But while the Stones were playing concerts almost every night and appearing on at least one national television program each week, the three records they had released were not chartbusters. The week the tour with the Ronettes ended, the Stones’ first extended-play record was number 2 in the popular EP charts, “I Wanna Be Your Man” was the number 9 single. It would go no higher, but it was still a hit, a Top Ten record. Now they had to do it again.
On the day after the tour ended, the Stones were scheduled to record, but Andrew Oldham cancelled the session, and they all went to a reception for Phil Spector, the Ronettes’ record producer, the boy genius from the United States. Young, talented, and rich, he was everything that Oldham wanted to be. The Stones had tried several times to record “Not Fade Away,” the Bo Diddley-inspired song by Buddy Holly, and when they tried again a few days later, Oldham invited Spector to the session. But the session didn’t go well, and Oldham telephoned Gene Pitney, who was in London on his way to the United States from an appearance in Italy. Pitney had written “He’s a Rebel,” the first hit record on Spector’s Philles label, and he knew a lot about the record business. “Andrew called me and said, ‘Listen, we gotta record a follow-up, and they all hate each other, and I don’t know what to do,’” Pitney said.
“ ‘I’ll be over in a minute,’ I said, ‘I’ll work it out.’ So I took a big bottle of Martell cognac, and I got there and told them that it was my birthday, and it was a custom in my family that everybody had to drink a water glass of cognac to celebrate the birthday. It was the happiest session you ever saw in your life. Spector wound up playing an empty cognac bottle with a half-dollar.”
It was such a happy session that the Stones recorded a song for the B side of their next single and two more songs for album cuts. But Pitney saw “a standoff thing. Mick and Keith were always close together, and Brian was like—in left field. God bless him, but I think he always had a problem with—I think just society in general. He was very paranoid even with the other guys in the group, not just from people outside the group. When you have that, there’s giant problems to begin with.” The Stones had no time for problems. Almost every day they were entering further realms of wealth and fame. A couple of days after the record session, they made more money than they had ever made in one day by recording a television commercial for Rice Krispies, a breakfast cereal that talked to itself in a three-word vocabulary, snap, crackle, pop.
Meanwhile the Beatles left England for their first performances in the United States, on the Ed Sullivan television program and two concerts at Carnegie Hall. Fifty thousand people requested the Sullivan show’s 728 seats, and the Carnegie Hall shows sold out in a matter of hours.
Two of the Beatles’ records had been released in the United States a year earlier to scant response. But steady publicity in the British press had been picked up by the London offices of the U.S. news media; Time, Newsweek, and the New York Times, as well as NBC and CBS television, did stories about the Beatles. Capitol Records, who distributed the Beatles’ records in the United States, spent fifty thousand dollars for what they called a “crash publicity program.” They plastered five million THE BEATLES ARE COMING stickers on telephone poles, washroom walls, and other appropriate places throughout the country. They tried to get a copy of the Beatles’ current single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” to every disc jockey in the country. They made up a four-page newspaper about the Beatles and sent out a million copies. They photographed their top executives wearing Beatle wigs, offered Beatle haircuts free to all their female employees, and persuaded the actress Janet Leigh to get one. They even tried, unsuccessfully, to bribe a University of Washington cheerleader into holding up a card reading “The Beatles Are Coming” before the television cameras at the Rose Bowl football game. “There was,” said one Capitol vice president, “a lot of hype.”
The Beatles’ appearance on the Sullivan show was reported to have been seen by seventy-three million people, and to have reformed the United States’ teenagers for as long as it lasted, since across the country during that hour not one major crime was committed by a teenager.
The Rolling Stones, on tour with some peculiar English acts, did not seem to be doing much to deter crime. Rather the opposite; fans attacked the Stones, separately and together, and their van, breaking the windshield. “Some of those crowds were too much,” Stu said. “They began to get used to the idea that the Stones dropped their bleedin’ guitars the last number and ran for it. And then the crowd from the first house would hang about till the second house had finished, and they’d be waiting for you as well. It got to be quite a problem. This is something they never really got credit for, that even at this stage they were causing bigger riots than the Beatles ever caused in this country. You see, nobody liked them. The establishment hated them, so they never got any good publicity.”
