The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

The result, even after mixing, was clearly far below even the very moderate standard of a 1963 pop single. Dick Rowe said so, and the Stones agreed. They were now as keen as Rowe that the single be recorded under experienced supervision in Decca’s own studios. There, at last, both Come On and I Want to Be Loved reached a standard satisfactory to musicians and A & R man. Then it was decided to go with the IBC version after all. The release date was fixed as June 7.

The Stones were now Decca recording artists, part of a galaxy of talent that included Little Richard, Tommy Steele, Duane Eddy and the works of Buddy Holly. For all that, while Eric Easton worked on their future career, present circumstances remained much as before. They continued playing the same few club dates for the same few pounds each – Giorgio’s Crawdaddy, the Marquee, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51. Even that former nest of folk purists was now so packed out each Sunday afternoon that girls could reach the lavatory only by letting themselves be lifted up and passed along over people’s heads.

One Sunday at Studio 51, the crush was so fierce that a girl named Shirley Arnold fainted. She came to in the band’s changing room, under the solicitous gaze of the Stones and their young manager. Shirley was a passionate blues fan, then going out with a member of another r & b group, the Downliner Sect. She got talking to Oldham who, after very few minutes, offered her the job of organizing the Stones’ embryonic fan club. ‘I said I’d give it a go. There and then, Andrew handed me about three hundred postal orders that girls had sent in as subscriptions and said, “Okay, get on with it.”’

Decca, meanwhile, prepared to launch their new acquisition with all the fire and verve of civil servants on a Friday afternoon. Decca’s promotional strategy – in common with everything else – came directly from the chairman’s office. Sir Edward Lewis did not believe in publicity. In his experience, greater profits accrued from artists whose private lives remained obscure. So it had proved in the case of Ted Heath the bandleader, whose very death had gone largely unnoticed by his sizeable American public, thus allowing Decca to go on recording the Heath band as if he were still conducting them.

As Andrew Loog Oldham knew from his months as a publicist, there was only one sure way of pushing a debut single by an unknown group into the national Top Twenty charts. The group must appear on ABC-TV’s hugely popular Saturday night pop show, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

It seemed a great stroke of luck that Brian Matthew, compere of Thank Your Lucky Stars – and of BBC Radio’s equally influential Saturday Club programme – was also one of Eric Easton’s clients. Unfortunately, Matthew had so far reacted adversely to the Stones, criticizing Mick Jagger’s vocal style and their general scruffiness. To get a booking on Thank Your Lucky Stars, the Stones must conform to the pattern for all pop groups that the Beatles had ordained. They must wear matching stage suits, and look neat and clean and amiable.

Whatever outrage the Stones felt at his proposal was subdued by their eagerness to get in front of the TV cameras. They allowed themselves to be presented to Matthew and his producer, Philip Jones, in uniform outfits whose Carnaby cuteness might better have suited a team of chorus boys. The jackets were houndstooth check bumfreezers, high-buttoning, with velvet half-collars. With the jackets went round-collar shirts, slim ties and Cuban-heeled Beatle boots. The ensemble had been financed – and chosen – by Eric Easton, and earned nods of approval from all but those compelled to button and tab themselves into it. The humiliation, though, was more than worthwhile. The Stones were booked to mime their single on Thank Your Lucky Stars on the day of its release, June 7.

The alterations did not stop there. Keith Richards, to his eternal mystification, was told to drop the ‘s’ from his surname to give it a ‘more pop sound’, like Cliff Richard. And Ian Stewart, the Stones’ piano player, chauffeur and provider of luncheon vouchers, was dropped from the stage line-up. Six in one group was too many, Andrew Loog Oldham had decided. And Stew, with his short hair, beefy arms and pugnaciously sensible face, looked ‘too normal’ for what Oldham’s mental movie camera was already starting to run.

‘It wasn’t done very nicely,’ Stewart remembered. ‘I just turned up one day to find the others had stage suits and there was no stage suit for me. None of them even mentioned it to me – apart from Brian. “You’re still a full member of the group, Stew,” he kept telling me. “You’ll still get a sixth share, I promise you.’”

The Stones, however, did not ditch Stew with the amnesiac finality with which the Beatles had ditched their first drummer, Pete Best, in favour of Ringo Starr. Oldham’s request was that Stew should stay on as their roadie, driver and packhorse and occasional back-up pianist. He agreed, though his pride was badly hurt. ‘I thought, “I can’t go back to ICI after this. I might as well stay with them and see the world.”’

