Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994

by David Hepworth

  That September Ringo played some shows with his new group and made a few records but his most important day’s work was on the 28th. Brian Epstein was a successful record retailer. He had tried to become an actor, which had given him some understanding of the requirements of publicity. To that end he’d hired a local photographic firm in Liverpool to take pictures of the group to mark the release of their first single ‘Love Me Do’ in October. A studio session had to be junked when they refused to take the task seriously. Epstein wanted a picture that positioned them as being from Liverpool. After all, Liverpool was their gimmick. Hence for the follow-up session they were taken to a number of locations in the old industrial heart of the city. And here, against the background of soot-weathered warehouse buildings from the nineteenth century, in such a place as you would never have found Cliff Richard and the Shadows or the Everly Brothers or in fact anybody involved in the business of light entertainment, the four of them placed their Chelsea boots on the brick and shale of a wasteground and just looked at the camera, neither smiling nor frowning. They were all wearing suits, shirts and ties which had the effect of making them look the same. John and George had smart short coats over the top which had the effect of making them look different. Ringo had a cigarette between his fingers. If they looked like anything it was a bunch of northern playwrights assembled for a shoot for a newspaper.

  The background of the picture says not only ‘this is who we are’ but also ‘this is where we come from’. The background wasn’t the cyclorama dreamscape of the standard Hollywood publicity pic, designed to suggest a nowhere-in-particular neverland. Here you were being invited to buy the context as much as the content. It was an image, all the more powerful because it didn’t seem to be an image. And Ringo, with side-parting still hanging on from the recent makeover, grey streak in the hair behind his ear and his lugubrious bus driver’s face, rendered that image complete. This was a case of the instinct of three young men being worth more than all the accumulated wisdom of show business. In replacing Pete Best with Ringo Starr, John, Paul and George had got rid of somebody who looked as if he ought to be a rock star but wasn’t. They’d replaced him with somebody who didn’t look like a rock star at all but was. In the process they had done something even more important: they had truly become the Beatles.

  1962 PLAYLIST

  The Crystals, ‘He’s A Rebel’

  Frank Sinatra, ‘Everybody’s Twistin”

  Bruce Channel, ‘Hey! Baby’

  Peter, Paul & Mary, ‘If I Had A Hammer’

  Carole King, ‘It Might As Well Rain Until September’

  John Barry, the James Bond theme

  The Four Seasons, ‘Sherry’

  Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan

  The Tornados, ‘Telstar’

  The Beatles, ‘Love Me Do’

  1 MAY 1963

  LONDON

  The man who didn’t fit in

  NEWS TRAVELLED FASTER in the days when there were fewer channels for that news to travel down. Furthermore, that news made more impact when it landed. For young fans of specialist musical genres in the UK in 1963 the advantage of only having two channels of TV and three of radio was that if the blues, or indeed anything slightly out of the ordinary, were broadcast, the likelihood was you would catch it. Having done so, it was equally likely you would meet other people who had also caught it.

  Mick Jagger came to meet up with Keith Richards in just such a way. The two had been to primary school together in Dartford, Kent when they were seven years old. But after primary school their paths had diverged. Michael Philip, being academically able and the son of a middle-class family, had gone to Dartford Grammar School, which turned out Dartford’s next generation of doctors and bank managers. Keith, not being academically inclined and coming from a family with low expectations, had gone to the Dartford Technical High School, which turned out the people who fixed the cars of the doctors and bank managers. It would have been perfectly possible for them never to have met again had it not been for the blues.

  On 17 October 1961 they were both waiting for a train at Dartford station, but heading for different places and different futures. Mick was going to the London School of Economics, which offered the kind of university education available at the time to less than 4 per cent of the population. Keith was headed to Sidcup Art College, which promised at best a future designing letterheads for small businesses. But what united them was stronger than what divided them. Mick was carrying two albums under his arm. One was Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ At The Hops; the other was The Best Of Muddy Waters. He had bought both by sending off to Chess Records in Chicago. This was a process that involved writing letters, buying postal orders and then waiting for a long time and praying that the record wouldn’t get broken in transit. Keith was lugging his hollow-bodied Epiphone guitar. The carrying of such items in a public place in the year 1961 was like a cry for help. They weren’t going anywhere in particular. They were probably carrying these items to show that they had them. The two struck up a conversation. It was inconceivable they wouldn’t.

  This was in the days when any records, but particularly imported American blues records, were such objects of desire that enthusiasts would often embark on inconvenient cross-town trips involving bus changes in order to visit the house of somebody rumoured to have a copy of some particular gem; once there they would play both sides again and again, staring hypnotized at the spinning labels until both sight and sound had been seared into the memory. If you wanted to go beyond listening and actually play this music, as Keith and Mick did, you had to listen even harder until you could make a guess at what the guitarist had been playing at the original session. If you lived within reach of London it was of course more useful to watch the fingers of actual musicians, even if they were a few years older than you and condescending about which varieties of music they were prepared to play and which they weren’t.

