On February 26, Decca released a new Stones single that was to prove to Oldham beyond all doubt that he could make hits happen by the mesmeric power of his will. With The Last Time, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard, under duress from their manager, had at last written something good enough for an A-side. The song itself was basic and Bo Diddley-esque. What lifted it out of the ordinary was a four-note guitar phrase by Keith Richard that slithered through the lyric with a malign, unignorable persistence, like migraine rendered into sound.
The Last Time went to number one in Britain eight days after its release. With the top-selling British single as well as top LP and EP (Five By Five), the Stones might reasonably have expected a rest. Instead, Oldham and Easton launched them afresh on a British tour, itself to be turned into a further EP, Got Live If You Want It, engineered by their IBC friend, Glyn Johns, and containing scream-rent versions of Pain in My Heart and Everybody Needs Somebody to Love. One track consisted solely of the audience chanting ‘We want the Stones.’ ‘It was technically a song,’ Oldham says. ‘So we thought Nanker Phelge might as well cop the proceeds from the publishing.’
Oldham’s ambitions had by now outgrown any simple group of five. From January 1964, he began recording for Decca in his own right as director of ‘the Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra’. Studio session men in huge numbers – sometimes including individual Stones – would be assembled periodically to perform such Oldham orchestral compositions as Funky and Fleopatra; 365 Rolling Stones; and the tortuously punning Theme for a Mod Summer Night’s Ball.
Only one obstacle remained between Oldham and total fulfilment. This was, alas, not something which Reg the Butcher could arrange by going over and thumping somebody. It could only come in a letter such as Paul McCartney in his Wimpole Street bedsitter had just received from his Mayfair accountants. Andrew Loog Oldham, despite his hold over Britain’s number one hit-making pop group, still, somehow or other, had not managed to become a millionaire.
The Stones, despite selling something like a million singles and albums for Decca, remained victims of an accountancy system which did not pay artists their royalty earnings for anything up to a year. Decca saw no reason to change this practice, even though the Stones’ initial two-year recording contract was due to expire in May 1965, and several other major labels – notably American CBS – had already expressed passionate eagerness to sign them.
The present British tour, though sold out at all its seventy shows, was still resolutely failing to make anyone’s fortune. Oldham and Eric Easton were in legal dispute with their co-promoter, the Australian Robert Stigwood, for allegedly not paying their agreed percentage of the box-office receipts. Keith, in particular, felt so strongly about the £10,000 involved that he confronted Robert Stigwood at a London club and – in the words of journalist Keith Altham – ‘started to beat the shit out of him. Every time Stigwood tried to get up, Keith would belt him again. “Keith,” I said, “why do you keep on hitting him?” “Because he keeps getting up,” Keith said.’
The Swinging Summer of 1965 found Oldham still eager and eagle-eyed for every possible farthing. It was his reason, that August, for going to London’s Hilton Hotel to have breakfast with the New York accountant Allen Klein. Klein was Sam Cooke’s manager, and also proprietor of the song-publishing company which held copyright on the Rolling Stones’ recent big hit, It’s All Over Now. Oldham, as usual, hoped to obtain a share of the song’s publishing royalties.
At the Hilton – after brief general pleasantries – Klein asked Andrew Loog Oldham a simple but devastating question. ‘Andrew,’ he said. ‘How’d you like to be a millionaire?’
Oldham replied that he would, very much.
‘Okay,’ Klein said. ‘Whaddaya want for now?’
‘I want a Rolls-Royce,’ Andrew Loog Oldham replied.
‘You got it,’ said Klein.
It was the summer when British life broke up and rearranged itself on a kaleidoscopic array of seeming brand-newness. Everywhere, there seemed to be new clothes, new trends, new wounds, new looks, new promises for the future. Matters far more important than mere pop music had come to be computed in terms of image. National euphoria reached its highest point in 1965 when almost everyone seemed to have got their image just right.
