Mick Jagger by Philip Norman

unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing—in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation—his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.
    At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realized his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was “too shy to ask.”
    After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang the blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical—blues, with some pop if it was good—and their empathy almost telepathic. “We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,” Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. “We’d hear a record and go ‘That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.’ ” As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement their friendship. “[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,” says Taylor, “and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.”
    Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable “Teds.” However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as “an absolute lout … but a really nice lout.” The lineup obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.
    Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could—made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Memphis, Tennessee,” even the complex intro and solo to “Johnny B. Goode,” where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit