True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  “This is where Brian starts to realize that things have gone beyond his control,” Keith said. “Before this, everybody knows that Brian considers it to be his band. Now Andrew Oldham sees Mick as a big sex symbol, and wants to kick Stu out, and we won’t have it. And eventually, because Brian had known him longer than we, and the band was Brian’s idea in the first place, Brian had to tell Stu how we’d signed with these people, how they were very image-conscious, and Stu didn’t fit in. If I’d been Stu I’d have said fuck it, fuck you. But he stayed on to be our roadie, which I think is incredible, so bighearted. Because by now we were star-struck, every one of us, the Beatles have been to see us play [‘They were just back from Germany,’ Bill said, ‘and they stood in front of the bandstand, all in long black leather coats, looking like cut-outs.’] and we’ve been to see them at the Albert Hall, and we’ve seen all the screaming chicks, the birds down in front, and everybody can’t wait, you can’t wait to hear the screams. . . .”

  “That is what I want,” Brian told Giorgio.

  “The next time I saw them they were the five of them,” Shirley Arnold said. “I’d seen them at Colyer’s once, and it was about three months, the record had been released by the time I saw them again. The next time we went we begged the girl on the door to sell us tickets the day before. She let us have the tickets. The queue next day was fantastic. Colyer’s is a long room with a very small stage at one end, low ceiling, you could touch the ceiling. We were in early, so we were at the front of the stage, but we were packed so tight that I was pushed up against the stage. People were standing, and sitting on people’s shoulders. Every inch was packed. Sweat was pouring from the walls and the amps kept going wrong, but the music was fantastic, the boys were fantastic. I didn’t actually faint because of them, I fainted because it was so hot. And they just passed me over everyone’s head into the tea room. One of the bouncers was pourin’ water on me and I was thinkin’, ‘Oh, my makeup’s gonna run.’ My friend came in to see about me. She said, ‘The music’s stopped, they’re comin’ in.’ So I went in a swoon like I wasn’t strong enough to leave, because I wanted to see them. It was Brian who was the first one that ever spoke to me. He said, ‘Are you the girl that fainted?’ I was such a fan—there was never anything I wouldn’t do for them, and at the time there weren’t many girls like me who were freakin’ out, so they were quite surprised. I asked Andrew about the fan club. He said, ‘I don’t know what’s happenin’ about the fan club. Do you want to do the fan club? Go up and see Annabelle Smith, I’ll tell her you’re coming, what’s your name?’ Annabelle was Andrew’s secretary. She was older than any of the boys. I think she was about twenty-nine, which was old to us ’cause we were all so young. The fan club was started in her name, but I don’t think she was really interested. So we went up to see Annabelle. She was only too pleased to give it to me. She gave me a stack of postal orders and said, ‘It’s yours, do it from home.’ Things were happening so fast with Andrew and the boys that they had no time to think about the fan club anyway. So there was me goin’ home with two hundred members and a stack of postal orders that came to about sixty quid. Well, sixty quid, you can imagine, I had it under my pillow every night ’cause it was a fortune. I tried to pay them into the bank, and they said, ‘No, no, you’ve got to open an account through the office.’ Weeks went on, I kept calling Andrew’s office and saying, ‘Look, I must do a newsletter and write to everyone—’but everyone was so busy, I never really got to speak to Andrew, so I had all the fan club things and still wasn’t in contact with anyone. I was working for the boys and I’d only seen them once.”

  On July 13 the Rolling Stones played their first date outside London, at the Alcove Club in Middlesbrough on a bill with a group from Liverpool called the Hollies. “And in those days—what the Liverpool groups do must be right,” Stu said, “and Andrew had the Stones convinced that he was going to make them London’s answer to the fuckin’ Beatles, and they were gonna be a really fantastic pop group, which pleased Brian no end, because it meant money, and I think the others were quite happy, ’cause they appreciate money, same as anybody else. Andrew knew nothing about music, he was only interested in the money.

