Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  It made Mick Jagger sick. Keith was in shock. “It was an attack from the north,” he said later. “We thought we were the only guys in the world.”

  The Stones wanted to be the Next Big Thing, but the Beatles from uncool Liverpool had beaten them to stardom, launching the “Mersey Sound” of Liverpool groups that dominated white pop for the next two years. It took the Stones that long to catch the Beatles’ wave, after which the two bands would form what Keith has called “a double act” that lasted for the rest of the sixties.

  Brian Jones, de facto manager of the Rollin’ Stones, realized he had to make something happen, so he deployed his soft-edged charm and impressive faith in his band to massage his contacts to get a record deal, the Holy Grail of bandhood.

  He hustled some studio time at Curly Clayton Sound Studios in North London, and on October 27 the Rollin’ Stones cut a three-song demo: Muddy’s “Soon Forgotten,” Jimmy Reed’s “Close Together,” and a new Bo Diddley number, “You Can’t Judge a Book (by Looking at the Cover).” Brian sent their demo tape to an executive at EMI, one of the two major record labels (the other was Decca) in England at the time. EMI passed, and they were back where they started.

  At a Wednesday night gig by a band called the Presidents (led by young musician Glyn Johns) at the Red Lion pub, drummer Tony Chapman brought along the bass player from his old band, Bill Perks, and introduced him to Ian Stewart, who was in the audience. Stu mentioned that the Stones were looking for a full-time bass and suggested Bill audition for them at their Friday rehearsal at the Wetherby Arms. Bill promised to show up.

  Bill Perks was older than the Stones, born to an impoverished family in Penge, a tough part of South London, in 1936. He felt the war: evacuation, his neighborhood flattened by bombs, schoolmates killed. They ate horsemeat and whale for protein when they could get it.

  Willy was good at numbers and won a place at a good grammar school, where he was mocked for his cockney accent. In Penge, the kids threw bricks at him because they didn’t like his school blazer and cap. He was beaten by his dad for wasting his time playing boogie-woogie piano instead of practicing classical scales. In 1953, his dad pulled him out of school two months before his last exams and put him to work in a bookmaker’s shop for three pounds ten shillings a week.

  Bill loved music and spent his evenings glued to the radio. His autobiography, Stone Alone, claims impressive sexual precocity. By 1955, he was in the Royal Air Force in Germany, where skiffle was the rage. He caught Chris Barber’s band with Lonnie Donegan and picked up his first guitar. He also became friends with a fellow RAF airman, Lee Wyman, to whose last name Bill took a shine. Back home, he took a clerical job and married a local girl, Diane, who was three months gone at the time. This was 1959, and a son, Stephen, was born the following year.

  Bill started playing in rock and roll bands and got involved with the Cliftons in the spring of 1962, switching to bass guitar (which he built himself) because they already had a lead. Many rehearsals, a few gigs around South London, and Bill bought a couple of amps, a Vox Phantom and an AC-30 as a spare, on the installment plan. That summer, Tony Chapman answered Brian Jones’s ad for a bass player and started with the Stones. When Dick Taylor left and they couldn’t find anyone good, Tony introduced Bill, which is how he found himself in a pub in Chelsea on December 7, being contemptuously snubbed by Keith and Brian. They looked like scruffy, arty-type bohemian bums to Bill, and Bill looked like a Ted to them—“a real London Ernie,” as Keith put it.

  Hate at first sight.

  Bill: “It was snowing, there were two inches on the ground, and it was absolutely freezing. Tony and I went in his father’s car to Chelsea for the audition. I brought all my stuff with me, including my spare amp, the echo unit, plus the enormous wardrobe [cabinet] I’d built, with my eighteen-inch speaker and the amplifier that ran it. They all knew who I was but no one spoke to me. Stu I’d met once before and I kind of said hello to him, but Brian and Keith were drinking at the bar and they totally ignored me for an hour and a half . . . Mick came over and said something, so I got my amp and that was a bit more interesting. We began playing ’I’m a King Bee,’ the Jimmy Reed thing, and I found it easy to get into, just a simple twelve-bar riff.”

