Mick Jagger by Philip Norman Read Free Book Online

biggest star, Tony Donegan, formerly Barber’s banjo player, had changed his first name to Lonnie in honor of bluesman Lonnie Johnson.
    British-made skiffle was to have an influence far beyond its barely two-year commercial life span. In its original American form, its poor white performers often could not afford conventional instruments, so would use kitchen utensils like washboards, spoons, and dustbin lids, augmented by kazoos, combs-and-paper, and the occasional guitar. The success of Lonnie Donegan’s “skiffle group” inspired youthful facsimiles to spring up throughout the UK, rattling and plunking on homespun instruments (which actually never featured in Donegan’s lineup). The amateur music-making tradition, in long decline since its Victorian heyday, was superabundantly reborn. Buttoned-up British boys, never previously considered in the least musical, now boldly faced audiences of their families and friends to sing and play with abandon. Overnight, the guitar changed from an obscure back-row rhythm instrument into an object of young-manly worship and desire surpassing even the soccer ball. Such were the queues outside musical-instrument shops that, evoking not-so-distant wartime austerities, the Daily Mirror reported a national guitar shortage.
    Here Mike Jagger was ahead of the game. He already owned a guitar, a round-hole acoustic model bought for him by his parents on a family trip to Spain. The holiday snaps included one of him in a floppy straw hat, holding up the guitar neck flamenco-style and miming cod-Spanish words. It would have been his passport into any of the skiffle groups then germinating at Dartford Grammar and in the Wilmington neighborhood. But mastering even the few simple chord shapes that covered most skiffle numbers was too much like hard work, nor could he be so uncool as to thump a single-string tea-chest “bass” or scrabble at a washboard. Instead, with the organizational flair already given to programming basketball fixtures, he started a school record club. The meetings took place in a classroom during lunch hour and, he later recalled, had the atmosphere of an extra lesson. “We’d sit there … with a master behind the desk, frowning while we played Lonnie Donegan.”
    As bland white vocalists grew famous with cleaned-up R&B songs, the original black performers mostly stayed in the obscurity to which they were long accustomed. One notable exception was Richard Penniman, aka Little Richard, a former dishwasher from Macon, Georgia, whose repertoire of window-shattering screams, whoops, and falsetto trills affronted grown-up ears worse than a dozen Presleys. While obediently parroting rock ’n’ roll’s teenage gaucheries, Richard projected what none had yet learned to call high camp with his gold suits, flashy jewelry, and exploding licorice-whip hair. Indeed, his emblematic song, “Tutti Frutti,” ostensibly an anthem to ice cream, had started out as a graphic commentary on gay sex (its cry of “Awopbopaloobopalopbamboom!” representing long-delayed ejaculation). He was the first rock ’n’ roller who made Mike Jagger forget all middle-class, grammar school sophistication and detachment, and surrender to the sheer mindless joy of the music.
    The numerous media Cassandras who predicted rock ’n’ roll would be over in weeks rather than months found speedy corroboration in Little Richard. Touring Australia in 1958, he saw Russia’s Sputnik space satellite hurtle through the sky, interpreted it as a summons from the Almighty, threw a costly diamond ring into Sydney Harbor, and announced he was giving up music to enter the ministry. When the story reached the British press, Mike asked his father for six shillings and eight pence (about thirty-eight pence) to buy “Good Golly Miss Molly” because Richard was “retiring” and this must be his farewell single. But Joe refused to stump up, adding, “I’m glad he’s retiring,” as if it would be a formal ceremony