Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  From the moment they began pulling in the crowds at Richmond, Giorgio had been urging his contacts in the London music press to come to Richmond and see the Stones perform. He also began shooting 35mm film of them onstage at the Crawdaddy and arranged for them to make a soundtrack of two Bo Diddley songs at a small studio in Morden. It was typical of the idealistic Russian that, while working to launch the Stones, he never attempted to put them under exclusive contract to himself. His advice, on the contrary, was to let no one have control over them but themselves. ‘I kept telling them, “Wait. Get strong, so that you can handle all of it yourselves and don’t have to ask anyone for anything. Don’t run the risk of someone walking in here and taking you over.”’

  Giorgio, in fairness, had a somewhat larger project on his mind. Two years previously, while living in West Germany, he had visited Hamburg’s sleazy St Pauli district and had seen the Beatles in their earliest incarnation as black-leather rockers, pouring out bowdlerized r & b and their own primitive compositions to an audience of whores, transvestites and merchant seamen. Watching them now, in their crew-necked suits, bobbing and frolicking on the torrents of ever wilder hysteria, Giorgio Gomelsky realized they were something more than merely the biggest pop attraction since Cliff Richard and the Shadows.

  The tiny world of London impresarios soon brought Giorgio Gomelsky into contact with the Beatles’ twenty-seven-year-old manager, Brian Epstein. ‘I would be there when dance hall promoters rang up Epstein, offering him £50 for one appearance by the Beatles. He’d say, “I don’t know …” and start looking in his diary. So then the promoter would offer him £60. “I don’t know …” he’d still say. The promoter would offer £70, thinking Epstein was stalling for more money. He wasn’t. He just couldn’t find the right date in his diary.’

  Giorgio approached Brian Epstein in his role as avant-garde movie director, proposing a film that would bring out the still unperceived wit and knockabout charm of the Beatles’ offstage characters. He was now working on a rough script, helped by Ronan O’Rahilly, his fellow Method-acting student, and the jazz writer Peter Clayton. With the Beatles themselves he was on good enough terms to invite them to the Crawdaddy one Sunday after their appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars at the ABC-TV studios in nearby Twickenham.

  As the Stones played that night, they were astonished to see all four Beatles, in expensive leather overcoats, being escorted by Giorgio to a special vantage point beside the stage. Still more astonished were they, later, to be approached by people they looked on as big-time celebrities, and to be told in thick, pally Liverpool accents that their music was ‘fab’ and ‘gear’. John Lennon, in particular, looked at Brian Jones with something like hero-worship. ‘You really play that harmonica, don’t you,’ he said. ‘I can’t really play – I just blow and suck.’

  A lengthy and amicable conversation ensued. For the Beatles, it had been a poignant experience to see a group so much like their former selves, before Brian Epstein cleaned up their music and appearance. The Stones, on their side, recognized blood brothers in the r & b cause who had only reluctantly dropped Chuck Berry in favour of original compositions the pop public increasingly demanded. It fascinated Mick Jagger, especially, to learn that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had already written more than a hundred songs together and that, after just one Top Ten hit, they had a share in their own music-publishing company. For a brief while, Mick cast aside his reserve and quizzed the Beatles closely about how much per song one could earn in royalties.

  A week later, the Beatles appeared in their first major London concert, a Pop Prom run by the BBC at the Royal Albert Hall. The Rollin’ Stones received front-row tickets and access to the Liverpudlians’ embattled dressing room. Later, Giorgio and Brian Jones helped the Beatles’ two road managers, Mal and Neil, to load their stage equipment into their van. Some girls, spotting Brian’s blond dome of hair, mistook him for a Beatle, crowded round him, despite his protests, and clamoured for autographs.

  The incident, Giorgio remembers, had a transfixing effect on Brian. ‘As we walked away from the Albert Hall, down the big steps at the back, he was almost in a daze. “That’s what I want, Giorgio,” he kept saying. “That’s what I want.’”

