Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Andrew rented an office on Regent Street from an old-line talent agent, Eric Easton, a thirty-six-year-old former theater organist and veteran of variety shows. The next week, he took Easton to Richmond to see the Stones. They lured Brian Jones to Regent Street, where he surrendered control of his group, signing a three-year management contract on behalf of the band on May 1, 1963 (the contract gave the Stones’ new management 25 percent of all earnings). At first, Easton said he wanted Jagger out of the band because he couldn’t sing. Brian seemed amenable, but Andrew insisted that Jagger stay.

  Brian also insisted on being secretly paid five pounds more a week than the rest of the band, because he was the leader. When Gomelsky returned to London a few days later, Brian gave him the bad news that they were movin’ on.

  Things started to happen fast. Andrew impulsively decided to put the Stones in uniforms like the Beatles. On Carnaby Street, he bought them black jeans, black turtlenecks, and Cuban-heeled boots. Brian hated this. Mick didn’t like the tight boots and stopped wearing them in favor of his loafers.

  They kept playing their regular venues, the Ricky Tick in Windsor and Eel Pie Island, and Andrew got them publicity gigs, like News of the World’s fun fair in Battersea Park on the south bank of the Thames on the afternoon of May 4. Pat Andrews showed up with baby Julian, and Brian proudly held the boy and took him around the fair. Afterward, Andrew took Brian aside and told him to lose the kid and the girlfriend, man, if he ever wanted to be a pop star. Pat and her son went back to Cheltenham soon after.

  Within a week of signing the Stones, Andrew got them their dreamed-of record deal, a preposterous swindle that worked out badly for the Stones in the end.

  There were only two big record companies in England, EMI and Decca. Both were subsidiaries of giant electronic corporations. EMI had the Beatles, and Decca needed the Next Big Thing. Decca executive Dick Rowe was notorious for having passed on the Beatles a year earlier. When he ran into George Harrison cojudging a talent show in Liverpool, George told him his favorite new band was playing the next night in Richmond. Rowe drove all day to be at the Crawdaddy Club in time to catch the Rollin’ Stones’ raucous rite of spring. He made a deal with Andrew almost on the spot. They played Rowe the IBC demos from March, Andrew acted his “little teenage tycoon shit” to the hilt, and they leveraged a desperate Decca Records into giving them a two-year deal and a 20 percent royalty.

  Andrew went to Brian and crowed that he’d made Decca fucking crawl, baby, and that he’d managed to get the band a whopping 6 percent royalty—better than the Beatles’ (famously horrendous) contract with EMI. Andrew and Eric Easton incorporated a company called Impact Sound, which would record and own the master tapes, leasing them—Spector-like—to hapless Decca for worldwide distribution. Brian immediately signed a three-year recording contract with Impact Sound on behalf of the Rollin’ Stones. Andrew didn’t tell Brian that Impact Sound would retain 14 percent of the Stones’ royalties.

  At this point, Brian let drop that he’d already signed a contract with IBC when they cut their earlier demo tapes. Easton gave Brian a hundred pounds, and Brian went to IBC, told them the Stones were breaking up, bought out their contract, and got the tapes back, in what Keith called “one of his fantastic get-out schemes.”

  When the Decca contract was finally signed, Andrew’s mother, with whom he still lived, had to act as legal guardian for him, since he was nineteen years old, too young to sign the papers by himself.

  * * *

  Come On

  On May 10, 1963, Andrew took the band into Olympic Studios, an advertising-jingle factory near Marble Arch, to record their first songs for Decca. They cut Chuck Berry’s “Come On” and (after much debate) Muddy Waters’s “I Want to Be Loved” and thought they were through for the day until the engineer asked the departing Andrew, who’d acted as producer, if he wanted to mix the tapes. Huh? The engineer explained that they had recorded four tracks but had to edit it down to one monaural track in order to manufacture the record. Patiently Andrew explained that he didn’t know anything about recording, or even about music, and had never been in a studio before. “You mix them,” Andrew said, “and I’ll be back in the morning for the tape.”

