Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  He got his first guitar at fourteen, a Spanish acoustic bought while on holiday in Spain. Already adept at singing tunes he heard on the radio, Mike started learning to play Ritchie Valens’s big hit “La Bamba.” A gifted mimic since he learned to talk, Mike bawled out a phonetic version of the Spanish lyric with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents. At fifteen Mike Jagger already knew how to put a song over. Soon he was practicing his guitar in the garden shed in back of the house on Denver Road so his mother couldn’t hear him. She didn’t really approve.

  Buddy Holly came to England that year, 1958, as pivotal a musical event as Muddy Waters’s almost concurrent tour.

  Holly was a gawky, goofy-looking Texan with Coke-bottle glasses, a neat little band, the Crickets, and a bag of great rock and roll songs: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” “Oh Boy,” “Rave On.” Holly’s stuttering style and geeky demeanor gave immense hope to anyone, especially in England, who felt out of it and yet ready, ready, ready to rock and roll.

  Mike and his friend Dick Taylor went to see Holly at a movie theater, the Woolwich Granada. Young Jagger had seen American rockers only on television shows like Cool for Cats, Oh Boy, and Six Five Special, which had introduced rockabilly stars like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Ronnie Hawkins to England. Buddy Holly—twitching, stuttering, really intense Texas music—was Mike Jagger’s first experience of living rock on the hoof.

  Mike discovered Howlin’ Wolf in Dick Taylor’s record collection, and the two started to look for imports in the record shops along the Charing Cross Road. Mike began writing to Chess Records in Chicago to order LPs that were impossible to find in England. He got hold of a Blind Willie Johnson EP, Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground, and wore it out. Mike and Dick and some chums in Dartford started jamming in the front room of Dick’s house in Bexleyheath. Dick’s mum would serve tea to the boys and giggle with Dick’s sister in the kitchen as Mike Jagger belted out “La Bamba” for the umpteenth time.

  They called themselves Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. (“Little Boy Blue” was Sonny Boy Williamson’s nom de bleus.) Mick recalled later, “I used to do Saturday night shows with all these little groups. If I could get a show I would do it. I used to do mad things—get on my knees and roll on the floor—when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And my parents were extremely disapproving of it all, because it was just not done. This was for very low-class people, remember. I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent and thought, ’Well, I can do this.’ It’s a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.

  “But people seemed to like it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces . . . Yeah, I thought it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time, in these little places in the suburbs.”

  Mike Jagger finished Dartford Grammar in 1960 and won a grant to attend the prestigious London School of Economics, whose graduates usually went on to run the British Empire. Mike told friends he wanted to be a barrister or a journalist, maybe even a politician. During the summer, to earn money for his record addiction, he sold ice cream outside the Dartford library. Keith bought one once and they chatted briefly.

  Mike started classes in September 1960, commuting by train from Dartford to LSE in Aldwych, in central London. He quickly identified the blues cultists among his fellow students and helped organize an informal club. Mike started bringing LPs from his impressive collection to school, and he was carrying a bunch of these when he was approached early one misty, gray October morning on the platform of Dartford Station by a starved-looking art student, who looked like he’d slept in his purple shirt and was carrying a guitar case. Mike knew the face: he’d been at school with him. “I always knew where he lived,” Mick recalled, “because my mother would never lose contact with anybody, and she knew where they’d moved. I used to see him coming home from his school, which was less than a mile away from where we lived.”

  It was his new brother from the other side of the tracks, Keith Richards.

  * * *

  The Boy at the Top of the Stairs

  Keith’s beloved grandfather, Theodore Augustus “Gus” Dupree, was a musician and bandleader descended from the Huguenots, Protestants who fled Catholic France in Elizabethan times and settled around Canterbury in Kent. Gus played some guitar, had dance bands in the area in the early 1930s, and fathered six pretty daughters. The youngest, Doris, married Bert Richards from northeast London in 1936. When the war came, she got pregnant to avoid factory work, and Keith was born in December 1943 in the same Dartford hospital where Mike Jagger had been born five months earlier.

