Mick Jagger by Philip Norman
Karis went into film and television production, and recently directed her mother, Marsha Hunt, in a one-woman show based on Marsha’s novel Joy. Lucas, Sir Mick’s twelve-year-old son with Luciana Morad, lives in Brazil with his mother—now a leading TV presenter—but sees his father on a regular one-to-one basis, for instance joining him in South Africa to watch the 2010 soccer World Cup. All in all, it is a brood of which Captain von Trapp himself could be proud. To be sure, as Jade says, “My dad likes to get us all together from time to time, line us up, and make sure we’re all in check.”
HE STILL TURNS up continually in the papers or on YouTube, that new spy hole for voyeurs, slipping out of the rear entrances of clubs as discreetly as three or four security point men can make him; arriving at the Oscars ceremony, where he will probably now never pick up a statuette; making a surprise appearance in brother Chris’s church-hall blues band as a quid pro quo for Chris’s occasional help with song lyrics; or hanging out with the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, Paul Allen.
All sorts of figures in public life, unconnected with rock ’n’ roll, have a personal, invariably fond anecdote about him: Sir Mick the cricket fanatic, charming a private box full of gruff old Panama hats at a Lord’s Test match; Sir Mick the wine connoisseur, ordering a pipe, or sixty cases, of 1977 vintage port (the year of Elvis Presley’s death) directly from the makers in Portugal; Sir Mick the history buff, authoritatively pronouncing TV historian Simon Schama “a bit spotty on the High Middle Ages”; Sir Mick the supposed mega-amnesiac, meeting would-be Tory MP Annunziata Rees-Mogg, daughter of former Times editor William, and gratefully recalling how her father saved his career back in 1967; Sir Mick the stickler for etiquette, who insists that all his homes contain a copy of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management, the Victorian domestic manual, with its definitive rules on table placements, flower arrangement, and the correct way to clean silverware.
His legacy is all around us . . . in the endless debate about the sexualization of pop music that started with Elvis but went into overdrive with “Satisfaction” and has latterly focused on female performers from Madonna to Lady Gaga and Rihanna . . . in the faux-Cockney accent now used by young people from every background in every region of Britain . . . in the very latest hot new boy band, slouched on a sofa and taking the piss out of the media, thinking they’re the first ones ever to do it.
American rappers the Black Eyed Peas commemorate him in “The Time (Dirty Bit),” which, since its release in 2010, has scored 10 million hits on YouTube: “All these girls, they like my swagger / They callin’ me Mick Jagger . . .” In June 2011, Maroon 5’s tribute song, “Moves Like Jagger,” featuring Christina Aguilera (“Take me by the tongue / And I’ll let you know . . . I’ve got the moves like Jagger”) became an international smash, giving the band their first Billboard Top 10 hit since 2007 and Aguilera her first since 2008. At the same time there’s still nothing cooler than vintage Stones. When supermodel “Cocaine Kate” Moss—who has almost single-handedly made modeling “the new rock ’n’ roll”—married guitarist Jamie Hince, the couple drove away from the ceremony in a vintage Rolls-Royce with “Gimme Shelter” blasting from the stereo.
Moves like Jagger these days percolate into the most unlikely places. For example, the Welsh old-age home where—in a wonderful example of modern institutional care and sensitivity—residents were given a tambourine to shake if they needed to call for assistance. “These people are pensioners,” commented one justifiably outraged relative, “not Mick Jagger.” Nor can we forget the modern craze among otherwise rational women for having their lips artificially pumped up to the bolstery proportions God gave him naturally. That mouth, which was once unique to Mick and certain species of tropical fish, is now smeared across female countenances in every capitalist society on earth. (Hardly “Moves Like Jagger,” though, for being fitted with one of these perma-pouts leaves a face virtually incapable of movement.)
Since 1989, the Rolling Stones have earned an estimated £2 billion gross from records, song rights, merchandising, touring, and sponsorship, while the Lapping Tongue brand appears on around fifty products, including a range of lingerie by Agent Provocateur. Mick’s mouth, the New Yorker recently noted, is “a brand as recognizable on the corporate landscape as McDonald’s golden arches.” Over the same period, Jagger-Richard’s songs are calculated to have earned in excess of $56 million, a significant tranche of this from the computer industry. Microsoft paid $4 million to use “Start Me Up” to launch its Windows 95 software, and Apple, an undisclosed but hardly lesser sum for “She’s a Rainbow” to market colored Macs.
