Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The second time he sang with Blues Incorporated, Mick brought Keith on, and they did Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” and “Beautiful Delilah” to a smattering of polite applause and then stony silence from the 120 paying members of the Ealing Club. “Good voice you got,” Cyril said to Mick, not deigning to notice shy Keith. Dick Taylor, sitting in the audience, scratched his new goatee and realized everyone in the club hated Keith as an unwelcome intrusion of déclassé rock and roll.

  And yet, even so, Mick was just . . . glowing. He drank a quick lager to wet his whistle and was so jazzed on the pure heat of it that he couldn’t say a word, let alone worry about the negative reaction to Keith’s raw chords. On the way home, they agreed to keep going.

  By late April ’62, Mick had become one of five rotating singers in Blues Incorporated, performing three songs a night in a cardigan sweater and a skinny black tie. He’d sing half-drunk because he was so nervous, shouting “Got My Mojo Working” with Long John Baldry and Paul Pond on either side of him. Other singers included Eric Burdon and Manfred Mann. Eric Clapton, before he owned a guitar, would show up at Ealing on Tuesday nights, ask to sing “Roll Over Beethoven” (the only song he knew), and then disappear. They called Clapton “Plimsolls” because he looked down at his sneakers when he sang.

  As he gained confidence, Mick started doing his act: tossing his hair, rolling his eyes, dipping his shoulders, suggestive hand gestures, tight-assed little spins, acting out the risqué lyrics with his eyes and especially his lips. They were full-fledged, pouty, serious lips, and he kept licking them between verses, diminutive flicks of the tongue. All this got noticed. Cyril Davies called him “Marilyn Monroe” behind his back, and there was no doubt that at age nineteen Mick was already bringing an ironic, “camp” sensibility to his delivery of the songs.

  The Ealing crowd never saw Keith without Mick. Keith was the sidekick, the interior of Mick’s outgoing persona. When Mick got onstage to sing, Keith stood in the shadows, waiting for his turn. Then Mick brought Keith on to rock the house with Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” annoying Cyril Davies, who hated rock and roll. Davies refused to even speak to Keith, who didn’t care because he in turn hated Blues Incorporated. To Keith, they were just a dreary bunch of middle-aged men. Keith was into the mating dance of rock and roll, not the weary fatalism of the older blues guys.

  Then a serious buzz began about Mick, the new face in town. The weekly music paper Disc, May 19, 1962: “A 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 at Ealing and their Thursday sessions at the Marquee Jazz Club, London.” As the Ealing Club caught on, a few trendy types began to show up, the hipper fringe of Swinging London slumming in Ealing. Alexis saw Mick going down well with the girls, so he started bringing him along to sing at the debutante parties Alexis was hired to entertain. This was Blues Incorporated as a society band, though without Charlie, who couldn’t be bothered.

  This was also Mick’s entrée into posh society; at the deb parties, he met London’s jeunesse dorée, young members of the aristocracy and rich families—the Honorable This, Lady Arabella That, the legendary Tara Browne, Guinnesses, Tennants, Ormsby-Gores—with whom he happily hung out (“That’s where we met all our friends,” he claimed years later). It was a giant step up in the stratified English class system from his roots in petit-bourgeois exurbia.

  Brian Jones was also very much part of the scene at Ealing and the increasingly clamorous Thursday nights at the Marquee, where the customers had started dancing on the tables. He turned Charlie Watts on to Robert Johnson’s just-released posthumous compilation album, King of the Delta Blues Singers. But soon Pat Andrews arrived with baby Julian in tow and sent Brian into shock by moving in with him. So Brian took a job in a department store while Pat worked in a laundry. Brian was quickly fired for stealing, and the young couple was evicted. Brian found a flat in Notting Hill Gate and another job in another store. He got fired from that, too, for stealing.

  Brain was determined to have his own R&B band and kept hustling. In May 1962, he advertised for R&B musicians in Jazz News, rehearsals to begin in the back room of a pub in Leicester Square. One of the first to answer the ad was an older guy: a brawny, unhip, geezer-type Scot named Ian Stewart.

