by Marc Spitz
Joe and Eva Jagger were considerably less comforting. “It was very, very difficult,” Mick said years later, “because my parents obviously didn’t want me to do it. My father was furious with me; absolutely furious.” His parents feared for him, even as they raged at him, but clearly the days of straddling the world of the Guvnor and the world of the Ernie were over. Mick had to commit to one or the other and opted to take a huge risk on his own talents, as well as those of his fellow blues zealots.
“Suppose we failed,” Brian Jones recalled. “We’d have tried to the best of our ability and we would have had nothing to regret in later life—when possibly we’d all be working in offices and married and settled in some suburban house. But if we didn’t give it a proper fling, we would probably end up kicking ourselves—like never knowing how good we could have been. And we figured that a lifetime of regret, of thinking back, just wouldn’t work out.”
One month later, while the Rolling Stones were backstage during a taping of the British pop dance show Ready Steady Go!, another former L.S.E. student, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated in Dallas. President Kennedy’s death would bring about a mourning, heaving desire for both escapism and an edgy awareness of the kind of constantly looming darkness that the headier days of Camelot tended to mask. The Rolling Stones, now with the power of a fully committed lead singer, would provide both.
3
“Stone of Hope”
“It’s about time we had Howlin’ Wolf onstage!” a beaming Brian Jones announces, then quickly gets out of the way. There’s footage from a 1964 episode of the American teen music program Shindig in which Howlin’ Wolf, the towering blues man with the uniquely gruff voice, appears. He’s fifty-four years old, not exactly the type of attraction Shindig was used to featuring, but the Rolling Stones, having popularized the songs of older black American blues artists, were now acting as their de facto chaperones, taking every available opportunity to turn the kids on to the original artists who inspired their sound. This was likely more a by-product of their still flush enthusiasm for the form than any concentrated effort to pay it back. They were gushers, not activists, but when the band visited America they were soon exposed to the myriad injustices, not just musical or professional, but social, that their great heroes had been reckoning with for decades. The Stones insisted on the Howlin’ Wolf booking and sat not just respectfully but reverentially at the old man’s feet as he wailed for the cameras, reversing, for one small moment, a lengthy and institutional order.
Before ever leaving Europe, the Stones had already met and played with some of their greatest African-American influences. They toured with Chess Records star Bo Diddley, striking about a half dozen Diddley covers from their set, out of respect. The tribal “shave and a haircut” Diddley beat was a band favorite, a cornerstone to their early sound. The Stones also toured with Little Richard and the white Everly Brothers. These were stars of the’50s and very early ’60s, no longer inciting teenage fervor wherever they went. The Stones of ’64 were faced with a strange dilemma: how to process the surprise success of this heavily influenced music without offending their heroes. “This was our first contact with the cats whose music we’ve been playing,” Keith has said. The possibility for awkward moments was unending. The America that the Stones first visited in the spring of ’64 seemed, in the words of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “a mountain of despair.” The Civil Rights Act guaranteeing voting rights and outlawing discrimination on the basis of race and sex would not be passed until July, and in many pockets of the country, things proceeded as usual even after that; WHITES ONLY signs still hung in front of diners, water fountains, and public bathrooms. There were still lynchings and cross burnings. A black man risked his life by looking a white man dead in the eye, or talking back. Protests were mounting : marches and walkouts. African-Americans, many of them the same age as the Stones’ white teenage fans, bravely clashed with police dogs and took the brunt of fire hoses. How could the Stones find success in America without becoming part of the problem, and profiting from the injustices? How could they sell the black man’s music to white America with respect and grace? They would have to tread carefully.
