Old Gods Almost Dead (9 page)

At the Stones' flat, Brian was the deejay, playing the Stones' demo tape and Jimmy Reed records until four in the morning (despite the hyperopinionated Lennon's blunt dismissal of Chicago blues). The Beatles were charmed by Brian, a fellow provincial with a respectful attitude, and stayed friends with him for the rest of his life. They invited the Stones to Albert Hall a few days later, where they were playing a Pop Proms concert on Thursday night. Before the Beatles left, Brian got them to sign a photo of themselves from a magazine, which he proudly stuck on the wall like any fan.

Brian, Mick, and Keith cabbed to Kensington on April 18 to see the Beatles and got in free by carrying in the gear. In the dressing room, the Stones were astonished to see the Beatles putting on stage makeup. (McCartney says the next time they saw the Stones perform, Mick was made up like a tart.) When the Beatles went on, the Stones checked out the mass Beatlemania of the young girls packed into enormous Albert Hall—the screaming, the hysteria, the undies and the candy raining down on the stage—and were deeply, indelibly impressed. Afterward, Brian and Giorgio were helping to get the Beatles' gear out the stage door. Brian was mistaken for one of the mop-tops and was mobbed: hair pulled, clothes torn, face ripped by fingernails, deafened by screams. Brian Jones, ignored for too long, now had his first taste of stardom. Driving him back to Chelsea, Gomelsky noticed he seemed dazed and asked if he was all right.

“That's what I want,” Brian whispered. “That's what I want.”

                

Giorgio saw himself
as the next Brian Epstein, who had just launched his second Liverpool band, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Epstein was building an empire, and Giorgio wanted one too. He started work on a film about the Stones, and they recorded “Pretty Thing” for the sound track. He invited Peter Jones, a respected music journalist, to come to the Crawdaddy. “The fans were going mad with excitement,” Jones recalled. “During the break, Giorgio brought over Brian and Mick, introduced them as the Rolling Stones. We ate hot [meat] pies; drank a few glasses of beer. They said, 'You can see how the fans go for us down here, but we're already fed up. The clubs in London don't want to know us. The recording scene seems dead. The local papers have given us fantastic write-ups, but nobody can be bothered to even read them.' ” The two Stones seemed sullen and exhausted to Jones, who promised he would spread the word about their “wild, raw-edged music.”

On Tuesday, April 23, Giorgio got them to the BBC for a radio audition. Cyril Davies's rhythm section subbed for Charlie and Bill, who couldn't leave their jobs. Stu managed to get away from the chemical company because his piano was so crucial to the drive of the band.

The next night, the Rollin' Stones started playing the failing jazz club on Eel Pie Island in the Thames, a rickety old ballroom with a sprung dance floor. To get there, you paid a toll and crossed a little footbridge from the Twickenham shore. They served brown Newcastle ale, and if you were overcome by the sweat and the smoke, you could fall out on the grassy lawn outside. Eel Pie Island was where many fans saw the Stones for the first time, and it became a legendary venue for them.

                

Back at Edith Grove,
alliances among the Stones shifted around like the changing spring weather. It was still cold and the walls were covered in damp. John Lennon dropped by and found Mick and Keith huddled in bed together for warmth. All they had to eat was potatoes: boiled, mashed, and fried. Brian and Keith were closely bonded, playing guitars incessantly, deconstructing R&B to build a new, more modern sound with a jagged edge of adolescent sex drive. “With gloves on, freezing my balls off, that's the closest I ever got to Brian Jones,” Keith said. “We had two guitars weaving around each other. We'd play these things so much that we knew both guitar parts. So when we got to the crucial point where we got it really flash, we'd suddenly switch. The lead picks up the rhythm, and the rhythm picks up the lead. It's what Ronnie [Wood] and I call the ancient art of weaving. We still do it today. We don't even have to look at each other, almost. You can feel it. You say, 'Ah, he's gonna take off now, okay, I'll go down.' And vice versa.”

Sometimes Mick Jagger picked up a guitar and tried to play along. He'd ask Brian to show him a chord or a lick, but Brian refused, insisting that Mick stick to singing.

