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Mick became a regular overnight visitor at the Shrimptons’, always occupying a separate room from Chrissie’s, as any well-brought-up young man in that era would be expected to do. After breakfast he would catch the same 8:42 commuter train from Burnham that Chrissie took to her secretarial school. ‘My sister Jean by that time was going around with a lot of debby Vogue types who’d sometimes be on the same train,’ she remembers. ‘I used to hear them whispering “Poor Chrissie . . . her boyfriend’s so ugly.”’
Chrissie, by contrast, spent little time in the bosom of the Jagger family, though that was a consequence of Mick’s desire to get away from home more than any mutual antipathy. She remembers her surprise on discovering that, unlike their elder son, neither Joe nor Eva had any trace of a Cockney accent and that both were ‘quite intellectual people, which my parents weren’t, though we had more money. Mick’s mother was quite simply a domestic slave, devoted to looking after the males of the household. She was one of those garrulous women, and Mick was often very irritated by her and very dismissive of her. And his father was very formal and – to me – charmless and rather alarming. But I did get on very well with his brother, Chris, who at that time was mostly away at school. We were the two Chrisses, the younger siblings of the more successful older ones.’
Very soon after that initial refusal, Chrissie began sleeping with Mick – something that for a genteelly raised, convent-educated seventeen-year-old in 1963 was still far from routine. The first time was at the Shrimpton family home while her parents were away, since she couldn’t bring herself to enter his bed at the squalid flat he shared with Keith, Brian and the ‘gobbing’ printer Phelge at 102 Edith Grove. ‘I hated it . . . it was so dirty,’ she recalls. ‘The spitting and the Nankering . . . and they’d got notes that girls had sent them pinned up all over the wall. It was an all-blokes place, where I was always made to feel like an intruder.’
Keith she remembers as ‘just a weedy little boy, who was very sweet and shy and upset about his parents having recently got divorced . . . Brian was very bright, and it was obvious that he and Mick didn’t get on at all. He tried to pull me a couple of times, but only to spite Mick. When it happened I can remember thinking “This is ridiculous because you’re half my size.”’
Mick had been seeing Chrissie only about two weeks when – out of nowhere – the Stones’ fortunes suddenly began to improve. A whole-page feature article on the Crawdaddy Club in the local Richmond and Twickenham Times gave them a laudatory plug. Then Giorgio Gomelsky persuaded a leading music trade journalist, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror – who had filed the first-ever national story on the Beatles – to come to the Station Hotel on a Sunday lunchtime and watch the Stones while Gomelsky shot further documentary footage of them onstage. ‘I met them in the bar, before they started playing,’ Jones remembers. ‘Mick was amiable and well spoken, but he stayed pretty much in the background. I thought Brian was the leader because he was the pushiest one, waving their single press cutting under my nose.’
Peter Jones was ‘knocked out’ by the set that followed, but cautiously said he wanted his paper’s in-house R&B enthusiast, Norman Jopling, to give a more knowledgeable assessment. Nineteen-year-old Jopling turned up at the Crawdaddy’s next Sunday session, but without great expectations. ‘British bands who tried to play the blues all had this kind of worthy, post-Trad feel, so I expected them to be rubbish. But as soon as Mick opened his mouth, I realised how wrong I was. All I remember thinking as the Stones played was “This stuff doesn’t only belong to black guys in the States any more. White kids in Britain can play it just as well.”’
When the band talked to Jopling afterwards, Brian again took the lead, quizzing him at length about what he could do for them in print. Mick was ‘a bit distant’, as if he resented his colleague’s assertiveness. ‘He knew Brian had started the band and was the leader, but he knew he was the guy people were looking at.’ Later, Jopling rode with them in Stu’s van to the house of a record producer, where Keith initiated an earnest discussion about Motown music and how disappointing Mary Wells’s latest single had been. ‘I remember that there were a lot of musical instruments lying around, Brian was picking them up and just playing them with that instinctive talent of his. But Mick was playing some, too – and I don’t mean only percussion instruments.’
Jopling’s article in the next week’s Record Mirror was the stuff of which careers are made:
As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments heave a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R&B clubs that have sprung up is nothing short of fantastic . . . At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves around to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad. And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are you haven’t. But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene if that scene continues to flourish . . .
After engineering such a triumph, Giorgio Gomelsky might have expected formal ratification as the band’s manager in time to handle the consequent surge of interest from record companies and talent agents. But all Gomelsky’s unselfish work on their behalf was suddenly forgotten. Before the Norman Jopling article had even appeared, Brian asked Jopling’s Record Mirror senior Peter Jones whether he’d consider taking on the Stones’ management. Jones was not interested – but once again proved a crucial catalyst. A couple of days later, he happened to run into a business acquaintance, a young freelance PR man whose naked ambition was a byword throughout the music trade press. If the young PR man cared to check out the Crawdaddy Club’s house band, Peter Jones suggested, he might find something of interest. And until the Record Mirror’s rave appeared, the field would be clear. When Mick had played Jimmy Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’ to his new Beatle friend John Lennon, he little imagined how prophetic the title would be.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
‘Self-Esteem? He Didn’t Have Any’ (#ulink_8c15f410-cf91-563b-aea7-55249b2621a8)
Long before the Rolling Stones turned into a new kind of band and Mick into a new kind of singer, Andrew Loog Oldham was a totally new kind of manager.
Before Oldham, managers of pop acts – a pool of talent then 99.9 per cent male – had been older men with no interest in the music beyond what it might earn them, and no empathy with their young charges or with teenagers generally. Most in addition were homosexuals, which explains why so many early boy rock ’n’ rollers had the same rough-trade fantasy look of flossy blond hair, black leather, tight jeans and high-heeled boots. Andrew Oldham was the first manager to be the same age as his charges, to speak their language, share their outlook, mirror their rampant heterosexuality and seem motivated by their collective ideals as much as by financial gain. While engineering managerial coups that, at the outset, seemed little short of magical, he was naturally and undisputedly one of the band.
Managers of the traditional kind had been content to stay in the shadows, counting their percentages. Oldham, however, craved stardom in his own right and, from the earliest age, possessed all the drive, ruthlessness and shamelessness necessary to win it. He was ahead of his time in nurturing such ambition despite possessing no abilities whatsoever as either a performer or musician and, indeed, no quantifiable talent in any direction. The talent he did have – one of the very highest order – would emerge only when he began managing the Stones, which at the outset he saw primarily as a means of projecting himself into the spotlight.
