Beatles vs. Stones (10 page)

Rowe wasn’t the only one susceptible to that line of thinking. So too was Sir Edward Lewis, Decca’s major shareholder. Lewis was a dour old man, with little passion for rock ’n’ roll. But he had a great enthusiasm for moneymaking.

“I remember taking [the Stones’ audition tape] to him,” Rowe said, “and I wondered if it was
too
raw. But he was
so annoyed
that we had passed on the Beatles, that he was
determined
that the Stones were going to make it. He hadn’t got the slightest idea what [the Stones] were about. And he said ‘fantastic!’ And I remember looking at him [and thinking to myself] ‘fantastic?’ ”

On May 14, 1963—just a couple days after Dick Rowe first laid eyes on them—the Stones signed with Decca. And whereas the Beatles, lacking any real bargaining power, had found it necessary to accept EMI’s chintzy royalty rate of just one penny per double-sided single sold (i.e., about 1 percent of the retail price), Rowe was proud
to be able to offer the Stones a much better deal: 5 percent of the price of each record they sold.

The Stones’ contract with Decca had another notable feature. Sometime earlier, pop producer Phil Spector had advised Oldham that if he ever managed a group, under no circumstances should he have them lay tracks in a studio that belonged to, or was paid for by, their record company. Instead, he should reach into his own pockets in order to finance independent studio sessions, and then lease the band’s master tapes to their record company. These terms were virtually unheard of in England, but when Decca agreed to them, the Stones retained the copyright on their music. In this way, they also secured more artistic control over their work, and ultimately, they were able to garner much more money than they would have otherwise.
“He had us totally beaten there,” remarked Chris Stamp, the comanager of the Who. “[Other managers] didn’t even know about that shit. When Andrew got that tape-lease deal . . . it was visionary.”

It is unclear whether Decca executives acceded to this arrangement because they didn’t fully understand its implications, or because of their determination not to be left in the lurch again, no matter the cost. Either way, it was the culmination of an incredible string of good fortune for the Stones. In little more than a month’s time, they’d received their first glowing press report, befriended the Beatles, been discovered by a pair of talented agents, and signed a lucrative recording contract with one of Britain’s two most prestigious record companies.

The Rolling Stones weren’t yet stars, but they knew they had just been blessed with an extraordinary opportunity. About a year later, by which time the Stones truly were riding high, someone asked Brian Jones:
“Who has been most helpful to you since you turned professional?”

Brian answered, “Our comanagers Eric Easton and Andrew Oldham, of course. But I’ll never forget the early words of praise from the Beatles.”

•  •  •

In a 2001 interview, Gomelsky reminisced about that night at the Royal Albert Hall way back in the spring of 1963, when a gaggle of teenage girls mistook Brian Jones for a pop star and then proceeded to tug at his clothes and beg him for autographs.

Jones told him:
“Giorgio, Giorgio,
that’s
what I want.”

“And I said, ‘Brian, you’re going to have it. Don’t worry about it. But when you get it you might not want it.’ I was wrong—he never got enough of it . . .”

Some of the consequences of Jones’s rising fame lust were predictable. First, he began backpedaling on some of his esoteric blues purism. Meanwhile, he started evincing a new willingness to compromise the band’s “authenticity” (that was always the byword) in exchange for the possibility of greater commercial success. The trend was set in motion when the band released their first single in June 1963—a starchy cover of Chuck Berry’s “Come On” that (even the Stones admitted) didn’t really resemble what they were doing at the clubs.
“In these hectic days of Liverpool chart domination it has become almost an event for any group outside Merseyside to break into the hit lists,” observed
Hit Parade
magazine, “but that is just what the London-based Rolling Stones did” with their first single. (It peaked at number 21 on the UK charts.) A
Record Mirror
reviewer, however, damned the single with faint praise:
“It’s good, punchy, and commercial, but it’s not the fanatical R&B that audiences wait hours to hear. Instead it’s a bluesy very commercial group that should make the charts in a smallish sort of way.” On a jury show, British pop singer Craig Douglas was more critical, proclaiming the song “Very, very ordinary. If there was a Liverpool accent it might get somewhere, but this is definitely no hit.”

