Jagger

Jagger

Chapter 1

“I Dig to Sing”

Phil Spector, the deeply troubled but frequently sage- like producer and music industry pioneer, once said, “I believe that the English kids have soul . . . they say soul comes through suffering. Slavery for the blacks. And getting your ass bombed off is another way of getting some soul legitimately.” If that’s true, then Dartford, the area where both Mick and Keith came of age in the late ’50s, bred the most soulful English kids going. About twenty minutes from London proper by rail, the suburb had been a constant target for Nazi bombs during World War II. By the time Michael Philip Jagger was born on July 26, 1943, the brutal raids were slowly becoming less frequent, the direction of the war effort moving in the Allied forces’ favor. Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party were ousted from power the day before Mick came into the world. If you’re looking for a good, early, Mick vs. Keith metaphor, the childhood home of Mick (then “Mike”) managed to escape destruction, whereas the home of Bert and Doris Richards was nearly obliterated in the summer of ’44, when Keith, an only child, was not quite two. From there, housing in Dartford was often makeshift. Many residents, like the Richards family, moved into hastily erected replacement homes among the broken bricks and twisted metal of the bomb sites. “Everyone was displaced,” Keith said of his preteens. “They were still building it and already there were gangs everywhere.” The sense of impermanence toughened Keith up and remains the source of his hard- edge image. Mick by contrast was raised in what Keith dismissed (perhaps a bit enviously) as “Posh Town,” but the stalwart nature of the place informed both their personalities.

Mick and Keith were both middle-class kids with hardworking parents, but within the English middle class, as with the Americans, there were sublevels. If you were “posh,” like Mick, it
most likely meant that you were slightly upper-middle class with a house that was “semidetached” as opposed to virtually connected to your neighbors. You had the suggestion of a yard and a strand of individuality but were still looked down upon as provincial by Londoners proper (a prejudice that some insist Mick has overcompensated for). Dartford was divided by a railway. Keith literally lived on the other side of the tracks, a section on the border of a deep, wooded area marked by gothic factories, hospitals, and other industrial edifice. Mick lived on the slightly prettier side, but both were born at the right time in the wrong place. The advent of rock and roll would soon redirect them.

From JAGGER by Marc Spitz. Published by arrangement with Gotham, a member of Penguin Group (USA), Inc. Copyright © 2011 by Marc Spitz