Mick Jagger

At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright ‘dolly’ dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: ‘It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits. Andrew and Mick both said together, “I want to fuck her.” Both their girlfriends went, “What did you say?” Mick and Andrew went, “We said we want to record her.”’

Marianne at this point thought the Rolling Stones were ‘yobbish schoolboys . . . with none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney’. By her own later account, she wouldn’t have noticed Mick if he hadn’t been in the throes of yet another row with Chrissie, ‘who was crying and shouting at him . . . and in the heat of the moment, one of her false eyelashes was peeling off’. The person who most interested her was Andrew Oldham, especially when he came over (‘all beaky and angular, like some bird of prey’), brusquely asked his friend John Dunbar for her name – no female equality for years yet! – and, on learning it genuinely was Marianne Faithfull, announced that he intended to make her a pop star.

Within days, to her amazement, Marianne had a contract with the Stones’ label, Decca, and an appointment to record a single with Oldham as her producer. The A-side was to have been a Lionel Bart song, ‘I Don’t Know How (To Tell You)’, but when she tried it out it proved totally unsuited to her voice and to the persona her Svengali intended to create. Instead, Oldham turned to his in-house team of Jagger– Richard, giving them precise instructions as to the kind of ballad he required for Marianne: ‘She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows and no sex.’

Though the result bore a joint credit, Tony Calder remembers its conception to have been entirely Mick’s, working with session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. The monologue of a lonely, disillusioned older woman – harking back to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shallot’ and foreshadowing the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ – it was a glimpse of the sensitivity and almost feminine intuition Mick was known to possess but so rarely showed. The original title, ‘As Time Goes By’, became ‘As Tears Go By’ to avoid confusion with pianist Dooley Wilson’s famous cabaret spot in the film Casablanca.

With hindsight, Marianne would consider ‘As Tears Go By’ ‘a Françoise Hardy song . . . Europop you might hear on a French jukebox . . . “The Lady of Shalott” to the tune of “These Foolish Things”’. She still concedes that for a songwriter so inexperienced it showed remarkable maturity – clairvoyance even. ‘It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened . . . it’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.’

For this second recording session, Marianne travelled up from Reading to London chaperoned by her friend Sally Oldfield (sister of the future Tubular Bells wizard, Mike). Oldham’s production stuck to the ‘high brick walls and no sex’ formula, toning down her usually robust mezzo-soprano to a wispy demureness, counterpointed by the mournful murmur of a cor anglais, or English horn. Mick and Keith watched the proceedings and afterwards gave the two girls a lift back to Paddington station by taxi. On the way, Mick tried to get Marianne to sit on his lap, but she made Sally do so instead. ‘I mean, it was on that level,’ she recalls. ‘“What a cheeky little yob,” I thought to myself. “So immature.”’

Within a month, ‘As Tears Go By’ was in the UK Top 20, finally peaking at No. 9. British pop finally had a thoroughly English female singer, or so it appeared, rather than just would-be American ones. And the media were confronted with a head-scratching paradox: two members of a band notorious for dirtiness, rawness and uncouthness had brought gentility – not to say virginity – into the charts for the very first time.

The success of ‘As Tears Go By’ might have been expected to start a wholesale winning streak for the Jagger– Richard songwriting partnership that would finally benefit their own band rather than ill-assorted outsiders. But, strangely, having their name on a No. 9 hit acted more like a brake. Mick had no idea where the song had come from and, after weeks of racking his brains with Keith, began to despair of writing anything else a fraction as good.