Like the Beatles that February, the Stones landed at John F. Kennedy Airport in June of 1964 and were met by about five hundred screaming fans. Like the Beatles, they proceeded to host a press conference where they fielded questions about their long hair (“Are you guys wearing wigs?”), their influence on the nation’s teens, and the Beatles, Beatles, Beatles (“Do you play the same music?”). As with the Beatles, local DJ Murray the K, the selfdescribed “Fifth Beatle,” inserted himself into the group’s inner circle. Once in Manhattan, they discovered their hotel, the Astor in Times Square, was surrounded by about two hundred screaming female fans. At night, the Stones were feted by New York society. They went twisting at the Peppermint Lounge and attended a party for socialite and Warhol star “Baby” Jane Holzer. The Holzer affair is famously chronicled by new journalism pioneer Tom Wolfe in his “Girl of the Year” essay, which provides a good window into how Mick Jagger was already becoming the face not just of the Rolling Stones, but of the faster, smarter, and harder new’60s itself. “Wait until you see the Stones,” Holzer is quoted as saying. “They’re so sexy! They’re pure sex. They’re divine! The Beatles, well you know, Paul McCartney—sweet Paul McCartney. You know what I mean. He’s such a sweet person. I mean, the Stones are bitter. They’re all from the working class you know? The East End. Mick Jagger—well, it’s all Mick. You know what they say about his lips? They say his lips are diabolical. That was in one of the magazines.”
Mick’s “diabolical” lips made their American television debut on the local talk show The Les Crane Show, but it aired very late and was hardly a splash to rival the Beatles’ debut on Ed Sullivan. Over the next week, they would find that America was vast and far more difficult to conquer. Things went from exhilarating to humbling quickly. They flew to Los Angeles, another soft landing, culturally. These were show business cities, hardly the Deep South, but the idea of a bunch of white kids attempting to “play black,” was not an easy one to sell to the old showbiz guard. On the Hollywood Palace show, a variety hour featuring a revolving series of guest hosts, the Stones had the bad fortune to get booked when Dean Martin was presiding. Martin, like his pal Frank Sinatra, was at first highly suspicious of the British Invasion bands, with their scruffy demeanor and long hair. Rather than welcoming them as an ambassador of American entertainment, the aging and clearly threatened superstar gleefully (some say drunkenly) subjected them to a mean-spirited Rat Pack treatment: “Their hair isn’t long,” he joked before introducing them. “Now something for the youngsters,” Martin read off cue cards. “Five singin’ boys from England who sold a lot of al-bee-yums.” The audience laughs nervously. Backstage, the Stones are laughing as well, at Martin’s Brylcreemed hair and tuxedo. It seems surreal to them. “They’re called the Rolling Stones. I been rolled while I was stoned myself. Here they are at ya.” Mick sang a jumping “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” while Brian played harmonica and Keith stalked around looking dour and furiously pounded the strings of his guitar like they were piano keys.
“Rolling Stones, aren’t they great?” Martin cheered as the number ended. He rolled his eyes and signaled his exasperation to the studio audience. The sixty seconds were clearly painful for him. The Stones did a half bow, then decided against it. “Fuck Dean Martin,” their tired eyes seemed to say. “You know something about the groups today; of course they have long hair. It’s not true at all. It’s an optical illusion. They just have low foreheads and high eyebrows.” It would get worse. Shows in San Antonio, Detroit, Minneapolis, Omaha, and West Virginia would be half full, with hostile law enforcement ribbing them about their hair and their loud, sexed-up “black” music.
Only the two-day recording session at Chess in Chicago returned the band to the realm of fantasy fulfillment, but for all their agog joy, they would have to face some potential cri
ngeworthy moments as well. Even though Chess was run by the Jewish brothers Leonard and Phillip Chess, the Rolling Stones would be among the very first white artists to record there. “We never had outside people,” recalls Marshall Chess. “That was a very major rarity. You had to be on Chess to record there. We were always recording our own artists. We had our own engineers.” The Stones got to stand in the very studio where their heroes recorded and lay down what they assumed would be considered genuine Chicago rhythm and blues tracks, including the jaunty instrumental “2120 South Michigan Avenue,” the late-night, boogiewoogie piano blues “Stewed and Keef ” (featuring Ian Stewart and Keith Richards), an echo-drenched “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” a country blues version of Muddy Waters’ “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” and their soon-to-be-a-hit cover of Irma Thomas’ “Time Is on My Side.” All the while, they drew a fascinated crowd of label staff, artists, and spectators. “They were white guys, they were young, they looked strange,” said Marshall Chess. “They drank whiskey out of the bottle. We never had that in the studio. Blues guys drank out of a glass.” On that visit, the Stones met heroes Buddy Guy, Willie Dixon, and Chuck Berry, who penned their debut single “Come On.” Berry was supportive but brief and slightly aloof, encouraging them to “swing on.”
