“Satisfaction” was released in America in June 1965, almost three months ahead of Britain. In six weeks, it jumped sixty-seven places on the Billboard chart to become the Stones’ first U.S. No. 1 single.
Before a note had been heard, the song created the greatest scandal since Elvis Presley had first curled his lip and swiveled his hips exactly a decade earlier. “Satisfaction” may once have been what young noblemen sought by fighting duels at dawn, but by 1965 its meaning had become explicitly sexual—and implicitly solitary. What else could those thrice-dreadful Rolling Stones have contrived, therefore, but a hymn to masturbation, vocalized by the one among them seemingly least in need of it? “Ah try . . . and Ah try . . . and Ah TRY . . . and Ah TRY!” The “vice” still believed by many to cause blindness, heart disease, and hair to sprout on the palms was being blatantly advocated, even simulated, on a million rotating vinyl discs.
Its sexual daring apart, “Satisfaction” was a pop musical landmark as significant as Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel”—more so than any Beatles track yet. Over the previous couple of years, the charts had increasingly featured so-called protest songs against nuclear bombs, racial persecution in the American South, and the accelerating horrors of the Vietnam War. Whereas pop had once given young people only intoxicating noise, it now gave them a voice which, to adult ears, was becoming ever louder and more threatening. The opening riff of “Satisfaction” was its most ominous manifestation to date.
Not that any hint of morality or altruism leaked into this particular protest song. It was about nothing but the singer himself; not his failure to achieve orgasm but his frustration and ennui with a life palpably mirroring Mick’s own, “ridin’ round the world, doin’ this and signin’ that,” while the electronic media and advertising industry competed in fatuity for his attention and his money. If the title wasn’t enough, its third verse contained the first direct reference to sex in any pop song (“tryin’ to make some girl”) and the first indirect one to menstruation (“Baby, better come back, maybe next week / ’Cause you see I’m on a losin’streak.”). Pure blues fans would be outraged, of course, but in a way this was a blues song, albeit turned upside down; a cri de coeur from the luxury penthouse, a lament for having just too damned much of every-bloody-thing.
No song was ever more perfectly matched to a voice—or, rather, a mouth—from the almost girlish cooing of those four scandalous syllables at its start to the raucous “Hey! Hey! Hey! That’s what I say!” at its multiple climax. Nor was a voice ever more perfectly in synch with a body in performance as this one with the moves recently appropriated from James Brown—the tossing head, the rippling arms, the staring eyes and Travelator feet; the employment of a heavy stand microphone with a trailing lead like the mute partner in a ballet or Apache dance, grabbed around the neck and dragged down almost to the floor or tilted vertically into the air.
Andrew Oldham’s associate Tony Calder has three separate memories of cracking America at last, and for good. The first is driving on L.A.’s Pacific Coast Highway with Oldham and Mick in a red Ford Mustang, punching all five buttons of its radio in turn and getting “Satisfaction” every time.
The second is flying back to New York with the pair and being buttonholed in the first-class cabin by a young woman with some “useless information” that came as news to all of them. “You guys smoke dope, right?” she said. “That bit in the song where Mick sings ‘Hay! Hay! Hay!’ he’s really talking about grass.”
The third is walking with Oldham, Mick, and Keith along Broadway near the CBS theater—where of course The Ed Sullivan Show had now welcomed back the Stones with open arms. “As we passed this bloke on the sidewalk, he spat at Mick and Keith. ‘That’s just what we want,’ Andrew said. ‘That means we’ve really made it over here.’ Dead chuffed he was.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“We Piss Anywhere, Man”
ON JUNE 12, 1965, the Beatles gained total acceptance by the British establishment when each was awarded a minor decoration, the MBE (Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) on the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. Three weeks later, a case at East Ham magistrates’ court in east London brought home yet again the difference between this national treasure and an ever-worsening national disgrace.
Charles Keeley, manager of the Francis petrol station in nearby Romford, testified that, late in the evening of March 18, a chauffeur-driven limousine had pulled onto his forecourt and a “shaggy-haired monster” (Bill Wyman) had got out and asked “in disgusting language” if he could use the toilet. When Mr. Keeley refused, “a group of eight or nine youths and girls” including Mick Jagger and Brian Jones had emerged from the car, and Mick had allegedly pushed him aside, saying, “We piss anywhere, man.” The others had echoed the words in “a gentle chant” with one of the females swaying in time. As a climax to this drunken scene straight out of A Clockwork Orange, Mick, Bill, and Brian were said to have urinated in a row against the forecourt wall.