Thank Your Lucky Stars on June 7, 1963, offered Britain’s teenagers the customary spectacle of records mimed by their artists, not always accurately, dwarfed by elaborate stage sets and half-drowned by pre-recorded female screams. Top of the bill was Helen Shapiro, a sixteen-year-old got up to look forty, in bouffant hair and flouncy petticoats. The Viscounts, an English close-harmony trio, sang their cover version of the American novelty hit Who Put the Bomp? Two disc jockeys, Pete Murray and Jimmy Henney, delivered judgement on new singles with all the fatuous disinterest of men in their late thirties, aided by a local girl named Janice Nicholls, whose invariable adjudication, ‘I’ll give it five’ – or, in Birmingham dialect, ‘Oi’ll give eet foive’ – had become a national catch phrase.

The Stones were bottom of the bill and, as such, merited only a simple, two-sided set, decorated with cut-out playing-card shapes. Mick stood on a low plinth, just to the rear of Brian and Bill. Keith, seated on a stool, and Charlie at his drums were seen in profile. Their spot in all lasted barely a minute and a half. As the cameras moved up and back, and pre-recorded screams raged around them, the houndstooth-checked, velvet-collared Rolling Stones tried as hard as they could, or ever would again, to be a conventional pop group.

A minute and a half proved enough for many viewers, when the recorded show was broadcast the following weekend. Afterwards, ABC-TV’s Birmingham switchboard was jammed with calls protesting that such a scruffy group had appeared on Lucky Stars, and hoping they would not be invited back.

First review of Come On in the trade press new release columns were not much better. Record Mirror, the most enthusiastic, commended ‘a bluesy, commercial group which could make the charts in a small way’. For the pop-oriented Disc and New Musical Express, Come On fell between two stools, being neither ‘Mersey Sound’ nor imported American ballad. What little radio play the single received made it sound thin and anaemic. A month after its release, the New Musical Express chart showed it at number twenty-six, only one place higher than the Beatles’ From Me to You, issued almost three months earlier.

The only significant piece of publicity, apart from Thank Your Lucky Stars, came about thanks to Giorgio Gomelsky’s good nature. Giorgio bore the Stones no ill will for his peremptory squeezing out, and had gone on plugging them enthusiastically to his friends in Fleet Street. Patrick Doncaster, the Daily Mirror’s rather elderly pop columnist, was at length persuaded to come to Richmond and write about the Crawdaddy Club, the Stones and a new young group, the Yardbirds, whom Giorgio now promoted.

Doncaster’s full-page Mirror piece on June 13 set the scene only too well. The Ind Coope brewery – which had not previously been aware of the frolics conducted on its property – summarily evicted Giorgio Gomelsky from the Station Hotel’s back room. Thereafter, the Crawdaddy Club convened in the open air at Richmond Athletic Ground. The Stones, the Yardbirds, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry played on a rugby pitch in front of the main grandstand, to promenading audiences of up to a thousand.

Eric Easton, meanwhile, laboured to set the Stones on the path ordained for an aspiring beat group – the dreary round-Britain path of the pop package show. It was no mean achievement, after the poor chart performance of Come On, for Easton to book them into a nationwide tour beginning on September 29, headed by America’s famous Everly Brothers and featuring the Stones’ own r & b hero, Bo Diddley.

The prospect was one alluring enough to make up Mick Jagger’s mind, at last, about the direction he wanted his life to take. Even after the Stones had signed with Decca, he had continued to hover between music and the London School of Economics, keeping all options open to a point where the other Stones became irritated hardly less than Joe and Eva Jagger, and even threatened to drop him as vocalist if he were not available to go on tour. So Mick Jagger went to the LSE registrar and announced he would not be completing his economics course. To his surprise, and relief, no obstacle was put in his way. ‘The registrar said I could go back later if I wanted. It was all surprisingly easy.’

On August 12, the Stones made their last appearance on their Richmond home turf, playing at the Evening News-sponsored National Jazz and Blues Festival with Acker Bilk, Cyril Davies and Long John Baldry. It was to be almost their only London booking prior to leaving on tour with the Everly Brothers. The next step in Eric Easton’s strategy was to launch them into a practically non-stop schedule of one-nighters at ballrooms in remote East Anglian towns like Wisbech, Soham, Whittlesey and King’s Lynn.