The Stones did their part to alienate people. On this tour, after playing the Stockton Odeon, they stayed at one of the more pleasant English hotels, called Scotch Corner. “That was a hotel from the past,” Stu said. “Lovely hotel, always wanted to stay there, but they didn’t appreciate Brian at all. Brian would walk around the halls in his underpants, making noise, and just be a fuckin’ uncivilized idiot. At most of these British hotels, people go to bed at ten at night. But these people made the effort. They said, Yeah, fine, okay, we’ll lay on a nice cold meal, and there’ll be waiters here when you come back. So we come back from Stockton at twelve midnight, and there are two waiters there, a great big table, fresh fruit salad and melon and cold meat. But Brian’s got to start throwing bread rolls around the room, and demanding all sorts of bloody things they didn’t have, and then he’d be obnoxious when they didn’t have it. And instead of some-body sit—well, sometimes they would sit on him and they wouldn’t go along, but at other times, once he’d start, the others’d start as well, and oh, I used to get so bleedin’ embarrassed.”
On February 21 the Stones’ EP record was number one in the EP charts. “Not Fade Away” was released and went into the Top Ten. They were still touring, causing riots of sexual frenzy each night. At the Sophia Garden in Cardiff, a man came into their dressing room, offered to sell them hashish, and they had him thrown out. Sexual frenzy was all right, but hashish was illegal. A few nights later at the Wolverhampton Gaumont, Jagger found among the fan letters left in the Stones’ dressing room a note addressed to him, containing a stick of chewing gum and the request, “Please chew some and send it back!” Beyond the perverse and illegal into the unsanitary.
Same day and place, a reporter from Melody Maker interviewed the Stones, and the resulting story had probably the most-quoted headline of their early career, the headline that asked the musical question WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? Consciously or not, the headline echoed the racism directed against people of African descent in the United States. It also fit the image of the Stones held by many people—leering Rolling Stone locked in savage embrace with fair young girl. True or not (and it was both), the image was too strong to be forgotten, especially by newspaper writers. A couple of weeks later, another headline asked: MARRY YOUR DAUGHTER TO A STONE? The article mentioned that Brian was moving to a flat in Belgravia. He had left Linda Lawrence. “I think Brian got scared,” Shirley Arnold said. “It was the thought of another baby. They packed each other up, and then I think Brian got scared again ’cause she was having the baby and he decided to stay with her.”
During this time, besides playing to berserk crowds twice and sometimes four times daily, the Stones recorded their first long-playing album, were given scripts for their first film, signed to tour the United States, and Mick and Keith became more skilled as songwriters, “though we didn’t like anything we wrote,” Keith said, “and we couldn’t seem to get anybody else in the band to play it.” But Gene Pitney had a hit in England with one of their songs, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday,” and Oldham produced a hit on another Jagger/Richards song, “As Tears Go By,” recorded by Marian
ne Faithfull, a girl they had recently met at a party. She could barely sing, but she was very pale and blond and had a pseudo-virginal sadomasochist charm that was not wasted on Jagger’s philosophical eye.
The Rolling Stones, their artily untitled (Oldham’s idea) first album, was released and went directly to the top of the popular music album charts, a position held by the Beatles for almost all the previous year. “Not Fade Away,” their first release in the United States, entered the Cashbox magazine Hot 100. It was number 98, but it was there.
And every day, in every sense, the crowds kept coming. In some towns the Stones would find the places they were going surrounded and couldn’t get inside to play. At other places, where there were low stages, the Stones would start, the little girls would run right over the bouncers in front of the stage, and the Stones would drop their guitars and run. Oldham discovered one night between shows that the seats were dripping with liquids deposited by female fans. Dozens of girls fainted at every show; in the places where tickets were counterfeited, or promoters sold more tickets than they had seats, things were even worse.
