Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Giorgio called Stu on Monday morning. “Tell everybody in the band you guys are on next Sunday for a quid apiece.” So on February 24, the Rollin’ Stones made their debut at Gomelsky’s yet-to-be-named club in the back room of the Station Hotel, across from the Richmond tube stop. Playing for about thirty kids, the Stones rocked through “Talkin’ ’bout You,” “Mona,” “Pretty Thing,” and others, finishing with their new, orgasmic Bo Diddley showstopper, “Hey Crawdaddy.”

  “Ah gotta line an’ yew gotta pole, less go fishin’ at da crawdad hole . . .”

  What Charlie Watts could do with the Bo Diddley beat can’t be put into words. Any drummer who mastered the primitive rhythm saw what it could do to a party. Gomelsky saw what it did at the Station Hotel, with kids jumping around and dancing, and he offered the Stones a Sunday residency. Word spread like a disease. Sixty kids showed up the following week, and it doubled after that. You had to arrive early and queue to get in.

  Sundays at the Crawdaddy, the name Gomelsky gave his club when he saw the mayhem the Stones’ “Crawdaddy” vamp caused, quickly became a tribal rite. At first, the larger crowd of kids, trying to be cool, didn’t know how to react. Then a Crawdaddy employee got up during “Mona” and started dancing on one of the tables. The Stones loved this anarchic move and revved up the music even higher. The room just exploded. It started an audience-participation dance called the shake that became a sweat-soaked ritual when the Stones launched into their hypnotic, Diddley-pumping finale, throbbing with lust and hoodoo jive.

  By early March, the Stones were also playing paid rehearsals on Sunday afternoons at Ken Colyer’s club, Studio 51, on Great Newport Street in Soho, from four until six. Then they had to get across London to play in Richmond that evening. So Ian Stewart took a bonus he’d earned from his job at the chemical company and used it as a down payment on a Volkswagen bus so he could haul the amps, the drums, and the guitars over to the next gig.

  Brian Jones was telling everyone that with Charlie Watts in the band the Stones were unstoppable. The Beatles were the biggest act in England, and Brian was anxious to get there too. The Stones needed some national exposure, so Brian kept calling and writing the BBC to get the band on the radio.

  When the BBC told Brian it would be easier to get the Stones an audition if they had a new demo tape, he hustled an hour at IBC Studios in Portland Place. The sessions were set up and produced by Glyn Johns, who worked as a tape operator at IBC. On March 11, the Stones recorded straight-up readings of Bo Diddley’s “Road Runner,” “Crackin’ Up,” and “Diddley Daddy,” Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Honey What’s Wrong,” and Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved.” These tapes reveal the early Stones as a rhythm band, with Brian’s Hohner Echo “Super Vamper” harp as the lead instrument. Stu’s barrelhouse piano drives the music, and Brian plays the guitar solos on “Honey” and “Road Runner,” currently a big Stones jam at the Crawdaddy Club.

  Copies of the Stones’ tape made the rounds of the record companies, all of whom passed. They wanted pop groups in suits, not an artsy R&B band.

  But the Stones’ reputation as a hot live band began to really build. They got more gigs and drew big crowds of younger fans—art students from the Kingston College of Art and teenagers who’d been excluded from the cultish milieu of R&B fans. One of these was Chrissie Shrimpton, the fifteen-year-old sister of supermodel Jean Shrimpton—“the Shrimp,” as she was known to Swinging London. At a club in Maidenhead, a friend dared lively and precocious Chrissie to go up and kiss the Stones’ sexy, big-lipped singer after the gig. Mick kissed her back and promptly asked her out. Soon Chrissie and Mick Jagger were an item.

  Jean Shrimpton’s boyfriend then was David Bailey, the hottest fashion photographer in London. Though he was already married, Bailey and the Shrimp were the royal couple in the hot clubs of Swinging London. Bailey recalled, “Mick and I became friends, though I think I was lacking in his eyes because I wasn’t a musician; but I became his link to another world—and I knew this rude, longhaired git was on his way. By this time I was a man of the world, so when Mick wanted to go to a proper restaurant, I took him to Cassarole in the Kings Road. He slopped his food like a good lower-middle-class boy. I, being working-class, noticed bad manners more than most. To Mick’s amazement I told him he had to leave a 15 percent tip. I think that was his first realization of things to come.

