Mick Jagger (6 page)

A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and a striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquizes droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends “ordinary gym shoes … like the kind Mike is wearing.” Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare—and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips—say it all.

At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts were somewhere infinitely more glamorous and amusing. “Too easily distracted,” “attitude rather unsatisfactory,” and other such faint damnations recurred through his end-of-term reports. In the summer of 1959 he took his GCE ordinary-level exams, which in those days were assessed by marks out of one hundred rather than grades. He passed in seven subjects, just scraping through English literature (48), geography (51), history (56), Latin (49), and pure mathematics (53), doing moderately well in French (61) and English language (66). Further education being still for the fortunate minority, this was when most pupils left, aged sixteen, to start jobs in banks or solicitors’ offices. Mike, however, went into the sixth form for two more years to take advanced-level English, history, and French. His headmaster, Lofty Hudson, predicted that he was “unlikely to do brilliantly in any of them.”

He was also made a school prefect, in theory an auxiliary to Lofty and the staff in maintaining order and discipline. But it was an appointment that the head soon came to regret. Though Elvis Presley had originally cast his disruptive spell over girls, he had left a more lasting mark on boys, especially British ones, turning their former upright postures to rebellious slouches and their former sunny smiles to sullen pouts, replacing their short-back-and-sides haircuts with toppling greasy quiffs, “ducks’ arses,” and sideburns. The Teddy Boy (i.e., Edwardian) style, too, was no longer peculiar to lawless young artisans but had introduced middle-and upper-class youths to ankle-hugging trousers, two-button “drape” jackets, and Slim Jim ties.

Mike was not one to go too far—his mother would never have allowed it—but he broke Dartford Grammar’s strict dress code in subtle ways that were no less provocative to Lofty’s enforcers, sporting slip-on moccasin shoes instead of clumpy black lace-ups; a pale “shorty” raincoat instead of the dark, belted kind; a low-fastening black jacket with a subtle gold fleck instead of his school blazer. Among his fiercest sartorial critics was Dr. Wilfred Bennett, the senior languages tutor, whom he had already displeased by consistently performing below his abilities in French. Matters came to a head at the school’s annual Founders’ Day ceremony, attended by bigwigs from Dartford Council and other local dignitaries, when his gold-flecked jacket marred the otherwise faultless rows of regulation blazers. There was a heated confrontation with Dr. Bennett afterward, which ended with the teacher lashing out—as teachers then could with impunity—and Mike sprawled out on the ground.

Perhaps more than any other pastime, music forges friendships between individuals who otherwise have nothing whatsoever in common. Never was it truer than in late 1950s Britain, when for the first time young people found a music of their own, only to have it derided by adult society in general. A few months from now, this feeling of persecuted brotherhood would initiate, or rather revive, the most important relationship of Mike’s life. The prologue, as it were, took place in his last two years at school when, somewhat surprisingly, the genteel kid from Wilmington chummed up with a plumber’s son from Bexleyheath named Dick Taylor.

Dick’s consuming passion was not rock ’n’ roll but blues, the black music that had preceded it by something like half a century and provided its structure, its chords, and its rebellious soul. For this esoteric taste he had to thank his older sister Robin, a hard-core blues fan while her friends swooned over white crooners like Frankie Vaughan and Russ Hamilton. Robin knew all its greatest exponents and, more important, knew where to find it on AFN or Voice of America, where the occasional blues record was played for the benefit of black GIs helping to defend Europe from communism. Dick, in turn, passed on the revelation to a small coterie at Dartford Grammar that included Mike Jagger.