The other two most celebrated managers in pop history, Colonel Tom Parker and Brian Epstein, both had little real comprehension of the artists under their control. With the Stones – particularly their singer – Oldham very quickly realised exactly what he had found and what to do with it. In all the annals of huckstering and hype, no one has possessed a shrewder understanding of both his product and his customers.
It is a familiar music-business cliché to give the name ‘Svengali’ to any manager who radically remoulds a performer’s appearance or persona. Svengali is one of the scarier figures in Victorian gothic literature, a music teacher with a black beard and a hypnotic stare, combining the auras of Dracula and the Phantom of the Opera. In George du Maurier’s 1894 novel, Trilby, the eponymous heroine, an innocent young artist’s model, allows Svengali to take her over, heart and soul, in exchange for transforming her into a world-famous operatic diva.
The analogy is always made with both Colonel Parker and Epstein, even though the managerial reshaping of Presley and the Beatles was purely cosmetic, impermanent, and reached neither their hearts nor their souls. In pop’s premier league, the Svengali–Trilby scenario has actually been played out just once: when Andrew Loog Oldham met Mick Jagger.
When it happened, it would stir yet more foreign influences into the making of Mick. Oldham’s arrestingly hybrid name commemorated his father Andrew Loog, a Dutch-American air-force lieutenant, shot down and killed while serving in Britain during the last years of the Second World War. His mother, born Cecelia Schatkowski, was the daughter of a Russian Ashkenazi Jew who, like Mick’s mother’s family, had emigrated to New South Wales in Australia. After arriving in Britain aged four – the same age Eva Jagger did – Cecelia became known as Celia and, like Eva, preferred to draw a veil of pukka Englishness over her origins.
Born in 1944, after his father’s death and out of wedlock, Oldham grew up in the literary-bohemian north London suburb of Hampstead and attended a first-rank private school, Wellingborough. Like his future Trilby, he possessed a keen intelligence but resolutely refused to live up to his academic promise, instead hungering for glamour and style and choosing the unlikeliest possible role models for a boy of his background. In Oldham’s case, these were not venerable blues musicians but the amoral young hustlers who swindled and finger-snapped their way through late 1950s cinema – Tony Curtis as Sidney Falco, the sleazy Broadway press agent in Sweet Smell of Success; Laurence Harvey as Johnny Jackson, the prototype ‘bent’ British pop manager in Expresso Bongo.
When London first began to swing, Andrew Loog Oldham – by now a strawberry-blond nineteen-year-old with an educated accent and a killer line in suits and tab-collared shirts – was perfectly placed to hop aboard the pendulum. He became an odd-job boy at Mary Quant’s Bazaar boutique while working nights as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club (where he could easily have sighted Mick but somehow never did). Given his mania for attention seeking, it was inevitable he should end up in public relations, a field until then also dominated by much older men and therefore largely uncomprehending of teenage music and culture.
Among Oldham’s earliest PR clients from the pop world, one left a lasting impression. This was America’s Phil Spector, the first record producer to become as famous as the acts he recorded, thanks to his trademark ‘Wall of Sound’ technique, the total artistic control on which he insisted, and his already legendary egotism and neurosis. Most fascinating to his young English minder was the simultaneous image of a maestro and hoodlum Spector cultivated, wearing dark glasses whatever the weather or time of day, travelling in limousines with blacked-out windows, and surrounding himself with more bodyguards than most current heads of state. If being a backroom boy could be like that, who needed the front parlour?
Oldham’s primary ambition was to be working with the Beatles, whose records now instantly topped the UK charts on release and who were showing themselves to be far more than just another pop group with their Liverpudlian charm and wit. Their breakthrough had allowed their manager, Brian Epstein, to successfully launch a whole troupe of ‘Mersey Beat’ acts, so destroying London’s historic anti-northern snobbery at a stroke and becoming the most successful British pop impresario ever.
Oldham soon talked himself into a freelance PR role with Epstein’s NEMS organisation and forged a good personal relationship with all four Beatles. Ambition-wise, though, it was a blind alley, since the possessive Epstein handled all their PR himself in tandem with fellow Liverpudlian Tony Barrow, and would allow Oldham to publicise only second-rank NEMS names like Gerry and the Pacemakers. He had decided to move on and was just reviewing his not very numerous options when his Record Mirror contact Peter Jones advised him to check out the house band at the Richmond Station Hotel.
For Oldham, walking into the Stones’ jam-packed, mirror-multiplied lair was like seeing ‘rock ’n’ roll in 3-D and Cinerama for the very first time’. His cracklingly entertaining autobiography, Stoned, records the visual shock of their front rank like a James Joyce epiphany: Keith’s ‘black as night, hacked hair . . . atop a war-rationed baby body . . .’; Brian’s ‘pretty-ugly shining blond hair belied by a face that already looked as if it had a few unpaid bills with life . . .’; Mick, ‘the boy from the railway tow-path . . . the hors d’oeuvre, the dessert and meal in between . . .’ After the cute Liverpudlian harmonies currently clogging the Top 10, that raw, sour, southern solo voice was like a dash of icy water in the face. ‘It wasn’t just a voice, and it was much, much more than a rendition, a mere lead vocal . . . It was an instrument . . . a declaration, not backed by a band but a part of a band . . . their decree.’
Oldham, in fact, caught the Stones at a low-energy moment, when they had reverted to being serious bluesmen seated on a semicircle of bar stools. Even then, Mick ‘moved like an adolescent Tarzan plucked from the jungle, not comfortable in his clothes . . . a body still deciding what it was and what it wanted . . . He was thin, waistless, giving him the human form of a puma with a gender of its own . . . He gave me a look that asked me everything about myself in one moment – as in “What are you doing with the rest of my life?” The lips looked at me, seconding that emotion.’
In the brief interlude before Record Mirror’s story brought every London talent scout flocking to Richmond, Oldham persuaded the Stones he should be their manager. It was a pitch of finely tuned brilliance, in which the nineteen-year-old presented himself simultaneously as a street-smart metropolitan tycoon with more experience of life than all of them put together, and a kindred spirit who shared their love of the blues and sacred mission to preserve it. Actually, he would confess in Stoned, ‘[the blues] didn’t mean dick to me. If it had, I might have had an opinion about it and missed the totality of what had hit me.’ The clincher was the tenuous connection with Brian Epstein and the Beatles, now made to sound as if John, Paul, George and Ringo barely made a move without his say-so. The cautious Mick could not help but be as impressed as the fame-famished Brian. ‘Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery,’ he would recall, ‘and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.’
