by Bob Stanley
The youthful authority the Stones perceptively had – which even the Beatles lacked – resulted not from their knowledge of Muddy Waters B-sides but from their complete control of their image, sound and media angle from the start: Oldham produced the records and designed the sleeves, while Jagger and Richards made sure there would be no pantos, no synchronised head-shaking on stage, nothing predictable. It was very appealing.3
Their first single of 1965, ‘The Last Time’ was also their first self-penned single and the moment at which they fully justified their manager’s hype. It was an incredible sound for a group from Kent. This was largely because it was recorded at one of the premier American studios (RCA in Los Angeles) and had assistance from one of the premier American arrangers (Phil Spector’s henchman Jack Nitzsche), so there was light and space as well as a vortex created by the guitars, with Keith Richards’s relentless spiralling hook sucking you in. From now on they were unstoppable: ‘Satisfaction’ (their manifesto, and first US number one), ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ (their most minimalist), ‘Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown’ (their most cutting) and, ultimately, in the glorious World Cup summer of ’66, ‘Paint It Black’. So intense that it never gets mentioned in round-ups of the subgenre, ‘Paint It Black’ is a death disc just as much as the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack’ or ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’, the song that had marked the start and end of Andrew Oldham’s singing career. Jagger’s girlfriend is dead. We never learn why or how, but Brian Jones’s sitar and Charlie Watts’s drums mirror the throbbing, endless pain in the singer’s head. Weird hums and an increasingly intense drone push Jagger’s numbness to its limit, to the point of insanity. ‘I want to see the sun blotted out from the sky.’
By this point they were the toast of London society and the rive gauche, the height of both fashion and debauchery, and making their very best, misanthropic records. Still they didn’t explain anything, barely had to speak, and in this way they built up a vast reserve of cool and kudos. Their blank expressions were a blank wall on which fans could write all kinds of rebellious slogans, from Maoist philosophy to ‘teachers suck’, while the Establishment could make them hate figures responsible for everything from rising drug use and teenage pregnancies to the ill manners of the gum-chewing girl behind the counter at Boots. Beyond this, their long hair and outsider status gave them the air of Byron, Blake or De Quincey; their girlfriends were the rudest, sexiest, poshest girls in town. So just who would break a butterfly on a wheel?
In 1967 came a drugs bust at Keith Richards’s Redlands house. The press were leaked lurid details: Jagger’s girlfriend was naked; a Mars bar was involved. This was a rearguard action against everything people thought the Stones stood for, their lawless joy, their youth. A week before the bust, the News of the World had fabricated a story about Jagger luring girls with drugs. The Establishment was primed, and this time they were sent down. This was swingeing London. In the witness box, Keith Richards – previously seen as a bit player to anyone but hardcore Stones fans – became a counterculture hero. Dressed like a cross between Beau Brummell and a highway robber, he told the prosecutor, ‘We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.’ He was sentenced to a year in Wormwood Scrubs. A Times editorial helped to get the verdict overturned, but the damage was done. Their next single, a beautiful, threatening, psychedelic kiss-off called ‘We Love You’, stalled well short of number one. Oldham and Jagger now bickered like a married couple and, soon after, divorced. Their messianic trip was over. ‘You had no barometer’, Oldham later explained, ‘except Hitler or Jesus.’
Regrouping, the Stones got back to basics in ’68, ditched the drug-addled Jones and Oldham, and lost their adventurous streak. Initially, they became darker, bluesier, and their new-found self-reliance imbued them with a confidence to cut some of their very best records: ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, ‘Gimme Shelter’, ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. By the early seventies, though, they had their own logo, official merchandise, even their own catchphrase: ‘It’s only rock ’n’ roll!’
This was, literally, their get-out-of-jail card. To a large degree they became a different group in the seventies. Without Jones they never used a sitar, an ocarina or a tabla again. Without Oldham they gradually became a self-parody. The Stones of the mid-sixties had been an amazingly focused pop group; disobeying their mentor’s number-one rule, they became predictable.
The Stones were the Bartlebys of modern pop, and could be seen either as refuseniks, street-fighting men or – forty years on – as libertarians, avatars of the new right. Whichever they really were, they weren’t about to give the game away by letting you know. Through this, they were indirectly responsible for some of the worst aspects of modern pop – their nonchalance has been taken up by hundreds of bands in the last forty years, from the Doors onwards, to excuse lethargy, tedium, childishness; it’s been a serial abuse of the term ‘rock ’n’ roll’.
