Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The album was a blast of R&B energy, a stark alternative to the Beatles’ tuneful love songs. “Not Fade Away” lifted off with Keith’s acoustic chop and Brian’s wailing harp. “Route 66” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You” were furious jams, the latter a sped-up Delta blues for the Atomic Age featuring Brian on harp. “Honest I Do” was a slow Jimmy Reed blues. The first side finished with two of the “filler” tracks recorded with Spector and Pitney, “Now I’ve Got a Witness” and “Little by Little.”

  “I’m a King Bee” opened the second side, driven by Bill’s buzzing bass line. Brian deployed a stinging slide guitar part and some more harmonica on the fade. The momentum picked up with some sped-up Chuck Berry on “Carol” with an overdrive fueled by handclaps.

  “Tell Me” was in many ways the showpiece of the album and the first Jagger/Richards song to be released by the Stones. A dark, acoustic folk rock ballad of pleading love with a soft/hard dynamic, moving from intimacy to insistence, “Tell Me” was written in the studio, one of the first seeds of the modern Stones sound. Keith played twelve-string guitar and sang harmonies into the same microphone as the twelve-string. With its off-key, echolike atmosphere, “Tell Me” was especially big in the United States when it was released as a single in May. The song conveyed an aggressive longing and sexual malaise (“I hear the telephone / that hasn’t rung”) that appealed to young men bored with soppy emotional responses to unobtainable girls. “Tell Me” was described by Andrew as “a blues traveler resting his head in a commercial space.” It was so unlike the surf pop and post-folk optimism prevalent on American radio in 1964 that it eclipsed even the Stones’ powerhouse R&B interpretations.

  England’s Newest Hitmakers finished with Stu playing piano boogie and Mick the tambourine on the Motown hit “Can I Get a Witness”; Mick playing soul singer on Gene Allison’s obscure “You Can Make It If You Try”; and the Stones’ epochal take on Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog.” Unlike Thomas’s funny novelty tune, the Stones’ version played it straight to the groin. Brian whistles and sings harmony (perhaps his only vocal on a Stones record), and the clapping dance rhythm came close to matching the infectious energy of the Stones onstage. “Walking the Dog” launched thousands of garage bands, particularly in America. Aerosmith covered the Stones’ unironic version on their own first album, almost ten years later.

  The Stones’ first album located its audience within days of release. By the end of April, it knocked the seemingly invincible With the Beatles down to no. 2 on the English charts, only a week after it first appeared in the shops. In England, the album was no. 1 for twelve weeks, dethroned only by the soundtrack album of the new Beatles film, A Hard Day’s Night. If ’63 was the year of the Beatles, ’64 would be the year of the Stones.

  From April to June, the Stones stayed on the road, the gigs getting shorter and weirder as rabid young fans rioted and the cops stopped the shows.

  Keith: “There was a period of six months in England where we couldn’t play in ballrooms anymore because we never got through more than three songs every night. Man! Chaos. Too many kids in the places, and the girls are fainting. We’d walk into some of these places and it was like the battle of the Crimea going on: people gasping, tits hanging out, chicks choking, nurses, ambulances. We couldn’t hear ourselves. It became impossible to play as a band onstage.”

  The English papers also began to press an offensive against the Stones. Conservative critics were aghast at the Stones’ hair and clothes, especially Mick’s preference for performing in a loose sweatshirt and corduroy trousers. The London Evening Standard, March 21, 1964: “This horrible lot have done terrible things to the music scene, set it back about eight years. Just when we’d got our pop singers looking all neat, tidy and cheerful, along come the Stones looking like beatniks. They’ve wrecked the image of the pop singer of the Sixties . . . They’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.”

  Brian tried to explain: “We seem to arouse some sort of personal anxiety in people. They think we’re getting away with things they never could. It’s a sort of frustration . . . A lot of men would like to wear their hair long, but they daren’t. I am one of the few people who is doing what he wants.”