Waters, Keith famously insists (although some claim this is apocryphal), was supposedly whitewashing the Chess ceiling. The implication was that these giants had to do menial chores in order to subsidize their income, as the opportunities that the Rolling Stones enjoyed as white rock and roll stars was not available to them. Being a hero to a young fan was one thing, but the reality of their struggle, both financially and in order to receive the kind of dignity they enjoyed when touring Europe, was another. Thanks to their “undergrad” study at the Ealing Club and in Edith Grove, the Stones themselves could imagine what it was like to be hungry, to make sacrifices for the sake of their music, and to be judged for their love of the lowbrow rock and roll (as opposed to traditional jazz). They were judged by the way they looked and dressed as they traveled the Windy City. “No one at Chess and very few people in Chicago had seen anyone with long hair,” Chess says. “That night after the session, I drove Brian Jones back to the hotel and they were yelling, ‘Homo!’ at us from the streets. With his hair, they thought he was my boyfriend.” Still, this was a trifle compared with the only slowly vanishing inequalities of 1964 America.
It would be the finale of the Stones’ second tour of America in the autumn when the band would be faced with possibly their greatest moral dilemma of this kind: what to do when one of their heroes makes an issue of a perceived inequality.
The place, again Southern California: the Santa Monica Civic Center, a three-thousand-seat arena by the ocean. The occasion : the taping of the T.A. M.I . Show—short for Teen Awards Music International, a pop film with multiple acts like their beloved Jazz on a Summer’s Day. The hero was, of course, James Brown, not yet the Godfather of Soul or the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, but already as much a star in the black community as the Stones were to white teenagers. Both bands were candidates to top a bill featuring a dozen stars, both black and white, performing rock, pop, and soul. This would not be the last time Mick Jagger would have to deal with issues of race over the music that he loved to play. He’d still find himself in the middle of a storm twenty-five years on, in 1989, but this was the first time it compelled the twenty-one-year-old to really address whether or not he and a black counterpart were truly equal, and to take a stand. If the Stones believed that James Brown should not be treated any different from themselves or any other band no matter what his race, then they had to commit 100 percent to blowing Mr. “Star Time” off the stage . . . for the good of humankind.
There were no formal dressing rooms in the bowels of the Civic, just a large, communal backstage area where Mick sat on a folding chair and stared at his shoes. The muffled sound of a production crew member shouting at a coworker and the bleats and half notes of an orchestra tuning up worked his already jumping nerves. There was a knock on the wall. Mick was jolted. He opened it and was shocked to see Marvin Gaye standing there. Gaye was handsome and wearing a dark suit. About five years Mick’s senior, he, like the other Motown artists, the Supremes and Smokey Robinson, greeted the group warmly, making it clear that they dug the group’s look and sound. The Stones returned the compliments, making it known that while traveling through America on two full tours, they listened almost exclusively to Motown, whose hit factory pretty much owned the airwaves at the time. “Don’t worry about James Brown,” Gaye said, crouching to comfort Mick. “People love you because of what you do onstage.” Gaye had yet to become a titan of American soul. Like Diana Ross, Smokey Robinson, and the Stones themselves, he was just a star on the rise, with a few hits to his credit; but the words meant a lot. The Stones had covered his hit songs as well, including “Hitch Hike” and “Can I Get a Witness.” To most white listeners, James Brown was an unknown, too, but the Stones knew what it meant to follow him. At the start of the tour, they’d seen the act live. Ronnie Bennett, later Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes, with whom they’d also toured England, had played host to the visiting Englishmen. Keith and Ronnie were having a secret affair and Mick was enjoying the company of her cousin and fellow Ronette Estelle. “They were so far away from home, I guess they just needed to be around a family sometimes,” Spector explained in her memoir, Be My Baby. Mick and Keith would eat home-cooked breakfasts, play records, watch TV. One night, during their short stay in the city, Ronnie brought Mick and Keith over to Harlem’s legendary Apollo Theater, where James Brown was scheduled to headline. “Mick Jagger was the biggest James Brown nut ever,” Spector recalled. “When we were on tour in England, he kept us up half the night asking questions about James Brown. What was he like offstage? Where he’d learned to dance. How much did he rehearse? I finally had to tell Mick, ‘Enough already. I don’t even know James Brown. I’m a Ronette, remember?’ ”
Mick and Keith were taken backstage after Brown brought down the house and were briefly introduced by Spector. “I don’t think James Brown even knew who these weird English guys were, but Mick and Keith were practically shaking.”