Some people defined their basic worldview on whether they liked the Beatles or the Stones. Stones supporters thought the Beatles were cosy, white bread, establishment, lightweight; they considered themselves to be artistic adventurers, sympathisers with the underclass, rebellious outsiders, heavyweight. They thought the Beatles were Pop and the Stones were Rock. This was the first major fissure in modern pop, and it was soon to become a chasm.
1 Oldham lived in Frognal, on an obscure railway route called the North London Line. Richmond was also on the line. He later admitted that if he’d had the hassle of changing trains, he might not have bothered going to see the Rolling Stones that night.
2 No group had their name abbreviated before the Rolling Stones. This only tends to happen to rock acts, for the writer or fan to show an empathy with their art (see also Bowie, Dylan, Roxy). Straight pop groups – from the Trems to the Aloud – tend to get their names shortened as a nickname, in the same way as Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne. I’m not quite sure of the exact difference, but I’m working on it.
3 It’s closer to the truth to say the Rolling Stones were middle-class kids slumming it, acting tough, and the Beatles – semi-detached suburban Lennon aside – were working-class rebels who had their wings clipped initially by Brian Epstein, and later by McCartney’s commercial sensibilities.
15
THIS IS MY PRAYER: THE BIRTH OF SOUL
By 1963 R&B meant something quite different to Americans from what it did to the Rolling Stones. Their blues heroes belonged to an older generation. In the States, the Four Seasons’ urban, razor-cut ‘Sherry’ topped the R&B chart at the end of ’62, in spite of being pure New Jersey Italo doo wop – simply, it had a sound that black tee nagers wanted just as much as white teenagers.1 The Four Seasons as well as Chicago’s Impressions, Detroit’s Miracles, New York’s Shirelles and Memphis’s Booker T and the MGs were all creating something new on Billboard’s R&B chart, an urban post-rock ’n’ roll stew with sass and class. The fact that Lesley Gore and the Four Seasons could rub shoulders with Ray Charles and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland at the top of the R&B chart suggested something momentous was happening in still-segregated America.
Though ‘soul’ didn’t emerge as a mass public name for the genre until Ben E. King’s 1966 single ‘What Is Soul’, the music had entered the pop consciousness in 1957, on the day Sam Cooke left gospel and moved into secular music. It then developed, still nameless, in tandem with rock ’n’ roll. Its constituent parts were contradictory and unstable, making it hard to pin down until Ben E. King nailed it. There had been explicit suggestions of something separate, a new expressive looseness in the vocal phrasing on some of the late-wave doo-wop hits of 1961: Shep and the Limelites’ ‘Daddy’s Home’ and the falsetto confessional ‘My True Story’ by the Jive Five were both American Top 3 hits that year, while the Impressions’ elegant debut hit ‘Gypsy Woman’ made the Top 30. Gene Chandler suggested a further stretch when he followed ‘Duke of Earl’ (US no. 1, ’61) with the tear-soaked wail of ‘Rainbow’ (US no. 47
’62). Then there was the gravel-voiced teen screamer ‘Please Mr Postman’ by the Marvelettes, another number one in 1961, and Solomon Burke’s cover of the Faron Young and Patsy Cline oldie ‘Just out of Reach’ (no. 24 ’61), produced by Jerry Wexler in New York for the Atlantic label. All of these records were definitely modern pop, and just as definitely not electric blues or speakeasy R&B; they were going back to elements of the church, even to country, to add a little more zing. The vocals had grit, spontaneity, and they felt personal. One man had this essence bottled.
There’s a photograph of Sam Cooke standing, smiling, next to fellow R&B stars Jackie Wilson and LaVern Baker. Like most pictures of Cooke it has a slightly unreal quality: he looks like someone playing Sam Cooke in a movie. He seems too good to be true. Wilson has processed, piled-up hair and wears a safari suit; Baker looks almost mumsy. Next to them, Sam Cooke looks like he’s been beamed in from the future.