  “So anyway, here were the Hollies on, doing their three-part vocal harmony, and we had never heard anything like it. Brian immediately said, ‘Right, everybody’s got to sing.’ Andrew and them changed the group right round, and the emphasis became on ‘Poison Ivy’ and ‘Fortune Teller,’ numbers like that. For a while the Stones lost their identity, I think, because they were playing all these novelty numbers and trying to sing them like Liverpool groups. That was Andrew’s idea, which was a bit of a drag. Those ballrooms were awful. We used to go to these terribly thick places like Wisbech and Cambridge, and all the yokels, they’d heard of these Rolling Stones, but they hadn’t the foggiest idea what to expect in the way of music. To start off with, some of them just gawked.

  “There was a little bit of uncertainty in those days as to what should be played. They thought of more numbers like ‘Poison Ivy’ and that didn’t seem to be doing much, and eventually they got everybody with the Chuck Berry stuff, and they reverted more to what they had been playing, till after a year or so some of these ballroom dates began to get really fucking wild. It was the sheer excitement of the music. Oh, Christ. No dressing rooms, no stages, no electricity, no security, fuck-all, used to be a hell of a fight every bloody night. They all said, ‘We’ve had the Beatles here, we can handle anything.’ You’d say, ‘Well, you haven’t had the Stones yet. You wait,’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, we can handle everything,’ so everything used to get destroyed. The boys themselves never used to help matters much, because they resisted for a while the idea of all travelling together. Brian had something to do with this. Nobody wanted to be in the same car with Brian for any length of time. He began to feel as if he’d been eased out. He became difficult to live with.

  “Brian, being Welsh, had always got a very obnoxious streak in him, and he used to be very tactless, and say things like, ‘As I’m the leader of the group, I’m gonna have an extra five pounds a week.’ We used to stay in cheap hotels ’cause we didn’t have any money, but they never stayed in real shit, once they’d got a little bit of money. So we’d stay in a medium-class hotel, but Brian would say, ‘In a few months’ time, when we’re earning more for a gig, I’m gonna stay in the Hilton because I’m the leader, and everybody else will be staying with you somewhere.’ So eventually they got sick to fuckin’ death of him. He would change with the wind as well. Brian was very pretty, but a very silly boy really. Eventually it became obvious that Mick was the leader of the group. In those days Brian was simply a very, very good guitar player, and he was very mercenary too, very keen on money. So when Andrew comes along and says It’s time you started playing numbers like ‘Poison Ivy’ because you’ll sell more records, it was Brian who immediately said Yeah, groovy, great. But having done this, after about the first six months of playing ballrooms in Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe, it was Brian who said, ‘I think we ought to play at Eel Pie Island twice a week again, and play the blues.’ Brian would change from one day to another, and they just got fed up with him.

  “It was a pity. Brian was brought up in the worst possible way. He had a very good education, was very clever at school, but somewhere along the line he decided he was going to be a full-time professional rebel, and it didn’t really suit him. So that when he wanted to be obnoxious, he had to really make an effort, and having made the effort, he would be really obnoxious. But his nature was really quite sweet. Brian was really quite a sweet person, but he took everything to excess. It’s a shame, because he was really a good musician. I don’t want to be too hard on Brian. He was a very difficult person.”

  What Keith remembered best about the night the Stones played with the Hollies was the drive back to London, three hundred miles in the back of Stu’s Volkswagen van with Charlie, Mick, Brian, and all their equipment, Bill in the front with Stu because he lied
and said he got carsick in the back, where they had to piss out the ventilator because Stu, “a sadist,” Keith said, wouldn’t stop except when he wanted. Thinking about that night and how they all had to sing because that’s what the Hollies did, Keith said, “Brian collapsed straightaway to commercialism. He shattered.”

  The Stones were playing nearly every day, sometimes twice a day, and when they weren’t playing or recording, they were rehearsing for their first concert tour of England, with the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. On July 19 they were booked to play a debutante’s ball, but Brian was sick, the Stones all got drunk, and another band played. The next night the Stones, with Brian, played their first ballroom date, at a place called the Corn Exchange in Wisbech. “Come On” was at number 30 in its struggle upwards in the Top Fifty. The Stones were a gathering sensation and were averaging less than £5 per man for each job. On August 10 they played two shows near Birmingham, and the next day, after playing the Studio 51 Club in the afternoon, the Stones played at the third National Jazz Festival in Richmond. Stu had left his job at the chemical company because there was no time for anything but driving, setting up equipment, taking it down, and driving.