For all his hubris, Oldham was realistic. As a small-fry freelance PR, without even an office, he knew he was in no position to launch into management on his own. Bearing in mind the main plank of his sales pitch to the Stones, his first move was to approach Brian Epstein and offer Epstein a half share in them in return for office space and facilities. But Epstein, feeling he already had more than enough artists, declined the opportunity that would have put the two biggest bands of all time in his pocket. Trawling the lower reaches of West End theatrical agents, Oldham next hit on Eric Easton, a former professional organist whose middle-of-the-road musical clients included guitarist Bert Weedon and the pub pianist Mrs Mills, and who also hired out electronic organs to theatres, cinemas and holiday camps.
Despite being an archetypal ‘Ernie’, according to Mick and Brian’s private argot, Easton realised how the British pop market was exploding and readily agreed to become the Stones’ co-manager and financial backer. However, a potentially serious obstacle existed in Giorgio Gomelsky, who had given the band their Crawdaddy residency, got them eulogised by Record Mirror and was their manager in every way other than writing. Oldham brought an incognito Easton to the Station Hotel to see the Stones perform and meet their acknowledged leader, Brian Jones. A few days later – during Gomelsky’s absence in Switzerland following the sudden death of his father – Brian and Mick attended a meeting with Oldham and Easton at the latter’s office.
It was a scene that had already been played in hundreds of other pop-managerial sanctums, and would be in thousands more – the walls covered with signed celebrity photos, framed Gold Discs and posters; the balding, over-genial man at a desk cluttered by pictures of wife and children (and, in this case, electronic organs), telling the two youngsters in front of him that, of course, he couldn’t promise anything but, if they followed his guidance, there was every chance of them ending up rich and famous. The only difference was the sceptical look on one youngster’s face and the penetrating questions he put to both his older and younger would-be mentors. ‘Mick asked me to define this “fame” I kept talking about,’ Oldham recalls. ‘I breathed deeply and said, “This is how I see fame. Every time you go through an airport you will get your picture taken and be in the papers. That is fame and you will be that famous.”’
True to his altruistic nature, Giorgio Gomelsky made no trouble about having the Stones filched from him in this devious manner, sought no financial compensation for all he had done to advance them, and even continued to offer them bookings at the Crawdaddy. In May 1963, Brian Jones signed a three-year management contract with Oldham and Easton on behalf of the whole band, setting the duo’s commission at 25 per cent. During the grooming process, each Stone would receive a weekly cash retainer, modest enough but sufficient to lift the three flat-sharers out of their previous abject poverty. Unknown to Mick and Keith, Brian negotiated an extra £5 per week in his capacity as leader.
Svengali lost no time in setting to work, though his original aim was to package the Stones pretty much like other pop bands, i.e., as Beatle copies. Their piano player, Ian Stewart, was dropped because Oldham thought six too cumbersome a line-up in this age of the Fab Four – and besides, chunky, short-haired Stu looked ‘too normal’. Good friend as well as fine musician though he was, neither Mick nor Brian protested, and there was general relief when he agreed to stay on as roadie and occasional back-up player. Keith deeply disapproved of Stu’s treatment – as he had of Giorgio Gomelsky’s – but felt his subordinate position (‘a mere hireling’) did not entitle him to take a moral stand. He was equally docile when Svengali gave a moment of attention to him, ordering him to drop the s from ‘Richards’ to give it a more showbizzy sound, as in Cliff Richard.
As an experienced entertainment agent, as well as a substantial investor, Eric Easton had a voice that must also be heeded. And, so far as Easton was concerned, the Stones had one possibly serious weak link. He wondered whether Mick’s voice could stand the strain of nightly, often twice-nightly, appearances in the touring pop package shows that were every band’s most lucrative market. There was also the question of whether the crucially important BBC would still bar him for sounding ‘too coloured’. Group leader Brian Jones was brought into the discussion, and readily agreed with Easton that, if necessary, the Stones’ vocalist would have to go the same way as their pianist.
A couple of days after the contract signing, Oldham telephoned a young photographer friend named Philip Townsend and commissioned the Stones’ first-ever publicity shoot. The only brief Townsend received was to ‘make them look mean and nasty’. He posed them in various Chelsea locations: on a bench outside a pub, mingling with oblivious King’s Road shoppers, even sitting kindergarten-style on the road outside 102 Edith Grove, ferociously casual and cool with their corduroy jackets, polo necks and ever-smouldering cigarettes, but, to twenty-first-century eyes, not mustering a shred of meanness or nastiness between them. Mick stands out only for his lighter-coloured jacket with raglan lapels; if anyone seems the star of the group, it’s sleek, enigmatic-looking Charlie Watts.
Having been dubbed the next big thing by London’s most influential music trade paper, the Stones were as good as guaranteed a contract with a major record label. Theoretically, of course, they were still bound to IBC studios by the demo tape on which they had given Ian Stewart’s friend, Glyn Johns, a six-month option. Eric Easton’s advice was that the agreement would have no validity if they could get back the tape’s only copy. Adopting Brian’s habit of bare-faced lying, they therefore told Johns they’d decided to break up the band but would like to keep the tape as a souvenir. An unsuspecting Johns handed it over in exchange for its recording cost: £109.
Among Britain’s few record labels in 1963, the mighty Decca company was the Stones’ almost inevitable destination. Having dominated the UK music market for thirty years, Decca had seen its arch-rival, EMI, achieve the equivalent of a Klondike gold strike with the Beatles. To compound the agony, Decca’s head of ‘artists and repertoire’, Dick Rowe, had had first chance to sign the Liverpudlians but had passed on them. So desperate was Rowe to rescue his reputation that the Stones (whose demo tape his department had also rejected a few months earlier because of Mick’s vocals) walked into Decca without the customary studio audition.
A well-worn procedure now lay ahead, which even the otherwise mould-breaking Beatles had followed – and continued to follow. The new signees would go into their record company’s own studios in the charge of a staff producer, who would choose the material they recorded and specify how it should be performed. Though Rowe, in his thankfulness, offered a significantly higher royalty than EMI had given the Beatles (it could hardly have been lower), the Stones would still receive only a tiny fraction of the sale price of each record, and that at a far-distant date, after labyrinthine adjustments and deductions.
Andrew Oldham had other ideas, absorbed from his American entrepreneurial idol, Phil Spector. The artists who helped constitute Spector’s Wall of Sound were recorded privately by the producer at his own expense and free from any interference by third parties. The master tapes were then leased to the record company, which manufactured, distributed and marketed the product but had no say in its character or creative evolution and, crucially, did not own the copyright. In Britain’s cosily exploitative record business, a tape-lease deal was still a rarity. Such was Decca’s terror of losing another next big thing that they complied without a murmur.