  With the Luftwaffe’s bombs falling, the family was evacuated to the country while Bert was in the army. He was wounded in Normandy and after the war took a job in a factory in Hammersmith. Keith didn’t see much of him and was raised an only child, doted on and coddled, in the musical world of the Dupree sisters and their dad. The Dupree girls were all talented, could play instruments, wanted to be actresses or movie stars. The family lived on Morland Avenue in Dartford and called their little boy “Ricky.”

  Gus Dupree played guitar, fiddle, and piano and breathed music into his grandson, especially the country and western styles of Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Jimmie Rodgers. To supplement his income as a baker during the 1950s, he had a C&W group that played at American bases. Doris loved jazzy pop music, and the radio was always playing Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Django Reinhardt. When Keith visited his granddad’s house in London, he would be drawn to Gus’s guitar, which lived on top of the piano. Gus would take it out of its case, polish it with a cloth, tune it, play a little for the boy. He never offered the instrument, never pushed it on Keith, just let him be fascinated by it. Sometimes the two would visit Gus’s friends in the repair shop under Ivor Marantz’s music store in Charing Cross Road. Keith sat in the corner while the men repaired guitars and violins. The cozy room smelled of hot, bubbling glue, steamed wood, and tobacco, and Keith watched as they rebuilt old instruments and hung them from the ceiling to dry.

  At age seven, Keith went to school. He hated it with a passion, preferring life in his mother’s cheery house. He cried in the mornings, and they almost had to force him out of the house. At school, he met Mike Jagger, who remembered: “I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers, roping ponies and playing guitar.”

  Keith’s two passions were animals and singing. By age eight, he was in the school choir, and a teacher picked him out as a natural harmonist, able to descant almost any tune by ear. At age ten, he was one of the best young choristers in London. The choir won several competitions, which is how Keith and three others—“the three biggest hoods in the school”—were picked to sing in the massed choirs at the coronation of the new English queen, Elizabeth II, at Westminster Abbey in 1953. He made several more appearances in the abbey at Christmastime, before his voice finally broke at thirteen.

  In 1955, Bert Richards moved the family to the Temple Hill council estate on the other side of Dartford. It was government housing for working families, and for twelve-year-old Keith, it was rough. The older kids were Teds, Teddy boys, tough little thugs in exaggerated Edwardian costume who thought nothing of beating up weaker kids for their pocket money. It was the Teds who rioted when Bill Haley barnstormed the U.K. in ’56. It was bicycle chains and razors in the ballrooms, the lead pipe down the trousers. The chicks were as tough as the cats. So Keith learned to keep his head down, watch his mouth, watch his back.

  In 1956, Keith’s poor grades channeled him into Dartford Technical College, where underachievers learned manual trades. He hated it and ended up having to do a year over again with younger kids, which he hated even more. But that was year one, when rock and roll hit England, and that was it for Keith’s formal education. In early 1958, the family got its first record player, and for his birthday th
at December, Doris bought Keith his first guitar, a seven-quid Rosetti acoustic, and he started to practice almost every minute, sitting in a sonically cool place at the top of the staircase in the little council house. Keith had learned the rudiments from Gus Dupree, who had taught him to play the Spanish guitar classic “Malagueñ a.” Now Keith hardly moved from the stairs as he laboriously taught himself guitarist Scotty Moore’s bouncy riff from Elvis’s “That’s All Right, Mama” and the rhythmic lick from “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Scotty Moore was Keith’s first mentor on the guitar via records, all the way from Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.

