Mick Jagger (14 page)

Very soon after that initial refusal, Chrissie began sleeping with Mick—something that for a genteelly raised, convent-educated seventeen-year-old in 1963 was still far from routine. The first time was at the Shrimpton family home while her parents were away, since she couldn’t bring herself to enter his bed at the squalid flat he shared with Keith, Brian, and the gobbing printer Phelge at 102 Edith Grove. “I hated it … it was so dirty,” she recalls. “The spitting and the Nankering … and they’d got notes that girls had sent them pinned up all over the wall. It was an all-blokes place, where I was always made to feel like an intruder.”

Keith she remembers as “just a weedy little boy, who was very sweet and shy and upset about his parents having recently got divorced … Brian was very bright, and it was obvious that he and Mick didn’t get on at all. He tried to pull me a couple of times, but only to spite Mick. When it happened I can remember thinking, ‘This is ridiculous because you’re half my size.’ ”

Mick had been seeing Chrissie only about two weeks when—out of nowhere—the Stones’ fortunes suddenly began to improve. A whole-page feature article on the Crawdaddy Club in the local Richmond and Twickenham Times gave them a laudatory plug. Then Giorgio Gomelsky persuaded a leading music trade journalist, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror—who had filed the first-ever national story on the Beatles—to come to the Station Hotel on a Sunday lunchtime and watch the Stones while Gomelsky shot further documentary footage of them onstage. “I met them in the bar, before they started playing,” Jones remembers. “Mick was amiable and well spoken, but he stayed pretty much in the background. I thought Brian was the leader because he was the pushiest one, waving their single press cutting under my nose.”

Peter Jones was “knocked out” by the set that followed, but cautiously said he wanted his paper’s in-house R&B enthusiast, Norman Jopling, to give a more knowledgeable assessment. Nineteen-year-old Jopling turned up at the Crawdaddy’s next Sunday session, but without great expectations. “British bands who tried to play the blues all had this kind of worthy, post-Trad feel, so I expected them to be rubbish. But as soon as Mick opened his mouth, I realized how wrong I was. All I remember thinking as the Stones played was ‘This stuff doesn’t only belong to black guys in the States anymore. White kids in Britain can play it just as well.’ ”

When the band talked to Jopling afterward, Brian again took the lead, quizzing him at length about what he could do for them in print. Mick was “a bit distant,” as if he resented his colleague’s assertiveness. “He knew Brian had started the band and was the leader, but he knew he was the guy people were looking at.” Later, Jopling rode with them in Stu’s van to the house of a record producer, where Keith initiated an earnest discussion about Motown music and how disappointing Mary Wells’s latest single had been. “I remember that there were a lot of musical instruments lying around, Brian was picking them up and just playing them with that instinctive talent of his. But Mick was playing some, too—and I don’t mean only percussion instruments.”

Jopling’s article in the next week’s Record Mirror was the stuff of which careers are made:

As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments heave a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R&B clubs that have sprung up is nothing short of fantastic … At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves around to the new “jungle music” like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad. And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them—if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t. But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if that scene continues to flourish …

After engineering such a triumph, Giorgio Gomelsky might have expected formal ratification as the band’s manager in time to handle the consequent surge of interest from record companies and talent agents. But all Gomelsky’s unselfish work on their behalf was suddenly forgotten. Before the Norman Jopling article had even appeared, Brian asked Jopling’s Record Mirror senior Peter Jones whether he’d consider taking on the Stones’ management. Jones was not interested—but once again proved a crucial catalyst. A couple of days later, he happened to run into a business acquaintance, a young freelance PR man whose naked ambition was a byword throughout the music trade press. If the young PR man cared to check out the Crawdaddy Club’s house band, Peter Jones suggested, he might find something of interest. And until the Record Mirror’s rave appeared, the field would be clear. When Mick had played Jimmy Reed’s “I’ll Change My Style” to his new Beatle friend John Lennon, he little imagined how prophetic the title would be.

LONG BEFORE THE Rolling Stones turned into a new kind of band and Mick into a new kind of singer, Andrew Loog Oldham was a totally new kind of manager.