Certainly, when the Stones’ first album appeared, on 17 April, it was still far from clear that they had a would-be Lennon and McCartney in their ranks. Recorded at Regent Sound in just five days snatched from the Ronettes tour, this was almost completely made up of the cover versions from which Oldham had struggled to wean them – Chuck Berry’s ‘Carol’, Bo Diddley’s ‘Mona (I Need You Baby)’, Willie Dixon’s ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, James Moore’s ‘I’m a King Bee’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, Marvin Gaye’s ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Rufus Thomas’s ‘Walking the Dog’, Bobby Troup’s ‘Route 66’. The only Jagger– Richard track thought worthy of inclusion was ‘Tell Me (You’re Coming Back)’, an echoey ballad in faintly Merseybeat style. The album, in fact, was like a Stones live show (much as the Beatles’ first one had been), its immediacy heightened by Regent Sound’s primitive equipment and Andrew Oldham’s anguished eye on the clock. At the session for ‘Can I Get a Witness?’, Mick realised he couldn’t remember all Marvin Gaye’s words, and neither could anyone else present. A hurried phone call had to be made to the song’s publishers on Savile Row for a copy of the lyrics to be hunted out and left in reception. The usefully athletic vocalist ran a half mile from Denmark Street to collect them, then back again. On the track he is still audibly breathless.

The album was entitled, simply, The Rolling Stones – in itself an act of extreme Oldham hubris. The Beatles’ first album had followed custom in bearing the name of a hit single, ‘Please Please Me’, and even their ground-breaking second, With the Beatles, still had a whiff of conventionality. But Oldham did not stop there. In defiance of Decca Records’ entire marketing department, he insisted that The Rolling Stones’ front cover showed neither name nor title – just a glossy picture of the five standing sideways with heavily shadowed, unsmiling faces turned to the camera. Mick was first, then dapper Charlie, a squeezed-in Bill and barely recognisable Keith, with Brian – the only one in their old stage uniform of leather waistcoat and shirtsleeves rather than varicoloured suits – symbolically at the back and out of line.

On its reverse, the cover returned to wordy normality, with track listings, studio credits and a pronouncement that seemed like yet more Oldham hubris: ‘The Rolling Stones are more than a group – they are a way of life.’ Little did even he imagine that, almost half a century later, at the BAFTA film awards, an audience of the world’s most glamorous people would still be hungering to lead it.

Advance orders for The Rolling Stones exceeded 100,000 as against only 6,000 for the Beatles’ album début, Please Please Me. Better still, as it climbed the UK album chart to No. 1 it passed With the Beatles, finally on the decline after six months in the Top 20. The Stones, Oldham crowed delightedly, had ‘knocked the Beatles off’ in their home market. Now for America.

CHAPTER SIX

‘We Spent a Lot of Time Sitting in Bed, Doing Crosswords’

For any British band, the supreme challenge, and greatest thrill, is to ‘crack’ America. And few have failed quite so comprehensively as the Rolling Stones on their first US tour, in June 1964. The country would notice Mick soon enough, for better or worse, but during most of this initial three-week visit he was a barely distinguishable face among five, taking his equal share of disappointment and humiliation.

The Stones were not only following the triumphal footsteps of the Beatles four months earlier; they were also well to the rear in the so-called British Invasion of other UK bands who had stampeded after John, Paul, George and Ringo across the Atlantic and into the US charts. On the American edition of their first album, they were billed as ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’, bracketing them with ‘soft’ pop acts they despised, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas and the Dave Clark Five.

When the Beatles had arrived in New York in February, it was with an American No. 1 single, ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. But the Stones could offer no such impressive calling card. Their Beatle-bestowed UK hit, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’, had been released on the London label, Decca’s US affiliate, but then abruptly withdrawn because its B-side was called ‘Stoned’, which in America meant drunk. It had then been rereleased, coupled with ‘Not Fade Away’, but even in a market supposedly ravenous for all British bands had barely scraped into Billboard magazine’s Top 50.

Thanks to Andrew Oldham, their transatlantic hosts had been primed to welcome them like a new strain of herpes. ‘Americans, brace yourselves!’ warned the flash circulated to newspapers and broadcast media by the Associated Press. ‘In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting Britons is on the way . . . dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles . . .’ The Fab Four had flown off, carrying the whole nation’s hopes and even prayers like Neville Chamberlain bound for Munich or a Test cricket team for Australasia. Before the Stones left Heathrow Airport on 1 June an MP in the House of Commons expressed fears that they might do real harm to Anglo-American relations.

