By autumn, the Stones’ word-of-mouth reputation was sufficient for them to be voted Britain’s sixth most popular band in Melody Maker’s annual readers’ poll. Yet their future on record was anything but secure. Unless their inexperienced young manager–record producer could concoct a far bigger hit single than “Come On,” Decca would be looking for excuses to circumvent their contract and dump them. And the stock of likely hits in the R&B canon was shrinking all the time as other bands and solo singers dipped into it.
After a flick through R&B’s back catalog, Andrew Oldham chose an overt novelty number, Leiber and Stoller’s “Poison Ivy,” originally recorded by the Coasters with voices teetering on the edge of goonery. As the B-side, weirdly, he prescribed another quasi-comedy song, Benny Spellman’s “Fortune Teller.” For a time Mick seemed headed for exactly the vaudeville kind of pop he so despised. However, a recording session with Decca’s in-house producer, Michael Barclay, on July 15 revealed the whole band to be deeply uncomfortable with Oldham’s choices. And, having scheduled the two tracks for release in August, Decca then ominously canceled them.
Salvation came unexpectedly while Oldham and the Stones were at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 club in Soho, trying out other potential A-sides and getting nowhere. Escaping outside for a breath of air, Oldham chanced to run into John Lennon and Paul McCartney, fresh from receiving awards as Show-Business Personalities of the Year at the Savoy hotel. Told of the Stones’ problem, John and Paul good-naturedly offered a song of theirs called “I Wanna Be Your Man,” so new that it wasn’t even quite finished. The duo accompanied Oldham back to Studio 51 and demo’d a Liverpudlian R&B pastiche that their rivals could cover without shame or self-compromise. Their gift thankfully accepted, they added the song’s final touches then and there, making it all look absurdly easy.
On October 7, the Stones went straight into Kingsway Sound Studios, Holborn (just down the road from LSE), and recorded a version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” needing virtually no production and only a couple of takes. The B-side was a cobbled-up instrumental, based on Booker T. and the MG’s’ “Green Onions” and entitled “Stoned”—to most British ears, still only something that happened to adulterous women in the Bible.
“I Wanna Be Your Man” was released on November 1, three weeks before the Beatles’ own version, sung by Ringo Starr, appeared on their landmark second album, With the Beatles. While the northerners could not stop themselves adding harmony and humor, the Stones’ treatment was raw and basic, just Mick’s voice in alternation with Brian’s molten slide guitar; not so much sly romantic proposition as barefaced sexual attack. “Another group trying their chart luck with a Lennon-McCartney composition,” patronized the New Musical Express. “Fuzzy and undisciplined . . . complete chaos,” sniffed Disc. Indiscipline and chaos seemed to be just what Britain’s record buyers had been waiting for, and the single went straight to No. 12.
At year’s end, BBC television launched a new weekly music show called Top of the Pops, based solely on the week’s chart placings, that would run without significant change of format for the next forty years. The Stones featured on the very first program, their vocalist adding a further twist to that un-Beatly Beatles song still rudely disrupting the Top 20. Motionless and in profile, buttoned into a tab collar as high as a Regency hunting stock, he seemed as detached and preoccupied as the lyric was hot and urgent. The downcast eyes and irritably drooping mouth suggested something rather tedious being spelled out to an unseen listener who was either slow-witted or deaf. To the studio audience surging round him, the clear message came straight from his recently aborted version of “Poison Ivy”: “You can look but you better not touch . . .”
Everyone knew now it was Mick not Mike and that—even though they might have attended the same seat of learning—he was nothing whatsoever like Mike Sarne.
CHAPTER FIVE
“ ‘What a Cheeky Little Yob,’ I Thought to Myself”
Saturday 14th December, 1963: Beatles at [Wimbledon] Palais, Stones at [the Baths] Epsom. Went down to Palais but saw nothing but police & more police. Got to Epsom early & when we saw “admission by ticket only” thought we might as well go home. Stayed for a little while chatting to 2 mods however & then that darling DARLING doorman let us in. Got right to the front & wow! Leaning up on the stage gazing into the face of Mick and he looked at me—he did! Keith glanced once, Charlie never & I don’t know about Brian & Ghost [Bill Wyman]. Mick kind of looks at you in a funny way—shy? impersonal? sexy? cold? I don’t know but it’s certainly cool & calm . . . as usual [he] commanded all the attention. He was in a pink shirt, navy trousers, Cuban [heeled] Chelsea’s & brown Chelsea cord waistcoat with black onyx cufflinks. He looked thin, cool and haggard. His hair hung in long ginger waves & his sharp sideways glances down at the audience (no—me!) made him look even more fright [crossed out] aloof and somehow witchlike . . . After the Stones had gone off, the curtains were drawn across but we got underneath them & watched the Stones standing around at the side, talking . . . Couldn’t get backstage worst luck!
—from Jacqui Graham’s diary
Chelsea had lost Mick, for now anyway. Under Andrew Oldham and Eric Easton’s management, the Rolling Stones received around twenty pounds each per week, the same as most top British soccer players of that era. The three Edith Grove flatmates therefore could move on from the squalid pad where they had frozen and half starved—but also shared an idealism and camaraderie that were never to be revived.