For most of Britain throughout that unseasonably wet summer, interest had centred on the developing scandal of John Profumo, a Conservative cabinet minister, Christine Keeler, his twenty-two-year-old mistress, and the subsequent lurid press exposures which had revealed Britain’s High Tory establishment to be sexually linked with an underworld of call girls, Mayfair pimps, property racketeers and even – it was suggested – Russian spies. For once, Britain suspended disapproval of its renegade young to contemplate the possibility that senior government ministers indulged in public fellatio; that ‘up to eight’ High Court judges had been involved in a single sex orgy; that at a fashionable London dinner party, another eminent politician had waited at table naked and masked and wearing a placard which read ‘If my services don’t please you, whip me.’

By contrast with Profumo, Christine Keeler, Stephen Ward and Mandy Rice-Davies, the preoccupations of teenagers seemed positively wholesome. The exact nature of that preoccupation was earnestly sought by London’s commercial TV company, Associated-Rediffusion, in planning a new weekend pop music show to pre-empt Thank Your Lucky Stars. The A-R show was to be called Ready, Steady, Go and be introduced – unprecedentedly – by people the same age as its audience. The producer, Elkan Allan, auditioned each applicant for the job by asking one question: ‘What do you think young people in this country care about most?’ A girl named Cathy McGowan was hired for answering, simply, ‘Clothes.’

It was the clothes of its audience – not confined to seats as before in such shows, but thronging a large, high-ceilinged, multi-level studio – which established Ready, Steady, Go as the epitome of a new pop style, a fashion changing almost as quickly as did the Top Ten sounds. Hipster trousers, flared jeans, leather jackets, op-art dresses, the girls’ Quant crops, the boys’ Beatle cuts, seethed all around Cathy McGowan and the deliberately exposed TV hardware. The atmosphere was that of a King’s Road party where the performers themselves had just chanced to drop by. It was an atmosphere powerfully established by the show’s Friday-night slogan ‘The weekend starts here’; a feeling projected to millions that all belonged to the same quintessentially fashionable club whose only qualification was that you must be under twenty-one.

The Stones, to their great chagrin, spent those same Friday nights packed into Ian Stewart’s van, heading out through the East End to Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire or the Cambridgeshire Fens. It irked them particularly to think that the Beatles, mere northerners, were kings of the new London while they themselves suffered this provincial banishment. In Stew’s van, Bill Wyman always insisted on the front passenger seat as safeguard against the travel sickness from which he claimed to have suffered since childhood. Not for years did the others realize that was Bill’s way of securing the van’s most comfortable seat.

The town halls and ballrooms of Whittlesey, Soham and Wisbech were about as far as one could travel from Ready, Steady Go: big, draughty vaults, filled with boys in Fifties cowlicks and girls in twinsets and ballooned petticoats. The Stones’ r & b repertoire was greeted with puzzlement, if not downright hostility. Better things happened when they tried American songs in the pop-soul idiom – Lieber and Stoller’s Poison Ivy; Arthur Alexander’s You Better Move On. Even after Come On became a minor hit, the Stones were so ashamed of their performance on record, they refused to do the song on stage.

Somewhere between Whittlesey, Cambridgeshire, and the Everly Brothers tour, Eric Easton’s houndstooth-check jackets were cast off for good. It was a discreet rebellion, led – surprisingly – by Charlie Watts, the first to abandon his stage suit in some Fenland dressing room. Keith Richard made his unwearable by multilayered whisky and chocolate stains. The group photograph taken for the tour poster shows them restored to their corduroys and polo necks, standing on a jetty beside the Thames, not far from Edith Grove. A short pre-tour feature in New Musical Express began: ‘They are the group who prefer casual wear to stage suits and who sometimes don’t bother to change before going onstage …’

The tour that opened at the London New Victoria Cinema on September 29 was an odd mélange assembled by its promoter – the frightening Don Arden – to attract all possible levels of the pop listening public. The Everly Brothers were fading legends of the rock ’n’ roll Fifties. Bo Diddley was a cult r & b star. The Flintstones were a heavy saxophone combo. Julie Grant – another Eric Easton client – was a middle-of-the-road ballad singer. When, after barely a week, the mixture proved insufficiently powerful at the box office, Don Arden hastily flew in a second rock ’n’ roll legend Little Richard, to co-star with the Everlys.

For the Stones – given small-type billing equal to Julie Grant – what mattered most was the honour of appearing on the same programme as their idol, Bo Diddley. To show their respect, they dropped all Bo Diddley material from their tour act. Diddley was flattered by the homage of his five shaggy acolytes and was so impressed by Bill and Charlie’s playing he asked both to appear with him as session men on BBC Radio’s Saturday Club.

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?’