Читать книгу Mick Jagger - Philip Norman - Страница 8
ОглавлениеMike Jagger seemed living proof of the unnamed band’s determination to go nowhere. He remained firm in his refusal to play a guitar, instead just standing there in front of the other three, as incomplete and exposed without that instantly glamorising, dignifying prop as if he’d forgotten to put on his trousers. The singing voice unveiled by his prodigious lips and flicking tongue was likewise an almost perverse departure from the norm. White British vocalists usually sang jazz or blues in a gravelly, cigarette-smoky style modelled – vainly – on Louis ‘Satchmo’ Armstrong. Mike’s voice, higher and lighter in tone, borrowed from a larger, more eclectic cast; it was a distillation of every Deep Southern accent he’d ever heard, white as much as black, feminine as much as masculine; Scarlett O’Hara, plus a touch of Mammy from Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois from A Streetcar Named Desire as much as Blind Lemon Jefferson or Sonny Boy Williamson.
Unencumbered by a guitar – mostly even by a microphone – he had to do something while he sang. But the three friends, accustomed to his cool, non-committal school persona, were amazed by what he did do. Blues vocalists traditionally stood or, more often, sat in an anguished trance, cupping one ear with a hand to amplify the sonic self-flagellation. When Mike sang the blues, however, his loose-limbed, athletic body rebutted the music’s melancholic inertia word by word: he shuffled to and fro on his moccasins, ground his hips, rippled his arms and euphorically shook his shaggy head. Like his singing, it had an element of parody and self-parody, but an underlying total conviction. A song from his early repertoire, John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, summed up this metamorphosis: ‘The blues is in him . . . and it’s got to come out . . .’
Practice sessions for the non-existent gigs were mostly held at Dick Taylor’s house in Bexleyheath or at Alan Etherington’s, a few doors along from the Jaggers. Alan owned a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a Philips ‘Joystick’ (so named for its aeronautical-looking volume control) on which the four could preserve and review their first efforts together. The Etherington home boasted the further luxury of a Grundig ‘radiogram’, a cabinet radio-cum-record-player with surround sound, an early form of stereo. Dick and Bob Beckwith did not have custom-built electric guitars, only acoustic ones with metal pickups screwed to the bodies. Beckwith, the more accomplished player of the two, would plug his guitar into the radiogram, increasing its volume about thirtyfold.
At Dick’s, if the weather was fine, they would rehearse in the back garden – the future lord of giant alfresco spaces and horizonless crowds surveying a narrow vista of creosoted wood fences, washing lines and potting sheds. Dick’s mum, who sometimes interrupted her housework to watch, told Mike from the start that he had ‘something special’. However small or accidental the audience, he gave them his all. ‘If I could get a show, I would do it,’ he would remember. ‘I used to do mad things . . . Get on my knees and roll on the floor . . . I didn’t have inhibitions. It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.’
Though Joe and Eva Jagger had no comprehension of the blues or its transfiguring effect on their elder son, they were quite happy for his group to practise at ‘Newlands’, in either his bedroom or the garden. Eva found his singing hilarious and would later describe ‘creasing up’ with laughter at the sound of his voice through the wall. His father’s only concern was that it shouldn’t interfere with his physical training programme. Once, when he and Dick Taylor were leaving for a practise session elsewhere, Joe called out, ‘Michael . . . don’t forget your weight training.’ Mike dutifully turned back and spent half an hour in the garden with his weights and barbells. Another time, he arrived for band practice distraught because he’d fallen from one of the tree ropes at home and bitten his tongue. What if it had permanently damaged his singing voice? ‘We all told him it made no difference,’ Dick Taylor remembers. ‘But he did seem to lisp a bit and sound a bit more bluesy after that.’
Building up a repertoire was a laborious process. The usual way was for Mike and Dick to bring a record back from London, and the four to listen to it over and over until Bob had mastered the guitar fills and Mike learned the words. They did not restrict themselves to blues, but also experimented with white rock and pop songs, like Buddy Holly’s, which had some kinship with it. One of the better performances committed to the Philips Joystick was of ‘La Bamba’, whose sixteen-year-old singer–composer Ritchie Valens had died in the same plane crash that killed Holly in February 1959. Its Latino nonsense words being impossible to decipher, no matter how often one replayed the record, Mike simply invented his own.
The Joystick’s inventory dramatically improved with their discovery of harder-edged electric blues, as played by John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Memphis Slim and Howlin’ Wolf. A discovery of almost equal momentousness was that many of these alluring names could be traced to the same source, the Chess record label of Chicago. Founded in the 1940s by two Polish immigrant brothers, Leonard and Phil Chess, the label had started out with jazz but become increasingly dominated by what was then called ‘race’ music – i.e., for exclusively black consumption. Its most notable early acquisition had been McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters, born in 1913 (the same year as Joe Jagger) and known as ‘the father of the Chicago Blues’ for tracks like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, ‘I Just Want to Make Love to You’ and his theme song, ‘Rollin’ Stone’. His album At Newport 1960, capturing his performance at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, was the first album Mike Jagger ever bought.
In 1955, Chess signed St. Louis-born Charles Edward Anderson – aka Chuck – Berry, a singer-songwriter-guitarist who combined the sexiness and cockiness of R&B with the social commentary of country and western, the lucid diction of black balladeers like Nat ‘King’ Cole and Billy Eckstine, and a lyrical and instrumental nimbleness all his own. Soon afterwards Berry made an effortless crossover from ‘race’ music to white rock ’n’ roll with compositions such as ‘Johnny B. Goode’, ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ and ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ that were to become its defining anthems. Long before he ever heard a Chuck Berry song, Mike’s voice had some of the same character.
