Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  This newly fragile Brian could barely take the long journeys in Stu’s bus as it bumped along Britain’s primitive roads crammed with gear, amps, and sullen, chain-smoking musicians. Crafty Bill claimed he got carsick and could only ride in the front seat next to Stu. So the others were stuffed in the back. Plus, they were always running late, and Stu would refuse to stop when they had to relieve themselves. Keith complained bitterly that he had to piss out of the VW’s air vent as the Stones hurtled along on ten-hour drives to far-off gigs in deepest Wales. They ate mainly greasy eggs, chips, and sausages at truck stops, lived on restless exhaustion, could only dream of collapsing when they got home late at night. It was a way of life none of them would have traded for the world.

  Mick: “It was very exciting, the whole thing. The first time we got our picture in Record Mirror was so exciting, you couldn’t believe it . . . And then to go from the music-oriented press to the national press and national television, and everyone seeing you [on the] two television channels, and then being recognized by everyone from builders to people working in shops . . . It goes to your head—a very champagne feeling.”

  * * *

  Wanna Be Your Man

  Tuesday, September 10, 1963. Summer held on to gray London. The Profumo Scandal was raging. Red double-decker buses and black cabs choked the streets with diesel smoke. Andrew Oldham was walking along Jermyn Street, St. James, head down, wondering where the Rolling Stones’ second single was coming from. The band was rehearsing in Soho. Andrew had just gotten them a spot on a package tour going out later in the month with their heroes Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers. The Stones would get an education in classic rock and roll, but first Andrew had to find their next record and was coming up with fuck-all.

  A black taxi pulled up sharply next to him. “Get in, Andy, we’ve got something for you.”

  It was half the Beatles, John and Paul, jolly and a bit tight, having had one or two at the Variety Club Awards luncheon at the Savoy. The Beatles had just appeared on the big TV variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium and were certified Big Stars, currently working on their second album. Andrew jumped into the cab, speed-rapping about his single problem with the Stones until Paul helpfully mentioned, “We’ve got some fresh numbers that might be right for the Stones.”

  Andrew ordered the driver to take them to Studio 51 in Great Newport Street. They crashed down the steps to the basement club. “Mick!” John called. “We’ve got yer next fookin’ record!” Handed guitars, Lennon and McCartney played them the first verse and chorus of “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which they’d written for Ringo to sing.

  Andrew’s problem was solved. Rescued by the Beatles! Andrew told them he wanted the song, and John said, “Well, we have to finish it, then, don’t we?” They sat in a corner and wrote the middle eight bars on the spot. The simple mating chant was so hot that after the Stones recorded it, the Beatles did too. Even Bob Dylan, soon to be besotted with the English bands, would cut a version.

  The confidence, speed, and ease they saw in John and Paul impressed Mick and Keith. “I mean, the way they used to hustle tunes was great,” Mick said. It knocked them all out.

  A few days later, the Stones played a charity benefit at Albert Hall, the opening act on an interminable bill topped by the Beatles. A teen magazine had organized it, and there were a thousand girls on the street, the first time the Stones had to make a serious run for the stage door.

  Early in the month, Mick dropped out of the LSE. He informed the school and told his parents. “It was very, very difficult,” he recalled, “because my parents didn’t want me to do it. My father was absolutely furious with me. Anything but this. He couldn’t believe it. It was probably a stupid thing to do, but I didn’t like being in college. It was a dull, boring course I was stuck on.” The LSE told Mick he could come back to school anytime in the next year.

  Pressured by young fans, the BBC finally relented, and the Stones recorded four songs for the Saturday Club radio program: “Come On,” two more Chuck Berry numbers, and “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” The producers asked Brian, Charlie, and Bill to remain at the studio to back up Bo Diddley, who was arriving later that afternoon to tape some songs. Brian agreed, but then disappeared, unready to meet an idol whose songs they played night after night in clubs and ballrooms (they had even recently made Diddley’s witty playlet “Cops and Robbers” the centerpiece of their show). Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts did the backing, and Bo thanked and complimented them afterward.