  Stones shows were now so truncated by riots that the band was forgetting how to play a whole set of songs. The shortest Stones show happened on April 30, 1964, in a ballroom in Birkenhead, near Liverpool. The Stones were onstage, the curtain down, Keith’s hand raised over his head, ready to strike. The curtain went up, the band played three bars of “Talkin’ ’bout You,” and the place erupted. The fans launched a frontal assault at the stage, the curtain was dropped, and before Mick sang a word the show was over, the band hustled backstage, protected by a cordon of pissed-off cops. The Rolling Stones still talk about Birkenhead, even though a lifetime of gigs has gone by.

  May 1964. “High Heel Sneakers” and “I’m All Right” aroused passions that made for the band’s craziest nights. “Bye Bye Johnny” closed the shows. Some nights Keith was pulled off the stage and had to be rescued. “I Just Want to Make Love to You” was a sensation on Top of the Pops. The Stones recorded the demo for “As Tears Go By” on May 4. On May 9 the whole band went to see Chuck Berry, released from prison and touring England with fellow ur-rocker Carl Perkins, auteur of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Expecting mellow showbiz backstage bonhomie, the Stones were disappointed and hurt when famously ill-tempered Chuck Berry snubbed them, refusing to meet his worshipful young disciples. Two weeks later Mick and Charlie encountered Berry in a hotel elevator. Chuck turned his back on them and didn’t say a word.

  On May 14, in Bradford, the Stones were forced to make a dash for their hotel, across the road from the hall they were playing. Mick and Keith won their race, but Bill and Charlie were forced back through the stage door by a howling mob of Bacchae. Brian was caught alone, knocked down, and the girls almost tore his clothes off before he was rescued by the cops and hustled away from the danger.

  Four thousand fans, many with forged tickets, rioted outside the hall the Stones were playing in Scotland four days later. Dozens were taken to hospitals, some with serious injuries. This scene would be repeated all over England for at least another year, as the Furies began to gather wherever the Rolling Stones played their hopped-up sex machine songs.

  * * *

  A Sore Pimple in Omaha

  The Rolling Stones followed the Beatles to America as best they could in June 1964. The Beatles had arrived in New York the previous February, three months after the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to miraculously wipe away the national shock and grief over the president’s murder with their sharp looks, cheeky repartee, and bag of cheery, innocent love songs. It was almost as if the Liverpool pop quartet had responded to an occult summons to confound America’s darkness and personify teenage lust on a scale as yet unimagined. Their presence in New York City inspired molten crowds of girls to ring their hotel in hysterical demonstrations of female desire that threatened to dismember the band if they were caught alone. The Beatles charmed everyone by taking this mania in stride and seeming to enjoy the moment among themselves, like a private joke.

  On June 1, 1964, the Rolling Stones flew to New York to begin their chaotic first American tour, hastily organized by Eric Easton and Decca’s hapless American branch, London Records. London’s best-selling act was Mantovani, king of mood music, and the label was clueless when it came to marketing the hot English acts it now got from Decca. London had already botched the Stones’ first U.S. single when it pressed the instrumental “Stoned” as the flip side of “Not Fade Away.” The record was suppressed when the label’s president objected to “Stoned,” and “Not Fade Away” was reissued with “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

  At the airport, the Stones were greeted by five hundred excited girls and a chorus of dopey, shouted questions at a raucous press conference. “Hey! Over here! You guys wearing wigs? Do you sing like the Beatles?”

  Promo men whisked them over to
WINS, the big New York rock and roll station, to appear on Murray the K’s Swinging Soiree. Murray (Kaufman), who called himself the Fifth Beatle since he’d latched onto their February tour, played “Not Fade Away” and interviewed the Stones on the air. After the show, he played them a new song by the Valentinos called “It’s All Over Now” and suggested that the Stones could advance their career by covering it.

  The next morning, they woke to find the Astor Hotel in Times Square teeming with a hundred girls, many armed with scissors and determined to cut a lock of long English hair. Bill was sick with the flu, it was Charlie’s twenty-third birthday, and when anyone left the hotel for some sight-seeing, he was swamped by autograph-seeking teenagers.

