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From its opening London date, the tour headed out into the dim, dark hemisphere beyond Watford which, in pre-motorway Britain, was referred to with vague foreboding as ‘the North’. ‘A few miles out, and it was all new to me,’ Keith says. ‘Up to then, I’d never been further north than north London.’
Derby, Nottingham, Sheffield, Birmingham, Manchester, Bradford, Newcastle and twenty other cities – ancient and important and even beautiful cities, as yet undespoiled by planners – all clotted indistinguishably into the Stones’ first experience of the road. Shows, twice nightly, in some huge old art deco circuit cinema, a Gaumont, a Regal or Odeon. Dark alleys, scratched stage doors and freezing backstairs passages. Dressing-rooms littered with beer bottles and old fish and chip wrappings. Hooks for coats, squalid lavatories, naked light bulbs. A peep through dusty plush curtains into the buzzing, twilit auditorium. Managers and under-managers, short-haired and nylon-shirted, hovering in anxious hostility. Sound systems as a rule no more elaborate than the same two stand microphones used in last Christmas’s pantomime. The curtains parting on shrieks as from damned souls, and plush darkness bejewelled with green Exit signs, smudged here and there by the white crossbelts of the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Cinema managers, fearful of riots and torn seats, had looked sufficiently askance at pop groups who invaded their backstage region in mock sharkskin suits and ruffle-fronted evening shirts. ‘When we used to walk in,’ Bill Wyman says, ‘some manager guy would look at us and say, “Go on, get down to your dressing room. You’ve only got ten minutes to get changed for the show.” We’d say, “We’re ready to go onstage now. We’re ten minutes early.’”
The initiation was also into cities still walled in Victorian darkness, where the only restaurants open late were Indian or Chinese; where hotels smelled of cabbage and beer slops, heat in the rooms was available only by coin meter, and bedclothes passed on a rich legacy of fleas, ticks and scabies. For most of the tour – thanks to another private deal he had done as self-styled leader of the group – Brian managed to stay in slightly more expensive hotels than the others.
On Sunday, October 13, at the Odeon Cinema, Liverpool, Little Richard, the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Julie Grant and the Rolling Stones performed to a barely half-filled house. That same night, the Beatles topped the bill of ATV’s variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium after a day in which their fans had kept the Palladium virtually under siege. An audience of fifteen million watched the four little figures in halter-neck suits, with wide grins and bouncing-clean hair, who in that moment ceased to be a teenage fad and became a national treasure.
It was with some nervousness, later on, that the Stones played the Cavern Club in Mathew Street, the Beatles’ now celebrated Liverpool home. They need not have worried. The Cavern crowd, urged on by Bob Wooler, the resident disc jockey, gave the visitors a tumultuous welcome. Later, they sampled the pleasures of an all-night city, first at Allan Williams’s Blue Angel Club, then with some local girls who concluded the entertainment by inviting them home to breakfast.
On October 16, it was announced that the Beatles would take part in the 1963 Royal Command Variety Show in the presence of the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon. Fleet Street had found the ideal antidote to Profumo, Keeler, that whole summer of upper-class sordidness. With the encouragement of the press, Britain gulped down the Beatles like a reviving tonic. Even those who found their music loud and their hair ludicrous could not help but be charmed by their freshness and cheekiness, the sharp-witted yet amiable back-answers – uttered mainly by John Lennon – which seemed to reassert the essential honesty and integrity of the working man.
The Rolling Stones, like everyone else on the Everly Brothers package tour, grew even more conscious that the centre of the world was far from the Gaumont Cinema, Bradford. Nor did a visit from their nineteen-year-old co-manager greatly bolster up their self-esteem. Andrew Loog Oldham, having breezed in, made perfunctory enquiries and looked aghast at the encircling grimness, wished them good luck and disappeared again.
Oldham went straight to Liverpool, and the more promising company of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, both simultaneously visiting what was still their home base. The three afterwards drove back down to London. ‘It was a very weird journey,’ Oldham remembers. ‘I don’t know if we were drunk or stoned, or both. John and Paul started talking about getting themselves disfigured so that the fans could never recognize them and chase them any more. They were talking about all the different ways their faces might be mutilated. “We could get caught in a fire,” Paul said. “We could have special rubber masks made, like skin …”’
Oldham’s main worry on the Stones’ behalf was finding them something to record as a follow-up to Come On. He had ransacked the entire catalogue of the American Chess and Checker r & b labels for something which was neither too well known in its original version or covered already by the proliferation of new British blues groups. It was an unsuccessful search which made Andrew Loog Oldham wish even more fervently, as he sat in John and Paul’s black-windowed limousine, that the Rolling Stones could knock off their own hit songs with the same nonchalant ease as the Beatles.
The final choice, agreed with Decca’s Dick Rowe, was a cover version of the Coasters’ semi-comical Poison Ivy and, for the B-side, Benny Spellman’s Fortune Teller. At Rowe’s suggestion, the session was entrusted to one of Decca’s younger staff producers, Michael Barclay. ‘It was a disaster,’ Dick Rowe remembered. ‘The Stones thought Mike was a fuddy-duddy; he thought they were mad.’ The result was a version of Poison Ivy which Decca and the Stones hated in almost equal measure. The single appeared on Decca’s schedule of new releases but was then cancelled.
A further long discussion-cum-rehearsal at the Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street produced nothing else that Andrew Loog Oldham considered remotely promising. Exasperated, he left the Stones to their tinkering and arguing and started mooching round the Soho streets like Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo, hoping – as that inspirational film idol had hoped – that something or other might turn up.
Miraculously enough, something did. A London taxi stopped next to Oldham, and out jumped John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles, that day, had been at the Dorchester Hotel, receiving awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain. John and Paul were now on the loose together, looking for more excitement.
