MICK JAGGER : The Most Ambitious & Comprehensive Jagger Biography To Date
Philip NormanBRAND NEW, PAPERBACK
RM10.00
The Biography : Extraordinarily Detailed & Vibrantly Written In-Depth Account of the Life & Half-Century-Long Career of Mick Jagger
3 in stock
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Author Phillip Norman, whose previous bestseller, John Lennon: The Life, was praised as a âhaunting, mammoth, terrific piece of workâ (New York Times Book Review) and whose classic Shout! is widely considered to be the definitive biography of the Beatles.
Now turns his attention to the iconic front man of the Rolling Stones, âthe greatest rock ânâ roll band in the world.â A miracle of still-plentiful hair, raw sex appeal, and strutting talent. The frontman of one of the most influential and controversial groups of all time.A brilliant musician with a career spanning over four decades. A testament at once to British glamour and sensual decline. The ultimate demigod of rock. Bestselling biographer Philip Norman offers an unparalleled account of the life of a living legend, Mick Jagger.
From middle-class schoolboy to rebel without a cause to Sixties rock sensation and global idol, the myth of the inimitable frontman of the Rolling Stones is unravelled by Norman with astonishing intimacy. Jagger charts his extraordinary journey through scandal-ridden conspiracy, infamous prison spell, hordes of female admirers and a knighthood while stripping away the colossal fame, wealth and idolatry to reveal a story of talent and promise unfulfilled.
Jagger is shown in all his paradoxical glory: understated yet ostentatious; the ultimate incarnation of modern man’s favourite fantasy–“sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll”–yet blessed with taste and intelligence; a social chameleon who couldn’t blend in if he tried; always moving with the Jagger swagger, yet modest enough to be self-deprecating.
This revelatory tour de force is ample tribute to a flawed genius who reconfigured the musical landscape.
â A supreme achiever to whom his colossal achievements seem to mean nothing . . .
â A supreme extrovert who prefers discretion . . .
â A supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself . . .
Philip Norman has long towered above other rock biographers with his definitive studies of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Elton John, Buddy Holly, and John Lennonâlegends whom the world thought it knew,but who came to life as never before through the meticulousness of Norman’s research, the sweep of his cultural knowledge, and the brilliance of his writing.
Now Norman turns to a rock icon who is the most notorious yet enigmatic of them all. Throughout five decades of fronting the Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger has been seen as the ultimate arrogant, narcissistic superstar, whose sexual appetite and cavalier treatment of women rival Casanova’s and whose supposed reckless drug use touched off the most famous scandal in rock history.
Now a grandfather nearing seventy and a British knight of the realm, he still creates excitement at the mere mention of his name; still remains the model for every young rock singer who ever takes the stage. Norman shows Jagger to be a character far more complex than the cold archseducer of myth: human, vulnerable, often impressive, sometimes endearing.
Here at last is the real story of how the Stones’ brilliant first manager, Andrew Oldham, transformed a shy economics student named Mike Jagger into a modern Antichrist…
â…of Jagger’s vicious show trial and imprisonment on minuscule drug charges in 1967
â…his remarkable feat at the Stones’ Hyde Park concert in making a quarter of a million people keep quiet and listen to poetry
â …his unpublicized heroic role at the Altamont festival that brought the sunny sixties to a horrific end
â …the cavalcade of beautiful women from Chrissie Shrimpton to Jerry Hall, whom he has bedded but not always dominated
â …the enduring but ever-fraught partnership with his “Glimmer Twin,” Keith Richards.
While playful about some aspects of Sir Mick, Norman gives him long overdue credit as a songwriter, whose “Sympathy for the Devil” is one of the few truly epic pop singles, and as a harmonica player fit to rank among the great blues masters who inspired the Stones before money became their raison d’etre. Mick Jagger, above all, explores the keen and calculating intelligence that has kept the Stones on their plinth as “the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band” for half a century.
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Review From Aux AV Club :
Who is Mick Jagger, and how has he kept the world spellbound for almost 50 years?
