Head Stone

Late on the night of March 18, 1965, a large, unwashed automobile pulled up outside the Francis Service Station, Romford Road, London, and a number of youths got out. Naturally suspicious (London being the iniquitous place it is), an attendant approached them; there was a short, heated exchange. And suddenly, without any warning, three of the men threw aside their coats and urinated against the wall. It was the worst thing that had happened to a garage since the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. If the newspapers were to be believed, that is. Drawing on that strength of moral outrage rarely encountered outside circulation departments, they fell on this monumental news item and shook it out into column lengths that dwarfed such trivia of the day as Leonov's first space walk and the first landings of the Marines in South Vietnam. For were these monstrous criminals not the Rolling Stones, bastard offspring of Dr. Savannah and the Wolf Maiden, threats to society beside whom Great Train Robbers, Boston Stranglers and the Waffen SS paled into insignificance? Well, yes, is the short answer. And, of course, no. They were the Stones, all right, who have bladders pretty much like everyone else, and whose jail record, at the time of going to press, happens to be nil. What the journalists neglected to point out, in their excess of crusading zeal, was that on any given night in England, after the pubs have closed, something like half the male population of the country pees against the nearest shady wall. Without being crucified for it. Stones, however, do not get off as lightly as people; and four months later, when Mick Jagger, Bill Woman and the late Brian Jones came up before the West Ham magistrates, they were found guilty of using insulting behavior and fined five pounds apiece. Which was nowhere near enough for the decent people with whom I am fortunate to share an island, the general feeling at that time being that a conspiracy to assault a British garage should have been punishable by hanging. One or two of the more enlightened barroom lawyers would have compromised with their consciences and accepted castration as the suitable sentence, but they were few and far between. Because the Rolling Stones, and Mick Jagger in particular, had by that time become the moral scapegoats for the English middle class; and, make no mistake, when it comes to moral standards, 99 percent of England is middle class, irrespective of what they shake out of their pay packets on a Friday night. The sole criterion is respectability; and respectability is compounded of conformity, ears visible beneath the hairline, small-knotted ties, sexual restraint (or, at least, discretion, which is how we spell hypocrisy) and clean fingernails. It didn't take Mick Jagger long to become the focus of bourgeois hatred and--what else?--guilt. Like all good sociohistorical phenomena, and I'm sure Richard Nixon would be the first to bear me out, he was the man for whom the times had been waiting. For 20 years, following the end of World War Two, England had been suffering, still is, a terrible religious agony: Believing with our whole souls in capitalism and commercial success, we have unfortunately found ourselves growing poorer and poorer. People kept coming and taking away our possessions; right now, we don't have much besides Hong Kong, and, as far as status goes, that's a little like having an Edsel in Palm Springs. Like all truly devout believers, Englishmen looked around for someone to blame for the fact that the island race was going to the dogs. Where have we gone wrong? they cried; and the figure who most totally summed up the decay of the old values, who most clearly represented threat, deviation, social destructiveness and a lack of those qualities that had made this country great (or, at any rate, rich) was M. Jagger. To the disgusting sensual rhythms of this tieless Pied Piper, the youth of England would frug themselves to perdition. They would tune in, they would turn on and (Are you listening, Queen Victoria? Do you hear me, George V?) they would drop out. Taking England with them.

The odd thing is that Jagger didn't actually do anything to warrant this terror nor substantiate these apocalyptic visions. True, he wore his hair long and his jeans tight, and, whether he washed regularly or not, he did not rush forward with evidence to refute hysterical middle-aged claims that soap passed through his hands less frequently than girls. But his offstage, off-disc behavior, publicly, at any rate, in no way differentiated him from any other intelligent 20-year-old somewhat irritated by the prejudices, conformities and general lackluster of his carping seniors. Unlike many other entertainers (usually more middle aged than Jagger), he did not figure in brawls, divorces, paternity suits; no one found him drunk or high in public places.