‘The dialogue,’ Oldham says, ‘really did go like this, “’Ello, Andy. You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?” “Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.” “Oh – we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can record that if yer like.”’
The song was I Wanna Be Your Man, one of a clutch of new Lennon-McCartney numbers written for their forthcoming second album With The Beatles. Susceptible to fashion as ever, and natural mimics, they had produced their own two-minute blast of rhythm and blues. As it was still not quite finished, John and Paul went back with Oldham to Studio 51 and put the final touches to it while the Stones waited.
This casual gift from pop music’s hottest songwriting team provided the lethargic Stones with a rush of adrenaline. It required only an hour or two at Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn, to produce their own Chicago Blues interpretation of I Wanna Be Your Man, replacing winsome Beatles’ harmonics with the belligerent simplicity of Mick Jagger’s voice and Brian Jones’s slide guitar. For a B-side, it was enough to tape a twelve-bar blues instrumental, hastily ad-libbed, as was its title: Stoned. Plagiarism as it was (of Booker T’s Green Onions), this counted as an original composition. Andrew Loog Oldham set up a publishing company to handle such collective efforts, its proceeds to be divided between the five Stones and himself. The company was called Nanker Phelge Music, combining Brian Jones’s word for a grotesque facial contortion with the name of their Edith Grove flatmate, Jimmy Phelge, the youth who at unexpected moments used to wear his underpants on his head.
I Wanna Be Your Man was released on November 1. The Stones were still on tour with the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, playing two shows at the Odeon Cinema, Rochester. Two nights later, the tour finally wound itself up at the Odeon, Hammersmith. Here at last the Stones were on home territory. The show’s compere, Bob Bain, had to plead with the audience to stop shouting, ‘We want the Stones’ and instead shout, ‘We Want the Everlys.’
To the rest of Britain, however, even big-name groups like the Searchers and the Shadows hardly impinged on an obsession born in the trickery of Fleet Street but now rampant beyond any newspaper’s manipulation. On November 4, the Beatles captivated the Royal Command Variety Show by suggesting that a blue-blooded audience containing both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret should either clap or ‘rattle yer jewellery’. On November 22, their second album, With the Beatles, launched them, looking like soulful art students, into the upper as well as lower social sphere, selling enough copies on advance orders to push the whole album into the Top Twenty singles chart. In early December, the New Musical Express chart showed yet another Lennon-McCartney song, I Wanna Be Your Man by the Rolling Stones, at number thirteen. For influential critics like Brian Matthew, more interest lay in the song’s composers than in the group which had been lucky enough to record it. ‘Do you realize,’ Brian Matthew repeatedly asked his BBC radio audience, ‘how many songs in the current Top Ten are written by, if not sung by, the Beatles?’
FOUR (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)
‘BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)
We owe this intimate backstage visit to one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, in happier days devoted exclusively to sport and royalty but now, in 1964, bravely attempting to fathom an uproar more raucous, to its elderly editors, than the cry of their own screen emblem, the Pathé cockerel.
We follow as the camera tracks uncertainly down a dark passageway, round a corner and through a suddenly opened door into the Stones’ dressing room. It is, however clumsy, an attempt at cinéma vérité – a pop group on tour, caught between performances. The camera settles first on Keith Richard, leaning forward, a cigarette clamped between his lips, to fasten a shirt collar as high as a Regency beau’s hunting stock. Beyond Keith, Brian Jones, in black coat and snow-white jeans, holds up his lozenge-shaped guitar, the better to show the complex chord he is shaping. His hair is now peroxide blond, an aureole of metallic gold covering his eyes, almost encircling his face. The camera moves to Mick Jagger, in a matelot-striped jersey, then it moves on somewhat hastily. His face wears an expression not wholly welcoming; besides, he isn’t holding a guitar.
The stage sequence filmed by Pathé shows how undeveloped Jagger still was as a performer or personality. The song is the Stones’ old club standby, Chuck Berry’s Around and Around. Jagger sings it, hunched around the old-fashioned stand-mike, his face turned diffidently into one matelot-striped shoulder. His lips open just enough to moisten themselves. His eyes seem cloudily preoccupied. At intervals, he claps his hands flamenco-style above his head. Beside him, Keith Richard jigs around, wearing a happy, rather dizzy grin. Far on the other side, with heaped gold hair shutting out his eyes, Brian Jones stands, motionlessly provocative. The camera cuts away to girls with Beatle fringes, alternately screaming and stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths. Now we see the full stage, empty but for the Stones, their vestigial equipment and a red-curtained backdrop. Jagger leaves the microphone and – the only word is – waddles like a duck shaking water from its tail.
On January 6, they were out on tour again, in the George Cooper Organization’s ‘Group Scene 1964’ show. By now they were big enough to merit equal top billing with the Ronettes, an American girl group, highly successful on Phil Spector’s Philles record label. Spector had already sent his acolyte Andrew Loog Oldham a telegram, sternly warning ‘Leave my girls alone.’ As both individual Stones and Ronettes have since corroborated, that warning was to no avail.
The combination of svelte, sinuous black girls and snarling, scruffy white boys attracted much interest in a music press jaded equally by Christmas indulgence and Beatle overkill. In New Musical Express under a heading ‘Girls Scream at Stones, Boys at Ronnettes’. Andy Gray praised the show’s ‘vocal volume and body action’. Gray’s review – which set the seal of box-office success on the tour – is revealing as a sample both of 1964 pop journalism and also the pitifully short performances given by even top-of-the-bill attractions:
Two packed houses greeted with cheers, screams and scarf-waving the local lads who have made good – the Rolling Stones. Fever-pitch excitement met compere Al Paige’s announcement of them, and they tore into their act with Girls, followed by Come On. This group certainly is different – members wear what they like, from shirts to leather jackets, but they have long hair in common.
