True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  “Absolutely no bread at this point, Brian’s in and out of work more frequently than ever. Got caught stealing again and very luckily was let off. He was always very good, Brian, at getting out of things. He’d always chat up the manager and they’d say, Yeah, we understand, your wife’s left you (wasn’t his wife but he’d always tell them it was), and your grandmother died and anything else he could think of. Brian was the one who kept us all together then. Mick was still going to school. I was sort of halfway looking for a job. I went out one morning and came back in the evening and Brian was blowing harp. He’s standing at the top of the stairs saying, ‘Listen to this: Whoooo. Whooooo.’ All these blue notes comin’ out. ‘I’ve learned how to do it. I’ve figured it out.’ One day.

  “We were rehearsing two or three times a week, no gigging, we didn’t dare. Dick Taylor’s still with us, he’s on bass by now. We were looking for drums. Charlie was gigging with Alexis Korner. We couldn’t afford him. We picked up a drummer called Tony Chapman. Terrible drummer, always comin’ in on the onbeat. Then Dick Taylor decided, I think, that he was gonna go on to another art school in London. Stu drifted with us for some reason.

  “Brian’s just about making enough to keep us from being chucked out of this place, and it’s winter, it’s like the worst winter ever. Brian and me sitting around this gas fire, wondering where to get the next shilling to put in it to keep the fire going. Collecting beer bottles and selling them back to the pubs, getting like three shillings, and going to pads where we knew there’d been parties on, walkin’ in sayin’ Hello, how nice, we’ll help you clean up, and we’d steal the bottles and whatever food we could find lying around the kitchen and run for it. It’s gettin’ really sick, down to pickin’ people’s pockets, in fact that’s why these two LSE cats leave. They split, and we get this other cat in who’s worth a brief mention ’cause he was as horrifyingly disgusting as Brian and myself at the time and also ’cause he used to call himself Phelge, which was just a nickname, but he insisted on being called Phelge.

  “Nanker Phelge”—listed as the writer of the Stones’ original songs on their first records—“was a creation of Brian’s. This guy who called himself Phelge was going through this incredible scene at the time—everybody went through it in a way, Mick went through his first camp period, he started wandering round in a blue linen housecoat, wavin’ his hands everywhere—‘Oh! Don’t!’ A real King’s Road queen for about six months, and Brian and I used to take the piss out of him. Mick was on that kick, and this guy that we lived with, Phelge, was into being the most disgusting person—he was going through being the most disgusting thing ever. Literally. You would walk into this pad, and he would be standing at the top of the stairs, completely nude except for his underpants, which would be filthy, on top of his head, and he’d be spitting at you. It wasn’t a thing to get mad about, you’d just collapse laughing. Covered in spit, you’d collapse laughing.

  “And this pad is getting so screwed up, for like six months we used the kitchen to play in, just rehearse in, because it was cold, and slowly the place got filthy and started to smell, so we bolted the doors and locked them all up, and the kitchen was condemned. I was at that time into making tapes, I had a tape recorder, reels and reels of tape in the bedroom. See, it was interesting, the place was built like if that was the bedroom, the stairs would be coming up here, and turn round and then come along here, and the kitchen would be off here, and the bog would be here. I used to have a bed here, and the window there, and the window to the bog would be there. All this was outside a courtyard in the garden. I had the microphone through the window in the cistern of the bog, and the tape recorder at the foot of the bed. And I had reels and reels of tapes of people goin’ to the bog. Chains pullin’. On cheap tape recorders, if you record the flushing of a John, it sounds like people applauding, so it would be like some incredible show Brian and I would make up, like with the chick from downstairs: ‘And now, folks, Miss Judy Whatever.’ Every time somebody would come into the bog, I’d switch the tape recorder on and go round to the bog door and knock, and they’d say ‘Wait a minute,’ and you’d get these conversations going through the door, followed at the end by applause, and then the next person would come in. That’s the sort of thing we were into. Real down-home.

