‘When I was twelve years old,’ Mick said, ‘I worked on an American army base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction – because I was good at it. I had to learn their games, so I learned football and baseball, all the American games. There was a black cat there named José, a cook, who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music. In fact that was my first encounter with American thought. They buried a flag, a piece of cloth, with full military honors. I thought it was ridiculous, and said so. They said, “How would you feel if we said something about the Queen?” I said, “I wouldn’t mind, you wouldn’t be talking about me. She might mind, but I wouldn’t.”’
We talked in many places – movie sets, motel rooms, airplanes, at Mick’s house on Cheyne Walk, with Marsha Hunt, the Afro-American actress, pregnant with Mick’s first child, wearing her bosom Scotch-taped into a hippie-Indian dress.
One night at Keith’s London house, a few doors up from Mick’s, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were talking, and Anita mentioned that Mrs Jagger often speaks of how Mick used to enjoy camping and the outdoor life. In a high-pitched, proper voice, imitating Mrs Jagger, I said, ‘As a child, Mick was very butch.’
‘Yeah, I was butch,’ Mick said. ‘But she was always butcher.’
‘Technical school was completely the wrong thing for me,’ Keith said. ‘Working with the hands, metalwork. I can’t even measure an inch properly, so they’re forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.’
‘You tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?’
‘Not so much that, because they do too many things to you for doing that. It makes life difficult for you. I was trying to make it easier for me.
‘At this time rock and roll had just hit the scene. That also played a very heavy part in my decision. The first record that really turned me on out of the rock and roll thing was “Heartbreak Hotel.”’
‘Did you see Blackboard Jungle over here?’
‘Yeah, that was the first ripping-the-seats-up, Teddy Boys type of scene here. I was very young at that time. I did the first school year, I did the second year, I did the third year, and at the end of the third year I’d fucked up so much that they made me do the third-year course again, which was really to humiliate me. It meant you had to stay down with the younger kids and couldn’t take the G.C.E. examinations, which in this country are very important in getting a job. I didn’t take the fucking things at all. I did the third year again, and I did the fourth year, and at the end of the fourth year – remember, everybody else was at the end of the fifth year – I made things so bad – culminating in a spate of truancy which they wouldn’t take from me – they kicked me out.
‘The particular thing was splitting constantly very early in the day, and just generally turning out contrary to their demands, and millions of things, like I used to wear two pairs of pants to school, a very tight pair and a very baggy pair which I would put on as soon as I got near the school, because they would just send you home if you had tight pants on. That’s another thing about English schools, you had to wear the school uniform . . . the cap, very strange contraption, like a skullcap with a peak on it, school badge on the front. And a dark blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, a tie, and gray flannel trousers. I refused to go to and from school with those fucking clothes on.
‘But in kicking me out, they as a final show of benevolence fixed up this place for me in art school. Actually that was the best thing they could have done for me, because the art schools in England are very freaky. Half the staff anyway are in advertising agencies, and to keep up the art bit and make a bit of extra bread they teach school like one day a week. Freaks, drunks, potheads. Also there’s a lot of kids. I was fifteen and there are kids there nineteen, in their last year. A lot of music goes on at art schools. That’s where I got hung up on guitar, because there were a lot of guitar players around then, playing anything from Big Bill Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and Jesse Fuller stuff. In art school I met Dick Taylor, a guitar player. He was the first cat I played with. We were playing a bit of blues, Chuck Berry stuff on acoustic guitars, and I think I’d just about now got an amplifier like a little beat-up radio. There was another cat at art school called Michael Ross. He decided to form a country and western band – this is real amateur – Sanford Clark songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ The first time I got onstage and played was with this C&W band. One gig I remember was a sports dance at Eltham, which is near Sidcup, where the art school I went to was.
‘I left technical school when I was fifteen. I did three years of art school. I was just starting the last year when Mick and I happened to meet up on the train at Dartford Station. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen you go through a lot of changes. So I didn’t know what he was like. It was like seeing an old friend, but it was also like meeting a new person. He’d left grammar school and he was going to the London School of Economics, very heavily into a university student number. He had some records with him, and I said Wotcha got? Turned out to be Chuck Berry, Rocking at the Hop.
‘He was into singin’ in the bath sort of stuff, he had been singin’ with a rock group a few years previous, couple of years. Buddy Holly stuff and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ Eddie Cochran stuff, at youth clubs and things in Dartford, but he hadn’t done that for a while when I met him. I told him I was messin’ around with Dick Taylor. It turned out that Mick knew Dick Taylor because they’d been to grammar school together, so, fine, why don’t we all get together? I think one night we all went round to Dick’s place and had a rehearsal, just a jam. That was the first time we got into playing. Just back-room stuff, just for ourselves. So we started gettin’ it together in front rooms and back rooms, at Dick Taylor’s home particularly. We started doing things like Billy Boy Arnold stuff, ‘Ride an Eldorado Cadillac,’ Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, didn’t attempt any Muddy Waters yet, or Bo Diddley, I don’t think, in that period. Mick laid a lot of sounds on me that I hadn’t heard. He’d imported records from Ernie’s Record Mart.
‘At this time the big music among the kids was traditional jazz, some of it very funky, some of it very wet, most of it very, very wet. Rock and roll had already drifted into pop like it has already done again here because the mass media have to cater to everybody. They don’t have it broken down into segments so that kids can listen to one station. It’s all put together, so eventually it boils down to what the average person wants to hear, which is average rubbish. Anyway, that was the scene then, no good music coming out of the radio, no good music coming out of the so-called rock and roll stars. No good nothing.
‘Just about the time Mick and I are getting the scene together with Dick Taylor, trying to find out what it’s all about, who’s playing what and how they’re playing it, Alexis Korner starts a band at a club in the west of London, in Ealing, with a harmonica player called Cyril Davies, a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. Cyril had been to Chicago and sat in with Muddy at Smitty’s Corner and was therefore a very big deal. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish. Alexis and Cyril got this band together and who happens to be on drums, none other than Charlie Watts. We went down about the second week it opened. It was the only club in England where they were playing anything funky, as far as anybody knew. The first person we see sitting in – Alexis gets up and says, ‘And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here tonight’ – and suddenly there’s fucking Elmore James up there, ‘Dust My Broom,’ beautifully played, and it’s Brian.’
FIVE
If the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.
WILLIAM BLAKE: Proverbs of Hell
It was after eleven in the morning when I clawed my way