What they found was his music and his words. Both were sexually intense and suggestive: It was revealed that he couldn't get no satisfaction, that his little red rooster was too lazy to crow today, that he was engaging in something wicked under the boardwalk. And all the little prepubescent girls, disqualified by time from anything more orgiastic, wet their pants in ecstasy. Maybe the only people genuinely entitled to lay a complaint against the Rolling Stones are laundrymen. This, of course, didn't stop the whole world from taking a crack at the title, particularly parents, who, through their own sad inadequacies or just the luck of the draw, rushed to attribute their children's shortcomings to the terrible influence of the Stones. What they avoided recognizing, since the trend was as much the responsibility of their generation as anyone's, was that the whole of England was suddenly entering into what has since been tagged the permissive age. And it wasn't the Stones who reformed the laws concerning onstage nudity, or cinema censorship, or homosexuality, or striptease; nor did they own chains of pornographic bookstands, blue-movie houses, nor take money from the 30,000 girls who made London the prostitute's Mecca. I don't think they had a hand in developing the contraceptive pill, come to that.

But it was more complicated than frustrated sex on the part of Jagger's detractors. What grabbed the infibulators more than anything was the apparent dedication of Jagger to pleasure. All pleasure. The English are not a naturally hedonistic race; if anything's going to be stiff, they'd prefer it to be the upper lip. They do not take easily to joy, they resent what looks like easy money and easy success, they feel the weight of the respectable shackles on their ankles and hate the scoundrels who've managed to slip the chain. Restricted, they project their fantasies at the same time as they condemn those onto whom the fantasies have been projected. And because of this, they made Mick Jagger into the image they would wish to have themselves, were guilt not the inconvenient thing it is. Because Jagger seemed to have won himself some sort of freedom, they labeled it anarchy.

And since that overabused word has now been thrown into the ring, it's not a bad time to examine it and whatever application it has to Mick Jagger. For there are those in England who, quite seriously, feel that the harvest of protest that currently has a large section of the world's youth reaching for their scythes was, in fact, sown by Mick Jagger and what they loosely term "his kind." The argument, if you can call it that, being that today's student generation was just entering teenhood when the first Stones records were placed on the turntables; and that the past seven years have seen them pacing Mick Jagger into depravity, irresponsibility, anarchy and, finally, violence. In light of these supposed satanic powers, playboy and I felt it was time to talk to Jagger about the role in which so much of the world is so eager to cast him.

Jagger isn't easy to get hold of. But there's no reason he should be; the Stones have never made any secret of the fact that their fans take from them what they can get and, if it's not enough, well, that's too bad. They won't serve themselves up on a plate to be devoured; they don't feel that because the public has bought their discs, then it has acquired the lease on their souls. Part of the calumny that's been heaped on Jagger's head has been the direct result of the shrift he's given the press, which has been characteristically short. He won't fawn on journalists and his disrespect for them is no part of image building, no cunning underground plan to make them hate him because hate is good copy and good copy sells records. He genuinely doesn't see what right they've got to find out whom he slept with last night, whether either of them enjoyed it or what they smoked after it was all over.

When I finally got to spend some time with him, the first shock was realizing how old he looked. One had thought of him as an enfant terrible in every sense of the cliché, a teenager with what Baudelaire called la beauté du disable. Not so: Jagger looks more than his 25 years, with a thinness in his pale face that suggests strain, not boyish leanness. He reminded me very much of portraits of Charles II, which always seem to have been dashed off at a moment when the sitter was sighing. The dark hair breaks on his shoulders (no dandruff, England!), framing deep-socketed eyes that are resigned, perhaps, rather than sad; the mouth, probably the most notorious moue since Bardot's first fellatial promise hit the neighborhood screens, is surprisingly less full, less aggressively sensual than the lenses would have us believe; the voice is soft, a London sound, not Cockney, not suburban, but shaded by both. He's very thin, of middle height, hipless; his hands are made larger and flatter by skin-fitting clothes and move restlessly, very white. We met for the first time in his London office, on the commercial rim of Mayfair, off Bond Street. It's a comfortable, haphazard, unfunctional suite, full of whitewood and deal furniture, draped in bright, inexpensive multicolors, piled with records and song sheets, awash with bits of a stereo kit, tapes, film cans, among which the minied legs of his secretaries and assistants twinkle delicately. The whole place is like nothing so much as the flat of a fairly well-heeled undergraduate. He had recently finished his first feature film, Performance, in which he seemed to have lost all interest immediately.