  Stu, as he was known, was born in Scotland in 1938. The family moved to suburban London when he was a baby, and Stu grew up playing the piano in the parlor. Drafted in 1956, he was released for medical reasons and took a clerical job with a chemical company. He’d been to Ealing a couple of times, had seen Brian play, but was a bit chagrined when he showed up at the White Bear pub and found that Brian was into small group Chicago blues. Stu was a committed boogie-woogie piano scholar, who’d started out admiring white swing bands and then discovered old “barrelhouse” players Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, whose boogie piano duets he found “very moving.” Stu liked the big American R&B ensembles of the early fifties—Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris—where the piano played eight to the bar and the saxes ruled. But Stu could see Brian’s potential and stifled his disappointment when Jones kept talking about Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters.

  They began rehearsing, got thrown out of the pub after Brian was caught stealing cigarettes, then moved to the Bricklayer’s Arms in Lisle Street, Soho, where golden Brian Jones and solid, true-hearted Ian Stewart became the two founding members of the Rolling Stones.

  Alexis Korner helped Brian find players for his new band. Geoff Bradford had recorded with Alexis and also played slide guitar (better than Brian, according to Charlie). Brian Knight was a good blues singer and played the harmonica well enough to teach Brian Jones a little. But Bradford was a serious blues purist, deep into Elmore and John Lee Hooker, and didn’t want to rock out. Knight quarreled with Jones over songs—Knight wanted to do country blues—and quit. Brian asked Charlie Watts to join on drums, but Charlie didn’t want to turn pro. He’d turned down Korner’s offers to play full-time because he didn’t want to give up his job. In fact, when Blues Incorporated got really big that summer, Charlie left the group, later joining a band, Blues by Six, that didn’t interfere with his work schedule. So other drummers were in and out of Brian’s new band: Ginger Baker, Carlo Little, Tony Chapman, Mick Avory.

  And Brian wanted Mick Jagger because the buzz was out that this weird new talent was out there, this young cat who was putting (and this was, of course, completely unspoken) a sex appeal spin on R&B, the only possible way to transcend the rigid boundaries of fandom and maybe take R&B to the kids. Brian knew that Jagger was the guy he wanted to be in a band with. Over a pint of ale in a pub during the interval of a Marquee gig, Brian invited Mick and (somewhat grudgingly) Keith to a rehearsal the next day.

  * * *

  The Rollin’ Stones

  Keith Richards—eighteen years old, rail-thin, in jeans, denim jacket, and purple shirt, looking like, in William Burroughs’s phrase, a sheep-killing dog—slung his cheap guitar in a plastic case down Wardour Street as strippers darted past him in wigs and brassieres. Bricklayer’s Arms, at the corner of Wardour and Lisle, smelled of warm ale and last night’s cigarettes. Cheery old barmaid. “We’re supposed to rehearse here. Would you know—?” “Second floor, luv.”

  Keith heard the piano by the time he hit the first landing. Beautiful rolling boogie with a touch of Crescent City stride—relaxed, soulful, totally, craftsmanly expert. Keith slipped into the room and doughty Ian Stewart was sitting at the piano, which had been pushed over by the window. He was playing whorehouse piano licks, Jelly Roll Morton and Professor Longhair, and he didn’t know anyone was listening. He was staring out the window because, Keith later realized, his bicycle was chained to a post outside and he was worried someone would nick it.

  Keith was impressed, riveted. He’d seen Stu play with Korner and pull the amateurish band together with his authority. He knew Stu didn’t care shit for Chuck Berry. To hard-core blues
fans like Stu, Keith was rock and roll and should have been ducking brawls on the ballroom circuit with Neil Christian and the Crusaders (whose guitarist was seventeen-year-old Jimmy Page). Keith just stood in awe and listened to the fluid pianism of this Pinetop Perkins in the body of a square-jawed Scot. Every few minutes Stu would comment on one of the strippers flashing down the street in her high heels. Finally Stu turned around, inspected Keith, and deflatingly deadpanned: “And you must be the Chuck Berry artist.”

  Rehearsals got under way. Brian Jones was in charge, the leader. Geoff Bradford, ten years older and visibly uptight, on blues guitar. Brian on guitar. Keith on rhythm guitar. Dick Taylor on bass. Stu on piano. Mick singing. Various drummers, Mick Avory a lot. They started learning Elmore James songs, dissecting Jimmy Reed masterpieces, and speeding up Chuck Berry.

  Brian was encouraging to Dick Taylor, who was new on the bass, and tried to be accommodating to Mick and his mates, who wanted Chuck and Bo, though he himself was really interested in being the white Jimmy Reed. There was a little conflict and some mixed feelings, but all were impressed by Brian’s brilliant musicianship, his out-of-town diligence, and his certainty that they were cool and that something was gonna happen, man.

