Читать книгу The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones - Stanley Booth - Страница 21

TEN

One of the most popular of these combinations . . . was a company of boys, from twelve to fifteen years old, who called themselves the Spasm Band. They were the real creators of jazz, and the Spasm Band was the original jazz band . . . The Spasm Band first appeared in New Orleans about 1895, and for several years the boys picked up many an honest penny playing in front of the theaters and saloons and in the brothels, and with a few formal engagements at West End, Grand Opera House, and other resorts, when they were advertised as ‘The Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band.’ Their big moment, however, came when they serenaded Sarah Bernhardt, who expressed amazement and gave them each a coin.

HERBERT ASBURY: The French Quarter

‘Then we got that Richmond gig that built up to an enormous scene,’ Keith said. ‘In London that was the place to be every Saturday night, at the Richmond Station Hotel, on the river, a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, but kids from all over London would come down there.’

‘The Station Hotel was the most important thing,’ Stu said, ‘’cause it was at the Station Hotel that you really started seeing excitement. It was at Richmond that they finally started to get up off their backsides and move, and within two months they were swingin’ off the rafters.

‘The Station Hotel only lasted about ten weeks, because they wanted to pull the place down, and it’s still standing there yet. So they moved us to Richmond Athletic Club, which had a very low ceiling, with girders, so of course they’re leaping about among the girders, they’re going barmy. I’d love to see all that again. Because it was so good. There was never the slightest nastiness about it. Everybody really sort of dug each other, and – we never wanted to stop playing. Half past ten would come, and they’d say Stop, and we’d say Aw fuck, and play another three or four numbers. Some of those numbers used to really, really move. By this time, having lived together and done nothing else but listen to their records and tapes and play together, Brian and Keith had this guitar thing like you wouldn’t believe. There was never any suggestion of a lead and a rhythm guitar player. They were two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hand.

‘Still rehearsing three times a week. Nobody had any money. They were spending everything they got on either equipment or records. Those days were hard enough, but there was a thrill about being involved with it all. Even though at this time the Beatles were filling the Albert Hall with screaming kids, they were still over there with Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and that lot, there was no guts to it. But you were aware at the time that you were really starting something.’

‘I went to the Station Hotel – how old was I? Fifteen – yeah, fifteen,’ said Shirley Arnold, a pretty auburn-haired English girl. ‘It was fairly cold. It must have been February. I was about to leave school. There were six of us went down to Richmond. We walked around all day there and then went to the Station Hotel. Two of us ended up in the club, but I didn’t actually see the boys, I just heard the music. There were quite a few people there. I was a fan of Tommy Steele and Elvis before that, I think they were the only two. The Beatles did come along just before that, and I was a fan of the Beatles. I don’t think I knew what rhythm & blues and rock and roll were at the time. “Route 66” was the first thing I heard the Stones do. We loved it. Then we came back and I said, “Oh, I must see them again.” Apparently Mick and Keith went down to Ken Colyer’s jazz club one afternoon and said, “Look, can we play when Ken has his break, can we go in and play for nothing?” So they said, “Yeah, you can do it.” No one was really interested, it wasn’t that packed, and I could see them, and I just fell in love with them. The music was so exciting. Then, bang! It happened so quickly, everyone knew who they were.’

Charlie almost hesitantly told me, ‘At Richmond we became sort of a cult, in a way. Not because of us, it just happens. We were there the night that everybody – it sort of works both ways. We followed them and they followed us. There were so many people, and because there was no room to dance they used to invent ridiculous dances. There was no room for Mick to dance onstage and he used to just wiggle his arse, which sort of made . . . I don’t know, but it sort of created – it was a lovely . . . I mean the Crawdaddy was like – it was nice to have a dance. It was nice to be there, and the Crawdaddy was always like that. That was really the best time for response of them all. I mean, it got a bit wearing, if you did the same set, and you knew at a certain time everything would explode. And sure enough it always did, and it always ended up in an absolute . . . gyrating . . . riot. When the last Encore, or More, would die down – when you were nearly dead with sweat, you can’t do more than four hours, and they had to shut the place up. That’s what it was like.’

‘Singlehandedly, we discover,’ Keith said, ‘we’ve stabbed Dixieland jazz to death, it’s really just collapsed, all because of us. Brian was so pleased to see the last jazz band disband and us taking over the clubs, it was his happiest, proudest moment.’

The Crawdaddy Club was operated by Giorgio Gomelsky, the Italian of Russian ancestry who liked to think of himself as the Stones’ manager. ‘We had no such illusions,’ Keith said.