"I suppose I enjoyed it," he said. "These days, you have to do a film before you can actually Get Into Films, with capital letters. What it is doesn't matter that much. Apart from anything else, film people don't think you can actually get up at seven in the morning and start work. It's as simple as that. They reckon that being a rock-'n'-roll singer for seven years isn't hard work. But it's a bloody sight harder than doing a film." He didn't laugh--I didn't get the impression that he ever laughs much--but he half smiled. "Nobody thinks I work. They reckon I just get up and dance about a bit and collect the bread."

He drops the word distastefully. Only those for whom the bakery never shuts can afford such disrespect; Jagger has been accumulating the stuff since 1962. No one, naturally, will say what Jagger is worth, no one will even release details of the current disc tally (though a Decca spy, from the comparative security of his home number, muttered, "Thirty million," sotto voce and rang off quickly), but it's clear that Mick Jagger's old age is unlikely to be spent bumming bus fare. As far back as 1964, the boy whose name had become a synonym for profligacy and anarchy was already an astute (continued on page 249)Head Stone(continued from page 164) husbandman of anything negotiable. Wilfred De'Ath, a BBC producer who worked with Jagger around that time, recalls their first studio meeting. "He came up to me and we shook hands, and the first thing he said was, 'I'm the only Stone who hasn't got an overdraft, what do you think of that?'" When I retold this bizarre gobbet to the 1969 Jagger, he claimed that putting on the BBC was one of his few sporting activities, but it was a shrugged defence at best and followed closely by an acknowledgement that money wasn't something he never thought about. He helps manage the Stones' finances now and clearly enjoys doing so; according to Jo Bergman, a pretty New Yorker who has for some time been Jagger's assistant and shield of the faith, Mick could reincarnate as Onassis without much soul retreading.

In Performance, he was cast as a pop singer with a full repertoire of hang-ups, who dropped out to meditate and took on a couple of fleshy teeny-boppers to help with the thinking. I wondered whether he was bothered that audiences might just see this as typecasting, something that fitted in with all the old preconceptions about him.

"So what?" He shrugged, a gesture summing up seven years of getting along with other people's pre-and misconceptions." I mean, I'm not a pop singer who's retired to a house in Notting Hill because he can't make it, am I? And I'm not living with two women; I mean, I'm not into that at all. If people who see the movie think that's the way I am, well, that's all right, too. I'm only an actor, aren't I? It's my job to get them to think, that's what I'm like."

He looked at me hard, and it was a curiously practiced look, a look perfectly aware that the mouth beneath it had just served up a half volley of a begged question. This was not the first interview he had ever given. Jagger was waiting for me to ask him what he was really like. It would have been about the 600th time the question had been put.

"Student revolt," I said.

"Oh, yes?" said Jagger.

"It's been suggested that you're involved with the whole student bit in this country--"

"I'll bet it has."

"With the feeling of rebellion, with the overthrow of the Establishment, all that. How far would you say it's true?"

"About that much. "The pale, soft finger and thumb a centimeter apart.

"Do you care about it at all?"

"Of course, I care about it. I was at LSE, after all, wasn't I?" The London School of Economics being the current spearhead of student unrest in England.

"When I was there," said Jagger, "nothing was happening. That's--what?--six, seven years ago. But it's always been a traditionally activist school, and I understand what they're doing, and it's fine by me. Provided they believe in it, naturally. The thing is, most of it is really copying methods that have succeeded in other places, and you don't get the feeling it's altogether their bit, but I'm right there with them, if they want to take over more of the running of the school and the administration. But when I was there, I mean, well, I didn't go there in order to take it over, because, quite honestly, I can't think of anything more boring."

The lips lingered over the word, scornfully. Later, I came to realize that it was the most damning word in Mick Jagger's considerable vocabulary. Boredom was anathema; it was always hanging about among the hours, waiting to crawl out and choke you. You had to be on guard.

"God knows," he said, "I'd never be interested in running LSE, in getting involved that way; half these kids that shout out for anarchy and all the rest of it, well, they're all little organization men, really, aren't they? All they want to do is form committees and chuck one another off them. I just went there to read a lot of books, and when I'd read enough, I left."

The lyrics of Jagger's Street Fighting Man sat up in my head: No doubt, a fair number of the paranoiacs who've heard the title and been unable, or unconcerned, to decipher the words think of it as a Marseillaise for the dropouts poised to smash their double-glazed windows and pounce on their double-glazed wives. In fact, it's no such thing: the very opposite, a cynical little song that runs:

Everywhere I hear the soundof marching, chargingfeet, Oh, Boy.'Cause summer's here andthe time is right forfighting in the street, Oh, Boy.