The diminishing comparison to the Beatles might have stung Jones a bit, but presumably the repeated descriptions of the song as “commercial” may have rankled more. After all, he had been crafting his whole identify out of his love for, and identification with, revved-up American blues. In the band’s earliest days, Watts recalls, Brian
“would sit for hours composing letters about R&B. The letters would go on forever—he used to write to
Melody Maker
” telling them that advertisements for Stones performances “must include the description ‘R&B’; it couldn’t be just a band. . . . It was a crusade to him a) to get us on the stage in a club where we could be paid half a crown and b) to be billed as an R&B band.”

Yet now, Jones, once the most fiercely partisan of music fans, was laboring to justify his apostasy:
“When we left the club scene,” he explained to a reporter, “we also left the diehard R&B fanatics and we temporarily made a compromise to cope with the pop fans we came across in dance halls and on tours. It’s all very nice, I suppose, to know you’re appreciated, but it’s also rather frightening.”

Several of the varieties of denial that psychologists talk about can be found in just that short statement. Brian passively acknowledges that the Stones have shifted their approach, only he gets it wrong: they didn’t “temporarily” compromise their artistic integrity in order to “cope with” the legions of pop fans that were flocking to see them in dance halls and on tour. When they released “Come On” in the spring of 1963, they had yet to play in any such venues; they were still confined to a few tiny clubs in London. In addition to reframing the situation, he shows willful blindness. The plain fact is, from the moment they signed with Decca, if not before, the Stones ceased being blues purists. True, they would continue reworking obscure R&B songs on some of their early albums, but the singles they released were meant to be broadly appealing. The whole band was on board with that approach, but Wyman said that Jones
“was the most uneasy of all of us over the route to mass popularity we were driven along by Andrew Oldham.”

Nor was Jones nearly as ambivalent about fame as his statement suggests. As the band’s founder, he always believed it was desirable and necessary that
he
should also be its central figure, its biggest star. With Jagger in the group, that was always a ludicrous proposition, but it was something he never wavered from. “Brian was the only
guy in the world who thought he could take on Mick as an onstage personality,” Keith marveled. The contrast between the two was only heightened when Brian would spend hours practicing his stagecraft—literally rehearsing his moves in front of a mirror, and performing the identical feints, twists, and jives, night after night—whereas Mick’s onstage vamping always seemed like a spontaneous expression of his personality.

Already insecure and paranoid, Jones also had the misfortune of being in a group whose members, on occasion, really did plot against one another. Mick and Keith, especially, seemed to revel in subjecting their bandmates to caustic jokes and sulfurous denunciations.
“From the moment I joined,” Wyman says, “I realized they had to have someone to poke fun at, not always in a humorous way, often spiteful and hurtful. They
had
to have a scapegoat or a guinea pig and in the early days it was me, followed by Brian.” They teased him about his immoderately shampooed hair, his faint lisp, and his stubby arms and legs. They berated him for being an unreliable lush and a selfish egomaniac. Knowing full well that Brian was asthmatic, they often refused to even stub out their cigarettes in his presence, even while in a crowded van on tour.

Things got even harder for Jones around the fall of 1963, when Oldham started sharing a flat with Mick and Keith at 33 Mapesbury Road, in North West London. Jones took this as sign that the three were now in league together. He felt, and was made to feel, disconnected from the band’s center of gravity. By about the middle of 1964, the whole band would occasionally treat Jones from on high, as if he were merely a session musician. Later that year, they began fitfully discussing whether to just get rid of him.

Then again, Brian orchestrated a lot of his own misery. Keith later explained the unhealthy dynamic this way:

You’re on the road 350 days of the year and suddenly you’ve got this guy who is the one cog in the machine who doesn’t seem to be considering how much the machine can help him. . . . If you’ve got to travel with somebody in a car for eight hours, do three gigs in the same night and then move on, you have to be a smooth team and support each other. But Brian either wouldn’t turn up, or if he did he’d just make a lot of snide remarks, and he also developed some very annoying personal habits like his obsession with his hair. When you’re alone with the guy so much, you start to mimic him. Then Brian would get pissed off that we were taking the piss out of him, and the whole thing became compounded.

