The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

The first spark of originality in the group was struck by spontaneous interaction between Brian on his Gibson guitar and Keith on his Hofner. They would play, not as lead and subordinate rhythm, but as a duet, matching one another solo for solo, merging in a natural two-amp harmony, one zigzagging down the bass notes as the other climbed into treble register. This emergence of a ‘two-guitar band’ seemed an infinitely more exciting prospect than the skinny LSE student who sat about patiently, awaiting his chance to sing. Even then, in the trio of Mick, Keith and Brian, the joining of two inexorably left the third one out in the cold.

The sound they made could be heard in the main pub and, one night, fell on appreciative ears. Later, in the bar, a middle-aged man came up and introduced himself by visiting card as ‘David Norris, Artists’ Representative, Cockfosters’. He told them he’d liked what he’d heard, and could get them some engagements in ballrooms and dance halls – perhaps even at military bases on the Continent – provided they got themselves some decent instruments and stage suits. Mr Norris, for his pains, was firmly snubbed. All five had vowed they would never sell out their music to the commercial world, even if it meant they never got a single engagement.

Alexis Korner remained the only real star in the blues firmament. And, in the summer of 1962, it seemed as if Korner’s meteoric career was about to leave Mick Jagger behind. Blues Incorporated had been offered their first nationwide broadcast, on the BBC Light Programme’s Jazz Club. There were, however, two drawbacks. The first was that the BBC appearance, on July 12, clashed with Korner’s regular Thursday booking at the Marquee. The second was that the BBC, with typical frugality, would pay for five musicians only. Korner must therefore shed the most dispensable one in his line-up, the vocalist.

Jagger did not mind being dropped. He was, on the contrary, anxious for Korner to seize this chance to bring blues to a national audience. It was arranged that the Marquee date should be filled by Korner’s original Ealing vocalist, Long John Baldry. For an intermission band, the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton, agreed to give a chance to the group which had been rehearsing at the Bricklayer’s Arms, though with so little hope it did not yet have a name.

The engagement was sufficiently important to merit a paragraph in the July 11 issue of Jazz News.

Mick Jagger, R & B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig.

Called ‘The Rolling Stones’ (‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock and roll outfit,’ says Mick), the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), ‘Stew’ (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).

The name was chosen by Brian, in honour of the Muddy Waters song Rolling Stone. Ian Stewart, for one, objected strongly to it. ‘The Rolling Stones – I said it was terrible! It sounded like the name of an Irish show band, or something that ought to be playing at the Savoy.’ Mick Avory, the drummer they had recruited, felt equally dubious, but accepted – as the others did – that, since Brian had formed the group, he could call it what he liked.

So on July 12, 1962, with a playing order written on a page of Ian Stewart’s pocket diary, the six Rolling Stones faced their first audience. Mick wore a sweater, Brian a cord jacket and Keith a skimpy dark suit which left his shirt collar and cuffs exposed like the surplice of the angelic choirboy he formerly had been. Behind them, Dick Taylor, Ian Stewart and Mick Avory glanced at one another ominously. ‘You could hear people saying “Rolling Stones … Rolling Stones …”’ Dick Taylor remembers, ‘“Ah … rock ’n’ roll, are they …” Before we’d played a note, we could feel the hostility.’

Britain in 1962 was a nation still predominantly interested in recovering from 1939. The only generation that mattered was the one which had survived the war and its scarcely less uncomfortable aftermath, inspired by a common belief that one day butter would cease to be rationed; that coupons would no longer be needed to buy clothing or chocolate. These miracles had come to pass – and more. In British homes, as in American ones seen on the cinema screen, there were now TV sets, washing machines, garages containing cars with fins. There were transistor radios, cocktail cabinets and ‘genuine champagne perry’. Harold Macmillan, prime minister since the Suez Crisis, could be believed when he told the country, ‘You’ve never had it so good.’ Largely through that powerful superstition, government remained firmly in the hands of an elderly Edwardian whose winged white hair and drooping moustache gave him the appearance of a dilapidated but complacent sea lion.

