Jagger and lennon still fascinate
New books examine two of rock's greatest figures
For several weeks now, one of the most popular songs in North America has been Maroon 5's Moves Like Jagger. The song itself is a trifle, unlikely to be remembered beyond its chart run, but its title conceit indicates that the Rolling Stones' lead singer endures as shorthand for a certain kind of cool.
Ask yourself this question, though: What's the most recent Rolling Stones song you can name? The Stones have so long been more a brand than a band that the only drama coming out of their camp has been provided by the tussle between Jagger and Keith Richards to represent their legacy. Richards, aided by his justly acclaimed autobiography Life, has been winning that fight decisively; now, in the absence of a riposte from Jagger himself, comes Marc Spitz's pro-Mick argument, Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue.
Appearances notwithstanding, the book is not so much a biography as a series of essays on pivotal Stones episodes of the past 50 years, all in aid of the thesis that the present perception of Jagger as a singing plutocrat is unwarranted. The trouble is that the case weakens as it proceeds. Spitz's best stretch of writing by some distance comes in his account of the 1964 TAMI Show, a filmed concert where the green young Stones were forced to follow a titanic performance by James Brown. Had they failed at such a crucial early juncture, there's a good chance that their career as we know it wouldn't have happened, but their singer's galvanic stage presence carried the day, and Spitz captures the moment well. He's much less convincing on Jagger's brief "radical" phase, when the singer took part in a 1968 ant-war demonstration in London's Grosvenor Square. With hindsight, there's no reason to think he did it for any reason other than a grab at street cred - he was back in the comfort of his Chelsea townhouse before the demonstration had even ended - and Spitz's case to the contrary rings hollow.
And so it goes, with ever-diminishing returns. Does anyone care, at this late date, about the implications of the Stones' choosing Living Colour as an opening act in 1988, or whether Jagger betrayed his "rebel" status by accepting a knighthood? It all seems so quaint somehow. None of which, of course, makes Exile on Main Street any less great. I think I'll play it right now.
John Lennon's life before, during and after the Beatles has been
told and retold so many times that it has taken on the quality of an epic ballad: You know what's coming, but it grips you anyway. It's a story rich and complex enough to support the strategies of any number of biographers: Albert Goldman's iconoclasm provided a useful corrective to a lot of post-death hagiographies, but was undermined by what felt like a hateful undertow; Philip Norman did protean research, but evinced a curious dispassion regarding the subject's music.
In Lennon: The Man, The Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life, author Tim Riley, whose Tell Me Why was the definitive song-by-song Beatles study until superseded by Ian Macdonald's Revolution in the Head, lands midway between those two poles. Clearly a fan, he's still at pains to show the sometimes unpleasant reality.
Lennon, as Riley shows, was always prone to swings between sensitive artist and plain bully, but once the Beatles' unprecedented fame placed him in a world where conventional standards of conduct were suspended, his behaviour was often appalling. There's no pretty spin to put on how he treated first wife, Cynthia, and neglected first son, Julian, nor for his habit of publicly humiliating his insecure, besotted manager, Brian Epstein. That lifelong conflict, Riley argues, can be traced essentially to a single event: the day in 1946 when the 6-year-old Lennon was forced to choose between his separated parents, a trauma followed by a youth and early manhood where the emancipation of rock and roll was counterbalanced by an astounding death rate among Lennon's intimates: between the ages of 17 and 26, he lost his mother, Julia; father figure George Smith; bandmate and best friend Stuart Sutcliffe; and Epstein. Riley identifies the subsequent dominant artistic impulse as the "funnelling of leftover grief" and illuminates the mingling of joy and pain that has made Lennon's work with and without the Beatles endlessly resonant.
Riley's book is longer than it probably needs to be - at times he gets caught up in Beatles lore and goes on tangents. But the life he recounts is so fecund, and his telling so balanced, eloquent and absorbing, that few are likely to complain. Riley has just leaped to the front of a very crowded field.
Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue ?By Marc Spitz ?Gotham Books/Penguin, 310 pages, $30
Lennon: The Man, The Myth, the Music - The Definitive Life ?By Tim Riley ?Hyperion, 765 pages, $35