In vain did the Stones’ solicitor offer a less drooglike scenario: on the night in question, they were returning from a show at Romford’s Odeon cinema, where rioting fans had necessitated a quick escape without any chance to use the backstage facilities. At the service station, Bill had made his request politely, but Mr. Keeley had gone berserk and started screaming, “Get off my forecourt!” None of the car’s passengers had drunk anything all evening but tea and Coca-Cola, and the urinating had not taken place on the floodlit forecourt but some way up a dark side road.
Once again, no credibility could be given to shaggy-haired monsters: Mick, Brian, and Bill were found guilty of “insulting behavior likely to cause a breach of the peace,” fined £5 each with 15 guineas (£15.75) costs, and reprimanded, as if it were the mid-nineteenth rather than mid-twentieth century, for “behavior not becoming young gentlemen.” An additional charge against Bill of using insulting language was not pursued.
The police had not been involved on the night of the incident and showed little interest, until Keeley and an onlooker with the suitably fragrancing name Eric Lavender threatened to bring a private prosecution if there were no official one. A judicious groveling apology to the two outraged citizens might easily have smoothed everything over; instead, Andrew Oldham and his associate Tony Calder had fed the story to Britain’s two main news agencies (each receiving a fee as freelance journalists, according to Calder) with the result that police action had to follow.
However, Oldham’s creation of an anti-Beatle Antichrist demanded one major tweak to the facts. The only person in the group actually taken short had been Bill and the only one to provoke the garage manager (with mock-hysteric cries of “Get off my foreskin!”) had been Brian. The notion of supercautious Mick elbowing someone aside and saying “We piss anywhere” was as far-fetched as that of superfastidious Mick publicly unzipping and doing it against a wall. Yet somewhere between Messrs. Keely and Lavender’s complaint and the formal summons, Oldham managed, in his own words, to “[transfer] the credit as piss-artist from the bass line to the lead vocalist.”
Oldham himself at the time would have been a far more unwelcome visitor to any garage forecourt. As Britain’s answer to Phil Spector—that is, combining the auras of a recording genius and a gangster—Oldham now employed a permanent bodyguard to drive him around in his white American Lincoln Continental, shield him from the crush at the Stones’ concerts, and wreak summary vengeance on anyone who aroused his displeasure. The bodyguard in question was a blond young Cockney named Reg King, known as “Reg the Butcher” for an alleged prowess with flick knives and razors (though his offensive weapon of choice was actually a walking stick). What was known as “that side of Andrew” worried friends like John Dunbar. “If another driver even cut across them in traffic,” Dunbar recalls, “Reg would take off after him.”
On one level, Oldham seemed quite happy to be closer to his “boys” than any other manager ever had been or would be; the undisputed sixth Stone who went everywhere with
them, roomed, ate, got drunk and laid with them, bore the insults hurled at them, and (with or without Reg the Butcher’s help) joined in the physical confrontations that often followed. On the road, he had the same fuck-’em-all attitude that Keith did and Mick so conspicuously didn’t: when the Stones visited Ireland in January 1965, Oldham and Keith each bought a handgun and shoulder holster which they wore under their jackets on the flight home and through UK Immigration.
At the same time the only-just ex–“teenage tycoon-shit” regarded himself as the star and the Stones, along with a growing roster of other acts and projects, as mere pawns in the heady game he was playing with the music business, the media, and the public. To be sure, in his egotism, arrogance, grandiosity, self-indulgence, and lack of self-control, he was far more like a modern rock star than any of them, Mick especially.