  Keith: “We turned up [at the rehearsal] and in walks Bill Wyman, ladies and gentlemen! Huge speaker he’s got, and a spare Vox AC-30 amp, which is the biggest fuckin’ amp we’ve ever seen in our lives. And that’s spare! He says, ’You can put one of your guitars through there.’ Whew. Put us up quite a few volts goin’ through that thing.

  “He had the bass together already, because he’d been playing in terrible, shitty rock bands for a few years. He’s older than us; he knows how to play.”

  After they jammed for a while, Bill stood them a round of drinks and offered cigarettes. “These were jumped on,” he says, “like I was offering famine relief.” Still, Brian and Keith were cool, distant. Mick asked Bill if he knew any music by the Chicago bluesmen, and Bill replied that all he knew was Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Bill said he didn’t know Bo Diddley’s stuff, drawing eye-rolling contempt from Brian and Keith.

  But at the end of the day, they invited Bill back to their next rehearsal and somehow manipulated him into leaving his amps and gear in the front room of their lair in Edith Grove. Bill was appalled by the scene he found there—filth, old food and dirty socks strewn about, tubercular damp walls smelling of stale grease and poverty—but despite their misgivings about him, Bill Wyman was about to become a Rollin’ Stone. Ian Stewart recalled, “There’s a certain amount of truth in the old story about Bill being taken on because he had a few amplifiers. But remember, Bill was very good.”

  Hard-core Stones fans still call Bill the luckiest man in the world.

  * * *

  Swinging London

  If timing is everything, the Rollin’ Stones certainly picked the perfect moment. “It began in 1963,” wrote Philip Larkin, quintessential poet of midcentury British angst, and by “it” Larkin meant the generational shift and daring pop experiments that made the stodgy gray kingdom blossom with art, wit, style, and hype that year. A manic new energy emerged as the generation born during the war remade British culture in its own image, an image broadcast to the wider world via music and design. “Swinging London” was the catchphrase for what happened in the capital in the early sixties. When the Stones burst out of their isolation into a rhythm and blues cult, they became among Swinging London’s most famous avatars.

  The only significant postwar English art movement until then had been the so-called Angry Young Men, the name loosely applied to a number of playwrights and novelists in the mid-1950s whose politically radical or anarchic work depicted existential alienation and malaise. The archetype emerged from director Tony Richardson’s discovery of playwright John Osborne, whose Look Back in Anger pulled British theater into the twentieth century. Angry Young Men were portrayed by a new group of actors—Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde—in a new cycle of movies that dealt with the harsh realities of postwar British life: Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, A Taste of Honey, and later The Servant. In some ways, with their dark looks, foreign music, and threatening sexuality amid the sunny, unisex pop of early Swinging London, the Rollin’ Stones might have been England’s last Angry Young Men.

  Angry Young heroes included fashion photographers, among the first sixties Englishmen to merge technology with style and get their work published widely. And then there were the Angry Young gangsters, tough East End hoodlums in sharp suits and flattened noses who operated in the underworld of gambling, extortion, leg-breaking and show business, owning and managing nightclubs. The masters of this world were the notorious Kray twins, Reg and Ron, whose sadistic and (closeted) homosexual crew of thugs controlled Plutonian activities in London after dark. The Krays in turn inspired a younger generation of petty criminals, drug dealers, and goons who became known as Chelsea Villains when a few were absorbed into
the more upscale social order of Swinging London in the 1960s. A few of them gained fame “minding” rock stars on American tours a decade later.

  By 1961, satire began to take the edge off some of the anger. Beyond the Fringe began as a Cambridge University student production lampooning politics and the church. It took London by storm, then Broadway. The magazine Private Eye skewered every target available, lowering the taste barrier and raising political consciousness. By 1963, the virus had spread to traditionally hidebound British TV when That Was the Week That Was began to laugh at the royal family on the BBC.