  Something had to happen, because none of them had a shilling to his name.

  Their break came when the BBC offered Blues Incorporated a slot on its Jazz Club radio show on Thursday, July 12, 1962. But the BBC only had a budget to pay five musicians, and the producer didn’t want Mick anyway because it was a jazz show. Since Korner couldn’t make his Thursday gig at the Marquee, Harold Pendleton had to find another act. He hired Long John Baldry’s group, but was persuaded by Brian to hire his new group to play between Baldry’s sets. Panic set in when Brian realized they didn’t have decent enough amplifiers for a paid performance, so Mick got his dad to lend them enough to rent some cheap Harmony amps, and Brian got hold of a used Harmony Stratotone electric guitar.

  When Pendleton told Brian the group needed a name for the adverts, Brian came up with “the Rollin’ Stones,” from Muddy Waters’s classic “Rollin’ Stone.” Stu hated the name (“It sounds like a troupe of fucking Irish acrobats”), but it stuck. To Brian’s dismay, the ad for the gig read, “Mick Jagger and the Rollin’ Stones.”

  And so, consciously or not, the Stones anointed themselves as the anticipated messiahs of the blues—the sons, the boy-children, of Muddy Waters, agents of Mississippi Delta culture to the world. It was a prophesy they managed to fulfill, introducing blues and R&B to their huge postwar generation, and so keeping the endangered species alive.

  The Rollin’ Stones played their debut gig at the Marquee in Oxford Street on a bright London summer evening in July. Their gear was humped down the narrow stairs by Stu and Brian’s friend Dick Hattrell, who acted as their unpaid roadie. The crowd was half Marquee jazz regulars and half young R&B fans glazed over from speed, cigarettes, and too much espresso. Mick, Keith, and Brian were the front line, with Stu on piano and maracas, Dick Taylor on bass, and (possibly) Mick Avory on drums. Wearing coats and ties, they lit into “Kansas City.” Despair as Brian and Stu realized that the drummer was way off. But they continued for an hour of chugging, clunky, piano-driven R&B: “Honey What’s Wrong,” “Confessin’ the Blues,” “Bright Lights,” “Dust My Blues,” with Brian’s clarion slide guitar that woke the audience up. Mick and Brian got some kids dancing. “Down the Road Apiece” injected some up-tempo Chuck Berry rocking into the set. Back to laconic Jimmy Reed blues with “I Want to Love You.” “Bad Boy.” “I Ain’t Got You.” Jimmy Reed again with “Hush Hush.” Muddy’s “Ride ’Em on Down.” Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.” “Feel Kind of Lonesome.” Elmore James’s “Blues Before Sunrise.” “Big Boss Man.” Billy Boy Arnold’s “Don’t Stay Out All Night.” And (according to the set list jotted down by Stu in his diary along with the keys the songs were in) they finished with Jimmy Reed’s “Tell Me That You Love Me” and Elmore James’s “Happy Home.”

  They had a drink in a pub afterward and split the twenty-pound fee among them.

  Charlie Watts went to see them that night. “There were a lot of people dancing,” he recalled, “but the usual Marquee jazz crowd was saying, ’This is really terrible.’ But really, they were very popular even then. The thing was, the bands that were doing that stuff—me included—were eccentric old men. Now the Stones, the front line at any rate, were young, so there was obvious appeal for the kids that wanted to dance. Alexis’s band was a joke to look at, but this lot crossed the barrier. They actually looked like rock stars, I suppose, but they could play.”

  They rehearsed for the rest of the summer, finding occasional substitute gigs at the Marquee. Mick Avory left and was replaced by Tony Chapman, who played in a South London rock and roll band, the Cliftons. (Some believe it was Chapman, not Avory, who played the first Stones gig at the Marquee.) The other Stones didn’t like Chapman, but he kept showing up. Brian asked Charlie Watts to join, but he again declined. Satisfied with his job and his amateur Blues by Six gig, Charlie Watts was out of Brian’s reach, at least financially.

  In August, Mick found a cheap flat at 102 Edith Grove in the unfashionable part of Chelsea called World’s End. It was a two-room dump with bare lightbulbs and a shilling-fed gas fire for heat, and for the next eight months it was Stones world headquarters. Mick and Keith both left Dartford and moved in, along with a young printer named Jimmy Phelge, who kept everyone laughing with his disgusting personal hygiene and sick, gross-out humor. Brian lived at Edith Grove but had Pat and their baby in another flat. Food and money were in extremely short supply, and that fall the little group was saved from starvation by Doris Richards, who turned up occasionally with groceries and clean laundry.