The decade which still had not defined itself in 1962 was actually starting to form in 1955, with early sightings of that problematical new species, the ‘teenager’. It was a species, however, which for the next five years caused little profound effect on British life. For it sprang almost wholly from what was still dismissively called the ‘working’ class. Rock ’n’ roll music, skiffle, long hair and coffee bars were condemned all in one as a deviation of the lower proletariat. ‘Pop’, the rock sound watered down, figured not much higher in the social register. Its most successful British exponent, Cliff Richard, owed his survival to having exchanged the grubby aura of the Rocker for that of a conventional show-business personality.

Change was coming, even now, in a battered van making its way to London from the unregarded northern city of Liverpool. In June 1962, the head of an obscure record label, Parlophone, gave an audition to four young Liverpool musicians who had, up to then, been rejected by all the major companies. Their first record – chosen with difficulty from an eccentric and uncommercial repertoire – was not released until the following October. The record was called Love Me Do; the group was the Beatles.

For the Rolling Stones, in October 1962, the most pressing question was whether they could survive another week. It scarcely mattered that their debut at the Marquee Club had gone better than any of them dared hope. To the club’s jazz and pure blues crowd, merely the sight of Dick Taylor’s bass guitar had been reason enough to detest them. But there had also been a contingent of Mods, up on the town from Wembley or Shepherd’s Bush, who loved Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley as much as Keith did, and – being Mods – had conclusively drowned out the jazz fans’ disapproval. That endeared the new group still less to Harold Pendleton, who ran the Marquee on behalf of the National Jazz League, and loudly disapproved of their music, their clothes, their attitude and – as it seemed to Ian Stewart – their perversely ill-chosen name.

The only further bookings Harold Pendleton would offer them were as dogsbodies, filling in for other bands that had not turned up. Often, after booking them, Pendleton would telephone Brian Jones and say he didn’t want them after all. On the nights when they did make it to the Marquee stage, Pendleton would indulge in sarcasm at their expense. Keith Richards was a frequent target, gawky and shy, with his skinny black suit and pimple-chapped face, playing the Chuck Berry guitar riffs that Pendleton so despised.

The slights they continually received from the jazz faction led Brian Jones, in his capacity as leader, to compose a long, erudite letter to Jazz News, complaining of ‘the pseudo-intellectual snobbery that unfortunately contaminates the Jazz scene … It must be apparent,’ Brian continued weightily, ‘that Rock ’n’ Roll has a far greater affinity for r & b than the latter has for Jazz, insofar that Rock is a direct corruption of Rhythm and Blues whereas Jazz is Negro music on a different plane, intellectually higher but emotionally less intense …’

Harold Pendleton had some cause for complaint. The Rolling Stones, though top-heavy with guitarists and their non-playing singer, could persuade no drummer to throw in his lot with them. While anyone could buy a guitar and strum at it, a drummer, with his vast capital investment of fifty pounds or more, conferred instant professionalism and permanence. Mick Avory, on that first Marquee night, had sat in only as a favour. All the drummers they had tried since then were from jazz bands, unable or unwilling to find the r & b backbeat. The only exception was Charlie Watts, Blues Incorporated’s part-time drummer, who sat in also with a Soho band called Blues by Six. Charlie, despite his jazz background and long, glum face, always gave them just what they wanted. But he seemed altogether too well set up and prosperous to consider joining them for good. ‘We were all a bit in awe of Charlie then,’ Keith says. ‘We thought he was much too expensive for us.’

Brian Jones’s double life as a reluctant family man and fancy-free London bachelor took on a new complexity, late that summer, when he, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards rented a flat together in Edith Grove, Chelsea. The three shared two rooms halfway up a shabby house racked by the noise of lorries thundering through to Fulham Road. The flat was squalid even by London bedsitter standards, with its damp and peeling wallpaper, grubby furniture, filthy curtains and naked light bulbs that functioned at the behest of a single, iron-clad electric coin meter. The lavatory was communal, on the staircase to the flat above. Those who visited it after dark did so with a supply of newspaper, matches and a candle. Keith spoke of buying a revolver, so that he could sit there and shoot at the rats.

The minuscule rent was paid by the pooling of Mick Jagger’s student grant with Brian’s wage as a shop assistant at Whiteley’s. Keith – apart from one brief stint as a Christmas relief postman – contrived to remain unencumbered by any job but playing his guitar. His contribution was a supply of food parcels sent up from Dartford by his mother. Doris Richards would also descend on the flat once a week and take away mounds of dirty underwear and shirts to wash.

