The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

скачать книгу бесплатно


* * *

The bright spot of their journey was to be their recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago. Oldham had been determined not to waste this precious opportunity on run-of-the-mill r & b material, and had succeeded in finding the Stones a first-class soul song to record at Chess as their next single. The song, It’s All Over Now, had already been a minor hit for its composer Bobby Womack and his group the Valentinos. The publishing rights, Oldham learned, were controlled for Womack by his business manager, a New York accountant named Allen Klein.

Chicago was all but poisoned for the Stones by the spectacle of themselves on the Hollywood Palace TV show, recorded a week previously. Even after doing the show, they had not realized the extent to which they had been just fodder for Dean Martin’s boozy jokes. Jagger was particularly outraged that they should have been set up as stooges, and at once telephoned Eric Easton in London to scream at Easton for having booked the spot. In fact, as Oldham said, the Stones probably gained fans as a result of Martin’s behaviour.

Next day, they arrived at Chess Studios, on South Michigan Boulevard. As they walked in, so did a black man with a chubby, kindly face and a small Oriental moustache. ‘It was Muddy Waters,’ says Bill Wyman. ‘He helped us carry our gear inside.’

Two formative days passed at Chess, under the supervision of Ron Malo, a house engineer responsible for some of the greatest work ever recorded by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. What Malo had done in the Fifties for Berry and Diddley, he now did for the Rolling Stones, cutting back their native looseness and disorder, focusing tight on the essentials which they themselves still could not see. Under Malo, for the first time, they played, not as a scrabbly rhythm section but in the broken-up style developed by blues masters who had sung and played lead guitar simultaneously. The first few seconds of It’s All Over Now, with Keith Richard’s bass tremolo growling like the bark of a large dog against Brian Jones’s country pizzicato, represents the start of the Stones as, above all, an irresistible compulsion to dance.

No less formative was the mood of the song itself: a lyric about losing love, sung by Mick Jagger with a triumphant and delighted sneer, released at last from the tedious affair and its tiresome ‘half-assed games’. Perfectly in counterpoint with the fang-sharp sound, that callow voice grimaced its poison-pen phrases, uncertain – as it would ever be – whether it spoke as victor or victim. The mimic was becoming his own man at last.

Muddy Waters dropped in frequently to talk to the Stones during their session. So did two more of their great Chicago blues idols, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy. The bluesmen were naturally full of benevolence towards the young Britishers who had given their songs a new lease of life. Later on, even the great Chuck Berry came in to inspect them. Rock ’n’ roll’s poet laureate, though not best known for charity towards young musicians, thawed considerably in the light of the composer’s royalties the Stones were earning him. He praised their version of Reelin’ and Rockin’, stayed to watch them work on an EP track, Down the Road Apiece, and invited them to visit his nearby estate, Berry Park.

The session concluded, the Stones euphorically called a press conference outside the Chess building on South Michigan Avenue. Several dozen screaming girls turned the occasion into a riot which ended only after a senior Chicago police officer strode up to the Stones and snarled, ‘Get outta here or I’ll lock up the whole goddamned bunch.’

They had been back on tour only a day or two when Phil Spector, in New York, picked up his office telephone to hear Mick Jagger’s voice, speaking from a hotel room in Hershey, Pennsylvania. ‘Everything here,’ Jagger moaned, ‘is fuckin’ brown!’ The Stones that night were performing in a town named, and largely decorated, in honour of its principal product, the Hershey chocolate bar. ‘The phones are brown,’ Jagger wailed, ‘the rooms are brown, even the fuckin’ streets are brown …’

The tour’s last weary leg through Pennsylvania and New York State was interrupted by some cheering news from home. In Record Mirror’s annual popularity poll, the Stones had pipped the Beatles as Top British Group. Mick Jagger had been named Top British Group Member. The Beatles held their lead only in the Year’s Best Single category, She Loves You winning narrowly from the Stones’ Not Fade Away.