After a long and fruitless search for Chess LPs up and down Charing Cross Road, he discovered they could be obtained by mail order directly from the company’s Chicago headquarters. It was a gamble, since prepayment had to be enclosed and he had no idea whether he’d like the titles he ordered – if they ever materialised at all. But, after a lengthy wait, flat brown cardboard packages with American stamps began arriving at ‘Newlands’. Some of the covers had been badly chewed up in transit and not all the music lived up to his expectations. But the albums in themselves were splendiferous status symbols. He took to carrying around three or four at once tucked under one arm, a fashion accessory as much as his gold-flecked jacket and moccasins. Alan Dow, who’d rejected him as a vocalist for Danny Rogers and the Realms, witnessed one such almost regal progress across the school playground.
In summer 1961, he sat his A-level exams, passing in English and history but, surprisingly, failing in French. He considered becoming a schoolteacher in his father’s – and grandfather’s – footsteps, and toyed with the idea of journalism and (unmentionably to his parents) disc-jockeying on Radio Luxembourg. Leafing through the pop music papers one week, he spotted an advertisement by a London record producer named Joe Meek, inviting would-be deejays to submit audition tapes. He clipped the ad and kept it, but – perhaps fortunately – didn’t follow it up. Meek later produced several British pop classics, all from his small north London flat, but was notorious for trying to seduce the prettier young men who crossed his path.
Instead, somewhat against expectations, Mike Jagger joined the 2 per cent of Britain’s school leavers in that era who went on to university. Despite those clashes over uniform, his headmaster, Lofty Hudson, decided he was worthy of the privilege and, in December 1960, well before he had sat his A-levels, supplied a character reference putting the best possible gloss on his academic record. ‘Jagger is a lad of good general character,’ it read in part, ‘although he has been rather slow to mature. The pleasing quality which is now emerging is that of persistence when he makes up his mind to tackle something. His interests are wide. He has been a member of several School Societies and is prominent in Games, being Secretary of our Basketball Club, a member of our First Cricket Eleven and he plays Rugby Football for his House. Out of school he is interested in Camping, Climbing, Canoeing, Music and is a member of the Local Historical Association . . . Jagger’s development now fully justifies me in recommending him for a Degree course and I hope you will be able to accept him.’
Though in no sense hyperbolic, the head’s letter did the trick. Conditional on two A-level passes, Mike was offered a place at the London School of Economics to begin reading for a BSc degree in the autumn of 1961. He accepted it, albeit without great enthusiasm. ‘I wanted to do arts, but thought I ought to do science,’ he would remember. ‘Economics seemed about halfway in between.’
At that time, Britain’s university entrants were not forced to run themselves into debt to the government to pay for their tuition, but received virtually automatic grants from local education authorities. Kent County Council gave Mike £350 per annum, which at a time of almost zero inflation was more than enough to cover three years of study, especially as he would continue living at home and travel up each day by train to the LSE’s small campus in Houghton Street, off Kings-way. Even so, it was clearly advisable to earn some money during the long summer holiday between leaving school and starting there. His choice of job sheds interesting light on a character always thought to have been consumed by selfishness, revealing that until his late teens at least he had a caring and altruistic side that made him very much his father’s son.
For several weeks that summer, he worked as a porter at a local psychiatric institution. Not Stone House – that would have been too perfect – but Bexley Hospital, a similarly grim and sprawling Victorian edifice locally nicknamed ‘the Village on the Heath’ because until recently, in the interests of total segregation, its grounds had included a fully functioning farm. He earned £4.50 per week, not at all a bad wage for the time, though he clearly could have chosen an easier job, both physically and emotionally. He was to be remembered by patients and staff alike as unfailingly kind and cheerful. He himself believed the experience taught him lessons about human psychology that were to prove invaluable throughout his life.
It was at Bexley Hospital, too, by his own account, that he lost his virginity to a nurse, huddled in a store cupboard during a brief respite from pushing trolleys and taking round meals: the furthest possible extreme from all those luxury hotel suites of the future.
A STUDENT AT the London School of Economics in 1961 enjoyed a prestige only slightly below that of Oxford or Cambridge. Founded by George Bernard Shaw and the Fabians Beatrice and Sidney Webb, it was an autonomous unit of London University whose past lecturers had included the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell and the economist John Maynard Keynes. Among its many celebrated alumni were the Labour chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Dalton, the polemical journalist Bernard Levin, the newly elected president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, and his brother (and attorney general) Robert.
It was also by long tradition Britain’s most highly politicised seat of learning, governed largely by old-school right-wingers but with an increasingly radical student population and junior staff. Though its heyday as a cauldron of youthful dissent was still half a dozen years in the future, LSE demonstrators already took to the streets on a regular basis, protesting against foreign atrocities like the Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa and supporting their elder statesman Bertrand Russell’s Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. One of Mike’s fellow students, the future publisher and peer Matthew Evans, had won his place despite passing only one A-level and with a far more modest cache of O-levels, including woodwork. More important was that he’d taken part in the famous CND protest march to the nuclear weapons research establishment at Aldermaston, Berkshire.
On the same BSc degree course was Laurence Isaacson, in later life a highly successful restaurant tycoon who would quip that if he’d sung or played an instrument his future might have been very different. Born in Liverpool, he had attended Dovedale Primary School like John Lennon and George Harrison and then, like Lennon, gone on to Quarry Bank High School; now here he was actually sitting next to another future legend of rock. The two were doing the same specialist subject, industry and trade, for the second paper in their finals. ‘That meant that if Jagger missed a lecture, he’d copy out my notes, and if I missed one, I’d copy out his,’ Isaacson says. ‘I seem to recall he used to do most of the copying.’
