The Chess studio was basically unchanged from the late 1950s. Although Andrew was nominally producing the sessions, they began working with resident engineer Ron Malo, who’d recorded classic sides by Muddy, Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Stones’ other idols. It was the first time the Stones had recorded in a modern four-track studio, and Malo surrounded them with the trademark Chess echo that gave the blues a misterioso depth and dramatic edge. Over the next two days, the Stones taped their next single, a second British EP, and most of their next album in a burst of inspired creativity. On the first day, they cut “It’s All Over Now” and the first version of Irma Thomas’s “Time Is on My Side.” Muddy smiled as he watched twenty-two-year-old Brian Jones play his skilled bottleneck guitar on “I Can’t Be Satisfied” and some instrumental tracks featuring Stu on piano. Chess’s resident composer Willie Dixon dropped by to sell the Stones some songs, but the band was more interested in covering some of their newly bought American soul records. Guitarist Buddy Guy and other blues stars came in and shook hands.
The next morning, Andrew staged a typically provocative press conference on a traffic island outside the Chicago Tribune building in the middle of the Loop. As reporters shouted questions, fans surged around them and traffic jammed up. An irate Chicago police captain showed up, threatened everyone with arrest, and the conference moved to the sidewalk before it broke up.
Back at Chess that afternoon, the band continued to record the soul tunes and R&B covers that would appear on the next album. In the middle of the session, Chuck Berry showed up, having been alerted that the English band was cutting a bunch of his songs. He had snubbed the boys earlier that year at one of the shows on his post-prison English tour, but now, with visions of royalties dancing in his head, Berry was much more friendly. He walked in while the Stones were playing “Down the Road Apiece,” and afterward he smiled and said, “Wow, you guys are really getting it on. Swing on, gentlemen.”
Bill Wyman: “Chuck Berry was the nicest I can ever remember him being, but don’t forget we were making money for him. We all stood around talking about guitars, amplifiers, all that. We played ’Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ for him and he really liked it and said most of the cover versions of his songs didn’t swing.”
The Chess sessions produced a cornucopia of fresh material. Brian was brilliant on harmonica, Stu was prominent on boogie piano, and Mick slurred his vocals like an Arkansas sharecropper. Among the outtakes were Big Bill Broonzy’s “Tell Me Baby,” Willie Dixon’s “Meet Me in the Bottom,” “High Heel Sneakers,” and Chuck Berry’s “Don’t Lie to Me” and “Reelin’ and Rockin’.” And in an incredible moment, as the Stones were recording the atmospheric Nanker Phelge instrumental “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” Muddy Waters picked up a guitar and began to jam with the band (when the song was released later that year, Muddy’s guitar had to be edited out—except for a single note—for contractual reasons).
In between takes, the Stones gave interviews to radio and TV crews, ate soul food from local rib joints, and chatted with Chicago blues idols who dropped in, curious about the strange English kids who had picked up on their thing. The Stones got a big dose of Chess ambience. Keith: “[There was] some incredible music going on in the back room while we were there. Sometimes we would open the door and peep in. Some amazing stuff going on.”
The session lasted until two that morning, and then the Stones packed up and flew to Minneapolis, where they played that night. The tour was back on. Only four hundred kids showed up for the Minneapolis gig. Then to Omaha, where the Stones got a taste of old-style frontier justice.
Keith: “We really felt like a sore pimple in Omaha. The only people to meet us off the plane were twelve motorcycle cops, who insisted on doing this motorcade thing right through town. And nobody in Omaha had heard of us. We get to the auditorium and there’s six hundred people in a fifteen-thousand-seat hall.
“There was this ridiculous cop scene. It was then that I realized what [satirist] Lenny Bruce was talking about. We were sitting back in the dressing room, drinking whiskey and Coke out of paper cups, waiting to go on. Cop walks in. ’You can’t drink whiskey in a public place.’ I was just drinking Coke, actually, and he says, ’Tip it down the bog [toilet].’ I said, ’No, man, I’ve just got Coca-Cola in here.’
“The cop pulled his gun on me! I look up and I’ve got a .44 lookin’ at me, right between the eyes. That’s when I realized what it could get into.”