Let Philip Norman count the ways. Jagger and the Rolling Stones have left âall competition far behind [in] the longevity sweepstakes,â and âremain role models for every band that makes it.â
Jagger himself is âinimitable,â the man who, âmore than anyone, invented the concept of the ârock starâ as opposed to mere singer within a bandâthe figure set apart from his fellow musicians⊠who could first unleash, then invade and control the myriad fantasies of enormous crowds.â (By comparison, Keith Richards âis a uniquely talented guitaristâ but âbelongs in a troubadour tradition,â whereas Jagger âfounded a new species and gave it a language that could never be improved on.â) And that isnât all.
âHis status as a sexual icon is comparable only to Rudolph âthe Sheikâ Valentino,â though his erotic fantasy essence is closer to that of âgreat ballet dancers, like Nijinsky and Nureyev, whose seeming feyness was belied by their lustful eyeballing of the ballerinas and overstuffed, straining codpieces.â If only Jagger could cook.
This is how someone writes about a prospective subject when heâs pitching, trying to persuade a prospective publisher that the resulting book will be both an epic portrait of a one-of-a-kind historical figure and a hot, trashy read.
Biographers whoâve gotten to know subjects well enough to describe them and their achievements on some kind of human scale donât generally spray the party foam around quite so thickly. Norman is a good writer, and a solid reporter who does his homework.
And he didnât pick this subject at random a year away from deadline. As he notes in the introduction, he first met Jagger, and discovered what a spectacularly unforthcoming interview subject he can be, in 1965, and their âpaths crossed again from time to timeâ when Norman was working as a pop-music journalist in the 1970s.
That phase of Normanâs career reached a pinnacle in 1981, when he published the superb Shout! The Beatles In Their Generation. Three years later, he plowed all those years of Stones-watching into another band biography, Symphony For The Devil: The Rolling Stones Story. Heâs also written biographies of Buddy Holly and Elton John, but he returned to Shout!âs basic material a few years ago for a thick biography of John Lennon.
It must have seemed a no-brainer to follow that one up with a solo book about the leader of the other biggest rock band of the â60s, especially since Norman had already done the spadework. But maybe the real reason Norman goes so far overboard in talking up Jaggerâs magnetic fascination is that, after decades on the case, heâs trying to convince himself that Sir Mick is worth the bother.
Norman duly records his lack of surprise that Jagger himself declined the chance to be interviewed for the book; itâs especially unsurprising given that Jagger contracted to produce an autobiography back in the early 1980s and wound up having to return the advance, after what he turned in was pronounced unreadably boring.
The most straightforward explanation given for Jaggerâs inability to talk about his own past in an interesting way comes from Charlie Watts, who says Jagger is so tightly focused on tomorrow that he has no interest in what he was doing yesterday. (Thereâs plenty of evidence of that in Jaggerâs career, and it may be the most important factor undermining his sincere desire for a film acting career. Again and again, heâs launched himself on some intriguing project, from a pre-Stanley Kubrick version of A Clockwork Orange to Werner Herzogâs Fitzcarraldo, only to lose interest in it along the way.)
This quality, and the impenetrable veneer that Norman sums up with the phrase âthe Tyranny of Cool,â make Jagger a terrible subject for a writer like Norman, who never seems to tire of revisiting the major events of the â60s. And whose attraction to the periodâs pop heroes finds its truest icon in John Lennon, who ultimately abandoned cool in hopes of direct emotional connection with his fans.
Norman jots down all the pertinent material about Jaggerâs role in the rise and sustained success of the Stones, but he never illuminates whatâs inside the man, and at some point, readers may suspect that he doesnât care to. Mick Jagger is almost 200 pages longer than Symphony For The Devil, but it mostly covers the same ground.
Norman recycles the material while making it Jaggerâs story by deemphasizing the other people in itâRichards, Brian Jones, Bianca Jagger, Andrew Loog Oldham (the manager he casts as Svengali to Jaggerâs Trilby)âeven when itâs clear that heâd be happier writing about any of them.
