Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Keith: “Andrew’s logic after the first album was that if we didn’t start to find a source of new material . . . we’d only be able to scrounge around for another album or two before we ran out of top-notch rock and roll and R&B. You run out of classics eventually. In those days, the original versions were far superior to ours; we were just learning them. We got our music across because white kids had never heard it before, even though it was in their own backyard in [America]. But we were white and eighteen and looked sort of cute, whatever.”

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  A New Delinquent Aristocracy

  The Rolling Stones were already huge in France in late 1964. The French never much liked the Beatles, but they loved the louche and grungy Stones, probably because they had always understood black American music more than white Americans had. When the Stones arrived in Paris on October 19, they had three records in the French charts, and their concerts at venerable L’Olympia theater (home of the cancan) were complete sellouts (fans attacked the box office when tickets ran out). The Stones played an expanded set that added “Carol,” “If You Need Me” (with acute vocal harmonies by Keith), “Tell Me,” and “Confessin’ the Blues” (with Brian terrific on harmonica). The cops planted stooges in the audience, and if some poor kid got rowdy, he was quickly frog-marched out of the hall, which annoyed the Parisian kids and got them ready to rumble.

  The set ended with “Bye Bye Johnny,” which set off anarchy and violence. As the Stones crowded into the armored riot police van with machine guns bolted to the walls that was waiting at the stage door, their audience went berserk, wrecking the ornate lobby and fighting in the street outside, breaking every plate-glass window around, attacking civilians and wasting cafés. The gendarmes made 150 arrests. Despite the Paris violence, the promoter told the press the Stones could come back to L’Olympia anytime.

  After the show, the band hung out with semicrazed English rocker Vince Taylor, an old friend whose French R&B band had opened the show. Mick and Keith went drinking with Taylor’s tambourine player, Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, known as Stash de Rola, the son of the painter Balthus, beginning a long and significant friendship. The group ended up at the disco New Jimmy’s, the place to be seen in 1964 Paris. Bill scored a French girl and left early.

  Long transatlantic flight to New York on a BOAC 707. Hundreds of fans at the airport. Band packed into Cadillac, swamped by fans at the Astor Hotel in Times Square. Outside the hotel, the girls chanted, “Time, time, time is on my side.” Andrew ordered London Records’ press rep, Connie deNave, to feed the straight press a hot flash: “The Rolling Stones, who haven’t bathed in a week, arrived here yesterday.” The image of the unwashed Stones was teletyped on the wire services and gained national notoriety instantly, guaranteeing the Rolling Stones would get noticed on this tour.

  The Stones took Manhattan by storm the next day. When they appeared on the radio with “Murray the Kunt” (as Keith called him), the station was mobbed, resulting in another mad dash for the cars. They taped some songs for Clay Cole’s dance show on Channel 11, then played two complete shows at the Academy of Music on 14th Street. The four thousand fans who saw the second show included Andy Warhol, Baby Jane Holzer, reporter Tom Wolfe, David Bailey, the Shrimp (but not her little sister, who was left behind in London to write her teen columns for Tiger Beat), Diana Vreeland, editor of Vogue, who had championed the Stones the previous spring; the high-camp crowd of art directors and fashionistas; the in-crowd (Dobie Gray’s song a big hit that month), as well as almost anybody cool in town that weekend. Because David Bailey had spread the word: the Beatles are over, too sweet, even your mum likes them. The Stones are switched on, man, totally now. They’re rebels with a cause, an R&B rebellion against the bourgeoisie and suburban values, rock and roll guerrillas in tight pants.

  Tom Wolfe: “In the center of the stage a short thin boy with a sweatshirt on, the neck of the sweatshirt almost falling off his shoulders, they are so narrow, all surmounted by this enormous head . . . with the hair puffing down over the forehead and ears, this boy has exceptional lips. He has two peculiarly gross and extraordinary red lips. They hang off his face like giblets. Slowly his eyes pour over the flaming bud horde, soft as Karo syrup, and close, and then the lips start spreading into the most languid, most confidential, the wettest, most labial, most concupiscent grin imaginable. Nirvana! The buds start shrieking, pawing toward the stage.”

