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rioting in proletarian dance halls, but was plausibly written off by the national media as just another short-lived transatlantic novelty. A year later, Elvis Presley came along with a younger, more dangerous spin on Haley’s simple exuberance and the added ingredient of raw sex.
    As a middle-class grammar school boy, Mike was just an onlooker in the media furor over Presley—the “suggestiveness” of his onstage hip grinding and knee trembling, the length of his hair and sullen smolder of his features, the (literally) incontinent hysteria to which he aroused his young female audiences. While adult America’s fear and loathing were almost on a par with the national Communist phobia, adult Britain reacted more with amusement and a dash of complacency. A figure like Presley, it was felt, could only emerge from the flashy, hyperactive land of Hollywood movies, Chicago gangsters, and ballyhooing political conventions. Here in the immemorial home of understatement, irony, and the stiff upper lip, a performer in any remotely similar mode was inconceivable.
    The charge of blatant sexuality leveled against all rock ’n’ roll, not merely Presley, was manifestly absurd. Its direct ancestor was the blues—black America’s original pairing of voice with guitar—and the modern, electrified, up-tempo variant called rhythm and blues or R&B. The blues had never been inhibited about sex; rock and roll were separate synonyms for making love, employed in song lyrics and titles (“Rock Me, Baby,” “Roll with Me, Henry,” etc.) for decades past, but heard only on segregated record labels and radio stations. Presley’s singing style and incendiary body movements were simply what he had observed on the stages and dance floors of black clubs in his native Memphis, Tennessee. Most rock ’n’ roll hits were cover versions of R&B standards by white vocalists, purged of their earthier sentiments or couched in slang so obscure (“I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store”) that no one realized. Even this sanitized product took the smallest step out of line at its peril. When the white, God-fearing Pat Boone covered Fats Domino’s “Ain’t That a Shame,” he was criticized for disseminating what was seen as a contagiously vulgar “black” speech idiom.
    As a Dartford Grammar pupil, the appropriate music for Mike Jagger was jazz, in particular the modern kind with its melodic complexities, subdued volume, and air of intellectualism. Even that played little part in daily school life, where the musical diet was limited to hymns at morning assembly and traditional airs like “Early One Morning” or “Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill” (the latter another pointer to Mike’s remarkable future). “There was a general feeling that music wasn’t important,” he would recall. “Some of the masters rather begrudgingly enjoyed jazz, but they couldn’t own up to it … Jazz was intelligent and people who wore glasses played it, so we all had to make out that we dug Dave Brubeck. It was cool to like that, and it wasn’t cool to like rock ’n’ roll.”
    This social barrier was breached by skiffle, a short-lived craze peculiar to Britain which nonetheless rivaled, even threatened to eclipse, rock ’n’ roll. Skiffle had originally been American folk (i.e., white) music, evolved in the Depression years of the 1930s; in this new form, however, it drew equally on blues giants of the same era, notably Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter. Lead Belly songs like “Rock Island Line,” “Midnight Special,” and “Bring Me Little Water, Sylvie,” set mostly around cotton fields and railroads, had rock ’n’ roll’s driving beat and hormone-jangling chord patterns, but not its sexual taint or its power to cause disturbances among the proles. Most crucially, skiffle was an offshoot of jazz, having been revived as an intermission novelty by historically minded “trad” bandleaders like Ken Colyer and Chris Barber. Its