A knight of the British realm astride a giant inflatable penis
Born this day, 80 years ago, Sir Michael "Mick" Jagger (b.1943), front man for The Rolling Stones, and a thing or two besides. Some may be surprised to learn he is that old, as he never let his age stop him from cavorting and prowling around arena stages as always he did. But others may be equally shocked to learn that he is that young; the New York Post dubbed him "the wrinkly rocker" as much as thirty years ago! Today, he is a multiple great-grandfather. What do the younger generations of Jaggers think of grandpa's contortions, I wonder? I'm pretty sure I never saw my grandfather get up from his chair!
At any rate, it's not accidental that Jagger is the last of the Rolling Stones to be written about on this blog (following Keith Richard, Brian Jones, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman, and even Ian Stewart). He is a topic for books, not blogposts, which must be concise. Mick ranks with Elvis or the Sex Pistols as a transformative cultural figure. Without him, the Stones would have undoubtedly been a great band, about on par with, say, The Kinks or The Animals, but maybe not, as they have often been called over the decades, "The World's Greatest Rock and Roll Band".
The rule of thumb has always been that where the Beatles were cute and cuddly, the Stones were scruffy rogues, and none more so than Jagger, who always looked to me like he'd be well cast in the role of Bill Sykes in an adaptation of Oliver Twist. His mother was from Australia; is he descended from convicts? My mother was hilarious in her disdain for Jagger's ugliness, but of course that was the entire point. The Stones were what passed for "objectionable" way back in the '60s and early '70s, until they were eclipsed by the more egregious excesses of metal, punk, and hip hop. The Stones were scofflaws, and they had the arrest records and illegitimate offspring to prove it. And Jagger was their bug-eyed, big-lipped poster boy.
When my brothers saw them live in Providence in 1965, a riot broke out. I get the impression that wasn't particularly remarkable back then, though that didn't make the experience less thrilling, by their account. Jagger's onstage behavior was provocative. While both the Rolling Stones and the Beatles were known for Chuck Berry covers, the other kinds of black acts they emulated diverge, and the differences are illuminating. The Beatles were into the harmonies of Girl Groups, and wacky novelty numbers by Larry Williams and The Coasters. The Stones, by contrast, combined the nasty, gritty sounds of Chicago Blues with a visual element that drew from soul singers like James Brown and Sam Cooke. That element was supplied by Jagger, with his rooster strut and snake-like slither.
Jagger's coarseness was an act of course. From a middle-class class background, he was surely unique in being a rock and roll star who had been educated at the London School of Economics. And if that seems to have been an irrelevant subject for him to have studied, his great wealth would argue otherwise. (At the present writing he is worth a half a billion dollars). This may be part and parcel with Jagger's penchant for long-term partnerships with women, as opposed to legal marriages, which tend to be expensive when they crash. Jagger was only married once; but he's been with many, many women. Five of them bore him children -- that we know of. It's fun to imagine entire playgrounds full of Jagger's unacknowledged children cavorting around like a brood of lizards.
Jagger's other babies are of course his records. It's something approaching a miracle that the '60s would produce another songwriting team as prolific and hit-making as Lennon and McCartney, especially as Jagger and Richard didn't truly start plugging at it until the Stones were already a going concern, in Britain anyway. They first hit the U.K. charts with a string of covers of American rock songs (and one Lennon-McCartney original). Their manager Andrew Loog Oldham egged them on, and they hit the jackpot. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was their "She Loves You", their breakthrough in the States, with an added edge that might be interpreted as either satire or downright hedonism, which would come to be their lyrical signature. Were they creatures of capitalism? Or its critics? They embodied "Wine, Women and Song", or, as it was reformulated for modern times, "Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll". And much more than his writing partner, Jagger was willing and able to recalibrate that idea to the tastes of the times, shepherding the band through phases that encompassed the British Blues Boom and psychedelia, through glam and disco, and later even techno.
It's always been astounding to me that the Stones were still a going concern when I was in high school in the early '80s. They outlasted the Beatles as an act. The Who were still having hit singles, though to my mind without Keith Moon they weren't The Who any more and at any rate they'd not had the same kind of chart success as the Stones. We learn in retrospect that during this period, the Stones came as close as they ever did to breaking up. The power dynamic in the band had shifted yet again, with Richard, addled for years on heroin, in danger of becoming as irrelevant as Brian Jones had, and Jagger stronger than ever. Jagger had embraced stardom, cavorted with fashion models and movers and shakers in publishing and the art world. He starred in movies like Performance and Ned Kelly. I am astounded to learn that he was considered for The Rocky Horror Picture Show -- that could well have been incredible. They clearly cast Tim Curry for his Jagger like qualities. Curry was the better actor, though. Jagger had a vapid, vacant animal quality that served the music somehow but didn't help his presence on screen, where you've got to fill out a character's interior. Did Jagger even have an interior? Much as with Elvis, it's something that could be debated.
It was around that same time in the '80s (half his life ago) that Jagger tried a solo career, and performed in team-ups with the likes of David Bowie and Michael Jackson. Had those efforts been more successful he might well have just dropped his old band. But the public quickly lost interest. There is something alchemical about the Stones sound, and as much as we love Mick's voice, we want his bandmates behind him. When his cover of "Dancing in the Street" was all over MTV, I was far more engrossed in the Stones' records of two decades earlier.
I just listened to some of their recent songs, and they still sound amazing, although to these ears they stopped exploring and growing some decades ago, which I must assert is NOT a necessary concomitant of old age. Of his generation, Bob Dylan and Paul McCartney, for example, still manage to reinvent themselves. Picasso, Bernard Shaw, Alfred Hitchcock. Grandma Moses! What do I want or expect from an octogenarian Mick Jagger? Oh, perhaps something like that 2006 movie Venus with Peter O'Toole. I would be over the moon with happiness if they released a record called Dirty Old Men.
Mick and the Stones get a mention in my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; look for a shout-out as well in my upcoming one Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.
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