To help with the rent, they found a fourth tenant – a young printer whom they knew only as ‘Phelge’. ‘He was the sort of madman you’d meet around Chelsea then,’ Keith says. ‘You’d walk in through the front door and there would be Phelge, standing at the top of the stairs with his underpants on his head.’

For Mick, the Edith Grove flat was a chance to break free of the constraints of home and his mother’s reproaches for the opportunities he was wasting. He remained, even so, primarily an economics student, tacitly acknowledging that he must one day give up blues singing to work for his degree. Up all night at the Marquee, and Chelsea’s perpetual bottle parties, he would still go off next morning to the London School of Economics in Aldwych. His father’s waning influence could not altogether remove the habit of exercise. The pale, languid Chelsea layabout still turned out at regular intervals to play soccer in the LSE second eleven.

Keith, jobless and almost penniless, spent most of his days at the flat with no other company than the coin meter and his guitar. Brian, at the outset, still had a job at Whiteley’s and, it was presumed, an alternative home with Pat Andrews and the baby. The Whiteley’s job vanished when Brian was caught pilfering from the cash register. The link with Pat and the baby was similarly broken – although his friend, Dick Hattrell, remained a faithful follower. After that, Brian also had nothing to do, and would sit around the Edith Grove flat all day with Keith, practising their guitar duets, working out on the harmonica he had almost mastered and plotting where their next meal was coming from. He taught Keith the trick, learned in his Oxford wanderings, of creeping into neighbours’ flats on the morning after bottle parties, collecting all the empty beer bottles and returning them to a pub or off-licence to collect the twopence deposits.

A tiny trickle of money came from dates arranged by Brian at venues he had already reconnoitred on his travels outside London. The venues were mostly weekend dances, put on in church halls or suburban sports pavilions. The fee – seldom more than a couple of pounds a night – would be received by Brian, then shared among the other five. They did not know, since Brian thought it not worth mentioning, that he had invariably obtained an extra payment for himself as their leader and – he would also say – their manager and booking agent. Brian, in those days, was always ahead by a tiny, surreptitious percentage.

One of their regular dates was at St Mary’s Parish Hall, in Hotheley Road, Richmond, playing in alternation with a group from Shepherd’s Bush called the High Numbers, later transfigured into The Who. Another was in a dilapidated wooden dance hall on Eel Pie Island in the River Thames at Twickenham, crossed by a footbridge that levied a sixpenny toll. They would go there by public transport, by bus or by tube, accompanied by Dick Hattrell, whom Brian seemed able to persuade to do almost anything. Hattrell acted as their road manager until he left London for a stint of part-time soldiering in the Territorial Army.

At the Marquee, meanwhile, Harold Pendleton’s sarcasm continued unabated. Even Cyril Davis, who had liked the Stones at first, now joined the jazzers against them, brusquely sacking them from a bill on which his band was headlining. No one in those days knew Keith Richards well enough to recognize the warning signs. One evening, late that autumn, after carefully considering something Harold Pendleton had said to him, Keith picked up his guitar like a caveman’s club and swung it at Pendleton’s head.

After that, there could be no more Marquee dates for a while. There was even less hope at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 or Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club, where they had had one disastrous flop. The Rolling Stones therefore decided to do what Alexis Korner had when snobbery and prejudice were threatening to extinguish Blues Incorporated. They set out to start a club and a following of their own.

The club was a peripatetic one, convened on Saturday nights or Sunday afternoons in a succession of pubs in Sutton, Richmond, Putney and Twickenham. Each date along the meridian would display the same laconic poster: ‘Rhythm and Blues with the Rollin’ Stones [sic]. Admission 4s.’ Fortunately, Ian Stewart owned a van as well as his racing bike, and could chauffeur them and their equipment to pubs in places even further distant, like Windsor, Guildford and Maidenhead. Stew proved a sterling hand at unloading guitar cases and amps, even though he might not himself always get the chance to play. ‘If there was no piano, I’d just settle down in the van and go to sleep. I did have to be up the next morning to go to work at ICI.’

The lack of a permanent drummer continued to be vexing. Mick Avory, who sat in with them most often, had little natural feel for r & b. Carlo Little, from Cyril Davies’s group, whom they liked much better, had more pressing extra-curricular work with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages. Unable to approach Charlie Watts, they reluctantly settled for a boy called Tony Chapman, who had played in several semi-pro rock ’n’ roll groups. But Chapman, a commercial traveller, wasn’t always reliable and was frequently out of town on business trips.