(Heâs perfectly equipped to sympathize with the plight of filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who was hired to shoot a cinĂ©ma vĂ©ritĂ© documentary about the Stonesâ 1965 tour of Ireland, and whose work met with the bandâs disapproval, because he was unable to tear himself and his camera away from Charlie Watts.)
Norman does touch on the best-known women caught in Jaggerâs web. The copious, moving attention paid to Marianne Faithfull amounts to a plug for her own book, while Jerry Hall, vibrant and funny (and the first woman capable of countering Jaggerâs whining about how he dreads going on tour again by telling him that she can afford to support both of them if he wants to retire), brightens up every page on which she appears.
This in spite of Normanâs decision to render all her dialogue in Liâl Abner-speak: At one point, he has her âholleringâ at the future First Lady of France, âWhy cainât you leave mah husband alone?â
Thereâs good, fresh reporting on the role that the intelligence agencies of two continents, including J. Edgar Hooverâs COINTELPRO, played in Jagger and Richardsâ 1967 drug busts, and Norman describes David Jove (âAcid King Davidâ), an aspiring filmmaker selected by the cops to set up the Stones, as a weird, near-tragic figure deserving of his own book, or at least a long magazine article.
Only the last hundred or so pages of Mick Jagger really delve into what Jagger and the Stones have been up to in the quarter-century since Symphony first appeared. Thereâs nothing inspiring to report about the music theyâve made, so the two basic subjects are the friction between Mick and Keith, much of it generated by Jaggerâs âbelated,â ill-advised attempt to launch a solo career, and the tabloid headlines generated by his love life.
(Norman seems to share some of the glee expressed by Jaggerâs former lovers when the 54-year-old singer hooks up with the 22-year-old Angelina Jolie, and for the first time in his life discovers how it feels to be âtreated like shit.â) Itâs probably for the best that Norman doesnât spend much time on trends in pop music that have developed since rock stars stopped looking for excuses to incorporate the sitar.
At one point, he sneers that the aging Mickâs devotion to the new and trendy led him to give serious attention to ârap or hip hop: black music as simple as formulaic as the blues, which replaced melody with a hard, unadorned beat and singing with the recitation of belligerent doggerel verse,â whose only âreal artistic creation was break dancing.â (As if to remind everyone who the true roots-rocker in the band is, he adds, âTo Keith, however, rap still only meant something heâd spent the last few years dodging.â)
Mick Jagger may come handy as a textbook for students of pop culture who donât know much about the â60s and what it took for a definitive â60s band to keep soldiering on through the â70s and beyond. The stories are here, and theyâre told well enough, but most of them mean less than they did when they were about the whole band.
(And theyâve lost some of the memorable touches that adorned them when Norman told them before, such as the passing mention of Jaggerâs middle-aged, middle-class parents at the celebrity-encrusted circus of his wedding to Bianca, patiently, awkwardly waiting for the chance to give him the present theyâd brought.)
And the central figure remains a cipher. The book could have really used some of the sympathetic imagination that Bill Wymanânot the perennially unappreciated former Stones bassist. But the critic of the same nameâbrought to the imaginary response he wrote from Jagger to Keith Richardsâ memoir, in which he had Jagger talk about what it was like to feel unappreciated for âall the tedious hours I had to spend with Jann Wennerâ to keep the Stonesâ reputation alive.
Knowing that critics and fans had come to regard him as a plastic celebrity compared to the gun-toting, drug-addicted âauthenticâ wild man Keith. It would be nice to think that Normanâwho, as he finds space to mention here, was once included in Grantaâs first âBest Of Young British Novelistsâ issue, alongside Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Julian Barnes, and William Boydâstill had the fictional imagination to do something like that.
But this book feels as if heâs had his head stuck in the â60s too long to have any fun with it.
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About the Author
Philip Norman is a novelist, biographer, journalist, and playwright. He is the author of the bestselling biography John Lennon: The Life and the history of The Beatles Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation. Norman has also published biographies of Buddy Holly, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John, as well as six works of fiction and two plays, The Man That Got Away and Words of Love. He lives in London.
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