‘There were all sorts of people wanting to manage us,’ Stu said, ‘but they could never get through to us, because there was no phone at Edith Grove. There was no phone ever anywhere near it. The only phone number was in the Jazz News, I.C.I.’ The Stones’ ads carried the telephone number of Imperial Chemical Industries, where Stu worked in the shipping department. ‘So one day this very pushy little guy called Andrew Oldham phoned up and said that he was very interested, and he was in partnership with Eric Easton, rhubarb rhubarb. So I said, The only way you’re gonna get hold of them – I don’t want to get too involved in this ’cause I’ve got enough to think about at the moment, shipping whole shitloads of explosives – I said, Look, why don’t you just get on your bike, or whatever you’ve got, and go round to Edith Grove? And so he went round there and saw Mick, and that was the start of a very close relationship between him and Mick. We used to smuggle Andrew into the Station Hotel without Giorgio knowing, ’cause there were huge queues to get in, they’d start queuing about half-past six at night.’

‘Andrew is very young,’ Keith said, ‘he’s even younger than we are, he’s got nobody on his books, but he’s an incredible bullshitter, fantastic hustler, and he’s also worked on the early Beatles publicity. He got together those very moody pictures that sold them in the first place, so although he hasn’t actually got much he does have people interested in what he’s doing. He comes along with this other cat he’s in partnership with, Eric Easton, who’s much older, used to be an organ player in that dying era of vaudeville after the war in the fifties, when the music hall ground to a halt as a means of popular entertainment. He had one or two people, he wasn’t making a lot of bread, but people in real show biz sort of respected him. He had contacts, one chick singer who’d had a couple of Top Twenty records, he wasn’t completely out of it, and he knew a lot about the rest of England, which we knew nothing about, he knew every hall.’

Oldham and Easton had a Decca recording contract for the Stones, but the Stones had already signed a contract with George Clouston at I.B.C. in lieu of paying for the session they had recorded there. I.B.C. had done nothing with the tapes. ‘They had no outlet,’ Keith said. ‘They didn’t know how to cut them or get them onto discs, and they couldn’t get any record company interested in them. This recording contract, although it’s nothing, is still a binding contract, and Brian pulls another one of his fantastic get-out schemes. Before this cat Clouston can hear that we’re signing with Decca, Brian goes to see him with a hundred quid that Andrew and Eric have given him, and he says, ‘Look, we’re not interested, we’re breaking up as a band, we’re not going to play anymore, we’ve given up, but in case we get something together in the future, we don’t want to be tied down by this contract, so can we buy ourselves out of it for a hundred pounds?’ And after hearing this story, which he obviously believes, this old Scrooge takes the hundred quid. The next day he hears that we’ve got a contract with Decca, we’re gonna be making our first single, London’s answer to the Beatles, folks.’

On April 28, 1963, Oldham brought Eric Easton to Richmond to see the Stones, who came the next day to Easton’s Regent Street offices, where they made a handshake deal that Oldham and Easton should manage them. Within three or four days Brian had bought back their I.B.C. contract, and on May 10 the Stones went to Olympic Studios in London for their first professional recording session. It was also Oldham’s first try at record producing. In about three hours, the Stones recorded two sides for their first single release: ‘Come On,’ a Chuck Berry song, and ‘I Wanna Be Loved,’ by Chicago song-writer Willie Dixon, both done in a style much lighter and less potent than they usually displayed onstage. Oldham left the mixing to the engineer, a young man aptly named Roger Savage. The tape of the session didn’t sound bad, considering that Oldham came into the studio thinking that guitars should be plugged into wall sockets, but the old gents at Decca listened to it and then rang Oldham to suggest that he and the Stones try again at Decca’s West Hampstead studios. ‘It was a big Decca session,’ Keith said. ‘All the big Decca heads were there, listening and going ‘tsk tsk’ and shaking their heads.’

The results, while nowhere near the equal of any of the tapes the Stones had made previously, including the bathroom tapes, were released as the Stones’ first single record on June 7. The record hovered around the middle of the Top Fifty records charts of the English music trade papers for more than three months. The Stones performed ‘Come On’ in their first television appearance, on a show called Thank Your Lucky Stars, taped in Birmingham. They wore matching houndstooth check jackets Oldham had provided to make them look more like a group and there were only five of them.

