Mick Jagger (22 page)

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 downward, 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 theater—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 on to 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 favor. It happened at a party at Crewe’s apartment, in a gloomy Central Park–side 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 mesmerizing 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, boogying 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—and never would—cover 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 practiced 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 program 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 standin was used; only during transmission did they realize they had been set up as stooges to their host’s boozy humor. “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 hometown 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 rednecked 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 L.A. 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 counseling 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 mailroom, 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 daylong 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 catalog (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.”

And Mick? Before leaving Britain, he’d told an interviewer with unusual candor, and passion, that his main objective in America was to meet as many of his blues idols as possible, and that even “to see and hear them work in person will be a big thing for me.” What happened with Chuck and Muddy and Willie and Buddy and Big Red in Chicago was, by a long way, the most thrilling experience of his life thus far. But afterward it was to be swallowed up by all-enveloping Jagger amnesia. “I don’t remember going to Chess,” he would claim. “It’s just like something I read about in books.”

Back in New York, things decidedly improved with a better hotel, the Park Sheraton (albeit still in shared rooms), and two sold-out concerts, like the Beatles’, at the city’s illustrious Carnegie Hall. After the second show, there was a party at the hotel with guests including the New York Post pop correspondent, and Bob Dylan’s close friend, Al Aronowitz. “The first thing we saw when we walked in,” Aronowitz recalled, “was Mick sitting on a bed, surrounded by a flock of elegantly styled chicks, fluttering as if they all wanted to rub his body … Okay, Mick’d discovered room service.”

There was also a first glimpse of the Jagger attitude toward women that we will come to know so well. At one point, Gloria Stavers, the influential editor of 16 Magazine, approached him among his seraglio to tell him how much she’d enjoyed the show. “Should I be flattered?” he replied.

With the release of the Stones’ “Merseybeat” song “Tell Me” as a U.S. single increasing album sales, and a general sense of making some headway at last, it was clearly vital for them to extend their visit beyond its scheduled three weeks. Instead—bafflingly to new American converts like Aronowitz and Murray the K—Oldham whisked them home as scheduled. The excuse he gave out was that they had to honor a booking to play at the summer ball of Magdalen College, Oxford. The truth was that he couldn’t afford to keep them in America a moment longer. In contrast to later forays there, he calculated the tour had earned them ten old shillings, or fifty pence, each.

ARRIVING BACK IN Britain during the music press’s awards season did much to restore everyone’s self-esteem. In the New Musical Express readers’ poll, the Stones came second to the Beatles as Top British Vocal Group with “Not Fade Away” only just losing out to “She Loves You” as Year’s Best Single. Record Mirror named the Stones Top British Group and Mick—underlining his still unusual non-guitar-playing role—as Top British Group Member. Nor was it long before the American nightmare was totally vindicated. On June 26, “It’s All Over Now” was released, with advance orders of 150,000, and took only two weeks to become their first British No. 1.