Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

Soul Brother Number Two

  Mick Jagger came back from America in his new chameleonic guise, Soul Brother Number Two, the white James Brown. He consulted a choreographer to see if Brownian moves could be learned, was told that James moved too fast to deconstruct the moves properly. “I do a bit of James Brown now,” he told a reporter, “but a very watered-down version.”

  On November 20, the Rolling Stones were back on Ready Steady Go!, miming “Little Red Rooster” for a segment that opened on a stark close shot of Mick’s lips and mouth. They also mimed “Off the Hook,” Mick slipping into tastefully understated dance steps, playing with an imaginary telephone. After “Around and Around,” Keith collapsed in the dressing room because he’d been speeding for five days straight.

  The rest of feverish 1964 was devoted to promoting their records, mostly on TV because of a serious feud between their management and the BBC that started when the Stones didn’t show up for a radio gig. In turn, the no. 1 smash “Rooster” was ignored by Top of the Pops. They scrambled to patch things up with the Beeb, playing four Chicago-style covers on the Saturday Club radio program, including “Beautiful Delilah” and Willie Dixon’s “Down at the Bottom.”

  Brian was busy denying that his recent illness would cause him to leave the Stones, a major rumor of the day. Charlie Watts denied the rumors about his two-month-old marriage, then admitted it when confronted by his annoyed band. Andrew thought two married members would kill his carefully nurtured image of the Stones as Bad Boys. They gave Watts a hard time about the secret marriage, but that was all. There was a certain integrity at stake here. The Stones, if they were really rebelling against anything, were protesting suburban values and outmoded bourgeois social rituals symbolized by marriage and family life. Mick and Keith constantly mocked Brian’s pretentions and genteel manners, and Mick would soon begin attacking the underbelly of suburbia’s hypocrisy in his songs. “My great thing against suburban life was that it was, first of all, petty,” he later told an interviewer, “and secondly, boring, based on consumer values, at best unambitious, and full of tittle-tattle and jealousies and things like that. I was trying to look for a music that wasn’t a reflection of that society.”

  The Rolling Stones had two million-selling singles that year in “It’s All Over Now” and “The Last Time.” In their flat in Hampstead, Keith and Mick were writing a new song, using a method that became standard procedure. They would play old blues riffs over and over until they mutated into something else, a new composition. That’s how they came up with “The Last Time,” based on an old gospel chant that had been updated by the Staples Singers and absorbed by Keith in the six months since he’d bought the Staples album in Chicago. They also had another tune going, a song about the skewed families of the rich girls the Stones were meeting—a threatening slow pop blues they called “Mess with Fire.”

  Now it was 1965, and “The Sixties” were about to really begin, with the Rolling Stones as their generation’s point men and outriders, brave scouts in a terra incognita of changing consciousness that would soon shake the world.

  I do the bits you can’t hear.

  Brian Jones

  * * *

  Knee-to-Knee

  Year zero for rock music was 1965, the pivot of the decade, when postwar baby boom culture took over the Western romantic tradition and turned the volume way up. In England, the Beatles and Stones tuned pop music into the new drug culture. In America, Bob Dylan invented rock by making strapping on an electric guitar a quasipolitical statement. In 1965 the novel was dead and the movies hopelessly behind the times. Music, fashion, and pop art carried the spirit of the day, and in the vanguard of this were the Rolling Stones.

  They had been working nonstop now for fifteen months. They were regarded by other rockers as the best live band in the world. Their concerts were interactive lust fiestas with a backbeat, and no one who saw the Stones play live in those times ever forgot it.

  During this period, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards sat knee-to-knee in hotel rooms and tour buses, writing songs. “It’s the best place to write,” Mick said, “because you’re totally into it. You get back from a show, have something to eat, a few beers, and just go into your room and write. I used to write about twelve songs in two weeks on tour. It gives you lots of ideas.”

  The germ of the songs usually came from Keith. He played old blues licks, transformed them, sang along wordlessly in mostly vowel sounds. Mick would translate them into lyric ideas (“vowel movement”). Often Mick would speed the tempo, and the little riff would evolve into a nasty radio anthem like “Get Off My Cloud” or “19th Nervous Breakdown” or one of the brilliant pop art manifestos the Stones were inventing in those exhilarating days.

  In January, The Rolling Stones No. 2 was out in England and spent the winter at no. 1. Clockwork-obsessed Andrew’s liner notes suggested mugging the blind for the money to buy the album until Decca changed the sleeve. The Stones refused to appear on England’s Sunday night TV variety show Live at the London Palladium because it was a family program. Keith told a reporter the Rolling Stones were atheists, but then hedged: “When you really get to know us, we’re pretty good guys at heart.”

  On January 16, the Stones flew to Los Angeles for two days in the studio before going on to tour Australia. Working with Jack Nitzsche and engineer Dave Hassinger at RCA Studio, they began building “The Last Time,” combining Keith’s rhythm with Brian’s serpentine guitar hook. Hailed by some as one of the first rock songs, “The Last Time” used Brian’s repeating, curling riff to hypnotic effect. “ ’The Last Time’ was the first song we actually managed to write with a beat,” Keith said. “It was our first nonpuerile song.” “The Last Time” took all night to get on tape, and Brian, Bill, and Charlie had passed out on the studio couches by the time they got to a demo called “Mess with Fire,” an acoustic ballad about the dysfunctional families of the rich girls Mick knew. Retitled “Play with Fire” and recorded while the others slept, Keith played guitar, with Jack Nitzsche on piano and harpsichord and Phil Spector on bass. Mick displayed his keen sense of London’s social geography in a somber lyric of blunt warning that was unprecedented in its negative passion. It was a star solo turn for him, the emergence of the sexual outrider who would haunt the airwaves for years to come.