  Knowing the Beatles was all very nice – but it did not help Giorgio in his efforts to interest powerful London people in a group whose venue, ten miles from the West End, might as well have been in another hemisphere. For record company talent scouts, the only worthwhile journey, if not to Soho, was 200 miles north to Liverpool, in their frenzied search for new groups in the Beatles’ image. It was a quest pursued with especial fervour by Decca, whose head of A & R, Dick Rowe, was celebrated as The Man Who Turned The Beatles Down. A letter from Giorgio Gomelsky about a new blues group in Surrey did not even reach Dick Rowe’s in-tray.

  The Stones themselves knew only one person connected with the record industry. This was a school friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked at IBC Studios in Portland Place. Part-owned by the orchestra leader Eric Robinson, IBC had very little to do with pop music. But Glyn, a talented engineer, was allowed to record any artists he thought promising. At his invitation, the Rolling Stones came to IBC and, in a single evening, recorded four songs for their stage act, including Chuck Berry’s Come On.

  The excitement of being in a real studio, supervised by a young engineer who was also a Crawdaddy fan, rather tailed off, since IBC carried little weight with the major record companies. A colleague of Glyn’s knew someone at Decca – but on the classical music side. It seemed just more effort wasted on a world whose ears were deaf to all but the Beatles’ second number one single, From Me to You.

  On April 13, when the Stones’ spirits were at their lowest ebb, Giorgio Gomelsky’s hustling of newspapers, small as well as large, finally began to pay off. The weekly Richmond and Twickenham Times devoted a full page to the blues club behind the Station Hotel and its effect in taking custom from trad jazz clubs in the area. ‘The Rolling Stones’ – the ‘g’ once more reinstated – received a somewhat incidental mention: “Save for the spotlit forms of the group on the stage, the room is dark … A patch of light catches the sweating dancers and those who are slumped on the floor, where no chairs are provided …’

  A few days later, Peter Jones of the Record Mirror succumbed to Giorgio’s entreaties and agreed to give up his Sunday lunchtime to watch Giorgio’s group being filmed onstage at their Richmond pub club. Jones was a prescient as well as a prolific journalist, the first to interview the Beatles in any national music paper. He watched the Stones perform on camera, and afterwards met them in the Station Hotel’s saloon bar. ‘They were hungry, and they were very bitter,’ Peter Jones says. ‘They told me no one had even been bothered before to drive ten miles out from London to see them. I promised to do my best to get a story about them into the Record Mirror.’

  Jones was as good as his word. He persuaded the Record Mirror’s star reporter, Norman Jopling, to go out to Richmond with a photographer the following Sunday. Jopling – a blues and soul fanatic – was even more impressed than Peter Jones had been. ‘The Stones had got the real r & b sound, not just a copy of it,’ Jopling remembers. ‘When they played a Bo Diddley number, it sounded like Bo Diddley. And the whole scene around them in that room was unbelievable.’

  Norman Jopling’s feature article in Record Mirror, the following Thursday, surpassed Giorgio’s wildest hopes:

  As the Trad scene gradually subsides, promoters of all kinds of teen-beat entertainments have a sigh of relief that they’ve found something to take its place. It’s Rhythm and Blues, of course. And the number of R & B clubs that have suddenly sprung up is nothing short of fantastic.

  At the Station Hotel, Kew Road, the hip kids throw themselves about to the new ‘jungle music’ like they never did in the more restrained days of Trad.

  And the combo they writhe and twist to is called the Rolling Stones. Maybe you haven’t heard of them – if you live far from London, the odds are
you haven’t.

  But by gad you will! The Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R & B scene, if that scene continues to flourish …

  It was, indeed, an astounding plug for unknown musicians in a paper read throughout the tight community of agents and A & R men. As Norman Jopling recalls, the feedback was instantaneous. ‘Record Mirror hit the streets at about one p.m. in the West End. By four o’clock that afternoon, three different record companies had phoned me, saying “Where can we get hold of these guys?”’ Jopling supplied particulars, although fully aware – as Peter Jones was – that the guys had by now been well and truly got hold of.