Like Evans, Isaacson remembers him as ‘obviously extremely bright’ and easily capable of achieving a 2:1 degree. At lectures, he was always quiet and well mannered and spoke ‘like a nice middle-class boy . . . The trouble was that it still all felt a bit too much like school. You had to be very respectful to the tutors and, of course, never answer back. And the classes were so small that they always had their eye on you. I remember one shouting out, “Jagger . . . if you don’t concentrate, you’re never going to get anywhere!”’
Barely two years into a new decade, London had already taken huge strides away from the stuffy, sleepy fifties – though the changes were only just beginning. A feeling of excitement and expectation pulsed through the crusty old Victorian metropolis at every level: from its towering new office blocks and swirling new traffic overpasses and underpasses to its impudent new minicars, minivans and minicabs and ever-lengthening rows of parking meters; from its new wine bars, ‘bistros’ and Italian trattorias to its sophisticated new advertisements and brand identities and newly launched, or revivified, glossy magazines like Town, Queen and Tatler; from its young men in modish narrower trousers, thick-striped shirts and square-toed shoes to its young women in masculine-looking V-necked Shetland sweaters, 1920s-style ropes of beads, black stockings and radically short skirts.
Innovation and experimentation (once again the merest amuse-bouche from the banquet to come) flourished at new theatres like Bernard Miles’s Mermaid and Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Royal, Stratford East; in the plays of Arnold Wesker and Harold Pinter; in mould-shattering productions like Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller’s Beyond the Fringe and Lionel Bart’s Oliver! The middle-aged metropolitan sophisticates whose posh accents always ruled London’s arts and media now began to seem laughably old-fashioned. An emergent school of young painters from humble families and provincial backgrounds – including Yorkshire’s David Hockney, Essex’s Allen Jones and Dartford’s Peter Blake – were being more talked and written about than any since the French Impressionists. Vogue magazine, the supreme arbiter of style and sophistication, ceased employing bow-tied society figures to photograph its model girls, instead hiring a brash young East End Cockney named David Bailey.
Only in popular music did excitement seem to be dwindling rather than growing. The ructions that rock ’n’ roll had caused among mid-fifties teenagers were a distant, almost embarrassing memory. Elvis Presley had disappeared into the US army for two years, and then emerged shorn of his sideburns, singing ballads and hymns. The American music industry had been convulsed by scandals over payola and the misadventures of individual stars. Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran were dead; Little Richard had found God; Jerry Lee Lewis had been engulfed in controversy after bigamously marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin; Chuck Berry had been convicted on an immorality charge involving a teenage girl. The new teenage icons were throwbacks to the crooner era, with names like Frankie and Bobby, chosen for prettiness rather than vocal talent, and their manifest inability to hurt a fly (or unbutton one). The only creative sparks came from young white songwriters working out of New York’s Brill Building, largely supplying black singers and groups, and from the black-owned Motown record label in Detroit: all conclusive proof that ‘race’ music was dead and buried.
Such rock idols as Britain had produced – Tommy Steele, Adam Faith, Cliff Richard – had all heeded the dire warnings that it couldn’t possibly last and crossed over as soon as possible into mainstream show business. The current craze was ‘Trad’, a homogenised version of traditional jazz whose bands dressed in faux-Victorian bowler hats and waistcoats and played mainstream show tunes like Cole Porter’s ‘I Love You, Samantha’ and even Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘March of the Siamese Children’. The wild, skirt-twirling rock ’n’ roll jive had given way to the slower, more formal Stomp, which involved minimal bodily contact between the dancers and tended to come to a respectful halt during drum solos.
In short, the danger seemed to have passed.
BARELY A MONTH into Mike’s first term at LSE, he met up with Keith Richards again and they resumed the conversation that had broken off in the Wentworth County Primary playground eleven years earlier.
The second most important partnership in rock music history might never have happened if either of them had got out of bed five minutes later, missed a bus, or lingered to buy a pack of cigarettes or a Mars bar. It took place early one weekday on the ‘up’ platform at Dartford railway station as they waited for the same train, Mike to get to Charing Cross in London and Keith to Sidcup, four stops away, where he was now at art college.
Since their discussion about cowboys and guitars as seven-year-olds, they had remained vaguely in each other’s orbit without being friends. When the Jaggers lived on Denver Road in the centre of Dartford, Keith’s home had been on Chastillian Road, literally one street away. Their mothers were on casually friendly terms, and would exchange family news if ever they chanced to meet around town. But after Wentworth their only further encounter had been one summer day outside Dartford Library when Mike had a holiday job selling ice cream and Keith, recognising him, stopped and bought one. That time, their conversation had been even briefer, albeit punctuated by a prophetic lapping tongue.
As eighteen-year-olds, waiting among the diurnal wage slaves at Dartford Station, they could not have looked more different. Mike was a typical middle-class student with his beige wool cardigan and black-, purple- and yellow-striped LSE scarf. Keith, though also technically a student, did his utmost not to resemble one with his faded blue denim jeans and jerkin and lilac-coloured shirt. To 1961 eyes, that made an unpleasing cross between a Teddy Boy and a beatnik.
Keith instantly recognised Mike by the lips, as Mike did Keith by the almost skull-bony face and protruding ears that had barely changed since he was in short trousers. It also happened that Mike was carrying two albums he had just received from the Chess label in Chicago, The Best of Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops. ‘To me,’ Keith would recall, ‘that was Captain Morgan’s treasure. I thought, “I know you. And what you got under your arm’s worth robbing.”’
