Филип Норман – Mick Jagger (страница 2)
Over the decades since their joint heyday, of course, pop music’s essentials have hardly changed. Each new generation of musicians hits on the same chords in the same order and adopts the same language of love, lust and loss; each new generation of fans seeks the same kind of male idol with the same kind of sex appeal, the same repertoire of gestures, attitudes and manifestations of cool.
The notion of a rock ‘band’ – young ensemble musicians enjoying fame, wealth and sexual opportunity undreamed of by their historic counterparts in military regiments or northern colliery towns – was well established by the time the Stones got going, and has not changed one iota since. It remains as true that, even though the pop industry mostly is about illusion, exploitation and hype, true talent will always out, and always endure. From the Stones’ great rabble-rousing hits like ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ or ‘Street Fighting Man’ to obscure early tracks like ‘Off the Hook’ or ‘Play with Fire’, and the R&B cover versions that came before, their music sounds as fresh as if recorded yesterday.
They remain role models for every band that makes it – the pampered boy potentates, lolling ungraciously on a couch as flashbulbs detonate, the same old questions are shouted by reporters, and the same facetious answers thrown back. The kind of tour they created in the late sixties is what everyone still wants: the private jets, the limos, the entourages, the groupies, the trashed hotel suites. All the well-documented evidence of how soul-destroyingly monotonous it soon becomes, all Christopher Guest’s brilliant send-up of a boneheaded travelling supergroup in
Above all Mick Jagger, at any age, is inimitable. Jagger it was who, more than anyone, invented the concept of the ‘rock star’ as opposed to mere singer within a band – the figure set apart from his fellow musicians (a major innovation in those days of unified Beatles, Hollies, Searchers et al.) who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds. Keith Richards, Jagger’s co-figurehead in the Stones, is a uniquely talented guitarist, as well as the rock world’s most unlikely survivor, but Keith belongs in a troubadour tradition stretching back to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Django Reinhardt, continuing on to Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Springsteen, Noel Gallagher and Pete Doherty. Jagger, on the other hand, founded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on. Among his rivals in rock showmanship, only Jim Morrison of the Doors found a different way to sing into a microphone, cradling it tenderly in both hands like a frightened baby bird rather than flourishing it, Jagger-style, like a phallus. Since the 1970s, many other gifted bands have emerged with vast international followings and indubitably charismatic front men – Freddie Mercury of Queen, Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Bono of U2, Michael Hutchence of INXS, Axl Rose of Guns N’ Roses. Distinctive on record they might be, but when they took the stage they had no choice but to follow in Jagger’s strutting footsteps.
His status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph ‘the Sheik’ Valentino, the silent cinema star who aroused 1920s women to palpitant dreams of being thrown across the saddle of a horse and carried off to a Bedouin tent in the desert. With Jagger, the aura was closer to great ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces. The Stones were one of the first rock bands to have a logo and, even for the louche early seventies, it was daringly explicit – a livid-red cartoon of Jagger’s own mouth, the cushiony lips sagging open with familiar gracelessness, the tongue slavering out to slurp an invisible something which, very clearly, was not ice cream. This ‘lapping tongue’ still adorns all the Stones’ literature and merchandise, symbolic of who controls every department. To modern eyes, there could hardly be a cruder monument to old-fashioned male chauvinism – yet it finds its mark as surely as ever. The most liberated twenty-first-century females perk up at the sound of Jagger’s name while those he captivated in the twentieth still belong to him in every fibre. As I was beginning this book, I mentioned its subject to my neighbour at a dinner party, a seemingly dignified, self-possessed Englishwoman of mature years. Her response was to re-create the scene in
Sexual icons are notoriously prone to fall short of their public image in private; look at Mae West, Marilyn Monroe or, for that matter, Elvis Presley. But in the oversexed world of rock, in the whole annals of show business, Jagger’s reputation as a modern Casanova is unequalled. It’s questionable whether even the greatest lotharios of centuries past found sexual partners in such prodigious number, or were so often saved the tiresome preliminaries of seduction. Certainly, none maintained his prowess, as Jagger has, through middle and then old age (Casanova was knackered by his mid-thirties). What Swift called ‘the rage of the groin’ is now known as sex addiction and can be cured by therapy, but Jagger has never shown any sign of considering it a problem.
Looking at that craggy countenance, one tries but fails to imagine the vast carnal banquet on which he has gorged, yet still not sated himself . . . the unending gallery of beautiful faces and bright, willing eyes . . . the innumerable chat-up lines, delivered and received . . . the countless brusque adjournments to beds, couches, heaped-up cushions, dressing room floors, shower stalls or limo back seats . . . the ever-changing voices, scents, skin tones and hair colour . . . the names instantly forgotten, if ever known in the first place . . . Old men are often revisited in dreams, or daydreams, by the women they have lusted after. For him, it would be like one of those old-style reviews of the Soviet army in Red Square. And at least one of the gorgeous foot soldiers is among his BAFTA audience tonight, seated not a million miles from Brad Pitt.
By rights, the scandals in which he starred during the 1960s should have been forgotten decades ago, cancelled out by the teeming peccadilloes of today’s pop stars, soccer players, supermodels and reality-TV stars. But the sixties have an indestructible fascination, most of all among those too young to remember them – the condition known to psychologists as ‘nostalgia without memory’. Jagger personifies that ‘swinging’ era for Britain’s youth, both its freedom and hedonism and the backlash it finally provoked. Even quite young people today have heard of his 1967 drug bust, or at least of the Mars bar which figured so lewdly in it. Few realise the extent of the British establishment’s vindictiveness during that so-called Summer of Love; how tonight’s witty, well-spoken knight of the realm was reviled like a long-haired Antichrist, led to court in handcuffs, subjected to a show trial of almost medieval grotesquerie, then thrown into prison.
He is perhaps the ultimate example of that well-loved show-business stereotype, the ‘survivor’. But while most rock ’n’ roll survivors end up as bulgy old farts in grey ponytails, he is unchanged – other than facially – from the day he first took the stage. While most others have long since addled their wits with drugs or alcohol, his faculties are all intact, not least his celebrated instinct for what is fashionable, cool and posh. While others whinge about the money they lost or were cheated out of, he leads the biggest-earning band in history, its own survival achieved solely by his determination and astuteness. Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968; from a gang of scruffball outsiders, he turned them into a British national treasure as legitimate as Shakespeare or the White Cliffs of Dover.
Yet behind all the idolatry, wealth and superabundant satisfaction is a story of talent and promise consistently, almost stubbornly, unfulfilled. Among all his contemporaries endowed with half a brain, only John Lennon had as many opportunities to move beyond the confines of pop. Though undeniably an actor, as Jonathan Ross introduced him to BAFTA, with both film and TV roles to his credit, Jagger could have developed a parallel screen career as successful as Presley’s or Sinatra’s, perhaps even more so. He could have used his sway over audiences to become a politician, perhaps a leader, such as the world had never seen – and still has not. He could have extended the (often overlooked) brilliance of his best song lyrics into poetry or prose, as Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney have done. At the very least, he could have become a first-echelon performer in his own right instead of merely fronting a band. But, somehow or other, none of it came to pass. His film-acting career stalled in 1970 and never restarted in any significant way, despite the literally dozens of juicy screen roles he was offered. He did no more than toy with the idea of politics and has never shown any signs of wanting to be a serious writer. As for going solo, he waited until the mid-eighties to make his move, creating such ill-feeling among the other Stones, especially Keith, that he had to choose between continuing or seeing the band implode. As a consequence, he is still only their front man, doing the same job he was at eighteen.