Harold Wilson had brought the Labour Party back to power after thirteen years in exile, with a slogan borrowed from teenage culture (Let’s Go With Labour) and promises of national revival, after decadent Toryism, administered by clean, bright, classless young ministers, ‘forged in the white heat of the technological revolution’. So stupendously successful had been Harold Wilson’s verbal gimmickry that the Conservatives, too, now looked to their image, dismissing the skeletal Scottish laird who had been their last prime minister and choosing as leader a middle-class, ex-grammar-school boy whose recreations were not grouse-shooting and port drinking but yachting and playing the church organ. Amazing as it must seem to posterity, Edward Heath was intended to fire the imagination of the young.
The Tories, colouring Heath’s shirt a shade darker blue on campaign posters, did not yet realize they were competing with a master. In May 1965, the Queen’s Birthday Honours list – drawn up by her Prime Minister – created each of the four Beatles Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. By that brilliant stroke, Harold Wilson’s Socialist government and the bigger and bigger booming youth market became synonymous. Those who had feared Labour’s restoration would mean a return to postwar austerity saw with amazement that it meant op-art dresses, Carnaby Street boutiques and pop stars skipping into Buckingham Palace like an extra scene from A Hard Day’s Night.
Throughout that whole deluded summer, Britain could be said to contain only one genuinely and unapologetically wicked element. One stubborn obstacle to Harold Wilson’s yeah-yeah Utopia reaffirmed its disruptive presence on July 22 at West Ham Magistrates’ Court, in a case which was to arouse comment and disgust across the nation.
Mr Charles Keeley, manager of the Francis service station in Romford Road, Stratford, testified that late on the night of March 18, a chauffeur-driven Daimler had pulled on to his garage forecourt and a ‘shaggy-haired monster’ – identified in court as Bill Wyman – had got out and asked ‘in disgusting language’ whether he could use the lavatory. Mr Keeley – whose whole testimony suggested that before he took up garage work he had been resident in a monastery – replied that the public washroom was out of order, and refused to allow use of a staff one inside. At this, he said, ‘eight or nine youths and girls’, including Mick Jagger and Brian Jones, got out of the car and Jagger pushed him aside, saying, ‘We piss anywhere, man.’ The phrase was taken up by the others in what was described as a ‘gentle chant’, with one of the party even dancing in time to it. Jagger, Jones and Wyman, it was alleged, then walked across and urinated in a line against the forecourt wall.
Convicted for ‘insulting behaviour’, they were fined three pounds each, with fifteen pounds court costs. ‘Because you have reached exalted heights in your profession, it does not mean you can behave in this manner,’ the chairman of the magistrates said, speaking against female uproar from the public gallery which suggested precisely the opposite.
The story of Charles Keeley’s midnight ordeal was splashed in every national newspaper, accompanied by pictures of the five Stones (Keith and Charlie had appeared as character witnesses) emerging from the court in handy juxtaposition to headlines like the Sunday Express’s LONG-HAIRED MONSTERS. Buried deep in each spun-out narrative was the significant fact that the prosecution had not been a police matter, but had been brought privately by Mr Keeley and a garage customer, Mr Eric Lavender, ‘former chief warden at the Dunning Hall Youth Club’. Both asked to give their addresses to the court in writing for fear of reprisals from Stones fans.
The incident at Charles Keeley’s service station was a moderate retaliation to what the Stones themselves had suffered, from garage attendants and many others intent on striking some similar ad hoc blow for c
ommon decency. Wherever they stopped, however well-mannered their behaviour, they still faced persecution, in open insults and arbitrary bans from roadside hotels, restaurants and cafés. A scattered few places like the Ram Jam Inn or the Blue Boar café – as their food-splattered walls bore witness – catered specifically for travelling pop groups. Otherwise, the Stones had no choice but to use lorry-drivers’ pull-ups and motorway service areas, which brought them into direct contact with a public literally thirsting for their blood.