Again following Spector’s lead, Oldham appointed himself the Stones’ record producer as well as co-manager, undaunted by his indifference to their sacred music – or by never having set foot in a recording studio other than as a PR minder. Decca were already agitating for a début single to catch the ever-rising tide of hysteria around the Beatles and beat groups generally. With no clue what that début should be, Oldham simply told his charges to pick out their five best R&B stage numbers and they would make the choice democratically between them. A session was booked at Olympic Sounds, one of central London’s only three or four independent studios, on 10 May. Mick arrived straight from a London School of Economics lecture with a pile of textbooks under one arm.
The decision about the single’s A-side – the one to be submitted for radio play and review in the trades – proved problematic. The Stones’ best live numbers were uncommercial blues like Elmore James’s ‘Dust My Broom’ or Chuck Berry anthems like ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, which by now had become the staple of many other bands, not least the Beatles. Finally they chose Berry’s ‘Come On’, a serio-comic lament about a lost girlfriend, a broken-down car, and being rudely awoken by a wrong number on the telephone. Released two years earlier as the B-side to ‘Go Go Go’, it had made little impact in Britain, and had a slightly more pop feel than Berry’s usual output.
There was little time for any radical reinterpretation of the track at Olympic Sound. Oldham, using Eric Easton’s money, had booked the studio for three hours at a special rate of £40, and was under strict orders from his co-manager not to run over time. That sense of haste and compromise permeated the Stones’ ‘Come On’; indeed, Berry’s languid vocal was so speeded up by Mick, it sounded more like some tongue-twisting elocution exercise. With an eye to the mass market, he also toned down the lyrics (an act of self-censorship never to be repeated), singing about ‘some stupid guy tryin’’ to reach another number rather than ‘some stupid jerk’. Brian Jones’s musicianship was limited to a harmonica riff in place of Berry’s lead guitar, and a falsetto harmony in the chorus. Even with a key change to spin it out, the track lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. For the unimportant B-side, the band could return to their comfort zone with Willie Dixon’s ‘I Want to Be Loved’.
The session wrapped in just under three hours, so sparing Eric Easton a £5 surcharge. As the participants left, the single engineer – whose services were included in the price – asked Oldham what he wanted to do about ‘mixing’. Britain’s answer to Phil Spector did not yet know this to be an essential part of the recording process. Still fearful of being charged overtime, he replied, ‘You mix it and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.’
Everyone involved realised how unsatisfactory the session had been, and there was neither surprise nor protest when Decca’s Dick Rowe judged both the tracks to be unreleasable in their present form and said they must be re-recorded at the company’s West Hampstead studios under the supervision of a staff producer, Michael Barclay. The wisest thing would have been for Mick to start afresh with a new A-side, but instead he continued trying to pummel some life into his hepped-up yet watered-down version of ‘Come On’. The infusion of technical expertise and extra time made so little audible difference that Decca’s bureaucracy decided to stick with the Olympic Sound version, and this was duly released on 7 June 1963.
To drum up advance publicity, Oldham took his new discoveries on an exhaustive tour of the newspaper and magazine offices to which he had easy access thanks to his former connection with the Beatles. As well as the trade press, these included magazines catering to a female teenage audience, like Boyfriend, whose Regent Street offices were just around the corner from Decca. ‘After Andrew first brought them in, the Stones just used to turn up – usually at lunchtime,’ recalls former Boyfriend writer Maureen O’Grady. ‘I remember Mick and Brian going round the office, trying to cadge a sandwich from our packed lunches. They were obviously ravenous.’
When it came to getting television exposure, the ‘Ernie’ Eric Easton proved to have his uses. Among Easton’s more conventional clients was Brian Matthew, the host of British television’s only significant pop performance show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Transmitted in black-and-white early each Saturday evening from ABC-TV’s Birmingham studios, it featured all the top British and American chart names lip-synching their latest releases and, in this era of only two UK television channels, pulled in a weekly audience of around 13 million. Six months earlier, while Mick, Brian and Keith were shivering at Edith Grove, the show had broken the Beatles nationally, sending their second single, ‘Please Please Me’, straight to No. 1.
Easton spoke to Brian Matthew, and as a result Thank Your Lucky Stars booked the Stones to perform ‘Come On’ on the show to be recorded on Sunday 7 July and aired nationally the following Saturday. The catch was that they would have to look like a conventional beat group, in matching black-and-white-checked bumfreezer jackets with black velvet collars, black trousers, white shirts and Slim Jim ties. Mick and Keith protested in outrage to Andrew Oldham their supposed soul mate, but to Oldham exposure on this scale far outweighed a little compromising clobber; if they wanted the spot, they must wear the check.
Thus did Britain receive its first sight of Mick Jagger – far down a bill headlined by the teenage songstress Helen Shapiro and introduced by Brian Matthew in the kind of cut-glass BBC tones that traditionally commentated on Royal funerals or Test cricket matches. By today’s standards, it was hardly a provocative début. The Stones in their little checked jackets appeared on a two-sided set formed of giant playing cards, with Mick standing on a low plinth to the rear of Brian and Bill, and Keith and Charlie shown in profile. Merely lip-synching ‘Come On’ removed any involvement Mick had ever felt with the song, reducing him to the same tailor’s-dummy inanimation as the other four. For nobodies like these, the track was not allowed even its pitifully short ninety-second running time, prematurely fading amid the (artificially induced) screams of the studio audience.
It was long enough to cause horror and revulsion in living rooms the length and breadth of Britain. Earlier that year, a nation that immemorially equated masculinity – and heterosexuality – with the army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’ had been appalled by the sight of four young Liverpudlians with hair slabbed over their foreheads like the twenties Hollywood vamp Louise Brooks. Closer inspection, however, had revealed the Beatles’ mop-tops to be no more than that, leaving their necks and ears as neatly shorn as any regimental sergeant major could wish. But here were pop musicians whose hair burst through those last frontiers of decorum and hygiene, curling over ears and brushing shirt collars; here in particular was a vocalist (if one could call him that), the blatant effeminacy of whose coiffure carried on into his marginally twitching torso and unsmiling, obscurely ungracious face.
Out there, of course, nobody knew who he was: almost no band members’ names were yet known but John, Paul, George and Ringo. The telephone calls that flooded ABC-TV’s switchboard were to protest about the ‘scruffy’ group who had disfigured Thank Your Lucky Stars, and to urge the producers never to invite them back.