  As the autumn of 1962 wore on, the Rollin’ Stones picked up occasional jobs, at a parish hall in Richmond, arranged by Brian, and at the Red Lion pub in Stu’s hometown, Cheam, in Surrey. Dick Taylor left the band in September to attend the Royal College of Art. For a couple of months, the bass chores were handled by various people, most often Colin Golding, who probably played around eight gigs, even more than Dick Taylor (who went on to start the legendary R&B band Pretty Things, with fellow Sidcup student Phil May).

  Gigs were hard to come by because the old jazz promoters who controlled the clubs were against playing blues. “We were a blues band that played in clubs,” Mick said, “not a rock band that played in ballrooms. We didn’t play any Eddie Cochran numbers.” Brian Jones was moved to write a detailed letter to Jazz News, explaining that R&B was a fresh wind blowing in from Chicago that deserved a proper hearing. The jazzers thought that Alexis and the Stones were trying to kill trad, and they were right. They tried to starve the Rollin’ Stones out and almost succeeded. Even Cyril Davies fired the Stones as a support band for his powerful R&B All-Stars after a bitter argument with Mick about blues singing. Sarcastic Harold Pendleton needled them constantly about their act and beatnik appearance until one night Keith grabbed his guitar by the neck and tried to smash Pendleton in the head. After that, the Stones were banned from the Marquee. Occasional gigs at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club didn’t make up for the loss of the West End’s premier venue.

  It was the Rollin’ Stones against the music business. No young band had ever taken on the big boys before and come out with all their fingers intact.

  * * *

  The Luckiest Man in the World

  Now it was late autumn in England, John Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. England was about to suffer its worst winter in years.

  Late 1962 was an uncertain time for the Rollin’ Stones. With few gigs and no permanent rhythm section, Mick Jagger was getting a little vague. He was still doing the occasional gig and society party with Alexis. The new term at LSE had begun, and Mick’s student grant was his only source of income. Brian and Keith had burned their bridges, were committed to the band and frustrated that Mick seemed to be waffling. When Brian got fir
ed from his last job for stealing, he had to talk his way out of being arrested. Now he and Keith began to really bond, spending their days in the freezing Edith Grove flat, learning to weave their guitars in an aggressive blues phalanx. At one point, after Jagger missed some rehearsals to study for exams, Brian and Keith felt abandoned and talked about forming an Everly Brothers—style duo together. While they were plotting, Mick visited Brian’s flat and made love to his girlfriend, Pat.

  It was around this time that Brian really got into the harmonica, with Little Walter and Sonny Boy as his models. Soon Brian even lost interest in playing guitar, his saxophone background providing a good foundation for blowing the harp with his band in rehearsal.

  Keith: “Brian and me would be home in this pad [Edith Grove] all day, trying to make one foray a day either to pick up empty beer bottles from a party or raid the local supermarket because we were so hungry. We’d try and get some eggs or potatoes or something.

  “I went out one morning and came back in the evening and Brian was blowing harp! Man! He’s got it together. He’s standin’ at the top of the stairs, saying, ’Listen to this: waaaaaaaah wah, waaaaaaaaaaah wah wah wah wah, waaaaa waaa aaa.’ All these blues notes coming out. He says, ’I’ve learned how to do it! I’ve figured it out.’ And he did it in one fucking day.”

  There was shock in Edith Grove when they first heard “Love Me Do” on the radio by a new group from Liverpool called the Beatles. “Love Me Do” was a little pop blues with a harmonica solo and a touch of Buddy Holly and the Everlys. It was a bolt from the blue; the Beatles were unknown in London and only a rumor in Soho.

  John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and their new drummer, Ringo Starr, had survived their leather-jacketed years in Hamburg dives and were now fighting their way out of remote Liverpool, which might have been Mars as far as London was concerned. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had cleaned them up, let their hair grow, put them in modernist suits, but had been rebuffed by the big labels in London. Then he sold a demo to Parlophone, which in October 1962 released their first single, “Love Me Do,” chosen (according to their biographer Philip Norman) “with difficulty from an eccentric and uncommercial repertoire.”