The tour continued through Detroit, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Harrisburg—only handfuls of kids in big arenas. The band continued its record-buying binge, picking up Motown and Stax records, stocking up on the soul music that was the cultural expression of the civil rights movement. The great soul artists—James Brown, the Supremes, the Temptations, the Miracles, Sam Cooke, Stevie Wonder, Otis Redding, Martha and the Vandellas, Wilson Pickett, the Four Tops, Mary Wells, Junior Walker, and others—were the dominant and most progressive force in American music, and the Stones had to deal with it. The soul records they bought on the road in America made them believers, and they knew they had to cover these songs to stay current.
The tour ended with New York concerts at Carnegie Hall. The first show was a mini-riot, with screaming girls jumping out of their seats and rushing the stage. When scissor-waving chicks besieged the stage door after the first show, the cops insisted that another band close the second show so the Stones could sneak out of the building alive.
Two days later, the Stones flew home, having begun their effort to restore a lost American folkway—the blues—to its homeland. But there were some unpleasant surprises waiting for them in England. Mick and Keith had moved into a new apartment in Hampstead just before leaving for America, and while they were on tour someone had robbed the place. Most of their clothes and gear were gone. And Keith’s girlfriend, Linda Keith, had been in an accident and gone through the windshield of a car, leaving her scarred and disfigured. “Keith came to the hospital,” she remembered, “and he leaned down and kissed me on the face and showed me I wasn’t a monster and I wasn’t revolting. And that was Keith.”
The Stones came home with very mixed emotions about the American journey. The tour had been badly organized and premature, with no hit record to promote, and no one felt good about it except Brian, who was itching to get back to Los Angeles, where he’d been received as a living god.
Mick: “The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early sixties, and I was rebelling against it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else . . . a very restrictive society in thought, behavior, and dress. And touring outside of New York and L.A. . . . we found it the most repressive society, very prejudiced in every way. There was still segregation, and attitudes were fantastically old-fashioned. Americans shocked me by their behavior and narrow-mindedness.”
Things would be different when they returned to America a few months later. The Rolling Stones had indeed made an impression. “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” Tom Wolfe wrote, “but the Stones want to burn your town.”
* * *
The Three-Chord Wonders
Late June 1964. More TV shows in England during a lull after the U.S. tour. On June 26, the band’s appearance on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury (where a panel of pop stars rated records) caused a furor when the bored-looking, cigarette-dragging Stones slagged all the records. Outraged headline: THE UGLIEST GROUP IN BRITAIN.
Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By” was climbing the charts (her photographs alone were a sensation). Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Little Walter Jacobs were touring England, riding the blues boom opened by the Stones.
Eager to get their fresh Chicago music out to Stones fans, Decca released “It’s All Over Now” with its harmonized chorus, proto-rock dynamics, and classic Stones dual-guitar attack—Brian’s chiming drone and Keith’s chunky rhythm riffing. The single quickly became the Rolling Stones’ first no. 1 record. London issued it in the United States a month later.
In New York, the song’s composer, Bobby Womack, was righteously pissed off. His group the Valentinos were signed to soul star Sam Cooke’s label, and Cooke’s manager, the savvy New York accountant Allen Klein, had given Andrew the song for the Stones to record. “I was very angry about it,” Womack recalled. “I knew their record was going to go far, and our version was going to quit.” But Womack felt better when the royalties began to click in. “Sam Cooke put me straight. He said, ’Bobby, one day this is gonna be history. Them boys are gonna be huge, and you’ll be glad because you’ll be the writer whose song broke ’em in this country.’ When I saw the first check, I was shocked. It was huge.”