Lead singer Mick Jagger whips out a harmonica occasionally and brews up more excitement while the three guitars and drums throb away in back. Hey Mona was another R & B compeller before a quiet number, very appealingly sung by Brian Jones [sic], You Better Move On. Back to the torrid stuff for the last two numbers, Roll Over, Beethoven and I Wanna Be Your Man, taking the act to encore applause …
Decca’s release of an EP – extended play – record on January 17 redoubled the nightly pandemonium. The EP, with its handful of tracks and cheap picture cover, was a well-tried device for getting additional mileage from a pop act whose success did not yet warrant a full twelve- or thirteen-track LP. The Stones’ first EP was in this catchpenny tradition, offering their cancelled A-side Poison Ivy, together with versions of Chuck Berry’s Bye Bye Johnny and Berry Gordy’s much imitated Money. The exception was an Arthur Alexander song, You Better Move On, sung by Mick Jagger with care and almost without affectation. You Better Move On proved popular enough to take the entire EP into the Top Ten singles chart barely a week after its release.
The Stones’ third single, it was already decided, would be a cover version of the Buddy Holly song Not Fade Away – which Mick Jagger had first heard with Dick Taylor at Woolwich Granada back in 1957 – but drastically rearranged by cross-breeding with an equally important stylistic source. On to the mild, reflective Holly song, Keith Richard had grafted guitar chords played in the shuffling, stop-start Bo Diddley beat. ‘To me,’ Andrew Loog Oldham says, ‘when Keith sat in the corner and came up with those chords, that was really the first song the Stones ever wrote.’ The result was played at twice the speed of the Holly original, flashed across, each second verse, by a whinny from Brian Jones’s harmonica.
The taping of Not Fade Away, at Regent Sound, towards the end of January 1964, was an occasion that would have horrified conventional A & R men like Dick Rowe. Oldham and the Stones had hit on the ideal way of escaping interference from Rowe or anyone else from Decca. They recorded by night, not even starting until long after all A & R men were safely back in their suburban mock-Georgian villas, tucked up between their nylon fitted sheets.
Not Fade Away was taped as the culmination of a drunken studio party at which the Stones and Oldham were joined by Phil Spector and two members of the Hollies, Alan Clarke and Graham Nash. Later on, the American singer Gene Pitney also dropped in, bringing with him an outsize bottle of brandy. The final Not Fade Away take featured the two Hollies, appropriately, on back-up vocals and Phil Spector shaking the maracas of which the rhythm track is mainly composed. Spector also cobbled up a B-side song called Little by Little, a pastiche of Jimmy Reed’s Shame, Shame, Shame, dashing it off in minutes, with Mick Jagger’s help, in the corridor. Little by Little was recorded as a simple jam session of guitar, harmonica, piano – played by Gene Pitney – and a Jagger vocal, like the maracas, audibly plastered. At frequent intervals, the session disintegrated into tomfoolery, with Jagger rudely mimicking Sir Edward Lewis, the Decca chairman, and Phil Spector ad-libbing an obscene recitative under the title Andrew’s Blues.
On February 4, at New York’s Kennedy airport, the Beatles emerged from their aircraft to behold a 5,000-strong crowd, keening and howling in the grip of that European virus which the New York Post had predicted would definitely not spread to America. Their appearance, four nights later, on NBC-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show – for a knockdown fee of $3,500 – was watched by an estimated 70 million, or 60 per cent of the American TV audience.
The Beatles’ conquest of America took them out of the orbit of mere pop. In Britain, those who had once damned and denounced them now commended them as an invaluable addition to the export drive. Their name took on almost a talismanic quality, securing newspaper headlines impartially for anyone who invoked it. Members of Parliament, peers of the realm, archbishops, even royalty itself, now talked and talked about the Beatles. To their teenage audience this was, of course, the most gratifying turnabout from last year’s parental ridicule. Just the same, to find one’s idols shared by one’s mother, and even one’s grandmother, made pop seem suddenly rather tame.
No one’s mother or grandmother liked the single, released on February 27 and now climbing up the Top Twenty, spurred on by alternate kicks of delight and hostility. The Stones’ late-night carousings with the Hollies and Phil Spector had produced a noise which sold itself, both as instant hit material and instant anti-heroism, from its first chaotic, maraca-shaking chord. Phil Spector’s presence is widely supposed to have brought about the Stones’ vastly improved cohesion in Not Fade Away – guitars sharper, harmonica more savage, the general onslaught resembling a miniature wall of sound.
The national press was quick to spot the new fad – or, in other words, to take up Andrew Loog Oldham’s suggested story angle. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom. But the Rolling Stones – five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair – are not worried what mums think … For now that the Beatles have registered with all age groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’
Last year’s Beatle crowds, it was becoming clear, had behaved moderately in comparison with those who followed the new voice of the teens. The Stones’ third tour, early in February, played each night to an uproar, not merely of screaming girls corralled in cinema seats, but also of spontaneous battles between Mods and their sartorial foes, the Rockers. Other groups to whom this happened would hug their precious guitars to them and hurry from the stage. But the Rolling Stones played on. Brian Jones in particular loved to see trouble starting and to encourage it subtly by brief, goading shakes of his hair and tambourine. It was largely from this trick of Brian’s that Mick Jagger learned how small, tantalizing body movements could tease up conventional screams to a banshee-like howl. He, too, began to experiment, slipping off his Cecil Gee Italian jacket and dangling it on his forefinger like a stripper’s G-string.
