Oldham’s main worry on the Stones’ behalf was finding them something to record as a follow-up to Come On. He had ransacked the entire catalogue of the American Chess and Checker r & b labels for something which was neither too well known in its original version or covered already by the proliferation of new British blues groups. It was an unsuccessful search which made Andrew Loog Oldham wish even more fervently, as he sat in John and Paul’s black-windowed limousine, that the Rolling Stones could knock off their own hit songs with the same nonchalant ease as the Beatles.
The final choice, agreed with Decca’s Dick Rowe, was a cover version of the Coasters’ semi-comical Poison Ivy and, for the B-side, Benny Spellman’s Fortune Teller. At Rowe’s suggestion, the session was entrusted to one of Decca’s younger staff producers, Michael Barclay. ‘It was a disaster,’ Dick Rowe remembered. ‘The Stones thought Mike was a fuddy-duddy; he thought they were mad.’ The result was a version of Poison Ivy which Decca and the Stones hated in almost equal measure. The single appeared on Decca’s schedule of new releases but was then cancelled.
A further long discussion-cum-rehearsal at the Studio 51 Club in Great Newport Street produced nothing else that Andrew Loog Oldham considered remotely promising. Exasperated, he left the Stones to their tinkering and arguing and started mooching round the Soho streets like Laurence Harvey in Expresso Bongo, hoping – as that inspirational film idol had hoped – that something or other might turn up.
Miraculously enough, something did. A London taxi stopped next to Oldham, and out jumped John Lennon and Paul McCartney. The Beatles, that day, had been at the Dorchester Hotel, receiving awards from the Variety Club of Great Britain. John and Paul were now on the loose together, looking for more excitement.
‘The dialogue,’ Oldham says, ‘really did go like this, “’Ello, Andy. You’re looking unhappy. What’s the matter?” “Oh, I’m fed up. The Stones can’t find a song to record.” “Oh – we’ve got a song we’ve almost written. The Stones can record that if yer like.”’
The song was I Wanna Be Your Man, one of a clutch of new Lennon-McCartney numbers written for their forthcoming second album With The Beatles. Susceptible to fashion as ever, and natural mimics, they had produced their own two-minute blast of rhythm and blues. As it was still not quite finished, John and Paul went back with Oldham to Studio 51 and put the final touches to it while the Stones waited.
This casual gift from pop music’s hottest songwriting team provided the lethargic Stones with a rush of adrenaline. It required only an hour or two at Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn, to produce their own Chicago Blues interpretation of I Wanna Be Your Man, replacing winsome Beatles’ harmonics with the belligerent simplicity of Mick Jagger’s voice and Brian Jones’s slide guitar. For a B-side, it was enough to tape a twelve-bar blues instrumental, hastily ad-libbed, as was its title: Stoned. Plagiarism as it was (of Booker T’s Green Onions), this counted as an original composition. Andrew Loog Oldham set up a publishing company to handle such collective efforts, its proceeds to be divided between the five Stones and himself. The company was called Nanker Phelge Music, combining Brian Jones’s word for a grotesque facial contortion with the name of their Edith Grove flatmate, Jimmy Phelge, the youth who at unexpected moments used to wear his underpants on his head.
I Wanna Be Your Man was released on November 1. The Stones were still on tour with the Everly Brothers and Little Richard, playing two shows at the Odeon Cinema, Rochester. Two nights later, the tour finally wound itself up at the Odeon, Hammersmith. Here at last the Stones were on home territory. The show’s compere, Bob Bain, had to plead with the audience to stop shouting, ‘We want the Stones’ and instead shout, ‘We Want the Everlys.’
To the rest of Britain, however, even big-name groups like the Searchers and the Shadows hardly impinged on an obsession born in the trickery of Fleet Street but now rampant beyond any newspaper’s manipulation. On November 4, the Beatles captivated the Royal Command Variety Show by suggesting that a blue-blooded audience containing both the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret should either clap or ‘rattle yer jewellery’. On November 22, their second album, With the Beatles, launched them, looking like soulful art students, into the upper as well as lower social sphere, selling enough copies on advance orders to push the whole album into the Top Twenty singles chart. In early December, the New Musical Express chart showed yet another Lennon-McCartney song, I Wanna Be Your Man by the Rolling Stones, at number thirteen. For influential critics like Brian Matthew, more interest lay in the song’s composers than in the group which had been lucky enough to record it. ‘Do you realize,’ Brian Matthew repeatedly asked his BBC radio audience, ‘how many songs in the current Top Ten are written by, if not sung by, the Beatles?’
