by Marc Spitz
There were, even at this early stage, moments of great hybridization. Mick and Keith, despite their newfound confidence, didn’t dare reveal, especially in the company of a purist like Ian Stewart or Brian Jones, that they had such catholic tastes. Rock and roll was not taken seriously. Pop was anathema. Mick and Keith loved them both. It would prove a secret advantage, one that would later help the Rolling Stones motor to the front of the pack once the scene began to take off.
Mick’s voice isn’t as naturally soulful or “black” as, say, that of Steve Winwood, who hailed from Birmingham, England. Winwood seemed a phenomenon or R&B prodigy, whereas, listening to Mick, you can hear the effort, and his phrasing is more interesting for it. Given his flair for mimicry, Mick could have handily employed the elastic, minstrel show baritone, suggestive of a southern sharecropper. There’s an instance in Gimme Shelter where he proves just that, doing a verse of Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “You Gotta Move” (covered by the Stones on Sticky Fingers): “Yo got teemove.” But on record it’s pretty rare. The Stones’ cover of Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved,” the B-side to their debut single, “Come On,” finds Mick changing “want” to “wants,” for example. More often than not, Mick instinctively sought a parallel instead between the original swampy archetype, the urban bluesman, the hipsters who worshipped them, and the British equivalent of down home: the Cockney. It’s an amalgam. Like Frank Sinatra, or Billie Holiday, Mick has extra sensory power as a singer. He anticipates the band’s direction and can ride along at his own pace without ever losing the groove. Lesser vocalists have to spit each word with rapidity in order to do the same. Instead, Mick enunciates every consonant. He can make a sibilant “Yes,” sound like “Yeah.” There’s a calm to the delivery, a fast math that soothes and impresses even when the verses call for anger or frustration. There’s irony in there too, but it’s the remove of an intellectual and makes a pasty, bony kid in a sweater singing about chicken fried in bacon grease on “Down the Road a Piece” seem somehow less absurd. Who knows what else was tossed into the pot? Mick was always listening for inspiration. “He’s a sponge,” Keith would observe years later in his memoir. It was a backhanded compliment from an exasperated partner reflecting on all the times Mick came to him after a night at the disco. He’d absorbed some new style and had an idea for a Stones song. Middle-age Keith would recoil, but teenage Keith surely benefitted from Mick’s knack for soaking up absolutely everything, then refining it into a personal style. Away from Dartford’s yards and house rows, Mick could reinvent himself. He was meeting new kids every day—boys and girls, new students at the L.S.E.—and he could be anyone to them. He sometimes favored the voice of a Cockney tough. This was something he could parrot expertly, and some of it bled nicely into his singing. In “Little Red Rooster,” “King Bee,” and “Mona,” he never sounds anything but English, though there’s a real blues voice in the mix. Authenticity was, after all, about conviction—stepping on a stage and declaring, “This is me.” And that “me” was in the early ’60s a magpie, sometimes a mess, occasionally a boy genius.
Fashion-wise, Mick began cultivating a more lived-in look; a sort of urban student bohemian air, influenced, surely, by Keith and Dick’s art school pose. He stopped bathing regularly, grew his hair out, began smoking, hoping perhaps to deepen his voice, and when not in class, slouched around Soho in threadbare sweaters, tight jeans, and boots. In order to be taken seriously, one had to appear as if one’s mind was heavy, but in private, Mick was still a cutup, given to moments of gay mimicry.
When a tiny, coldwater bedroom apartment became available at 102 Edith Grove, Mick, and later Keith, moved in with Brian. It was walking distance to the L.S.E., where he was prepping for his first-year exams, and while the tiny adobe did not provide much quiet for study, it quickly became a think tank of a sort. Jones moved in his record player and radio. The three musicians and a fourth lodger, a skinny, unwashed blues fan named James Phelge, talked and drank until they collapsed on one of the mattresses spread on the floor. There was “no fixed rotation,” according to Keith. They lived communally. The winter of 1962, when they moved in, was the coldest in two centuries and often the future Stones bound their bodies together for warmth. A boiled egg or a bottle of Coke was a rare treat. They lived mostly on potatoes. They even developed their own slang. If something was all right it was “Guvnor”; if it was square, it was “Ernie,” as in “How fucking Ernie.” It was ideal for a young, aspiring performer, but Mick frequently had to navigate both the world of the Guvnor and the world of the Ernie. Mick, of course, had an out. Keith and Brian never seemed to leave the building. Mick spent hours on the L.S.E. campus and often traveled to Dartford for hot meals and clean laundry.