  The air was thick with a rain of objects hurled at the stage: candy, lipstick, sneakers, paper plates with scrawls on them, stuffed animals, compacts, dozens of pens and pencils, wallets, coins, garbage, junk and trash, every one a love letter and a message of lust.

  Later that night, the band went to a party thrown for them at photographer Jerry Schatzberg’s huge studio loft on Park Avenue South. While hundreds danced to 12 X 5 and the Supremes asked “Baby baby baby, where did our love go?” the Stones, in jeans and sweatshirts, lounged in the private pad upstairs, too shy and exhausted and stoned to come down. Keith was hanging out with Ronnie Bennett. Mick had Jane Ormsby-Gore, daughter of Lord Harlech, British ambassador to Washington, in a dark corner. Only Brian went down to the party to meet and greet.

  The next day, Sunday, was spent rehearsing for The Ed Sullivan Show, the only national live exposure then available to pop music. The cops guarding the theater refused to let the Stones leave the building for their own safety, since it was surrounded by girls. That night, the Rolling Stones made their live American coast-to-coast TV debut amid screams and tumult in the studio audience. On a stage set with giant wheel-shaped “stones,” they did “Around and Around” at the top of the show and “Time Is on My Side” near the end. Seventy million Americans watched.

  The Stones performed in stark contrast to what Americans had seen coming out of England. America west of the Hudson finally got a load of sweatshirted Mick’s leering sexuality, Brian’s suggestive aggression, Keith’s pimples and attitude, Charlie’s Neanderthal look, and—perhaps worst and most shocking of all—the saturnine, older, knowing, lock-up-your-daughters gaze of His Otherness Bill Wyman.

  It was America’s introduction to what critic Nick Kent later called “a new, delinquent aristocracy.” And it scared the shit out of normal people. The switchboard at CBS was overwhelmed with angry messages from parents objecting to the Stones. Thousands of them. A shaken Ed Sullivan gave a statement next morning to the press: “I promise you they will never be back on our show. If things can’t be handled, we’ll stop the whole business. We won’t book any more rock and roll groups and we’ll ban teenagers from the theater. Frankly, I didn’t see the group until the day before the broadcast . . . It took me seventeen years to build this show, and I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks.”

  The Stones were called slobs and riffraff in the papers that day, but they were already on a plane to a more receptive scene in L.A. Six months later, unstoppable, they were back on Ed Sullivan too.

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  No Peace in the Barnyard

  Late October 1964. A Cold War presidential campaign had America—still paranoid and traumatized by the Kennedy assassination—locked in a political death grip. Atom bombs and mushroom clouds were on TV as anti-Republican propaganda. Roy Orbison was big on the radio with “Pretty Woman.” The new Supremes single was “Baby Love.” The Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night was the no. 1 album. The Beach Boys were moving out of the surf and into Brian Wilson’s autoerotic love calls like “Don’t Worry Baby.”

  The Rolling Stones made only a small splash in this cultural maelstrom, but at least in Los Angeles they hit like one of Lyndon Johnson’s bombs on Vietnam a few months later. Their arrival coincided with the Teen Age Music International (TAMI) show, an old-style rock and roll show shot on videotape and kinescoped to be shown in movie theaters. The cast included Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Beach Boys, some second-division English bands, and the Barbarians with their one-armed drummer. As spearheads of the cash-generating British Invasion, the Stones we
re shocked to learn they were headlining: this meant they had to follow James Brown and the Famous Flames—the best, most exciting, most impossible-to-follow band in the world. Even worse, Soul Brother Number One was mad as hell that the Stones were closing the show, rasping, “Tell those crazy motherfuckers they gonna wish they never left London.” Mick badgered Andrew to get the billing changed, but the producers refused. Musical director Jack Nitzsche couldn’t help. It was finally agreed that it would be ten minutes after the wringing-wet James Brown was helped from the stage by his retainers that the Stones would go on.

  Only the Supremes deigned to greet the Stones and say hello. None of the other American acts would speak to them.