  “Come On” was a Chuck Berry St. Louis rhumba, unreleased in England, that Andrew thought would be a good first single. They came up with a fast arrangement that echoed the Jamaican ska style that was sweeping England (where it was called bluebeat). Andrew: “We’re all very tense [in the studio]. We all felt a bit of panic through that three-hour session. We kept rushing out to have a drink in an effort to keep the nerves down.” The Stones played it fast, clocking in at under two minutes, and they hated the result. Decca hated it too and later sent the band into their West Hampstead studio to redo it with Eric Easton supervising. The band was tense—red-light fever—in Decca’s stuffy studio and disliked the clean but stiff new version with its nervous rhythm and Brian’s wah-wah harp. “I don’t think ’Come On’ was very good,” Mick said later. “In fact, it was shit.” He sang the two-word chorus in falsetto, a device he would use for his entire career. Decca released it as the renamed Rolling Stones’ first single on June 7, 1963.

  Andrew and Decca worked the record, and it eventually reached a semirespectable no. 21 on the charts, even though reviewers wrote that it sounded nothing like the Stones. The first photos of the group were shot by Gered Mankowitz (son of the author of Expresso Bongo) and released by Decca with the record. They showed the shaggy band slouching on a London bomb site and drew even more (sarcastic) comment than the music. The Stones refused to play “Come On” in public. Keith: “It was done just to get a record out. We never even wanted to hear it. The idea was Andrew’s: get a strong single so they would let us make an album, which back then was a privilege.”

  The Daily Mirror did a positive story on the wild little scene in Richmond, and attendance at the Stones’ still-small gigs started to get too big for the Station Hotel to handle. As the Stones’ began their inexorable liftoff, other transitions were afoot. Andrew changed Keith’s last name to Richard, because it echoed Cliff Richard. Bill Perks changed his name to Bill Wyman. Charlie, Bill, and Stu quit their day jobs that summer to devote all their time to the band. Their families thought they were crazy.

  June 1963. Someone at the BBC told the Stones they were “unsuitable” for an audition. (Actually they thought Mick sounded too black, and Easton again mooted getting rid of him.) They kept playing the rickety ballroom on Eel Pie Island, alternating with blues rivals the All-Stars, featuring Long John Baldry. When Baldry wanted a break, he’d introduce the big-nosed, bouffant-haired mod Rodney Stewart in his high-heeled boots, who’d scream his head off. When the Piccadilly Jazz Club changed its name to the Scene Club, the Stones played the opening. Then the BBC started to get angry letters from Stones fans, and a BBC rep finally called Eric Easton to ask about a possible audition for the band.

  Early in July, the Stones were offered their first TV slot on a summer spin-off of Thank Your Lucky Stars. The gig had come through Easton, who repped the show’s host. Andrew sent the band to a tailor for matching jackets in houndstooth check with black velvet collars. When the finished suits arrived and the Stones showed up to try them on, there were only five suits. Andrew had told the tailor not to bother with Stu’s because he was out of the band.

  The crushing news was broken to Stu by Brian, who told him Andrew insisted on it. Stu was older, straighter, a big geezer type who didn’t fit the image. The Rolling Stones had to be pretty, thin, longhaired boys. At a band meeting on Eel Pie Island, Andrew facetiously explained that six was too fucking many for a band anyway, since the kids could only count to five. Brian didn’t like Andrew, was nervous about his obvious preference for Mick as point man and sex symbol, but went along. So did the others.

  It was a big moment, the end of the R&B band called the Rollin’ Stones and the beginning of the group that would rival the Beatles. Stu took being fired from the band he and Brian had f
ounded philosophically. “I mean,” he said later, “there would have been a group exactly like the Rolling Stones, and they would have been as good as the Rolling Stones, whether Brian and I existed or not.”

  They asked Stu to stay on as road manager, to keep playing piano at the gigs and on the records, and bighearted Stu agreed, not without some lingering bitterness. He grew to hate Brian Jones for this easy betrayal. As for Andrew Oldham, despite his admiration for Andrew’s careful and brilliant handling of the group in days to come, Stu said, “I wouldn’t piss on him if he were on fire.”