While doomed to fall into a chemically fried and permanent state of apathy or entropy, Brian Jones was, at the time, the most ambitious of them all, determined to start his own band and lead the charge to turn every jazzer and pop fan into a blues devotee. Mick, Keith, Derek Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and a rotating series of drummers including Tony Chapman and future Kink Mick Avory rehearsed at the nearby Bricklayers Pub whenever they could, with an eye toward getting their chance to apply the wisdom of two hundred hours shivering around a record player, hungry bellies pressed against their guitars. “Do we need a horn section? Do we need backup singers? Can they be black backup singers? How did he do this? Here, I’ll show you. That’s it, there.” All the while, Mick hobnobbed with future Nobel Prize winners, published anarchists, and Parliament members.
On Mondays, after a weekend in the clubs, Mick spiffed himself up to attend classes, then returned to find Keith, Brian, and their new flatmate, Jimmy Phelge, in the same place where he’d left them, listening to blues and pop music and deconstructing it with the same fervor that Mick had just witnessed among the formally educated. “We would stick a pile of singles on the record player and lay there listening to them and making comments. It was always the same selection of records, including ‘Donna’ by Ritchie Valens, Jerry Lee’s ‘Ballad of Billy Joe,’ Ketty Lester’s ‘Love Letters,’ Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On,’ and Jimmy Reed’s ‘Goin’ by the River,’ Phelge writes in his memoir Nankering with the Stones. “Some nights Mick would not arrive back at the flat until about midnight. He would come in and dive straight into bed, having maybe spent the evening somewhere else with other L.S.E. students. On other occasions he never came back at all and I presumed he had gone home to see his family in Dartford,” Phelge recalled. Joe, Eva, and Chris were spared the seamier details of life in Edith Grove. In a way, the Ernie world was Mick’s saving grace, providing a disconnect that would help him survive the tumult of the later decade. He was becoming adept at committing to a scene as necessary and removing himself as necessary, while others with less of a talent for such things, specifically Brian and Keith, were doomed to drown (literally and figuratively) in their affectations.
If the proto-Stones at World’s End (the section of London where the Edith Grove flat was situated) were the Young Ones, that classic ’80s British sitcom (this is how I imagine them when I read of this period), Keith, Brian, and Phelge would be Neil, Vivian, and Rick—antisocial, unfit for real employment, people who could only be what they were: outcasts, struggling, making a living on lentils and crockery—whereas Mick would be Mike, the one who could pass for straight and go out into the world, figuring out how to hustle a few bucks in his tie and dirty sport coat.
In addition to their Saturday nights at the Ealing, Korner and Davies began playing Thursday engagements at the Marquee, another Soho jazz hive, soon to be the premiere club of the ’60s beat scene. An offer to perform on the BBC’s Jazz Club left a spontaneous vacancy at the Marquee. Korner turned to Brian Jones to fill in and hold their residency for fear of alienating the club owner and losing it. This forced the still nascent band to commit to a name quickly. Brian suggested the Rollin’ Stones after the Muddy Waters song “I’m a Man.” The need for commitment came in a rush, as mos
t things did at the time. This band would, after all, be very famous inside of eighteen months.
