He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his superchic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humor; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself—and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child—with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed “a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness.” Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat—not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronizing way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner “Auntie Bobbie”—Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian—who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice—worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star, and radio presenter). On some nights, the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to “Long” John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others, it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in Mick’s favor. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognizably “soulful” voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Workin’,” brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John—openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be—dismissed him as “all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy.”
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him “a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]” per show. Some of these were for debutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick—or anyone in his social bracket—knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone, and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barreled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings—but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and supersocialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, “by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something.” Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even “paw” at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivaled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway—and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs—Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly program, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on May 19.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but—atypically nice man that he was—hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. “I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,” Bobbie Korner recalls. “He said, ‘Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.’ ”
Disc magazine made the announcement, a first droplet of newsprint oceans to come: “Nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer Mick Jagger has joined the Alexis Korner group Blues Incorporated and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates in Ealing and at their Thursday sessions at the Marquee.”
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose center of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in Jazz News, the most serious of all London’s music trades, inviting prospective sidemen to audition in the upstairs function room of a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square. When its management caught him pilfering from the bar, he was forced to relocate to another pub, the Bricklayers Arms on Broadwick Street.
His original plan had been to poach the two most talented members of a well-regarded band called Blues by Six, lead guitarist Geoff Bradford and vocalist Brian Knight. Soon after the move to the Bricklayers Arms, however, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turned up, accompanied by the other most serious musician from the Blue Boys, Dick Taylor. There was nothing to stop Mick singing with Brian’s band as well as Blues Incorporated if he chose, but that spot already seemed to have been taken by Brian Knight. Fortunately for him, the instrumental mix as it stood simply did not work. Geoff Bradford wished only to play the authentic blues of Muddy Waters and his ilk and was offended by Keith’s Chuck Berry licks—as well as nervous of Brian’s kleptomania. After a couple of practice sessions, Bradford bowed out, loyally accompanied by his friend Knight, so leaving the way open for Mick and Keith.
The only other worthwhile recruit was a burly, pugnacious-looking youth named Ian Stewart, a shipping clerk with the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation who arrived unpromisingly wearing too-brief leather cycling shorts and munching a pork pie, but who could play stride and barrelhouse piano as if he’d grown up around the New Orleans bordellos rather than in Ewell, Surrey. Just as appealing were his plainspoken manner, dry wit, and refusal to show his prospective bandmates the slightest reverence. “Stu” was not only welcomed into the lineup but recognized as a natural friend and ally even by the cautious Mick—in his case, perhaps the only one who would always tal
k to him as an equal, refuse to flatter him, and be unafraid to tell him the truth.
Brian had now filled every spot in his blues band except that of drummer. It was the vital ingredient for any kind of “beat” music, marking out the serious from the strum-along amateur. Drummers tended to be slightly older men with daytime jobs well paid enough for them to afford the sixty pounds which a new professional kit could cost. Even mediocre players were as sought after as plumbers during burst pipe season and could take their pick from among the best Trad or rock ’n’ roll bands. Although Soho had a whole street of drummers for hire (Archer Street, where pro and semipro musicians congregated seeking work), none was likely to be tempted by a gaggle of young blues apostles without money, management, or prospects. The Bricklayers Arms auditions did produce one promising candidate in Mick Avory, who sat in with the lineup a couple of times and seemed to fit in well enough. But he could see no future in playing behind this other Mick, and refused to commit himself permanently.
There was also the question of what to name the band. Brian, whose prerogative it was, had endlessly agonized about it, rejecting all suggestions from Mick and Keith while thinking of nothing suitable himself. The problem was only resolved when he decided to advertise for gigs in Jazz News and had to come up with a name while dictating the small ad over the telephone. His impromptu choice of “the Rolling Stones” was a further debt to Muddy Waters—not only Waters’s 1950 song “Rollin’ Stone” but a lesser-known EP track, “Mannish Boy,” which includes the line “Oh, I’m a rollin’ stone.”
To British ears it was an odd choice, less evocative of a blues master’s raunchy potted autobiography than of the sententious proverb recommending stagnation over adventure: “A rolling stone gathers no moss.” Mick, Keith, Stu, and Dick all protested that it made them sound halfway between a classical string quartet and an Irish show band, but the die was cast—and, after all, it was Brian’s group.
Their big break was the end result of a rather brutal slap in the face for Mick. Alexis Korner’s success at the Marquee Club had by now not only galvanized Soho but come to the notice of the British Broadcasting Corporation on Portland Place, three-quarters of a mile to the north. As a result, completing Korner’s sense of vindication, Blues Incorporated were offered a live appearance on BBC radio’s Thursday night Jazz Club program on July 12. It was an opportunity not to be missed, even though it clashed with the band’s regular weekly show at the Marquee. So as not to disappoint their club audience, Long John Baldry, the Ealing Club’s queenly blond giant, was lined up to deputize for them.