  By the end of September, the Rolling Stones had retired as a club act. The Crawdaddy Club residency ended on the twenty-second, and the Stones were replaced by the rip-roaring Yardbirds. Their last gig at the Ricky Tick in Windsor came two days later, and they played Eel Pie Island for the last time the next night.

  On Sunday, September 29, amid the din of hundreds of screaming girls, the Stones opened the Bo Diddley/Everly Brothers tour with two shows at the New Victoria Theater in London before heading out on the road. It was the Stones’ first package tour, a Don Arden Enterprises Ltd. production, a big deal. Arden was a music business heavy who made his fierce reputation by hanging Australian promoter Robert Stigwood out of his office window by his ankles, three stories above Oxford Street, after Stigwood had caused a spot of bother. Stigwood famously shat himself, and no one ever crossed Don Arden again. If you were a musician working for him and didn’t show up for the gig, you might have your fingers broken.

  Bo Diddley had his sister, the Duchess, and legendary maracas shaker Jerome Green (“Bring it on home, bring it to Jerome”) with him. The Kentucky-bred Everly Brothers—Don and Phil—headed the bill with their classic string of hits and a sweet harmony style that was finished in the United States and fading in England. Chuck Berry, who was to have headlined, was in jail in Missouri, serving time for promoting prostitution at his nightclub in St. Louis. The Stones opened the show with a four-song set: “Come On,” “Route 66,” “Poison Ivy,” and “Money,” Barrett Strong’s 1960 hit that became a big jam with every band in the world. They dropped all Bo Diddley covers in deference to the master.

  The Stones started the tour in their absurd checked uniform jackets with skinny black ties, but these were quickly abandoned when Keith spilled coffee and whiskey on his jacket and Charlie “lost” his. After the first gigs, the Stones appeared in collarless white shirts and black leather vests. Most of the gigs were in movie theaters, and the cramped conditions backstage led to much jamming and socializing among the musicians. Bo Diddley was friendly and gracious toward the Stones, so Brian borrowed a set of ornate gold cuff links from a photographer and gave them to Bo as an offering from the band. Bo’s act was pure gutbucket rock, with the Duchess’s skintight gold-lamé catsuit providing sexy flash. Diddley and the Stones became “jug buddies,” in Diddley’s words, drinking wine together before going on.

  Keith watched Don Everly from the wings almost every night like it was a master class. “Plenty to learn in a real short time, following those guys around,” he recalled. “The Everlys came on with just their trio and themselves. Don Everly is one of the best rhythm guitar players in the world. The killer rhythm man, always used an open tuning. It’s country shit, basically. That’s why the Everly Brothers’ stuff was so hard, because it was all on acoustic [guitars].” Watching Don, Keith also picked up his dramatic technique of windmilling the strings, swinging his arm in a wide circle to dramatize the chord (and Pete Townshend stole it from Keith when his band, the Detours, next played with the Stones).

  On October 3, the tour did two shows at the Odeon in Southend. Keith was going home to his girlfriend afterward and was looking forward to a night of love. Exhausted by the adrenaline of playing every night, he ordered a chicken dinner delivered to the dressing room. Brian got there first and ate it.

  “You cunt,” Keith yelled. “You et me fuckin’ dinner!” He smashed Brian in the face as hard as he could. Mr. Jones appeared onstage for the second show with a massive black eye, t
rying to smile but looking miserable.

  Things were very tense within the Stones. Brian was jealous of the attention Mick was getting and began to insist on singing lead on some songs. From the start, Brian had been at the front of the stage with Mick, teasing the kids and drawing his sometimes-bigger share of adulation and screams. But as Mick’s confidence increased and his persona developed into the Stones’ all-powerful front, Brian’s instrumental work naturally cast him in a secondary role, which he deeply resented. Brian wasn’t shy about acting out his anger. He got drunk, played poorly, fucked up in other ways. The other Stones resented this even more, ignored or mocked him, even began to hate him for being on a petty ego trip. His girlfriend Linda Lawrence came along on part of the tour, working as their hairdresser, and Brian had a deal with Eric Easton that had them staying in better hotels than the rest of the band. The Stones started taking big doses of speed to work and stay awake, and Brian’s paranoia index went off the chart. Keith: “Brian was the only guy in the world who thought he could take on Mick as the onstage personality. [He’d say,] ’All the chicks liked me better than Mick.’ And [this] went on for so long.”