Now, as the hour drew closer, it was a becoming a true challenge not to obsess about James Brown once again. With the exception of Berry, who would be the first act to perform, the T.A.M.I. Show was all about showcasing the new. The technology (a camera system called “Electrono-vision”) was new. The sounds were new. Surf rock (the Beach Boys), girl groups (the aforementioned Supremes), pop soul (Gaye, Robinson and the Miracles), teen pop (Leslie Gore), British Invasion (Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Gerry and the Pacemakers), and the American garage rock it inspired (The Barbarians): black, white, American, and English, all playing on the same stage to the same crowd. And if the world was really new, then Mick had to prove it. It was not an unimportant showcase for the Stones, career-wise. They had a few American hits but they weren’t in the Beatles’ league yet. The T.A.M.I . Show film would be distributed to more than a thousand theaters throughout the country—a serious boost in exposure.
Brown arrived at the Civic Center and was promptly informed of what the Stones already knew. “I remember James coming up and saying ‘Of course I’m the last act on the bill, right?’ ” says Steve Binder, director of the T.A.M.I. Show. “I told him, ‘No, actually you’re going to be followed by the Rolling Stones.’ James looked at me and smiled and said, ‘Nobody follows James Brown.’ ”
Visually, the Stones had what it took to anchor the show. Like very few of their fellow British invaders, they were uncommonly fascinating on camera; better even than the Beatles; sinister and wry, more like Elvis. The lens seemed to pick up their raunchy inner monologues and transmit each suggestive expression straight into the viewer id. At that point, they were TV veterans, starting with appearances on Ready, Steady Go! in ’63 and finally following the Beatles to the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York on this last tour. If nerves didn’t get the better
of them, they stood a fighting chance of justifying the hype that went along with newsreel footage of fainting girls and hastily boarded limousines.
With no separate quarters for the bands backstage, behind the wall of the proscenium it was a sprawl where shop was talked, friendships made, admiration expressed, cigarettes bummed. When one band would rehearse, others would gather in the wings to watch. But James Brown was nowhere to be seen. His absence was conspicuous.
“The Rolling Stones from Liverpool are gonna be there—the fab-looking guys with the moppy long hair,” went the lyrics to the “T.A.M.I. Show Theme,” sung by hosts Jan and Dean. If nothing else, this underscores just how difficult it was to delineate yourself from the Beatles in ’64. Every band with a British accent might as well have been from Liverpool. Jan and Dean opened the show and introduced Berry, who duckwalked through “Maybelline” before ceding the stage to Gerry and the Pacemakers, who played along to a meandering blues segue before performing their own ballad “Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying.” Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, their leader somewhat hoarse but still at turns smoldering and kinetic, followed (“You Really Got a Hold on Me,” “Mickey’s Monkey”). A dapper Gaye played the aforementioned “Hitch Hike.” Leslie Gore brought undiluted teenage gothic drama with “You Don’t Own Me.” Jan and Dean returned to perform their skateboard ode, “Sidewalk Surfin’.”