  “[Actor] Terry Stamp had taken Jean and me to a place in the sky called the Ad Lib, a Soho penthouse converted into a discotheque with loud music, mirrored walls, and a huge window looking down on London. The clients were pop stars, young actors and actresses, artists and photographers. I took Mick, and soon, like a fifties debutante, he came out with a little help from his friends.”

  * * *

  Doing the Crawdaddy

  By April 1963, R&B was killing trad. The jazz club on Eel Pie Island in the Thames near Richmond was down to two nights a week from four. The rebels were on the outskirts and closing fast. Ground zero of the scene had moved to Richmond. Sunday night was a jungle grope lit only by a red spotlight. Half an hour of the Stones doing Bo Diddley’s “Pretty Thing” turned the place into a torrid steam bath. Younger musicians—the Who, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Small Faces—jammed into the Crawdaddy, learning the moves. The raw power of the Stones energized London for years afterward.

  First Stones article, Richmond and Twickenham Times, April 17, 1963:

  . . . Hair worn down Piltdown-style, brushed forward from the crown like the Beatles pop group—“We looked like this before they became famous” [says Brian]—the rhythm section provides a warm, steady backing for the blues of the harmonica and lead guitars.

  Save for the swaying forms of the group on the spotlit stage, the room is in darkness. A patch of light from the entrance doors catches the sweating dancers and those who are slumped on the floor.

  Outside in the bar, the long hair, suede jackets, gaucho trousers and Chelsea boots rub shoulders with the Station Hotel regulars, resulting in whispered mocking, though not unfriendly remarks about the “funny” clothes.

  By mid-April, Giorgio Gomelsky thought he had a handshake deal with the Stones to manage the band, who told everyone he didn’t. He started hustling for them. Hearing that the Beatles were taping “From Me to You” for the TV show Thank Your Lucky Stars on Sunday, April 14, he went to the studios to pitch a Beatles film to Brian Epstein, and invited the boys to come see the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club that night.

  Later at the steamy club, the Stones, playing in jackets and ties, were drenched in sweat as they launched into the last twenty minutes of the night, Bo Diddley’s “Mona,” with the dancers packed together like goats, shaking up and down with arms pinned to their sides, since there was no room to move to the dark throb of the beat. Mick was in front, wiggling and twisting, with Brian and Keith seated on barstools on either side. Bill and Charlie were at the back, Stu playing maracas beside them. The scene was loud, raw, and raving.

  Suddenly Mick and Brian noticed that a space had opened in front of the stage and four longhaired men in long black leather coats were standing there looking at them. Bill turned to Charlie: “Shit! Them’s the Beatles.” Brian was grinning madly, playing his ass off. The Beatles were checking them out! The audience picked up on it and began to shake even harder. Another explosive night at the Crawdaddy.

  They finished the set, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo came back to say hello. Paul was effusive. George told them they were the best new group he’d seen. John was a little distant. He wasn’t keen on Jagger’s sex appeal, thought his gyrations passé—“bullshit movement,” as he put it—something the Beatles had left behind in Hamburg. But they all got on well, so Brian invited the Beatles back to Edith Grove.

  At the Stones’ flat, Brian was the deejay, playing the Stones’ demo tape and Jimmy Reed records until four in the morning (despite the hyperopinionated Lennon’s blunt dismissal of Chicago blues). The Beatles were charmed by Br
ian, a fellow provincial with a respectful attitude, and stayed friends with him for the rest of his life. They invited the Stones to Albert Hall a few days later, where they were playing a Pop Proms concert on Thursday night. Before the Beatles left, Brian got them to sign a photo of themselves from a magazine, which he proudly stuck on the wall like any fan.

  Brian, Mick, and Keith cabbed to Kensington on April 18 to see the Beatles and got in free by carrying in the gear. In the dressing room, the Stones were astonished to see the Beatles putting on stage makeup. (McCartney says the next time they saw the Stones perform, Mick was made up like a tart.) When the Beatles went on, the Stones checked out the mass Beatlemania of the young girls packed into enormous Albert Hall—the screaming, the hysteria, the undies and the candy raining down on the stage—and were deeply, indelibly impressed. Afterward, Brian and Giorgio were helping to get the Beatles’ gear out the stage door. Brian was mistaken for one of the mop-tops and was mobbed: hair pulled, clothes torn, face ripped by fingernails, deafened by screams. Brian Jones, ignored for too long, now had his first taste of stardom. Driving him back to Chelsea, Gomelsky noticed he seemed dazed and asked if he was all right.

  “That’s what I want,” Brian whispered. “That’s what I want.”