All of this flows into a nest of companies, based in Holland for its advantageous tax rules, with low-key names like Promopub, Promotone, and Musidor at the top, rather like some blue-chip law firm with a partnership comprising Sir Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Ronnie. America’s Fortune magazine recently tried to discover if every partner received an equal share, but, after extensive quizzing of their financial advisers, had to report that “no one will go there.”
On the London Sunday Times 2011 Rich List, Sir Mick stood at number eight in the entertainers category with an estimated £190 million, just behind Elton John and just ahead of Sting. Yet Stargroves, his house on Mustique, is available for rent during part of each year. According to the rental agent, the place is left just as it was during his occupancy, with family pictures and possessions still on view. Sir Mick personally vets each application and automatically excludes rock stars because of the mess they make.
Under his personal trainer, the famous Norwegian Torje Eike, he maintains as strenous a fitness regimen as ever, with daily running, swimming, cycling, gym work, yoga, and Pilates. He drinks a great deal less than formerly, and exercises those once omnivorous lips on a sensible diet of whole-grain bread, rice, beans, pasta, chicken, and fish. He also takes numerous supplements, vitamins A, C, D, and E as well as B complexes, cod liver oil, ginseng, and ginkgo biloba. In an age when even celebrity chefs beat a path to the plastic surgeon’s door, he rather impressively sticks to the face he was born with, relying instead on antiaging creams and moisturizers—including the £350-per-bottle Crème de la Mer—to soften the Mount Rushmore gullies and crevasses. In other words, the show goes on.
Rumors about a new Rolling Stones tour began circulating in 2010 and strengthened the following year when U2 broke A Bigger Bang’s $558 million record. In 2011, there was talk of the Stones headlining at the Glastonbury Festival, the last major gap in their CV (although Chris Jagger has appeared on a fringe stage there with his band Atcha, loyally cheered on by nieces Elizabeth and Georgia May and nephew James, but almost no one else). Media opinion was that with the Stones’ fiftieth anniversary coming in 2012, Sir Mick would have to end his quarrel with “the Human Riff”—or should that now be “Rift”?—over Life and take the Stones out for a final farewell withdrawal from the biggest cash point in the universe.
Then it emerged that Sir Mick put together another breakaway band, named SuperHeavy, and comprising his friend Dave Stewart, the Bollywood composer-producer A. R. Rahman, Bob Marley’s son Damian, and the serendipitously named chanteuse Joss Stone. For two years past, in conditions of MI5-like secrecy, they had been working on a debut album with a no-expenses-spared rehearsal and recording schedule in L.A., Jamaica, Greece, Italy, India, and Miami, and aboard Microsoft chief Paul Allen’s mega-yacht. It was a project, or journey, as people say nowadays, of possibly even greater symbolism for Sir Mick than his earlier solo albums. To preview SuperHeavy, he chose the Mail on Sunday’s Live magazine for its young audience on the borderline of music and fashion. Yet even here, his young female interviewer reported that getting anything quotable out of him was “like trying to grasp mercury.”
SuperHeavy’s eponymous debut album and a single, “Miracle Worker,” appeared in September 2011, two months before a rerelease of the Stones’ 1978 Some Girls album. The single, said the Guardian, was “not all that bad—pop-regga
As July 2012 approached—the fiftieth anniversary of the first-ever Rolling Stones gig, at Soho’s Marquee club—it was revealed that Sir Mick and Keith had gotten together in New York and were on speaking terms again. Sir Mick conceded that Keith might have felt left out of running the band during the eighties and, if so, it had been “a pity.” Whether Keith in turn apologized for the todger reference was not recorded.
Speculation about a commemorative tour or show was heightened still further after Keith invited Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor to a jam session, seemingly prefiguring some onstage reunion of all surviving Stones past and present. To buy more time, the official anniversary date was set for January 2013, marking Charlie Watts’s final, reluctant absorption into the lineup. But Sir Mick continued to keep his lips firmly sealed and to enforce the same order on the band’s second rank. When Ronnie Wood innocently observed in earshot of a journalist that a reunion gig might be nice, he was hauled up before the CO and ordered to write a letter of apology to Keith and Charlie. As it was, the July 12 anniversary was marked by a brief photo op with the band, posing against a mock-up of the old Marquee facade.