“The first time Chuck Berry came to England,” Stu said, “we were supposed to be doing two spots at the Savoy Room in Catford, and the first one was supposed to be about nine o’clock, and the next one at half past ten. Berry was at Finsbury Park, and we’d never seen Berry live. Catford is south London, Finsbury Park is north London. So we’re all looking at each other and saying, ‘Well, what’s it gonna be?’ Of course we went off to see Chuck Berry. And these things were running a little bit late, and it must have been well after nine o’clock before Berry was finished. And he was very weird, he wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t say a bloody dickybird.” The Stones then drove down to Catford.
“You couldn’t see the bloody ballroom for ambulances,” Stu said. “They were carrying girls out one after another. The promoter had let far more people into the hall than it would hold. And they were passing out right, left, and center. The boys had to come in through somebody’s garden, up a ladder, through a window. I think it’d originally been a cinema, and there was this vast great wide stairway on one side of the building, and when we left, it was covered in bodies. Just gone. Flaked out. They carried hundreds out that night. It was awful. All fuckin’ Chuck Berry’s fault.”
The next night the Stones played in Bristol, and Brian, driving down alone from London, missed the first show. “That caused one hell of a row,” Stu said. Brian’s retribution was so swift as to seem compulsive. Three days later the Stones played Saint George’s Hall in Bradford, across the street from the Victoria Hotel, where they stayed. Between shows, Stu said, “They didn’t want to sit around their dressing room until the second half. No cops about. They said, Shall we chance running across the road to the hotel? They all made it except Brian, who chickened out before he got to the hotel entrance because there was people running after him. He eventually turned round and ran the other way. So all these people are chasing Brian through the streets in Bradford, tearing clothes off him. The police finally brought him back without a jacket, without a shirt, and he’d lost a shoe and handfuls of hair. All the others got across easy, but not him.”
Two days before, the Stones had taken smallpox vaccinations for their trip to the United States, about three weeks away. Before leaving, they did more television appearances and frantic concerts in Scotland and England. One newspaper review said, “Never before has there been a sound to rival this—except, perhaps, in the jungles of darkest Africa!” Their mounting success brought reporters to write about the individual Stones. Wyman, who for months had been writing “stuck in fog” in his diary as code for spending the night with a girl, complained in one story that the Stones’ busy schedule kept him from his family: “We had a dog once but we couldn’t keep it because I was never at home and he used to bite me when I turned up. That’s rather sad really, isn’t it?”
In another story, Brian answered critics of the Stones’ effect on their audiences. “The Rolling Stones do not incite violence,” he said. “I deny it categorically.”
On June 1, the Stones left for the United States, where they were not unknown but not exactly known. Their LP had been released, and London Records, English Decca’s U.S. chapter, had distributed news clippings, photographs of the Stones, and T-shirts with THE ROLLING STONES on the front. London had also hired Murray “the K” Kaufman—a Manhattan disc jockey also called, because he liked and helped them, the Fifth Beatle—to like and help the Stones. Kaufman met the Stones at Kennedy Airport, conducted a press conference for them there, and took them to his program on WINS, where they spent most of the evening. He also gave them a record he thought they might like, called “It’s All Over Now.” The Stones planned some recording, as well as touring and television, while in the United States. They would stay two and a half weeks, much longer than the Beatles’ first visit, with greatly inferior planning and promotion, and with, as Keith said, “disastrous results, almost.”
The Stones spent their first night in the U.S. trapped in the Astor Hotel by screaming girls outside, whom they believed had been hired. The next day they were taken out and shown to interviewers and photographers. They saw David Bailey, the fashionable London photographer, and met Jerry Schatzberg, the fashionable New York City photographer, and Baby Jane Holzer, a Warholite who was blond and fashionable all over. “The first people to catch onto us in New York, thought we were just bee-yoo-tee-full,” Keith said.