‘This is where Brian starts to realize that things have gone beyond his control,’ Keith said. ‘Before this, everybody knows that Brian considers it to be his band. Now Andrew Oldham sees Mick as a big sex symbol, and wants to kick Stu out, and we won’t have it. And eventually, because Brian had known him longer than we, and the band was Brian’s idea in the first place, Brian had to tell Stu how we’d signed with these people, how they were very image-conscious, and Stu didn’t fit in. If I’d been Stu I’d have said fuck it, fuck you. But he stayed on to be our roadie, which I think is incredible, so bighearted. Because by now we were star-struck, every one of us, the Beatles have been to see us play [“They were just back from Germany,” Bill said, “and they stood in front of the bandstand, all in long black leather coats, looking like cut-outs.”] and we’ve been to see them at the Albert Hall, and we’ve seen all the screaming chicks, the birds down in front, and everybody can’t wait, you can’t wait to hear the screams . . .’

‘That is what I want’ Brian told Giorgio.

‘The next time I saw them they were the five of them,’ Shirley Arnold said. ‘I’d seen them at Colyer’s once, and it was about three months, the record had been released by the time I saw them again. The next time we went we begged the girl on the door to sell us tickets the day before. She let us have the tickets. The queue next day was fantastic. Colyer’s is a long room with a very small stage at one end, low ceiling, you could touch the ceiling. We were in early, so we were at the front of the stage, but we were packed so tight that I was pushed up against the stage. People were standing, and sitting on people’s shoulders. Every inch was packed. Sweat was pouring from the walls and the amps kept going wrong, but the music was fantastic, the boys were fantastic. I didn’t actually faint because of them, I fainted because it was so hot. And they just passed me over everyone’s head into the tea room. One of the bouncers was pourin’ water on me and I was thinkin’, “Oh, my makeup’s gonna run.” My friend came in to see about me. She said, ‘The music’s stopped, they’re comin’ in.’ So I went in a swoon like I wasn’t strong enough to leave, because I wanted to see them. It was Brian who was the first one that ever spoke to me. He said, “Are you the girl that fainted?” I was such a fan – there was never anything I wouldn’t do for them, and at the time there weren’t many girls like me who were freakin’ out, so they were quite surprised. I asked Andrew about the fan club. He said, “I don’t know what’s happenin’ about the fan club. Do you want to do the fan club? Go up and see Annabelle Smith, I’ll tell her you’re coming, what’s your name?” Annabelle was Andrew’s secretary. She was older than any of the boys. I think she was about twenty-nine, which was old to us ’cause we were all so young. The fan club was started in her name, but I don’t think she was really interested. So we went up to see Annabelle. She was only too pleased to give it to me. She gave me a stack of postal orders and said, “It’s yours, do it from home.” Things were happening so fast with Andrew and the boys that they had no time to think about the fan club anyway. So there was me goin’ home with two hundred members and a stack of postal orders that came to about sixty quid. Well, sixty quid, you can imagine, I had it under my pillow every night ’cause it was a fortune. I tried to pay them into the bank, and they said, “No, no, you’ve got to open an account through the office.” Weeks went on, I kept calling Andrew’s office and saying, “Look, I must do a newsletter and write to everyone—” but everyone was so busy, I never really got to speak to Andrew, so I had all the fan club things and still wasn’t in contact with anyone. I was working for the boys and I’d only seen them once.’

On July 13 the Rolling Stones played their first date outside London, at the Alcove Club in Middlesbrough on a bill with a group from Liverpool called the Hollies. ‘And in those days – what the Liverpool groups do must be right,’ Stu said, ‘and Andrew had the Stones convinced that he was going to make them London’s answer to the fuckin’ Beatles, and they were gonna be a really fantastic pop group, which pleased Brian no end, because it meant money, and I think the others were quite happy, ’cause they appreciate money, same as anybody else. Andrew knew nothing about music, he was only interested in the money.

‘So anyway, here were the Hollies on, doing their three-part vocal harmony, and we had never heard anything like it. Brian immediately said, “Right, everybody’s got to sing.” Andrew and them changed the group right round, and the emphasis became on “Poison Ivy” and “Fortune Teller,” numbers like that. For a while the Stones lost their identity, I think, because they were playing all these novelty numbers and trying to sing them like Liverpool groups. That was Andrew’s idea, which was a bit of a drag. Those ballrooms were awful. We used to go to these terribly thick places like Wisbech and Cambridge, and all the yokels, they’d heard of these Rolling Stones, but they hadn’t the foggiest idea what to expect in the way of music. To start off with, some of them just gawked.

