Liquidators spent seven years winding up City Savings & Loans during which time a small proportion of its debts were paid. At the end of the process creditors large and small were left £3.5 million ($5.5 million) out of pocket. One creditor was Glen Day, whose Yorkshire glazing company supplied the glass for the windows Mitch sold. His firm was owed £50,000. Glen Day recalls meeting Mitch in happier times when their companies were doing business: ‘Funny. Vibrant. Plenty of chat. If he’s a sales director, that’s what he needs to be. [But] as a director, of course, he’s responsible equally.’ Day also recalls angry creditors’ meetings at which he and others demanded to know from the directors what had gone wrong. ‘I’m sat there owed fifty grand … and the questions are asked, as I asked, I’m sure: What on Earth were you playing at to rack up a bill like this? You knew you were in financial difficulty. You knew you couldn’t pay your way.’ He didn’t receive satisfactory answers. Neither did he get his money.
The collapse of City Savings & Loans was sufficiently serious for the secretary of state for trade and industry to take legal action at the High Court against Mitch Winehouse and his fellow directors under the Company Directors Disqualification Act 1986 (Section 7), which deals with people unfit to run a limited company. The case was discontinued in August 2001 when the three directors ‘accepted disqualification undertakings’ – that is, they promised they would not be a director of a limited company, or take part in the management of a company directly or indirectly, for a period of years. The minimum disqualification period is two years. Mitch was disqualified for three and a half.
That was the unhappy end of Mitch Winehouse’s career in double glazing, a subject he skips, along with his bankruptcy, in Amy, My Daughter, writing simply that he ‘left [his] double-glazing business’ to go back to driving a cab. Mitch’s business history is relevant, however, in light of his subsequent close involvement in his daughter’s business affairs, and the high public profile he maintained after Amy’s death by running a charity in her name and asking the public for donations.
4
Amy started at the BRIT School on 29 August 2000, a month before she turned seventeen, arriving complete with piercings, tattoos and the eyeliner that became part of her image, drawn thickly in the style of Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra.
Amy’s home and the BRIT School were on opposite sides of London. The commute was long and Amy was often grumpy when she arrived at school, if she turned up. ‘She wasn’t someone who wanted to be institutionalised,’ says teacher Adrian Packer. ‘We are not talking about someone who is lazy. We are talking about someone who was used to doing things on her own terms.’ Still, Amy was an impressive and endearing pupil when she did attend school. ‘She was great fun to teach, because she was really funny, she was really challenging … robust and forthright … an individual who stood out.’ At the same time, Packer was concerned: ‘Often as a teacher you look at a young person who is presenting themselves in such an upbeat way and think, Are you really that happy? Are you really feeling that good about things? And obviously she wasn’t.’ In fact, Amy was suffering with depression. She asked her pharmacist mother what was wrong with her, and Janis suggested that she might be bipolar (that term again). Amy felt bad enough to take anti-depressants.
By the end of 2000 Amy’s commitment to her education was in serious doubt. She agreed with her teachers that she needed to find more self-discipline, but it wasn’t forthcoming. She left the BRIT School after nine months in May 2001. It was a momentous year for the Winehouse family: Janis collapsed on holiday in Italy and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which affected her life considerably from then on. She started to struggle with the stairs at Guildown Avenue, and didn’t have the energy to fight with her wilful daughter who, having left full-time education, went out to work.
At weekends Amy worked on a clothes stall in Camden market and found part-time employment at World Entertainment News Network (WENN), a small press agency founded by the father of her friend Juliette Ashby. Young freelance journalists were employed on a shift system at the WENN office, behind King’s Cross station, to trawl through newspapers and magazines for show-business stories, which were checked, rewritten and sent out ‘on the wire’ to foreign publications that paid if they used the copy. Working at WENN on the night shift, Amy learned the rudiments of tabloid journalism, of which she would soon become a subject. It was a valuable if limited lesson in how the media works. She also met her first serious boyfriend, a journalist seven years her senior named Chris.