Next day the Stones flew to Los Angeles. There were crowds of girls, probably a few hundred in all, waiting for them at the airport, as there had been in New York. The Stones appeared that night at the taping of a television show called The Hollywood Palace, whose guest host, Dean Martin, a musician of a different school, ridiculed their performance, appearance, ancestry, you name it. Partly because of this, and partly because they were billed among a trampolinist, a great many King Sisters, an elephant act, cowgirls, and so on, the Stones discussed walking off the show. But the dress rehearsal had been taped and could be shown, so they decided they might as well go on.
The Stones had a distinct feeling that they were not taking off in the United States like a rocket, but after a day of swimming at Malibu and a night of relaxing, they played a concert in San Bernardino that was a riot, just like England, except that the cops wore white motor-cycle helmets and carried guns. San Bernardino raised the Stones’ spirits so that they could fall the next night, at the Texas Teen Fair in San Antonio with George Jones, Bobby Vee, circus acts, and rodeo riders. Nobody came. It was so hot in San Antonio, not far from the Mexican border, that Wyman had Keith cut his hair. The tour was taking on a deep aura of gloom, and they were thinking of cutting it short. By the time they reached Chicago, Andrew Oldham was in hysterics or at least histrionics. At the hotel, after a scene with a revolver, Mick and Keith told Andrew to shape up and go to bed. He kept begging them for “just one bullet.”
By the next day Andrew was in sufficient control to accompany the Stones to the morning television interviews and to Chess Recording Studio, where the Stones, with the help of Ron Malo, Chess’ expert engineer, recorded four songs, including their next single, “It’s All Over Now,” a fine, spontaneous fourteenth take. The group ended the day with more radio and television interviews. The problem was that the Stones were making no national impact. Andrew used one of the oldest techniques a hustler can use when his act is too cold to get arrested: he got arrested.
The next morning Andrew called the news media and invited them to a press conference the Stones planned to have on a traffic island in Michigan Avenue, and did have, until the police came. It was on the national television news that night, which was the idea in the first place.
After taking their leave of the police, the Stones went back to Chess and recorded twelve more songs. Muddy Waters was there and helped them carry in their equipment. The graciousness of Muddy, from whose song “Rollin’ Stone” Brian had taken their name, was touching. The Stones were recording C
huck Berry’s “Around and Around” when Berry walked in. A week before they left England, Mick and Charlie happened to confront Berry, after he had snubbed them backstage at Finsbury Park. They were in a hotel elevator: the elevator stopped at a floor, the door opened, there stood Berry, who stepped aboard, saw Mick and Charlie, turned his back, when the door opened again he walked out, wouldn’t speak. But this time he was trapped. “Swing on, gentlemen, you are sounding most well if I may say so,” he said, sounding like Duke Ellington at his most unguent.
The next day the Stones, back on tour, played to four hundred kids at a fair in Minneapolis, the following day to six hundred in an Omaha auditorium. These were the days of Scotch and Coke, and there was always a bottle of Scotch in the dressing room, but the auditorium in Omaha was public property, where alcoholic beverages were prohibited by law, in the person of a cop who looked into the dressing room, saw the whisky bottle, made them pour it out, and made a couple of the Stones pour out their drinks. He told Keith to do likewise. “The thing is,” Keith said, “I wasn’t actually drinking whisky, the other two were drinking whisky and Coke, and I was drinking a Coca-Cola. He told them to pour it down the bog, and I refused to pour mine down because I said, Why the fuck is an American cop telling me to pour the national drink down the bog? Cop pulled a gun on me. Very strange scene to me, a cop ordering me at gunpoint to pour a Coke down the John.”
Then, Scotch gone, cop gone, the Stones watched grimly on a tele-vision set in the dressing room the network broadcast of their visit to The Hollywood Palace, cut to near forty-five seconds among the elephants.
“That was the thin end of the wedge for Eric Easton,” Stu said.
“Easton, we suddenly realized,” Keith said, “wasn’t big enough to handle anything outside of England.” The next day, Keith bought a.38 revolver, in case he might want to drink a Coke backstage again sometime.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 18