  While Brown did his wild act—the spins, the double splits, the slippery moves, the razor-sharp band, the choreographed manic episodes—the Stones trembled in the dressing room while the other acts, watching a video feed, cheered Brown on. Finally Chuck Berry and Marvin Gaye took pity on them and smiled. Marvin told them, “Just go out there and do your thing.” The Stones calmed down and played a perfect set: “Around and Around,” “Off the Hook,” “Time Is on My Side,” “It’s All Over Now,” and “I’m All Right.”

  Afterward, James Brown walked up to the Stones, shook their hands, and complimented them. After that, Mick decided to become James Brown.

  The Stones in L.A. Hot sunshine and brown haze. California girls. Major wood at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. New pal Jack Nitzsche laughing as he finds Mick and Keith, naked in the hotel corridor, after a girl locked them out of their suite. Brian cruising Sunset Strip, a Stones sensation in his tailored mod jacket, collar and tie, big shades and tight white Lee Riders jeans. Mick and Keith huddled in the hotel, working on new songs for sessions Andrew organized in Los Angeles. They banged out “Surprise, Surprise” and “What a Shame” and reworked “Heart of Stone,” which they had composed back in July. They bought new soul records and learned Marvin Gaye’s “Hitch Hike” and Otis Redding’s “Pain in My Heart.” They went to parties and did radio interviews. Charlie Watts told a disc jockey that American teenagers were like kids everywhere, except they had a lot more money. The Stones played shows in Sacramento and San Bernardino. Old-fart London Records promotion man George Sherlock tagged along and did no promo, which intrigued the band to no end. A show in Long Beach ended with a riot, with the Stones’ getaway car engulfed and damaged by a mob of girls.

  The next day, the Rolling Stones began working in RCA Studios with Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. Nitzsche, twenty-seven, was the key studio musician in L.A., a cool hipster with a Beatle haircut, wraparound shades, and a primo track record. He’d worked as Phil Spector’s arranger since 1962, creating the thunderous orchestrations behind the Ronettes and the Crystals. He’d written “Needles and Pins,” a big hit for the Searchers, one of the hottest bands in England. Now Jack Nitzsche basically joined the Rolling Stones as their indispensable arranger, playing on and helping produce almost all the records they would make in California over the next four years.

  At RCA, the Stones cut Mick and Keith’s new songs and redid “Heart of Stone” (recorded earlier in London with Jimmy Page on guitar) and Solomon Burke’s “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” They covered “Down Home Girl,” written by tunesmith Jerry Lieber as an R&B parody, by playing it straight like the honkies they were. They started at 11 A.M. and astounded the studio crew by working for seventeen hours. No one did that in L.A.

  Jack Nitzsche wasn’t used to working this way, and he was deeply impressed by the Stones’ stamina and intensity. “They were the first rock and roll band I met that was actually intelligent,” he said. “They could all talk! They were all really bright. We couldn’t believe it. The Stones were also the first ones I ever saw say ’fuck you’ to everybody. There was no guidance at all on those records and very little need for it . . . They changed my whole idea of recording. I’d just been doing sessions, three hours to get a tune down. This was the first time [I saw] a band got together and just played. That was the first really free feeling I had in the studio.”

  Back on tour. In Cleveland, fans exploded in sex frenzy during “I’m All Right” and a girl got pushed over the balcony. Tough Rhode Island girls with beehive hair wrecked Loew’s Theater in Providence when cops stopped the show after five songs. Night train to New York. The next night, the boys—Keith, Mick, Andrew—were driven to Harlem to catch James Brown at the Apollo Theater on 125th Street. They were the only white faces in the audience. James was glad to see the hot English band and invited them onstage to take a bow during his show. Backstage afterward, James noted that even black women screamed at the Stones’ long hair, and he offered them good champagne from an ice-filled tub in the corner of the room.

  In New York and L.A., Brian Jones was the Stone the in-crowd wanted to know. Andy Warhol’s hard-chic entourage in Manhattan took up Brian, who whispered to them, drew them in, his “china-cat smile of evil assurance” (Nick Kent) causing sexual havoc in the girls who encountered him. Brian told New York Post reporter Al Aronowitz that he’d fucked sixty-four girls in the past month, and showed him the dog chain Brian claimed he beat them with afterward.