Meanwhile, Amy’s stage-school friend Tyler James was attempting to launch his singing career with the help of a public-relations man named Nick Shymansky. When Shymansky suggested that he record a duet, Tyler asked Amy to sing with him. A demo tape duly arrived at Nick Shymansky’s office decorated with the type of stickers little girls put on their pencil cases, as well as hearts and Amy’s name, as if Amy was seven, not seventeen. When he listened to the tape Shymansky suspected that he was the victim of a practical joke. The voice was so mature and powerful that ‘I thought it was a [recording of] an old classic jazz singer.’ Assured by Tyler that it was Amy singing, Shymansky called her to arrange a meeting, excited that he might have stumbled upon a star.
Success came relatively quickly and easily after this break. Amy was offered a management deal followed by recording and publishing contracts, giving her financial freedom virtually straight from school. She was not an artist who had to work for years to get started. She did not pay her dues. To some extent she may have been spoilt by easy early breaks. What we don’t work for, we don’t value, and Amy seemed to put a low value on her subsequent career, behaving in a cavalier fashion seldom found in people who have worked harder and longer for their chance to be heard.
It is sobering to reflect that at this stage, in common with the other principal 27s, Amy was more than halfway through her short but dramatic pocket-battleship life. Her character, interests and psychological quirks had been formed. As she wrote in her notebook, she intended to take full advantage of the opportunities ahead, and ‘live like the bombshell I really am’.
* The boy, now grown up, says the story has been exaggerated.
* For the benefit of British and North American readers, amounts of money are given in pounds sterling and US dollars at current exchange rates.
Three
THE MAD ONES
… the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles …
Jack Kerouac
1
After childhood, but before they became famous, the 27s met key people who helped them turn adolescent dreams into careers. For Brian Jones these were the years 1960–63, from when his parents kicked him out until the Rolling Stones released their first record.
For the time being Brian worked at a variety of jobs in Cheltenham, and made an unsuccessful attempt to enrol at art college. No longer welcome at home, he shared flats with friends. One morning Pat Andrews came round to Brian’s latest digs to discover him in bed with another girl. She chased him with a knife, though it was usually Brian who was the jealous one. Still, Pat loved Brian, and she was now pregnant with his child. A naïve sixteen-year-old, she refused at first to accept that she was pregnant. ‘Strange as it seems, I didn’t know how babies were born.’ She persisted in her denial until her sister took her to the doctor. ‘He looked at me and he said, “You’re having a baby.” I said, “Don’t be stupid. Of course I’m not having a baby. I’m not married. How can I have a baby?” Then they looked at each other and must have thought, We’ve got a right one here.’ The baby, born on 23 October 1961, was given the first names Julian Mark, Julian in honour of the saxophonist Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderley, one of the Brian’s heroes. At nineteen, Brian was now the father of three children by three women, making no attempt to provide for any of
them. ‘I think he was quite proud to be a father,’ says his friend Richard Hattrell, ‘although he wasn’t a very good one.’
One night Brian and Richard went to Cheltenham Town Hall to hear the Chris Barber Jazz Band showcasing Alexis Korner, the first British musician to sing the blues while accompanying himself on electric guitar. They went backstage to meet Korner. ‘He told us he was going to start a rhythm and blues band, based on the music of Muddy Waters, and the first gig would be in March 1962 at the Ealing Club [in London],’ recalls Hattrell. The boys hitchhiked to London for the show, discovering the Ealing Club to be a basement beneath the ABC Tea Shop opposite Ealing tube station. Korner’s band, Blues Incorporated, played amplified rhythm and blues in this cavern, with a young drummer named Charlie Watts. Brian was inspired. He began to hitch up from Cheltenham every weekend to attend the club, sleeping at Korner’s flat, and soon getting onstage to jam with his new friends under the stage name Elmo Lewis, after the bluesman Elmore James.
One night two boys came into the club while Brian was performing a song by one of the first 27s, and one of the fathers of the blues, Robert Johnson. ‘He played “Dust My Broom,” and it was electrifying. He played it beautifully. We were very impressed,’ Keith Richards recalled in his memoirs, the first and almost the last compliment he paid Brian.