Treading his usual fine line between sex addict and sex offender, Brian Jones had impregnated yet another teenage girlfriend. The mother of this, his fourth child by different partners—due to arrive in summer of 1964—was a sixteen-year-old trainee hairdresser named Linda Lawrence. In a surprising reversal of his usual tactics, Brian did not instantly desert Linda but showed every sign of standing by her and the baby and, still more surprisingly, went to live with her at her family’s council house in Windsor, Berkshire, where Mick had first wooed Chrissie Shrimpton. So fond of this prospective son-in-law did the Lawrences become that they named the house “Rolling Stone” in Brian’s honor and also gave board and lodging to a white goat he bought as a pet and liked to take out for walks through Windsor on a leash.
It went without saying that Mick and Keith would continue living together. However, treading his usual fine line between authority figure and honorary bandmate, Andrew Oldham put forward the idea, or instruction, that he should join them. Svengali needed to be as close as possible to the Trilby he was molding day by day.
Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove—though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.
Rock musicians’ neighbors are usually condemned to purgatorial nuisance, but with Jagger and Richard, Mapesbury Road got off lightly. For much of the time, the pair were away on tour, and when they returned, they would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. Their fans had no idea where they were living, and none yet possessed the gumption to find out. There were no riotous all-night parties, no revving cars or motorbikes or onslaughts of deafening music, not even the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass. There was no drug taking whatsoever at this stage, or even very much drinking. “A half bottle of wine in that place,” Oldham would remember, “was a big deal.”
Since Mick had been swept up into his new pop-star life, his parents back home in Dartford had hardly seen him and, apart from the increasingly unflattering stories they read in the press, had no idea where he was or what he was doing. When Oldham commandeered the Stones, he did not have to sell himself as a responsible manager to their respective families the way Brian Epstein had, painstakingly, to the Beatles’; Oldham,
indeed, had not even met Joe and Eva Jagger, and initially left all dealings with the couple to his associate Tony Calder. “One day,” Calder remembers, “a call came through to the office, and this very polite voice said, ‘My name’s Joe Jagger. I understand that my son is getting rather famous. If you need help of any kind, just let me know.’ I took calls from so many angry, hysterical people every day . . . I couldn’t believe I’d just been talking to somebody who was polite.”
Liaison with Joe and Eva improved when Oldham employed seventeen-year-old Shirley Arnold, a longtime loyal Stones supporter around the club circuit, to organize their fast-growing national fan club. Shirley joined the small Oldham enclave inside Eric Easton’s office in a Piccadilly office block called Radnor House. Also among the staff was Easton’s elderly father-in-law, a Mr. Boreham, who advised clients on long-term financial planning. Shirley remembers Mr. Boreham’s amazement after a consultation session with Mick. “He said Mick had asked him what he thought the pound would be worth on the currency markets in a few years’ time. That was something no one in the music or entertainment business thought about in those days.”
Henceforward, Shirley kept Joe and Eva fully updated about their son, finding them “lovely people” who never made the slightest demands on their own account or expected to profit from his success. “Eva was the dominant one in the marriage, very conscious of what other people thought, and to begin with she wasn’t sure what to make of all the headlines. But Mick’s dad was always totally laid-back about it all.”
Brian Jones might cut a dash with his pet goat on the streets of Windsor, but elsewhere he was finding it increasingly hard to win the attention he craved. Ironically, the Stones’ takeover by professional managers that he had wanted so desperately had eroded almost all his former power and status as the band’s founder, chief motivator, and creative driving force. While they were still struggling to break through, Brian had a certain value to Oldham and Easton as an ally within their ranks, and so could wangle preferential treatment in pay or hotel accommodation. But now that they had made it, his doom was effectively sealed.
Knowing in his own mind what a star he was, he could not understand why Oldham should be devoting such time and trouble to Mick, or why audiences responded to the results with such fervor. “Brian would come into the office to collect his fan mail,” Tony Calder remembers, “and there it would be in a little pile, with a dirty great pile next to it. ‘Who’s that other lot for?’ he’d say. ‘They’re for Mick,’ I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.”
One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness—the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove—Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.
The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and—as an inveterate hypochondriac—too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). “If Andrew told Mick, ‘You’ve got two interviews today,’ his response would always be ‘Are you sure they want me?’ ” Tony Calder remembers. “Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.” Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you, sir.”
The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. “This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.”
At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. “Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,” Tony Calder says. “But he’d expand it into twenty-five . . . then forty-five, then an hour.” While other pop musicians fraternized with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones—and him. “I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,” he told Melody Maker. “I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day . . .” It was a trick that never failed (in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words) “to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.”
But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963 and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards, and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could often be extraordinarily close.
Jacqui’s diary greets January 5 as a “brilliant Stoning start to 1964” after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his “lovely hair,” and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick “seem[s] not to be his usual bright self” and is rather less “gorgeous” than at Epsom three weeks before: “I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,” the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. “He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!”
On January 11, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. “Fabulous Keith,” with his “lovely, lean, intelligent face,” does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be “not looking madly happy” and to have “a very clipped and well-spoken voice . . . and a lovely slow, tired smile.” Charlie is “dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined” and Bill is “sweet, small, dark, very very helpful.” But Mick proves “a big disappointment & a big head . . . [he] thought
he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still—although the worst—he is still fab! . . . then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.”
Friday, January 24, which for the diarist “started off being puke,” turns into “the most fabulous day ever . . . Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING—yes REALLY TALKING TO US!” With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick “very friendly . . . he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say.” Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his “secret wife,” Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an adman who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. “He made crude remarks like ‘must cover me tits up’ etc.,” the diarist records, “but I liked him.” She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.
By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologizes that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:
Mick Jagger Page 14