Before Oldham, managers of pop acts—a pool of talent then 99.9 percent male—had been older men with no interest in the music beyond what it might earn them, and no empathy with their young charges or with teenagers generally. Most in addition were homosexuals, which explains why so many early boy rock ’n’ rollers had the same rough trade-fantasy look of flossy blond hair, black leather, tight jeans, and high-heeled boots. Andrew Oldham was the first manager to be the same age as his charges, to speak their language, share their outlook, mirror their rampant heterosexuality, and seem motivated by their collective ideals as much as by financial gain. While engineering managerial coups that, at the outset, seemed little short of magical, he was naturally and undisputedly one of the band.

Managers of the traditional kind had been content to stay in the shadows, counting their percentages. Oldham, however, craved stardom in his own right and, from the earliest age, possessed all the drive, ruthlessness, and shamelessness necessary to win it. He was ahead of his time in nurturing such ambition despite possessing no abilities whatsoever either as a performer or musician and, indeed, no quantifiable talent in any direction. The talent he did have—one of the very highest order—would emerge only when he began managing the Stones, which at the outset he saw primarily as a means of projecting himself into the spotlight.

The other two most celebrated managers in pop history, Colonel Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, both had little real comprehension of the artists under their control. With the Stones—particularly their singer—Oldham very quickly realized exactly what he had found and what to do with it. In all the annals of huckstering and hype, no one has possessed a shrewder understanding of both his product and his customers.

It is a familiar music-business cliché to give the name “Svengali” to any manager who radically remolds a performer’s appearance or persona. Svengali is one of the scarier figures in Victorian gothic literature, a music teacher with a black beard and a hypnotic stare, combining the auras of Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera. In George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the eponymous heroine, an innocent young artist’s model, allows Svengali to take her over, heart and soul, in exchange for transforming her into a world-famous operatic diva.

The analogy is always made with both Colonel Parker and Epstein, even though the managerial reshaping of Presley and the Beatles was purely cosmetic and impermanent, and reached neither their hearts nor their souls. In pop’s premier league, the Svengali-Trilby scenario has actually been played out just once: when Andrew Loog Oldham met Mick Jagger.

When it happened, it would stir yet more foreign influences into the making of Mick. Oldham’s arrestingly hybrid name commemorated his father Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American air force lieutenant, shot down and killed while serving in Britain during the last years of the Second World War. His mother, born Cecelia Schatkowski, was the daughter of a Russian Ashkenazi Jew who, like Mick’s mother’s family, had emigrated to New South Wales in Australia. After arriving in Britain aged four—the same age Eva Jagger did—Cecelia became known as Celia and, like Eva, preferred to draw a veil of pukka Englishness over her origins.

Born in 1944, after his father’s death and out of wedlock, Oldham grew up in the literary-bohemian north London suburb of Hampstead and attended a first-rank private school, Wellingborough. Like his future Trilby, he possessed a keen intelligence but resolutely refused to live up to his academic promise, instead hungering for glamour and style and choosing the unlikeliest possible role models for a boy of his background. In Oldham’s case, these were not venerable blues musicians but the amoral young hustlers who swindled and finger-snapped their way through late 1950s cinema—Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the sleazy Broadway press agent in Sweet Smell of Success; Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson, the prototype “bent” British pop manager in Expresso Bongo.

When London first began to swing, Andrew Loog Oldham—by now a strawberry-blond nineteen-year-old with an educated accent and a killer line of suits and tab-collared shirts—was perfectly placed to hop aboard the pendulum. He became an odd-job boy at Mary Quant’s Bazaar boutique while working nights as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club (where he could easily have sighted Mick but somehow never did). Given his mania for attention seeking, it was inevitable he should end up in public relations, a field until then also dominated by much older men and therefore largely uncomprehending of teenage music and culture.