Even with this advance word-of-badmouth, it proved impossible for Oldham to whip up any major media coverage on the American side. Turndowns came from the NBC and CBS TV networks and, most slightingly, from The Ed Sullivan Show, which had clinched the Beatles’ conquest by beaming them to a national audience of more than 70 million. Paradoxically, the splashiest print coverage came from a quarter not normally interested in dirtiness and scruffiness – Vogue magazine. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue’s American edition, agreed to publish a David Bailey photograph of Mick that every British magazine had rejected, despite never having heard of him or his band. ‘I don’t care who he is,’ she told Bailey. ‘He looks great, so I’ll run it.’

While calling the Stones ‘scruffier and seedier than the Beatles’, Vogue summed them up more pithily than any UK publication thus far, and with a hint of ladylike moist gussets that probably did Mick’s image more good in the long run than NBC, CBS and Ed Sullivan put together: ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger, one of the five Rolling Stones, those singers [sic] who will set out to cross America by bandwagon in June. For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his teammates. To women he’s fascinating, to men a scare . . .’

Since the Beatles’ reception by three thousand banner-waving fans, spilling over observation terraces and buckling plate-glass windows, the arrival of British pop bands at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport had become a routine story to the city’s media. For the Stones, London Records laid on a markedly cut-price version of the now-familiar procedure, enlisting a few dozen teenage girls to scream dutifully as the band descended the aircraft steps after their economy-class flight, hiring a couple of Old English sheepdogs to represent kindred spirits, and providing a cake for Charlie Watts’s twenty-third birthday. At the press conference which followed, there was surprise, even some disappointment, when they proved to be politer and better spoken than most of the invaders who had come before. Who was the leader? one reporter asked. ‘We are . . . all of us,’ Mick lisped in his best LSE accent, without a frisson of Cockney.

The Beatles had spent their first New York landfall with their manager and considerable retinue in interconnecting luxury suites at the top of Manhattan’s grandest hotel, the Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The Stones spent theirs at the far-from-grand Hotel Astor in Times Square, bunking two to a poky room with their retinue (i.e., roadie Ian Stewart). To save money – an urgent consideration throughout the tour – Oldham slept on the office sofa of his friend and role model, Phil Spector.

Once his charges had checked into the Astor (which, miraculously, offered no objection), Oldham managed to feed the British press a story that, in true Beatle style, they had caused riots in midtown Manhattan and were imprisoned in their hotel by shrieking mobs. Unfortunately, agency photos which arrived home at the same time showed them exploring the Times Square district without a single hysteric in sight.

That is not to say that they went unnoticed. They had come to a land where every ‘manly’ man, from President Lyndon Johnson downwards, had hair cropped as close to the scalp as a convict’s but for a little toothbrushlike crest. The Beatles had been let off their hair because of some vague correlation with British classical theatre – Laurence Olivier as Richard III or Hamlet. But Rolling Stone hair meant only homosexuality, which – save in certain enlightened parts of Greenwich Village – was regarded as even more unnatural and detestable than it was in Britain. What should have been a magical first experience of New York for Mick and the others was marred by the typically forthright comments of passing New Yorkers: ‘Ya fuckin’ faggot!’ or ‘Look at that goddamn faggot!’ The fact that to English ears faggot still meant a rissole, or meat patty, did not make the experience any pleasanter.

The city’s welcome grew several degrees warmer after they met up with Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the WINS radio deejay who had generated huge publicity for his show, and himself, by hooking onto the Beatles back in February. Now he adopted the Stones in the same way, escorting them to nightspots like the Peppermint Lounge – where the Twist had been born and was now in its death throes – and introducing them to useful New York music-biz cronies like Bob Crewe, songwriter and producer to the Four Seasons.

The Stones privately thought Murray the K a ludicrous figure, but he did do them one huge favour. It happened at a party at Crewe’s apartment, in a gloomy Central Parkside pile known as the Dakota where, sixteen years later, the Beatles’ story would come to a horrific full stop. During the evening, Murray gave Andrew Oldham an R&B single, ‘It’s All Over Now’, written by Sam Cooke’s guitarist Bobby Womack and recorded by Womack and his three brothers as the Valentinos. It would be a perfect song for the Stones to cover, the deejay insisted. And the rights could be picked up here in New York from Womack’s manager, an accountant-turned-pop impresario named Allen Klein.