The upshot was that when their train pulled in, they decided to travel together. Rattling through the Kentish suburbs, they found they had other idols in common, a crowd almost as dense as the newspaper-reading, strap-hanging one around them: Sonny Boy Williamson . . . John Lee Hooker . . . Howlin’ Wolf . . . Willie Dixon . . . Jimmy Reed . . . Jimmy Witherspoon . . . T-Bone Walker . . . Little Walter . . . Never one to stint on melodrama, Keith would afterwards equate the moment with the blues’ darkest fable – young Robert Johnson keeping a tryst with the devil and, Faust-like, bartering his soul to be able to play like an angel. ‘Just sitting on that train . . . it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert did.’ When the train pulled into Sidcup, he was so absorbed in copying down the serial numbers on Mike’s albums that he almost forgot to get off.
Keith not only had music in his blood (where it was destined to be severely jostled by other, more questionable additives) but guitar wood almost in his bones. Once again, Kent could claim little of the credit. On his mother’s side, he was descended from French Huguenots, Protestants who had fled Catholic persecution in their own country and found asylum in the Channel Isles. The music was infused largely through his maternal grandfather, Theodore Augustus Dupree, who led a succession of semi-professional dance bands and played numerous instruments, including piano, saxophone, violin and guitar. One of Keith’s great childhood treats – all in all somewhat fewer than Mike Jagger enjoyed – was to accompany his ‘Grandfather Gus’ to the Ivor Mairants music store in London’s West End, where guitars were custom-built on the premises. Sometimes he would be allowed into the workshops to watch the fascinating silhouettes take shape and inhale the aromas of raw rosewood, resin and varnish; despite stiff competition, the headiest narcotic he would ever know.
An only child, he had been raised by parents who in every way were the opposite of Mike’s. His father, Bert Richards, a dour, introverted character, worked punishingly long shifts as a supervisor in a lightbulb factory and so had little energy left over to be an authority figure and role model like Joe Jagger. In equal contrast with Eva Jagger, Keith’s mother, Doris, was a sunny-natured, down-to-earth woman who spoiled him rotten, loved music, and had an eclectic taste ranging from Sarah Vaughan to Mozart. As she washed up his dirty dishes with the radio blaring, she’d call out to him to ‘listen to that blue note!’
Doris’s refusal ever to make Keith toe the line had withstood every sanction of mid-fifties state schooling and resulted in an intelligent, perceptive boy being branded an irredeemable dunce. By the age of thirteen, he was regarded as an academic no-hoper and had been consigned to Dartford Technical School, hopefully to acquire some honest artisan trade. The school was in Wilmington, which meant he unknowingly crossed paths with Mike every morning and evening as Mike went to and from Dartford Grammar. At Dartford Tech, he was as inattentive and disruptive as at school, and was expelled after two years without a single plumbing or bricklaying certificate to his name.
Sidcup Art College was the bottom of the heap. In this era, even the smallest British town usually had its own college or school of art built in Victorian mock-Gothic style, a civic amenity as familiar as the library or the swimming baths. All were open to school leavers with the faintest artistic bent, which as a rule meant misfits who had not reached university standard but lacked the drive to go out and find a job. Since the fifties, a secondary role of art schools had been giving shelter to young men whose obsession with rock ’n’ roll music seemed destined to take them nowhere. Keith had joined an unwitting brotherhood that also included, or would include, John Lennon, Peter Townshend, Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood, Ray Davies, Syd Barrett and David Jones, later Bowie.
As a working-class teenager, he felt the full impact of rock ’n’ roll’s first wave, rather than waiting around like bourgeois Mike for it to clean up its act. The national guitar fever unleashed by Elvis Presley had infected him long ago, thanks to Grandfather Gus and the craftsmen at Ivor Mairants’s. His adoring mum bought him his first guitar for seven pounds, out of her wages from working in a Dartford baker’s shop. Though he could sing – in fact, had sung soprano in the massed choirs at the Queen’s coronation – his ambition was to be like Scotty Moore, the solo guitarist in Presley’s backing trio, whose light and jaunty rockabilly riffs somehow perfectly set off the King’s brooding sexual menace.
At Sidcup Art College he did little on a creative level, apart from developing what would become a near genius for vandalism. Musically speaking, however, the college provided an education which he devoured like none before. Among its students was a clique of hard-core blues enthusiasts, as usual acting like a resistance cell in an occupied country. Their moving spirit, Dick Taylor, had lately arrived from Dartford Grammar School, where he had belonged to an identical underground movement with Mike Jagger. Dick converted Keith to the blues just as he’d converted Mike a year earlier. In the process, he sometimes mentioned playing in a band, but so vaguely that Keith never realised his old primary schoolmate was also a member. He had in fact been longing to join but, says Taylor, was ‘too shy to ask’.
After their chance reunion on that morning commuter train, Mike and Keith met up again at Dartford’s only cool place, the Carousel coffee bar, and were soon regularly hanging out together. Keith brought along his guitar, an acoustic Hofner cello model with F-holes, and Mike revealed that, despite his college scarf and well-bred accent, he sang blues. They began making music together immediately, finding their tastes identical – blues, with some pop if it was good – and their empathy almost telepathic. ‘We’d hear something, we’d both look at each other at once,’ Keith would later write in his autobiography, Life. ‘We’d hear a record and go “That’s wrong. That’s faking it. That’s real.”’ As with two other total opposites, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who had met in Liverpool four years earlier, their character differences only seemed to cement the friendship. ‘[Mike] liked Keith’s laid-back quality, his tough stance, his obsession with the guitar,’ says Taylor, ‘and Keith was attracted to Mike’s intelligence, his dramatic flair.’