The Stones’ television appearances, on Lucky Stars and Ready, Steady, Go, had precipitated a blizzard of hate mail. ‘The whole lot of you,’ wrote a typical correspondent, ‘should be given a good bath, then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country …’
One feature of those TV appearances, above all, had caused adult Britain to recoil with almost speechless revulsion. The Beatles, for all their mop-top fringes, had always been assiduously barbered and groomed. The Stones’ hair, its length, its volume, its wild lack of shape, made the Beatles’ look decorously short by comparison. Not since the early Victorian age had young British men been seen with hair that hung down their necks and curled over their shirt collars, half obliterating their eyes and ears. To a nation whose collective memory of military life was still strong, the Stones’ hair signified almost rabid uncleanliness. And, indeed, the voice of adult Britain rang out like so many sergeant majors. The president of the National Federation of Hairdressers, offering to give the next number one pop group a free haircut – and, by implication, a disinfecting and de-lousing – added: ‘The Rolling Stones are the worst. One of them looks as though he has got a yellow feather duster on his head.’ Brian Jones was deeply offended, especially since he nowadays washed his newly golden hair on average twice each day and was known within the Stones as Mister Shampoo.
All who attacked the Stones fondly imagined themselves to be part of a process that must ultimately consign the ugly little upstarts to ear-burning oblivion. A great many worthy citizens might have held their peace if they had realized what Andrew Loog Oldham did by early 1964: that the more ferociously grown-ups attacked and derided the Stones, the more their teenage fans would love and support them.
Coverage of the Stones from spring 1964 onwards testifies to Oldham’s artful success in making their name synonymous with surliness, squalor, rebellion and menace. Newspaper reporters then were usually middle-aged, baffled by pop music and only too glad of the phrases which Oldham provided. Almost every story began in the same way: ‘They are called the Ugliest Group in Britain …’ Other stories described the Stones’ habit, when exasperated by pressmen’s questions, of sticking their fingers up their noses and dragging down their eyes in a collective version of Brian Jones’s ‘nanker’ grimace. Perhaps Oldham’s greatest thematic coup was a headline in Melody Maker: WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The words mutated into what became almost a national catchphrase whenever the Stones appeared on television. ‘Would you let your daughter marry one?’ people said to each other, or, ‘Mothers turn pale …’
To the fans, they were presented in the mode of Elvis Presley a decade previously – as rebels who were nice boys when you got to know them. No less an authority than Jimmy Savile confided to his pop column audience in the People newspaper that ‘they’re a great team for having a laugh, and dress very clean and smart when they relax’. Oldham ensured that they did everything that pop fans expected, posing as lurid colour pin-ups for teen magazines like Rave and Fabulous 208, grouped in uniform leather waistcoats or jumping up together in zany Beatle style. Their clothes – Brian Jones’s especially – were discussed at inordinate length. Like every other group, they filled in their ‘Life Lines’ for New Musical Express, tempering sarcasm with what was usual, including the ritual white lie about their ages. Mick Jagger (‘born 1944’) gave his Favourite Colour as ‘red, blue, yellow, green, pink, black, white’, and his Favourite Clothes as ‘my father’s’. Keith Richard gave his Year of Birth as ‘1944’, his Parents’ Names as ‘Boris and Dirt’, his Favourite Actor as ‘Harold Wilson’, his Miscellaneous Dislikes as ‘headaches, corns, pimples, gangrene’. Brian Jones (‘born 1944’) gave his Sister’s Name as ‘Hashish’ and his Biggest Career Break as ‘break from parents’. Though Bill Wyman subtracted the largest amount from his age – five years – he admitted the existence of his wife, Diane, and his four-year-old son, Steven. Only Charlie Watts did not lie about his age or his Hobbies: ‘collecting antique firearms and modelling in plaster’.
The ‘voice of the teens’ no longer needed their manager to whip up notoriety for them. On March 27, under a headline BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR, the Daily Mirror reported that eleven pupils at a boys’ school in Coventry had been suspended for imitating the Stones’ hairstyle. The headmaster had refused to reinstate them until they returned to school with hair ‘cut neatly, like the Beatles’.’
By April 1964, they had spent so many consecutive weeks on tour that when Bill Wyman finally went home, his dog mistook him for a burglar and tried to bite him.
Bill had moved with his wife and son from their flat in Penge to a modest house in Farnborough. He was still conspicuously the older man of the group, weighing the pleasures of stardom against the need to support a family and pay off a mortgage. That was only just possible on the wage each of the Stones drew from Eric Easton, pending Decca’s first payout of royalties – which, their contract now revealed, might not be for up to a year after the actual record sales. When Bill drove home to Farnborough, he did so in the mood of an overworked commercial traveller, minus commission.
Mick, Keith and Brian had left the Edith Grove flat and gone separate ways which, at the time, seemed dictated by Brian’s eternally complicated love life. He now wanted nothing to do with Pat Andrews and baby Julian, being deeply involved with a pretty young model named Linda Lawrence. Within a matter of only months, the inevitable happened. Linda, too, discovered that she was pregnant.
Mick and Keith were now sharing a flat with Andrew Loog Oldham in Willesden, North London. ‘We had two rooms between us,’ Oldham says. ‘And we had to share a bathroom. It was rather a quiet place, really. Half a bottle of wine in that flat was a big deal. And anyway, all three of us were going steady.’
Mick Jagger was ‘going steady’, in almost every sense of that winsome Fifties phrase, with Chrissie Shrimpton, seventeen-year-old younger sister of Jean Shrimpton, the famous new face of Vogue and Sunday colour supplements. A year earlier, watching the Stones play at a basement club in Maidenhead, a friend of Chrissie’s dared her to go up to Jagger and ask him to kiss her. The encounter was symbolic of the new kind of Sixties girl Chrissie Shrimpton was no less than the kind of Sixties man Jagger would shortly become. He did kiss her and afterwards invited her out to a cinema in Windsor.