  When the so-called Profumo Scandal broke in 1963, all social bets in England suddenly seemed off. The scandal involved a ring of beautiful call girls, a prominant society doctor, some titled names, London’s West Indian underground, and the minister of war, John Profumo, who was caught sharing a girlfriend, Christine Keeler, with a Russian spy. Profumo resigned in the glare of publicity, and London’s rarely viewed sexual underbelly was exposed to the world. Now a new group of faces—perhaps only two hundred people in all—took over a new batch of clubs and discotheques and created the inspired ambience called Swinging London.

  There are several ways of looking at Swinging London, which lasted roughly from 1962 to 1965.

  In one, Swinging London was a British Renaissance of pop music, pop art, fashion, design, and photography in which class barriers gave way to talent, style, and hard work. In this view, pop stars, louche young aristocrats, the fashion world, and talented art dealers created an exciting vibration that captured the speedy zeitgeist of the early sixties.

  In another, Swinging London was a cynical marketing campaign that masked the loss of the British Empire to decolonization (and outright rebellion in Rhodesia) and the subsequent loss of national wealth, the rise of the welfare state, and the degradation of a once-great nation.

  And then there’s Ian Stewart’s view of Swinging London as a load of bollocks in which no-talent bands competed with horrible “art” to outshine each other in a drugged world of cheap hustlers and incredible pretense—a soulless cavalcade of crap and wasted lives. A lot of others felt that way too, but by then London was in full swing, and the money was pouring in as the “British Invasion” stormed American teenage markets.

  Swinging London preferred American pop songs and dances like the twist and so was at first ambivalent about the Beatles when they arrived in London in 1963. The Beatles felt this, famously sticking together in nightclubs for protection against snubs and put-downs. The Beatles had been transformed by manager Brian Epstein from a punkish band in black leather to a sanitized pop group in matching suits and boots. Mop-top hair replaced greasy pompadours, and sometimes-cruel insolence (Lennon’s spastic imitations) had turned into bluff, clever repartee. Now the Beatles were unstoppable: their second single, “Please Please Me,” took the country by storm, and their personal charm captured teenage girldom. When met with resistance from the London press, Epstein hired a nineteen-year-old Soho P.R. kid named Andrew Oldham, who had started running errands for designer Mary Quant. Speed-happy Andrew got a buzz going in the papers and helped sell the Beatles to London, no mean feat.

  Many other Swinging London faces would impact the Stones. The young art dealer Robert Fraser opened a gallery that brought New York’s pop art stars Andy Warhol and Jim Dine to England. Antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs was making his first forays into Morocco, returning with the wild Berber fabrics and artifacts that would launch the orientalism of the era. Donald Cammell was painting brilliant portraits in his Chelsea studio, dabbling in the occult, and reading the magic-realist stories of Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine master whose work only became available in English in 1962.

  And then there was Tara Browne. By 1963, Tara was a deliciously rich and fey eighteen-year-old heir to the Guinness brewing fortune. He lived in Paris with his mother and in a castle in Ireland. When in London, he was installed in a suite at Claridge’s. He got around town in a chauffeured Lincoln equipped with a rare, battery-powered singles changer that played fresh American pop hits that Tara had flown in monthly. It was Bobby Vee’s “Rubber Ball” and “Take Good Care of My Baby” and the Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ USA” as Tara cruised the West End and Chelsea in lavender silk shirts from Paris, starting instant disco parties in train stations when he and his friends set up the little record player and danced around the photo booths. Tara was golden, aristocratic, warm, generous, beautiful, and a little crazed. If anyone typified the instinctive hedonism and expansive personality of Swinging London, it was young Tara Browne. He helped tune in the essential romantic signal of the times, and both the Beatles and the Stones loved him to death.

  * * *

  Pandemonium in Richmond

  With Bill Perks now in the band (having adopted the Stones’ daring, combed-forward hairstyle), the Rollin’ Stones began to sound good. If only they could score a decent drummer . . .