‘There was a little bit of uncertainty in those days as to what should be played. They thought of more numbers like “Poison Ivy” and that didn’t seem to be doing much, and eventually they got everybody with the Chuck Berry stuff, and they reverted more to what they had been playing, till after a year or so some of these ballroom dates began to get really fucking wild. It was the sheer excitement of the music. Oh, Christ. No dressing rooms, no stages, no electricity, no security, fuck-all, used to be a hell of a fight every bloody night. They all said, “We’ve had the Beatles here, we can handle anything.” You’d say, “Well, you haven’t had the Stones yet. You wait,” and they’d say, “Oh, we can handle everything,” so everything used to get destroyed. The boys themselves never used to help matters much, because they resisted for a while the idea of all travelling together. Brian had something to do with this. Nobody wanted to be in the same car with Brian for any length of time. He began to feel as if he’d been eased out. He became difficult to live with.

‘Brian, being Welsh, had always got a very obnoxious streak in him, and he used to be very tactless, and say things like, “As I’m the leader of the group, I’m gonna have an extra five pounds a week.” We used to stay in cheap hotels ’cause we didn’t have any money, but they never stayed in real shit, once they’d got a little bit of money. So we’d stay in a medium-class hotel, but Brian would say, “In a few months’ time, when we’re earning more for a gig, I’m gonna stay in the Hilton because I’m the leader, and everybody else will be staying with you somewhere.” So eventually they got sick to fuckin’ death of him. He would change with the wind as well. Brian was very pretty, but a very silly boy really. Eventually it became obvious that Mick was the leader of the group. In those days Brian was simply a very, very good guitar player, and he was very mercenary too, very keen on money. So when Andrew comes along and says It’s time you started playing numbers like “Poison Ivy” because you’ll sell more records, it was Brian who immediately said Yeah, groovy, great. But having done this, after about the first six months of playing ballrooms in Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe, it was Brian who said, “I think we ought to play at Eel Pie Island twice a week again, and play the blues.” Brian would change from one day to another, and they just got fed up with him.

‘It was a pity. Brian was brought up in the worst possible way. He had a very good education, was very clever at school, but somewhere along the line he decided he was going to be a full-time professional rebel, and it didn’t really suit him. So that when he wanted to be obnoxious, he had to really make an effort, and having made the effort, he would be really obnoxious. But his nature was really quite sweet. Brian was really quite a sweet person, but he took everything to excess. It’s a shame, because he was really a good musician. I don’t want to be too hard on Brian. He was a very difficult person.’

What Keith remembered best about the night the Stones played with the Hollies was the drive back to London, three hundred miles in the back of Stu’s Volkswagen van with Charlie, Mick, Brian, and all their equipment, Bill in the front with Stu because he lied and said he got carsick in the back, where they had to piss out the ventilator because Stu, ‘a sadist,’ Keith said, wouldn’t stop except when he wanted. Thinking about that night and how they all had to sing because that’s what the Hollies did, Keith said, ‘Brian collapsed straightaway to commercialism. He shattered.’

The Stones were playing nearly every day, sometimes twice a day, and when they weren’t playing or recording, they were rehearsing for their first concert tour of England, with the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. On July 19 they were booked to play a debutante’s ball, but Brian was sick, the Stones all got drunk, and another band played. The next night the Stones, with Brian, played their first ballroom date, at a place called the Corn Exchange in Wisbech. ‘Come On’ was at number 30 in its struggle upwards in the Top Fifty. The Stones were a gathering sensation and were averaging less than £5 per man for each job. On August 10 they played two shows near Birmingham, and the next day, after playing the Studio 51 Club in the afternoon, the Stones played at the third National Jazz Festival in Richmond. Stu had left his job at the chemical company because there was no time for anything but driving, setting up equipment, taking it down, and driving.

On August 17 the Stones played in Northwich, up near Liverpool, on a bill with Lee Curtis, who according to Keith ‘pulled an incredible scene to steal the show, where he’d do Conway Twitty’s “Only Make Believe,” and he’d faint onstage. Guys came and carried him off, and he’d fight them off and come back, singing “Only Make Believe.” Then they’d carry him off again.’ The craziness was a part of the time, the beat craze that carried thousands of acts along for a while. Coming home on this same night, Bill mentioned in his diary, they met Billy J. Kramer and his band the Dakotas at a café on the M-1. ‘Doesn’t sound very exciting now,’ Bill said. ‘Billy J. Kramer then was as big as the Beatles.’ And the Beatles were on their way to being, as John Lennon later said, more popular than Jesus. That week the Rolling Stones played six dates, not counting rehearsals and photo sessions, and each man got paid £25. The pace was killing, but they all managed to maintain it except Brian. On August 27 the Stones were booked to play at Windsor in a room over the Star and Garter pub. Brian, sick again, was not there, and for the first time the band that had been ‘Brian’s idea in the first place’ played without him.