For Mick and Keith, the main point of being in New York was to visit the Apollo Theater, Harlem’s famous showplace for black music, which had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder among many others. Harlem was still a no-go area for unaccompanied whites, so they had to ask Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – on whom Keith still had a huge crush – to be their guide. Because of the difficulty of getting cabs back to Midtown late at night, which, anyway, they couldn’t afford, they had to sleep on the floor at Ronnie’s mother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem. In the morning, she would cook them bacon and eggs, and they would thank her with punctilious good manners.

To add to the thrill, it happened to be James Brown Week at the Apollo. Known as ‘the Godfather of Soul’, Brown had a mesmerising stage act that combined R&B and soul with Barnum-esque showmanship: backed by his vocal group the Famous Flames, he never stopped moving for a second, boogieing as if on an invisible Travelator (two decades before Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk), hurling himself onto his knees or into the splits, finally suffering a make-believe seizure, when two minders would rush from the wings, wrap him in a cloak and half carry him away. Four or five of these operatic cardiac arrests would be simulated before the curtain finally fell.

Such was Mick’s awe of the Godfather that he never had covered any of Brown’s great showstoppers: not ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, or ‘Please Please Please’ or even ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’, much as he might applaud the sentiment. Now, in the Apollo’s marijuana-scented dark, he took careful note of every dance move Brown made, to be practised later in front of a full-length mirror. When Ronnie sneaked him and Keith into Brown’s dressing room, he beheld an almost monarchical figure, surrounded by servants and sycophants, who took care of business as assiduously as he did music, watched every penny and imposed strict discipline on his musicians, fining anyone who was late or went onstage with dirty shoes. Here, too, were important lessons for the future.

From New York, the Stones flew to Los Angeles to make their one nationwide TV appearance. This was not on a prestigious show like Ed Sullivan’s, but Hollywood Palace, a mixed-bag variety programme emceed that week by Dean Martin. When they turned up at the studio, the producer was aghast that they weren’t in matching suits and, unavailingly, offered them money to go out and buy some. They did not meet the great ‘Dino’ himself during rehearsals, when a stand-in was used; only during transmission did they realise they had been set up as stooges to their host’s boozy humour. ‘Now here’s something for the youngsters,’ Martin announced with an air of intense long-suffering. ‘Five young musicians from England . . . the Rolling Stones. I’ve been rolled a few times when I was stoned myself. I dunno what they’re singin’ about, but here they are . . .’ A few moments of Mick singing ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’, and their tuxedo-clad host was sniping at them again. ‘The Rolling Stones! Aren’t they great? [Exaggerated eye roll] People talk about these long-haired groups but it’s really an optical illusion. They just have smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.’

The tour that followed had been planned by the American agency GAC, seemingly with some of the same malevolence. There was a good opening show in San Bernardino, California, where a capacity crowd roared enthusiastic response to the name check their home town received in Mick’s version of ‘Route 66’. After that, a series of economy-class internal flights took the band on a transcontinental wander far off Route 66: San Antonio, Minneapolis, Omaha, Detroit, Pittsburgh and Harrisburg. Their support was the American balladeer Bobby Vee, whose backing musicians wore matching mohair suits, collars and ties just like the ones they themselves had lately escaped. At some stops, they found themselves appearing at state fairs in company with carnival midways, rodeos and circus acts, including a baby elephant and a troupe of seals. Thanks to wildly uneven advance publicity, audience sizes varied between a rapturous two or three thousand and an apathetic few dozen among whom the dominant element were homophobic red-necked cowboys.

The Stones’ heyday as arrogant kings of the American road were still far in the future. Surrounded by gun-toting, crop-headed and resentful police, they all did their utmost not to step out of line. In one cheerless, raw-brick dressing room, Mick and Brian were drinking rum and Coca-Cola while Keith, atypically, made do with plain Coke. A policeman walked up and screamed at them to empty their glasses down the toilet. When Keith protested, the cop drew his gun. Also in contrast with later trans-American journeys, Keith would recall, ‘it was almost impossible to have sex . . . In New York or LA you can always find something, but when you’re in Omaha in 1964 and you suddenly feel horny, you’ve had it.’