But what can a poor boy doexcept to sing for aRock 'N' Roll Band'Cause in sleepy London Town,there's just no place forStreet Fighting Man!

I can't answer for Chairman Mao, of course, but as far as I'm concerned, that wouldn't persuade me to march toward a mannerly Hyde Park debate, let alone the sound of the guns. Seeing that Jagger didn't enroll at LSE with a view to fortifying it against Establishment oppression, I asked him why he didn't stay the course and collect a degree. I should have been able to anticipate the answer.

"I got bored. It's my own fault, really; I mean, I did spend a couple of years there, and I only had one more to go, but I just got bored with the whole scene. I started with the Stones while I was there, and that was more interesting. I kept up doing both for about nine months; but after that, I couldn't, so I left. I mean, I never had time to go to lectures, and you had to there; it's not like Oxford--you can't just sit by the river and glance at an odd book. I'd have had to work twelve fucking hours a day to get anywhere."

"What did you have in mind when you first went? What did you want to do?"

"I really had no idea. I didn't know anyone who did, either. Any bourgeois child learns to treat university as just the place you go when you've finished school. Bonk! Just like that."

It was peculiar, hearing Mick Jagger describe himself as a bourgeois child; one tried to imagine the notorious face scaled down, plumped out, underneath a school cap; one tried to see the knees shining between regulation sock and short pants, the small, short-haired, grayflanneled figure standing in a line outside some carbolic-smelling classroom, his future contained within him, waiting. It was impossible--like imagining Hitler, or Churchill, or Cary Grant, four feet tall and holding up a tiny arm, begging permission to go to the lavatory.

"My father was a lecturer in physical education; my mother's just, well, working class, I suppose, a housewife, with the ordinary, traditional attitudes. People reckon I must've beaten up my parents regularly, or burned the house down twice a week, or something, but we got on all right. There was the conventional sort of rebellion, naturally, just like anyone else's; generation gap, all that crap, long hair, funny clothes. But nothing serious. I only left home because I was going to university. That's something everyone forgets--that I was like any other kid, which is why all the rest identified with me. I was just the same as they were, except that I'd jumped the tracks a bit more, that's all. All the stuff about my leading them or perverting them, or whatever, it's a load of cock. We just sort of went along together, didn't we?"

The question struck me as genuinely put, not a piece of responsibility shirking; but it still seemed important to find out how far the press had been responsible for promoting the idea of Stone rebelliousness and how far they'd pushed it themselves, for its sales value. The idea irritated Jagger considerably.

"Look, I just don't think about it, I honestly don't. I don't think about image or rebellion or their profit potential; it's only the newspapers that think that way. They're the ones who create the whole thing, just to make good copy. What have I ever done? Sung a few songs, that's all. You'd think I was bloody Satan. Christ knows why the papers still push it; I mean, when you've had that bag for five years and more, you'd think everyone'd be sick of it."

I reminded him of the infamous garage incident, and the drugs row after Jagger had been discovered to have four amphetamine tablets in his possession. Why did people need him as a target for outrage?

"Don't ask me why people like to take it out on other people so much. They're really hung up on revenge, you know that? You get hung-up people of all kinds--hung-up coppers, hung-up garagemen, hung-up magistrates; they really have to take it out on someone. It's not just the jealousy, sexual or financial or whatever, of the ordinary, so-called respectable person-- they have all these fantasies, these mad bogeys, and they fix them onto me. It's like being a voodoo doll for a whole fucking society, everyone sticking pins in. Happy just so long as someone gets hurt, anyone. And they think they know all about me, they talk about 'Your Way Of Life' as if they really know what it is; but they can't know, and I don't want them to. I never tell anybody what I'm doing, what I'm reading, who I'm with. All right, they have fantasies; I mean, I don't mind, if that's what they're into, but I don't provide it for them so I can make money out of it."