  Early on June 3, the Stones, joined by Andrew Oldham, flew to Los Angeles to tape their national TV debut on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace variety show. (Ed Sullivan, revolted by photographs of the shaggy, loutish Stones, had turned them down flat for his more popular show.) Dean Martin was an old-style fifties crooner at the height of his career—the leader, along with his pal Frank Sinatra, of the legendary Hollywood/Las Vegas Rat Pack that celebrated booze, broads, and gambling in song and lascivious patter. Martin’s producer offered to buy the Stones uniforms and they refused. Then Martin and the Stones’ new tour manager, Bob Bonis, had a loud fight backstage over how many numbers they would tape. Dino felt threatened by the Stones and went out of his way to insult them in his introduction.

  “Now, something for the youngsters, five singing boys from England who’ve sold a lot of albeeums . . . albums [Martin was feigning being drunk]. They’re called the Rolling Stones. [Aside:] I’ve been rolled when I was stoned myself. I don’t know what they’re singing about, but here they are.”

  The Stones appeared in dark suits and blasted into “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” rocking the old Muddy Waters tune, Brian switching harmonicas for the bridge and appearing to give old Dino the finger while he was playing.

  Dino came back afterward, rolling his eyes with withering sarcasm: “Aren’t they great?” Audience laughter. “Y’know, these singing groups are under the impression they have long hair. Not true at all! It’s an optical illusion—they just have low foreheads and high eyebrows, that’s all.” The next act was a trampoline acrobat. Dino: “That’s the Rolling Stones’ father—he’s been trying to kill himself ever since!”

  Backstage the band was furious, but came back and performed “Not Fade Away” and their new single, “Tell Me.” Dino: “Now don’t go away, folks. You wouldn’t want to leave me with those Rolling Stones!” When the show was broadcast on ABC two weeks later, the Stones’ segment had been cut to just sixty-five seconds of “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” Furious, Mick called Eric Easton in London and yelled at him for booking them on the show.

  But, “after we’d had some big records in the States,” recalled Bill Wyman, “they reran the show—’And now the fabulous Rolling Stones’—with screams and cheers added in the background.”

  There was outrage in certain circles over Dino’s rough treatment of the band. In the liner notes to his 1964 album Another Side of Bob Dylan, Dylan took the trouble to write, “Dean Martin should apologize t’ the Rolling Stones.” It was evident to the Stones’ generation that they were killing the old showbiz mentality. The Rat Pack’s scummy booze culture was history, demoted from the Big Rooms and into the Lounges where they belonged. Even Frank Sinatra’s career as a huge seller was almost over. The new wind from England blew the middle-aged crooners away.

  A month later, at the Newport Folk Festival, Bob Dylan was jamming at his hotel, trying to match the harmonies of “Tell Me” with fellow folkie Tony Glover. Dylan was a Stones fan from early on.

  The Stones spent their time in Los Angeles going to music stores, buying clothes, hanging out. (Brian Jones attracted small crowds when he visited music stores in his seersucker jacket and new wraparound shades.) At RCA Studios, they met Jack Nitzsche, Phil Spector’s resident arranger and keyboard player, the key man in Spector’s musical scheme, who would also become a major element in future Stones records. There were parties every night, where the Stones met the Beach Boys and some of the L.A. crowd, like promo man Sonny Bono and his girlfriend, Cher, yet to have their first folk rock hit record.

  Keith: “America was a real fantasyland. It was still Walt Disney and hamburger dates and kids going steady. We watched the presidential debates [Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater] and noticed that kids were more into what was going on [politically]. It was what we’d been dreaming of—better music, better cars . . . the girls were better looking, ha ha! It was like throwing a load of demons into heaven.”

  On June 5, the Stones played their first American gig in San Bernardino, about an hour from L.A., on a bill with the Chiffons, Bobby Goldsboro, Bobby Comstock, and Bobby Vee and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee’s band (which had once employed a young, pre-Dylan Bobby Zimmerman) included a twenty-year-old tenor saxophonist named Bobby Keys. Bobby Vee, accustomed to the scorching heat of the American Southwest in summertime, appeared onstage in cool Bermuda shorts; he was amused to see the Stones playing in their usual jeans and sweatshirts, sweltering in the blazing sun of the outdoor gigs.