  Thrown out of school at sixteen for insolence, tight trousers, and cutting class, Keith enrolled at Sidcup Art School, where he took classes in commercial art. England’s art colleges in the late 1950s were the real incubators of the rock movement. As David Bowie has said, “In Britain there was always this joke that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar.” Sidcup was full of talented kids like Keith with guitar cases slung over their shoulders. The smoky lavs were packed with teenage pickers teaching each other Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott songs, trying to duplicate Leadbelly’s ringing twelve-string orchestrations on cheap Spanish guitars with gut strings. The first song Keith learned to play in art school was Jack Elliott’s version of “Cocaine Blues” (Keith didn’t know what cocaine was). This is where Keith met Dick Taylor, who happened to be in Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys with Mike Jagger.

  Dick was another art student, more serious than Keith. They began to practice guitar together at Dick’s house. Another schoolmate formed a country and western band, and Keith and Dick joined up. Keith Richards’s first gig ever was at a dance in Eltham, south of London near Sidcup. The band didn’t get paid, but this is where Keith started to play the easy progression that powers Hank Snow’s classic country song “I’m Movin’ On.”

  Chuck Berry got to England late, because his early records weren’t released there and the movies he appeared in weren’t distributed. Keith first heard him around 1959, and it was all over. “Chuck Berry was my man,” he says. “He was really the one who made me say, as a teenager, ’Jesus Christ! I want to play guitar!’ And then suddenly I had a focal point, not that I was naive enough to ever expect it to pan out. But now at least I had something to go for, some way to channel the energies you have at that age. And definitely, with rock and roll, you have to start somewhere around then.”

  Keith’s discovery of Chuck Berry coincided with the young Richards’s dreadful split with his father. Bert Richards worked in a warehouse, left home at five in the morning, and came back exhausted at seven at night to hear his boy making a racket at the top of the stairs with his guitar when he should have been doing his schoolwork. Bert hated his spotty son’s art school look, the way he wore his hair long, his sullen, rebellious attitude. Mutual loathing developed, and Keith and his father stopped speaking around 1960. His parents divorced a couple years later. Despite occasional attempts to reach his dad by mail, it would be more than twenty years before Keith and his father were reconciled.

  * * *

  Dartford Station

  Early commuter train from Dartford to Victoria Station in London, October 1960.

  “So I get on the train one morning,” says Keith, “and there’s Mike Jagger, and under his arm he has four or five albums. I haven’t seen him since the time I bought an ice cream off him, and we haven’t hung around since we were five, six, ten years. We recognized each other straight off. ’Hi, man,’ I say.

  “ ’Where ya goin’?’ he says. And under his arm he’s got Chuck Berry [Rocking at the Hop] and Little Walter, Muddy Waters [The Best of Muddy Waters]. I say, ’You’re into Chuck Berry, man, really? That’s a coincidence. I can play that shit. I didn’t know you were into that.’

  “He says, ’Yeah, I’ve even got a little band. And I got a few more albums. Been writin’ away to this, uh, Chess Records in Chicago and got a mailing list thing and got it together, y’know?’

  “ ’Wow, man.’ So I invited him up to my place for a cup of tea. He started playing me these records and I really turned on to it.”

  Keith was impressed. It wasn’t just that Mike was carrying these records. It was more that anyone in England had them at all. Expensive imports, they had to be specially ordered. The orders were filled by Leonard Chess’s own eighteen-year-old son, Marshall, who worked in the Chess stockroom in Chicago.

  Keith: “Back then the long-playing record was a very small market in England. Top-of-the-line stuff . . . Flash son of a bitch, because he comes from a better side of town than me. It’s the music I’m trying to listen to. I’ve got a few singles, but he’s got the bloody albums. One Dozen Berries. I’m afraid he might reach the [train door] handle before I rob them off him.”

  Keith managed to borrow The Best of Muddy Waters. He abandoned his post at the top of the stairs and spent days studying the album. It changed his life.

  Keith: “Just sitting in that train carriage in Dartford, it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert Johnson at the crossroads. There was a bond made there that, despite everything else, goes on and on. Like a solid deal.”