Nonetheless, ‘Come On’ proved a rallying cry in vain. After the muddle over the recording, Decca seemed to lose interest, spending almost nothing on promotion and publicity. Reviews in the music trades were no more than tepid. ‘A bluesy, commercial group who could make the charts in a small way,’ commented Record Mirror. Writing as guest reviewer in Melody Maker, fellow singer Craig Douglas was scathing about Mick’s vocal: ‘Very ordinary. I can’t hear a word [he’s] saying. If there were a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere.’
The national press failed to pick up on the Thank Your Lucky Stars furore and would have ignored the Stones altogether but for the unflagging generosity of the manager they had just rudely dumped. Giorgio Gomelsky knew the tabloid Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop correspondent, Patrick Doncaster, and persuaded Doncaster to devote his whole column to the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young band named the Yardbirds whom Gomelsky had found to take his ungrateful protégés’ place. The good turn backfired when the beer brewery that owned the Station Hotel read of the wild rites jeopardising its mirror-lined function room and evicted the Crawdaddy forthwith.
In 1963, the procedure for getting a single into the Top 20 charts published by the half-dozen trades, and broadcast each Sunday on the BBC Light Programme and Radio Luxembourg, was quite straightforward. The listings were based on sales by a selection of retailers throughout the country. Undercover teams would tour these key outlets and buy up the 10,000 or so copies needed to push a record into the charts’ lower reaches and to pole position on radio playlists. At that point, in most cases, public interest kicked in and it continued the climb unaided.
Decca being unwilling to activate this mechanism for ‘Come On’, Andrew Oldham had no choice but to do it himself. To help him, he brought in a young freelance promotion man named Tony Calder who had worked on the Beatles’ first single, ‘Love Me Do’, and who, as a former Decca employee, knew the whole hyping routine backwards. But even with Calder’s bulk-buying teams behind it, ‘Come On’ could be winched no higher than No. 20 on the New Musical Express’s chart. To blues-unaware pop-record buyers, the name ‘Rolling Stones’, with its echo of schoolroom proverbs, struck almost as bizarre a note as ‘the Beatles’ initially had. And Mick’s over-accelerated vocal removed the crucial element of danceability.
He was never to make that mistake again.
OUTSIDE OF MUSIC, Chrissie Shrimpton occupied Mick’s whole attention. They had been going out for more than six months and were now ‘going steady’, in this era the recognised preliminary to engagement and marriage – though steady was the least appropriate word for their relationship.
Chrissie, now eighteen, had left secretarial college and moved up to London, ostensibly to work but really to provide a place where she and Mick could find some privacy. With her friend Liz Gribben, she lived in a succession of bed-sitting-rooms which, though ‘very grim’, were still more conducive to romance than 102 Edith Grove. However, she still could not break it to her parents that she was sleeping with Mick; on their visits home to Buckinghamshire to stay with Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, they continued virtuously to occupy separate bedrooms.
One of Chrissie’s first secretarial jobs was at Fletcher & Newman’s piano warehouse in Covent Garden – at that time still the scene of a raucous daily fruit and vegetable market. ‘It was only a few minutes’ walk from the London School of Economics and Mick would come and meet me for lunch. One day as we walked through the market, a stallholder threw a cabbage at his head and shouted, “You ugly fucker.”’
In fact, he hugely enjoyed showing Chrissie off to his fellow LSE students, not only as a breathtakingly beautiful ‘bird’ but as sister of the famous model Jean. Only Matthew Evans, the future publisher and peer, went out with anyone on the same level, a girl named Elizabeth Mead. ‘That amused Mick,’ Evans recalls. ‘We used to sit and discuss how similar Elizabeth and Chrissie were.’
When Andrew Oldham first saw Mick, in the passageway to the Crawdaddy Club, he was with Chrissie and the pair were having a furious argument – this only a couple of weeks after they met. ‘We were always together,’ Chrissie says, ‘and we rowed all the time. He’d get upset about something that hadn’t been my fault – like I’d been meant to turn up at a gig and then the bouncers wouldn’t let me in. I always stood up for myself, so we did have huge rows. They’d often end in physical fights – though we never hurt each other. Mick would cry a lot. We both would cry a lot.’
Though she found him ‘a sweet, loving person’, his evolution from club blues singer to pop star began to create a barrier between them. ‘We’d be walking down the street . . . and suddenly he’d see some Stones fans. My hand would suddenly be dropped, and he’d be walking ahead on his own.’ Yet their rows were always devastatingly upsetting to him, especially when – as often happened – Chrissie screamed that she never wanted to see him again, stormed out of the house and disappeared. Peggy Shrimpton grew accustomed to late-night phone calls and Mick’s anguished voice saying, ‘Mrs Shrimpton . . . where is she?’
With the Stones now launched as a pro band, however precariously, there clearly could no longer be two members with parallel occupations. Charlie Watts must leave his job with the advertising agency Charles, Hobson & Grey, and Mick his half-finished course at LSE. In truth, his attendance at lectures was by now so erratic that Andrew Oldham’s new associate, Tony Calder, barely realised he went there at all. ‘I knew Charlie had a day job that sometimes affected his getting to gigs,’ Calder remembers. ‘But with Mick, it was never an issue.’
By all the logic of the time, it seemed pure insanity to sacrifice a course at one of the country’s finest universities – and the career that would follow – to plunge into the unstable, unsavoury, overwhelmingly proletarian world of pop. The protests Mick faced from his parents, especially his voluble, socially sensitive mother, only articulated what he himself already knew only too well: that economists and lawyers were sure of well-remunerated employment for life, while the average career for pop artists up to then had been about six months.
One afternoon, when the Stones were appearing at Ken Colyer’s club in Soho, he told Chrissie that his mind was made up and he was leaving the LSE. ‘I didn’t get the feeling that he’d agonised very much about it,’ she remembers. ‘He certainly didn’t discuss it with me – but then my opinion wouldn’t have meant that much. I do remember that it was very upsetting to his father. To his mother, too, obviously, but the way it was always expressed was that “Joe is very upset.”’
The decision became easier when it proved not irrevocable. For all his recent lack of commitment, the LSE had clearly marked him down as something special and, with its traditional broad-mindedness, was prepared to regard turning pro with the Stones as a form of sabbatical or, as we would now say, gap year. After a ‘surprisingly easy’ interview with the college registrar, he would later recall, he was allowed to walk without recrimination or financial penalty, and reassured that if things didn’t work out with the Stones he could always come back and complete his degree.