Mick was going through an ironic “camp” period, mincing about the filthy flat in housecoat and slippers, trying to tidy up a bit. The fetid squalor and chaos of Edith Grove was getting to him. Brian was dealing with the severe stresses of his life by drinking as much brandy as he could hold. When he was really loaded, he liked to beat up his girlfriends in the front room. Brian and Keith amused themselves by blowing gobs of snot on the walls and thinking up colorful names for the disgusting blotches. With Jimmy Phelge, who walked around wearing his soiled underwear on his head, Brian and Keith worked on perfecting their most insolent face, the “nanker,” pulling down their eyes while pushing up their nostrils in a cretinous mask of contempt. When Mick complained about the toxic conditions in their flat, they pulled the nanker on him. Mick was also doubtful about what he was doing, and nervous about his parents' reaction if he told them he was leaving LSE for the life of a full-time musician.

                

In late April 1963,
music journalist Peter Jones tipped off teenage London press agent Andrew Oldham about the Rollin' Stones and insisted he visit Richmond to hear for himself. Andrew was nineteen, a hyper baby promoter with a desk in Soho and an eye to find the next Beatles.

“Well, okay,” said Oldham. “I don't mind having a look at them. But you know I hear about new groups every day of the week, and I wouldn't give most of them the steam off my shit, but if you want, I might go down there and see them.”

On April 28, Andrew turned up in Richmond in his peaked Bob Dylan cap and shouldered his way through the mob of mods waiting to get out of the cold drizzle. Making his way to the alley behind the club, Andrew heard some hard words and a girl shouting. As he entered the Crawdaddy Club through the back door, he passed Mick and his new girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, standing in the shadows, having a blazing row.

Andrew went inside, and that was the end of the Rollin' Stones.

R&B was a minority thing that had to be defended at all times. There was this kind of crusade mentality.

Mick Jagger

Messenger of the Gods

Andrew Loog Oldham
stood in the back of the Crawdaddy Club as the Stones started their set. “The stuttering beat spoke of sex the instant it started a little dance in my heart.” He looked at Mick Jagger, in critic George Melly's famous joke, like Sylvester looked at Tweety Pie. Andrew's destiny revealed itself as he checked out Mick's obscene lips, the future fast-forwarding in a screaming chaos of fame, money, power, sex. All those lips needed was someone who knew what to do with them.

Andrew was the one. He was mercurial Hermes, messenger of the gods. He was a cheap hustler, younger than the Stones, hipper than thou, speedier, druggier, manic-depressive. His hypersensitive antennae were perpetually scanning the horizon for the Next Big Thing and already tracking the shift toward a media-controlled pop marketplace ruled by image and hype. He immediately saw the Stones as a paradigm of his latest obsession, Anthony Burgess's just-published novel
A Clockwork Orange,
with its thuggish new language of aggro and social control. Andrew's semimystic revelation as he felt the aggressive jungle boogie of the Stones in his very bones was that this new band and its dark, marginal R&B were the antidote to the Beatles' wholesome and cheery pop image. The Stones would sell massive amounts of records and concert seats, and the seats would be sopping wet as soon as they started to play.

“Even before I got into the club,” Andrew later said, “I knew this was the
one.
I stood outside and watched Mick and Chrissie Shrimpton, sister of Jean, having a fight in the alleyway. They were as attractive as each other, and I knew I was onto something.”

Giorgio Gomelsky's father had died, and he was in Switzerland for the funeral. After the gig, Andrew started talking to Mick and Keith. Brian butted in, told Andrew he was the leader of the group. Andrew did his number on them, jive-talking outlandish claims about how he could make them bigger than the Beatles. He talked American slang, went on about knowing Phil Spector, legendary American producer of the Crystals and Ronettes and the first teenage millionaire in the pop world. Andrew wore eye makeup, came on very cutting, very camp, all “darling” and “my dear,” and he got their total attention. He was irreverent, cynical about the record business, and they got the (erroneous) impression that Andrew loved the blues and R&B as much as they did. He told them they had to begin making records immediately and that he would style them as the anti-Beatles, looking the opposite of them. “To the extent that they looked all clean-cut and good,” Keith said, “we would look scruffy and evil.”