His excesses and eccentricities were becoming the stuff of legend: how on visits to Los Angeles he kept two limos on standby around the clock . . . how he’d once got the Stones out of trouble in a British roadside greasy spoon full of threatening lorry drivers by having a fried egg served to every customer, so the truculent truckers had no choice but to smile and say thank you . . . how on one day he might impulsively give an expensive suede jacket he was wearing to a young employee, and on the next personally trash the office of another employee he wanted to be rid of . . . how he’d bought a whole-page ad in the NME to praise Phil Spector’s latest production, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” by the Righteous Brothers, despite having had no financial interest in promoting it . . . how the only way he could come down from his permanent high on drink, pills, and success was to disappear to a north London clinic and be put to sleep for a couple of days . . . how he’d taken against an American producer offering lucrative new business because at lunch the man cut his bread roll with a knife.
If all this were not enough to be going on in one twenty-one-year-old, there was also the extravagant campness (a word only just entering general British usage) that kept rumors about his relationship with Mick constantly simmering. It was not only his habit of addressing males and females alike as “darling” or “dear” and his fascination with celebrity mega-queens like Lionel Bart. His office staff always contained a high quotient of pretty young men, the most likely recipients of expensive suede jackets; even his bodyguard, the sinister Reg the Butcher, was a predatory gay with tastes verging on the pedophilic.
In fact, no one around Oldham thought for a second that he was genuinely homosexual. Some speculated that because London’s other foremost pop managers were, like the Beatles’ Brian Epstein and the Who’s Kit (aka “Kitty”) Lambert, he felt it gave him more credibility; others saw it merely as another symptom of “being Andrew,” never happy unless shocking people and living on the edge. But while camping it up among colleagues and friends, he tolerated no slur on his heterosexuality from outsiders. Once when he was lunching with David Bailey, a man at a nearby table wolf-whistled at them. Oldham went over, grabbed the whistler’s head, and rammed it down into his plate.
Despite his oft-expressed notion of pop management as first and foremost a cultural crusade, no one on the London music scene was hungrier for profit or more adept at wringing it from the unlikeliest sources. When he was producing Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” the B-side Oldham had chosen was “Greensleeves,” which not only suited Marianne’s virginal image but (having been written by King Henry VIII five centuries earlier) was also comfortably out of copyright. A few slight changes thus turned it into an “original” composition on which he now controlled the publishing. On the Stones’ live EP Got Live If You Want It, one track consisted only of a theater audience chanting “We want the Stones!” This, too, Oldham listed as a song, eligible for royalties from radio play and available for cover versions.
In 1964 had come a typical act of hubris and hopeful revenue raising, the so-called Andrew Oldham Orchestra, which went on to release four all-instrumental albums on Decca. The Orchestra recruited London’s best classical session musicians; individual Stones—including Mick—played anonymously in its ranks; and Oldham himself took the baton, wearing a black beret like some punk Stravinsky. The repertoire combined easy-listening versions of Jagger-Richard songs like “The Last Time” with the bereted maestro’s self-written mini-symphonies: “Funky and Fleopatra,” “There Are 365 Rolling Stones,” and “Theme for a Mod Summer Night’s Ball.”
And yet somehow, after two hit-studded years in these hyperactive hands, the Stones’ capital worth still came nowhere near that of their main rivals. For the Beatles’ next American tour, kicking off at New York’s Shea Stadium, $1 million was known to be on the table. The Stones, by contrast, had received only £10,000 into their collective company, Rolling Stones Ltd. for the year ending June 1965, and still had not been paid for their UK tour the previous year. When Oldham could not extract the money from the tour’s promoter, Robert Stigwood, Keith Richard confronted Stigwood at the Scotch of St. James club and beat him up in front of a sizable crowd including the NME journalist Keith Altham. “Why do you keep hitting him, Keith?” Altham asked. “Because he keeps getting up,” Keith replied.
By far the greatest obstacle to affluence was Decca Records, which had signed the Stones for a reasonable enough royalty—roughly three times the pitiful rate the Beatles first received from EMI—but which settled accounts with elephantine slowness, two years or more in arrears. The band’s contract with Decca was due to expire in July 1965; their co-manager Eric Easton had convinced them to re-sign with the same label and was in the process of negotiating new and significantly better terms: 24 percent of wholesale price or the equivalent of four pence on every record sold. The deal was all but done when Allen Klein happened along.