It was not the best moment to be competing for British pop fans’ attention. That rainy summer of 1963 saw the Beatles change from mere teenage idols into the objects of a national, multi-generational psychosis, ‘Beatlemania’. Their chirpy Liverpool charm a perfect antidote to the upper-class sleaze of the Profumo Affair – for now, Britain’s most lurid modern sex scandal – they dominated the headlines day after day with their wacky (but hygienic) haircuts, the shrieking hysteria of their audiences and the ‘yeah yeah yeah’ chorus of their latest and biggest-ever single, ‘She Loves You’. Politicians mentioned them in Parliament, psychologists analysed them, clerics preached sermons on them, historians found precedents for them in ancient Greece or Rome; no less an authority than the classical music critic of ‘top people’s paper’ The Times dissected the emergent songwriting talent of John Lennon and Paul McCartney with a seriousness normally devoted to Mozart and Beethoven.
For the national press, which hitherto had virtually ignored pop music and its constituency except to criticise or lampoon, the Beatles were a circulation booster like nothing ever before. As a result, Fleet Street entered into an unspoken pact to print nothing negative about them, to keep the cotton-wool ball rolling as long as possible. Before the year’s end, they would top the bill on television’s prestigious Sunday Night at the London Palladium and duck their mop-tops respectfully before Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother at the Royal Variety Show.
While the Beatles headed for the Palladium and the royal receiving line, the Rolling Stones, with only half a hit to their name, continued playing their circuit of little blues clubs, with the occasional débutante ball, for fees between £25 and £50. While the Beatles were fenced off by increasing numbers of police and security, the Stones still performed close enough to their fans for any to reach out and touch them. Among the newest of these was a Wimbledon schoolgirl named Jacqui Graham, in future life the publicity director of a major British publishing house. Fifteen-year-old Jacqui charted her developing obsession with twenty-year-old Mick in a diary that – rather like a 1960s version of Daisy Ashford’s The Young Visiters – combines eagle-eyed observation and the innocence of a bygone age:
How fab can anyone be! . . . I have just seen the Rolling Stones and they are endsville! Mick Jagger is definitely the best. Tall [sic], very, very thin, with terribly long hair he was gorgeous! Dressed in a shirt, a brown wool tie which he took off, brown cord trousers and soft squidgy chukka boots. He (or I’m pretty sure he did) kept looking at me – I was just in front of him so he couldn’t help it – & I wasn’t quite sure what to do! Keith Richard is marvellous-looking but he didn’t join in much, he only seemed human when one of his guitar-strings broke. He wore very long and tight grey trousers, shirt and black leather waistcoat. Brian Jones had lovely colour hair & was rather nice. Didn’t think much of Bill Wyman. Charlie Watts had a rather interesting face. Oh but when Mick and Keith looked at me – I’m sure they did. Must see them on Sunday. They really are good – my ears are still buzzing.
One August night when the Stones appeared at Richmond Athletic Ground – the Crawdaddy Club’s new, much-enlarged home – a production team from London’s Rediffusion TV company was there, recruiting audience members to take part in a new live Friday-evening pop show called Ready Steady Go! Its co-presenter was to be a twenty-year-old fashion journalist, and über-Mod, named Cathy McGowan, who belonged to the Stones’ regular Studio 51 following. And, after the show’s talent scouts had watched them at Richmond, they were booked for the show’s second broadcast, on 26 August.
Ready Steady Go! was a mould-breaking production, designed in every way to give a musical mould-breaker his first significant national exposure. Whereas previous TV pop shows like Drumbeat and Thank Your Lucky Stars had kept the young studio audiences firmly out of shot, this one made them integral to the action, dancing the newest go-go steps on a studio floor littered with exposed cameras and sound booms or mingling with the featured singers and bands as if they were all guests at one big party. London’s new allure was captured in the slogan flashed on-screen with the opening credits – ‘The Weekend Starts Here.’ Coincidentally, the programme was made at Rediffusion’s Kingsway headquarters, just around the corner from the London School of Economics.
The Rolling Stones on Ready Steady Go! showed Britain’s youth the real band behind that odd name and rather spiritless début single. Even though dressed in a kind of matching uniform – leather waistcoats, black trousers, white shirts and ties – and lip-synching to a backing track, they connected with their audience as instantaneously as at Richmond or on Eel Pie. Indeed, the resultant party atmosphere in the studio was a little too much even for RSG’s lenient floor managers. After the Stones’ brief spot, so many shrieking girls waited to waylay them that they couldn’t leave the building by any normal exit. Instead, Mick’s alma mater provided an escape route, across the small back courtyard Rediffusion shared with LSE and into the student bar where so recently he’d sat in his striped college scarf, discussing Russell and Keynes and making a half pint of bitter last a whole evening.
Also in accordance with the beat-group style book (rule one: take all the work you can while it’s going), the Stones were launched on a series of one-nighters at the opposite extreme from the comfortable residencies to which they were accustomed. Distance was no object, and they frequently faced round-trips of two hundred miles or more in Ian Stewart’s Volkswagen van: no joke in an era when motorways were still a rarity and even two segregated traffic lanes were an occasion. These journeys often took them up north, the Jagger family’s original homeland – not that Mick ever showed any sign of nostalgia – through redbrick towns where streets were still cobbled, factories still hummed, coal pit-head wheels still turned and long-haired Londoners were gawped at like just-landed aliens.
The gig might be at a cinema, a theatre, a Victorian town hall or corn exchange; one was a kiddies’ party whose guests, expecting more conventional entertainment, pelted them with cream buns. The Britain of 1963 had no fast-food outlets but fish-and-chip shops and Wimpy hamburger bars: but for these and Chinese and Indian restaurants, a certain ever-hungry mouth would have seen little action the livelong night. Local promoters who had booked the Stones sight unseen reacted with varying degrees of incredulity and horror at what turned up. After one show to a near-empty hall in the industrial back-of-beyond, the promoter docked them their entire fee for being ‘too noisy’, then saw them off the premises with the help of a ferocious Alsatian guard dog and wearing boxing gloves for good measure.
