Mick Jagger Remembered

Sir Michael Philip “Mick” Jagger (born 26 July 1943)^[1] is a Golden Globe and Grammy Award winning English musician, singer, songwriter, record producer, occasional film producer and actor, best known for his work as lead vocalist and frontman of The Rolling Stones.

The Rolling Stones started in the early 1960s as a rhythm and blues cover band with Jagger as frontman. Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards developed a songwriting partnership and by the mid-1960s the group had evolved into a major rock band. Frequent conflict with the authorities, including alleged drug use, and his romantic involvements ensured that during this time Jagger was never far from the headlines, and he was often portrayed as a counterculture figure. In the late 1960s Jagger began acting in films (starting with Performance and Ned Kelly), to mixed reception.

In the 1970s, Jagger, with the rest of the Stones, became tax exiles, consolidated their global position and gained more control over their business affairs with the formation of the Rolling Stones Records label. During this time, Jagger was also known for his high-profile marriages to Bianca De Macías and later to Jerry Hall. In the 1980s Jagger released his first solo albums. He was knighted in 2003.

Early life

Jagger was born into a middle-class family at the Livingstone Hospital, Dartford, Kent, England. His father, Basil Fanshawe (“Joe”) Jagger (13 April 1913 – 11 November 2006), and his paternal grandfather, David Ernest Jagger, were both teachers. His mother, Eva Ensley Mary Scutts^[2] (6 April 1913 – 18 May 2000),^[3] an Australian immigrant to England, was a hairdresser^[4] and an active member of the Conservative Party. Jagger is the elder of two sons (his brother Chris Jagger was born in 1949) and was raised to follow in his father’s career path.

In the book According to the Rolling Stones, Jagger states “I was always a singer. I always sang as a child. I was one of those kids who just liked to sing. Some kids sing in choirs; others like to show off in front of the mirror. I was in the church choir and I also loved listening to singers on the radio – the BBC or Radio Luxembourg – or watching them on TV and in the movies.”^[5]

In the early 1950s Keith Richards and Mick Jagger (who as a youngster preferred to be known as “Mike”) were classmates at Wentworth Primary School in Dartford, Kent. Having lost contact with each other when they went to different schools at the age of 11, Richards and Jagger resumed their friendship in 1960 after a chance encounter and discovered that they had both developed a love for rhythm and blues music, which began for Jagger with Little Richard.^[6] They moved into a flat in Chelsea with a guitarist they had encountered named Brian Jones. While Richards and Jones were making plans to start their own rhythm and blues group, Jagger continued his business courses at the London School of Economics.^[7]

[edit] Career

[edit] Early years: 1960s

In their earliest days the members played for no money in the interval of Alexis Korner‘s gigs at a basement club opposite Ealing Broadway tube station (subsequently called “Ferry’s” club). At the time the group had very little equipment and needed to borrow Alexis’ gear to play. This was before Andrew Oldham became their manager. The group’s first appearance under the name The Rollin’ Stones (after one of their favourite Muddy Waters tunes) was at a jazz club called the Marquee Club on 12 July 1962. The lineup did not at that time include drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman. By 1963, they were finding their stride as well as popularity. By 1964 two unscientific opinion polls rated them as England’s most popular group, outranking even the Beatles.^[7]

By the autumn of 1963, Jagger had left the London School of Economics in favour of his promising musical career with the Rolling Stones. The group continued to mine the works of American rhythm and blues artists such as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but with the strong encouragement of Andrew Loog Oldham, Jagger and Richards soon began to write their own songs. This core songwriting partnership would flourish in time; one of their early compositions, “As Tears Go By“, was a song written for Marianne Faithfull, a young singer being promoted by Loog Oldham at the time.^[8] For the Rolling Stones, the duo would write “The Last Time“, the group’s third number-one single in the UK (their first two UK number-one hits had been cover versions). Another of the fruits of this collaboration was their first international hit, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction“. It also established The Rolling Stones’ image as defiant troublemakers in contrast to The Beatles’ “lovable moptop” image.^[7]

Jagger told Stephen Schiff in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile: “I wasn’t trying to be rebellious in those days; I was just being me. I wasn’t trying to push the edge of anything. I’m being me and ordinary, the guy from suburbia who sings in this band, but someone older might have thought it was just the most awful racket, the most terrible thing, and where are we going if this is music?… But all those songs we sang were pretty tame, really. People didn’t think they were, but I thought they were tame.”^[9]

The group released several successful albums including December’s Children (And Everybody’s), Aftermath, and Between the Buttons, but their reputations were catching up to them. In 1967 Jagger and Richards were arrested on drug charges and were given unusually harsh sentences: Jagger was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for possession of four over-the-counter pep pills he had purchased in Italy. On appeal Richards’ sentence was overturned and Jagger’s was amended to a conditional discharge after an article appeared in The Times, written by its traditionally conservative editor William (now Lord) Rees-Mogg,^[10] but the Rolling Stones continued to face legal battles for the next decade. Around the same time internal struggles about the direction of the group had begun to surface.

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