For this hugely important exposure on national radio, Korner did not want Mick to be his band’s sole vocalist but to perform in alternation with Art Wood, elder brother of the still-unknown schoolboy Ronnie. However, the parsimonious BBC would not pay for two singers on top of five instrumentalists. So Korner, figuring that Mick’s appeal was more visual than vocal, and thus of doubtful impact on radio, decided to drop him in favor of Art Wood. (In the end Art did not appear either, and the vocals were left to Cyril Davies.)
As a consolation prize for Mick, Korner arranged that the band in which he’d been moonlighting should play their first-ever gig on the same night as the broadcast, filling the Marquee’s intermission spot between Long John Baldry’s sets for a twenty-pound fee. They even received a mention in Jazz News’s preview section, on equal terms with all Soho’s most illustrious jazz names, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, and the like.
By rights, the paper should have sought details from the loquacious and articulate Brian, but instead, because of the Korner connection, it contacted Mick. Consequently, he rather than Brian seemed like the leader of the band as he listed its personnel and showed a twinge of unease lest its new name should offend the Marquee’s purist blues audience. Brian, for some reason, had decided to revert to his slide-guitar alter ego for the occasion, so was not even identified: “Mick Jagger, R&B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig. Called ‘The Rolling Stones’ [‘I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit,’ said Mick], the lineup is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), ‘Stu’ (piano), and Mick Avory (drums).”
So that night of July 12, 1962, under the pink-and-white canvas awning of the Marquee stage, Mick sang with the Rolling Stones for the very first time. To set off his cord trousers, he wore a horizontally striped matelot jersey, common enough among young men in the South of France but in London chiefly identified with girls or sexually ambiguous “chorus boys” in West End musicals. As blues-singing attire, it was as daring as the white frilly dress he would select for an open-air show at the other end of Oxford Street seven years later.
The hourlong set consisted mostly of irreproachable blues and R&B standards by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, and Billy Boy Arnold, with the odd Chuck Berry like “Down the Road Apiece” and “Back in the USA” (“New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearn for you . . .”). As Mick Avory did not, after all, play drums that night, the sound had considerably less attack than usual. Even so, many hard-core blues Marqueesards could not dissociate the word stones from rock; the applause was muted and at times almost drowned by whistles and boos.
Among the crowd that night was Charlie Watts, the drummer who occasionally played for Blues Incorporated but more regularly for Blues by Six, the band that was supposed to have given the Rolling Stones both a lead guitarist and vocalist. Charlie was the epitome of the superior drummer class, immaculately dressed and barbered, with the almost tragically serious face of a latter-day Buster Keaton. True to form, he showed no outward emotion as the stripe-jerseyed figure onstage blew the “harp” passages in Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” as if it were an erotic rite rather than a religious one. But, as he would recall, the highly esteemed blues and jazz musicians of his acquaintanceship all suddenly seemed like “eccentric old men” compared to Mick.
Afterward, collecting their four pounds apiece (enough in these days to buy three LPs, dinner for two at an Angus Steakhouse, or a pair of boots from the modish Regent Shoe store), Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick, and Stu felt they had connected with the Marquee crowd at least enough to be offered further regular work there. But Harold Pendleton still considered them to be infected with the rock ’n’ roll virus, if not in their repertoire then in the energy of their sound and the body language and flying hair of their front man. He would use them only as an interval band and with the worst possible grace, muttering that they were “bloody rockers” and their R&B idols were “rubbish.”
Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51, and the Flamingo on Wardour Street—the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.
Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, traveling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart—and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: “Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings (20p).”
At this stage, Mick’s organizational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from
promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).
While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never “sell out” to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s “Close Together,” Bo Diddley’s “You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s “Soon Forgotten.”
The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organization, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: “A great band,” Decca’s letter said, “but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Very Bright, Highly Motivated Layabouts”
THE ROLLIN’ STONES’ far-flung work schedule was making it increasingly hard for Mick to get back to his own bed in Dartford each night. Besides, at nineteen he was too old to be ordered to do washing up or weight training any longer. So in the autumn of 1962, he left his spotless, well-regulated home and moved up to London to share a flat with Brian Jones at number 102 Edith Grove in the World’s End district of Chelsea. Originally, the ménage also included Brian’s girlfriend, Pat Andrews, and their toddler son, Julian, but after a few days Pat and Julian departed without explanation, and Keith Richards moved in instead.
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