Mike was all for bringing Keith into the unnamed blues band that still somehow struggled along. But aside from Taylor, there were two other members to convince. Although Bob Beckwith and Alan Etherington had also now left Dartford Grammar School, both still lived at home, in circumstances as irreproachably middle class as the Jaggers’. Keith was not simply their social inferior, but hailed from very much the wrong side of the tracks: he lived in a council house on the definitely rough Temple Hill estate in east Dartford, and was known to hang out with the town’s most disreputable ‘Teds’. However, one band practice session was enough for Beckwith and Etherington to agree with Taylor’s estimate of Mike’s mate as ‘an absolute lout . . . but a really nice lout’. The line-up obligingly rearranged itself so that Keith could alternate on lead guitar with Beckwith.
Chuck Berry was Keith’s real passport into their ranks. For Berry had done what no schoolteacher or college lecturer could – made him pay attention and apply himself. The gymnastic electric riffs with which Berry punctuated his vocals were still way beyond most of his young British admirers. But Keith, by listening to the records over and over, had nailed every last note and half chord in ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’, ‘Memphis, Tennessee’, even the complex intro and solo to ‘Johnny B. Goode’, where Berry somehow single-handedly sounded like two lead guitarists trying to outpick each other. Mike’s voice, if it resembled anyone’s, had always sounded a bit like Berry’s; in this authentic instrumental setting, he now became Chuck almost to the life.
With Keith’s arrival, the band finally acquired a name, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. His guitar had the name ‘Blue Boy’ inside it, and ‘Little Boy Blue’ was a pseudonym of the blues giant Sonny Boy Williamson. There was also a hint of giggle-making double entendre (‘Little Boy Blue, come blow up your horn’) and an ironic nod to The Blue Boy, Thomas Gainsborough’s eighteenth-century portrait of an angelic youth in sky-coloured satin. In other words, they could not have dreamed up anything much worse.
Away from the band, not all Mike’s friends were quite so accepting of Keith. Alan Etherington recalls that in their wider ex-Dartford Grammar School circle, there would sometimes be parties to which Mike’s Teddy Boy friend was pointedly not invited. That used to upset Mike, showing his bandmates a more sensitive, caring person than they previously had taken him for. He adopted a protective attitude towards Keith – who was not nearly as tough as he pretended, and in many ways a rather sensitive, vulnerable soul – while Keith, in return, followed him with almost dog-like devotion.
Mike, for his part, crossed over to Keith’s side of the tracks without any problem. The Richardses’ cosy, untidy council house on Spielman Road was the pleasantest possible contrast to the spotless and regimented Jagger home in The Close. Keith had no vigorous dad around to insist on weight training or team washing up, and Doris was motherly and easygoing in a way that Eva Jagger, for all her sterling qualities, had never been. When the Richardses went away for the weekend to Beesands in Devon that summer, Mike accompanied them in their battered old Vauxhall car. Keith took his guitar, and the two friends entertained customers at the local pub by playing Everly Brothers songs. Otherwise, Doris Richards remembered Mike being ‘bored to tears’ and repeatedly moaning, ‘No women . . . no women.’ On their marathon return journey, the car battery failed and they had to drive without lights. When finally they drew up outside the Jagger house four or five hours late, a tight-lipped Eva showed little sympathy.
Mike had always soaked up other people’s accents and mannerisms, usually in a mocking spirit, sometimes in an admiring one. Now, outside of college – and home – he abandoned his rather goody-goody, stripe-scarfed student persona and began to dress and carry himself more like Keith, no longer speaking in the quiet, accentless tone of a nicely brought-up middle-class boy, but in brash Kentish Cockney. Around Keith, he ceased to be known as ‘Mike’, that name so redolent of sports cars, Harris-tweed jackets, and beer in pewter mugs at smart roadhouses on Sunday mornings. Now, instead, he became ‘Mick’, its defiantly proletarian butt end, redolent only of reeking public bars and mad-drunk Irishmen. It was the tough-nut prefix for which ‘Jagger’ seemed to have been waiting all these years; joined together, the three syllables were already practically smashing windows.
While Keith’s arrival in the band widened their repertoire and gave their sound an extra bite, it did not make them any more ambitious or purposeful. They continued to practise together in a vacuum, still not trying to find live playing gigs or acquire a manager who might do so for them. Early in 1962, at Alan Etherington’s house, they used the Philips ‘Joystick’ recorder to tape Mike’s – or Mick’s – better Chuck Berry take-offs with Keith on lead guitar: two versions apiece of ‘Beautiful Delilah’, ‘Little Queenie’ and ‘Around and Around’, and one each of ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and ‘Down the Road Apiece’, plus Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘I Ain’t Got You’ and Ritchie Valens’s ‘La Bamba’. The tape was not submitted to a record company or talent agent, however, but simply analysed for instrumental and vocal faults, then forgotten – until thirty years later, when it was put up for auction as a unique glimpse of a superstar and supergroup in embryo, and sold for a fortune.
*
ON 15 MARCH 1962 Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys discovered they were not alone after all. Scanning that Thursday’s edition of Melody Maker, they lit on an advertisement for what was described – wholly justifiably, in their view – as ‘The Most Exciting Event of This Year’. In two evenings’ time, a club dedicated to blues music would open in the west London suburb of Ealing.