Just before Christmas came another setback. Dick Taylor, their bass player, announced he was quitting to begin a course at the Royal College of Art. The others asked Tony Chapman if he knew any bass guitarists looking for work. Chapman said he might know someone, an ex-colleague of his in a conventional pop group called the Cliftons. It was arranged that Tony Chapman’s friend should come for an audition with Brian, Keith and Mick at their local Chelsea pub, the Wetherby Arms, one cold, snowy day in December.

Bill Perks had always hated his family name, and wished he could change it to something more in keeping with his nature and ambitions. His grandfather Perks, he knew, had done the same thing fifty years earlier when fighting illegally as a bare-fist pugilist. ‘And when he got older and used to breed racing pigeons, he still went on using another name,’ the metamorphosed Bill Wyman says. ‘He always raced his pigeons under the name of Jackson.’

The son born to William and Kathleen Perks on October 24, 1936, showed little sign of his ultimate destiny for almost the first quarter of his life. As a child, he was thoughtful, steady, quiet, rather pious. His mother remembers how he would spend hours in his bedroom, in Blenheim Road, Penge, just reading the Bible. At Beckenham Grammar School he was proficient in art and mathematics and a useful athlete. With his precise mind and prodigious memory, he would have been natural university material if born just one decade later. Then, amid Britain’s post-war and class-ridden chill, the best a bright working-class boy could hope for was respectable clerkship. His father, a bricklayer out of doors in all weathers, was delighted to think Bill might get a comfortable office job.

His first employment was with the City Tote, a firm of multiple bookmakers in London’s West End. He was then called up for two years’ service as a clerk in the Royal Air Force. Some of that time he spent in West Germany, at an RAF station near Bremen, where he heard rock ’n’ roll music for the first time over the American Forces Network. He remembers, too, what a liking he developed for a fellow serviceman called Lee Wyman, not realizing it was the surname that really appealed to him.

He already thought of himself as Bill Wyman when, demobbed from the RAF, he took a job as storekeeper with an engineering firm in Streatham, south London. He organized the stores with fastidious efficiency, cataloguing the stock and recording its level by a neat system of dockets and coloured strings. In 1959, he married a girl named Diane whom he had met at a dance in Beckenham, and moved with her into a flat above a Penge garage.

His first guitar, bought during his RAF service, was a Spanish model, so badly made he could hardly hold down the strings. He played with scratch groups, in and out of the service, for the next year or two. ‘I was never much of a guitarist. I was no good at playing chords. That’s why I switched to bass as soon as they started coming in.’

In December 1962 he was already semi-professional, playing bass regularly in the Cliftons and, occasionally, in stage shows presented by the great pop impresario Larry Parnes. He had risen as high as backing Parnes’s discovery Dickie Pride, a tiny youth then billed as ‘Britain’s Little Richard’. ‘We had to wear stage make-up … little suits all the same. Horrible, they were. You always knew they’d been passed on to you from someone else.’

It was, therefore, with no great hope or expectation that Bill Wyman walked into the Wetherby Arms in Chelsea and beheld the group with whom Tony Chapman had arranged for him to audition. His first thought – tinged with working-class resentment – was that they looked off-puttingly ‘bohemian’ and ‘arty’. They, on their side, felt no instant rapport with the hollow-cheeked, unsmiling newcomer, seven years older than Mick and Keith, and whose reserved manner suggested the superiority of a bass player who had once accompanied Dickie Pride.

What made him desirable was the sheer magnificence of his equipment. With his bass guitar, he hauled in two enormous black and gold amplifiers. Even the one he airily called his ‘spare’ was a Vox 850, bigger than Keith Richards had ever seen outside a shop window. Plugging in his bass, he indicated the 850 and said, ‘One of you can put your guitar through that.’

‘I wasn’t sure – I thought I’d just try things out with them for a bit,’ Bill says, ‘even though I did think they looked too bohemian. Not long afterwards, they decided they wanted to get rid of Tony Chapman as drummer and bring in Charlie Watts. Tony came to me and said, “Well, that’s it, Bill. We can form a new group of our own now.” I said, ‘No – I think I’m all right where I am.” I think I made a wise decision.