FOUR
‘BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR’
We owe this intimate backstage visit to one of Britain’s last surviving cinema newsreels, in happier days devoted exclusively to sport and royalty but now, in 1964, bravely attempting to fathom an uproar more raucous, to its elderly editors, than the cry of their own screen emblem, the Pathé cockerel.
We follow as the camera tracks uncertainly down a dark passageway, round a corner and through a suddenly opened door into the Stones’ dressing room. It is, however clumsy, an attempt at cinéma vérité – a pop group on tour, caught between performances. The camera settles first on Keith Richard, leaning forward, a cigarette clamped between his lips, to fasten a shirt collar as high as a Regency beau’s hunting stock. Beyond Keith, Brian Jones, in black coat and snow-white jeans, holds up his lozenge-shaped guitar, the better to show the complex chord he is shaping. His hair is now peroxide blond, an aureole of metallic gold covering his eyes, almost encircling his face. The camera moves to Mick Jagger, in a matelot-striped jersey, then it moves on somewhat hastily. His face wears an expression not wholly welcoming; besides, he isn’t holding a guitar.
The stage sequence filmed by Pathé shows how undeveloped Jagger still was as a performer or personality. The song is the Stones’ old club standby, Chuck Berry’s Around and Around. Jagger sings it, hunched around the old-fashioned stand-mike, his face turned diffidently into one matelot-striped shoulder. His lips open just enough to moisten themselves. His eyes seem cloudily preoccupied. At intervals, he claps his hands flamenco-style above his head. Beside him, Keith Richard jigs around, wearing a happy, rather dizzy grin. Far on the other side, with heaped gold hair shutting out his eyes, Brian Jones stands, motionlessly provocative. The camera cuts away to girls with Beatle fringes, alternately screaming and stuffing handkerchiefs into their mouths. Now we see the full stage, empty but for the Stones, their vestigial equipment and a red-curtained backdrop. Jagger leaves the microphone and – the only word is – waddles like a duck shaking water from its tail.
On January 6, they were out on tour again, in the George Cooper Organization’s ‘Group Scene 1964’ show. By now they were big enough to merit equal top billing with the Ronettes, an American girl group, highly successful on Phil Spector’s Philles record label. Spector had already sent his acolyte Andrew Loog Oldham a telegram, sternly warning ‘Leave my girls alone.’ As both individual Stones and Ronettes have since corroborated, that warning was to no avail.
The combination of svelte, sinuous black girls and snarling, scruffy white boys attracted much interest in a music press jaded equally by Christmas indulgence and Beatle overkill. In New Musical Express under a heading ‘Girls Scream at Stones, Boys at Ronnettes’. Andy Gray praised the show’s ‘vocal volume and body action’. Gray’s review – which set the seal of box-office success on the tour – is revealing as a sample both of 1964 pop journalism and also the pitifully short performances given by even top-of-the-bill attractions:
Two packed houses greeted with cheers, screams and scarf-waving the local lads who have made good – the Rolling Stones. Fever-pitch excitement met compere Al Paige’s announcement of them, and they tore into their act with Girls, followed by Come On. This group certainly is diff
erent – members wear what they like, from shirts to leather jackets, but they have long hair in common.
Lead singer Mick Jagger whips out a harmonica occasionally and brews up more excitement while the three guitars and drums throb away in back. Hey Mona was another R & B compeller before a quiet number, very appealingly sung by Brian Jones [sic], You Better Move On. Back to the torrid stuff for the last two numbers, Roll Over, Beethoven and I Wanna Be Your Man, taking the act to encore applause …
Decca’s release of an EP – extended play – record on January 17 redoubled the nightly pandemonium. The EP, with its handful of tracks and cheap picture cover, was a well-tried device for getting additional mileage from a pop act whose success did not yet warrant a full twelve- or thirteen-track LP. The Stones’ first EP was in this catchpenny tradition, offering their cancelled A-side Poison Ivy, together with versions of Chuck Berry’s Bye Bye Johnny and Berry Gordy’s much imitated Money. The exception was an Arthur Alexander song, You Better Move On, sung by Mick Jagger with care and almost without affectation. You Better Move On proved popular enough to take the entire EP into the Top Ten singles chart barely a week after its release.