Andrew was more like them than they were, talked like them, wore the same clothes, had the same contempt for the wankers of the world. By the end of the evening, Andrew had the Stones in his pocket. They went home to Edith Grove and stayed up, almost insane with excitement, all night. Brian Jones was completely ecstatic because someone had discovered them. Giorgio Gomelsky would get the shock of his life on his return to London, but nothing mattered to Brian, who was determined to be a pop star at any price, with no apology.

                

Andrew Oldham's father
was a Dutch airman killed in the war. Born out of wedlock in Hampstead in 1944 to a well-off English girl, Andrew spent his youth getting kicked out of good schools for blackmail, shoplifting, and wearing the wrong trousers. He started tramping the streets of Soho at fourteen, trying to live the lives portrayed by playwright Wolf Mankowitz in the stage version of
Expresso Bongo,
which his mother took him to (Paul Scofield was the pop manager played by Laurence Harvey in the later film). He was an early mod, a young English “sixties mega-spiv” with a taste for sharp clothes and American music, all flash and plastic. Tall, blond, totally rude, he talked his way into a job with Mary Quant, working by night as a waiter at the Flamingo and even releasing a couple of singles as “Sandy Beach” before working little P.R. jobs in London. An early client was Don Arden, tough-guy promoter of rock and roll shows. Arden reportedly fired Andrew after he proudly showed reporters the razor-slashed, urine-soaked seats that fans had left behind after an Arden show. Andrew was in the studio when the Beatles made their first national TV broadcast on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
in February 1963, and was hired by Brian Epstein to do P.R. for “Please Please Me” and for his other groups. Another client was American record producer Phil Spector, inventor of the Wall of Sound, paranoid mogul of pop, “the first tycoon of teen,” as Tom Wolfe called him. When Spector visited London, Andrew grooved on his wise-guy persona: the limos, bodyguards, muscle, guns, and especially the know-how. Spector told him if he ever found a band to produce, Andrew should record it himself, and only lease the tapes to a record label, retaining ownership (and control).

Andrew rented an office on Regent Street from an old-line talent agent, Eric Easton, a thirty-six-year-old former theater organist and veteran of variety shows. The next week, he took Easton to Richmond to see the Stones. They lured Brian Jones to Regent Street, where he surrendered control of his group, signing a three-year management contract on behalf of the band on May 1, 1963 (the contract gave the Stones' new management 25 percent of all earnings). At first, Easton said he wanted Jagger out of the band because he couldn't sing. Brian seemed amenable, but Andrew insisted that Jagger stay.

Brian also insisted on being secretly paid five pounds more a week than the rest of the band, because he was the leader. When Gomelsky returned to London a few days later, Brian gave him the bad news that they were movin' on.

Things started to happen fast. Andrew impulsively decided to put the Stones in uniforms like the Beatles. On Carnaby Street, he bought them black jeans, black turtlenecks, and Cuban-heeled boots. Brian hated this. Mick didn't like the tight boots and stopped wearing them in favor of his loafers.

They kept playing their regular venues, the Ricky Tick in Windsor and Eel Pie Island, and Andrew got them publicity gigs, like
News of the World
's fun fair in Battersea Park on the south bank of the Thames on the afternoon of May 4. Pat Andrews showed up with baby Julian, and Brian proudly held the boy and took him around the fair. Afterward, Andrew took Brian aside and told him to lose the kid and the girlfriend, man, if he ever wanted to be a pop star. Pat and her son went back to Cheltenham soon after.

                

Within a week
of signing the Stones, Andrew got them their dreamed-of record deal, a preposterous swindle that worked out badly for the Stones in the end.

There were only two big record companies in England, EMI and Decca. Both were subsidiaries of giant electronic corporations. EMI had the Beatles, and Decca needed the Next Big Thing. Decca executive Dick Rowe was notorious for having passed on the Beatles a year earlier. When he ran into George Harrison cojudging a talent show in Liverpool, George told him his favorite new band was playing the next night in Richmond. Rowe drove all day to be at the Crawdaddy Club in time to catch the Rollin' Stones' raucous rite of spring. He made a deal with Andrew almost on the spot. They played Rowe the IBC demos from March, Andrew acted his “little teenage tycoon shit” to the hilt, and they leveraged a desperate Decca Records into giving them a two-year deal and a 20 percent royalty.