  At least the Stones got a warm welcome too. There were 4,500 kids at the San Bernardino show, mostly deeply tanned teenage girls in tight shorts, bare feet, bare tummies. The band played an eleven-song set, Mick dancing around the stage, shaking his ass and his four maracas, leaping into the air with his scissors kick. Girls started rushing the stage, which sent the cops into action: flying tackles, body slams, pile-ons. One girl grabbed Mick and it took three cops to get her off. Brian almost had his harp pushed down his throat. Keith: “It was a straight gas. They all know the songs and they were bopping! It was like being back home. ’Route 66’ mentioned San Bernardino and everybody was into it. We went out on the road and in Omaha there’d be six hundred kids. You get deflated. That’s what stopped us from turning into pop stars. Then we really had to work America and it really got the band together. We’d fallen off playing in England because nobody was listening. We’d do four numbers and be gone. Don’t blink, you’ll miss us.”

  The next day, the tour flew to Texas to play the San Antonio Teen Fair. The Stones’ scruffy hair drew fire at the airport and in hotel lobbies. Crew-cut local rednecks, getting their first taste of long hair, uptight with homosexual panic, yelled taunts and wolf-whistled at them. All-American girls in their cashmere sweaters with round necklines and circle pins, wearing straight fifties-style skirts, came up and asked the band why they didn’t carry purses and wear lipstick. There was hostility backstage too, and Mick Jagger got into a shoving match with the guitar player of country singer George Jones’s band, which was also on the bill. Mick ended up in a headlock until Jones—disgusted by the Stones’ look—told his ol’ boy to let go.

  After the San Antonio shows, the Stones were photographed at the Alamo, shrine of Texas independence. They complained bitterly to road manager Bonis that they weren’t pulling any girls, what Keith termed “a distinct lack of crumpet.” Alarmed by constant taunts and insults from strangers, scared by random violence reported on the TV news, Keith and Bill bought cheap automatic pistols in Texas. Keith never toured America again without a gun close by, especially when he learned that Muddy Waters carried a .25 wherever he went.

  * * *

  2120 South Michigan Avenue

  Andrew Oldham wanted to record the next Stones album in America. They were all frustrated that the gutsy sound they’d been getting live in England never came close to being duplicated on record, which they blamed on sterile London studios and inadequate engineers. They were determined to get it right in a more sophisticated American studio. Phil Spector suggested they go to Chicago and work where their R&B heroes made their records. They flew to the Windy City on June 9. The band wanted to visit some famous blues clubs that night, but were told that racial tensions were running high and they’d better stay out of the South Side. Br
ian Jones spent the evening writing postcards to both of his pregnant girlfriends.

  The next day, the Stones arrived at Chess Records at 2120 South Michigan Avenue. They walked into the studio and saw a big black man with a familiar-looking face, up on a ladder, painting the place. It was Muddy Waters.

  Keith: “He was painting the goddamn ceiling, dressed all in white, with white paint like tears on his face, ’cause he wasn’t selling any records at the time. That throws you a curve: here’s the king of the blues painting a wall. When we started the Rolling Stones, our main aim was to turn other people on to Muddy. We named the group after him. And now I was getting to meet The Man. He’s my fucking God, right?—and he’s painting the ceiling!”

  Bill: “We’re unloading our van, helping Stu take the equipment in, when this big black guy comes up and says, ’Want some help here?’ It’s Muddy Waters, and he starts helping us carry in the guitars, the amps, the mike stands. It was unbelievable. Here’s the great Muddy Waters carrying my guitar into the studio. I mean, it was unreal.”

  Muddy Waters had been following the Stones’ progress for a while. He’d toured England in late 1963 (disappointing R&B fans by playing only acoustic blues because Chess was trying to reposition him as a folksinger) and had said complimentary things about the Stones.

  Muddy was also one of the inspirations for a new American generation of young white musicians beginning to update R&B. In New York, John Hammond, Jr., was reviving Robert Johnson’s songs. Ronnie Hawkins and his band the Hawks were recording Bo Diddley jams, and in Chicago, white kids—Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite, and Elvin Bishop—were adapting R&B styles for a new audience. The Stones had an advantage over the local white musicians: they had the British Invasion momentum and a sexy, hip-swiveling lead singer who had never been advised by Muddy—as had Mike Bloomfield—that he wasn’t man enough to sing the blues yet.