The club’s founder, Alexis Korner, was the first in a succession of characters from exotic regions far outside Kent who would assist Mike’s transfiguration into Mick. Born in Paris of an Austro-Russian father and a Greco-Turkish mother, Korner spent his infancy in Switzerland and North Africa before growing up in London and attending one of its most exclusive schools, St Paul’s. He became addicted to the blues as a schoolboy, rejecting all his various heritages to learn boogie-woogie piano, banjo and guitar, and feeling – much like our Dartford schoolboy in later years – an almost sacred mission to keep the music alive.
As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters – which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harbouring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents and recording studios – plus almost all the live venues that mattered – among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar shops and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched on the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a centre of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where ‘pure’ jazz enthusiasts gathered – nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognised as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements – the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton – Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate and almost wholly ‘white’ residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios – maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico – and for having a ‘Broadway’ rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the north west of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on 17 March. But the following Saturday the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.
First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as ‘trainspotters who needed somewhere to go . . . just a bunch of anoraks . . . and the girls were very thin on the ground’.
Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the line-up, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards), were attired conventionally in white shirts with sober ties, baggy grey flannel trousers and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’
Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson – but not this one. By the age of twenty he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them – motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake – there was Brian Jones.
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement he’d migrated to London soon afterwards, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got ‘up the duff’ with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well – brilliantly – enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated line-up at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his super-chic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humour; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.
Thereafter, when the Dartford boys drove to Ealing, they would make a lengthy detour to pick up Brian from his flat in Notting Hill Gate. He was supporting himself – and, to a minor extent, his girlfriend and third child – with day jobs in shops and department stores that usually ended when he was caught stealing from the cash register. Despite a seeming total lack of scruples, he had a knack of endearing himself to honest people with what Alexis Korner termed ‘a beautiful mixture of politeness and rudeness’. Whereas Mick was merely a visitor to the Korners’ flat – not always appreciated for his left-wing stridency and his patronising way of calling thirty-something Bobbie Korner ‘Auntie Bobbie’ – Brian treated the place virtually as a second home.
By now, the Ealing Club’s open-mic policy had produced other young blues singers, all similarly white and bourgeois, to challenge the kid in the cardigan. Brian – who, despite his Welsh antecedents, did not possess a singing voice – worked as a guitar/vocal duo with a sometime Oxford University student named Paul Pond (later to find fame as Paul Jones with the Manfred Mann band and, still later, as an actor, musical comedy star and radio presenter). On some nights the vocal spot with Blues Incorporated would be given to ‘Long’ John Baldry, a hugely tall, sandy-haired former street busker whose father was a police officer in Colindale; on others it went to a long-faced Middlesex boy named Art Wood whose kid brother Ronnie was among the club’s most devoted members, though not yet old enough to be served alcohol.
Occasionally, two or more vocalists at once took the stage in an implied talent contest that did not always seem to come out in the kid’s favour. Both Paul Pond and Long John Baldry had more recognisably ‘soulful’ voices, while Long John, towering over him in a shared rendition of Muddy Waters’s ‘Got My Mojo Workin’’, brought his lack of inches into uncomfortable relief. Yet Mick was the vocalist Korner always preferred. The waspish Long John – openly gay at a time when few young Britons dared to be – dismissed him as ‘all lips and ears . . . like a ventriloquist’s dummy’.
Korner also began using Mick on Blues Incorporated gigs outside the club, paying him ‘a pound or ten bob [fifty pence]’ per show. Some of these were for débutante balls at posh London hotels or country houses, in Buckinghamshire or Essex, whose front gates had porters’ lodges almost as big as the Jagger family home and front drives that seemed to go on forever. As far as Mick – or anyone in his social bracket – knew, the aristocracy had never taken the slightest interest in blues or R&B. But these young men in dinner jackets, Guards mess tunics or even kilts, proved as susceptible to Muddy, Elmore, T-Bone and Chuck as any back in proletarian Ealing; the girls might have double-barrelled surnames and horsey accents, but were no less putty in his hands when he threw his hair around. Despite the wealth all around, the gigs seldom earned him more than a few shillings – but at least he always got fed well.
The most memorable was a grand ball given by the youthful marquess of Londonderry at his ancestral home, Londonderry House in Park Lane, shortly before its demolition to make way for the new London Hilton Hotel. Among the guests was the future interior designer and super-socialite Nicky Haslam, then still a pupil at Eton. Though America’s legendary Benny Goodman Orchestra was the main musical attraction, Blues Incorporated had an early-evening spot fronted, as Haslam’s memoirs recall, ‘by a hired-in singer . . . a skinny kid named Mick something’. Haslam’s companion, the future magazine editor Min Hogg, later reported the skinny kid had been sure enough of himself to make overtures and even ‘paw’ at her strapless pink satin evening gown. From the ABC bakery to the upper crust: he had found the milieu where from now on he would be happiest.
THE EALING CLUB had started with just one hundred members; now, only two months later, it boasted more than eight hundred. When it was crowded to capacity, and beyond, the heat rivalled that of a similar subterranean space called the Cavern in far-off Liverpool. So much condensation dripped from the walls and ceiling that Korner had to hang a tarpaulin sheet over the stage canopy to stop the already precarious electrical connections from shorting out.
Korner’s real triumph was a phone call from Harold Pendleton, manager of Soho’s Marquee Club, who had so loftily banned the blues from his stage at the beginning of the year. Worried by the numbers who were defecting from the Marquee to Ealing Broadway – and by an upsurge of younger blues musicians in rival Soho clubs – Pendleton had undergone a rapid change of heart. It happened that in his weekly programme, the Thursday-night spot had fallen vacant. This he offered to Blues Incorporated, starting on 19 May.