  “We’re trying to get this band off the ground without any real hope. At this time the Beatles’ first record comes out and we’re really brought down. It’s the beginning of Beatlemania. Suddenly everybody’s lookin’ round for groups, and we see more and more groups being signed. Alexis Korner gets a recording contract, splits from the Marquee Club, and who gets his spot, the Rolling Stones. For just about enough bread to keep alive.

  “We really need a bass player now. I’m not sure what happened to Dick Taylor. I think we kicked him out, very ruthless in those days. Nobody could hear him because he had terrible equipment and he seemed to have no way to get anything better. Everybody else had hustled reasonable-size amplifiers. There was the scene of how much bread you were makin’ and why split it with a cat who couldn’t be heard anyway. Advertised for a bass player. The drummer we’ve got says, ‘I know a bass player who’s got his own amplifier, huge speaker, plus a spare Vox 130 amp’—which at the time was the biggest amp available, the best. He got one of those to spare, fantastic. So onto the scene comes—” William Perks, a bricklayer’s son from Penge, in southeast London “—and we can’t believe him. He’s a real London Ernie, Brylcreemed hair and eleven-inch cuffs on his pants and huge blue suede shoes with rubber soles.”

  Bill met the Stones at a pub called the Weatherby Arms, in King’s Road, Chelsea. “Bill came down there,” Stu said, “and they were in one of their funny moods, and they didn’t even bother to talk to him, and Bill didn’t know what was going on. They were living in Edith Grove together and, um, I used to dread goin’ round there because of some of the weird things that used to go on. I used to think they were fuckin’ insane at times. When people live together all the bloody time they begin to develop virtually their own language and you’re never sure whether you’re gettin’ through to them, or whether they mean what they say or whether they’re laughin’ at you all the fuckin’ time. So Bill wasn’t one bit impressed.”

  A few years older than the other Stones, Bill (born October 24, 1935) had received, along with his brothers and sisters (two of each), a sound musical education. By the time he was fourteen he could play clarinet, piano, and organ. “He was very good,” his father said. “In fact, he was in line for the job of organist at our local church.” The elder Mr. Perks, who played accordion “just for fun” at neighborhood pubs, told his children that “if they learned to play an instrument they’d never be short of a pound.” But even though Bill’s parents both worked, his mother in a factory, at sixteen he had to leave Beckenham Grammar School to find a job. Drafted into National Service, Bill started playing guitar while stationed in Germany with the Royal Air Force as a file clerk.

  After his discharge, Bill found a job with an engineering firm in Lewisham. When he met the Stones he had been married for a year and a half and had a year-old son, Stephen. Bill was working for the engineering firm and playing part-time with a rock and roll band called the Cliftons. “We had a drummer and three guitarists,” Bill said. “One played rhythm, one lead, and I’d tune the top two strings of mine down seven semitones and play bass Chuck Berry-style. We got away with it, but then we’d hear groups with real basses, and we knew there was something wrong. So we bought a bass guitar from a fellow, cut it down, took all the metal off, made it very light and easy to play. I still use it sometimes.” The Cliftons played weddings, youth-club dances, “picked up a fair amount of money, considering we weren’t all that good.”

  Bill used part of the money to buy the equipment that the Stones admired. “They didn’t like me, they liked my amplifier,” Bill said. “The two they had were broken and torn up inside—sounded great, really, but we didn’t know that then. But I didn’t like their music very
much. I had been playing hard rock—Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis—and the slow blues things seemed very boring to me.”

  But Stu “got on all right with Bill, really, and as I was the guy that was taking him home each night, I managed to sort of talk him into staying.”

  “It also turns out,” Keith said, “that he can really play. At first it’s very untogether, but slowly he starts to play very natural, very swinging bass lines. But it’s not a permanent thing, he does play with us and he’s coming to rehearsals, but then he can’t make the gigs sometimes, because he’s married and’s got a kid, and he has to work. So it’s very touchy one way and the other.