Keith Richards was a spotty, taciturn youth of eighteen from Dartford in Kent, a satellite town of south London, as was his friend Mick Jagger, a more personable boy of the same age. Richards was at art college. Jagger was studying at the London School of Economics. The boys were as passionate about the blues as Brian and they had a band, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, in which Mick sang and Keith played guitar. It was Mick who first spoke to Brian at the Ealing Club. Brian held significant advantages over the Dartford lads: he was slightly older than Mick and Keith, a more accomplished musician, and evidently highly experienced with the opposite sex. He also had an air of superiority that initially impressed but soon came to irritate.
Brian was now living in London, working sporadically in shops, sacked at least once for stealing, while Pat Andrews worked in a laundry. Unable to cope with baby Julian, the couple put their son into foster care briefly. Brian was more interested in his music than his family. When he advertised for musicians to form a new band his young friends from the Ealing Club, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, replied and thereby joined a group Brian named the Rollin (sic) Stones, after the Muddy Waters song ‘Rollin’ Stone Blues’. They played their first gig at the Marquee in London in July 1962, shortly after which Mick, Keith and Brian moved into a flat together in Edith Grove, Chelsea, where they shivered through the winter of 1962–63, saved from starvation by the kindness of friends such as Richard Hattrell, who experienced the nasty side of Brian in return for his charity. ‘Brian bossed me about quite a bit,’ says Hattrell. ‘Brian and I were good friends, but he had a vicious streak in him. He had two characters – he could be as nice as pie one minute, and really turn on you the next.’ Brian ordered Hattrell to give Keith Richards his overcoat when Keith was cold and made Hattrell pay for everybody at the Wimpy Bar. ‘[Brian] would make me walk behind the three of them – Brian, Mick and Keith – [and then make] me wait outside [while they ate]. Then he’d come out and expect me to pay for the three of them. If I kicked up a fuss, he just got aggressive … I can’t remember him actually hitting me as such, but verbally he attacked me in no uncertain manner and I’m a pretty sensitive, very emotional person, so that used to upset me a great deal.’
The line-up of the Stones was completed in January 1963 when bass guitarist Bill Wyman and drummer Charlie Watts joined the band. ‘The Rolling Stones that I joined was led by Brian Jones,’ Wyman wrote in his autobiography, Stone Alone, which provides the most detailed account of the band’s early years, making it plain that Brian was their leader at this stage. Not only had Brian founded the Stones, he had given the band its name, its musical direction, and he was the front man. But he didn’t sing. Mick Jagger held the microphone, which allowed him to command the audience’s attention. His position was strengthened by his friendship with Keith, whom Brian condescended to as his understudy on the guitar. Meanwhile, Brian seemed to look down on Bill and Charlie because they were from working-class families. He had an unfortunate knack of upsetting people.
The fact that Mick, Keith and Brian were so young, and living on top of each other at Edith Grove,* made everything more intense. There was a good deal of teasing and jockeying for position. One day Mick made a move on Pat Andrews. Even though she found him ‘funny and charming’, Pat says she turned him down. But the others made sure that Brian knew what Mick had done, just to annoy him, Brian being pathologically jealous. As an example, he accused Pat of sleeping with a man at work to get money to buy clothes for herself and the baby. And in his jealousy he sometimes became aggressive. As Brian raised his hand to Pat again, she decided to defend herself by hitting him first. She left Brian soon afterwards and brought up Julian alone. Brian didn’t seem to care. He had already met someone else.