  Giorgio saw himself as the next Brian Epstein, who had just launched his second Liverpool band, Gerry and the Pacemakers. Epstein was building an empire, and Giorgio wanted one too. He started work on a film about the Stones, and they recorded “Pretty Thing” for the sound track. He invited Peter Jones, a respected music journalist, to come to the Crawdaddy. “The fans were going mad with excitement,” Jones recalled. “During the break, Giorgio brought over Brian and Mick, introduced them as the Rolling Stones. We ate hot [meat] pies; drank a few glasses of beer. They said, ’You can see how the fans go for us down here, but we’re already fed up. The clubs in London don’t want to know us. The recording scene seems dead. The local papers have given us fantastic write-ups, but nobody can be bothered to even read them.’ ” The two Stones seemed sullen and exhausted to Jones, who promised he would spread the word about their “wild, raw-edged music.”

  On Tuesday, April 23, Giorgio got them to the BBC for a radio audition. Cyril Davies’s rhythm section subbed for Charlie and Bill, who couldn’t leave their jobs. Stu managed to get away from the chemical company because his piano was so crucial to the drive of the band.

  The next night, the Rollin’ Stones started playing the failing jazz club on Eel Pie Island in the Thames, a rickety old ballroom with a sprung dance floor. To get there, you paid a toll and crossed a little footbridge from the Twickenham shore. They served brown Newcastle ale, and if you were overcome by the sweat and the smoke, you could fall out on the grassy lawn outside. Eel Pie Island was where many fans saw the Stones for the first time, and it became a legendary venue for them.

  Back at Edith Grove, alliances among the Stones shifted around like the changing spring weather. It was still cold and the walls were covered in damp. John Lennon dropped by and found Mick and Keith huddled in bed together for warmth. All they had to eat was potatoes: boiled, mashed, and fried. Brian and Keith were closely bonded, playing guitars incessantly, deconstructing R&B to build a new, more modern sound with a jagged edge of adolescent sex drive. “With gloves on, freezing my balls off, that’s the closest I ever got to Brian Jones,” Keith said. “We had two guitars weaving around each other. We’d play these things so much that we knew both guitar parts. So when we got to the crucial point where we got it really flash, we’d suddenly switch. The lead picks up the rhythm, and the rhythm picks up the lead. It’s what Ronnie [Wood] and I call the ancient art of weaving. We still do it today. We don’t even have to look at each other, almost. You can feel it. You say, ’Ah, he’s gonna take off now, okay, I’ll go down.’ And vice versa.”

  Sometimes Mick Jagger picked up a guitar and tried to play along. He’d ask Brian to show him a chord or a lick, but Brian refused, insisting that Mick stick to singing.

  Mick was going through an ironic “camp” period, mincing about the filthy flat in housecoat and slippers, trying to tidy up a bit. The fetid squalor and chaos of Edith Grove was getting to him. Brian was dealing with the severe stresses of his life by drinking as much brandy as he could hold. When he was really loaded, he liked to beat up his girlfriends in the front room. Brian and Keith amused themselves by blowing gobs of snot on the walls and thinking up colorful names for the disgusting blotches. With Jimmy Phelge, who walked around wearing his soiled underwear on his head, Brian and Keith worked on perfecting their most insolent face, the “nanker,” pulling down their eyes while pushing up their nostrils in a cretinous mask of contempt. When Mick complained about the toxic conditions in their flat, they pulled the nanker on him. Mick was also doubtful about what he was doing, and nervous about his parents’ reaction if he told them he was leaving LSE for the life of a full-time musician.

  In late April 1963, music journalist Peter Jones tipped off teenage London press agent Andrew Oldham about the Rollin’ Stones and insisted he visit Richmond to hear for himself. Andrew was nineteen, a hyper baby promoter with a desk in Soho and an eye to find the next Beatles.

  “Well, okay,” said Oldham. “I don’t mind having a look at them. But you know I hear about new groups every day of the week, and I wouldn’t give most of them the steam off my shit, but if you want, I might go down there and see them.”

  On April 28, Andrew turned up in Richmond in his peaked Bob Dylan cap and shouldered his way through the mob of mods waiting to get out of the cold drizzle. Making his way to the alley behind the club, Andrew heard some hard words and a girl shouting. As he entered the Crawdaddy Club through the back door, he passed Mick and his new girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, standing in the shadows, having a blazing row.

  Andrew went inside, and that was the end of the Rollin’ Stones.

  R&B was a minority thing that had to be defended at all times. There was this kind of crusade mentality.