The Stones’ third single, it was already decided, would be a cover version of the Buddy Holly song Not Fade Away – which Mick Jagger had first heard with Dick Taylor at Woolwich Granada back in 1957 – but drastically rearranged by cross-breeding with an equally important stylistic source. On to the mild, reflective Holly song, Keith Richard had grafted guitar chords played in the shuffling, stop-start Bo Diddley beat. ‘To me,’ Andrew Loog Oldham says, ‘when Keith sat in the corner and came up with those chords, that was really the first song the Stones ever wrote.’ The result was played at twice the speed of the Holly original, flashed across, each second verse, by a whinny from Brian Jones’s harmonica.
The taping of Not Fade Away, at Regent Sound, towards the end of January 1964, was an occasion that would have horrified conventional A & R men like Dick Rowe. Oldham and the Stones had hit on the ideal way of escaping interference from Rowe or anyone else from Decca. They recorded by night, not even starting until long after all A & R men were safely back in their suburban mock-Georgian villas, tucked up between their nylon fitted sheets.
Not Fade Away was taped as the culmination of a drunken studio party at which the Stones and Oldham were joined by Phil Spector and two members of the Hollies, Alan Clarke and Graham Nash. Later on, the American singer Gene Pitney also dropped in, bringing with him an outsize bottle of brandy. The final Not Fade Away take featured the two Hollies, appropriately, on back-up vocals and Phil Spector shaking the maracas of which the rhythm track is mainly composed. Spector also cobbled up a B-side song called Little by Little, a pastiche of Jimmy Reed’s Shame, Shame, Shame, dashing it off in minutes, with Mick Jagger’s help, in the corridor. Little by Little was recorded as a simple jam session of guitar, harmonica, piano – played by Gene Pitney – and a Jagger vocal, like the maracas, audibly plastered. At frequent intervals, the session disintegrated into tomfoolery, with Jagger rudely mimicking Sir Edward Lewis, the Decca chairman, and Phil Spector ad-libbing an obscene recitative under the title Andrew’s Blues.
On February 4, at New York’s Kennedy airport, the Beatles emerged from their aircraft to behold a 5,000-strong crowd, keening and howling in the grip of that European virus which the New York Post had predicted would definitely not spread to America. Their appearance, four nights later, on NBC-TV’s Ed Sullivan Show – for a knockdown fee of $3,500 – was watched by an estimated 70 million, or 60 per cent of the American TV audience.
The Beatles’ conquest of America took them out of the orbit of mere pop. In Britain, those who had once damned and denounced them now commended them as an invaluable addition to the export drive. Their name took on almost a talismanic quality, securing newspaper headlines impartially for anyone who invoked it. Members of Parliament, peers of the realm, archbishops, even royalty itself, now talked and talked about the Beatles. To their teenage audience this was, of course, the most gratifying turnabout from last year’s parental ridicule. Just the same, to find one’s idols shared by one’s mother, and even one’s grandmother, made pop seem suddenly rather tame.
No one’s mother or grandmother liked the single, released on February 27 and now climbing up the Top Twenty, spurred on by alternate kicks of delight and hostility. The Stones’ late-night carousings with the Hollies and Phil Spector had produced a noise which sold itself, both as instant hit material and instant anti-heroism, from its first chaotic, maraca-shaking chord. Phil Spector’s presence is widely supposed to have brought about the Stones’ vastly improved cohesion in Not Fade Away – guitars sharper, harmonica more savage, the general onslaught resembling a miniature wall of sound.
The national press was quick to spot the new fad – or, in other words, to take up Andrew Loog Oldham’s suggested story angle. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom. But the Rolling Stones – five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair – are not worried what mums think … For now that the Beatles have registered with all age groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’
Last year’s Beatle crowds, it was becoming clear, had behaved moderately in comparison with those who followed the new voice of the teens. The Stones’ third tour, early in February, played each night to an uproar, not merely of screaming girls corralled in cinema seats, but also of spontaneous battles between Mods and their sartorial foes, the Rockers. Other groups to whom this happened would hug their precious guitars to them and hurry from the stage. But the Rolling Stones played on. Brian Jones in particular loved to see trouble starting and to encourage it subtly by brief, goading shakes of his hair and tambourine. It was largely from this trick of Brian’s that Mick Jagger learned how small, tantalizing body movements could tease up conventional screams to a banshee-like howl. He, too, began to experiment, slipping off his Cecil Gee Italian jacket and dangling it on his forefinger like a stripper’s G-string.
