Mick Jagger, an obsessively private man, has said in interviews time and again that he’d never write a tell-all. But, in a new essay for The Spectator, writer John Blake says he has a copy of an unpublished 75,000-word Jagger autobiography that was penned in decades past. (The New York Times couldn’t verify or deny its authenticity with Jagger’s manager.)
Blake calls the book “the rock ’n’ roll equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls” and alleges a number of things we haven’t confirmed (namely that Jagger’s brain is so drug-addled that he couldn’t remember his own life story). He manages a few anecdotes from the book into his essay, including a delicious story of Jagger buying a palatial estate while on a psychedelic kick:
“Mick tells of buying a historic mansion, Stargroves, while high on acid and of trying out the life of horse-riding country squire. Having never ridden a horse before, he leapt on to a stallion, whereupon it reared and roared off ‘like a Ferrari’. Summoning his wits and some half-remembered horse facts, he gave the stallion a thump on the forehead right between the eyes and slowed it down — otherwise the Stones’ story might have ended differently.”
How Blake got his hands on this manuscript is dodgy, saying it was passed from a mutual friend about three years ago. Jagger, who is a great-grandfather and also recently had his eighth child at the spry age of 73, could not remember having written the book, even after it was shown to him.
Unfortunately, the project floundered, and Blake assumes it will never be published. And into dust, for it appears Jagger has forgotten more about life than many of us will ever experience.