Chrissie’s father was a prosperous builder in the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe, with a substantial house and farm a few miles into the country. Mr Shrimpton did not at first care at all for the thin, spotty boy his younger daughter had been bringing home after excursions to music clubs in the neighbourhood. The fact that he was an LSE student, a cut above the usual pop-group type, somewhat mollified Chrissie’s parents. And Mr Shrimpton, self-made man that he was, perceived that, under the hair and spots and sullen lips, there was an acute and calculating intelligence.
Though Chrissie did not share her sister Jean’s cool, unfussed beauty, she was in every way an improvement on Mick’s Dartford girlfriends. She was also, despite her elfin appearance, strong-minded and forthright, with a temper that Mick soon provoked by his cool and careless attitude to the obligations of a steady boyfriend. Their romance from the beginning was punctuated by fights like the one Oldham had witnessed in the Crawdaddy Club passage.
They were, even so, genuinely and often happily in love, and had made plans to marry as soon as Mick earned enough money to support a wife. This was in the days when he still planned to finish his economics degree course and choose some respectable career in business, or – he once told Chrissie’s father – perhaps even politics.
The Shrimptons, with their substantial country house, gave Mick Jagger his first social step up from suburban Dartford. Still more attractive was the connection through Chrissie’s famous sister with the world of fashionable young London – David Bailey, Mary Quant, the Sunday Times, Whipp’s and the Ad Lib. Though Chrissie herself was at secretarial college, her name sometimes appeared in magazine stories about Jean. Mick, though hardly even semi-famous, liked to imagine their romance to be the stuff of newspaper gossip columns. So he would refer to it, in tour interviews with provincial journalists, sitting on the cold back stairs of some northern Gaumont of ABC, sniffing with the faint flu that plagued all the Stones and tilting a Pepsi bottle against his lips. ‘… there’s all those lies being written about me and Chrissie Shrimpton …’
He was now palpably a being apart from the other Stones, in his cable-stitched fisherman’s sweater, his languid eyes appraising his interviewer’s cheap suit as he dismissed this or that question as ‘too much of a drag to talk about’. Offstage, he seemed the most antisocial and isolated: a rebel against his home and background, more vehement even than was Brian Jones. For weeks on end, Joe and Eva Jagger down in Dartford would hear nothing from him. Keith, by contrast, kept in touch with Doris Richards and showered her with gifts to delight her eccentric heart. Charlie Watts was a model of filial affection who presented his mother with a coffee gateau religiously every Friday night. When buying a gateau for his girlfriend also, Charlie would take the walnut from the centre of the girlfriend’s cake and put it on his mother’s, so that she’d have two walnuts.
In those days, there were people who could talk to Mick about his apparent rejection of two very pleasant, if deeply ordinary, parents. Paul McCartney had a long talk with him about it one night when the Beatles and Stones were out together. McCartney got on well with his widower father, and all old people, and was depressed by Mick’s dogged insistence, against much evidence to the contrary, that parents were ‘a drag’. Everything was ‘a drag’, it seemed, which did not supply lustre to his still undecided image.
To so natural a mimic, those early road shows as supporting attraction to big American stars were like a series of lessons in pop idol behaviour and deportment. He had watched the Everly Brothers, singing to one another like blow-waved, cooing narcissists. He had seen Little Richard, a rock ’n’ roll master whose music had always been strangely ambiguous of gender, and who now took to the stage in full make-up, complete with nail varnish. It was on the Little Richard tour that Jagger asked a Liverpool musician, Lee Curtis, how he could find out about theatrical make-up. Curtis’s brother, Joe Flannery, sat him down backstage and showed him how to apply actors’ pancake and rouge.
Chrissie Shrimpton had watched Jagger’s growing awareness of himself as something more than merely a constituent of the Stones’ democracy. To Chrissie, he still pretended it was all for a laugh; that the normal, sensible part of him stood back and laughed when little girls screamed for him. But then, if they were out together and girls waylaid them, to Chrissie’s great irritation, Mick would pretend not to be with her – even ask her to make herself scarce. The Beatles might have lost followers after the revelation that John Lennon had a wife. It was better for Mick’s image – so Andrew Loog Oldham said – if he seemed to have no steady girlfriend.
Chrissie felt slighted by Mick’s apparent willingness to let Andrew Oldham rule and dominate him – accepting, for instance, Oldham’s firm rule that girlfriends were barred when the Stones travelled on tour. Mick’s closeness with Oldham was starting to cause comment among Chrissie’s friends who saw them together in pubs, deep in purported musical strategy. Chrissie Shrimpton, in no doubt about Mick’s virility, was nettled when a female acquaintance asked, ‘At that flat, do Mick and Andrew sleep in the same bed?’
Brian Jones was now living in considerably greater comfort than his former flatmates, having managed to billet himself with the parents of his girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, at their house in Windsor. The arrangement was, of course, based on the idea that Brian’s intentions towards Linda were honourable. Before the opposite proved to be the case, the Lawrences showed him every consideration. He was allowed to use Mr Lawrence’s car whenever he wished. The name of the house was even changed, in Brian’s honour, to ‘Rolling Stone’. And he did seem infatuated with Linda. On tour, he would shower her with postcards – to ‘darlin’ Linda’ – and on his return buy her expensive presents. These included a French poodle and a goat which Brian liked to take for walks through Windsor on a lead.