This was unconventionality on an altogether more epic scale than shorty raincoats. Liking rock ’n’ roll with its concealed black subtext was one thing—but this was music wholly reflecting the experience of black people, which few musicians but black ones had ever authentically created. In late-fifties Britain, one still very seldom saw a black face outside London, least of all in the bucolic Home Counties: hence the unimpaired popularity of Helen Bannerman’s children’s story Little Black Sambo, Agatha Christie’s stage play Ten Little Niggers, and BBC TV’s Black and White Minstrels, to say nothing of “nigger brown” shoe polish and dogs routinely named “Blackie,” “Sambo,” and “Nigger.” Nor was there any but the most marginal, patronizing awareness of black culture. Mass immigration until now had come mainly from former colonies in the Caribbean, furnishing a new menial class to staff public transport and the National Health Service. The only generic black music most Britons ever heard was West Indian calypsos, full of careful deference to the host nation and usually employed as a soundtrack to major-league cricket matches.

There might seem no possible meeting point between suburban Kent with its privet hedges and slow green buses, and the Mississippi Delta with its tar-and-paper cabins, shantytowns, and prison farms; still less between a genteelly raised white British boy and the dusty black troubadours whose chants of pain or anger or defiance had lightened the load and lifted the spirits of untold fellow sufferers under twentieth-century servitude. For Mike, the initial attraction of the blues was simply that of being different—standing out from his coevals as he already did through basketball. To some extent, too, it had a political element. This was the era of English literature’s so-called angry young men and their well-publicized contempt for the coziness and insularity of life under Harold Macmillan’s Tory government. One of their numerous complaints, voiced in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger, was that “there are no good, brave causes left.” To a would-be rebel in 1959, the oppression of black musicians in prewar rural America was more than cause enough.

But Mike’s love of the blues was as passionate and sincere as he’d ever been about anything in his life, or perhaps ever would be. In crackly recordings, mostly made long before his birth, he found an excitement—an empathy—he never had in the wildest moments of rock ’n’ roll. Indeed, he could see now just what an impostor rock was in so many ways; how puny were its wealthy young white stars in comparison with the bluesmen who’d written the book and, mostly, died in poverty; how those long-dead voices, wailing to the beat of a lone guitar, had a ferocity and humor and eloquence and elegance to which nothing on the rock ’n’ roll jukebox even came close. The parental furor over Elvis Presley’s sexual content, for instance, seemed laughable if one compared the pubescent hot flushes of “Teddy Bear” and “All Shook Up” with Lonnie Johnson’s syphilis-crazed “Careless Love” or Blind Lemon Jefferson’s nakedly priaptic “Black Snake Moan.” And what press-pilloried rock ’n’ roll reprobate, Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, could hold a candle to Robert Johnson, the boy genius of the blues who lived almost the whole of his short life among drug addicts and prostitutes and was said to have made a pact with the devil in exchange for his peerless talent?

Though skiffle had brought some blues songs into general consciousness, the music still had only a tiny British following—mostly “intellectual” types who read leftish weeklies, wore maroon socks with sandals, and carried their change in leather purses. Like skiffle, it was seen as a branch of jazz: the few American blues performers who ever performed live in Britain did so through the sponsorship—charity, some might say—of traditional jazz bandleaders like Humphrey Lyttelton, Ken Colyer, and Chris Barber. “Humph” had been bringing Big Bill Broonzy over as a support attraction since 1950, while every year or so the duo of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee attracted small but ardent crowds to Colyer’s Soho club, Studio 51. After helping give birth to skiffle, Barber had become a stalwart of the National Jazz League, which strove to put this most lackadaisical of the arts on an organized footing and had its own club, the Marquee on Oxford Street. Here, too, from time to time, some famous old blues survivor would appear onstage, still bewildered by his sudden transition from Chicago or Memphis.

Finding the blues on record was almost as difficult. It was not available on six-shilling and fourpenny singles, like rock and pop, but only on what were still known as “LPs” (long-players) rather than albums, priced at a daunting thirty shillings (£1.50) and up. To add to the expense, these were usually not released on British record labels but imported from America in their original packaging with the price in dollars and cents crossed out and a new one in pounds, shillings, and pence substituted. Such exotica was, of course, not stocked by record shops in Dartford or even in large neighboring towns such as Chatham or Rochester. To find it, Mike and Dick had to go to up to London and trawl through the racks at specialist dealers like Dobell’s on Charing Cross Road.