The Rollin’ Stones—Mick, Keith, Brian, Ian Stewart, Dick Taylor, and Mick Avory—made their debut at the Marquee on the night of July 12, 1962, and never stopped playing, whether it was a lucrative gig, a free gig, an empty floor, or a full riot. It was easy for Mick to balance one Saturday night show with his studies and not find himself in the middle of a career quandary. The more they performed, however, the more crowds reacted to the energy of their communal, Edith Grove existence; the easy, male camaraderie, which is always an appealing and salable force. It was there on the stages of small clubs like the Scene and the Ricky Tick and pubs like the Red Lion, as was the laissez-faire sexuality and, certainly, a growing comfort with the material: other people’s songs played over and over again until they became their own. Word got around and a goateed blues fan from Soviet Georgia named Giorgio Gomelsky booked the band into his blues night at the Station Hotel in Richmond (which he’d christened the Crawdaddy Club). Here, the Stones, now known as “Rolling,” not “Rollin’,” became a draw for an ever-expanding wave of eager young Londoners. A residency was key; just like the hell-flat at Edith Grove, they could parse, and add and drop and perfect the idea of performance. “One night when the band was really giving out,” Gomelsky recalled, “I signaled to my friend and assistant Hamish Grimes to get on a table so everyone would see him, and start waving his arms over his head. Within seconds the whole crowd was undulating. This was perhaps the single most important event in the development of the Stones’ ability to build a link between stage and floor, to connect and become joined to an audience, to bring about something resembling a tribal ritual, not unlike ‘a revivalist meeting in the deep South,’ as Patrick Doncaster described it a few weeks later in the Daily Mirror. No one had seen anything like this in the sedate and reticent London of 1963. It was exciting and foreboding. It heralded that a drastic socialcultural turn was on the books.”
By the spring of ’63, a few months shy of Mick’s twentieth birthday, it was his band, the Rolling Stones, not their godfather’s Blues Incorporated, who were the preeminent band on the London blues-rock scene. They’d even pinched their drummer from Korner’s band in the winter of ’62, convincing, at Ian Stewart’s insistence, the imperious Mod Charlie Watts to join after months of campaigning for his talent and unflappable cool. Watts kept a jazz-style back beat and had the face of a stone-carved eagle. Around the same time that Watts gave them their first permanent drummer, Bill Wyman had replaced Taylor, who’d returned to school. Wyman, married and several years older than Keith, Brian, Mick, and Charlie, was more of an Ernie. He’d done his mandatory military service before it was repealed. “The only one of them who was truly working class,” according to Keith Altham. Bill knew and loved his blues and, famously, owned a powerful Watkins amplifier that the Stones coveted, and quickly demonstrated an interlocking chemistry with Watts. Improbably, the Rolling Stones soon had the entire scene’s most solid rhythm section ; one that could stir up a real riot.
“Once you saw them in Richmond, you realized they were really cool,” Peter Asher, then one half of pop duo Peter and Gordon and the brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane Asher, says today. “There were more and more people every week. You got a feeling of something building. And you really noticed Brian and Mick. They were very competitive. Brian was fabulous. He had a big green Gretsch and would put all this vibrato on it.” Brian still took most of the harmonica solos on their short set of blues covers (mostly from Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry), but Mick had a trump card that would help him garner the majority of attention, perhaps more than he could handle then. It was at this time that Mick entered into a three-year relationship with eighteen-year-old Chrissie Shrimpton, who approached him after a show and boldly asked for a kiss.
Such instances were becoming more and more commonplace, but Shrimpton had something that other Rolling Stones fans did not. She was from a well-to-do family, with a very famous sister.
Shrimpton’s older sister Jean, “The Shrimp,” was already world famous as the face of the new mod London fashion scene. She’d dated movie star Terence Stamp and was engaged to famed photographer David Bailey. Jean was Bailey’s muse, and her broad nose, bow lips, gigantic eyes, and handsome chin would peer out from fashion magazines and print ads throughout the world. Chrissie was not blessed with a similar symmetry. Her lips, like Mick’s, were full. She wore her hair in bangs that were too long, or with austere headbands. Her eyes seemed permanently unimpressed. Of the dozens, perhaps a hundred photos I’ve seen of Chrissie Shrimpton, I’ve only seen one of her smiling. She had a chip on her shoulder and enjoyed picking fights with Mick and anyone else who made the mistake of crossing her, but she was a Shrimpton, and in late 1963, this was akin to marrying into pop culture royalty. Word traveled fast about the Shrimpton girl’s new favorite band. “He’s great,” David Bailey recalled Chrissie Shrimpton telling him of Mick. “He’s going to be bigger than the Beatles.” Both Mick and Chrissie were so young that it’s hard to single out this love affair as one of mutual opportunism, but Mick, not Brian, was quickly emerging as the star of the band. He was becoming famous and Chrissie Shrimpton enjoyed that fame. Being associated with an up-and-coming rock and roll sensation certainly made Chrissie feel special, something rare when you consider a life of constant comparison with a beautiful, famous older sister. They didn’t seem to like each other very much. Witnesses recount dozens of fights, both in public and in private; Chrissie is the implicit “girl” in many of the Stones early “put-down” singles like “Out of Time” and “Stupid Girl.” But it was a crucial relationship at a crucial time.