His passion for Linda seemed to fade in proportion to the progress of her pregnancy. He was soon on the move again, forsaking the Lawrences’ hospitality for a small flat in Chester Street, Belgravia. The birth of a son to Linda completed the alienation process. Brian was seldom other than indifferent to the baby, to whom, in a mood of mischievous malice, he gave the same name as his child by Pat Andrews – Julian Mark. ‘He was so rude about that poor little kid,’ Shirley Arnold, the Stones’ fan club secretary, remembers. ‘He used to call it Broad Bean Head.’
As Brian tired of Linda, his indifference curdled into physical cruelty. On her visits to him in Chester Street, he would sometimes knock her about so violently that his downstairs neighbours – another group, the Pretty Things – could hear bumps and crashes through the ceiling.
To Brian all that mattered was the living of his longed-for role as a pop star. He loved being famous, being recognized, pursued and mobbed by girls – for himself now, not as a counterfeit Beatle. He loved having money, having girls, having wine, having clothes. He loved the pop-star night life at clubs like the Ad Lib, the Establishment, Whipp’s and Scotch of St James’s. He loved the shopping raids on boutiques in corduroy, button-down blocks on either side of Carnaby Street. Brian was the Stone nominated as Rave magazine’s Best-Dressed Pop Star of the Week. He thought nothing of spending £30 on one French Jacket from Cecil Gee’s, £10 on a single silk shirt from Just Men. What he did not buy he would cheerfully steal. The striped jersey, copied by boys all over Britain after Brian wore it on Ready, Steady, Go, had in fact been stolen from the wardrobe of one of his Pretty Things neighbours.
The Pathé newsreel film, shot backstage at Hull ABC cinema, shows what a masterly performer Brian was offstage as well as on. In that film, he appears choirboy innocent, concerned only with tuning his guitar. He would sit down with pimply teenage provincial journalists, the soul of amiability, speaking in that voice so soft, it was almost effeminate, his gold-fringed eyes open wide with incredulity at the attitude of the latest hotel to refuse the Stones accommodation, though – as likely as not – it would have been Brian’s own behaviour that precipitated the ban. ‘The Scotch Corner Hotel … near Darlington … ooh, that’s a terrible place. So aggressive.’
Within the Stones, in their claustrophobic tour life, Brian was invariably the source of any disagreement or disruption. They were all waiting in the wings one night when Keith went for him with both fists, shouting, ‘Where’s my chicken, you bastard?’ Brian, before the show, had filched and eaten Keith’s portion of the only food they would be likely to get that night.
Brian continued to regard himself as leader of the Rolling Stones, and as such entitled to a higher pay-out and superior hotel rooms, all the time in blissful unawareness that his secret negotiations and subterfuges were well known to the other four. In those heady early days, the others were content to take out their resentment of ‘Mr Shampoo’ in comparatively harmless ways. Mick and Keith both developed impersonations of Brian based on his physical defects – the too short legs he attempted to hide on stacked-up Cuban heels; the foreshortened neck which made his chin rest, never quite comfortably, on the roll-top of his sweater. The subtle ragging of Brian increased on a trip with Oldham to Northern Ireland to make a documentary film, directed by Peter Whitehead and entitled – in honour of its least willing participant – Charlie Is My Darling. ‘Brian really went over the top whenever Peter Whitehead’s camera was on him,’ Oldham says. ‘He’d do these long soliloquies to camera. “Why am I a musician … and who am I?” He didn’t realize the others were sending him up rotten.’
What no one could deny was the strength and drive Brian gave to the Stones by sheer musicianship. His preposterous egotism, his amoral willingness to do anyone down and filch anything, were forgotten as soon as he picked up his slide guitar or played harmonica, his cheeks filling and hollowing with the quick, light, dancing breath that kept the whole sound together.
‘Brian was a power in the Stones as long as he could pick up any instrument in the studio and get a tune out of it,’ Oldham says. ‘As soon as he stopped trying, and just played rhythm guitar, he was finished.’
The process had already begun which was to define the power structure within the Stones, binding Mick and Keith together in their unstoppable alliance and leaving Brian irretrievably out in the cold. It began on the night that Andrew Loog Oldham locked his two flatmates in the kitchen of their Willesden basement and threatened not to let them out until they had written a song.
For Oldham, it was a matter of sheer convenience. He was tired of rummaging through Chappell’s r & b song catalogue in the perpetual search for material acceptable to the Stones’ purist conscience and to Decca’s A & R department. Their two Top Twenty singles seemed to confirm what Oldham told them with ever increasing frequency: ‘You can’t be a hit group just on rhythm and blues.’ Nor – it was implicitly added – could Oldham himself become the teenage Svengali of British pop just by sorting through sheet music and listening to song pluggers’ demo tapes.
The necessity of putting together a twelve-track LP, to capitalize on their singles’ success, intensified Oldham’s fear that the Stones were in imminent danger of running out of material. Yet again, he looked enviously towards the Beatles, whose own original songs had comprised a good 50 per cent of their second, million-selling album, With The Beatles. Mick and Keith, too, though far from convinced they could concoct a song together, had been deeply impressed by the exercise in instant Lennon–McCartney composition that had produced I Wanna Be Your Man. So, when their manager locked the kitchen door on them in Willesden, they agreed, for the moment, not to kick it down.
Their first attempts at songs were ballads of a glutinous sentimentality, quite unsuitable for the Stones’ repertoire, or for anyone else’s, despite all Oldham’s bullish attempts at syndication. The first ever Jagger-Richard composition, It Should Be You, was eventually recorded by an obscure white soul artist named George Bean. Slightly more success befell another early ballad, That Girl Belongs to Yesterday, when recorded by Gene Pitney, their erstwhile session pianist. Pitney had a minor hit with the song only after drastic rearrangement to suit a piercing voice which, it was said, hit notes that only record engineers and gods could hear.