  * * *

  Lucky Stars

  Birmingham, Sunday, July 7. The Rolling Stones appeared smiling nervously on TV for the first time (Lucky Stars Summer Spin), miming to a tape of “Come On” in their juvenile black-velvet-collared checked suits, last on a bill with half a dozen now-forgotten acts. Mick shook his Beatles-cut hair and twitched spastically as the studio crew looked on in horror. Critics in the papers began to compare the Stones unfavorably to the more charming Beatles. Words like “apes” and “cavemen” were deployed in an ultimately successful effort to brand the Stones as the ugly, thuggish flip side of the sunny and engaging lads from Liverpool. Andrew thought this was brilliant and encouraged it, to the dismay of the Stones’ families.

  On July 13, the Stones opened for the Hollies in one of the Stones’ first shows outside London. The north of England was a foreign country to the London-bred Stones. Keith had never been farther north than the north of London. The Hollies, from Manchester, were a pop group (“Bus Stop”) featuring close harmony vocals that influenced the Stones in a more pop direction. Graham Nash and the other Hollies became close to the Stones, and Brian, in his almost desperate run for the rainbow, suddenly wanted to emulate their lighter style. Even Stu liked them. Ex-choirboy Keith was a good harmony singer and a plausible alternative vocalist, unlike Brian, who had an ugly singing voice. Bill Wyman started to sing backup vocals with Keith.

  On July 21, the Stones played Studio 51 on Great Newport Street in Soho, their first London gig since their record came out. The tiny sweat lodge of a club was crammed with young musicians—future Small Faces, Kinks, and Zombies; proto-Zeppelins—eager to hear the Stones, who didn’t bother to play their new record or even play to their audience. Instead, they pumped out their lusty, rumbling R&B and impressed everyone by not smiling or “entertaining” like every other hopeful young band. The Rolling Stones just stood there and played, cool to the point of intimidation, radiating a tough, potent, and extremely influential Evil.

  Andrew Oldham’s brilliant “styling” of the Stones began in earnest with the next round of interviews and photo sessions. In a process of spontaneous and instinctive invention relying as much on language as on a look or an attitude, he styled the Stones as sullen, inarticulate droogs. Photos displayed the group’s dissolute, delinquent body language, cribbed from icons of coolness in French New Wave cinema. Interviews were deliberately monosyllabic and unhelpful. Charlie Watts was ordered to stick out his tongue at newsreel cameras. If the Beatles were a blast of oxygen into a wheezing England, the Rolling Stones would be a dopey whiff of nitrous oxide. Teen rebellion and rock and roll had gone steady since the mid-1950s, but Andrew Oldham’s rethink of the Stones’ image built a successful model of pouting, rudeness, and contempt since used by hundreds of bands through four decades of rock, punk, and Brit-pop.

  Andrew got the Stones an endorsement deal with Vox, makers of instruments and amplifiers, and the Stones went to the Vox factory (in Dartford) to be photographed in skinny ties and leather vests. Vox gave Brian Jones the pear-shaped white guitar that he famously used for the next three years. Late in July, the Stones played a deb party for the daughter of Lord and Lady Killerman. Mick liked these affairs, but Brian hated them. He got drunk, vomited in Stu’s minibus, and passed out, missing the gig entirely.

  Meanwhile, the nervous brewery that owned the Station Hotel evicted the Crawdaddy Club. Gomelsky moved to the clubhouse of the Richmond Athletic Association, a bigger room where it got even crazier on Sunday nights as the Stones were finishing their sets with Chuck Berry’s “Bye Bye Johnny.” More girls showed up, hoisted onto their boyfriends’ shoulders. More fights broke out as rabid kids pushed up to get close to the band. The Stones were getting too big for the club, and soon found themselves booked out of town on Sunday nights. Giorgio replaced them with the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton’s raving R&B group, or the Detours, an early incarnation of the Who before Keith Moon joined on drums. Wistfully the Stones would find themselves headed up north on Sunday afternoons, while their friendly, familiar Crawdaddy slot (where their friends came to see them) was filled by a rival band.

