JAGGER AT 70
IN SEVEN DECADES, STONES STAR HAS TRANSFORMED AN INDUSTRY WHILE MAINTAINING HIS PRIVACY
Onstage, even at 70, he still moves like Jagger. But the rock legend who monetized the music industry remains primly private
Sir Mick Jagger, the lead singer and chief executive of the world’s original rock ’n’ roll corporation, takes a famously close interest in his band’s finances. The Rolling Stones are not just big earners, but mentors to an industry, and their example has changed the whole business model of popular music.
Yet there’s one monster payday Jagger won’t rise to. The approach of his 70th birthday on Friday has brought a fresh attempt to persuade him to write his autobiography. Such a memoir could be billed as the ultimate rock chronicle, but Jagger says he isn’t interested. Or, to be precise, he fears his public wouldn’t be interested.
Thirty years ago, he accepted a $2.5-million advance for his story, only to return it when the draft manuscript was deemed too dull for publication. It apparently came as a major shock to the otherwise-worldly rocker that the readers might expect a bit of juice and indiscretion, and the experience seems to have put him off for good.
“I’ve been asked again, but I still won’t,” he confirmed this month. “I found it depressing and boring.”
It may seem bizarre that a man who has lived such a life has nothing interesting to say about it, although his caginess fits securely into the pattern of self-protection that has kept Jagger afloat throughout his professional life. Any public pronouncements he makes are reliably inoffensive, and as Philip Norman — his most recent biographer — notes it is almost impossible to find an interview in which Mick has disclosed anything of real interest about himself.
That Jagger is highly intelligent, industrious, shrewd and mindful of his legacy only adds to the puzzle. The closest we have to a working picture of him is in his bandmate Keith Richards’ delectably malicious 2010 memoir, Life, from which Jagger emerges as a control-obsessed pantomime queen who has been “unbearable” since the 1980s.
Not so unbearable that the band couldn’t headline Glastonbury last month, with a performance that illustrated how much the Stones, and Jagger in particular, have done for rock. The business they entered in the early 1960s was ramshackle and crooked, and came with the assumption that no one would last for long.
“When we started out,” Jagger told the business magazine Fortune, “there wasn’t any money in rock ’n’ roll.
“Obviously there was someone who made money, but it wasn’t the act.
Even if you were very successful, you basically got paid nothing.”
Today, a Stones tour is as much a corporate as a musical spectacular. The travelling caravan will include tax consultants, accountants, lawyers, marketeers and merchandisers. The Rolling Stones “brand” is effectively several different companies, variously incorporated in tax-friendly domiciles.
The net result of all this is what Fortune calls “an astounding money-making machine,” but it is more than that: Jagger’s insistence on being properly paid has changed the entire commercial basis of rock.
He might be happy to tell us all about this, but it isn’t the book any publisher wants him to write. The big story is the women, the drugs, the hits, the highs, the lows and the horrors. Given that Jagger’s life over the past 50 years has run parallel to that of his native country’s, it seems reasonable to seek his version of all this.
In February 1967, for example, when he was 23, the police staged a drug raid on a party at Redlands, Richards’s home in Sussex. Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore, the officer in charge, found Jagger and his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, on a couch beside the fire. “The woman had wrapped around her a light-coloured fur rug which, from time to time, she let fall, showing her nude body,” the officer reported. “Sitting on her left was Jagger, and I was of the opinion he was wearing makeup.”
Although the police — and the spaced-out party guests — could not have known it, the raid would be a turning point in social history. The prison sentences of three and 12 months respectively given to Jagger and Richards mobilized the liberal establishment, and prompted a famous Times editorial, “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” The Lord Chief Justice quashed the jail terms, and drug policy hasn’t been the same since.
The women in his life, and his seven children, most likely explain his reluctance to open up. Born in Dartford, Kent, the son of a phys-ed teacher and an Avon lady, he has never slipped the manacles of middle-class mannerliness, and much as he has preened and strutted like — as Faithfull put it — “a mod Lord Byron,” his natural setting is small-c conservative.
From what little he has told us about himself, it is possible to detect a sense of regret that he didn’t do something else — or, at least, something more — with his life.
“I don’t want to be a rock star forever,” he said in the 1970s, “playing Las Vegas to old ladies.”
The same worry was on his mind at Glastonbury, where he told the BBC: “Everyone wants to have done more things. It’s slightly intellectually undemanding being a rock singer, but you make the best of it.”
In habitually orderly fashion, Jagger held his birthday party 10 days before the event, and slipped away from the swish Mayfair club at a civilized hour. Earliness is precious to him, but he is leaving it very late to tell us who he really is.