Their first public appearance was a spur-of-the-moment, unpaid show at a tiny jazz club called the Marquee. They had no name for their group, but impulsively decided to call themselves "Brian Jones and Mick Jagger and the Rollin' Stones" after the title of a favorite Muddy Waters song. Jagger, Jones, and Richards were accompanied by drummer Charlie Watts and bassist Bill Wyman. For the next year, this line-up struggled through a series of dates in working-class bars, where audiences seemed not to know what to make of the band's long hair and unkempt appearance, or of Jagger's sneering and prancing. By 1963, though, they had begun to find their audience, and their popularity grew rapidly; by 1964 two different polls had named them England's most popular group, outranking even the Beatles.
"In the beginning it was frightening," Jagger recalled to a Newsweek reporter. "It was dangerous. ... We'd only do half an hour and then [the audience would] scream for half an hour and some of them would faint." By 1965 the Rolling Stones had stopped playing clubs in favor of large concert venues, and Jagger had quit economics school to devote himself full time to life as a Stone. The band's first recordings drew heavily on the music of their favorite performers, including Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters, but Jagger and Richards soon began collaborative songwriting and developed their own sound. Their first international hit, "Satisfaction," stands today as their signature song. It was considered the perfect expression of the defiant, raunchy image they seemed to be deliberately cultivating, perhaps to differentiate themselves from the comparatively wholesome Beatles and their many imitators.
"I wasn't trying to be rebellious in those days," Jagger insisted, as quoted by Stephen Schiff in a 1992 Vanity Fair profile. "I was just being me. I wasn't trying to push the edge of anything. I'm being me and ordinary, the guy from suburbia who sings in this band, but someone older might have thought it was just the most awful racket, the most terrible thing, and where are we going if this is music?... But all those songs we sang were pretty tame, really. People didn't think they were, but I thought they were tame."
On the strength of such albums as December's Children, Aftermath, and Between the Buttons, Jagger and the Rolling Stones rose to the top, but their unsavory reputation led them into trouble with the law. In 1967 Jagger and two bandmates were arrested for drug offenses and given unusually harsh sentences. Jagger was handed three months for possession of four over-the-counter pep pills he had purchased in Italy. The punishment was eventually reduced, but their legal battles and internal conflicts seemed to leave the Stones demoralized. In 1967 they released Their Satanic Majesties Request, an album many critics dismissed as a flabby, pretentious attempt to copy the psychedelia of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
For the first time, Jagger began to look for creative outlets outside the group, playing lead roles in the films Performance and Ned Kelly. Reviews of his dramatic portrayals were mixed, but several critics expressed a certain fascination with the surly sexuality he projected on the screen, a style that became central to the performer's unique persona. "Before Mick Jagger," noted Schiff, "sexual iconography had reached a point that was both apotheosis and dead end. ... Perhaps the enormous re-evaluation of sex and sexuality that dominated the sixties and seventies--the long hair, the unisex fashions, the so-called sexual revolution--would have taken place without him, but Mick Jagger's charged androgyny now looks at the very least hugely influential, and probably catalytic."
The Rolling Stones remained together, reestablishing their standing in 1968 with Beggar's Banquet. Let It Bleed, another classic, followed in 1969, the same year the band toured the United States after a three-year absence. They were met in city after city by frantic, hysterical audiences. A free concert was planned near San Francisco, California, as a way of thanking U.S. fans for their support. The ill-organized event turned nightmarish when a gang of Hell's Angels--hired by the Stones to provide security--attacked the crowd violently, beating one spectator to death. To the further detriment of the band's reputation, the murder was inadvertently captured on film and released to the general public as part of the documentary Gimme Shelter.
The Stones stayed away from North America until 1972, but upon their return, they were met with as much enthusiasm as ever. Jack Batten praised Jagger in the Toronto Globe and Mail as "the single most exciting performer at work at this moment. He is charismatic, dynamic, glorious, riveting." Gradually, the media began to cast the Stones as superstars rather than outlaws. Each album they released was a sure bestseller, if not always a critical success. Though they continued to rock as hard as ever, the rise of the punk rock movement made the Stones's once outrageous behavior seem comparatively tame. Jagger recalled in Rolling Stone that the band lost "the whole idea of pushing the envelope open a little bit. We became a hard-rock band, and we became very content with it. ... We lost a little bit of sensitivity and adventure."
That loss of adventure brought a sense of boredom and restlessness. Dissension among the Stones became quite intense, and Jagger and Richards began to snipe openly at each other in the rock press. Both eventually turned to solo projects. Jagger released the LP She's the Boss in 1985 and Primitive Cool in 1987; the albums had disappointing sales and Anthony DeCurtis noted in Rolling Stone that the songs "ranged from bad to ordinary."
The Rolling Stones joined again to record Dirty Work in 1986, but Jagger refused to tour to support the album, a decision that infuriated Richards. "I was completely, 100 percent right about not doing that tour," Jagger avowed in Rolling Stone in 1989. "The band was in no condition to tour. ... The album wasn't that good. It was okay. It certainly wasn't a great Rolling Stones album. The feeling inside the band was very bad, too. The relationships were terrible. The health was diabolical ... so we had this long bad experience of making that record, and the last thing I wanted to do was spend another year with the same people." Such comments by Jagger had many fans predicting a Rolling Stones breakup.
Yet in May of 1988 Richards and Jagger set aside their differences to discuss the possibility of a new album and tour. Later that year they went to Barbados to begin writing new songs for Steel Wheels. Released in 1989, it was praised as "the best Rolling Stones album in at least a decade" by David Fricke in Rolling Stone. Both the album and the band's subsequent tour were widely touted as proof that the Stones were still a vital musical force. DeCurtis declared: "All the ambivalence, recriminations, attempted rapprochements and psychological one-upsmanship evident on Steel Wheels testify that the Stones are right in the element that has historically spawned their best music--a murky, dangerously charged environment. ... Against all odds, and at this late date, the Stones have once again generated an album that will have the world dancing to deeply troubling, unresolved emotions."
In February of 1992, after nearly 30 productive years in the music business, Jagger was at work on a third solo album and on the verge of signing a new three-record contract with Atlantic Records. "Doing a solo album, it's more relaxed than doing the Rolling Stones," Jagger admitted in to Schiff in Vanity Fair. "With a solo album, no one's going to get on my case. It's just free and easy." The singer also returned to his acting career, starring in Freejack--a science fiction film set in the year 2009--and he expressed an interest in writing and producing motion pictures. Though he has proven himself as a prolific solo performer, Jagger acknowledges the profound influence of his many years with the Rolling Stones. He told Schiff, "You know, I'm still me. ... It's still going to sound like me. I'm the singer of the Rolling Stones. I can't completely change."