It is difficult to exaggerate just how sullen and difficult Jones could be. Photographer Nicky Wright, who did the cover for
England’s Newest Hit Makers
, shares a story:

Brian could be sweet—he was intelligent, would listen to your conversation carefully, and was very charming. But he could also seem totally psychotic and schizophrenic. We were coming back from Folkestone one night about nine o’clock, sometime in 1963, and had stopped to look for something to eat. We found a fish shop, but it was closed. We banged on the door and this chap came to the door and told us, “We’ve switched everything off, the fat’s cooled down, we’re closed.” No-one argued until I shouted, “This is the Rolling Stones!” This little husband and wife were really sweet, and said come in and sit down while we see what we can do. So everybody’s ordered their fish and chips, steak and chips, and it takes quite a long time while they heat up the fat or whatever. Finally they bring it to the table. Keith’s happily eating away, so are the others, then Brian tries a forkful, and starts complaining: “I don’t like this! It’s soggy! I can’t eat this!” He stands up, takes this bottle, and squirts ketchup over the table and knocks his food onto the floor. It was heartbreaking—there’s this couple thinking, “Great, it’s the Rolling Stones,” then this happens.

On a few occasions he went so far as to undermine some of the band’s live performances.
Sometimes when the Stones performed their hugest hit, “Satisfaction,” he would screw it up on purpose by playing, as a countermelody, the riff from “Popeye the Sailor Man.” (He thought the two songs sounded alike.)

Even more self-sabotaging was Brian’s constant jockeying for position in the band. When Oldham and Easton had approached the Stones about the possibility of a management deal, Brian privately told both of them that if they deemed it necessary, he was okay with the idea of sacking Mick Jagger (presumably to replace him with someone who sounded less black). Later, Brian unwisely tried pitting Mick and Keith against each another. On tour, he began finagling his way into slightly better hotels than the rest of the group, and somehow he persuaded Easton to pay him secretly £5 a week more than the others received. (Inevitably, the rest of the group found out. When they did, they were all appropriately furious.) He was also becoming increasingly fuddle-brained and erratic as he increased his intake of booze and started gobbling all sorts of drugs. He missed rehearsals, showed up late for gigs, and complained about all manner of ailments, whether real or imagined. Occasionally while on tour, he would get himself into predicaments that were embarrassing and debilitating even by the Stones’ loose standards.

With all of this in mind, it is easy to assume that the Rolling Stones simply were not the type of outfit in which someone as petty minded and psychologically troubled as Brian Jones could be expected to thrive (at least not in the long term).

But did the Beatles’ success also contribute, even in a small way, to Jones’s downfall? Admittedly, the idea has not gotten much traction. You won’t find that it has been pursued by the legions of journalists and biographers who have already said so much about the Stones. Nor is it a notion that is likely to strike a chord with your typical rock connoisseurs—the types of guys (usually they’re guys) who normally find these sorts of imponderables so invigorating.

It is not, however, a novel idea. In fact, a couple of men who were particularly close to Brian in this period have put it across before. They put it across pretty emphatically.

“Brian embarrassed himself first, then he embarrassed us,” Andrew Oldham concluded. “I believe it was seeing the Beatles at the Albert Hall that did it. He came out a two-headed monster. He wanted to be a pure artist, and he wanted out-and-out fame and he was never able to put them together and have a life.”

Bill Wyman concurs:
“Rubbing shoulders with the Beatles” at Edith Grove and the Royal Albert Hall “really whetted [Brian’s] appetite. He suddenly seemed desperate for success—and quickly. It was obvious to all around him that he badly wanted to be a star, but a battle was going on inside him: he didn’t want to compromise his musical integrity, or that of the band.”

Make no mistake, Wyman clarified: Mick, Keith, and Andrew all likewise
“idolized the Beatles and loved to be seen alongside them.” But it was Brian who most craved their degree of fame. And just as soon as it seemed to be on the horizon, Mick, Keith, and Andrew all began shoving him to the margins.