He wasn’t the first great stylist who had left the church to make girls weak at the knees: Sonny Til of the Orioles was the first post-war gospel pin-up, followed by the elastic, keening Clyde McPhatter, lead singer with Billy Ward and the Dominoes. Cooke, though, had a mix of gentility and gospel growl like nobody else; his singing was effortless and intense. He was the original quiet storm.
Sam Cooke was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1931. His family moved to Chicago in 1933 and, when he was nine, he joined his siblings in the Singing Children, who toured with their minister father. Of the seven kids, only Sam and his brother L.C. decided to pursue a musical career. Both were terribly handsome, and had charm to spare. In 1950, aged nineteen, Sam replaced tenor R. H. Harris as lead singer of the landmark gospel group the Soul Stirrers. Wherever he sang, the air was ripe with sexual excitement, yet he was boyish enough to carry it off without unsettling the conservatives. Everyone fell at his feet.
Leaving gospel in 1957 meant no way back and caused much disapproval in the pews. When his first single – ‘Lovable’ – did nothing, he must have wondered if he’d made the right decision. His second was ‘You Send Me’, and with it he had his answer. The candy-cane backing would have suited Johnny Mathis, but the vocal was clearly spontaneous, mellifluous in the extreme, gliding and besotted, dotted and darted with ad libs. It was very warm and very open, so easy and natural that it made Clyde McPhatter, Johnnie Ray and Elvis Presley seem like sweaty artisans. ‘You Send Me’ went to number one in the States and stayed there for three weeks, during which time Cooke not only became the premier pin-up for the black girls of the Bronx – the demographic he was primed for – but for the Jewish princesses in Brooklyn too.
Hit singles continued in a steady stream: the knowing ‘Only Sixteen’ (US no. 28, UK no. 23 ’59), the self-deprecating ‘Wonderful World’ (US no. 12, UK no. 27 ’60), ‘Chain Gang’ (US no. 2, UK no. 9 ’60), ‘Cupid’ (US no. 17, UK no. 7 ’61), ‘Twistin’ the Night Away’ (US no. 9, UK no. 6 ’62), ‘Another Saturday Night’ (US no. 10, UK no. 23 ’63). Cooke was at a loss to explain his gift. ‘When I do it, it just comes,’ he once said. Still, there was always an undertow of rasp that let you know Sam may be cute but Sam meant business, and you might not trust him with your little sister. He could have made a tidy career criminal; as the leader of a pre-teen gang, he had convinced them to tear the slats off backyard fences, then sell them back to their previous owners as firewood. He was angel and devil, and his music contained the potent ambivalence of evangelist and repentant sinner.
Cooke was more than aware of his charms. Aged twenty-one he had three pregnant girlfriends and shunned them all. To everyone else, though, he seemed golden, always one step ahead of the game. Having first laid the foundations of soul music, he then set up his own record company, SAR, and publishing arm, creating a musical nursery from which, among others, the Womack family sprang. This was all virtually unheard of for a black performer. He was the first person Cassius Clay called into the ring after he had defeated Sonny Liston, the singer for whom Aretha and Erma Franklin wore their best gowns just to watch him on television.
By 1962 there was a new intensity to Cooke’s music, on the raw ‘Bring It On Home to Me’, even on ‘Having a Party’, which, as it declared ‘the cokes are in the icebox, popcorn’s on the table’, had a strange air of melancholic desperation. That year the Kennedy administration had ordered the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) to issue a new desegregation order, allowing passengers to sit wherever they chose on the bus. ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ signs were then removed from bus terminals; lunch counters began serving people regardless of skin colour. In September a teenager called James Meredith won a lawsuit that allowed him admission to the University of Mississippi in September 1962; two people were killed in the ensuing riot but an armed guard made sure Meredith made it to college. The atmosphere in the South was tense, murderous, yet change was coming, and it affected American pop, especially black pop, considerably. The fierce heart-tug of 1963’s ‘That’s Where It’s At’ reflected black pride, and black tribulations, but may have had less to do with the state of the nation than the slow unravelling of Sam Cooke’s life: Barbara, his wife, was losing her mind over his drinking and womanising; and that summer their son, Vincent, drowned in the family swimming pool.
