Mick Jagger

August 27, 2012
Drawing on research he conducted for his first Stones book, as well as on numerous interviews with Jagger's friends, former girlfriends, and musicians, music critic Norman's often plodding and exhaustively detailed though admiring biography recounts Jagger's life from his middle-class youth and first encounters with the blues and early rock to his first meetings with a young Keith Richards.From there, we read of Jagger's many tumultuous relationships with women, his lackluster attempts at acting, and his raging desire to control his and the band's image. Sympathetic to Jagger, Norman digs beneath the bad-boy posturing that Stones manager Andrew Oldham stage-managedâand that Jagger embracedâvery early in his career. Along the way, the author reveals an individual shaped by a conservative upbringing and maturing into a loving and beloved father, a history and literature buff, a wine connoisseur, and a stickler for etiquette. Unfortunately, in the end this is a dull set of fan notes, largely composed of much-rehashed Stones lore, especially since there are no new interviews with Jagger himself.

Starred review from October 1, 2012
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 highlightsand lowlightsfrom 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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)