  “Stu gets us a regular gig down where he lives, at this pub, the Red Lion, in Sutton. We’re playing around west London, Eel Pie Island. Nearly all the same people would follow us wherever we went, the first Stones fans, all doing the new dances. The clubs held a couple of hundred. Things were beginning to look up, we were making like fifty quid a week, playing about five nights a week, every week the same places, and it’s getting good. Brian’s trying to find out about recordings. We know that because of the Beatles thing that’s happening, there’s no time to lose if we want to get on records, which is what we really want to do. Every musician wants to make records, I don’t know why. It’s got nothing to do with the bread, they just want to see what they can lay down for posterity, I guess.

  “We’ve got a steady scene going in London, and we get hooked up with our first manager. Nothing was signed, but he was Giorgio Gomelsky, who owned the Piccadilly jazz club, a terrible place, nobody much used to go there, but we played there a couple of times. At one of these gigs we decided to get rid of our drummer and steal Charlie from this other band he was working with, because we were now in a position to offer Charlie twenty quid a week.”

  Charlie Watts, the son of a lorry driver for British Rail, was born in London on June 2, 1941. “My grandparents moved from London before I was born, when my father first got married. And they lived not in Wembley but near there. We moved to Wembley when I was about seven,” Charlie said. “It was like there was nobody there. There were greens and things, which twenty years before were farmland. I remember as a kid there was a farm in Wembley that’s not there any more. It’s an estate. That was the last farm in that area producing milk and having pigs and a farmhouse, with barns. It’s all gone now, and that’s in my lifetime. I mean how far can you go? The world’s going like that.

  “I went to infants school in Wembley. Junior school’s where you start to play football. You go to a secondary modern school for an ordinary education, which is what I had. We used to have forty in a class. I specialized in art. If I hadn’t, I’d have just played football all day long. That’s all I would have been living for—and cricket.

  “I started playing when I was fourteen or fifteen. We had a choir, which nobody liked singing in much, didn’t have a band. Music was a guy lecturing, and nobody understood what he was saying. Fortunately my parents were perceptive enough to buy me a drum kit. I’d bought a banjo myself and taken the neck off and started playing it as a drum. I don’t know how it came about, I started learning the banjo, and I just got pissed off with it, I didn’t like it. There was a little period of four weeks and by the end of it I’d already taken the neck off. Played newspaper with wire brushes. My parents bought me one of those first drum kits which every drummer knows only too well. But you have to have them, or you’d never get any appreciation of the other ones. I used to sell records to buy bigger cymbals and what-ever was in vogue at the time. I used to waste money like mad buying equipment. I practiced at home to jazz records all the time. The only rock and roll I ever listened to was after the Rolling Stones turned me on to it. I used to like Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley and from there I went on to, who’s that guy, ‘Ooh Poo Pah Doo,’ and slowly I got on to hearing how good the early Elvis records were.

  “When I was older I used to play at weddings, but then I was working in the day. I used to be a designer. Well, I don’t know what I used to be, I used to do lettering, that’s what I used to do all day. For three years, sit down and practice that. For a little guy who made his living at it, and I was his apprentice. And then from there—I’d done three years apprenticeship and wanted more money, being Jewish, so I moved to a bigger firm, which sent me to Sweden, ah, Denmark. Actually it was a big con because I went over there and got paid and did no work because nobody knew what I was supposed to be doing, as usual. I should have gone to New York. That was my big ambition in those days. But instead of that I went to Denmark. I’m glad I did—I got straight in with a band there—but I had no drum kit, had to borrow one all the time.

  “Prior to that I used to play at the Troubadour with this band, and that’s where I met Alexis Korner. Then I went away and came back and he’s starting a band. He said he wanted me to play, so I said okay. Three of us lasted through the first rehearsals. Well, the first six months. They all became friends of mine. ’Cause it wasn’t for bread. You never made bread, none of us did. We went all the way to Birmingham once and got five shillings. Time went on and I left that band and I’d left my firm, I was out of work, playing sometimes with another band, Blues by Five, just a mixture of stray people, and I joined the Stones.”