• • •

The King's Head And Eight Bells public house stands in Cheyne Walk, on the Chelsea Embankment of the Thames, a few yards from Jagger's London house. It's the nub of supertax territory and, in consequence, a curious meeting ground of old and new money, and old and new aristocracy: Drop a small piece of conventional military ordnance on the King's Head and, in the ensuing debris of the surrounding half acre, you'd find the bleeding remains of the majority of England's top stockbrokers, property developers, gynecologists, peers, pulp writers and pop stars. They have learned to rub shoulders fairly amicably, give or take occasional suspicion and mutual jealousies. From the windows of the pub, traffic can be seen chugging downriver toward the Pool of London, while slender trees ballet on the breeze and sea gulls shriek and defecate over the red Victorian brickery. It is a very English spot, the key piece to a child's jigsaw puzzle, a good place to ask one of the new aristocracy what he feels about his homeland.

"I don't hate anything about England," said Jagger. "I haven't got the capacity for it; it doesn't evoke that strong an emotion in me. The things I dislike about it are really very mild; they mostly just reflect the character of the people, particularly the changing character. I don't care about their sexual attitudes, I don't care about their political postures. I don't feel I belong to them, if you want to know the truth; I don't dig the, you know, fatherland bit. I mean, I like England, I was born here and that's why I live here; but if I'd been born in France, or Germany, or America, I'd live there. The things I dislike about England are so boring you don't want to hear about them. I mean, the whole world is much the same, double moral standards, all that."

"You'd never put all the loot into a bag and go of to Bermuda?"

"I can't think of anywhere worse to go. To end up with all your bread on a tiny island somewhere, floating down some stream, sitting on a pile of gold coins. The worst things about England are sad things: You can see what's going on just by looking at the people and the surroundings they're content to live in; you can see the kind of dreams that big business makes for them, telling them the sort of lives they ought to live. Most of it's just a watery reflection of America. I think that's a drag."

He looked, with something like melancholia, at the people around us. They plowed on with their conversations, studiedly unaware of Jagger; in such locales, no one can afford to gawp, to show that he's impressed at luminaries. You can cut the nonchalance with a blunt cleaver. Occasionally, a girl, caught off guard, will gasp and let you see the lips form "Jagger!" in her escort's ear; but the escort, steeled to rigid British nonreaction, will ignore the hiss, smarting inside. Perhaps, but smiling coolly on.

"As far as national character goes," said Jagger, "You won't find anyone as self-interested as the Englishman, particularly when it comes to loot. They're only interested in hanging onto things that are going to make money for them. They think, well, yes, we ought to keep the queen, because she earns money for us; they think about everything on that level; and when they build, when they make things, when they create an environment for themselves, they have no idea of how to create something new and good. It's pitiful."

• • •

"I mean, look at that!"

Outside his top-floor window, blocking any view, is a biscuit-colored slab of office block--new, but the weather's pawed at it and the stone is marked with grimy tears. It's shoddy, cheap.

"See? If you think about the way we have to live in London now, how it's changed over the last five years, you have to be sad. And we put up with everything, with total mediocrity. Everything--the city, the country--it's all getting less beautiful all the time, and there's no machinery for stopping it. Nobody cares, at least not enough to do anything about it. All they care about is how much money anything's going to make. They used to put up buildings for their beauty, for their usefulness; they used to care whether they would last. Would people, you know, look at it in three hundred years' time and still dig it? In creating surroundings, people used to want to reflect what they thought, how they felt. You have to. But now we only build in the cheapest way, just so it'll last a couple of years; half the new blocks they sling up are full of people who don't want to live there, anyhow. Unlivable environments and things that look bloody dreadful after they've been up a year or two. The only concern is economic."

In an ideal world, there would have been with me in Jagger's room a few of the conservatives, a few of the detractors, a few of the neurotics who have spent the past five-odd years dreaming of seeing Jagger in the pillory, so that they could work out their frustrations on him with rotten eggs. It would have been interesting to see what capital they could have made out of these pernicious, anarchic statements of his. Especially as Mick Jagger has also put his money where his mouth is, as far as preservation is concerned: Rather than opt for the split-level Greco-Moorish ranch-style residence with which so many quick-rich pop idols and high-rise businessmen have infested the English landscape, or for one of those penthouse layouts that always look as though they're going to be broken up and put on the back of a truck as soon as Rock Hudson has finished the day's shooting, Mick Jagger has bought an Elizabethan manor outside Newbury, in the lost middle of the shirest of English shires. It stands in 40 green acres, boundaried by wooded hills; and for anyone whose immediate reaction is that Jagger has taken the place over in order to transform it into a psychedelic pleasure palace and turn the gardens into rolling pot fields, let me say quickly that but for him, Stargroves manor might well have succumbed to a decay that's been nibbling at it for centuries. Previous owners, finding the house progressively more expensive to run, retired into ever smaller portions of the building, like explorers trapped on melting ice floes. Jagger bought the house a year ago and has set in motion a program of renovation to its original condition that will take two years and unmentionable amounts of coin to complete. It is not recorded whether Oliver Cromwell ever smiled; but because he stayed in Star-groves after the second Battle of Newbury in October 1644, it may well be that his ghost, softened from its puritan austerity by 300 years of heaven, will raise a passing grin at the paradox whereby the preservation of his old overnightery has been left to so unpuritan and Restoration a figure as the head Stone himself.