  In and around London at that time a few score white Englishmen from widely differing backgrounds – from the lower ranks of the services to the fringes of the aristocracy, from the ivy-clad walls of Oxbridge to the municipal art colleges, from working-class panel beaters to worldly Jewish émigrés – were drawn to the blues because it afforded them a chance to sink their personal histories and lose their giveaway accents in its rich fantasy world of hellhounds, bootleg whisky and Chicago-bound trains; having done so, they then went on to snipe at other English musicians for real or imagined offences against musical orthodoxy and signs of insufficient rootsiness. It would have been funny had it not been so earnest. When Keith and Mick first met Brian Jones, blond-haired father of three and only twenty years old, and he announced that he was performing under the name Elmo Lewis, they didn’t laugh or point out that he really couldn’t be called Elmo Lewis because he came from Cheltenham. They just nodded as if they understood.

  There was no such pretence about Ian Stewart. Stewart was in many senses the key individual in the group of people gathering at the time around Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. He didn’t have much interest in the mythology of the music; he dealt with the music itself. This had led him to meet Brian Jones, and through him Jagger and Richards. In that early summer of 1962, Stewart was twenty-three. He was a man of the world. He had a real job, one that gave him access to an actual telephone during working hours. He was practical. He was the one who suggested that this loose affiliation of boys should at least get serious enough to stop rehearsing in their front rooms and cough up the fifteen shillings it cost to hire the upstairs room at the Bricklayers Arms in Broadwick Street, Soho. When Keith arrived for that first rehearsal he heard the sound of boogie woogie being coaxed from the piano upstairs. Stewart, known to all as ‘Stu’, was the man doing the coaxing. He was wearing his customary leather cycling shorts and keeping one eye out for his bike which was attached to a lamp post across the street. ‘From the moment I walked in, went upstairs and heard him playing Albert Ammons, I always felt “this is Stu’s band”,’ Keith recalled years later.<
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  Stu was Scottish, which was not the only thing about him that marked him out from the rest. He was five years older than Mick and Keith and held down a proper job with ICI, which meant he spent every day undercover in the real world, a place the rest of the group knew little about. There was no possibility of Keith getting a job at the time because his hair was too long. Mick was a student and therefore didn’t have to get a job. Stu’s job involved wearing a collar and tie. His hair was swept back in the conventional fifties style. Stu was a doer, not a fantasist. He bought a van, which made him instantly indispensable as the band, now known as the Rollin’ Stones, began to pick up work. He was sharp as well. Stu was the one to spot that the trad jazz bands who dominated the circuit could be easily upstaged by a band serving up fifteen minutes of electric blues while they took a break to refill their pipes and recharge their glasses. Ian was the one who told them they had to get Charlie Watts in to play the drums. In fact in many ways Ian Stewart was the man who formed the Rollin’ Stones.

  The winter of 1962/63 was when ‘the whole attitude in London changed’, according to Keith Richards. He, Jagger and Jones were living at the time in a state of almost medieval squalor at 102 Edith Grove, Chelsea. (Fifty years later, when this was one of the most expensive districts in the world, a replica of the verminous kitchen at Edith Grove was constructed at great expense for a smart exhibition marking the anniversary of its former occupants.) Intuiting that neither of them was quite strong enough to perform the standard soloist’s role, Keith and Brian were groping their way towards a sound that involved the meshing of two or more guitars. This, together with the laconic drum sound of Charlie Watts, is what provided the texture of the Rollin’ Stones’ sound. It was this texture, which didn’t actually sound much like the records that inspired it, that went on to conquer the world. This was also the winter of the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’ going to number one, of the distant keening sound of Beatlemania coming out of the north, of a new decade beginning to walk upright, of a feeling of new possibilities. The Beatles turned up to see the Stones and promised them a song, a leg-up not even the most ardent purist could refuse. When winter began in 1962 the Rollin’ Stones were a blues band. By the spring of 1963 they had their sights on being the toppermost of the poppermost.

  The three men at the front of the group were excited by this. Two of the men in the back line could certainly see the appeal. Stu could not. Maybe there was no future for him in the group.

  Stewart’s hash was finally settled by a new kind of manager, somebody who saw a bigger picture for the group and ensured that they would live on while the hundreds of rhythm and blues groups who came in their wake would be forgotten. Again it was the lack of options that led young Andrew Loog Oldham, who was only nineteen at the time, to become the Rolling Stones’ first manager. He was a teenage PR man who had been tipped off that this group were starting to attract fans to their residencies at the Station Hotel, Richmond. He was spending Sunday with his mother in Hampstead. This was in the days when London shut down on Sunday and there was nothing on TV. He worked out he could take the train from Hampstead Heath directly to Richmond station, where the Rolling Stones played their Sunday afternoon show. He did so and walked straight into a scene of great enthusiasm, much of it female. Oldham smelled oestrogen in the air. The Stones played R&B in such a way that you would dance to it, which was not something you could say about the competition. The Stones were sexual. Oldham was excited by the possibilities inherent in this. Within days he had taken them on as management clients, in partnership with Eric Easton because he was too young to sign a legally binding document, and then got them a recording contract with Decca, who were so determined to atone for having passed on the Beatles they couldn’t wait to snap them up.