  • • •

  “We’d come to a club,” said Bill Wyman, who changed from Perks, taking the name of an air force friend, when the Stones began announcing their names onstage, “when we could get one to take us, and set up our amps. The others were dressed in sweaters, leather jackets, blue jeans, and I’d be in the clothes I’d worn to work. The manager would tell us, ‘Look sharp now, only ten minutes before you go on, better go and change.’ We’d tell him that we were going on as we were, and he’d say, ‘Very funny, now go and get dressed.’

  “We carried three stolen metal stools with us, and with Mick out front and Charlie in back we’d just sit down, Brian, Keith, and me, and start playing, just as if we were rehearsing. Each of us would have a beer by his stool, and when we finished a number we’d all drink a bit and light up a fag. Customers couldn’t believe it. They’d stop dancing, come stand around the stage and stare at us. Didn’t know what to think. The managers would say, ‘Right, pack up your gear and get out in five minutes or I’ll set my boys on you.’

  “We’d finish playing after two A.M., and I’d have to be up at six to go to my job. I averaged three hours’ sleep, and didn’t know where I was a good part of the time. But I had to go on, because I had Stephen. Finally, though, I had to choose—the people at work told me to cut my hair or pack up. I had had long hair before going with the Stones, but now it was longer than ever. It seemed such a silly thing. Everybody—the people at work, my friends, my parents, my wife—said I should keep my job and not go with the Stones. Later, when we were a success, they said, ‘See, I knew you could make it.’”

  “The first time I saw them,” Glyn Johns said, “I’d never seen any-thing like it, ever.” The chief engineer at I.B.C. recording studios in London in January 1963, Johns helped the Stones to get a recording session. “I can remember taking them to I.B.C. for the first session and being frightened of introducing them to George Clouston, the guy who owned the studio. I see photographs of them then and they look so tame and harmless, I can’t associate it with the effect they had on people. It was just their appearance, their clothes, their hair, their whole attitude was immediately obvious to you as soon as you saw them playing. It was just a complete pppprt to society and everybody and anything.”

  “At the start of the Stones it was Brian who was the monster head,” Alexis Korner said. “Brian was incredibly aggressive in performance. By then his hair was pretty long, and he had what was almost a permanent pout, crossed with a leer, and he used to look incredibly randy most of the time. He used to jump forward with the tambourine and smash it in your face and sneer at you at the same time. The aggression had a tremendous impact. Also, he was a very sensitive player, Brian, at his best, and could play slow blues excepti
onally well. But I remember him most for his ‘I’m gonna put the boot in’ attitude. Brian achieved what he wanted to achieve by his extreme aggression, and it was extreme, it was incitement, when Brian was onstage playing he was inciting every male in the room to hit him. Really and truly that was the feeling one got. At the start Brian was the image of aggression in the Stones much more than Mick.”

  “But it was always Mick who would take people on,” Stu said. “When we used to get fucked up every week by Jazz News” which seemed purposely to misprint the Stones’ ads, “it would be Mick who’d go up to their office and have it out.”

  “But onstage,” Alexis said, “it was Brian who made blokes want to thump him. He would deliberately play at someone’s chick, and when the bloke got stroppy, he’d slap a tambourine in his face.”

  “Brian could have been killed a few times,” Stu said.

  9

  She said, “Daddy, this old World Boogie

  Gone take me to my grave

  Gone take me to my grave.”

  BUKKA WHITE: “World Boogie”

  BEFORE TEN O’CLOCK in the morning I was sitting in the living room with my back to the sweep of Los Angeles, talking on a beige telephone to a travel agent, who said that Kerouac’s funeral could be reached only by taxi or rental car from Boston. There wasn’t time, but with the letter mailed and the Stones, Sandison said, planning to spend the next week in the studio finishing Let It Bleed, I could go home and try to prepare for the tour.

  After a day of shopping—a leather jacket, an ounce of grass—I rode to the airport with Chip Monck and Ian Stewart, who were going to inspect the hall the Stones would play in Chicago. Stu’s neat black hair with short back and sides, his khaki trousers, golf shirt, and Hush Puppies made him and Monck, in his California cowboy drag—red suede jeans—a curious pair. Monck had again fallen asleep sitting up. He was the only person I had ever seen who could make falling asleep pretentious.