Loudly insulted from almost every surrounding table in one particular motorway restaurant, they managed to consume a greasy, over-priced breakfast, showing no reaction whatever. ‘When we got up to leave,’ Bill Wyman says, ‘we went and ordered one fried egg to be served to everyone in the place. All the people who’d been abusing us suddenly got a single fried egg each put in front of them and were told that it was from us. This really British thing took over – everyone started nodding at us and smiling and saying “Oh – thanks very much …”’
Police patrol cars were simultaneously waking up to the fact that enormous black limousines with dark-shaded windows did not transport only cabinet ministers and foreign diplomats. From mid-1964, the Stones had to contend with ritual police checks and exuberant prosecutions for minor traffic offences, pumped up by press headlines into yet further evidence of Britain’s moral disintegration. When, in late 1964, Mick Jagger was summonsed on three such minuscule charges at Tettenhall, Staffordshire, his solicitor felt obliged to deliver a long and eloquent plea that the length of Jagger’s hair should not count as an additional offence. ‘The Duke of Marlborough had hair longer than my client, and he won several famous battles. His hair was powdered, I think because of fleas. My client has no fleas …’
The Stones’ tour of America and Canada, in April and May 1965, brought them up against police methods hurriedly evolved under the joint stimulus of pop and civil rights movement. At their Ottawa concert, a fifty-strong police cordon stood on the stage with them, literally blotting them from sight. In London, Ontario, the police stopped the show after fifteen minutes by turning on the house lights and cutting off the power to the Stones’ amplifiers. ‘We felt sorry for the fans, not getting a proper show,’ Mick Jagger says, ‘so we did sort of gang up on the police.’ CRUDE AND RUDE ROLLING STONES HURL INSULTS AT POLICE was the next day’s banner headline. Hundreds of calls to local radio stations, however, made it clear whom the audience blamed for the shambles.
Sometimes, backstage, Keith or Brian would be approached by a mountainous cop with a Rolling Stones album in his hand, and words to the general effect: ‘Sign this, ya long-haired sissy pervert, or I’ll bust ya goddamned head open.’ Other officers made it clear that, though they might regard the Stones as semi-human, they were still prepared to be insulted by a sufficiently large bribe. ‘That happened when we first went on the Ed Sullivan Show,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘Hundreds of girls were screaming and yelling outside the theatre. The police came and told us that if we wanted protection, we’d have to pay them off. Every hour, they came back and told us we’d have to give them more money or they’d go away.’
With The Last Time at number eight in the Billboard Hot Hundred, there was naturally no more talk of their being banned from the Sullivan show. They made a return appearance on May 2, looking slightly smarter, at their host’s earnest insistence, and even agreeing to be cooped up in the studio for eight hours before transmission. This time they appeared twice, playing The Last Time, then coming back for an unprecedented four-song encore. Sullivan afterwards sent them a conciliatory telegram. ‘Received hundreds of calls from parents complaining about you but thousands from teenagers praising you. Best of luck on your tour …’
Their other main TV spot was on Shindig, a nationally popular music show directed by the emigré British pop promotor Jack Good. ‘Howlin’ Wolf had come up from South California or somewhere to be with us on Shindig,’ Keith says. ‘I’ll always remember Jack Good’s voice on the set, very English, calling out, “Er – Howlin’, could you do that again?” and “Er, Mr Wolf …”’
It was on the tour’s Southern leg – at a small motel in Clearwater, Florida – that Keith played over to Mick Jagger a guitar riff which, he thought, might be the basis of a makeweight track for the Stones’ next LP. ‘I’d woken up in the middle of the night, thought of the riff and put it straight down on a tape. In the morning, I still thought it sounded pretty good. I played it to Mick and said, “The words that go with this are I can’t get no satisfaction.” That was just a working title. It could just as well have been Auntie Millie’s Caught Her Left Tit in the Mangle. I thought of it as just a little riff, an album filler. I never thought it was anything like commercial enough to be a single.’
Even after Jagger had gone away and written words developing this basic ‘hook’, Keith could not be persuaded that he’d hit on an inspirational new Stones A-side. ‘I think Keith felt it was too basic … just a silly kind of a riff,’ Jagger says. ‘And he was afraid it would sound like folk rock. Doing Satisfaction was the only real time we ever had a disagreement.’
The song was tried out on tape, first at Chess Studios, Chicago, then at RCA, Hollywood, under Dave Hassinger’s supervision and in the stimulating atmosphere of having recently escaped being crushed to death together in a limousine. After the Long Beach concert, 10,000 fans surged forward, through security barriers and around the Stones’ black Chrysler motorcade. For some minutes they were entombed by bodies and wrenching fingers and faces upside down, silently screaming, until police managed to clear a path ahead.