  In August, Eric Easton began booking the Stones into the circuit of ballrooms they had previously shunned. Their days as a blues band were over; now they had to come up with catchy dance numbers. Decca wanted another single right away, and Andrew was desperately trying to find the right song. “Come On” had sold forty thousand records, Eric Easton told the band as he doled out their royalties, amounting to a pathetic eighteen pounds apiece. The Beatles were writing their own hit records, but the Stones depended on covering American R&B songs unreleased in England. On August 19 in Decca’s studio, they recorded the Coasters’ “Poison Ivy” and the hoodoo shuffle “Fortune Teller.” This second single was canceled by Decca after a few hundred copies had already been pressed. Everyone involved was frustrated that the Stones’ canned-sounding versions of American records couldn’t match the intense rush of their live sound.

  On August 23, the Stones mimed “Come On” during their first appearance on the new pop TV show Ready Steady Go! on the independent ITV channel. Ready Steady Go!, hosted by mod fashion plate Cathy McGowan, had recently begun showcasing young English acts and visiting Motown stars lip-synching on pop art sets and scaffolds on Friday nights. Andrew had been hanging out in RSG’s trendy greenroom since it first went on the air, and had an easy entrée to the show. Its young director, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, was sympathetic to the Stones and took care to project the sullen, Byronic image of the band that Andrew desired. RSG helped make the Stones major figures in England. Their long hair and angular features were perfect for the glare and shadows of black-and-white television. The hot TV lights cast a glowing corona around Brian’s golden head, and there was an inherent visual drama in the backlit faces of Mick and especially Bill Wyman, on whom the camera seemed to linger in fascination. Mick’s childhood TV experience helped his natural ability to deliver a song, almost matching his intimate appeal on a club-size stage. TV brought the Stones into English living rooms and made them seem more human, more familiar. All except for Brian Jones: his watchful, serious charisma and untouchable, otherworldly mystique were only enhanced by the cathode-ray aura that seemed to radiate from his image on a television screen.

  August also saw the end of the Stones’ residence at 102 Edith Grove. Brian had already left to move in with the family of his new girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, a sixteen-year-old hairdressing student he’d met at the Ricky Tick in Windsor, where he liked to walk the Lawrences’ pet white goat on a lead through the streets while exquisitely dressed in the latest fashion. Mick and Keith moved into a flat at 33 Mapesbury Road, West Hampstead, and were soon joined by Andrew, who turned up on their doorstep claiming that his mother had thrown him out of her house. A few weeks later, Chrissie Shrimpton moved in as well. She and Mick fought all the time about almost everything. Andrew noted how often she hit Mick with her little fists. Keith also had a new girlfriend, Linda Keith, a cool, beautiful Jewish model he’d met through Andrew’s girlfriend Sheila Klein. Linda Keith was a star-quality free spirit, the first serious love of Keith’s life.

  Bill Wyman was living in Penge with his wife and son, but was beginning his reign as the Stones’ priapic love machine by bedding every girl he could find on the road, notching the tally of deflowered virgins in his diary like a bean counter. Charlie was already involved with the slightly older art student Shi
rley Ann Shepherd, whom he would soon secretly marry.

  The squalid flat at Edith Grove was left to Jimmy Phelge. “Lovable,” Keith later said of him. “A hidden hero.” A tattered Rolling Stones poster pasted to the outside wall of the house would remain for almost fifteen years.

  Late in August, Brian started missing gigs. He had trouble breathing, a possible asthmatic condition aggravated by constant drinking and anxiety attacks. He was still the nominal “leader” of the Stones, trying to hold his tenuous position by playing Mick and Keith off against each other, constantly whispering lies and gossip about one to the other, succeeding only in planting jealousy and confusion in his own group. Brian and Andrew were suspicious of each other and barely spoke. Andrew was only interested in pushing Mick to the fore and was also bothering Mick and Keith to start writing songs together. Brian was left out of this, couldn’t come up with a simple pop melody, and he resented this, which didn’t help his health problems. If he couldn’t make the gig, Stu sat in on piano, if one was available.