Only one Jagger-Richard song, Tell Me, was considered good enough for the album released by Decca in April 1964 (although two more tracks bore the Stones’ collective songwriting name, Phelge). Tell Me has curio value as a heavy-handed attempt by Mick and Keith to imitate the Mersey Beat sound of the numerous post-Beatle groups from Liverpool. Strange it is to hear the Stones trying to sound Beatle-ish, with tolling bass drum, minor chords and chocked-up close harmony. Mick Jagger’s ‘Whoa yeah’ rings out in patent embarrassment. Keith Richard descants him, a McCartney made of cigarette ash and Brillo pads.
The other eleven tracks are a belligerently alive memento of the Stones as an r & b band, the way they used to sound at Ken Colyer’s or the Crawdaddy. Given the limitations of a tiny, primitive studio, and severely rationed time there, they could do little else but blast out the best of their club repertoire, imagining an audience in place of Regent Sound’s egg-box walls and Oldham’s agitated eye on the clock. ‘Andrew told us we couldn’t afford retakes,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘The only time we broke was for food, or to let Mick run out and get sheet music for the words of Can I Get a Witness?’
The tracks are a squirming medley from the soul and blues bag: Chuck Berry’s Carol, Bo Diddley’s Mona, Jimmy Reed’s Honest I Do, Willie Dixon’s I Just Wanna Make Love to You. Even then, they could not find quite enough songs, and were forced to throw in a lengthy instrumental sequence vamped around the chords of Can I Get a Witness? featuring Ian Stewart on electric organ, with instrumental breaks by Keith and Brian. There is even a comedy number, Walkin’ the Dog, with Mick Jagger skilfully mimicking Rufus Thomas’s pop-eyed jokiness. The Jagger of this first album is simply a singer with the band, stepping back to allow others their turn. But in every syllable he sings, there are signs of the Jagger to come. There are signs, most powerfully, in Slim Harpo’s I’m a King Bee, a slow blues, torrid with sexual warning – ‘I’m a king bee, baby, buzzin’ round your hive’ – intoned by Jagger in a somnolent drawl, his tongue and lips playing an audible, almost visible part.
The album sleeve was an Oldham tour de force. Borrowed unashamedly from the famous black and white portrait on the cover of With The Beatles, it had one big difference – the subject of prolonged battle between Oldham and Decca’s design department. Even the epoch-making Beatles sleeve bore a title and the artists’ name. Oldham, however, insisted that the Stones’ sleeve should make no statement other than its pictorial one. The five Stones stood sidelong, glowering from shadows so intense, one could barely see the buttons on their Carnaby Street clothes. It was left to the buyer to know who they were and to peer closer at their faces for evidence of animal sullenness or poetic sensitivity. Twenty years on, the look is still modern, the nerve still coolly audacious. On the back, convention returned with song titles, photographs and a sleeve note by Oldham that began: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group. They are a way of life …’
By the day of its release, the album had sold 100,000 copies in advance orders. The Beatles – as Oldham jubilantly pointed out – had sold only 6,000 advance copies of their debut album, Please Please Me. He had further cause for glee when the Rolling Stones, climbing up the trade press album charts, displaced With The Beatles on its way down. Oldham, naturally, dismissed the fact that the Beatles album had been in the charts since the previous November. Everywhere he went, to everyone he met, he uttered the same cry of triumph: ‘The Stones have knocked the Beatles off.’
London (AP) Americans – brace yourselves.
In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting, guitar-playing Britons is on the way.
They call themselves the Rolling Stones and they’re due in New York Tuesday.
Of the Rolling Stones, one detractor has said:
‘They are dirtier and are streakier and more dishevelled than the Beatles, and in some places they’re more popular than the Beatles.’
Says Mick Jagger:
‘I hate to get up in the morning. I’m not overfond of being hungry either.’
From Keith Richard:
‘People think we’re wild and unruly. But it isn’t true. I would say that the most important thing about us is that we’re our own best friends.’
More than the others perhaps, Brian Jones likes clothes. He puts his philosophy this way:
‘It depends on what I feel like really. Sometimes I’ll wear very flamboyant clothes like this frilly shirt. Other times I’ll wear very casual stuff. I spend a lot of my free time buying stuff.’
Then he adds:
‘There’s really not much else to do.’
Misgivings about this first trip to America were by no means all on America’s side. The Stones took off from Heathrow airport on June 6 almost as unhappy about the whole idea. They knew only too well that when the Beatles had reached America four months earlier, it was on the strength of a single lodged firmly at the top of Billboard magazine’s Hot Hundred. Their own first US single, Not Fade Away, coupled with I Wanna Be Your Man, had, since its mid-May release, barely scraped into the Billboard list. Only Andrew Loog Oldham remained unperturbed. The Beatles, he reminded them, had taken two years and three flop singles to ‘break’ in America. Oldham believed he had the contacts and the nerve to make things happen a lot faster than that.
The Rolling Stones were to be launched in America, not as r & b iconoclasts but – in the subtitle of their US debut album – as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, overtly exploiting the craze for British pop which the Beatles had started and which was now too great for even the Beatles to satisfy alone. In this so-called British invasion, the Stones were following some of the groups they most despised – Herman’s Hermits, Billy J. Kramer, the Searchers. ‘Everyone we really hated seemed to be doing far better in the States than we were,’ Bill Wyman remembers. ‘They’d had a number one record, done a good tour, good TV. We’d got nothing like that to look forward to. No wonder we were depressed on the way over.’