Andrew went to Brian and crowed that he'd made Decca fucking
crawl,
baby, and that he'd managed to get the band a whopping
6 percent
royalty—better than the Beatles' (famously horrendous) contract with EMI. Andrew and Eric Easton incorporated a company called Impact Sound, which would record and own the master tapes, leasing them—Spector-like—to hapless Decca for worldwide distribution. Brian immediately signed a three-year recording contract with Impact Sound on behalf of the Rollin' Stones. Andrew didn't tell Brian that Impact Sound would retain 14 percent of the Stones' royalties.

At this point, Brian let drop that he'd already signed a contract with IBC when they cut their earlier demo tapes. Easton gave Brian a hundred pounds, and Brian went to IBC, told them the Stones were breaking up, bought out their contract, and got the tapes back, in what Keith called “one of his fantastic get-out schemes.”

When the Decca contract was finally signed, Andrew's mother, with whom he still lived, had to act as legal guardian for him, since he was nineteen years old, too young to sign the papers by himself.

Come On

On May 10, 1963,
Andrew took the band into Olympic Studios, an advertising-jingle factory near Marble Arch, to record their first songs for Decca. They cut Chuck Berry's “Come On” and (after much debate) Muddy Waters's “I Want to Be Loved” and thought they were through for the day until the engineer asked the departing Andrew, who'd acted as producer, if he wanted to mix the tapes. Huh? The engineer explained that they had recorded four tracks but had to edit it down to one monaural track in order to manufacture the record. Patiently Andrew explained that he didn't know anything about recording, or even about music, and had never been in a studio before.
“You
mix them,” Andrew said, “and I'll be back in the morning for the tape.”

“Come On” was a Chuck Berry St. Louis rhumba, unreleased in England, that Andrew thought would be a good first single. They came up with a fast arrangement that echoed the Jamaican ska style that was sweeping England (where it was called bluebeat). Andrew: “We're all very tense [in the studio]. We all felt a bit of panic through that three-hour session. We kept rushing out to have a drink in an effort to keep the nerves down.” The Stones played it fast, clocking in at under two minutes, and they hated the result. Decca hated it too and later sent the band into their West Hampstead studio to redo it with Eric Easton supervising. The band was tense—red-light fever—in Decca's stuffy studio and disliked the clean but stiff new version with its nervous rhythm and Brian's wah-wah harp. “I don't think 'Come On' was very good,” Mick said later. “In fact, it was shit.” He sang the two-word chorus in falsetto, a device he would use for his entire career. Decca released it as the renamed Rolling Stones' first single on June 7, 1963.

Andrew and Decca worked the record, and it eventually reached a semirespectable no. 21 on the charts, even though reviewers wrote that it sounded nothing like the Stones. The first photos of the group were shot by Gered Mankowitz (son of the author of
Expresso Bongo
) and released by Decca with the record. They showed the shaggy band slouching on a London bomb site and drew even more (sarcastic) comment than the music. The Stones refused to play “Come On” in public. Keith: “It was done just to get a record out. We never even wanted to hear it. The idea was Andrew's: get a strong single so they would let us make an album, which back then was a privilege.”

The
Daily Mirror
did a positive story on the wild little scene in Richmond, and attendance at the Stones' still-small gigs started to get too big for the Station Hotel to handle. As the Stones' began their inexorable liftoff, other transitions were afoot. Andrew changed Keith's last name to Richard, because it echoed Cliff Richard. Bill Perks changed his name to Bill Wyman. Charlie, Bill, and Stu quit their day jobs that summer to devote all their time to the band. Their families thought they were crazy.

                

June 1963.
Someone at the BBC told the Stones they were “unsuitable” for an audition. (Actually they thought Mick sounded too black, and Easton again mooted getting rid of him.) They kept playing the rickety ballroom on Eel Pie Island, alternating with blues rivals the All-Stars, featuring Long John Baldry. When Baldry wanted a break, he'd introduce the big-nosed, bouffant-haired mod Rodney Stewart in his high-heeled boots, who'd scream his head off. When the Piccadilly Jazz Club changed its name to the Scene Club, the Stones played the opening. Then the BBC started to get angry letters from Stones fans, and a BBC rep finally called Eric Easton to ask about a possible audition for the band.