Nowadays, it is a rare interviewer whose memory stretches even halfway back through Sir Mick’s career. In a recent Q & A with his old ally The Times, he was asked whether the fiftieth anniversary tempted him to write an autobiography as Keith had done. The interviewer had no idea that he’d already had a shot at it almost thirty years earlier, and he himself thought it not worth mentioning. His answer headlined the page: “I DON’T WANT TO RUMMAGE THROUGH MY PAST.”
In fact, he had recently announced yet another return to the cinema screen which, indirectly, would revisit his past’s most lurid and terrifying episode. He was both to produce and star in a film called Tabloid, portraying a media mogul based on Rupert Murdoch, owner of the Sunday tabloid News of the World which in 1967—before Murdoch acquired it—had set out to destroy him. The pre-Murdoch News of the World had, of course, been deeply implicated in the establishment dirty tricks that led to Sir Mick’s trial, public pillorying, and imprisonment, and so nearly broke a butterfly on a wheel. Now the paper was gone, shut down by Murdoch in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal, and the indestructible “butterfly” was to morph into a tabloid tycoon. The wheel had come full circle indeed.
WE STARTED THIS rummage through his past at the BAFTA awards in 2009. Let us end it with his appearance at the 2011 Grammy Awards, watched by new sensations like Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, young enough to be his grandchildren.
His performance was a tribute to Solomon Burke, the four-hundred-pound bluesman who had recently died after losing all mobility (but continuing to sing right to the very end, seated on a throne). In 2002, Burke had passed on the mantle of blues sovereignty to Sir Mick by wrapping him in a cloak; now Mick emerged from a rather smaller one to sing Burke’s classic “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love,” that long-ago show opener for the wild young Stones of suburban Surrey.
In his sixty-eighth year, the turquoise-jacketed torso was still as slight and hyperactive as ever, the hair as modishly cut and unrelievedly brown, the stomach as awesomely flat, the eyes as starey and the lips as trumpety, the voice still beamed straight from Planet Jagger: “Ever-baw-deah . . . wawnts some-baw-deah . . . someone to lerve . . . someone to ke-ass . . .” Another innocent vowel was murdered as he stood before the rapturous kindergarten, stabbing a forefinger by turns at the front stalls, the back stalls, the balcony, and the gods: “Ah need youw, youw, youw! . . . an’ Ah need youw, youw, youw!”
Though the accent might be as fake as ever, he’d never sung truer words.
Postscript
SCENE: THE CROWDED, sweltering carriage of a London tube train at rush hour on the Northern Line. Just after Camden Town, the connecting door from the next carriage—a means of access shunned by all normal people—is violently wrenched open and a busker appears. He’s in his late thirties, with the lank-haired, grimy-bearded sixties-hippie look common to buskers old or young; around his neck hangs a steel-strung Spanish guitar lacquered black and festooned in dingy red ribbons. Although busking has been legalized at tube stations, there remain a maverick breed who work the trains, usually emitting horrible sounds, and not much more welcome than muggers or pickpockets. So now everyone down this section of the carriage hastily looks the other way; hands move instinctively to protect bags and wallets; ears brace themselves to be offended.
But this isn’t the usual cacophonous nuisance; he’s positively charming as he offers a deal—“a song for twenty pence.” “Here’s one I wrote with Mick Jagger,” he says, then starts to beat out chords which even on a crap Spanish guitar, after half a century, have lost none of their wicked joy: “Duh-duh duh-duh-duh da-duh-duh . . .” And even in this most unpromising of arenas, their effect is the same as always. Spirits suddenly lift; fingers begin to tap on armrests; bums to shift on seats; lips, of whatever nationality, to follow the master’s:
“Ah cain’t git no . . . Sa-tis-fack-shern!”