  On August 17 the Stones played in Northwich, up near Liverpool, on a bill with Lee Curtis, who according to Keith “pulled an incredible scene to steal the show, where he’d do Conway Twitty’s ‘Only Make Believe,’ and he’d faint onstage. Guys came and carried him off, and he’d fight them off and come back, singing ‘Only Make Believe.’ Then they’d carry him off again.” The craziness was a part of the time, the beat craze that carried thousands of acts along for a while. Coming home on this same night, Bill mentioned in his diary, they met Billy J. Kramer and his band the Dakotas at a café on the M-l. “Doesn’t sound very exciting now,” Bill said. “Billy J. Kramer then was as big as the Beatles.” And the Beatles were on their way to being, as John Lennon later said, more popular than Jesus. That week the Rolling Stones played six dates, not counting rehearsals and photo sessions, and each man got paid £25. The pace was killing, but they all managed to maintain it except Brian. On August 27 the Stones were booked to play at Windsor in a room over the Star and Garter pub. Brian, sick again, was not there, and for the first time the band that had been “Brian’s idea in the first place” played without him.

  11

  Yes, it was some terrible environments that I went through in those days, inhabited by some very tough babies. Of course, wherever there is money, there is a lot of tough people, no getting around that, but a lot of swell people, too.

  Speaking of swell people, I might mention Buddy Bolden, the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard of or that was known and the absolute favorite of all the hangarounders in the Garden District.

  ALAN LOMAX: Mister Jelly Roll

  I STAYED in Memphis until the next Friday, October 31. Each day I sat at home waiting for the publishing contract that failed to arrive. It was no fun, but I stayed, maybe because this odyssey could have begun only on Halloween.

  I woke up late and rushed to the airport to make the L.A. flight. I kissed Christopher twice, she drove away, going to work, and I ran for the plane.

  You can get used to anything, and in the years of magazine writing I had become accustomed to spending time in the pastel plastic innards of giant fire-belching jets, getting drunk. On this plane I threw down my black flight bag and set in to drink champagne, not the best champagne but not bad, and to read about the World Series in The New Yorker, developing a strong attachment to the New York Mets, who this year came from last place to become world champions, and to the stewardess, who kept filling my glass. Yesterday I talked to Jo, who said that someone would meet me at the airport, but when I arrived I looked around, found nobody, and called the Oriole house. Sandison told me that they’d sent a driver named Mimi and that he, Sandison, was going back to England, “ignominiously recalled.” I’d heard Keith and Mick talk about Sandison, and I was not surprised he was leaving. I sat down to wait for Mimi. I had forgotten to ask how I’d recognize her, but I didn’t need to know because she never showed up. After the better part of an hour I took a taxi.

  At Oriole the back door was unlocked. The first person I saw was the glamorous Shirley Watts, who was in the kitchen pressing a blouse. “Delighted to see you ironing,” I said, and proceeded to the living room, where on one couch David Sandison and Glyn Johns the sound engineer (dark-haired, bearded, wearing a lime-green fedora) were sitting and on another was a girl reporter from Time magazine, wearing a neat red tweed suit. Glyn was saying, “He can be very nice and put you at ease, or he can put you very uptight. He has a remarkable, umm—”

  I put my bags in the Oz room. On the way back down the hall I saw Charlie shuffling along in his meditative cuticle-chewing 1950s hipster slump. He went into the living room, stood listening to the lady from Time and then said—closing the terrace door, it was getting dark and the air was cool—that he would find it hard to do her job, that he thought rock and roll had been inflated out of value. “A jazz bass player died recently,” Charlie said, talking about Paul Chambers, “and compared to rock players he didn’t make much money, and I can’t justify that.”

  The Time lady said that everything is inflated here, it’s a matter of the difference between countries, advertising in America is very exaggerated compared to that in Britain, everything in Britain tends to be understated.

