crimes regarding the Rolling Stones’ long, dark past. Mick must have been the one who agreed to change the lyrics of “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” to “Let’s Spend Some Time Together,” at the behest of Ed Sullivan’s frightened flunkies. He surely fired sickly, confused, bloated Brian Jones and left him to drown. He threw the Hells Angels he’d hired under the bus after Altamont. He forsook his rock and roll brothers and sisters for a retinue of Eurotrash counts and countesses . . . and Andy Warhol. He sullied the Stones’ gravitas by hobnobbing with Paul Young and Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes in the early ’80s as he wrestled with midlife and grasped for a solo pop career. He took our ticket money for the film Freejack and taxed the poor Verve for sampling a symphonic version of “The Last Time,” on “Bittersweet Symphony.” He’s even to blame for a 2010 World Cup curse (all the teams he rooted for from the stands lost in upsets). Conversely, everything that Keith Richards has done (including nearly derailing the Rolling Stones for good and forever with his all-consuming decade-long heroin addiction) amounts to our greatest antihero at work. Keith cashes the same checks and has never really missed a business meeting where a major decision has been made. “Keith sat at the board tables in Geneva with a bowie knife, carving his initials into the table of this very conservative Swiss bank, while Mick and [former Stones business manager] Prince Rupert Lowenstein and myself sat around working out the tax plan,” recalls former Stones staffer Peter Rudge. “But Keith never left the room.” This perception of Mick as the band’s lone miser and cynic has been encouraged at every opportunity by Keith. During their greatest period of estrangement in the mid-’80s, Keith happened to spy the jacket of a book by Yorkshire-born historical fiction writer Brenda Jagger, and from that moment, whenever his partner erred (in Keith’s eyes), he was referred to (behind his back) as such.

  Brenda. Her Majesty Brenda. Or sometimes simply “the bitch.” This didn’t stay an inside joke for long. “Keith has become a bit childish in some of his criticism of Mick,” Altham says. Mick hasn’t taken the bait. He’s never really made an effort to reverse opinions, to undergo a Brenda-ectomy. His sit-down with close friend and Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner in 1995 marked the last time to date that he has ever granted a lengthy question-andanswer session longer than the standard twenty minutes he usually allows. The cover story that British writer Zoë Heller wrote in the autumn of 2010 for the New York Times Style magazine was tellingly brief.

  “Being interviewed is one of Jagger’s least favorite pastimes,” Wenner wrote in his opening paragraph, before getting into the relatively generous main course. Even during his brief chats with less prestigious inquisitors, Mick can be read as suspicious, truculent, and dismissive. In 1973, while interviewing then Stones guitarist Mick Taylor for the New Musical Express (which for the duration of this book will be referred to as N.M.E.), legendary British music journalist Nick Kent had the cheek to inquire of the singer about the possibility of a solo album in Mick’s future. This was the response: [Busy eating sausage] “ ‘This isn’t my interview.’ ”

  Less sausages and more sugar might have endeared Mick to those who would have helped him build a sturdier myth and shield him from some of the potshots that would be fired in the years after “Rock Against Yeast.” For example, in 2003, the late, very occasionally great Blender magazine (where I was a contributor), ranking the fifty worst rock stars of all time, listed Mick Jagger the solo artist at No. 13, immediately in front of hirsute new ager Yanni and the comically volatile Swedish guitar-shredder Yngwie Malmsteen. “Given the roll call of A-list rockers who have appeared on the Stones front man’s four solo ventures, even a tone-deaf six year old could have produced something you’d want to hear twice,” Blender observed. “Alas it seems there’s never a tone-deaf six year old around when you need one.” A cold shot from a music magazine that’s had Tila Tequila on the cover. There is a temptation to defend Mick (as I just did) because of the silence from the Jagger camp. Keith and the like have turned some of us into playground refs. Two years earlier, the New York Observer published a column by Ron Rosenbaum entitled “Mick Jagger: Our Most Underrated Songwriter” in which the journalist keenly points out that Jagger’s “jet-setting” lifestyle and “manic exhibitionist stage persona” too often overshadow “killer, slow aching ballads,” like “Angie” and “Time Waits for No One,” and the jangly, and perfectly glum “Blue Turns to Grey.” Rosenbaum cites the “spare Beckett-like eloquence of ‘No Expectations’ ” and compares his characterization in “Till the Next Good Bye” to that of Graham Greene. That year, 2001, Mick’s fourth solo album, Goddess in the Doorway, sold about nine hundred copies in British shops its debut week. This despite a vast promotional campaign that included a feature-length prime-time BBC documentary (entitled Being Mick and featuring the catchphrase “You Would if You Could”) and a rare series of interviews with the music press. Like the appearance of pop stars such as Wyclef Jean, Rob Thomas, and Mick-solo-project mainstay Lenny Kravitz, these efforts did little to better Goddess’s commercial fate and may have actually worsened the Mick Jagger Problem. “Again it played into the image that people have always used to underrate him,” Rosenbaum wrote of Being Mick, “to write him off as a jet-setting celeb, rather than the serious artist he was and still is.” Keith could not resist the urge to pile on, publicly referring to Goddess in the Doorway as “Dogshit in the Doorway.”

  Shortly after the release of Keith’s autobiography, Life, in the autumn of 2010, the webzine Slate ran a witty rebuttal from “Mick” as told to journalist “Bill Wyman.” It’s a response that actually might have addressed various Brenda issues; feisty, funny, clever, a little bitchy, but absolutely appropriate: “[Keith] has written a book that says, essentially, that I have a small di
ck. That I am a bad friend. That I am unknowable. The reviewers, who idolize Keith, don’t ask why this is all in here. We have rarely spoken of such things publicly, and tangentially even then. We don’t talk about it in private, either, and, no, he hasn’t been in my dressing room in twenty years. I thought we both learned that there is no point in sharing anything at all with the press, save a few tidbits for the upbeat ‘the Stones are back in top rocking form!’ article that accompanies each of our tours.”

  It was, of course, entirely fictional; the punch Mick never threw. He simply seems to have no interest in improving his rep or letting us in beyond faux cinema verité promotional projects like Being Mick. He does not look back unless it’s good business to do so. Mick doesn’t require, like so many of the journalists who’ve written about him (myself included) context to appreciate or enjoy his own life. His skin is as resilient and dense as Keith’s liver tissue. Kent, who has been chronicling the Stones with great insight since the early’70s, frames this injustice perfectly in his own 2010 memoir, Apathy for the Devil: “In the gooey showbiz sense of the word, he’s always been smart enough to recognize that performers who actively look for love from their audiences often end up needy and burned-out, like Judy Garland.... and yet somehow he always ends up the villain whenever the Stones saga gets recounted—the control freak, the cold fish, the cunning, heartless greed head. It’s become one big fairy story—the Rolling Stones as perceived by the world’s media—with Jagger as the resident evil goblin.” During a telephone interview for Vanity Fair’s website (where I blog) in the late summer of 2010 while Kent was promoting Apathy, I queried him on this very subject after reading his memoir and asked him to explore the matter for me, and again it comes down to the relationship (or lack of relationship) with people who do what Kent and I do for a living.