Mick Jagger by Philip Norman Read Free Book Online Page B

across the stage on his knees, even lying flat on his back. Mike’s favorite number was the B-side of “Oh Boy!,” Holly’s second British hit fronting the Crickets: a song in blues call-and-response style called “Not Fade Away,” whose quirky stop-start tempo was beaten with drumsticks on a cardboard box. The lyrics had a humor previously unknown in rock ’n’ roll (“My love is bigger than a Cadillac / I try to show it but you drive me back …”). This, Mike realized, was not just someone to copy, but to be.
    Yet still he made no attempt to acquire the electric guitar needed to turn him into a rock singer like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran, or Britain’s first homegrown rock ’n’ roller, the chirpily unsexy Tommy Steele. And though attracted by the idea, along with countless other British boys, he did not seem exactly on fire with ambition. Dartford Grammar, it so happened, had produced a skiffle group named the Southerners who were something of a local legend. They had appeared on a nationwide TV talent show, Carroll Levis Junior Discoveries, and then been offered a recording test by the EMI label (which lost interest when they decided to wait until the school holidays before auditioning). Easily managing the transition from skiffle to rock, they were now a washboard-free, fully electrified combo renamed Danny Rogers and the Realms.
    The Realms’ drummer, Alan Dow, was a year senior to Mike, and in the science rather than arts stream, but met him on equal terms at the weekly basketball sessions run by Mike’s father. One night when Danny Rogers and the Realms played a gig at the school, Mike sidled up to Dow backstage and asked if he could sing a number with them. “I was specially nervous that night, because of appearing in front of all our schoolmates,” Dow recalls. “I said I’d rather he didn’t.”
    He had no better luck when two old classmates from Wentworth Primary, David Spinks and Mike Turner, started putting together a band intended to be more faithful to rock ’n’ roll’s black originators than its white echoes. Mike suggested himself as a possible vocalist, and auditioned at David’s home in Wentworth Drive. Much as the other two liked him, they felt he neither looked nor sounded right—and, anyway, lack of a guitar was an automatic disqualification.
    His first taste of celebrity did not have a singing or even a speaking part. Joe Jagger’s liaison duties for the Central Council of Physical Recreation included advising television companies about programs to encourage sports among children and teenagers—implicitly to counter the unhealthy effects of rock ’n’ roll. In 1957, Joe became a consultant to one of the new commercial networks, ATV, on a weekly series called Seeing Sport. Over the next couple of years, Mike appeared regularly on the program with his brother, Chris, and other handpicked young outdoor types, demonstrating skills like tent erecting or canoeing.
    A clip has survived of an item on rock climbing, filmed in grainy black-and-white at a beauty spot named High Rocks, near Tunbridge Wells. Fourteen-year-old Mike, in jeans and a striped T-shirt, reclines in a gully with some other boys while an elderly instructor soliloquizes droningly about equipment. Rather than studded mountaineering boots, which could damage these particular rock faces, the instructor recommends “ordinary gym shoes … like the kind Mike is wearing.” Mike allows one of his legs to be raised, displaying his virtuous rubber sole. For his father’s sake, he can’t show what he really thinks of this fussy, ragged-sweatered little man treating him like a dummy. But the deliberately blank stare—and the tongue, flicking out once too often to moisten the outsize lips—say it all.
    At school he continued to coast along, doing just enough to get by in class and on the games field. To his teachers and classmates alike he gave the impression he was there only under sufferance and that his thoughts