  Yeah, Charlie said, but how do you know about all that if you’re a kid, gesturing at Los Angeles outside the window.

  If you come from here you know about it, she said, and Charlie said, Yeah, but—

  Sandison, peeved at being sent home, warned me that no matter what I wrote, Mick would say that he had never seen me. “One of the publicity agents he talked to this week asked Mick about an interview with him in the Playboy that’s out now, and Mick said he’d never even spoken to anyone from Playboy.”

  Charlie was going up to the Laurel Canyon house to rehearse, and I went along with him, in a station wagon driven by Phil Kaufman. We rode down Doheny to Sunset, up Laurel Canyon Drive to Shady Oak, and stopped at a wide metal gate. A big black young man was coming toward the car. “That’s Tony,” Kaufman said. In his graded-tint shades and purple tie-dyed T-shirt, Tony looked like a Hollywood dream of a Black Panther, shapely and cool and slightly less colossal than King Kong.

  Tony peered in at us, said “Secret agents twenty-seven, thirty-nine, and forty-five,” and opened the gate. As we drove past he said, “Man, it’s really a mess up there.”

  “What?” Phil said. “Why?”

  “They forgot to open the chimbley and the fire smoked up the house.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yeah, and some creeps got in.”

  “What happened, you throw them out?”

  “No, when I got there they was all havin’ a party.”

  Most of the people at the house were outside because inside the big fireplace was still filling the air with smoke. In the kitchen Phil Kaufman’s quadroon girlfriend Janet was serving onto plates spaghetti with what appeared to be cocoons floating in it. Meals at the Oriole house were not very festive, but this one was about as cheering as a cremation, though not as warm.

  “Are we getting rid of the smoke?” Jagger asked Phil, standing before the fireplace.

  “Yeah,” Phil said. “We’re moving to Topanga Canyon.”

  “We are getting it together, right?” Mick said, not smiling.

  “Yeah, right,” Phil said. He and Sam Cutler stared up the chimney, trying to look competent.

  Jagger went into the rehearsal room in the rear of the house and started playing an acoustic guitar. Charlie started playing drums, Bill picked up a bass, and Mick Taylor, a guitar. Jagger told Janet to tell Keith they’d started. She found him smoking languidly in a chainsuspended wicker chair out by the pool. “Keith,” she said, “they’ve started.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said, not moving. “Tell them they’re sounding great.”

  But
in a few minutes Keith came in through the back door of the little rehearsal room and soon chaos became tuning, became a chord, a pattern, a riff, a twelve-bar blues that collapsed after a couple of minutes. Jagger put his guitar down and looked over a list of tunes. “How many are there?” Mick Taylor asked. “Eighteen,” Jagger said. “ ‘Carol,’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash,’ ‘Bad Boy’—”

  “ ‘Bad Boy’—that goes back a ways,” Wyman said.

  “Let’s do it,” Keith said, and they did it, a blues to inflame every girl-child within hearing: “I’m a bad boy, come to your town—”

  Next they did “Street Fighting Man.” From the big Altec speakers sound was pounding this coffin-shaped room, built to take abuse: lined at the top with fiberglass home insulation mats, the walls covered with carpet pads and one oriental rug.

  When the song ended, Keith said, “We should have the black light come on next—”

  “And police come on with truncheons, clubbing each other,” Jagger said. “To be followed by showers of petals.”

  Jagger said the Stones would open their shows with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the song they released the week of Brian’s final arrest, but now they played it with difficulty and finally it fell apart. Keith told Mick Taylor, “On that one you’ll want to use the Flying Arrow—”

  “Lying farrow,” Jagger said.

  “Mia Farrow,” said Keith.

  Mick Taylor said, “Well, we can just take all the guitars onstage and see which we want—”

  Jagger laughed. “Horrible thought.”

  Then Wyman had an idea—for an invention, an instrument that could be attached to a guitar and would light up when a string was in tune. Jagger and Keith insisted it was impossible. Charlie said it was possible and so did I. Keith was down on the whole idea. “Use your ears,” he said.