On July 23, Linda Lawrence gave birth to Brian’s son at her parents’ house. Brian was living in a new flat in Chester Square. In a typically perverse twist, Brian insisted the boy be named Julian Mark, which was the same name as his son by Pat Andrews. Brian hid out at a country cottage owned by Nicky Wright, the photographer who shot the band’s first album cover. “Brian used to drive down in his Humber Hawk,” Wright says, “often to escape these girls’ fathers. We’d hide his car in the woods in case they came looking for him. He was like a tomcat, really, that summer in ’64.” Brian would drink too much and get paranoid, complaining that he was being ignored by Mick and Andrew. One day the paranoia really got to him. “Suddenly Brian stood up in my tiny kitchen. ’I’m fed up—this will show them!’ He took a knife and slashed it across one wrist. My brother punched Brian on the chin and he went out like a light. His wrist was just scratched, with no serious damage.”
Dick Taylor and other members of the Pretty Things, who had the flat upstairs at Chester Square, could hear Brian and Linda fighting, and were often shocked by Brian’s brutality.
July and August 1964 were shaping into the two most horrendous months of the Stones’ stage career. Almost every show ended in mayhem, and some of them in extremely destructive and bloody riots.
Mick Jagger had returned from the States with a new thing, turning his back and shaking his ass directly at the audience, offering up his bum in a raw gesture of sexual incitement that provoked immediate bacchanalia and carnal violence. Facing Charlie, wiggling his hips, Mick became throbbing gristle, an anarchic invitation to let it rip. Rip it up. It was his way of combating the tedium of what they were about in those days, a teen pop band.
Mick: “We started out playing for a college crowd, so we were used to older people, y’know, blues enthusiasts. And to go from that to playing for thirteen-year-olds with the [flash] cameras, who are just screaming and not knowing any of the tunes, really, was kind of weird . . . We just got bored playing, because all they wanted to hear was the hits, and they didn’t want to know about the blues, and we were feeling very blues purist right then.”
The worst riot of the summer occurred on July 24 in the northern resort town of Blackpool during Scots Week, when thousands of vacationing Scots took over the town. Ten thousand drunk Tartans, some of the toughest people in the kingdom, even the girls carrying knives and stilettos, jammed into the cavernous Empress Ballroom. Beery football chants—“Scotland, Scotland”—filled the hall. Fights began the moment the Stones walked onstage, plugged in, and began “Walkin’ the Dog.” Mick and Keith looked scruffy, like they’d just been dragged from their beds. Mick turned his back and shook his bony arse in their faces. Brian— playing his pear-shaped white Vox guitar—began to tease the hysterical, screaming girls up front, who were quickly displaced by a rowdy gang of thugs who fought their way to the edge of the stage. Aroused by Brian’s provocative, contemptuous glaring, they spat all over his legs.
One of these hoods then unloaded a big gob of saliva on Keith’s Chelsea boot. Keith stomped his Cuban heel down on the guy’s hand, then stepped back and kicked him in the head. Keith: “This guy in front was spitting. In those days, for me, I had a temper. ’You spit on me?’ I kicked his face in.”
The show imploded as the riot began. Stu rushed onstage to try to save the equipment and shouted at Keith, “For fuck’s sake get out of here while you’re still alive!” As the Stones ran for the exit, cops began fighting with the rioting Scots. The drum kit (borrowed from the band that had opened the show) was wrecked. A white Steinway grand piano was pushed off the stage as Stu watched in horror. Even the hall’s immense chandelier was shattered. The band was smuggled into an armored van, but fighting continued in and out of the hall for hours.
At three in the morning, Stu arrived at the band’s hotel, which, though twenty miles from the gig, had to be guarded by police all night to prevent the Stones from being lynched by a vengeful mob. Stu held a few splinters of wood hanging by wires. “There we are, kiddies. This is your amp,” he told Keith, “and here’s your guitar . . .”
“It was very nearly the date on my gravestone,” Stu said afterward. A week later, the Stones’ Belfast concert was stopped after twelve minutes. Half a dozen crazed girls were carried out of the hall, trussed up in straitjackets.
