The little knowledge we’d gleaned from those pioneering writers who had actually been to the Deep South and heard people like Elmore James in the Northern ghettos set us apart from people who bought the songs in what was still known as the Hit Parade. Because we could brag that we’d heard records by Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Sleepy John Estes, we thought it was safe to listen to the blues as an art form removed from commercial considerations—never stopping to think that our idols earned their living this way. We had no idea of the reality of the lives of the people who played the music. All that began to change around the start of the sixties when some of us had the chance to sit down and actually talk to the bluesmen.
Center of everything for a while was Airways Mansions, a tiny hotel just off Piccadilly Circus. If we wanted to listen to the music we could go along to a place like the 100 Club or the Marquee, then also on Oxford Street, but it was after-hours that the musicians began to tell us their stories. Beginning with Champion Jack Dupree, who arrived in 1959, London hosted a steady stream of honky-tonk piano players who had learned their craft in the barrelhouses and sporting houses of New Orleans and the turpentine and lumber camps of the Deep South. All of them were a long way from home, all of them ready to welcome people with a genuine interest.
Airways Mansions was home to other musicians as well. Virtuoso instrumentalists who had played with Count Basie and jazz players here to accompany Ella
Jesse “Lone Cat” Fuller in the Wilmers’ kitchen
Fitzgerald enjoyed its relative freedom, and occasionally paths would cross and there would be an interesting breaking-down of barriers. Unlike the larger hotels with their racist hall porters who objected to their guests having “company,” whether female or male, the desk clerk at Airways Mansions virtually encouraged it. On occasion he’d come up to someone’s room for a drink, leaving the desk unmanned and the telephones ringing. The hotel became a kind of twenty-four-hour center of learning and many were the afternoon hangovers as glazed fans staggered back to work following a late lunchtime session…
It’s hard to remember now just how the various piano players came and went, for their visits crisscrossed with several others who came here to play with Chris Barber. Chris, who was largely responsible for launching me on to an unsuspecting world as a writer, was a key figure in bringing over a number of important artists. Touring the States with his band during the Trad boom, he would seek out bluesmen in tough joints white people seldom, if ever, visited. In Harlem, Chris stocked up on gospel 78s at the legendary Rainbow Records on 125th Street, and imported the sensational gospel guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe to tour with his band—another gig I caught when I was fifteen. His chart successes enabled him to subsidize the roots music that was his first love; credit where due, it was mainly through his tenacity that audiences had the chance to hear Louis Jordan and Jimmy Cotton as well as Muddy and Otis and the perennial folk favorites, guitar/harmonica duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.
One person who didn’t stay at Airways Mansions was the one-man-band folk “songster” Jesse Fuller. My relationship with Jesse was special. I was still at school when I wrote to him and asked him to tell me his life story. Amazingly, my extraordinary cheek succeeded. Over a number of months a series of pencil-written letters arrived, which I then worked up into a magazine article. This marked my beginning as a published writer and fired my ambition. Jesse, who composed the folk standard “San Francisco Bay Blues,” played guitar and harmonica or kazoo simultaneously (the harmonica harness he designed was copied by Dylan). He also played the fotdella, an instrument of his own creation, with one of his feet. I was looking forward to our meeting, but I found him a difficult individual, permanently dissatisfied with his lot. Following a short trip to Germany, he returned to London to find there was no more work in the offing. I took him back to my mother’s house and he stayed with us for a few awkward days. There, at least, he could cook himself something resembling a hamburger, but it was strange to discover that I could not get along with the one person I’d expected to like.
THE ROLLING STONES COME TOGETHER
[From The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, by Stanley Booth, 1984]
“Technical school was completely the wrong thing for me,” Keith [Richards] said. “Working with the hands, metalwork. I can’t even measure an inch properly, so they’re forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.”
“You tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?”
“Not so much that, because they do too many things to you for doing that. It makes life difficult for you. I was trying to make it easer for me…
“But in kicking me out, they as a final show of benevolence fixed up this place for me in art school. Actually, that was the best thing they could have done for me, because the art schools in England are very freaky. Half the staff anyway are in advertising agencies, and to keep up the art bit and make a bit of extra bread they teach school, like, one day a week. Freaks, drunks, potheads. Also, there’s a lot of kids. I was fifteen and there are kids there nineteen, in their last year.
“A lot of music goes on at art schools. That’s where I got hung up on guitar, because there were a lot of guitar players around then, playing anything from Big Bill Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and (esse Fuller stuff. In art school I met Dick Taylor, a guitar player. He was the first cat I played with. We were playing a bit of blues,
Chuck Berry stuff on acoustic guitars, and I think I’d just about now got an amplifier like a little beat-up radio. There was another cat at art school called Michael Ross. He decided to form a country & western band—this is real amateur—Sanford Clark songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ The first time I got onstage and played was with this C&W band. One gig I remember was a sports dance at Eltham, which is near Sidcup, where the art school I went to was.