A few months later, BBC Radio 4 celebrates its long-running Desert Island Discs program by asking its audience rather than the usual celebrities to choose eight pieces of music they would choose to take with them if cast away on that theoretical desert island. As a trailer, a random selection of voices is heard on the air, saying which piece would top their list. One sound bite comes from a typical conservative-sounding R4 listener, a woman whose crisply authoritarian tones might belong to a duchess, a private school headmistress, a judge, or perhaps a former director of MI5.
So what record, above all, would she depend on to brighten her solitude whenever she played it? Mozart . . . Beethoven . . . Elizabethan plainsong? “Mick Jagger’s ‘Satisfaction,’ ” replies this voice of the establishment, “because it’s the story of my life.”
Such is stardom.
Index
The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader.
Abbott, Maggie, 264, 265, 474–78, 499, 501, 538–40, 572, 575
ABKCO, 182, 326, 328, 329, 362
Acid King David (Snyderman), 225–26, 293, 435
and drug bust, 227, 231–33, 238, 243, 250, 262–66, 274, 539
Aftermath (album), 203–4, 205, 207, 220, 397
Aguilera, Christina, 583, 593
“Ain’t Too Proud to Beg,” 467, 585
Aitken, Jonathan, 254, 257
Alexander, Arthur, 134
Alfie (film remake), 581
Ali, Tariq, 257, 287, 289, 290
“All About You,” 523
“All Down the Line,” 432
Allen, Paul, 592, 595
Alley, Patrick, 535
Alomar, Carlos, 534, 535
Altamont festival, 10, 375–88, 412, 436, 439, 443, 512, 582
Altham, Keith, 181, 489
Anderson, Ian (Jethro Tull), 273, 318, 319
Andrews, Eamonn, 224
Andrews, Pat, 69, 196
Anger, Kenneth, 333, 364, 411
“Angie,” 462
Animals, 152, 153, 155, 182, 244
Annenberg, Walter, 471
“Anybody Seen My Baby?,” 560
Apollo Theater, Harlem, 146–47, 161
Apple computers, 594
Apple organization, 328–29, 331
Apted, Michael, 478, 574
Armstrong, Louis “Satchmo,” 39
Arnold, Billy Boy, 53, 58, 67
Arnold, Shirley, 127, 165, 257, 398, 445, 452
and Brian, 275, 344, 345, 349
and Mick/Bianca wedding, 418, 420, 421, 424
and Mick’s
and Stones’ office, 282, 283, 361
Arnstein, Bobbie, 440–41
Aronowitz, Al, 151
“Around and Around,” 53, 57, 111, 160
Ashby, Hal, 475
Asher, Jane, 138, 154, 245
Asher, Peter, 137–38
Ashley, Ted, 402–3
“As Tears Go By,” 140–41, 169, 170, 180, 189, 208, 209, 213, 270, 320, 335
Atlantic label, 392–95, 401, 406, 414, 417, 427, 463, 531
Australia, Stones’ tour to, 165–66
Avory, Mick, 65, 66, 67
baby boomers, 508, 558, 565, 581
Bachardy, Don, 360
Backstreet Boys, 582
Bacon, Francis, 314
BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), 1–4, 7, 8, 142, 560, 566, 597
Bailey, David, 125–26, 503
and Deneuve, 185, 188
and film production, 185
as photographer, 86, 144, 158, 167, 170, 185, 199, 298, 462, 542
Baker, Ginger, 81, 346
Baldry, Long John, 61, 65–66, 79, 337
Balin, Marty, 381
Bamigboye, Baz, 551
Bancroft, Anne, 568
Band, the, 300, 302
Bangs, Lester, 463
Barber, Chris, 28, 36, 60, 66
Barbuscia, Lisa, 547
Barclay, Eddie, 406, 407–8, 423
Barclay, Michael, 101, 114
Bardot, Brigitte, 421, 591
Barrett, Syd, 50
Barrow, Tony, 95
Bart, Lionel, 128, 139, 170, 172, 180, 197
Baryshnikov, Mikhail, 490
Battle of Britain, 16–17
Baud, Father Lucien, 420, 423
BBC, 30, 65–66, 98, 113, 115, 152, 268, 546, 580, 599–600
Beach Boys, 161
Beacon Theater, New York, 582–83
Bean, George, 137, 282
“Beast of Burden,” 498, 582
Beatles