Jagger, it had become clear to me, is a man who needs a physically attractive, even enchanting, world.

"Well, physical, mental, spiritual, all those things are bound together," he said. "You want your world to reflect what's going on in your skull; you can't separate the elements. I mean, everyone knows that the Renaissance was a total thing, it involved painting and music and sculpture and scholarship and architecture and, through them, it involved the people. It's the same relationship now, only everything is mediocre, so people are conditioned to accept mediocrity. To become it. But what can you do? An individual is so helpless, you can't do anything, because there are too many people with the drive to just make money; it all piles itself up into a wall, you can't break through. The drive for bread is so much more powerful than people's just caring about something that those who do care don't stand a fucking chance. They give up: You can't spend your whole life standing in front of the money-makers. You just let them carry on. You can only hang on and wait till it passes."

I thought about Paris last year and his contemporaries in their hand-me-down olive fatigues, tossing cars on their backs like turtles in the Boulevard St. Germain, or trading punches with Mayor Daley's finest, or piking police horses in Grosvenor Square, or defying tanks in downtown Prague. You can only hang on and wait till it passes?

"Look, that's their bag." A dissociative shrug. "Like I said before, I'm sympathetic. I'm just not a barricade stormer. If you, or the mothers of America, or anyone else, are trying to hang it on me, well, it's just the same as their lousy sexual and drug fantasies, isn't it? They give the kids a society which they them selves have buggered up out of all sanity, and when the kids don't buy the package deal, the decent, sensible people turn around and drop the bundle on my doorstep. You know, like, I invented germ warfare. Like, I have this hot line to Mao Tse-tung."

"So if somebody came to you," I said, "and shouted, 'Right, here you are, folk hero" you have all this untapped power, so we're giving you the chance to use it politically,' what about that?"

"Oh, sure! We've seen what sort of politicians actors make; why should singers be any better? Of course, politicians themselves, because of the mass media, are getting to be more and more like second-rate actors, learning how to control the tube, what lipstick to choose, all that. The only way to control the people is to control the media. But that doesn't make politics any more appealing, does it? Politicians are an endless procession of liars: Nixon says he hates this, he says he digs that, and it's probably the exact opposite of what he really thinks and feels; it's all compromise, and by the time you've got where you want to be, well, you haven't got one idea left that's yours. Or that's worth anything. I mean, who are you? What's left? You just have nothing. Unless you're Fidel Castro."

In the pause, you might have heard my ears pricking. After all, it was the kind of statement that the tabloid pharisees would have plucked out of context and run across a four-inch banner headline. "You just have nothing unless you're fidel Castro screams youth führer Jagger!"

"You admire Castro?"

"Well, if you have a revolutionary situation, a real revolution against a demonstrably corrupt status quo, where you come down from the hills with a few hundred people and you just, like, take over--yeah, I dig that very much. You can't keep all the fine promises, sure, but I still dig it. It has some purity left, and I don't reckon you can say that for any Western politician, all those characters working by subtlety and cunning."

I asked him what he'd like to see brought in after a people's revolt in Britain, farfetched as the possibility is, and he thought for a long time, pursing his lips and occasionally flicking the hair back from his face. Finally:

"I've got no alternative society I'd like to see set up. I don't see things that way, I just don't think about it; I mean, I don't sit at home, doodling island paradises, with me as king. And, not being interested in it, I don't have any blueprints for a new deal. You can't map out a plan for people like the English, any how; like, how much is wrong radically, how much that you could alter? OK, you can say: Right, no queen, no Parliament; but how much difference would it make in the end? Maybe you'll end up by banning dancing, like Cromwell. So what? The worst thing wrong with this country is that there were certain values here and now there's so many people trying to sweep values away, they don't even understand--"

He broke off at my laughter and laughed briefly, too.

