Mick Jagger Read Online Free PDF

waif, though he came from a good enough home. His name was Keith Richards.
    For British eight-year-olds in this era, the chief fantasy figures were American cowboy movie heroes like Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy, whose western raiment was flashingly gorgeous, and who would periodically sheathe their pearl-handled six-shooters and warble ballads to their own guitar accompaniment. In the Wentworth playground one day, Keith confided to Mike Jagger that when he grew up, he wanted to be like Roy Rogers, the self-styled “King of the Cowboys,” and play a guitar.
    Mike was indifferent to the King of the Cowboys—he was already good at being indifferent—but the idea of the guitar, and of this little imp with sticky-out ears strumming one, did pique his interest. However, their acquaintanceship did not ripen: it would be more than a decade before they explored the subject further.
    At the Jaggers’, like every other British household, music was constantly in the air, pumped out of bulky valve-operated radio sets by the BBC’s Light Programme in every form from dance bands to operetta. Mike enjoyed mimicking American crooners he heard—like Johnnie Ray blubbing through “Just Walkin’ in the Rain” and “The Little White Cloud That Cried”—but did not attract any special notice in school singing lessons or in the church choir to which he and his brother, Chris, both belonged. Chris, at that stage, seemed more of a natural performer, having won a prize at Maypole Infants School for singing “The Deadwood Stage” from the film Calamity Jane. The musical entertainments that appealed most to Mike were the professional Christmas pantomimes staged at larger theaters in the area—corny shows based on fairy tales like Mother Goose or “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but with an intriguing whiff of sex and gender blurring, the rouged and wisecracking “dame” traditionally played by a man, the “principal boy” by a leggy young woman.
    In 1954, the family moved from 39 Denver Road and out of Dartford entirely, to the nearby village of Wilmington. Their house now had a name, “Newlands,” and stood in a secluded thoroughfare called The Close, a term usually applied to cathedral precincts. There was a spacious garden where Joe could give his two sons regular PT sessions and practice the diverse sports in which he was coaching them. The neighbors grew accustomed to seeing the grass littered with balls, cricket stumps, and lifting weights, and Mike and Chris swinging like titchy Tarzans from ropes their father had tied to the trees
    For the Jaggers, as for most British families, it was a decade of steadily increasing prosperity, when luxuries barely imaginable before the war became commonplace in almost every home. They acquired a television set, whose minuscule screen showed a bluish rather than black-and-white picture, allowing Mike and Chris to watch Children’s Hour puppets like Muffin the Mule, Mr. Turnip, and Sooty, and serials like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Secret Garden and E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children. They took summer holidays in sunny Spain and the South of France rather than Kent’s own numerous, cold-comfort resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. But the boys were never spoiled. Joe in his quiet way was a strict disciplinarian and Eva was equally forceful, particularly over cleanliness and tidiness. From their youngest years, Mike and Chris were expected to do their share of household chores, set out in a school-like timetable.
    Mike pulled his weight without complaint. “[He] wasn’t a rebellious child at all,” Joe would later remember. “He was a very pleasant boy at home in the family, and he helped to look after his younger brother.” Indeed, the only shadow on his horizon was that Chris seemed to be his mother’s favorite and he himself never received quite the same level of affection and attention from her. It made him slow to give affection in his turn—a lifelong trait—and also