So Sam Cooke was a wild child, but he was generous, gullible, in some ways an innocent. He gave R&B singer Little Willie John $5,000 when he (falsely) claimed his mother had died. Then again, he’d go out clubbing, pick up girls, take them to motels. On December 11th 1964 he picked up the wrong girl, a prostitute who ran out with his clothes while Cooke was in the bathroom. Half naked and shouting, he scared the motel owner so much she shot him dead.
Posthumously, his career was still spotless – many people seemed to think his death was a cover-up, that there had to be more to it.2 His last single was a double A-side of the relentless, hedonistic dancer ‘Shake’ (‘Shake it like a bowl of soup!’) and ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, the song he wrote after hearing Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and figuring he should really write something that reflected his life, his friends and families’ lives, the lives of black Americans. ‘I go to the movies and I go downtown, people there tell me don’t hang around’ – this was the America you didn’t see on TV, everyday injustices you never heard about. It was an act of divination, shot through with hope and optimism; it’s really too sad that it was Sam Cooke’s epitaph.
If Sam Cooke was the voice, then Stax set the template for the sound of soul. Stax was set up by Memphis bank clerk Estelle Axton and her fiddle-playing brother Jim Stewart. The circumstances weren’t promising. Memphis was a strictly segregated city in the late fifties when they bought up the derelict Capitol cinema on East McLemore. The popcorn stand out front was converted into a record shop called Satellite, which funded the studio. Estelle’s son Packy had been rehearsing with a bunch of kids from Messick High School, including guitarist Steve Cropper and bassist Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn: calling themselves the Royal Spades, they experimented with country, R&B, rockabilly, practising until they became super-tight, and a backing group for any passing trade. Then they just hung around the shop and waited. One day in 1961 local DJ Rufus Thomas walked into the shop – his daughter Carla had something she’d written, a teenage poem called ‘Gee Whiz’, and he wanted her to record it. It was naive and irresistible, and when the Stax crew cut it ‘Gee Whiz’ became a Top 10 hit. Soon after, a dirty, brass-led, one-note Royal Spades instrumental called ‘Last Night’ – released under the name the Mar-Keys – made it as far as number two and Stax was off and running.
The key that unlocked Stax’s success was the Satellite record shop. It became a social club where black and white mixed and everyone heard the latest sounds as soon as they landed in the racks. Local kids like keyboard player Booker T. Jones and a grocery boy called David Porter were soon involved in studio sessions. Axton and Stewart worked in the shop by day, the studio by night and on weekends; once the hits began, some of the kids who frequented the shop became employees.
Stewart had ‘scarcely seen a black ’til I was grown. When I started I didn’t know there was such a thing as Atlantic Records. I didn’t know there was a Chess Records, or Imperial. I had no desire to start Stax Records, I had no dream of anything like that. I just wanted music. Just anything to be involved with music.’
Through a shared love of R&B and rock ’n’ roll, the studio musicians had hit upon a new, gritty but streamlined sound that solidified by ’63 into something distinctly Stax: triumphant horns, propellant vocals, plus Al Jackson and Duck Dunn’s warm, compact rhythm section. Central to their tight groove was the cut-diamond, economical guitar-playing of Steve Cropper; it was clipped, clean and cool, the opposite of flash.
With two more hits in ’62 – William Bell’s gospel-influenced ‘You Don’t Miss Your Water’ (US no. 95) and another house-band instrumental, the lean ‘Green Onions’ (US no. 3), credited to Booker T. and the MGs – Stax became the sound of Memphis, earning the right to hang a sign over the record shop that read ‘Soulsville USA’. When musicians began to seek out the Stax sound, the studio ended up recording Sam and Dave, Otis Redding, Judy Clay, Eddie Floyd and Johnnie Taylor. Pretty soon, the sound became more important than the artist, a Southern equivalent to Spectorsound and the Brill Building.
The other label which defined the burgeoning sound of soul was New York’s Atlantic Records. It had been set up as far back as 1947 to release R&B, jazz and blues for a largely black audience. There were three key figures behind Atlantic’s success, and none of them was a singer: Ahmet Ertegun, an educated New Yorker and jazz lover who was the instigator; Jerry Wexler, a business reporter for Billboard who became a director in ’53 and took Atlantic from the black districts of New York to the outside world; and Tom Dowd, an engineer whose scientific background involved a stint working on the Manhattan Project. Science and blind enthusiasm, sacred and secular, black and white, Atlantic embodied and extended all of soul’s contradictions.