  THREE

  ‘I BELONG TO YOU AND YOU BELONG TO ME, SO COME ON’

  At the age of eleven, Andrew Loog Oldham was already incorrigibly addicted to glamour. While other boys read the Eagle comic or swapped matchbox labels, Oldham walked the Soho streets, breathing in with delight the mingling scents of coffee beans, salami, striptease and primitive rock ’n’ roll. Glamorous as these surroundings were, they paled next to the glamour he already perceived in himself. From an even earlier age, he had visualized his own life as an epic film of which he was both the star and the rapt audience. ‘It was the only way I could get to school in the morning. As I walked in through the gates, I’d see the opening credits start to roll …’

  The name which in later years seemed so typical a product of its owner’s imagination was, in fact, genuine. Andrew Loog Oldham was the son of a Dutch-American air force officer, killed on a bombing mission over Germany in 1944. Born out of wedlock, the baby received both parents’ names. His Dutch origins were always faintly manifest in a pink complexion, butter-coloured hair and eyes whose myopic pallor gave Oldham, even at his most uppity and outrageous, the look of a rather studious small boy.

  A private boarding school to which his widowed mother sent him provided an early object lesson in the relation of fantasy to profit. The school – in Witney, Oxfordshire – was run by an ex-army officer, a dashing figure whose frequent absences were rumoured to be connected with vital work for the government. The head was, in fact, a prisoner on parole who moved around the country, setting up small schools, collecting fees, running up bills, then vanishing without trace. That headmaster was Andrew Loog Oldham’s first lesson in the principle that, provided you had nerve and style enough, you could get away with almost anything.

  In 1955, the pink-faced Hampstead schoolboy was a familiar figure among the teenage crowd at Soho’s famous 2 I’s coffee bar. Norah, the doorkeeper, knew him well and would let him downstairs into the skiffle cellar without paying the usual one-shilling cover charge. His taste in pop heroes was eccentric even then – Wee Willie Harris, green-haired and wizened; Vince Taylor, an early American rocker, afterwards famous in France. ‘It was always the sex in rock ’n’ roll that attracted me … the sex that most people didn’t realize was there. Like the Everly Brothers. Two guys with the same kind of face, the same kind of hair. They were meant to be singing together to some girl, but really they were singing to each other.’

  From the age of thirteen or so, Oldham saw himself as an amalgam of two movie roles, both portrayed by his screen idol, the suave if faintly reptilian Laurence Harvey. He wanted to be Harvey’s version of Joe Lampton, ruthless working-class hero of Room at the Top. He wanted just as much to be the jive-talking young Jewish hustler whom Harvey played in Expresso Bongo, sashaying round Soho in Italian box jacket and rakish trilby hat, scouring the pasteboard streets for any quick way to a dividend.

  He left Wellingborough College at sixteen with three GCE O-Levels – in English, divinity, and, he claims, rifle shooting – and at once set about making his way in the world as Laurence Harvey had shown him. His first coup was to go to Chelsea, walk into Mary Quant’s clothes boutique and ask for a job in any capacity whatever. Mary Quant and her husband, Alexander Plunkett-Green, were amused by the blond-haired youth and his barefaced effrontery. They agreed to take him on as an odd-job boy, teamaker and messenger.

  He worked for Mary Quant throughout the period when her plungingly simple black and white dresses, short skirts, sailor necks and oversized bows altered the look of haute couture, and of London, forever. In February 1962, the first issue of a colour supplement by the hitherto stuffy Sunday Times featured a Quant dress worn by a new young model, Jean Shrimpton, and photographed, not by the customary middle-aged society acolyte but by a young man, David Bailey, who came from London’s East End and – still more outrageously – made no attempt to conceal it. This first ‘in crowd’, as defined by the Sunday Times, did not, of course, include anyone named Andrew Loog Oldham; still, he was happy. ‘I was where I wanted to be – around stars.’

  At this stage, the only way of achieving stardom himself, as his mental scenario had dictated, was to become a pop singer. The fact that he could neither sing nor play an instrument seemed hardly relevant. Over a period of months, London agents and managers would be intermittently persecuted by the same blond, bespectacled, unmusical youth, posing under such aliases as ‘Chancery Laine’ and ‘Sandy Beach’.