At RCA, Keith worked on his silly little riff some more, feeding it now through a Gibson fuzzbox that lacquered each note into the malign darkness of ink or ebony. The result, as mixed by Dave Hassinger, struck everyone – but Keith – as the best thing the Stones had ever done in a studio. Keith still argued with Mick that (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction was too weak for an A-side, and that people would recognize his intro as a copy from Martha and the Vandellas’ Dancing in the Street.
Proof of this internal dissent was the single’s appearance in America in May, three full months before its British release. Within two weeks, it had jumped sixty places in the Billboard chart, from 64 to 4. On June 15, (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction became the Stones’ first American number one.
It also became the target of scandalized attack from the adult world, unparalleled even in the early days of the anti-rock ’n’ roll crusade. Up to then, moral outrage against pop music had centred on its alleged suggestiveness – the veiled suggestions and innuendoes beyond which no song lyricist dared go and few teenage listeners dared imagine. Here, for the first time, a pop song turned from the vocabulary of calf love to the vocabulary of sex. Since duellists ceased to meet each other on parade grounds at dawn, there had been but one, universally recognized source of ‘satisfaction’.
No song in history, probably, has gained so much notoriety from its title. Few enough people realized then – and few realize now – that (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction was not about sex (or, as many believed, about male masturbation). It was Mick Jagger’s reaction against the Stones’ American tour life, penned in motel rooms or streaming along endless interstate highways. The non-providers of satisfaction are not promiscuity or playing with oneself, or being unable to piss against garage walls. They are men on TV, advertising detergent, and voices on car radios, giving out ‘useless information’, and the general, head-whirling emptiness of ‘drivin’ round the world – doin’ this and signin’ that – and tryin’ to make some girl’ (the song’s one overt sexual reference). Satisfaction was a blues song transferred to the pop idiom: a hymn of hate against a world not oppressive but over-indulgent; a lament on the empty feeling of having too much, whose cosseted fury every over-indulged Western teenager could instantly recognize.
Not that such a definition occurred to anyone in 1965. What took Satisfaction to the top of the British and American charts was the guitar phrase whose guttura
l malevolence makes it still probably the best-known intro in pop. Bound up with the venomous noise, and the editorial uproar it provoked, there is the black and white image of the Stones performing Satisfaction on the Ed Sullivan Show, when Sullivan’s censors ordered a bleep to cover the reference to ‘tryin’ to make some girl’; as if that absurd squibble of sound could purge the sight of Mick Jagger, in his cuddly sweater and Rupert Bear checked trousers, wide-eyed and whispering mayhem.
SIX
‘EVERYBODY’S GOT SOMETHING TO HIDE’
In 1964, shortly after the Beatles’ conquest of America, Brian Epstein received a visit which caused that elegant, doomed young man considerable amusement. Allen Klein, the New York accountant, took advantage of a trip to London to call on Epstein and offer his client, Sam Cooke, as a possible supporting act on the Beatles’ next American tour. It soon became obvious, however, that larger matters were on Klein’s mind. Halfway through the meeting, in his hoarse and homely New Jersey accent, he made an outrageous suggestion, which was basically that he, Allen Klein, should manage the Beatles’ finances instead of Epstein. Touching his foulard scarf with a too-well-manicured hand, Brian Epstein smiled at the preposterous notion.
People about to do business with Klein would often smile in just that tolerantly patronizing way. One could easily laugh at the short, squat figure, in shape so much like a tenpin bowling pin, which would stump into executive boardrooms wearing only jeans and sneakers and none-too-clean turtleneck sweater. One could smile at the podgy face, topped by a cowlick of greased hair and jammed down ferociously on a chin that had already published a second edition and seemed to be contemplating a third. One could smile – one was positively encouraged to do so – with the sidelong quirky mouth and the dark brown, button-bright eyes, which, despite their fixed stare, moved from side to side continually as if studying the columns of invisible balance sheets.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 16