The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography

FOUR

‘BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR’

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.