Mick Jagger by Philip Norman Read Free Book Online Page A

complete with long-service gold watch.
    In America, a coast-to-coast network of commercial radio stations, motivated solely by what their listeners demanded, had made rock ’n’ roll ubiquitous within a few months. But for its British constituency, to begin with, the problem was finding it. The BBC, which held a monopoly on domestic radio broadcasting, played few records of any kind, let alone this unsavory one, in its huge daily output of live orchestral and dance-band music. To catch the hits now pouring across the Atlantic, Mike and his friends had to tune their families’ old-fashioned valve wireless sets to Radio Luxembourg, a tiny oasis of teen tolerance deep in continental Europe whose nighttime English language service consisted mainly of pop record shows. Serving the occupying forces braced for nuclear attack by Communist Russia, there were also AFN, the American Forces Network, and the U.S. government’s “Voice of America,” both of which sweetened their propaganda output with generous dollops of rock and jazz.
    Seeing American rock ’n’ rollers perform in person was even more problematic. Bill Haley visited Britain only once (by ocean liner) and was greeted by cheering multitudes not seen since the coronation three years earlier. Elvis Presley was expected to follow hard on his heels but, inexplicably, failed to do so. For the overwhelming majority of UK rock ’n’ roll fans, the only way to experience it was on the cinema screen. “Rock Around the Clock” had originally been a soundtrack (to a film about juvenile delinquency, naturally). No sooner was Presley launched than he, too, began making movies, further evidence to his detractors that his music alone had no staying power. While most such “exploitation” flicks were simply vehicles for the songs, a few were fresh and witty dramas in their own right, notably Presley’s King Creole and The Girl Can’t Help It, featuring Little Richard with new white heartthrobs Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. For Mike, the epiphany came in the companionable darkness of Dartford’s State Cinema, with its fuzzy-faced luminous clock and cigarette smoke drifting across the projector beam: “I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and thought, ‘Well, I can do this.’ ”
    Such American acts as did make it across the Atlantic often proved woefully unable to re-create the spellbinding sound of their records in the cavernous British variety theaters and cinemas where they appeared. The shining exception was Buddy Holly and his backing group, the Crickets, whose “That’ll Be the Day” topped the UK singles charts in the summer of 1957. As well as singing in a unique stuttery, hiccupy style, Holly played lead guitar and wrote or cowrote songs that were rock ’n’ roll at its most moodily exciting, yet constructed from the same simple chord sequences as skiffle. Bespectacled and dapper, more bank clerk than idol, he was a vital factor in raising rock ’n’ roll from its blue-collar status in Britain. Middle-class boys who could never hope or dare to be Elvis now used Holly’s songbook to transform their fading-from-fashion skiffle groups into tyro rock bands.
    His one and only British tour, in 1958, brought him to the Granada cinema in Woolwich, a few miles north of Dartford, on the evening of March 14. Mike Jagger—already skilled at aping Holly’s vocal tics for comic effect—was in the audience with a group of school friends, all attending their very first rock concert. Holly’s set with the Crickets lasted barely half an hour, and was powered by just one twenty-watt guitar amplifier, yet reproduced all his record hits with near-perfect fidelity. Disdaining musical apartheid despite hailing from segregated west Texas, he freely acknowledged his indebtedness to black artists like Little Richard and Bo Diddley. He was also an extrovert showman, able to keep the beat as well as play complex solos on his solid-body Fender Stratocaster while flinging himself