New book says Mick Jagger is cool at all costs
New biography of Mick Jagger says Rolling Stones frontman is more fakery than devilry
BY JAMIE PORTMAN, POSTMEDIA NEWS OCTOBER 12, 2012
Mick Jagger, who turns 70 next year, is the focus of a new book.
The day must surely come when Mick Jagger will take a long look in the mirror, stop admiring himself and concede that he's - well - old. But don't hold your breath.
"If you've been told you're wonderful every day since you were 19, that's not going to go away," says veteran British rock writer Philip Norman, whose massive 600-page biography of Jagger is published in Canada this week by Doubleday. "A vanity that no earthly instrument can measure - that's obviously going to be there."
In other words, narcissism can be blind - an irony that surfaces in Norman's opening chapter when he talks about the famous Jagger lips, which are "now drawn in and bloodless, the cheeks etched by crevasses so wide and deep as to resemble terrible matching scars."
Yet, astonishingly, Jagger, who turns 70 next year, and the Rolling Stones continue to flourish - retaining, the book concludes, "the same sulphurous whiff of sin and rebellion they had" in their '20s - albeit in geriatric mode.
"You would think that after a certain point in life you would not want to do this any more," Norman says with a laugh. "But that's all Mick knows, and of course the rewards are enormous, and no matter how rich you are you apparently want to be richer."
Norman is no blinkered admirer. For example, he was outraged by Jagger's 2002 knighthood, and in an angry article for the London Daily Mail attacked Sir Mick's presence on the Queen's birthday honours list as "a disgrace and a travesty."
A decade later, he is more mellow in his judgment. "I did change my view of Jagger," Norman admits, as he chats about the need for balance in dealing with a maddeningly elusive subject.
And he has no doubt about Jagger's place in pop culture: "Without Mick, the Stones would have been over by 1968," he notes in the book.
Norman could have opted for sensationalism and concentrated on the Stones's outlaw reputation and Jagger's image as the rubber-lipped, pelvis-gyrating, libidinous "anti-Christ" of rock music, but that wouldn't have been the full story.
Determined to be fair, Norman concluded early in his researches that Jagger isn't taken seriously enough musically. Setting aside Jagger's "ludicrous" singing voice, he cites his brilliance on the harmonica and blues harp and calls his 1968 Sympathy for the Devil an "epic" pop song with brilliant lyrics.
Jagger is a challenge to any biographer because - in Norman's view - his public persona is essentially fakery. Asking the real Mick to stand up is an exercise in futility. But the book still yields revealing snapshots.
Some examples: A young Jagger being kicked downstairs by a furious Chrissie Shrimpton.
A frightened Mick weeping in a prison hospital after the 1967 drug bust at Richards's country home.
Jagger persuading two women in his life to plaster themselves with strawberries and whipped cream for "a polite English garden-party version of mud wrestling."
"He was regarded as a sort of Satan ... the anti-Christ ... and it was all a pose," says Norman .
"There was no trauma or rebellion in Jagger's early life. He came from a happy middle-class home in the Kentish suburbs ."
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