Initially, it seemed far from wise. Bill Wyman’s recruitment to ‘the Rollin’ Stones’ coincided with heavy snowfalls, which, as they grew steadily worse, prevented them from getting to all but a scattered few of their suburban dates. At those they did manage to reach, attendance was disastrously reduced. Even their large Eel Pie Island following seemed reluctant to brave the toll bridge over the fast-freezing Thames. Wyman, perched on his amplifier rim, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, regretted his folly in exchanging Larry Parnes’s stage shows for arty types like this, who did not even stand up to play, but sat on chairs or stools in a semicircle behind their head-shaking vocalist.

The winter, it turned out, was Britain’s worst for more than a hundred years. The entire country became submerged in a featureless white plain, swept by unremittingly savage cold which turned milk to creamy granite and made beer explode spontaneously in its bottles. From December to mid-February, the weather was Britain’s sole talking point – apart from a brief scandal, reported from Carlisle just after Christmas, when a group called the Beatles was ejected from a Young Conservatives dance for the impossibly tasteless offence of arriving in black leather jackets.

At Edith Grove, the water pipes were now all frozen solid: Mick, Keith, Brian and Phelge could not wash or pull the lavatory chain. What puny room heaters they had barely took the edge off the biting cold. Bill Wyman, the settled married man, could hardly believe the squalor of the conditions. ‘They weren’t cooking – just living on pork pies and cups of instant coffee,’ Bill says. ‘I used to get through pounds, just feeding that electric meter of theirs.’

Their diet was mainly potatoes and eggs, which Brian and Keith would pilfer from Fulham Road grocery shops, and stale bread scavenged from the debris of parties given by other tenants in the house. Bill Wyman, when he dropped by, would bring food and cigarettes as well as shillings for their ravenous coin meter. Once a week, Ian Stewart would hand them a supply of six-shilling (30p) luncheon vouchers, bought up at a shilling each from weight-conscious secretaries in his office at ICI.

On many days, Keith remembers, it would not be worthwhile even getting out of bed. ‘We hadn’t got any gigs. Nothing to do. We’d spend hours at a time just making faces at each other. Brian was always the best at that. There was a particularly horrible one he could do by pulling his eyes down at the corners and sticking his fingers up his nostrils. He called it “doing a Nanker”.’ Even when every pipe in the flat was frozen, Brian somehow managed to wash his hair every day, and find a shilling somewhere to blow-dry it into its elaborate cresting wave. He seemed, for all his fastidiousness, the most adept of them all at living rough. Even Keith did not have Brian’s sublime assurance, as each frozen midday dawned outside their filthy, iced-up windows, that the wherewithal of keeping warm and not starving could always be borrowed, begged or stolen.

An unexpected windfall was the reappearance of Dick Hattrell, fresh from Territorial Army camp, his £80 gratuity in his pocket, and willing as ever to do anything Brian told him. Within a week, Brian had annexed every penny of Hattrell’s money for meals, drinks, even a brand-new guitar. On Brian’s orders, Hattrell took off his army greatcoat and handed it to the shivering Keith. He would obediently follow them to their local hamburger bar, hand them more money and, at Brian’s command, stand patiently in the snow until they came out again. When Dick Hattrell’s money ran out, so did his welcome at the flat. One night as he lay in bed, Brian threatened to electrocute him with a guitar lead. Hattrell fled into the snow, terrified, wearing only his underpants. ‘He wouldn’t come back for an hour, he was so scared of Brian,’ Keith says. ‘When they finally did bring him in, he’d turned blue.’

The new year 1963 found Britain still snowbound, with villages, towns, even whole counties cut off, most transport paralysed, all sport fixtures cancelled, a whole nation gone to ground and huddled round the fitful blue warmth of its television screen. On January 12, the Saturday night pop show Thank Your Lucky Stars provided its snowed-in bumper audience with the spectacle of the Beatles, in the mop-top haircuts and crew-necked suits, miming their new record Please Please Me, not with scowls and prissy dance steps like Cliff Richard’s Shadows, but jigging about uninhibitedly, grinning at the camera and each other. To viewers over twenty-one, the interlude seemed no more than faintly comic. But on a million British teenagers, pent up by so much more than cold, that zesty ‘Whoa yeah’ chorus had an altogether different effect. By February 16, Please Please Me was number one on the Melody Maker’s Top Twenty chart.