Jagger 'Can't Remember Writing Own Autobiography'

Publisher says forgotten '80s memoir has surfaced
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 16, 2017 2:20 AM CST
Jagger 'Can't Remember Writing Own Autobiography'
In this March 25, 2016, photo, Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger performs in Havana, Cuba.   (AP Photo/Enric Marti, File)

A publisher in Britain says he has the "rock 'n' roll equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls"—but he may never be able to bring it to the public. John Blake, writing in the Spectator, says that three years ago, somebody handed him a 75,000-word autobiography that Mick Jagger wrote in the early 1980s and forgot about in the following decades. Blake describes the manuscript, apparently rejected by a publisher at the time for not having enough sex and drugs, as a "perfectly preserved time capsule written when the Stones had produced all their greatest music but still burned with the passion and fire of youth and idealism."

Jagger has long said he would never write a memoir. Blake says that when he contacted the Rolling Stones frontman, now 73, his manager initially said Jagger couldn't remember any memoir. Blake says that after Jagger saw it, he considered having it published with a foreword "to establish that he wrote this story long ago and far away," but the singer eventually decided against publication and the "steel gates clanged shut." Blake says the memoir depicts a "quieter, more watchful Mick than the fast-living caricature," though it still contains plenty of rock 'n' roll moments, including the time Jagger bought a historic mansion while tripping on acid, the Times of London reports. (More Mick Jagger stories.)

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