  While they were up north, a dejected Brian told Bo Diddley he was thinking of leaving the Stones.

  “They were fixing to break up,” Diddley recalls, “but I told them to hang in there. They were down. They had problems in the band. I told ’em, if they abandoned what they had going, they were stupid. I told ’em: ’You gonna outlast the Beatles because you play like black dudes.’ I got Brian off to one side and I said, ’Brian, you look like the one with the level head. Hold this group together because you guys goin’ to be a motherfucker. If you don’t be bigger than the Beatles, you gonna last longer.’ ”

  Two nights later, in Watford, legendary rocker Little Richard arrived, added to the tour to boost slow ticket sales. The awe factor was ratcheted way up as the Stones watched, wide-eyed, as androgynous, godlike Richard and his guitar player blasted out “Tutti Frutti” and “Good Golly Miss Molly.”

  Keith: “When the lights went down, before he even came onstage, he’d let the band riff on ’Lucille’ for five, ten minutes. He’d come out the back, the spotlight would hit him, and the place was one solid roar.” Richard started at the piano, then jumped on top of it, did a lot of the shows on his knees. Some nights he stripped to his shorts while the band vamped on “Long Tall Sally.” The rest of the tour sold out.

  The next night, at two shows in Cardiff, Wales, the Stones added “I Wanna Be Your Man” to the show, dropping “Poison Ivy.” Brian’s slide guitar howled over the fast, pumping rhythm, and even Bo Diddley came to the wings and watched him, commenting he’d never heard anything like it before.

  Meanwhile, Keith was coming into his own onstage. He’d raise his hand above his head just as the curtain was opening, poised to hit that first big chord. He played mostly with his back to the audience, focusing on Charlie, crouching down to blast out a key passage, all taut body language and movement, building the template for the rock guitarists who followed him.

  It wasn’t just a matter of style; Keith had to focus on Charlie because the drums were all he could hear. The screaming girls drowned out Mick and Bill. Keith started the songs, and Charlie followed him into them, so Keith was always just slightly ahead of the beat, one of the secrets of the Rolling Stones’ sound. “It was just Charlie and me,” Keith said. “I developed more of the rhythm thing with the drum licks because that’s really all I was playing to.”

  * * *

  We Want the Stones!

  There was a break in the tour on October 7, during which the Stones cut their next single. Stu’s van had broken down on the way back to London, so the five of them piled into a black cab with their gear and rode to De Lane Lea Studio. Brian claimed he was skint—broke—so Mick paid the fare. Their manager and producer couldn’t make the session. The Beatles coup had been far too exciting for high-strung Andrew, who went into a manic episode, hospitalized himself, then left for Paris to recuperate. Andrew diagnosed himself as manic-depressive and launched into epic experiments with self-medication that made him an adventure to be around. When the pressure got to be too much over the next two years, Andrew sometimes simply disappeared.

  The Stones banged out “I Wanna Be Your Man” in an almost hysterical fury. The Beatles didn’t bother with preambles when they wrote, so the Stones hit the first verse running. Bill Wyman played a pumping, Beatles-style bass line. Mick bawled about making an erotic connection, and the song crash-landed in a hard little rave-up. It was a brilliant performance of an aggressive, wailing pop raga. But it was Brian who set the session completely on fire. His bottleneck slide guitar burned a blue sexual fervor into the groove. “Brian made that record,” Keith said. “No one in England had ever played that kind of guitar on a pop record.”

  For the flip side, they cut an instrumental titled “Stoned,” stolen from the hit song “Green Onions” by Memphis soul band Booker T. and the MGs. “Stoned” had a bleary lyric drawled by Mick: “Ah’m stoned . . . outta mah mind . . . here ah go.” It was a blues hymn to marijuana, one of the earliest drug references in the new music (Decca printed “Stones” as the title on the early pressings). Since the whole band wrote it, they used “Nanker Phelge” for the publishing credit, in tribute to their months perfecting the nanker at Edith Grove with Jimmy Phelge. Nanker Phelge became the publishing credit for material to which the whole band contributed, royalties shared equally among them. (Eric Easton scammed the Stones and his partner, Andrew, by assigning “Stoned” ’s publishing rights to a company he secretly controlled.)