With the release of another US single, Tell Me, and strategic plugging of their ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’ album, the Stones, at long last, seemed to be penetrating the consciousness of teenage America. The tour ended in New York on a definite high note with two concerts at Carnegie Hall, scene of the Beatles’ triumph six months earlier. Both concerts were promoted by Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the influential New York disc jockey whom John Lennon had first introduced to the Stones (largely to get the egregious deejay off the Beatles long-suffering backs). Thanks to Murray the K’s promotion, the Carnegie Hall concerts were each an immediate sell-out. At the first, Stones fans started running wild before a note had been played. The police forbade the Stones to close the show as planned: instead they were forced to appear halfway and escape during the first interval.

Their return to London, just as America was waking up to them, struck converts like Murray the K as perversely ill-advised. The truth was that Oldham could not afford to keep them, or himself, in New York a minute longer. Oldham had already calculated that, for the whole tour, he and the Stones would receive earnings of approximately ten shillings (50p) each. The story for the British press was that the Stones were returning – £1,500 out of pocket in air fares – to honour a booking, made months earlier when they weren’t famous, to play at the annual commemoration ball of Magdalen College, Oxford.

At Heathrow, they were met by a hundred girls and a bevy of newspapermen whose interest was now something more than perfunctory. To one reporter, Keith ingenuously showed the handgun he had bought in America, he said ‘as easily as candy floss’. Mick Jagger was met by his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton and on enquiries about how he felt at having been placed sixth in Record Mirror’s Best Dressed Pop Star list. ‘It’s a joke,’ Jagger replied, speaking in a cockney accent once again.

It’s All Over Now was released in Britain on June 26. Advance orders of 150,000 copies put it instantly into every trade paper’s Top Ten. Within a week it had risen through the Merseybeat barrier, to challenge and then displace that summer’s big surprise hit single, the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun.

The organizers of the Magdalen College ball were therefore not a little astonished when, halfway through the night’s open-air junketings, it was reported that the Stones had turned up as arranged and were bringing in their equipment. Even the Beatles, generally honourable about bookings, had, the previous year, accepted £500 to play at Christ’s College May Ball and had then failed to appear. The Stones’ fee had likewise been settled months earlier when they were still only semi-famous. None the less – for reasons never fully apparent – they insisted they must keep their word. It doubtless weighed with them that a major blues artist, Howlin’ Wolf, was also due to appear at the Magdalen event, and that they ought not to give ground to its other main pop attraction, Freddie and the Dreamers.

The writer John Heilpern was one of Oxford University’s few dedicated Stones fans who purposely crossed the floodlit college lawns, uproarious with patrician cries and steel-band music, to the marquee where the Stones were setting up their equipment in a mood of evident disenchantment. ‘They were all deeply pissed off about having to play,’ Heilpern remembers. ‘They’d been booked to do an hour, so they managed to spend at least the first forty minutes tuning up. Brian Jones already looked zonked out of his mind. There was a sense of vague leadership from Mick Jagger. When he started, everyone did. At first, they didn’t try; they were hissed and booed, which obviously delighted them. Then, all of a sudden, they all snapped into it.’

It was a moment, for Heilpern and many others, signifying the start of what would one day be termed ‘the counterculture’ but what, that night at Oxford, seemed more a question of class turned upside down. The surly, middle-class boys, playing American r & b, were patently a new aristocracy, just as the dinner-jacketed throng, jigging up and down before them, would become part of a willing new proletariat. The noise spread, through the canvas walls, across grass strewn with debs and duckboards, drowning the steel band. More and more young men in tailcoats, clutching girlfriends and champagne bottles, came in to hear the Stones, and dance.

PART TWO (#ulink_b0ebf4dc-b19e-5f77-8163-3fcc12946163)

FIVE (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

‘MY CLIENT HAS NO FLEAS’ (#ud6910e98-c912-5b43-9cd1-8f861586d1bd)

Until the 1960s, the Berkshire industrial town of Reading was one of the quietest, most boring places to be found in the entire British Isles. Its only notable architectural feature was the grim Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated and wrote his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol