Old Gods Almost Dead (12 page)

On November 17 the Stones drove back to Birmingham for another shot on
Thank Your Lucky Stars.
Also on the show was the American singer Gene Pitney, “the Rockville Rocker,” who was in England promoting his latest record, “24 Hours from Tulsa.” Clean-cut Pitney was at first put off by the Stones' sulking demeanor and long hair, but the Stones and Pitney got along well, talked a lot of music, and Pitney asked Mick and Keith for a song after he heard them working out a new tune backstage.

The creation myth of the Jagger/Richards songwriting team is that Andrew Oldham locked them in the kitchen of their flat and told them not to come out until they had a song. Supposedly they emerged an hour later with “As Tears Go By.” But as early as November 1963, they were recording “dubs” for songs at Regent Sound, a tiny demo studio on Denmark Street, London's Tin Pan Alley. Here they worked on a song for Pitney called “My Only Girl,” which Pitney later recorded as “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.” (It was a hit in England and marked the debut of the Jagger/Richards team in the Top Ten.) A dozen other song demos were also recorded with Andrew, some of which were later released by obscure singers (George Bean et al.) without much impact.

                

December 1963.
Andrew arranged for the Stones to pick up some extra cash by recording a TV commercial for Kellogg's Rice Krispies. Over a Chuck Berry vamp, with Brian wailing on harmonica, Mick sang the ad like he's selling King Biscuit Flour on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas: “Rice Krispies for you! And you! And you!” The band hated it, and they never did another commercial again.

Around this time, Linda Lawrence got pregnant. Charlie's girlfriend took her and Brian to a doctor to see about an abortion, but the doctor refused to do it when the couple said they were in love. Brian's parents didn't take it well, Andrew ranted that it was a mortal blow for the Stones, and there was a lot of upset.

The rest of 1963 was spent playing one-nighters in ballrooms and town halls all over England. And so the Rolling Stones were launched. They had mutated from an R&B band, flitting between authenticity and commercial appropriation, to a heat-seeking pop group about to reposition itself as a rock and soul band. Their anarchic manager's understanding of the power of theater and confrontation had served the Stones well. Everyone talked about them, and Brian and Mick were becoming national icons. Andrew had been right that an angry pose would be a successful marketing strategy. While Brian Epstein still worked hard to soften the Beatles' northern working-class roughness, Andrew would now spin the Stones a new image of sex and danger that turned on the bourgeoisie and the suburbanites.

The band was also playing well. Touring had sharpened them into a tight performing unit that took no prisoners, and no chances either. The Rolling Stones tended to stay within well-defined arrangements, leaving little room for jamming or improvisation. Within the group, increasingly sad and bitter tension coexisted with the heady rush of pop stardom. Even the reticent Charlie Watts, who seemed genuinely not to care about fame and fortune, was affected by it, even when he had a new suit torn to shreds and had been stabbed in the eyes by girls' fingernails during a violent mobbing outside a ballroom in Kilburn, a heavily Irish neighborhood in London.

Mick: “In England, they were very ready for another band. It was funny, because the Beatles had only been around a year. Things happened so quickly. Then there were a lot of popular bands from the north, and people are snobby in [London], so they wanted a band from the south. We were it.”

Keith: “We knew we'd become successful when we did that first tour . . . I was nineteen when it started to take off, just an ordinary guy, and then, suddenly, Adonis! And you know this is so ridiculous, so insane. It was really a bugger. It makes you very cynical. But it's a hell of a thing to deal with. It took me years to get it under control.”

Top of the Pops

The new English
music scene blew wide open in 1964. A year earlier, five or six groups had a choice of two or three clubs in London where they could play maybe twice a week. By 1964, there were thirty full-time groups and maybe fifty semipro bands getting steady club work in the city and the provinces. Hundreds of trad jazz clubs switched to a pop or R&B policy, and the movement took off nationally, chasing the Beatles.

In January, the Stones began five months of incessant touring and television work, cementing their position as Britain's number two band. On New Year's Day, they headlined
Top of the Pops,
a new BBC television show rolled out to compete with ITV's
Ready Steady Go! Pops
was taped in a new studio converted from an old church in Manchester, so it was less chaotic than
RSG,
a live gig where the band was jostled by the kids in the studio. Miming to records became an art in itself, requiring more rehearsal and tedious blocking of camera shots.

The next day, the Stones went into Regent Sound on Denmark Street to begin work on their first album. They cut “Carol,” “Route 66,” and Bo Diddley's “Mona.” The throbbing twin guitar attack on “Mona” was Brian's arrangement, demonstrating what Bill Wyman called “Brian's supremacy and instinctive musicianship.” Keith recalled that “Diddley himself [said] that Brian was the only cat he knew who'd worked out the secret of the Bo Diddley thing.” Regent Sound was only a one-room demo studio with a two-track Revox tape recorder, a speaker hung on a nail for playback, and egg boxes stuck to the walls for soundproofing. It was as primitive a studio as one could find in an industrialized country, but over the next year the Rolling Stones would cut some of their best early music there.

On January 6, they began a package tour, Group Scene '64, headlined by the Ronettes, the girl group whose big hit was “Be My Baby.” There was immediate tension as Mick and Keith competed for the attention of sultry Ronnie Bennett, girlfriend and future wife of producer Phil Spector. Mick won this little battle, and Keith hung out with Ronnie's sister Estelle. One of the other acts was a new London group, the Cheynes, with drummer Mick Fleetwood.

“It was our big break,” Fleetwood recalls, “and the beginning of my friendship with Brian Jones. He showed up in our dressing room, offering cigarettes around, very friendly and open, showing interest in who we were and what we were doing. Then, for some reason, he brought me into the Stones' dressing room and asked me to help him wash and dry his hair, a function I was happy to fill for a lot of that tour. Brian really knew how to bring you in, with his quiet voice that made you lean close to hear him. His hair, when reflected in the stage lights, had almost magical effect. The girls screamed to him while they played. He was mesmerizing. I was very impressed by him. We all were.”

                

“I Wanna Be Your Man”
was a big hit by this time, no. 12 in England. The Stones needed another single to follow it. One day at their flat on Mapesbury Road, Andrew heard Keith experimenting with the chords of Buddy Holly's “Not Fade Away,” chopping at them Bo Diddley style. On January 10 at Regent Sound, the Stones began work on the record. Andrew brought in Gene Pitney to help. “I was at my hotel,” Pitney recalled, “and Andrew Oldham called and said they were trying to cut 'Not Fade Away' and it wasn't making it. The Stones were fighting with each other and there was no energy. So I grabbed a couple bottles of cognac and went to the studio. I told them it was my birthday, got everyone drunk, and within a couple of hours they were playing their asses off and had 'Not Fade Away' in the can.” Decca executives didn't like the results, but Andrew insisted it was a hit. “That's what we fought for when we started,” Keith said, “the right to deliver the finished product in all its glory, take it or leave it.”

Meanwhile, it started to get really scary on the road. The audiences were now much younger kids who went nuts when the curtain rose and they saw the Stones blasting into “Talkin' 'Bout You.” From the stage, the musicians looked down and saw improbable tableaux of riot, rapture, and mania. At Glasgow on January 13, the Stones had to quit after three songs when the kids rushed the stage of the Barrowlands Ballroom in a human wave attack that trampled police trying to protect the band.

Now the group was playing seven nights a week, all over the country. Keith: “We were still sleeping in the back of this van every night because of the most hard-hearted and callous roadie I've ever encountered—Stu. From one end of England to another in Stu's VW bus with just an engine and a rear window and all the equipment, and then you fit in. The gear first, though.”

Ian Stewart was less than reverential about his charges. Five minutes before the gig, he'd stick his head in the dressing room and grumble, “Come on, my little shower of shit—you're on!”

The Stones' punishing schedule was punctuated by multiple radio and TV gigs every week, and got even more hectic as 1964 progressed. Between shows with the Ronettes, the Stones continued recording their album while their EP
The Rolling Stones
climbed the charts, after Andrew got the BBC to put “You Better Move On” in the rotation with the hits of the day. The Stones would record more than fifty separate tracks during the year.

Phil Spector was in London in February to keep tabs on the Ronettes, among other things. Despite his annoyance when he found out Keith had the hots for Ronnie, Spector was persuaded by Andrew Oldham to attend the Stones all-night session at Regent Sound on February 4.

Spector was a gun-toting eccentric—slight, with a vampire's pallor—who wore intimidating shades night and day. His grandiose Wall of Sound records were “little symphonies for the kids.” The Ronettes were his baby, the Crystals too. He'd cowritten “Spanish Harlem,” played guitar for the Drifters' “On Broadway,” and produced the Isley Brothers' epic version of “Twist and Shout.” He was about to score four Top Ten records with the Righteous Brothers. Spector was a boy genius at twenty-three, the crazy spirit of American pop music moving toward pop art. It was perfect that he was on the first Stones album.

With Pitney on piano, Stu on organ, and Spector playing maracas, the Stones cut Marvin Gaye's “Can I Get a Witness,” a Nanker Phelge instrumental titled “Now I've Got a Witness,” and “Little By Little,” a collaboration by Spector and the Stones. These were Memphis soul-style jams, continuing the Stones' transition from an R&B band to a rhythm and soul group. After midnight, Graham Nash and Allan Clarke of the Hollies showed up, and the now-drunken ensemble recorded some obscene novelties, with Mick and Phil trading vocals that parodied Andrew Oldham's flash persona and sexual appetites. Known as “Andrew's Blues” or “And Mr. Spector and Mr. Pitney Came Too,” these hilarious tracks remain available only on bootleg releases.

                

The grueling schedule
continued as the Stones' third British tour began on February 8, 1964, run by Robert Stigwood. (There was a lot of tension between Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton after Andrew discovered that Easton had demanded kickbacks from local promoters.) The set list was “Talkin' 'Bout You,” “Road Runner,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” Rufus Thomas's “Walking the Dog” (which the Stones played down and dirty), “You Better Move On,” and “I Wanna Be Your Man” for a finale, if the shows lasted that long before the livid mobs of kids began to scare the promoters and the cops.

They did even more TV and radio, which helped reposition them as a teen attraction. They played nightly gigs in Odeons, Gaumonts, and Granadas all over the land and continued recording on Denmark Street. Meanwhile, the Beatles' “Can't Buy Me Love” was a big hit single in the wake of their February conquest of the United States, where they'd been met by three thousand screaming girls at the airport in New York and appeared on Ed Sullivan's Sunday night TV variety program, charming the immense American audience, opening the door for the so-called British Invasion that followed them across the Atlantic.

In March, the Stones were interviewed by the London music paper
Melody Maker.
The famous headline—
WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE?
—was written by Andrew, whose confrontational strategy separated the Stones from the mainstream and emphasized their marginal, underdog pose. The press was happy to go along.

Early that month, Andrew gave the band a week off. Mick went to Paris. Charlie flew to Gibraltar, where he ran into jazz bassist Charles Mingus at the airport and asked for his autograph. Brian left Linda Lawrence at home and took a new girlfriend, Dawn Molloy, to Scotland. Dawn often traveled with the Stones around England after that and became pregnant with Brian's child.

Later in March, the Stones went to a party in Windsor for ingenue singer Adrienne Posta, whom Andrew was representing. In the middle of things, Mick had a loud argument with Chrissie, whose subsequent flood of tears caused her false eyelashes to peel off. Lots of London scene-makers were there: Paul McCartney and his girlfriend Jane Asher, her brother, singer Peter Asher, and Peter's friend John Dunbar, a dashing university student and London man-about-town. Dunbar brought along his stunning seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull.

Conversation died when Marianne walked into the room. Girls like her, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “do all the breathing for everyone, and finally even the men have to go outside for air.” She was a dreamy vision of Anglo-European drop-dead beauty: long blond hair, eyes like blue ice, a “large balcony” (as the French call big breasts), and full, inviting lips plumped like downy pillows. Marianne was also educated, well read, and highly intelligent, and her innocent gaze fell on a man like a heat wave.

Andrew was on her in a flash. She noticed he was wearing makeup and reeked of cologne. “Can she sing?” he asked not Marianne, but Dunbar, who answered yeah, man, she can sing too. Andrew turned on the charm and got her phone number. Tipsy Mick Jagger, keen to be noticed, spilled his drink down the front of her dress.