  The Stones downtown: hip Charlie in his Ivy League suit digging the Mingus band with the incomparable Danny Richmond on drums at the Village Vanguard, Dizzy Gillespie at the Village Gate with Max Roach on the skins. Bill Wyman was hanging out with John Hammond, Jr., and the buckskin-fringed, pot-puffing Village folk-blues crowd. Mick and Keith wrote songs in their hotel.

  On November 8, the Stones flew to Chicago to work at Chess, mostly without Brian, who collapsed with alcohol poisoning and exhaustion, sparking an industry-wide rumor that he had overdosed on pills. They put him in the hospital and said he had bronchitis. The Stones and Stu cut “What a Shame” at Chess and early versions of “Mercy, Mercy,” with Mick trying to reproduce the Afro-bayou falsetto of its original singer, Don Covay. Mick had a great respect for Covay’s style. “You get a real contrast between the falsetto and the butch, harsh voice,” he said. “It’s nice for a singer to have another voice.”

  By then the Stones felt more at home in Chicago. Keith: “Long as you knew cats, you was cool. They’d nurture us. ’These guys are cool. They’re weird but they’re cool.’ We’d become like their mascots. ’You want a bitch tonight? She’ll love you. She never had nothin’ like you before.’ You’d get laid and fed late at night. The white side of town was dead, but it was rockin’ across the tracks. An incredible education.”

  The Stones played most of their Midwest dates without Brian that November. Stu sat in on piano and they’d mike him way up to fill out the sound. In Dayton, Ohio, there was a titanic moan of disappointment at the announcement that Brian was ill and wouldn’t appear, and several hundred girls got up and left. The Stones sucked without Brian—“You can’t cover what you want from the Stones with one guitar,” Keith told biographer Stanley Booth—but there was desultory talk about getting rid of him.

  The last stop was in Chicago. Brian rejoined the band, and the show was a killer, a wild success. But after a week without him, with Keith struggling to play Brian’s trademark riffs, they dumped on Brian for being erratic, a drunk, and an asshole. They all hated his guts for letting them down. Mr. Jones’s paranoia index in turn jumped off the chart. It had been his band, but now he was shut out of the loop.

  “The thing about Brian,” Mick later said, “is that he was an extremely difficult person . . . and he did give everyone else an extremely miserable ride. Anyway, there was something very, very disturbed about him. He was so jealous of everybody else; that was his personality failing. . . . And you can’t be jealous and be a leader. He was obsessed with the idea of being the leader of the band.”

  Keith: “Brian was great. It was only when you had to work with him that he got very hung up. The harder the work got, the more awkward he got, and the more fucked up he would get himself . . . Mick and I were being merciless on him, because you don’t have the patience at the time.”r />
  Bill: “He could be the sweetest, softest, most considerate man in the world and the nastiest piece of work you ever met.”

  Charlie: “I think he wanted to be the lead singer. Well, of course he wasn’t. His breathing would never allow him to be. And he wanted to be leader, and he wasn’t a leader.”

  Stu hated Brian most of all. “Brian was very Welsh,” he told an interviewer, “and Welsh people are very devious. They are basically dishonest . . . I think Brian’s sin was being so goddamned stupid about himself. There was no need for him to get in that out-of-it state that he used to get into. He did it because he thought that was the way rock and roll stars should behave.”

  After a photo call in New York for Billboard (because 12 X 5 was selling so fast), the Stones flew back to London on November 17. They found “Little Red Rooster”/“Off the Hook” the no. 1 record in England, an incredible coup to have finally lifted a pure blues song atop the charts after two long years. Brian’s once-cherished ambition had come to pass. It was his masterpiece, his inspired guitar howling like a hound, barking like a dog, crowing like a rooster.

  But there was “no peace in the barnyard” for Brian. He learned that Andrew had told Eric Easton that he wanted Brian out of the group and that the idea had been vetoed by Mick, who didn’t want to face the girls alone on the front line of the Stones. Mick still felt he needed Brian up there beside him. And Mick knew that Brian was bigger than he was in America, where the real action was.

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