  So Mike and Keith linked up. They both knew Dick Taylor, and in short order Keith became a Blue Boy. Dick Taylor switched from guitar to bass, and Keith played lead guitar. They spent eighteen months jamming Buddy Holly, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Around and Around” in Dick’s front room. Dick’s mum liked to watch because Mike was already doing his little moves, tossing his head, dramatizing the tunes. Mike went on summer holiday in Devon with Keith’s family and delivered his first public performance during the summer of 1961 at a local pub, doing Everly Brothers songs, with Keith singing harmony and playing guitar.

  Then Keith satisfied his Chuck Berry obsession by trading a bunch of records for an electric guitar: a cheap, blond, no-name, f-hole acoustic with a Japanese pickup. The amplifier was an old radio. But it worked—sometimes. The pickup would get loose. “Does anyone have a soldering gun?” Soon Keith was learning “Maybelline” and “Beautiful Delilah,” songs that Berry played so easily with his huge hands.

  Keith now got to work, popping speed—purple hearts, French blues, female period pills, anything—to get the stamina to practice these riffs over and over. All this went on until he and Mike heard about the new blues club in Ealing and decided to go to the club’s second session on March 24, 1962.

  This time, Alexis Korner let Brian Jones get up and play. Brian and Charlie Watts had just spoken to each other for the first time. Mike, Keith, and Dick were gob-smacked by the Elmo Lewis persona, glowing with the groove and blasting loud, firey guitar over Charlie Watts’s solid backbeat. Mike went over and spoke with Elmo after the number and got pulled in by the soft patter, the hair, the penetrating eyes, the uncanny bluesman’s cool. They talked about him all the way back to Dartford.

  On April 7, Mike, Keith, and Dick were back at the Ealing Club. Alexis again brought Elmo Lewis onstage.

  Keith: “Suddenly it’s Elmore James, man, this cat . . . And it’s Brian, man, and he’s sitting on this little [stool], and he’s bent over . . . da-da-da, da-da-da on acoustic guitar with a pickup. We thought he was just fucking incredible, so this time we both went up and spoke with him, and he told us he was forming a band. He could have easily joined Blues Incorporated, because Alexis wanted him, but he needed to have his own, and he wanted it to be his own baby.”

  The lads from Dartford were also impressed when Brian told them he already had his own baby—in fact, a bunch of babies—with maybe another on the way. This bloke was only twenty, but he seemed so seasoned.

  Keith: “He was a good guitar player then. He had the touch and was just peaking. He was already out of school, he’d been fired from a bunch of jobs. He was already living on his own and told us he was trying to find a pad for his old lady and their kid. Whereas Mick and I were just kicking around in back rooms, still living at home.”

  A
t the same time, when they talked about him, they mocked Brian for his posh accent and his soft manner, which they regarded as provincial. They may have been from the suburbs, but Mike and Keith thought themselves Londoners, disdainful of anyone they considered a hick. This was when Mike (under the influence of the egalitarian, pro-Labour LSE students he admired) was beginning to be downwardly mobile into the newly chic working class, adopting a faux-cockney accent in the tones of the East End, growing his hair, changing his moniker from Mike to the more laddish Mick.

  Mick Jagger.

  Had a certain edge to it.

  * * *

  Blues Incorporated

  Back in Dartford, the Blue Boys recorded a tape reel of their favorites—“Around and Around,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” and some others—and sent it to Alexis Korner with a worshipful letter written by Mick. Korner liked the energy, and Cyril Davies heard something in Jagger’s voice, so Mick and Keith were invited to visit the Korner household. They arrived to find Brian Jones waking up from a night under the Korners’ kitchen table. They listened to records—Muddy, Memphis Slim, and Robert Johnson, unknown to the boys from Kent. Next time they visited the Ealing Club, Mick got invited to jump onstage and sing Billy Boy Arnold’s “Bad Boy.” But there was a rush to the bar as he started to sing, and no one noticed him.