The Beatles themselves showed up one April night at the Crawdaddy Club, unannounced, as a nervous Stones ripped through Bo Diddley’s “Roadrunner” at top speed. Not yet the global superpower they would soon become, the Beatles were still the biggest new pop group in England, whereas the Stones were barely making enough to meet their rent of sixteen pounds per week at Edith Grove (where Chrissie seldom ventured). They could see what life as a pop icon looked and sounded like, but they were still scruffy students (or former students) sleeping in a pack like foxes.
It was the arrival of Beatles affiliate and self-styled pop hustler Andrew Loog Oldham, a flamboyant young industry vet at just nineteen years old, that would eventually convince Mick to pick a road and travel it. Oldham was a persuader. “He was his own freelance hustler—very young, very cool, looked great,” says Peter Asher. “He was a mover and shaker. Absolutely I was impressed by him. Watching him in action [one could see he was a guy] going somewhere.” He caught their show on April 28, 1963, and inside of a month, the Rolling Stones were recording their debut single, a nimble cover of Chuck Berry’s little-heard “Come On” and a strolling take on the aforementioned “I Want to Be Loved,” at Olympic Studios, the grand London recording factory where they would create their most iconic late ’60s music. “Everything happened quickly,” Mick has recalled. “But you had to be quick in those days because there was so much going on and you could get lost in the rush.”
Oldham’s youthful confidence bolstered the new group, and yet there was no guarantee they’d enjoy any success at all outside of the London club scene. Brian was near megalomaniacal in his drive to succeed. Keith needed the band to work. He was in no hurry to join the workforce at some office, applying what little art and design skills he’d learned at Sidcup Art College when he wasn’t playing guitar in the cloak room. He’d done a few pallid runs through the ad agencies of London but returned to Edith Grove and the comfort of his records and guitar without any takers. But Mick took all of the attention and whispers that he was a star in the making with trepidation. To drop out of the London School of Economics on a full scholarship and counter so aggressively the plans and wishes of his family was a huge conflict. There were two influences that may have made his choice a bit easier and less painful. First, it helps to realize that this was not a
n age when pop groups enjoyed decades-long careers like actors, authors, or painters (or pop groups today). Rock and roll was still young and there was an implicit ephemeral quality to it. Second, if there was any group that seemed like they were changing such rules, it was the Beatles, and Oldham’s connection to them was impressive and already yielding some results. Short on potential singles, Oldham and the Stones asked John Lennon and Paul McCartney if they had anything useful. McCartney had been developing a chugging, bluesy number called “I Wanna Be Your Man” that seemed perfect. According to legend, he and Lennon retired to a corner of a nightclub to finish it together before playing the complete version to the band and their manager. The popular take on this event (recounted by Mick himself in the 1978 Beatles parody The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash, which we will soon visit) hints that this was a throwaway (Ringo, after all, sings on the version the Beatles themselves would record) as far as Beatles standards went, but it was more than good enough for the Stones, who were, like many of their peer bands at this point, a covers act. There’s a bit of truth to this, but the Stones inject “I Wanna Be Your Man” with the kind of masculinity and menace that made the Beatles look good. It’s a middling composition, and their furious take on it made it a hit that November, their first Top 10. And so, in the fall of 1963, with a three-year contract with Decca Records orchestrated by Oldham and their first successful single in stores, Mick and Keith finally moved on. They moved from the dangerously squalid flat on Edith Grove and into a more appealing home in West Hampstead (while Jones moved in with his then girlfriend Linda Lawrence’s family), and on October 22, 1963, after nearly two years of study, Mick informed his teachers and parents that he intended to leave L.S.E., citing a rare opportunity to become a performer. His L.S.E. professors offered him the chance to re-enroll the following year, which Mick found a great relief. For all he knew, he would be back should this rock and roll experiment ultimately prove short-lived.