There was, of course, no question of the band appearing without a regular vocalist as it had mostly done in Ealing. Korner wanted Mick but – atypically nice man that he was – hesitated to split up the band Mick still had with Keith. However, Keith was happy for his friend to jump at this big chance. ‘I’ll always remember how nice he was about it,’ Bobbie Korner recalls. ‘He said, “Mick really deserves this and I’m not going to stand in his way.”’
Disc magazine made the announcement, a first droplet of newsprint oceans to come: ‘Nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer Mick Jagger has joined the Alexis Korner group Blues Incorporated and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates in Ealing and at their Thursday sessions at the Marquee.’
Brian Jones was also heading for the West End. His stage partner Paul Pond, the vocalist he needed to set off his slide guitar riffs, had decided to resume studying at Oxford (and would do so until being recruited into Manfred Mann as Paul Jones). Korner’s move back to Soho, taking Mick along, spurred Brian into forming a blues band of his own whose centre of gravity would be there rather than provincial Ealing. The fact that he was unknown in Soho did not deter him. He placed an ad in Jazz News, the most serious of all London’s music trades, inviting prospective sidemen to audition in the upstairs function room of a pub called the White Bear, just off Leicester Square. When its management caught him pilfering from the bar, he was forced to relocate to another pub, the Bricklayers Arms on Broadwick Street.
His original plan had been to poach the two most talented members of a well-regarded band called Blues by Six, lead guitarist Geoff Bradford and vocalist Brian Knight. Soon after the move to the Bricklayers Arms, however, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards turned up, accompanied by the other most serious musician from the Blue Boys, Dick Taylor. There was nothing to stop Mick singing with Brian’s band as well as Blues Incorporated if he chose, but that spot already seemed to have been taken by Brian Knight. Fortunately for him, the instrumental mix as it stood simply did not work. Geoff Bradford wished only to play the authentic blues of Muddy Waters and his ilk and was offended by Keith’s Chuck Berry licks – as well as nervous of Brian’s kleptomania. After a couple of practice sessions, Bradford bowed out, loyally accompanied by his friend Knight, so leaving the way open for Mick and Keith.
The only other worthwhile recruit was a burly, pugnacious-looking youth named Ian Stewart, a shipping clerk with the Imperial Chemical Industries corporation who arrived unpromisingly wearing too-brief leather cycling shorts and munching a pork pie, but who could play stride and barrelhouse piano as if he’d grown up around the New Orleans bordellos rather than in Ewell, Surrey. Just as appealing were his plain-spoken manner, dry wit and refusal to show his prospective bandmates the slightest reverence. ‘Stu’ was not only welcomed into the line-up but recognised as a natural friend and ally even by the cautious Mick – in his case, perhaps the only one who would always talk to him as an equal, refuse to flatter him and be unafraid to tell him the truth.
Brian had now filled every spot in his blues band except that of drummer. It was the vital ingredient for any kind of ‘beat’ music, marking out the serious from the strum-along amateur. Drummers tended to be slightly older men with daytime jobs well paid enough for them to afford the £60 which a new professional kit could cost. Even mediocre players were as sought after as plumbers during burst pipe season and could take their pick from among the best Trad or rock ’n’ roll bands. Although Soho had a whole street of drummers for hire (Archer Street, where pro and semi-pro musicians congregated seeking work), none was likely to be tempted by a gaggle of young blues apostles without money, management or prospects. The Bricklayers Arms auditions did produce one promising candidate in Mick Avory, who sat in with the line-up a couple of times and seemed to fit in well enough. But he could see no future in playing behind this other Mick, and refused to commit himself permanently.
There was also the question of what to name the band. Brian, whose prerogative it was, had endlessly agonised about it, rejecting all suggestions from Mick and Keith while thinking of nothing suitable himself. The problem was only resolved when he decided to advertise for gigs in Jazz News and had to come up with a name while dictating the small ad over the telephone. His impromptu choice of ‘the Rolling Stones’ was a further debt to Muddy Waters – not only Waters’s 1950 song ‘Rollin’ Stone’ but a lesser-known EP track, ‘Mannish Boy’, which includes the line ‘Oh, I’m a rollin’ stone.’
To British ears it was an odd choice, less evocative of a blues master’s raunchy potted autobiography than of the sententious proverb recommending stagnation over adventure: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Mick, Keith, Stu and Dick all protested that it made them sound halfway between a classical string quartet and an Irish show band, but the die was cast – and, after all, it was Brian’s group.
Their big break was the end result of a rather brutal slap in the face for Mick. Alexis Korner’s success at the Marquee Club had by now not only galvanised Soho but come to the notice of the British Broadcasting Corporation in Portland Place, three-quarters of a mile to the north. As a result, completing Korner’s sense of vindication, Blues Incorporated were offered a live appearance on BBC radio’s Thursday night Jazz Club programme on 12 July. It was an opportunity not to be missed, even though it clashed with the band’s regular weekly show at the Marquee. So as not to disappoint their club audience, Long John Baldry, the Ealing Club’s queenly blond giant, was lined up to deputise for them.
For this hugely important exposure on national radio, Korner did not want Mick to be his band’s sole vocalist but to perform in alternation with Art Wood, elder brother of the still-unknown schoolboy Ronnie. However, the parsimonious BBC would not pay for two singers on top of five instrumentalists. So Korner, figuring that Mick’s appeal was more visual than vocal, and thus of doubtful impact on radio, decided to drop him in favour of Art Wood. (In the end Art did not appear either, and the vocals were left to Cyril Davis.)