“I left technical school when I was fifteen. I did three years of art school. I was just starting the last year when Mick and I happened to meet upon the train at Dartford Station. Between the ages of eleven and seventeen you go through a lot of changes. So I didn’t know what he was like. It was like seeing an old friend, but it was also like meeting a new person. He’d left grammar school and he was going to the London School of Economics, very heavily into a university student number. He had some records with him, and I said, Wotcha got? Turned out to be Chuck Berry, Rocking at the Hop.
“He was into singin’ in the bath sort of stuff, he had been singin’ with a rock group a few years previous, couple of years. Buddy Holly stuff and ‘Sweet Little Sixteen,’ Eddie Cochran stuff, at youth clubs and things in Dartford, but he hadn’t done that for a while when I met him. I told him I was messin’ around with Dick Taylor. It turned out that Mick knew Dick Taylor because they’d been to grammar school together, so, fine, why don’t we all get together? I think one night we all went ‘round to Dick’s place and had a rehearsal, just a jam. That was the first time we got into playing. Just backroom stuff, just for ourselves. So we started gettin’ it together in front rooms and back rooms, at Dick Taylor’s home,
Charlie Watts and Keith Richards (from left) backstage at the Odeon Theatre in Manchester on their first national tour of England, 1965
“There was a [racial] boundary line which no one thought could be crossed, but the Rolling Stones broke it by getting Wolf on [Shindig!]. That was something that we never would even have thought of, the hairs were just standing on my head. [Wolf] and I talked about it later, he said about how the man next door don’t know who I am, and here’s some British kids from thousands of miles away…’Cause as far as the record companies or the news media or anything, we were all ignored until those English kids came in.”—Buddy Guy
particularly. We
started doing things like Billy Boy Arnold stuff, ‘Ride an Eldorado Cadillac,’ Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Reed, didn’t attempt any Muddy Waters yet, or Bo Diddley, I don’t think, in that period. Mick laid a lot of sounds on me that I hadn’t heard. He’d imported records from Ernie’s Record Mart.
“At this time the big music among the kids was traditional jazz, some of it very funky, some of it very wet, most of it very, very wet. Rock & roll had already drifted into pop like it has already done again here because the mass media have to cater to everybody. They don’t have it broken down into segments so that kids can listen to one station. It’s all put together, so eventually it boils down to what the average person wants to hear, which is average rubbish. Anyway, that was the scene then, no good music coming out of the radio, no good music coming out of the so-called rock & roll stars. No good nothing.
“Just about the time Mick and I are getting the scene together with Dick Taylor, trying to find out what it’s all about, who’s playing what and how they’re playing it, Alexis Korner starts a band at 3 club in the west of London, in Ealing, with a harmonica player called Cyril Davies, a car-panel beater at a junkyard and body shop. Cyril had been to Chicago and sat in with Muddy at Smitty’s Corner and was therefore a very big deal. He was a good harp player and a good night man; he used to drink bourbon like a fucking fish. Alexis and Cyril got this band together and who happens to be on drums, none other than Charlie Watts. We went down about the second week it opened. It was the only club in England where they were playing anything funky, as far as anybody knew. The first person we see sitting in—Alexis gets up and says, ‘And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here tonight’—and suddenly there’s fucking Elmore James up there, ‘Dust My Broom,’ beautifully played, and it’s Brian [Jones].”
MY BLUES BAND: THE ROLLING STONES
BY RICHARD HELL
“A swift, too-pretty grackle swarming over a plate of noodles.”—Brian Jones on the Stones1
When I was fifteen, I had three music albums: The Rolling Stones Now!, Bringing It All Back Home by Bob Dylan, and Kinks-Size (featuring “All Day and All of the Night” and “Tired of Waiting for You”) by the Kinks. I really liked all three, though I didn’t think about it. (I remember I was suspended from school for a week in the ninth grade, and my mother made me paint the house. I ran a cord to a little portable record player in the yard and had those records repeat while I painted. The Stones one started to melt and warp in the sun, so that night I put it between two frying pans in the oven, and the next day it sounded even better.)
At that time I didn’t know what the music classification “the blues” meant. I had the vague idea of it being the sad folk music of African-American slaves and their oppressed sharecropper descendants. But you’d hear jazz people and TV singers claim it, too. Anyway, I thought of it as dated and corny, and the oppressed black people weren’t listening to it much then, either; they’d more likely be listening to Otis Redding or Mary Wells or Marvin Gaye.
I’ve done some research, and I know what people mean by blues music now. And the Rolling Stones, back then, in the mid-sixties, were a blues band who also did some R&B, and they were good. They were my blues band, and I will defend them.
Muddy Waters himself admitted to writer Robert Palmer in the seventies, “They got all these white
Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Brian Jones (from left), 1965
kids now. Some of them can play good blues. They play so much, run a ring around you playin’ guitar.” He added, “But they cannot vocal like the black man,” and I grant there’s not much denying that, but I’d propose Dylan as an exception,2 and also, with some caveats, Mick Jagger.