  Mick Jagger

  * * *

  Messenger of the Gods

  Andrew Loog Oldham stood in the back of the Crawdaddy Club as the Stones started their set. “The stuttering beat spoke of sex the instant it started a little dance in my heart.” He looked at Mick Jagger, in critic George Melly’s famous joke, like Sylvester looked at Tweety Pie. Andrew’s destiny revealed itself as he checked out Mick’s obscene lips, the future fast-forwarding in a screaming chaos of fame, money, power, sex. All those lips needed was someone who knew what to do with them.

  Andrew was the one. He was mercurial Hermes, messenger of the gods. He was a cheap hustler, younger than the Stones, hipper than thou, speedier, druggier, manic-depressive. His hypersensitive antennae were perpetually scanning the horizon for the Next Big Thing and already tracking the shift toward a media-controlled pop marketplace ruled by image and hype. He immediately saw the Stones as a paradigm of his latest obsession, Anthony Burgess’s just-published novel A Clockwork Orange, with its thuggish new language of aggro and social control. Andrew’s semimystic revelation as he felt the aggressive jungle boogie of the Stones in his very bones was that this new band and its dark, marginal R&B were the antidote to the Beatles’ wholesome and cheery pop image. The Stones would sell massive amounts of records and concert seats, and the seats would be sopping wet as soon as they started to play.

  “Even before I got into the club,” Andrew later said, “I knew this was the one. I stood outside and watched Mick and Chrissie Shrimpton, sister of Jean, having a fight in the alleyway. They were as attractive as each other, and I knew I was onto something.”

  Giorgio Gomelsky’s father had died, and he was in Switzerland for the funeral. After the gig, Andrew started talking to Mick and Keith. Brian butted in, told Andrew he was the leader of the group. Andrew did his number on them, jive-talking outlandish claims about how he could make them bigger than the Beatles. He talked American slang, went on about knowing Phil Spector, legendary American producer of the Cryst
als and Ronettes and the first teenage millionaire in the pop world. Andrew wore eye makeup, came on very cutting, very camp, all “darling” and “my dear,” and he got their total attention. He was irreverent, cynical about the record business, and they got the (erroneous) impression that Andrew loved the blues and R&B as much as they did. He told them they had to begin making records immediately and that he would style them as the anti-Beatles, looking the opposite of them. “To the extent that they looked all clean-cut and good,” Keith said, “we would look scruffy and evil.”

  Andrew was more like them than they were, talked like them, wore the same clothes, had the same contempt for the wankers of the world. By the end of the evening, Andrew had the Stones in his pocket. They went home to Edith Grove and stayed up, almost insane with excitement, all night. Brian Jones was completely ecstatic because someone had discovered them. Giorgio Gomelsky would get the shock of his life on his return to London, but nothing mattered to Brian, who was determined to be a pop star at any price, with no apology.

  Andrew Oldham’s father was a Dutch airman killed in the war. Born out of wedlock in Hampstead in 1944 to a well-off English girl, Andrew spent his youth getting kicked out of good schools for blackmail, shoplifting, and wearing the wrong trousers. He started tramping the streets of Soho at fourteen, trying to live the lives portrayed by playwright Wolf Mankowitz in the stage version of Expresso Bongo, which his mother took him to (Paul Scofield was the pop manager played by Laurence Harvey in the later film). He was an early mod, a young English “sixties mega-spiv” with a taste for sharp clothes and American music, all flash and plastic. Tall, blond, totally rude, he talked his way into a job with Mary Quant, working by night as a waiter at the Flamingo and even releasing a couple of singles as “Sandy Beach” before working little P.R. jobs in London. An early client was Don Arden, tough-guy promoter of rock and roll shows. Arden reportedly fired Andrew after he proudly showed reporters the razor-slashed, urine-soaked seats that fans had left behind after an Arden show. Andrew was in the studio when the Beatles made their first national TV broadcast on Thank Your Lucky Stars in February 1963, and was hired by Brian Epstein to do P.R. for “Please Please Me” and for his other groups. Another client was American record producer Phil Spector, inventor of the Wall of Sound, paranoid mogul of pop, “the first tycoon of teen,” as Tom Wolfe called him. When Spector visited London, Andrew grooved on his wise-guy persona: the limos, bodyguards, muscle, guns, and especially the know-how. Spector told him if he ever found a band to produce, Andrew should record it himself, and only lease the tapes to a record label, retaining ownership (and control).