Klein was a thirty-three-year-old New York accountant-turned-entrepreneur who specialized in obtaining large advance payments for recording artists—a concept still unknown in Britain—as well as ferreting out royalties that had been withheld from them, either through inefficiency or guile, and freeing them from oppressive contracts. His success in combating previously complacent and unchallengeable record companies on behalf of put-upon performers like Buddy Knox, Bobby Vinton, and Sam Cooke had earned him the nickname “the Robin Hood of Pop” (though some in retrospect would consider the beady-eyed Sheriff of Nottingham a better comparison). The popularity of British bands in America brought him to London, where he signed up Mick and Keith’s friend Mickie Most, an astute talent spotter as much as a producer. As a result, Most’s whole roster, including major names like the Animals and Herman’s Hermits, passed into Allen Klein’s control.
His first dealings with Andrew Oldham had been over the Stones’ cover version of “It’s All Over Now,” written by his client Bobby Womack and controlled by his company, ABKCO. That minor publishing transaction led to talks about the Stones’ poor financial yield, despite having had so many hits, and their still-to-be-finalized new recording contract with Decca. Klein’s real ambition was to bag the Beatles, but until he could pull off that supreme coup, he saw no harm in bagging the Beatles’ main rivals. He offered to take Oldham on as a client, becoming the hard-nosed moneyman in the background that he already was for Mickie Most while the young genius concentrated on being creative. And, as a first priority, he would sort out the Stones’ finances the way he had those of so many grateful chart toppers in America. Needless to say, no role was envisaged for Oldham’s present management partner, Eric Easton.
Initially, only Mick and Keith out of the five Stones were let in on the plan and called to meet Klein at the Scotch of St. James club. Though Klein’s background was devoutly Jewish, his strong-arm negotiating style with formidable American record bosses, like the Roulette label’s Morris Levy, had inspired rumors of connections to the Mafia. That, indeed, was his main appeal to Oldham: a boardroom Reg the Butcher. But while Keith was equally amenable to the notion, Mick presented a serious obstacle. With two hugely overblown and humiliating court appearances
already on his record, he would scarcely fall over himself to embrace organized crime. Besides, Klein was so comprehensively not Mick’s type: a podgy man who still combed his hair into a greasy fifties cowlick, wore none-too-clean white turtleneck sweaters, talked like Leo Gorcey from the Bowery Boys films, and smoked a malodorous pipe.
At the meeting, however, Klein played his hand perfectly, not only spinning visions of the vast wealth the Stones would enjoy under his protection but showing a mastery of percentages and high-multiple mental arithmetic that held the former economics student transfixed. In addition, he knew all the Stones’ music by heart and proved as adept at flattery as a Japanese geisha. While keeping the Mafia act going for Oldham and Keith, since that was what they transparently wanted, he massaged Mick’s ego—one bystander would later recall—“like a chick.” By the evening’s end, Mick was in Klein’s pocket along with the other two.
The whole band then met Klein at the brand-new London Hilton hotel on July 26, coincidentally Mick’s twenty-second birthday. Brian, Bill, and Charlie were similarly dazzled by Klein’s promises, but balked at the idea of dropping Eric Easton, who had backed them financially when no other agent would and whom, in spite of his desperate naffness, they all rather liked. But the Oldham-Jagger-Richard axis prevailed. The next day, without any prior warning, Oldham informed Easton that he should no longer consider himself the Stones co-manager, and simply walked away from their joint company, Impact Sound. The Stones’ affairs were transferred to Klein’s London accountants, Goodman Myers, and, as a taste of the riches to come, Oldham received a Rolls-Royce Phantom V.
The new contract with Decca currently on the table had been negotiated by Easton with the company’s financial department. But Klein announced he would talk only to Decca’s chairman, and major stockholder, Sir Edward Lewis. As Laurence Myers, one of the Stones’ newly appointed accountants, recalls, the elderly, gentlemanly Sir Edward was totally unprepared for what followed. When Klein arrived for the meeting, all five Stones—Mick included—followed him into the room like trustful ducklings. “Good afternoon, Mr. Klein” was Sir Edward’s courteous opening. “Would you like some tea?” Klein ignored both greeting and question, then dismissed the Stones—Mick included—and barked, “The Rolling Stones won’t be recording for Decca anymore.” “But we have a contract,” Sir Edward protested. “You may or may not have a contract,” Klein replied, “but the Stones won’t be recording for you anymore. Now I’ll have some tea.”
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