Of course, the teenage Rolling Stones, unlike thirties Delta farmhands, learned most of what they played from records—but that was often true of black blues musicians, too, by the mid-fifties—and it was the music of the R&B and Chicago blues players of that time that the Stones grew up loving and imitating when it was current: Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry (“rock & roll” but who was brought to Chess Records by Waters), Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed, Arthur Alexander. Keith Richards is always saying there’s only one song. That’s a stretch, but in a few real ways there is only one blues song— almost anything that can be called a blues follows a I-IV-V chord progression, and there are thirty or forty lines of lyrics that show up in half the songs that count as blues. The original country-blues players shuffled those lines continuously, depending on circumstances, not only among songs but within a given song. Players would habitually take credit for composing songs they recorded that were only a few words separated from their preexisting sources. The composition was really in the delivery.
The Rolling Stones were scrupulous about crediting their models, but they did carry on in this spirit of the blues recombinant dreamlike history. For instance, Muddy Waters’ first commercial recording, in Chicago, in 1948, was “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and it was a huge regional hit. The Stones covered this song on their second album, The Rolling Stones No. 2 (British Decca, 1964), and then a year or two later, their original international smash was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” “Satisfaction” is a rock & roll song, and it’s only related nominally and in spirit to that earlier blues, but it’s consistent with blues history and is an extension of the tradition. Of course, the Stones took their very band name from a Waters tune.
It’s a progression, and all one thing that evolved from the earliest turn-of-the-twentieth-century, first-person, country-blues prototypes that were never recorded—with their repetitions, calls and responses, African rhythms, and African musical value of roughness (Palmer cites, for instance, early New Orleans jazz horn players pressing their necks between frying pans3)—to the ramblin’ showmen, buskers, and Saturday-night dance entertainers like Charley Patton, Son House, and Robert Johnson, whose music we have some direct record of and whose recordings during their lifetimes were only popular among blacks and primarily in the South; to the Delta-drawn Chicago electric bands of Waters and Wolf and Reed, boogie of John Lee Hooker, and Texas-rooted style of Lightnin’ Hopkins, who made nationwide hit records that were still half-hidden from white listeners as “race” records; to the Rolling Stones, who had worldwide megahits (their 1964 British Number One version of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster” was the first and only full-fledged blues song to ever top the pop charts there or here). The progression took place over a span of only about sixty years, and though at each stage the music became a little less local and eccentric, it’s all blues, until it disperses into a kind of loamy “pop” that the blues (and other folk music) made possible, like the Stones, Dylan, and Prince. (I’d figured that this dispersion was where the tradition became so diluted as to necessarily be thought of as played out and finished, but check the White Stripes now.)
I was amazed when I heard the original versions of those records of fifties electric blues that I’d first heard in the Stones’ renditions. The thing that amazed me then was how ludicrously blatant the rip-off was: how the Stones would imitate the originals not only in arrangement and guitar tone, for instance, but also in the vocals, which imitated the accents of those Southern black men and the twists of the styles of their singing, line by line. By comparison, Elvis Presley’s covers of early R&B songs were awesomely creative. At the same time you could make a case that the Stones’ versions of Muddy Waters songs were to him as he was to, say, Son House. It’s true that the homogenization of the sound at the Stones’ level is mostly in the singing. What Robert Johnson and Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters did with their voices has not been touched by a white rock & roll singer (except, I’d maintain, for Bob Dylan). The way those great blues singers cut loose, playing their voices like something they’re beating on with sticks, while also whistling through like horns, and somehow at the same time talking in words like possessed confessors, interspersed with yelps and moans in seeming spontaneity of excitement or anger or pain, is
barely hinted at by Jagger. Jagger is good, though, and in ways other than mimicry. That fresh-voiced, snotty-kid defiance of his, mixed up with, of all things, a lisping femininity—his outrageous, girlish, threatening contempt—is completely “rock & roll,” completely weird blues. It works, and ultimately it’s probably the biggest contribution to the “canon” the Stones make as a blues band.
But the Stones aren’t legitimate as a blues band just because of their musical ability anyway. There are qualities of blues—as well as its extension, rock & roll—that get expressed by means other than through the music: namely, that weirdness, that insolence and snottiness, as well as miscegenation—sacred profanity, say, heartfelt entertainment, loving cruelty, say, black whiteness, happy sadness, say, rhythmic blues—a swaggering, freak, mutant thing of self-involved promiscuity and slick show-off duds, and the Rolling Stones were there by their ordinary nature. They were these ugly, skinny, all-jawed, girly-haired, British working-class kids dressing like romantic dandies, singing the folk music of another race, of another country, in obscene sibilant taunts and come-ons. Like Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson, they sold their souls to play the way they did. You can only play that music if you don’t give a fuck. What could selling your soul mean but never worrying about restraining your evil impulses anymore? And any way you look at it, they’re corrupt. It cuts in the most mundane and pathetic ways, too—the Stones immediately dropped their old friend and original band member, pianist Ian Stewart, from the group because their first manager thought his looks didn’t fit in with what could be popular at the time. Chuck Berry was maybe the most corrupt of all: His songs were written specifically to appeal to white high school kids. Charley Patton himself was looked down upon by many in his time and place for being too much of a showman, pandering to the crowd. Nothing is pure in this world.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 37