Their circle at Dartford Grammar School included two other boys with the same recondite passion. One was a rather quiet, bookish type from the arts stream named Bob Beckwith; the other was Mike’s Wilmington neighbor, the science student Alan Etherington. In late 1959, during Mike’s first term in the sixth form, the four decided to form a blues band. Bob and Dick played guitar, Alan (a drummer and bugler in the school cadet force) played percussion on a drum kit donated by Dick’s grandfather, and Mike was the vocalist.

Their aim was not to earn money or win local fame, like Danny Rogers and the Realms, nor even to pull girls. Mike in particular—as Alan Etherington recalls—already had all the ardent female followers he could wish for. The idea was simply to celebrate the blues and keep it alive amid the suffocating tides of commercial rock and pop. From first to last, they never had a single paid gig or performed to any audience larger than about half a dozen. Dartford Grammar gave them no opportunities to play or encouragement of any kind, even though they were effectively studying a byway of modern American history; Alan Etherington recalls “a stand-up row” with the school librarian after requesting a book by blues chronicler Paul Oliver as background reading for the quartet. They existed in a self-created vacuum, making no effort to contact kindred spirits in Kent or the wider world—hardly even aware that there were any. In Dick Taylor’s words, “We thought we were the only people in Britain who’d ever heard of the blues.”

MIKE JAGGER SEEMED living proof of the unnamed band’s determination to go nowhere. He remained firm in his refusal to play a guitar, instead just standing there in front of the other three, as incomplete and exposed without that instantly glamorizing, dignifying prop as if he’d forgotten to put on his trousers. The singing voice unveiled by his prodigious lips and flicking tongue was likewise an almost perverse departure from the norm. White British vocalists usually sang jazz or blues in a gravelly, cigarette-smoky style modeled—vainly—on Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong. Mike’s voice, higher and lighter in tone, borrowed from a larger, more eclectic cast; it was a distillation of every Deep Southern accent he’d ever heard, white as much as black, feminine as much as masculine; Scarlett O’Hara, plus a touch of Mammy from Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire as much as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Boy Williamson.

Unencumbered by a guitar—mostly even by a microphone—he had to do something while he sang. But the three friends, accustomed to his cool, noncommittal school persona, were amazed by what he did do. Blues vocalists traditionally stood or, more often, sat in an anguished trance, cupping one ear with a hand to amplify the sonic self-flagellation. When Mike sang the blues, however, his loose-limbed, athletic body rebutted the music’s melancholic inertia word by word: he shuffled to and fro in his moccasins, ground his hips, rippled his arms, and euphorically shook his shaggy head. Like his singing, it had an element of parody and self-parody, but an underlying total conviction. A song from his early repertoire, John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen,” summed up this metamorphosis: “The blues is in him … and it’s got to come out …”

Practice sessions for the nonexistent gigs were mostly held at Dick Taylor’s house in Bexleyheath or at Alan Etherington’s, a few doors along from the Jaggers. Alan owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Philips “Joystick” (so named for its aeronautical-looking volume control) on which the four could preserve and review their first efforts together. The Etherington home boasted the further luxury of a Grundig “radiogram,” a cabinet radio-cum-record-player with surround sound, an early form of stereo. Dick and Bob Beckwith did not have custom-built electric guitars, only acoustic ones with metal pickups screwed to the bodies. Beckwith, the more accomplished player of the two, would plug his guitar into the radiogram, increasing its volume about thirtyfold.

At Dick’s, if the weather was fine, they would rehearse in the back garden—the future lord of giant alfresco spaces and horizonless crowds surveying a narrow vista of creosoted wood fences, washing lines, and potting sheds. Dick’s mum, who sometimes interrupted her housework to watch, told Mike from the start that he had “something special.” However small or accidental the audience, he gave them his all. “If I could get a show, I would do it,” he would remember. “I used to do mad things … Get on my knees and roll on the floor … I didn’t have inhibitions. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.”