Jagger's Life Took Radical Turn From Shy Beginning

Dec 11, 1994

Christopher Sandford

BRITISH rock journalist and sometime Seattle resident Christopher Sandford wrote "Primitive Cool" (St. Martin's, $23), a biography of Mick Jagger, published in England last year and released earlier this year in the U.S. In this excerpt, he tells of Jagger's early college days and the formation of the band.

The plan now (in summer 1961) was for Jagger to go into either politics or industry. Strongly drawn to the arts, he realized that job opportunities as either a writer or a historian were limited. Journalism, he curiously thought, "seemed too much like hard work." His father Joe was forever instilling in him the virtues of an education. Jagger entered the London School of Economics determined "to prove something to his parents," a friend said. He seemed resigned to ending up in business or finance - possibly (a salve to his creative ambitions) in "marketing a bank." His eighteenth birthday party was gloomy, Jagger talking about preparing for college with the relish of a man facing the electric chair.

"Jagger was very shy, very polite and obviously nervous at being at university . . . he announced his intention of going into business but was worried about mathematics," recalled his tutor Walter Stern.

According to a contemporary, the LSE was where Jagger "got" politics. Though not the Marxist cornucopia it became later, the school in 1961 was open to radical ideas. Peter Holland, a school friend, remembers: "Mike (as he was known then) was never a rough-and-tumble radical. More an interested observer."

A conservative view

Jagger's mother Eva to this day is bemused by stories of her son's wildness as a youth. Throughout his subsequent career, Jagger would repeatedly demonstrate that a conservative approach to life is one of the best ways to enjoy it. People rich in imagination, rich in talent and invention, many of the highly gifted, remain forever innately cautious. Jagger, in his first term at university, had no serious ambitions beyond gaining a degree. Had things not conspired as they did, he might have ended up a civil servant, a salesman, a provincial journalist. He might have been a theatrical agent or manager. Even, with renewed effort, a professional sportsman. Anything, in fact, but a musician.

As Jagger stood at the train station in his home town on the morning of Oct. 17, 1961, that option seemed singularly improbable. A minute later it became inevitable. Coming down the bleak curve of Platform Two was (his childhood friend) Keith Richards, lugging his guitar. . . .

First stage appearance

The Rolling Stones first took the stage at the Marquee Club in London on July 12, 1962. The Beatles were still two months short of their first single. Across London an obscure group named the Detours considered changing identity to The Who. In New York the 21-year-old Bobby Dylan had recently released his first album. The phrase "rock and roll" had only imperfectly entered the public lexicon. Long hair in males was still considered evidence of sexual ambiguity - or worse.

When the group took to the Marquee's cramped, splintered stage they were viewed with polite curiosity; no more. Onstage, Jagger barely moved throughout the set. He wore a striped sweater and corduroys, Brian Jones a fringed jacket, and Richards a suit of funereal darkness . . .

Jagger may have admired Richards; he may have liked him. Undoubtedly he was influenced by him. By late that summer Jagger was unrecognizable from the grammar school student of a year before. In August he approached his parents with the information that he was leaving home. Henceforth, he would "hang out" in London. What, asked Joe, about money? "Don't worry," said Jagger. "I'll get it together." . . .

At the end of January (1963), the group entered the IBC studios and over five days recorded six numbers - three by Bo Diddley, two by Jimmy Reed and a Willie Dixon blues, "I Want to be Loved." The tapes reveal Jagger to have been an enthusiastic shouter, wholly without restraint or finesse. His harmonies with Richards were, to put it mildly, crude. Not surprisingly the songs remained unreleased. Over the next month IBC's director George Clewson played the tape to every record company in London. The reaction was uniform: "I'm sorry. It's not commercial enough." Out of this the Stones drew satisfaction.

On April 14, 1963, the group were halfway through their scheduled Sunday stage performance when four figures appeared in silhouette wearing identical black leather overcoats: the Beatles. At the time the Mop Tops' single "From Me to You" was an international hit. They had money; they had a manager. (Inducting the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in January 1988, Jagger recalled: "When the Stones were first together we heard there was a group from Liverpool with long hair, scruffy clothes and a record in the charts with a bluesy harmonica riff . . . The combination of all this made me sick.")

On April 18, Jones, Jagger and Richards went backstage at the Beatles' concert at the Albert Hall. Jones was mistaken for one of the Beatles and mobbed. Jagger stood in the shadows in his sweater and jeans. At the screams, his whole face crinkled like a teenybopper's. Feverishly excited, he was filled with incommunicable thoughts. "Meeting the Beatles," recalls band member Bill Wyman, "was a spur to all of us."

The Stones began their second British tour on Jan. 3, 1964. In the space of three months that winter the group went from provincial novelty act to national fixation, largely on the basis of Jagger's unerring ability to convey sex to a mass audience. He did so by dancing, preening, darting, shuffling, strutting - and by standing stock still, his eyes drooping under his fringe, with none of the apparent joie de vivre associated with, for one, the Beatles. "This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound," Jagger said; "as for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that's rubbish." The North v. South, Beatles v. Stones debate raged. "Who," the periodical Sketch asked, "would have thought that half Britain's teenagers would end the year with heads like hairy pudding basins?" (Not the Sketch obviously. They seemed genuinely perplexed.) Even Jagger, later in the year, would attribute the rage only to "some . . . kind of . . . chemical reaction" wherein the two groups had, in different ways, tapped the eternal vein of one generation's desire to be different from another.