Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ recondite passion. One was a rather quiet, bookish type from the arts stream named Bob Beckwith; the other was Mike’s Wilmington neighbour, 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.’

       CHAPTER TWO

       The Kid in the Cardigan

      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 glamorising, 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 modelled – 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, non-committal 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 on 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 non-existent 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.’

      Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practise at ‘Newlands’, in either his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe ‘creasing up’ with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training programme. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practise session elsewhere, Joe called out, ‘Michael . . . don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? ‘We all told him it made no difference,’ Dick Taylor remembers. ‘But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.’

      Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of ‘La Bamba’, whose sixteen-year-old singer–composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Latino nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.

      The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called ‘race’ music – i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as ‘the father of the Chicago Blues’ for tracks like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and his theme song, ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.

      In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis-born Charles Edward Anderson – aka Chuck – Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterwards Berry made an effortless crossover from ‘race’ music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.

      After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered – if they ever materialised at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American СКАЧАТЬ