Mick Jagger

And Mick? Before leaving Britain, he’d told an interviewer with unusual candour, and passion, that his main objective in America was to meet as many of his blues idols as possible, and that even ‘to see and hear them work in person will be a big thing for me’. What happened with Chuck and Muddy and Willie and Buddy and Big Red in Chicago was, by a long way, the most thrilling experience of his life thus far. But afterwards it was to be swallowed up by all-enveloping Jagger amnesia. ‘I don’t remember going to Chess,’ he would claim. ‘It’s just something I read about in books.’

Back in New York, things decidedly improved with a better hotel, the Park Sheraton (albeit still in shared rooms), and two sold-out concerts, like the Beatles’, at the city’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. After the second show, there was a party at the hotel with guests including the New York Post pop correspondent, and Bob Dylan’s close friend, Al Aronowitz. ‘The first thing we saw when we walked in,’ Aronowitz recalled, ‘was Mick sitting on a bed, surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks, fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body . . . Okay, Mick’d discovered room service.’

There was also a first glimpse of the Jagger attitude to women that we will come to know so well. At one point, Gloria Stavers, the influential editor of 16 Magazine, approached him among his seraglio to tell him how much she’d enjoyed the show. ‘Should I be flattered?’ he replied.

With the release of the Stones’ ‘Merseybeat’ song ‘Tell Me’ as a US single increasing album sales, and a general sense of making some headway at last, it was clearly vital for them to extend their visit beyond its scheduled three weeks. Instead – bafflingly to new American converts like Aronowitz and Murray the K – Oldham whisked them home as scheduled. The excuse he gave out was that they had to honour a booking to play at the summer ball of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth was that he couldn’t afford to keep them in America a moment longer. In contrast to later forays there, he calculated the tour had earned them ten old shillings, or fifty pence, each.

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