"Yeah, you're thinking: This, coming from him? Well, it's true: They sweep away and they've got nothing to sweep back. This society could just sink into a swamp, because no one kicks back against the decline, nobody reacts; it's sinking now, it's just decaying. We've got nothing to replace it with and most of us aren't even trying. We've chucked out a real style of living, a personal mood, a whole English thing; and if you bring in a sort of half-baked, plastic-topped, fake-American style, well, what've you got?"

It may be asked, and reasonably, why Jagger, with all his irritation, hasn't put more propaganda into his songs, pushed a message out to the millions of impressionable youngsters who hang on his every chord and syllable. But direct appeal in this way is something he is entirely against. A song such as the recent Factory Girl suggests the boredom of dull work and drab play, but Jagger will offer no explanations of how to break the circle. As he talks about the kids who leave school to go into humdrum existences, one senses a genuine pity in him for the life condition of the masses doomed to boredom and nonfulfillment; but he is markedly chary of telling people what to do or how to do it. Perhaps, having so consciously broken free from one form of threatened regimentation, he shrinks from the danger of proposing another, however abstract.

"The great thing about protest here in England is that it just happens, it's spontaneous, it comes out of irritation and dissatisfaction, but it doesn't end up with death and it hasn't got much hate in it. And it doesn't try to impose anything, either. It's only that hazy anarchistic feeling that everyone has; all the students are into it. It's boat rocking, that's all. It's refusing to gobble up the TV dinners that authority keeps trying to shove down your throat. Well, great, it's a gas and I'm all for it. But nobody has a replacement system for England, because nothing's so evil here that it has to be wiped out." He shrugged. "Sometimes, I think maybe we will change for the better here, but it may take thirty years before the wall breaks; I think there may just be a chance that today's students won't tap out and forget as soon as they've got a car and two kids and a mortgage. They'll go on being dissatisfied and things may finally climb upward again. Of course, they'll get more conservative as they get older, but I don't reckon they'll end up defending a way of life they really, deep down, don't agree with. I don't think they'll put up with the old sexual hypocrisies anymore, and I don't think they'll send their kids away to expensive prisons at the age of six anymore, and I really don't believe that if they were all suddenly called up to fight at the age of thirty, they'd go. They wouldn't go to Vietnam or march off to fight in some colonial war. I certainly wouldn't. Just because you're living in this country and you're not working for the Communist Party--and why should you, it's just as bad--that doesn't mean you have to stand up for everything, does it?"

And there is a look in the curiously innocent eyes that, like so much else about Mick Jagger, public enemy, despoiler of youth, singing carcinoma, surprises one for its sanity and calm. He is oddly similar to his most reactionary enemies, to the pale, correct conservatives with the rolled umbrellas and the spotless linen: He shares the pervading sentimentality of the English bourgeoisie, he regrets the passing of many of the same things as they; he likes the feel of land, the idea of property, the possession of a few good things, a flexible security. He deplores their traditional faults--cant and doublethink; and that, no doubt, is their main reason for hating him.

When, on the hottest midnight of the year, Brian Jones died at the bottom of his swimming pool, Mick Jagger turned an imminent Stones open-air concert into a beat memorial service, a rock wake; and three days after the death, 150,000 youngsters packed Hyde Park to dance goodbye. The older population of London rocked on its heels and beat its breast and keened, "Riot!" and "Desecration!" But none of this came to pass. When the feared hordes of teenage Visigoths had gone, all was calm and intact, and not a wisp of garbage could be seen; quietly, they had bagged it up and taken it with them. All they had left in the park to mark their passage were 3000 butterflies: Jagger had released them in memory of Jones.

The next day, the presidents of two wildlife organizations wrote furiously to their Members of Parliament, protesting at this wanton exploitation of Lepidoptera; the letters were published in The Times. They did not, typically, point out that this was the first time butterflies had been seen in Hyde Park for years, because traffic fallout, industrial pollution, chemical fertilizers and pesticides--those goodies presented by civilized society to the generation into which Mick Jagger was born--had succeeded in wiping them out.