As a consolation prize for Mick, Korner arranged that the band in which he’d been moonlighting should play their first-ever gig on the same night as the broadcast, filling the Marquee’s intermission spot between Long John Baldry’s sets for a £20 fee. They even received a mention in Jazz News’s preview section, on equal terms with all Soho’s most illustrious jazz names, Chris Barber, Ken Colyer and the like.
By rights, the paper should have sought details from the loquacious and articulate Brian, but instead, because of the Korner connection, it contacted Mick. Consequently, he rather than Brian seemed like the leader of the band as he listed its personnel and showed a twinge of unease lest its new name should offend the Marquee’s purist blues audience. Brian, for some reason, had decided to revert to his slide-guitar alter ego for the occasion, so was not even identified: ‘Mick Jagger, R&B vocalist, is taking a rhythm and blues group into the Marquee tomorrow night while Blues Inc. is doing its Jazz Club gig. Called “The Rolling Stones” [“I hope they don’t think we’re a rock ’n’ roll outfit,” said Mick], the line-up is: Jagger (vocals), Keith Richards, Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), “Stu” (piano) and Mick Avory (drums).’
So that night of 12 July 1962, under the pink-and-white canvas awning of the Marquee stage, Mick sang with the Rolling Stones for the very first time. To set off his cord trousers, he wore a horizontally striped matelot jersey, common enough among young men in the South of France but in London chiefly identified with girls or sexually ambiguous ‘chorus boys’ in West End musicals. As blues-singing attire, it was as daring as the white frilly dress he would select for an open-air show at the other end of Oxford Street seven years later.
The hour-long set consisted mostly of irreproachable blues and R&B standards by Jimmy Reed, Elmore James and Billy Boy Arnold, with the odd Chuck Berry like ‘Down the Road Apiece’ and ‘Back in the USA’ (‘New York, Los Angeles, oh, how I yearn for you . . .’). As Mick Avory did not, after all, play drums that night, the sound had considerably less attack than usual. Even so, many hard-core blues Marqueesards could not dissociate the word stones from rock; the applause was muted and at times almost drowned by whistles and boos.
Among the crowd that night was Charlie Watts, the drummer who occasionally played for Blues Incorporated but more regularly for Blues by Six, the band that was supposed to have given the Rolling Stones both a lead guitarist and a vocalist. Charlie was the epitome of the superior drummer class, immaculately dressed and barbered, with the almost tragically serious face of a latter-day Buster Keaton. True to form, he showed no outward emotion as the stripe-jerseyed figure onstage blew the ‘harp’ passages in Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ as if it were an erotic rite rather than a religious one. But, as he would recall, the highly esteemed blues and jazz musicians of his acquaintanceship all suddenly seemed like ‘eccentric old men’ compared with Mick.
Afterwards, collecting their £4 apiece (enough in these days to buy three LPs, dinner for two at an Angus Steakhouse or a pair of boots from the modish Regent Shoe store), Brian, Mick, Keith, Dick and Stu felt they had connected with the Marquee crowd at least enough to be offered further regular work there. But Harold Pendleton still considered them to be infected with rock ’n’ roll virus, if not in their repertoire then in the energy of their sound and the body language and flying hair of their front man. He would use them only as an interval band and with the worst possible grace, muttering that they were ‘bloody rockers’ and their R&B idols were ‘rubbish’.
Brian’s adverts in Jazz News and ceaseless touting for work brought a few gigs at other Soho clubs in transition from jazz to blues: the Piccadilly, Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and the Flamingo in Wardour Street – the latter attracting a mainly black clientele, made up of West Indian immigrants and American servicemen. Here, it took real nerve for a white teenager to walk in and buy a drink, let alone get onstage and sing a Muddy Waters song, especially the way Mick did it.
Whereas Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys used to shrink away from gigs, the Rolling Stones under Brian were positive gluttons for work. When Soho could not provide enough, they lit out for the suburbs once again, travelling in an old van that belonged to Ian Stewart – and trimming their name of its g to make the roll sound smoother. Following Ealing’s example, quiet Thames-side boroughs like Twickenham and Sutton also now had thriving blues clubs, in local church halls or bucolic pubs whose loudest sound had once been ducks on the river. In places where no club yet existed, the band would create their own ad hoc one, renting the hall or pub back room for a Saturday or Sunday night, putting up posters and handing out flyers: ‘Rhythm ’n’ blues with the Rollin’ Stones, four shillings [20p]’.
At this stage, Mick’s organisational talents were not much to the fore: Stu acted as driver and roadie and Brian was the self-appointed leader and manager (in which capacities he would secretly negotiate an extra payment from promoters or just take it when they were handling the money themselves).
While rehearsing at the Bricklayers Arms, they had taken an informal oath to keep their music pure and never ‘sell out’ to any commercial agent or record label should the possibility arise. But this resolution did not last long. Early in October, once again chivvied on by Brian, they went to Curly Clayton’s recording studios in Highbury, close to the Arsenal football ground, and recorded a three-track demo consisting of Jimmy Reed’s ‘Close Together’, Bo Diddley’s ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover’ and (despite its fate-tempting potential) Muddy Waters’s ‘Soon Forgotten’.
The demo was sent first to the huge EMI organisation, owner of prestigious labels such as Columbia and HMV, which returned it without comment. Undaunted, Brian tried Britain’s other main label, Decca, and this time at least received some feedback with the rejection: ‘A great band,’ Decca’s letter said, ‘but you’ll never get anywhere with that singer.’