The Stones’ television appearances, on Lucky Stars and Ready, Steady, Go, had precipitated a blizzard of hate mail. ‘The whole lot of you,’ wrote a typical correspondent, ‘should be given a good bath, then all that hair should be cut off. I’m not against pop music when it’s sung by a nice clean boy like Cliff Richard, but you are a disgrace. Your filthy appearance is likely to corrupt teenagers all over the country …’
One feature of those TV appearances, above all, had caused adult Britain to recoil with almost speechless revulsion. The Beatles, for all their mop-top fringes, had always been assiduously barbered and groomed. The Stones’ hair, its length, its volume, its wild lack of shape, made the Beatles’ look decorously short by comparison. Not since the early Victorian age had young British men been seen with hair that hung down their necks and curled over their shirt collars, half obliterating their eyes and ears. To a nation whose collective memory of military life was still strong, the Stones’ hair signified almost rabid uncleanliness. And, indeed, the voice of adult Britain rang out like so many sergeant majors. The president of the National Federation of Hairdressers, offering to give the next number one pop group a free haircut – and, by implication, a disinfecting and de-lousing – added: ‘The Rolling Stones are the worst. One of them looks as though he has got a yellow feather duster on his head.’ Brian Jones was deeply offended, especially since he nowadays washed his newly golden hair on average twice each day and was known within the Stones as Mister Shampoo.
All who attacked the Stones fondly imagined themselves to be part of a process that must ultimately consign the ugly little upstarts to ear-burning oblivion. A great many worthy citizens might have held their peace if they had realized what Andrew Loog Oldham did by early 1964: that the more ferociously grown-ups attacked and derided the Stones, the more their teenage fans would love and support them.
Coverage of the Stones from spring 1
964 onwards testifies to Oldham’s artful success in making their name synonymous with surliness, squalor, rebellion and menace. Newspaper reporters then were usually middle-aged, baffled by pop music and only too glad of the phrases which Oldham provided. Almost every story began in the same way: ‘They are called the Ugliest Group in Britain …’ Other stories described the Stones’ habit, when exasperated by pressmen’s questions, of sticking their fingers up their noses and dragging down their eyes in a collective version of Brian Jones’s ‘nanker’ grimace. Perhaps Oldham’s greatest thematic coup was a headline in Melody Maker: WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The words mutated into what became almost a national catchphrase whenever the Stones appeared on television. ‘Would you let your daughter marry one?’ people said to each other, or, ‘Mothers turn pale …’
To the fans, they were presented in the mode of Elvis Presley a decade previously – as rebels who were nice boys when you got to know them. No less an authority than Jimmy Savile confided to his pop column audience in the People newspaper that ‘they’re a great team for having a laugh, and dress very clean and smart when they relax’. Oldham ensured that they did everything that pop fans expected, posing as lurid colour pin-ups for teen magazines like Rave and Fabulous 208, grouped in uniform leather waistcoats or jumping up together in zany Beatle style. Their clothes – Brian Jones’s especially – were discussed at inordinate length. Like every other group, they filled in their ‘Life Lines’ for New Musical Express, tempering sarcasm with what was usual, including the ritual white lie about their ages. Mick Jagger (‘born 1944’) gave his Favourite Colour as ‘red, blue, yellow, green, pink, black, white’, and his Favourite Clothes as ‘my father’s’. Keith Richard gave his Year of Birth as ‘1944’, his Parents’ Names as ‘Boris and Dirt’, his Favourite Actor as ‘Harold Wilson’, his Miscellaneous Dislikes as ‘headaches, corns, pimples, gangrene’. Brian Jones (‘born 1944’) gave his Sister’s Name as ‘Hashish’ and his Biggest Career Break as ‘break from parents’. Though Bill Wyman subtracted the largest amount from his age – five years – he admitted the existence of his wife, Diane, and his four-year-old son, Steven. Only Charlie Watts did not lie about his age or his Hobbies: ‘collecting antique firearms and modelling in plaster’.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 11