The itinerary, however, included something of importance far outweighing these petty – and short-lived – setbacks. In Chicago, Oldham had booked the Stones to lay down some tracks (hopefully including their next British single) at Chess Records, the mythic label on which Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and just about every other major R&B and blues giant had transfigured Mick’s prim boyhood. Other than counselling him, against all his instincts, to become wicked, it was probably the greatest service his Svengali ever did him.

This nonpareil black music label had in fact been started by two white men, Polish immigrants named Leonard and Phil Chess, who had changed their surname from Czyz. Leonard’s twenty-two-year-old son, Marshall, had worked for the company since the age of thirteen and, during a spell in the postroom, used to send off albums to an unknown blues fanatic in England named Mike Jagger. Normally, Chess did not allow outsiders to record in its studio – especially young, white, British ones – but Marshall knew about the blues scene in London, so he persuaded his father and uncle to make an exception for them.

The band spent two days in Chess’s studios at 2120 South Michigan Avenue, working with the label’s most-sought-after engineer, Ron Malo. (Having delivered them there, Oldham had the good sense not to put on airs as their producer, but stayed discreetly in the background.) Malo treated the awestruck young Britons like musicians as legitimate as any others; their response was to work hard and harmoniously, finishing fourteen tracks during the two day-long sessions.

Top of the list was that gift from Murray the K, ‘It’s All Over Now’. The Valentinos’ version had hovered on the edge of burlesque, with a hermaphrodite lead vocal and a tempo lifted from Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’. Ron Malo turned it into a guitar-jangly pop track with a growling bass riff that was instant jukebox fodder, yet preserved the Stones’ essential roughness and hinted at the myriad influences of the blues mecca around them. While all the band sounded better than they ever had, the main advance was in Mick’s voice, now refined to a punk-Dixie snarl and hovering between self-pity (‘Well, I used to wake ’n mawnin’, git ma brekfusst in ba-a-id . . .’) and yah-boo triumph (‘Yes, I used to looeerve her, bu-u-rd it’s awl over now . . .’). Bobby Womack’s original lyric spoke of the errant girlfriend’s having ‘spent all my money . . . played the high-class game’, which Mick amended to ‘half-assed game’.

Marshall Chess was amused to see Mick, Brian and Keith behave in the studio as they thought their blues masters did, ‘swigging Jack Daniel’s from the bottle, where our guys would’ve poured it into a glass and sipped it’. Partly, this was nerves; they expected real Chicago bluesmen to tear them to pieces for their presumption. But in fact they were met with nothing but friendliness. During the first day’s session two of their greatest heroes, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy, both dropped by Malo’s studio to listen and bestow compliments and encouragement. On their second morning they found themselves walking in through Chess’s front lobby beside an immaculately dressed man with the face of a merry black Toby Jug – none other than Muddy Waters, without whose catalogue (not least ‘Rollin’ Stone’) they would never have got started. Muddy carried himself as regally as a king but, on seeing roadie Ian Stewart struggling with the Stones’ equipment, picked up an amp and carried it into the studio for them.

At the end of their second day, the great Chuck Berry himself drove in from his country-estate-cum-hotel, Berry Park, to take a look. Though never noted for philanthropy to young musicians, he could not but be softened by the Stones’ devotion – and the number of his songs they were covering that would pay him royalties. ‘Swing on, gentlemen,’ he told them in flawless Berry-ese. ‘You are sounding most well, if I may say so.’

Keith was always to remember a beyond-brilliant Chess session musician named Big Red, a huge black albino with a Gibson guitar that looked ‘like a mandolin’ in his hands. During breaks from their own session, Mick, Keith, Charlie and Stu used to creep into the next-door studio and listen to Big Red, but could never pluck up courage to ask him to sit in with them. ‘We just thought we were terribly lucky to be there, so let’s learn what we can,’ Keith would recall. ‘It was like being given extra tuition.’