Despite a weak and neurotic personality, despite his jealousy, faithlessness and violence, Brian had numerous girlfriends, many of whom still hold him in affection. ‘You [asked me] why did all these women like him,’ his next significant girlfriend, Linda Lawrence, said in an interview for this book. ‘Because he was so gentle and very sensual. [He was] the most sweet, gentle guy.’ This lovable side of Brian remained obscure to men, many of whom couldn’t stand him. ‘If Brian wanted to fuck you, maybe it would have been different,’ sneers Andrew Loog Oldham, who became the Stones’ manager in 1963. Loog Oldham saw Mick Jagger and Keith Richards as the natural leaders of the band and helped them take over. The power games had started and there would be a good deal of cruelty towards Brian before he was edged out. Loog Oldham defends his part in the manoeuvring by pointing out how young they all were, and when one looks at early photographs and film footage of the Stones their youth is striking, the band members only slightly older than their original fans, most of whom were little more than children. The Stones were essentially still kids themselves in 1963, and they behaved towards each other with the casual cruelty of children. Loog Oldham was nineteen when he started managing the band, the same age as Mick and Keith, while Brian was just 21. As he says, ‘When you’re children – which is what we were – it’s Lord of the Flies, dear.’
Loog Oldham altered the band’s name subtly, making them the Rolling Stones, secured a record deal with Decca and arranged valuable early publicity. The press seized on the Bohemian Stones as an alternative to the slick, packaged Beatles, fast becoming the biggest pop act in the world. Brian was ambitious to match the Beatles’ success. When the Stones’ début single, a cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Come On’, charted at a disappointing 21, he muttered about sacking Mick Jagger, as if Mick was holding them back. But events overtook him. The Stones had a rapidly growing following of enthusiastic teenagers, enough to fill every club and theatre they played, and those fans liked Mick Jagger very much. Indeed, it became apparent that it was Brian, not Mick, who was the weak link in the Rolling Stones.
In the history of the 27 Club, a sure sign of trouble comes when artists miss gigs. This happened with Brian Jones at the outset of the Rolling Stones’ career. He first failed to attend band rehearsals on 27 August 1963, having ‘apparently collapsed from nervous exhaustion’, according to Bill Wyman. That night, when Brian didn’t show up at the Ricky Tick Club in Windsor, the Stones had to perform without him, as they would many times in the years ahead, deciding ultimately that they would be better off if he left altogether.
2
Jimi Hendrix took longer than most of the 27s to get his break, which gave him time to become the most accomplished musician of the Big Six.
As we have seen, Jimi left home in May 1961 to join the US Army, doing his basic training in California before transferring to Fort Campbell on the border of Tennessee and Kentucky, where he joined the 101st Airborne because para
chutists received bonus pay. Jimi had never flown in a plane, let alone jumped out of one, and complained in letters home about the ‘dreadful’ experience of jump school. ‘I can laugh about it now,’ he wrote to his father, on 15 December 1961. ‘But then, if I laughed, I would be pushing Tennessee around all day – with my hands – push-ups.’ Despite a difficult childhood, Jimi’s letters to Al Hendrix were affectionate. Jimi was homesick, of course, and some parents are easier to love at a distance.
The best part of being at Fort Campbell was meeting Billy Cox, a soldier from Pennsylvania who played bass guitar and became a close friend. Hendrix and Cox formed a band that performed in and around the base. Jimi’s ambition to play music full time reasserted itself and he decided he needed to get out of the army without delay. He told the camp doctor that he was homosexual, as Charles R. Cross revealed in the biography Room Full of Mirrors. Jimi persisted in this story, adding other issues, until the army gave up and released him in the summer of 1962. When Billy Cox was later discharged, they formed a band, the King Kasuals, performing on the local club scene. After a while Jimi drifted off to play with other, bigger acts, but he and Billy Cox stayed in touch and they would work together again.
For the next four years Jimi performed on the so-called Chitlin Circuit of African-American clubs in the South, perfecting his skills and learning from musicians he met, including such greats as B. B. King, Little Richard and Muddy Waters. Jimi played in Richard’s band for a while. Musicians who knew him during those years of obscurity recall a young man obsessed with the guitar. He’d play ‘all night long, all day long, every day, that’s all he ever did,’ Bobby Womack told the writer Charles Shaar Murray. It wasn’t quite all Jimi did. He also started to experiment with drugs, and developed a reputation as a ladies’ man.
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