The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

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.’

* * *

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.