At the beginning, Mick and Keith still saw themselves as missionaries, preaching R&B to the unenlightened as they had dedicated themselves to doing back in Dartford. They discovered, however, that dozens of other bands around the circuit, especially northern ones, had undergone the same conversion and felt the same proselytising zeal. The difference was that, while the others played only Chuck Berry’s ‘Roll Over Beethoven’, the Stones knew Berry’s entire œuvre. Mick observed, too, that northern bands in particular felt a common affinity with old-fashioned music-hall comedy and, following the Beatles’ example, ‘turned into vaudeville entertainers onstage’. That was a trap he was determined never to fall into. Graham Nash from the Hollies, the north’s second most successful band, couldn’t help admiring these unsmiling southerners’ refusal to conform to type: ‘They didn’t seem to be copying anybody – and they didn’t give a fuck.’
The word that increasingly went ahead of them, based solely on the length of their hair, was dirty. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mick was utterly fastidious about personal cleanliness, and one of those fortunate people who do not show dirt; Brian washed his eye-obscuring blond helmet so religiously each day that the others nicknamed him ‘Mister Shampoo’; Bill Wyman as a small boy used to do his mother’s housework for her; the Hornsey Art School student Gillian Wilson, who had a fling with Charlie Watts, remembers his underwear being cleaner than hers. They had now given up any semblance of a stage uniform and went onstage in the same Carnaby motley in which they’d arrived at the theatre. Though all of them were clothes-mad and cutting-edge fashionable, this revolutionary break with tradition added a reek of BO to the implied dandruff and head lice. Their manager took every opportunity to circulate the double slander, adding a third for good measure: ‘They don’t wash much and they aren’t all that keen on clothes. They don’t play nice-mannered music, but raw and masculine. People keep asking me if they’re morons . . .’
For Oldham had finally seen with the clarity of a divine vision where to take them – and, in particular, Mick. As the Beatles progressively won over the older generation and the establishment, and were unconditionally adulated by Fleet Street, many of their original young fans were feeling a sense of letdown. Where was the excitement – the rebellion – in liking the same band your parents or even grandparents did? He would therefore turn the Rolling Stones into anti-Beatles; the scowling flip side of the coin Brian Epstein was minting like a modern Midas. It was a double paradox, since the angelic Fab Four had a decidedly sleazy past in Hamburg’s red-light district, whereas the bad boys Oldham now proposed to create were utterly blameless, none more than their vocalist.
Indeed, the Jagger image at this point could well have gone in the very opposite direction. Early press stories on the Stones still gave his Christian name as Mike, resurrecting that bourgeois aura of Sunday-morning pubs, sports cars and driving gloves. There was also PR mileage to be extracted from his intellectual achievements. Until now, only one British pop star, Mike Sarne, had experienced further education (coincidentally also at London University).
As Tony Calder remembers, Mick was profoundly uneasy over the master plan that Oldham outlined to him – and not just for its gross misrepresentation of his character. ‘He said he’d bide his time and see if it worked out or not. But there were so many times when he’d turn up at the office, Andrew would call for two cups of tea and shut the door. He’d be in there alone with Mick for a couple of hours doing one thing – building up his confidence. Self-esteem? He didn’t have any. He was a wimp.’
A famous colour clip of the Stones onstage at the ABC cinema, Hull, filmed by one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, shows them playing ‘Around and Around’ for the umpteenth time, against a barrage of maniacal screams. They seem to be doing remarkably little to encourage this uproar: Bill playing bass in his odd vertical style, Keith lost in his chords, Brian almost street-mime motionless, with an odd new electric guitar shaped like an Elizabethan lute. Mick, in his familiar matelot-striped shirt – and almost glowing with cleanliness – seems least involved of all. Even in this paean to the liberating joy of music, his well-moistened lips barely stir, giving the words an edge of sarcasm (‘Rose outa my seat . . . I just had to daynce . . .’) reflected in his veiled eyes and occasional flamenco-style hand clap. In the guitar solo he does a stiff-legged dance with head thrust forward and posterior stuck out, ironically rather like the vaudeville ‘eccentric’ style, then still preserved by such veterans as Max Wall and Nat Jackley.
Since the onset of Beatlemania, young girls at pop shows had screamed dementedly whatever acts were served up to them, male or female, but until now had always stayed in their seats. With Rolling Stones concerts came a new development: they attacked the stage. These were the days when security at British pop concerts consisted of theatre staff checking tickets at the door, and the only barrier between performers and audience as a rule was an empty orchestra pit. During a performance in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 6 September, half a dozen demented girls began trying to tear off the band’s clothes and grabbing for souvenirs. (Bill later discovered a valuable ring had been wrenched off his finger.) Mick’s athleticism proved an unexpected asset: as one invader rushed at him, he swept her up in a fireman’s lift, carried her offstage, then returned to continue the number.
The next day brought a 200-mile drive from coastal Suffolk to Aberystwyth, north Wales, then another of 150 miles south to Birmingham for a second appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the bill was Craig Douglas, who had panned Mick’s ‘Come On’ vocal in Melody Maker. Before becoming a pop singer, Douglas had been a milkman on the Isle of Wight; in revenge for his hostile review – and with unendearing social snobbery – the Stones dumped a cluster of empty milk bottles outside his dressing room door.
On 15 September they were opening in a show called The Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall, with the Beatles as top of the bill. Five months earlier, Mick, Keith and Brian had walked into the Albert Hall anonymously, disguised as Beatle roadies; now the Chelsea boot was well and truly on the other foot. The Stones’ support-band spot unleashed such pandemonium that John Lennon and Paul McCartney were seen peeping through the curtains, nervous of being upstaged for the first time since their Hamburg days. Boyfriend magazine was unequivocal in naming the night’s real stars: ‘Just one shake of [that] overgrown hair is enough to make every girl in the audience scream with tingling excitement.’
Two weeks later, the Stones set out on their first national package tour, as footnotes to a bill headed by three legendary American names, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. As a mark of respect to their third-biggest R&B hero – and perhaps a tacit admission that their singer was not as brazenly confident as he seemed – the band dropped all Bo Diddley songs from their stage act during the month-long tour. In fact, as well as being flattered by their reverence, Diddley was impressed by their musicianship, later using Bill and Charlie as his rhythm section on a BBC radio appearance. For Mick, the main benefit was seeing Diddley’s virtuoso sideman, Jerome Green, play lollipop-shaped maracas, two in each hand. From now on, he, too, shook maracas in the faster numbers, albeit only one per hand – and even that with a hint of irony.
Touring meant staying in hotels, which for such a bottom-of-the-bill act meant grim establishments with dirty net curtains, malodorous carpets and electricity coin meters in the bedrooms, all in all not much different from home back in Chelsea. It emerged, however, that one Edith Grove flatmate was not having to endure it. As well as his leader’s £5-per-week premium, Brian had secretly arranged with Eric Easton to stay in a better class of hotel than the others.
