Mick Jagger
*Starred Review* A great band, said the letter from Decca, one of Britain’s major record labels, but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer. Mick Jagger, voice and all, has always been one of a kind. Norman, biographer of John Lennon, the Rolling Stones, and Elton John, offers a penetrating and mostly sympathetic portrait of a controversial and not-always-likable figure. He discusses Jagger’s pleasant, middle-class upbringing as a too easily distracted student, his first gig as a Rolling Stone, his incorrigible womanizing (which Norman calls his Eternal Teenager Syndrome), and his movie roles (as well as the ones that got away, such as the role of Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Also here are highlights—and lowlights—from Jagger’s long career, including the origin of some of the group’s most famous songs, from Satisfaction to Sympathy for the Devil, and the tragic events at Altamont, California, where a young man was stabbed and beaten to death. Norman is a wonderful writer, a painter with words. His descriptions of Jagger and his bandmates alone are precious (a young Keith Richards, for example, is described as an ill-favored little fellow with the protruding ears and hollow cheeks of some Dickensian workhouse waif). A must for Jagger and Stones fans alike. --June Sawyers