MICK JAGGER AND DAVID BOWIE SLEPT HERE....TOGETHER. (SURPRISE)

Mick Jagger and David Bowie slept together? Really? In case you haven't heard, that's one of the "scandalous" revelations inside the pages of "Mick: The Wild Life And Mad Genuis of Jagger", the new, sure-to-be-best-selling book by Christopher Andersen. Yup, that's right. According to Andersen, Mick Jagger, rapidly aging front man for the Rolling Stones and the man behind the most famous lips in rock and roll, apparently didn't get enough "satisfaction" bedding models, actresses, and the occasional groupie. Turns out that he went on a little "space oddity" with fellow surreal superstar David Bowie as well. Shocked? I'm not. If you read Keith Richard's memoir, "Life" (in which he devotes at least as much time to outing his long-time bandmate as an almost pathelogical womanizer as he does to describing the many and varied ways he managed to stay high on drugs all those years), you know that Jagger is a man who likes to keep in step with the times. That's why we have cool songs like "Miss You" on the Stones' 1978 album "Some Girls" and less cool, and very awkward duets like "(You've Got To Walk) And Don't Look Back", which Jagger recorded with the late Peter Tosh the same year. It's apparently not enough for Mick Jagger, arguably one of the greatest front men of all time for one of the (inarguably) greatest rock and roll bands of all time, to be...well...Mick Jagger. He's obsessed with staying hip as well. And back in 1973, David Bowie was pretty much the hippest thing around, at least in rock and roll circles. The progenitor of the glam look whose sexually ambiguous alter ego "Ziggy Stardust" sent a generation of drag queens scrambling for orange hair dye and sequin-studded platform shoes was, we are told, so irresistable to Mick that he not only befriended Mr. Bowie, he bedded him, too.

It's not really that hard to imagine, when you think about it. Mick Jagger has always struck me as more than a little sexually ambiguous himself. Even back in the early days of the Stones, when they were all wearing turtlenecks and blazers and tight checkered pants, Mick mostly came off as someone trying to look like a normal guy. I mean, hell, can you imagine walking into an insurance company or a bank and being ushered into the office of a man with those lips? You wouldn't even be able to concentrate on the damned conversation. You'd be too busy wondering what his tongue looked like. And whether he was planning on licking you with it before you got the hell out of there. I wonder if that was what Bowie was thinking on the night that ol' Mick first came backstage to chat him up. Or was it something more along the lines of "Should I palm him off on (wife) Angela, or take him for a spin on my own?" Whatever it was, Andersen's book tells us that the two icons of androgyny shared a "genuine sexual attraction" which ultimately led to Angela discovering them lolling about in the Bowie bed one morning. According to Angela, she was surprised, but mainly jealous, since she fancied a roll in the hay with the Monkey Man herself. But ever the glam rock housewife hostess, she simply asked her husband's guest if he wanted coffee. Interestingly, there's no mention in Andersen's book about whether Mrs. Bowie, or even Bowie himself, found anything lacking in Mr. Jagger's...um...equipment. Too bad. I'd like to know if the scathing assessment that Mick's most active organ received in Keith Richards' book was genuine or just a bit of sour grapes...which, by the way, would be larger than the size Richards attributes to it. But back to Bowie...

Personally, as a long time admirer of both David Bowie and The Rolling Stones, as well as the early 1970s rock scene in general, the only thing that really surprises me about the Bowie/Jagger revelation is that it's considered to be a "revelation" at all. 1973. Okay...we're talking New York Dolls, Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Marc Bolan, Alice Cooper, and a slew of other eyeliner-sporting glam rock stars who tossed off the "I'm bisexual" line the same way that Snooki gabs about her latest hang-over. Only six years before, in 1967, the commercial music industry had been forced to bow to the changing times predicted by Bob Dylan and exemplified by the newly-named "hippies" who poured en masse into San Francisco that summer and declared that city the official headquarters for "The Summer Of Love." For the next half-decade, it wasn't so much who you were sleeping with that mattered as it was how guilt-free you felt whilst doing it. By the time glam rock hit the mainstream in the early 70's, the concept of "free love" had expanded into just plain "free." And what was more emblematic of being "free" than declaring that you slept with girls and boys? Never mind that almost all of the early 70s glam rock bi-boys ended up with women (except for, of course, Marc Bolan, who ended up dead). Back then, in the thick of it all, everyone in the music world was freaking bi-sexual.

Even so, one thing does bug me about the alleged sexual relationship between Bowie and Jagger. How is it that two iconoclastic figures of rock and roll who are responsible for creating some of the most culturally significant music of all time could, after having slept with each other and (presumably) enjoying it, reunite in 1985 for the purpose of making the worst video to ever have been foisted upon the viewing public? Ziggy Stardust would have cringed at the sight of all that cheesy choreography. And early 1960s Mick Jagger...hell, early 1970s, late 1970s, and early 1980s Mick Jagger, for that matter...would probably have asked Keith to get him hooked on heroin just so he could block out the visual. I mean, take a look and tell me if I'm wrong...

Bottom line, the book sounds like a great read for those of us who get off on backstage anecdotes and bedroom confessions of the classic rock scene. But the so-called revelation of Mick Jagger and David Bowie's erstwhile "love connection" is, to me, nowhere near as interesting as reading about the things their friends and lovers had to say about them as individuals. My favorite line, hands down? Comes from Jerri Hall, Mick Jagger's ex-wife, the mother of four of his children, and a woman who still looks like she would be happier sitting by a suburban pool in Texas. Talking about Mick's wayward ways with other women (and maybe David Bowie), she said, "I hope he finds happiness. But I'm not churning up inside about it."

Skol! xoxoxxoxoxoxoxo