  Brian Jones kept hustling with jesuitical fervor. Right after the start of the new year, 1963, he wrote to the BBC asking for an audition so the Stones’ “authentic Chicago rhythm and blues music” could get on the radio. Brian was tireless in looking for gigs to keep the band together. He also collected and paid out the band’s money and, like any good rock and roll manager, started padding the group’s expenses, stealing whatever he could. “He conned us,” Wyman later said, “and we knew it.” The Stones played Ealing, the Flamingo in Soho, and the Red Lion, where Charlie Watts turned up; once again Brian, Mick, and Keith begged him, without much hope, to join them. They desperately needed him. According to Keith, “The desire to get Charlie was one of the driving forces that nailed this band together. It was a conspiracy on our part. ’We’ve got to keep going long enough to offer Charlie Watts five pounds a week.’ ” Charlie liked their music and told them they needed “a fucking great drummer,” but he was still working with Blues by Six and was reluctant to give up his secure job. He asked Bobbie Korner what he should do, and she told him to give the Stones a go. Charlie was tired of hauling his drum kit around on the tube anyway. Stu later recalled, “We said to Charlie, ’Look, you’re in the band. That’s it.’ And Charlie said, ’Yeah, all right then, but I don’t know what my dad’s gonna say.’ ”

  After two more gigs with drummer Tony Chapman, they fired him at the Ricky Tick in Windsor. “Sorry, man,” Brian told him, “but you have to fuck off.” Chapman was angry and turned to Bill, whom he had brought into the band. “Right, Bill, come on—we can start a new band.” But Bill looked away and kept wiping off his bass guitar. “Sorry, Tony, but I’m happy where I am, and I think I’ll stay for a while.”

  Charlie Watts’s first show with the Rollin’ Stones was at the Flamingo in Piccadilly on January 14, 1963. The band watched in near disbelief as smiling Charlie, head tilted characteristically to his right, locked into a locomotive groove with Bill that made them really cook. Stu realized the Stones now had the best young drummer in England and that this could be the making of the group.

  The next night, they played the Marquee, opening for Cyril Davies’s All-Stars, a powerful blues band (with future Stones sideman Nicky Hopkins on piano). The new Stones blew Davies off the stage and into oblivion.

  Charlie started hanging out in frigid Edith Grove, where the only heat came from a gas meter on the wall fed with scarce shillings. Compulsive Brian infuriated his mates by using all their hot water to constantly wash his hair (they called him “Mr. Shampoo”). Brian and Keith spent their days wrapped in blankets, trying to practice guitar with gloves on. Charlie furthered his R&B education with the records Brian played for him, hour after hour.

  “By the time I joined the Stones, I was a bit used to rock and roll,” Charlie recalled. “I knew most of the rock and roll guys, people like Screaming Lord Sutch [whose act lampooned class pretentions], though I’d never had any desire to play it myself. But by the time I joined them, I was quite used to Chuck Berry and that. It was actually sitting up endlessly with Keith and Brian, waiting for jobs
to come up, just listening to Little Walter and all that, that it got really ground in.”

  From the beginning, Charlie changed the Stones. Before, they had basically been copying the records they liked. But on a song like Chuck Berry’s “Talkin’ ’Bout You,” Charlie would tap out a counterrhythmic shuffle beat under the Stones. Bill would play fast eighth notes to keep up with him, and the two guitars followed them. The phrase “shuffle and eighths” soon became an in-band description of the new style they were learning to play over Charlie’s more sophisticated time.

  Brian, meanwhile, ordered Charlie to grow his hair longer and start combing it forward.

  Early in February 1963, Brian contacted filmmaker and R&B impresario Giorgio Gomelsky, who entered the scene when he made a film of the Chris Barber band at the first Richmond Jazz Festival in 1961. Brian heard he was starting a jazz club in suburban Richmond, just southwest of London, and started to pester him.

  “Giorgio,” Brian would whisper, “you must come hear my band, best thing in London, we’re playing rhythm and blues, Chicago, you’ll dig it.” Russian-born, beatnik-goateed, with instinctive cosmopolitan tastes in music, Gomelsky came to a Stones gig at the Red Lion in early February and was impressed with the new kick that Charlie brought into play. But when Brian asked for Gomelsky’s Sunday evening slot at his new club, he was turned down because it had been promised to another band . . . which never showed up.