  By working for Mary Quant all day, and by night as a waiter at Soho’s Flamingo Club, he saved enough to migrate to the French Riviera. There, for several months, he worked in sea-front bars and as an itinerant window dresser. There, too, in company with two freelance journalists, he concocted his first great money-making scheme. The plan was to kidnap a wealthy heiress. Andrew would keep her, drugged, in a flat in Monte Carlo while the journalists sold the story to the London Daily Express. It would give the story a piquant twist, they said, if Andrew were subsequently to marry the heiress. This he was quite willing to do. Unfortunately, the scheme foundered after the, not unwilling, girl had been taken to the Monte Carlo flat. Her father had friends in the British government, and got an official D-notice issued, prohibiting any newspaper from running the story. Andrew Loog Oldham thus failed to become nationally famous either as a kidnapper or as a cad.

  Back in London, a job with the Leslie Frewin publishing house provided an entrée into the decidedly glamorous world of public relations. He left Frewin to join a PR company whose clients included the pop singer Mark Wynter. Handsome, blow-waved and insipid in the prevailing American style, Wynter was following what seemed an inexorable course from Top Twenty hit to low-budget ‘exploitation’ feature film. One of Oldham’s jobs was to accompany him on location to Twickenham studios and share a bedroom with him at a nearby small hotel. ‘Every morning, Mark used to get up very early and creep off to the bathroom to wash and shave and fix his hair. Then he’d come and get back into bed. A bit later, he’d sit up and say “Well, Andrew – time to set off for the studios.” He was convinced I thought he always woke up looking like that. I thought that was great – that really was looking after your image.’

  Two major pop impresarios, Larry Parnes and Don Arden, between them controlled all the singers and groups for whom Oldham hoped to work as publicist. Parnes ran a menagerie of exotically named singers from offices in Cromwell Road, opposite the headquarters of the Boy Scout movement (at which, in spare moments, he liked to gaze through binoculars). Don Arden, an authentically frightening figure, rivalled Larry Parnes in promoting pop package tours, cobbled from the hitmakers of the moment. Andew Loog Oldham joined Arden for a while but was fired after inviting journalists to view cinema seats which, during a particularly well-appreciated package show, had been slashed with razors and drenched with female urine.

  He was by this time a well-known figure around ABC-TV’s studios in Aston Road, Birmingham, where Thank Your Lucky Stars was recorded. In February 1963, he stood and watched the Beatles give their first nationwide performance of Please Please Me. He later approached Brian Epstein, and offered himself as publicist for Epstein’s company, NEMS Enterprises. Brian Epstein, it happened, was preparing to launch two other Liverpool acts, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. He agreed to hire Andrew Loog Oldham to promote the two groups on a monthly reta
iner of £25.

  The arrangement was somewhat hampered by Tony Barrow, a London-based Liverpudlian already writing press releases about the Beatles and sleeve notes for their first album Brian Eptstein ordained that Barrow should concentrate on written handouts while Oldham – by now running his own PR company – dreamed up stunts to get paragraphs into the papers. The Beatles themselves, watched over with obsessive jealousy by Epstein, remained always tantalizingly out of reach. His NEMS work was for the advancement of Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer, each awaiting Top Twenty success in cardboard shoes and cheap little shortie overcoats.

  Oldham’s journeys north, though chilly and unglamorous, brought one further big advance. In Manchester, he met Tony Calder, a young agent handling local groups like the Hollies and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders. Manchester groups were by now starting to benefit from London’s obsession with the Mersey Sound. Tony Calder also took on Oldham as publicist for his firm, Kennedy Street Enterprises. ‘It felt just like tiddlywinks. I’d already got Liverpool sewn up, with Epstein and NEMS. Now I’d got Manchester as well.’

  A chance PR assignment for the American record producer Phil Spector, early in 1962, altered Oldham’s conception of how he might seize his still unspecified destiny. Up to then, in pop music, celebrity had come only to performers – the singers first, then the star guitarists and, latterly, the groups. No fame, or even credit, was given to the A & R men who arranged and supervised even the biggest hit recordings. Phil Spector was the first A & R man to be as well known as the artists he recorded – to produce each three-minute disc in his individual and unmistakable style of complex multitrack effects and cavernous echo: the Spector Wall of Sound.