What few newspaper reports of their coming had appeared in America all picked up from the line from Associated Press – that the Stones’ chief characteristic as a group was barely believable ‘dirtiness’. The only exception was Vogue, a magazine then under the inspired editorship of Diana Vreeland. Vogue devoted a full page to David Bailey’s portrait of Mick Jagger, looking upward from his penny-round collar with big-eyed, schoolboyish winsomeness. ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger,’ Vogue reported. ‘For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his team-mates … To women, he’s fascinating, to men a scare … quite different from the Beatles, and more terrifying.’
The scene at John F. Kennedy airport, when the Stones landed on June 2, was all too obviously an attempt to recreate the Beatles’ famous touchdown four months earlier. A crowd, numbering hundreds rather than thousands, screamed somewhat wanly as a bevy of girls came forward to greet the arrivals, accompanied by four symbolically shaggy Old English sheepdogs. The screams were over well before the Stones entered the terminal, watched by US Customs and Immigration officials whose thunderstruck revulsion suggested them to be irregular readers of Vogue. That first walk down the synthetic red carpet unloosed, on every side, a cry which would be repeated in scales of horror and derision throughout almost every state in the Union: ‘Why dontcha get ya goddamned hair cut?’
With no hit single to their credit, the Stones merited scant promotional help from their US record label, London. It was left to Andrew Loog Oldham to whip up a rather pallid semblance of the Beatles’ celebrated imprisonment inside the Plaza Hotel. The London Daily Mirror, next day, was persuaded to run a story that the Rolling Stones were barricaded inside their – much less grand – Manhattan hotel for fear of girls with nail scissors, threatening to cut off lumps of their hair. The tale was rather spoiled by an agency picture of Brian Jones strolling down Broadway in a loose silk shirt and sleeveless bolero but producing no more public reaction than any other freak encountered at noon in midtown Manhattan.
For the Stones’ American TV debut, Oldham could arrange nothing grander than the Les Crane programme, an obscure talk show transmitted in competition with the Late Late Movies, whose semi-somnabulistic host contrived such penetrating questions as ‘You guys all dress different – how come?’ ‘Because we are all different persons,’ Mick Jagger answered in the lisping public school accent he had adopted for transatlantic use.
Worse was to come in Los Angeles two nights later, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace TV show, sharing the bill with circus elephants, acrobats and rhinestone-studded cowboys. As the show was pre-recorded in separate segments, the Stones could not know that Dean Martin’s script was full of ponderous attempts to be funny at their expense. ‘Their hair isn’t long,’ quipped the crooner. ‘It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows …’ ‘Now don’t go away, everyone,’ he pleaded humorously as the show broke for commercials. ‘You wouldn’t want to leave me with these Rolling Stones, would you?’ Later, introducing a trampolinist, Martin quipped, ‘That’s the father of the Rolling Stones. He’s been trying to kill himself ever since.’
The West Coast pop fraternity, by contrast, provided good friends and still better object lessons. As protégés of Phil Spector, the Stones were received as VIPs in what was, after New York, the world’s recording capital. Spector’s advice to Oldham at the Not Fade Away session had been to get the Stones with all speed into an American recording studio. In addition to touring, they were booked for a session at RCA’s Hollywood studio and, later in Chicago, at Chess Records, the self-same studios used by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and virtually every other blues master they had ever idolized.
A good friend on the West Coast was Sonny Bono, soon to find fame with his wife as Sonny and Cher, but at this time merely an energetic music PR and promotion man. ‘Sonny met us at the airport in these way-out clothes – striped trousers and scarves and bangles,’ Oldham says. ‘The Stones had never seen clothes like that before. When Sonny opened the boot of his car, there were stacks of records in there – about a thousand. That blew our minds as well. In England, you never saw the records like that, actually on their way to the punters.’
From the West Coast, the Stones embarked on what was not so much a tour as a series of random one-nighters, booked by Eric Easton in London, often with no knowledge of the event, the promoter or the venue. Their first American performance, at San Bernardino on July 5, was in an old-fashioned pop jamboree, sharing the bill with Bobby Goldsboro, Bobby Vee and the Chiffons. Here, the omens seemed promising. They easily outplayed their competition and finished their show fronted by kneeling, crash-helmeted police to fend off hundreds of entreating arms. ‘It was a straight gas that night,’ Keith remembers. ‘The kids knew all the songs and sang along with them. Especially when we got to Route 66 – they roared out ‘San Bernardino’ like a football crowd.’
That euphoria was to be short-lived. At the Stones’ next date – a ‘teen fair’ in San Antonio, Texas – they were required to play standing on the edge of a water tank full of trained seals. In a 20,000 capacity arena, only a few hundred seats were filled. The London Daily Mirror reported that the Stones had been booed – although an acrobatic act and a performing monkey on the same bill were both called back for encores. The Mirror quoted a local seventeen-year-old’s scornful remark about the ‘New Beatles’: ‘All they’ve got that our school groups haven’t got is hair.’
In Omaha, Nebraska, the arrival of the New Beatles was taken ludicrously in earnest. The Stones were met at the airport by a squad of twelve motorcycle cops and delivered, with wailing sirens, to a 15,000-seat auditorium where approximately 600 people awaited them. ‘We couldn’t see it at the time, but all that was really doing us some good,’ Keith says. ‘In England, we’d been used to coming onstage, blasting off four numbers and going. America, that first tour, really made us work. We had to fill up the spaces somehow.’
In New York and Los Angeles, the Stones had seemed wild enough. In the American Midwest in 1964, their effect was literally traumatizing. Incredulous revulsion, on the faces of policemen, town sheriffs, hotel clerks and coffee-shop waitresses, greeted them wherever they went. ‘I’ve never been hated by so many people I’ve never met as in Nebraska in the mid-Sixties,’ Keith says. ‘Everyone looked at you with a look that could kill. You could tell they just wanted to beat the shit out of you.’