Before long, the tour’s American headliners were facing the Beatles’ recent problem at the Royal Albert Hall. Little Richard remained oblivious, entertaining his audience with an extended striptease, then going for a ten-minute walkabout through the auditorium with a forty-strong police guard. But the Everly Brothers’ tender harmonies became increasingly drowned out by chants of ‘We want the Stones!’ In the end, the emcee had to go out and plead for Mick’s heroes of yesteryear to be given a break.
By autumn, the Stones’ word-of-mouth reputation was sufficient for them to be voted Britain’s sixth most popular band in Melody Maker’s annual readers’ poll. Yet their future on record was anything but secure. Unless their inexperienced young manager–record producer could concoct a far bigger hit single than ‘Come On’, Decca would be looking for excuses to circumvent their contract and dump them. And the stock of likely hits in the R&B canon was shrinking all the time as other bands and solo singers dipped into it.
After a flick through R&B’s back catalogue, Andrew Oldham chose an overt novelty number, Leiber and Stoller’s ‘Poison Ivy’, originally recorded by the Coasters with voices teetering on the edge of goonery. As the B-side, weirdly, he prescribed another quasi-comedy song, Benny Spellman’s ‘Fortune Teller’. For a time Mick seemed headed for exactly the vaudeville kind of pop he so despised. However, a recording session with Decca’s in-house producer, Michael Barclay, on 15 July revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choice. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously cancelled them.
Salvation came unexpectedly while Oldham and the Stones were at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 Club in Soho, trying out other potential A-sides and getting nowhere. Escaping outside for a breath of air, Oldham chanced to run into John Lennon and Paul McCartney, fresh from receiving awards as Show-Business Personalities of the Year at the Savoy Hotel. Told of the Stones’ problem, John and Paul good-naturedly offered a song of theirs called ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, so new that it wasn’t even quite finished. The duo accompanied Oldham back to Studio 51 and demo’d a Liverpudlian R&B pastiche that their rivals could cover without shame or self-compromise. Their gift thankfully accepted, they added the song’s final touches then and there, making it all look absurdly easy.
On 7 October the Stones went straight into Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn (just down the road from LSE), and recorded a version of ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ needing virtually no production and only a couple of takes. The B-side was a cobbled-up instrumental, based on Booker T. and the MG’s’ ‘Green Onions’ and entitled ‘Stoned’ – to most British ears, still only something that happened to adulterous women in the Bible.
‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was released on 1 November, three weeks before the Beatles’ own version, sung by Ringo Starr, appeared on their landmark second album, With the Beatles. While the northerners could not stop themselves adding harmony and humour, the Stones’ treatment was raw and basic, just Mick’s voice in alternation with Brian’s molten slide guitar; not so much sly romantic proposition as barefaced sexual attack. ‘Another group trying their chart luck with a Lennon-McCartney composition,’ patronised the New Musical Express. ‘Fuzzy and undisciplined . . . complete chaos,’ sniffed Disc. Indiscipline and chaos seemed to be just what Britain’s record buyers had been waiting for, and the single went straight to No. 12.
At year’s end, BBC television launched a new weekly music show called Top of the Pops, based solely on the week’s chart placings, that would run without significant change of format for the next forty years. The Stones featured in the very first programme, their vocalist adding a further twist to that un-Beatly Beatles song still rudely disrupting the Top 20. Motionless and in profile, buttoned into a tab collar as high as a Regency hunting stock, he seemed as detached and preoccupied as the lyric was hot and urgent. The downcast eyes and irritably drooping mouth suggested something rather tedious being spelled out to an unseen listener who was either slow-witted or deaf. To the studio audience surging round him, the clear message came straight from his recently aborted version of ‘Poison Ivy’: ‘You can look but you better not touch . . .’
Everyone knew now it was Mick, not Mike, and that – even though they might have attended the same seat of learning – he was nothing whatsoever like Mike Sarne.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
‘“What a Cheeky Little Yob,” I Thought to Myself ’ (#ulink_db359765-a521-55ab-b109-4673cf68a030)
Saturday 14th December, 1963: Beatles at [Wimbledon] Palais, Stones at [the Baths] Epsom. Went down to Palais but saw nothing but police & more police. Got to Epsom early & when we saw ‘admission by ticket only’ thought we might as well go home. Stayed for a little while chatting to 2 mods however & then that darling DARLING doorman let us in. Got right to the front & wow! Leaning up on the stage gazing into the face of Mick and he looked at me – he did! Keith glanced once, Charlie never & I don’t know about Brian & Ghost [Bill Wyman]. Mick kind of looks at you in a funny way – shy? impersonal? sexy? cold? I don’t know but it’s certainly cool & calm . . . as usual [he] commanded all the attention. He was in a pink shirt, navy trousers, Cuban [heeled] Chelsea’s & brown Chelsea cord waistcoat with black onyx cufflinks. He looked thin, cool and haggard. His hair hung in long ginger waves & his sharp sideways glances down at the audience (no – me!) made him look even more fright [crossed out] aloof and somehow witchlike . . . After the Stones had gone off, the curtains were drawn across but we got underneath them & watched the Stones standing around at the side, talking . . . Couldn’t get backstage worst luck!
– from Jacqui Graham’s diary
Chelsea had lost Mick, for now anyway. Under Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton’s management, the Rolling Stones received around £20 each per week, the same as most top British soccer players of that era. The three Edith Grove flatmates therefore could move on from the squalid pad where they had frozen and half starved – but also shared an idealism and camaraderie that were never to be revived.
Treading his usual fine line between sex addict and sex offender, Brian Jones had impregnated yet another teenage girlfriend. The mother of this, his fourth child by different partners – due to arrive in summer 1964 – was a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser named Linda Lawrence. In a surprising reversal of his usual tactics, Brian did not instantly desert Linda but showed every sign of standing by her and the baby and, still more surprisingly, went to live with her at her family’s council house in Windsor, Berkshire, where Mick had first wooed Chrissie Shrimpton. So fond of this prospective son-in-law did the Lawrences become that they named the house ‘Rolling Stone’ in Brian’s honour and also gave board and lodging to a white goat he bought as a pet and liked to take out for walks through Windsor on a lead.
It went without saying that Mick and Keith would continue living together. However, treading his usual fine line between authority figure and honorary bandmate, Andrew Oldham put forward the idea, or instruction, that he should join them. Svengali needed to be as close as possible to the Trilby he was moulding day by day.
Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove – though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.