  After their Liverpool show, the Stones visited the Cavern Club, ground zero of the Beatles, where they were mobbed by kids wanting autographs. In Newcastle, they visited a club after the gig and hung out with the Animals (still the Alan Price Combo at that point). In Bradford, there were squadrons of sharp-looking, pill-popping, music-digging mods on their chrome-plated Vespa and Lambretta scooters. They rushed the stage in speed-crazed mayhem during banging, frenetic “Route 66” when Jagger goofy-footed during the guitar solo and shook his bum at them.

  Some nights, after the shows, the Stones would find Stu’s white bus dyed red from the lipstick of girls passionately kissing the van while the Stones were playing. Eric Easton got them a new Volkswagen van, which was stripped clean of everything, including the license plate, within a few days.

  The Rolling Stones’ postgraduate education with the American rockers ended (badly) on November 3 with the final two London shows at the Hammersmith Odeon. The London kids were rabid for the Stones, whose new single, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” released just two days earlier, was already climbing the charts. (Disc called the record “fuzzy . . . complete chaos.”) The Stones closed with “I Wanna Be Your Man” and the audience went bonkers. When the Everlys came out, the kids started chanting “We want the Stones!” and threw debris at Don and Phil, who walked off early.

  There was a farewell party backstage afterward; all the groups had been friendly and supportive of each other, and the tour ended up making money. The party continued at Mick and Keith’s place, blues records and Stan Getz, bossa nova, on the turntable.

  The next night, the Stones were back in the ballrooms.

  There was a big fight at the hotel after a show at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. Andrew, tired of Brian’s egomania and paranoia, told the rest of the band that Brian was getting more money than them. Keith: “Everybody freaked out. We just said fuck you to him. That was the beginning of the decline of Brian.”

  And that was it. Brian lost his last vestige of control over the Stones, who were disgusted with him. He started to isolate himself from the group.

  Mick: “[Brian] went from being obsessive about the band, obsessive about the band’s image, to being rather an outsider. He’d turn up late to recording sessions and he’d miss the odd gig every now and then. He let his health deteriorate because he drank too much and took drugs when they were new, hung out too
much, stayed up too late . . . and didn’t concentrate on what he was doing. He started to let his talent slide.”

  Back to Kingsway Studio in Holborne on November 7 to record the Stones’ first EP—an “extended play” four-song album on a seven-inch disc. They cut another version of “Poison Ivy” (uptempo, Beatlesque ending), “Money,” “Bye Bye Johnny” (their current show-closer) and their first attempt at a soul music cover—Arthur Alexander’s “You Better Move On,” with strummed acoustic guitars over Charlie’s slow, sexy thump. Keith and Bill sang backup, and a new Stones sound emerged. The soul ballad became a big thing for the Stones, presenting a cool, restrained, pent-up side unseen by their fans.

  On November 17 the Stones drove back to Birmingham for another shot on Thank Your Lucky Stars. Also on the show was the American singer Gene Pitney, “the Rockville Rocker,” who was in England promoting his latest record, “24 Hours from Tulsa.” Clean-cut Pitney was at first put off by the Stones’ sulking demeanor and long hair, but the Stones and Pitney got along well, talked a lot of music, and Pitney asked Mick and Keith for a song after he heard them working out a new tune backstage.

  The creation myth of the Jagger/Richards songwriting team is that Andrew Oldham locked them in the kitchen of their flat and told them not to come out until they had a song. Supposedly they emerged an hour later with “As Tears Go By.” But as early as November 1963, they were recording “dubs” for songs at Regent Sound, a tiny demo studio on Denmark Street, London’s Tin Pan Alley. Here they worked on a song for Pitney called “My Only Girl,” which Pitney later recorded as “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.” (It was a hit in England and marked the debut of the Jagger/Richards team in the Top Ten.) A dozen other song demos were also recorded with Andrew, some of which were later released by obscure singers (George Bean et al.) without much impact.