  As soon as this had been accomplished, on 1 May 1963 Oldham and Easton got Mick and Keith in a room and told them that henceforth they would be the Rolling Stones and not the Rollin’ Stones, that Mick and Keith would be the heart of the group, and that Ian Stewart could continue to drive the van (the van he had bought and paid for) and play on sessions; indeed he could take the same stage with them, just as long as he remained behind the curtain. Henceforth he would no longer be in the group. Oldham’s reasons were similarly three-fold. Apart from the practical difficulties of lugging what was effectively an item of furniture around on the road, the presence of an upright piano such as many middle-class families still had in their living rooms in those days would be at odds with his preferred image of the Stones as a nimble, naughty guitar band; by having five members the band was already asking a lot of people’s capacity for recall; and finally, most crushingly, most tellingly and most indicative of why Andrew Loog Oldham is remembered as a great band manager, he told them that Ian Stewart spoiled the look of the group.

  The word Oldham used was ‘ugly’.

  Oldham was right. Stu didn’t fit the picture. In fact he looked as if he came from an earlier decade. As Oldham said, Stu had a chin like the American actor William Bendix, who was a figure from an even earlier decade. In the very few early publicity pictures which include him Ian Stewart looks embarrassed at the whole business of having his picture taken. Although the Rolling Stones were not conventionally handsome, and within a year would be attracting headlines like ‘Is this the ugliest group in Britain?’, they had a look. It was a look that the presence of Ian Stewart simply ruined. As Keith said, ‘I’m sure much of Ian’s character was influenced by his looks, and people’s reactions to them, from when he was a kid.’

  Mick and Keith didn’t fight it. Nor, to his credit, did Stu. As Keith recalled, he said, ‘“I’m here as long as I can still play piano and we’ll hang together in the band and I’ll not be in the pictures.” That takes a big heart, but Stu had one of the largest hearts around.’ He would continue to be the key person in their entourage and their right-hand man for the next twenty years. He died in a doctor’s waiting room in 1985. Most nights between 1962 and then he would call them to the stage of some enormous arena with the words ‘come on, my little shower of shit’. Nobody else could begin to talk to them the way Stu did. He was the last person to address them as if they were simple human beings and not rock gods. He could do that because he might not have been paid for it, he might not have been seen doing it, he might not have had his name on the records, but spiritually he was still in the band. Over the years they reasoned his departure away. ‘I don’t think Ian could imagine being a pop star,’ said Mick, which was true. Stu was also only interested in playing the kind of music that didn’t get above number forty-five in the charts. And his face literally didn’t fit. That was as good a reason as any for putting him out of the group. The best decision the Beatles took was to bring Ringo Starr in. The best decision the Stones took was to chuck Ian Stewart out.

  The standard reaction to Oldham’s firing of Stewart was to wonder how he could possibly say that this man was too ugly to be in a group that seemed to be chock-full of uglies: there was Mick with his cavernous mouth, Keith with his crooked teeth, Brian with his sinister smile and Bill Wyman looking as though Cruikshank had knocked him up from a set of instructions provided by Dickens. Andrew Oldham gave up a job doing PR for the Beatles to manage the Rolling Stones; therefore he knew something. He hadn’t worked with the Beatles long but it had been long enough to see how the magic within a group operated. He intuited that the magic wasn’t merely musical, it was connected with how they looked at each other and beyond that to how they looked out at the world. Groups who visibly related to each other when they played were far more absorbing to look at than those who didn’t. When they looked out at the world and the world looked back with the question ‘Just who the hell do you think you are?’ implicit in its gaze, a group, a proper group that is, needed to be able to return that gaze with interest. They needed to be able to return that gaze with a look that said, Yes, even I, former Aircraftsman Bill Perks from Penge, secretly twenty-seven years old and already married, who only got into this grou
p because I had an amplifier, was actually raised by wolves for this purpose, and it is my very special destiny to be a rock star and a member of this group and no other.

  Ian Stewart could never have done that. Ian could never have looked that way. Ian could never have portrayed what Oldham’s plan called for rock stars to portray, which was a bigger version of themselves. He was just too self-effacing for that. Stu went along with them for the ride and had a view of the madness that nobody else could match. He booked them into hotels near championship golf courses so that he could follow his other passion while they were still sleeping in. He wasn’t temperamentally suited to being a rock star. He was impervious to the lust for glory that drives rock stars on. He could never have been a rock star for the same simple reason that the rest of us aren’t rock stars. Because we can imagine not being one.

  1963 PLAYLIST

  The Beatles, ‘She Loves You’

  The Kingsmen, ‘Louie Louie’

  The Ronettes, ‘Be My Baby’