Among Oldham’s earliest PR clients from the pop world, one left a lasting impression. This was America’s Phil Spector, the first record producer to become as famous as the acts he recorded, thanks to his trademark “Wall of Sound” technique, the total artistic control on which he insisted, and his already legendary egotism and neurosis. Most fascinating to his young English minder was the simultaneous image of a maestro and hoodlum Spector cultivated, wearing dark glasses whatever the weather or time of day, traveling in limousines with blacked-out windows, and surrounding himself with more bodyguards than most current heads of state. If being a backroom boy could be like that, who needed the front parlor?

Oldham’s primary ambition was to be working with the Beatles, whose records now instantly topped the UK charts on release and who were showing themselves to be far more than just another pop group with their Liverpudlian charm and wit. Their breakthrough had allowed their manager, Brian Epstein, to successfully launch a whole troupe of “Mersey Beat” acts, so destroying London’s historic antinorthern snobbery at a stroke and becoming the most successful British pop impresario ever.

Oldham soon talked himself into a freelance PR role with Epstein’s NEMS organization and forged a good personal relationship with all four Beatles. Ambition-wise, though, it was a blind alley, since the possessive Epstein handled all their PR himself in tandem with fellow Liverpudlian Tony Barrow, and would allow Oldham to publicize only second-rank NEMS names like Gerry and the Pacemakers. He had decided to move on and was just reviewing his not very numerous options when his Record Mirror contact Peter Jones advised him to check out the house band at the Richmond Station Hotel.

For Oldham, walking into the Stones’ jam-packed, mirror-multiplied lair was like seeing “rock ’n’ roll in 3-D and Cinerama for the very first time.” His cracklingly entertaining autobiography, Stoned, records the visual shock of their front rank like a James Joyce epiphany: Keith’s “black as night, hacked hair … atop a war-rationed baby body …”; Brian’s “pretty-ugly shining blond hair belied by a face that already looked as if it had a few unpaid bills with life …”; Mick, “the boy from the railway tow-path … the hors d’oeuvre, the dessert and meal in between …” After the cute Liverpudlian harmonies currently clogging the Top 10, that raw, sour, southern solo voice was like a dash of icy water in the face. “It wasn’t just a voice, and it was much, much more than a rendition, a mere lead vocal … It was an instrument … a declaration, not backed by a band but a part of a band … their decree.”

Oldham, in fact, caught the Stones at a low-energy moment, when they had reverted to being serious bluesmen seated in a semicircle of bar stools. Even then, Mick “moved like an adolescent Tarzan plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes … a body still deciding what it was and what it wanted … He was thin, waistless, giving him the human form of a puma with a gender of its own … He gave me a look that asked me everything about myself in one moment—as in ‘What are you doing with the rest of my life?’ The lips looked at me, seconding that emotion.”

In the brief interlude before Record Mirror’s story brought every London talent scout flocking to Richmond, Oldham persuaded the Stones he should be their manager. It was a pitch of finely tuned brilliance, in which the nineteen-year-old presented himself simultaneously as a street-smart metropolitan tycoon with more experience of life than all of them put together, and a kindred spirit who shared their love of the blues and sacred mission to preserve it. Actually, he would confess in Stoned, “[The blues] didn’t mean dick to me. If it had, I might have had an opinion about it and missed the totality of what had hit me.” The clincher was the tenuous connection with Brian Epstein and the Beatles, now made to sound as if John, Paul, George, and Ringo barely made a move without his say-so. The cautious Mick could not help but be as impressed as the fame-famished Brian. “Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery,” he would recall, “and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.”

For all his hubris, Oldham was realistic. As a small-fry freelance PR, without even an office, he knew he was in no position to launch into management on his own. Bearing in mind the main plank of his sales pitch to the Stones, his first move was to approach Brian Epstein and offer Epstein a half share in them in return for office space and facilities. But Epstein, feeling he already had more than enough artists, declined the opportunity that would have put the two biggest bands of all time in his pocket. Trawling the lower reaches of West End theatrical agents, Oldham next hit on Eric Easton, a former professional organist whose middle-of-the-road musical clients included guitarist Bert Weedon and the pub pianist Mrs. Mills, and who also hired out electronic organs to theaters, cinemas, and holiday camps.