In August, the Stones returned to Richmond for the last time, headlining the National Jazz and Blues Festival. On the eighth, they flew to Holland to play a show at the Kurhaus, an elegant nineteenth-century opera house in The Hague. Surrounded by cops and filmed by a Dutch TV crew, the show ran through “Beautiful Delilah,” “Dog,” “Sneakers,” “Susie Q,” and “Mona,” whose subversive Diddley throb set off a chain reaction as berserk fans—almost all boys—stormed the stage, ripped down the curtains, tore out the microphone leads. Seats were ripped from the floor. The majestic room was being sacked before the band’s disbelieving eyes. They tried to continue with just drums, tambourine, and maracas, but then gave up and ran for cover. Stu was smashed on the head by a flying bottle and rushed to the hospital. The Kurhaus was left in shambles.
In mid-August, Decca released the Stones’ second EP in England, Five by Five, to showcase the new Chicago tracks. “Around and Around,” the Chuck Berry song that had been on the tape the Blue Boys sent Alexis Korner two years previously, featured Stu’s barrelhouse piano and an explosive chordal guitar tag by Keith at the end. “Confessin’ the Blues,” an old Jay McShann swing-era tune covered by Chuck Berry, had Brian’s intimate harp in an echoing solo, as did “Empty Heart,” written by the band, with Mick’s lyric improvised from boilerplate blues vocalese. “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” basically a duet between Stu on organ and Brian on harp, came minus Muddy Waters’s impromptu guitar part. “If You Need Me” dated from Wicked Wilson Pickett’s days as a member of the Falcons (also covered that year by Solomon Burke, an important Stones source); it had a hilarious “black” soul-style spoken verse by Mick.
Five by Five went to no. 1 almost instantly.
More riots on the island of Jersey and all over southern England amid teen subcult wars, the mods (fashionable, middle class) against the rockers (working class biker types). “Right, my little three-chord wonders,” Stu would bark to the band, “you’re on!” In Wales, Charlie was hit in the head with an air-gun pellet and kept the beat going with a bloody face.
The Stones recorded Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster” at Regent Sound in early September, plus three extraordinary numbers that throbbed with greasy funk: “Off the Hook,” “Grown Up All Wrong,” and “Susie Q.” There were hard feelings in the band. Brian arrived at what he thought was the “Rooster” session with Phil May of the Pretty Things. No other musicians were there, just a note from Mick telling Brian where to overdub his slide guitar. The Stones had recorded the track the previous night without telling Brian. “I can’t believe this,” he moaned to Stu. “You guys had a session, and now I’m just to fill in?”
On September 5 the Stones went back on tour with the American soul duo (and mod faves) Inez and Charlie Foxx, who had a hit with “Mockingbird.” At the end of it, Charlie Watts married his older art student girlfriend, Shirley Ann Shepherd, without telling the Stones or their manager, who was already nervous about Bill’s family and Brian’s legion of bastard children. Andrew himself married Sheila
Klein that month.
October 1964. In America, London Records released haphazardly selected tracks from Chicago and Regent Sound as the Stones’ second U.S. album, 12 X 5. (Their second English album, The Rolling Stones No. 2, came out three months later with half the tracks different.) The album’s jacket featured the unsmiling Stones in a dark, brooding photograph, faces half in shadow, by David Bailey. Kicking off with “Around and Around,” the album included the Chicago tracks from Five by Five and a collection of covers: “Time Is on My Side” (rerecorded in London) featuring a good Brian Jones blues guitar solo, Merseybeat harmonics, and the famous triple-“Time” tag; “It’s All Over Now”; the Drifters’ “Under the Boardwalk” (recorded in London) with its articulate British soul feeling; and “Susie Q,” Dale Hawkins’s 1957 bayou romp with crazed double guitar frenzy over the handclap rhythm.
There were also three Jagger/Richards originals. “Good Times, Bad Times” (recorded in London) was an acoustic blues with a lazy Brian harmonica line. “Congratulations” was a downbeat, sarcastic love song beloved by young American (male) fans—it was not released in England—with an acoustic guitar solo by Brian. And “Grown Up All Wrong” was a variant on the “Susie Q” rhythm, Brian sliding on bottleneck, a killer pastiche, stomping country blues straight outta Soho.
These songs marked the crucial beginnings of the Stones’ core creative structure: Mick and Keith writing words and music, while Brian overlaid his own riffs and harp mojo onto their ideas. But it was only Jagger/Richards on the songwriting credits.
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