  Later that day, the Stones flew to Australia, where three thousand girls rioted at the Sydney airport, smashing a chain-link fence and breaking rails in the customs hall in a suicide charge to get their hands on the band.

  There were twenty-four shows on this long tour. Do you feeeel it? Mick asked the squealing little girls, and they let him know that, yes, they felt it. “A blatantly sexual act which the chaste Beatles had not prepared our tender teens for,” opined the Sydney Morning Herald, and press hostility continued for the whole tour.

  Brian Jones and Bill Wyman took advantage of this by embarking on a carnival of intercourse, stealing each other’s girls, sometimes several girls a day, according to Bill. A Melbourne barbecue in the Stones’ honor turned into an orgy (Mick fucked both the hostess and her daughter).

  On to Singapore, the first English band to play there, as guests of the British high commissioner and his family. The promoter laid on a dozen beautiful Chinese whores for the band that night. The girls were hot, professional sex stars, not the little teens the Stones were used to, and even Bill Wyman was intimidated. His girl took matters in hand when he failed to become aroused; she filled her mouth with toothpaste and gave him a foamy menthol blow job that did the trick.

  While the band was Down Under, The Rolling Stones Now was released in America. It was another black album from the Stones, with black-and-white snapshots by David Bailey. Now was a rowdy grab bag of 1964 English singles (“Rooster,” “Heart of Stone”), soul covers, and newer up-tempo jams like “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” and the excellent “Down the Road Apiece” from Chess Studios. Even the primal, swampy “Mona,” still throbbing in the can from the earliest Stones sessions, got on Now.
So did “Pain in My Heart,” Otis Redding’s arrangement of New Orleans producer Allen Toussaint’s song, cut by the Stones in L.A. So ramshackle was this U.S.-only release that an inferior take of “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” was put on the album, supposedly because Chrissie Shrimpton delivered the wrong can of tape to the studio for mastering.

  But to their audience, The Rolling Stones Now appeared as a cohesive manifesto from a barrier-smashing band equally comfortable with rock and roll, R&B, and the blues. “Surprise, Surprise” ended the record with Mick’s snarling accusations over Charlie Watts’s hard backbeat. Mick preached the lyric soul-style, and this last track’s tough love carried over to the onslaught of “The Last Time” a few weeks later.

  After Australia and New Zealand, the Stones returned to Los Angeles. At RCA Studio, they added vocals and guitars to “The Last Time,” layering echo and reverb into the song’s groundbreaking mix. Keith’s famous single-note guitar break was a dramatic mirror of Mick’s angry threats in the lyric, an insistent emphasis of the number’s bloody-minded attitude.

  While Mick, Keith, and Charlie worked in the studio, Bill and Brian hit the Sunset Strip dance clubs, where the Byrds were a hot young band playing folk music on electric guitars, turning Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” into a folk rock anthem. Brian moved around L.A. like an English prince, inviting young girls back to his room at the Hollywood Ambassador Hotel for threesomes and orgies. The girls staggered out of Brian’s room after dawn, carrying rumors of sadism, perversion, and rough treatment from that freaky, insatiable maniac who played guitar for the Rolling Stones.

  * * *

  Mama’s Cookin’ Chicken Fried in Bacon Grease

  February 1965. With “The Last Time”/“Play with Fire” rushed out in England and hot on the radio, Mick was hanging out in the Ad-Lib club high over Leister Square with the Beatles, strategizing so their singles wouldn’t get in each other’s way. “A meticulous piece of work going down between the Beatles and the Stones,” according to Keith, “not to clash with each other.”

  In early March, the Stones began a two-week British package tour with the Hollies and other bands. As they progressed through Liverpool and Manchester, engineer Glyn Johns crudely recorded shows by hanging a single mike from the balcony. In Manchester a girl sailed off the balcony, losing some teeth when she landed on some other girls. Girls jumped the stage, clamping onto Mick in death grips, burying Brian in a rugby scrum until cops dragged them off.

  On March 18, last night of the Hollies’ tour, after escaping rioting fans in Romford, the band was banging back to town in a Daimler when Bill Wyman announced he had to pee. Then they all wanted a piss. They stopped at a service station, but the attendant took one look and told them to get lost. Mick gave him some lip and was told to get off the forecourt. “Get off my fucking foreskin,” yelled Brian, pulling a repulsive nanker. “We’ll piss anywhere, man,” Mick said, and the Rolling Stones lined up, peed on the wall, marking their territory, and roared off in a derisive blast of naughty language and rude gestures. Someone got the plate number, and the incident was splashed all over the press. Months later, they were dragged to court, charged with insulting behavior and obscene language, and fined five pounds each.

  Spring 1965. “The Last Time” was no. 1 in England. There were furious bids for the Stones by other record companies because their Decca contract was expiring in May.

  In April, Brian moved to a supposedly haunted mews house in Chelsea, which he outfitted in velvet drapes, precious guitars, turntable and record collection. He had become the outsider of the band and saw Mick, Keith, and Andrew only at the shows. Andrew kept talking about throwing Brian out of the band.

  Mick and Keith moved to a new flat in Hampstead after fans besieged their old place. John Lennon came by and listened to Keith’s superior collection of American records. They wore out the new Bob Dylan album, Bringing It All Back Home, a phantasmagoria of rock and roll recorded with young white bluesmen from Chicago. The songs were biting zeitgeist arrows, full of lyric trickery, surreal social protest, and soul force: “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Gates of Eden,” “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream.”

  The odd thing was that Dylan was said to be obsessed with charismatic Brian Jones and wanted to meet him on Dylan’s upcoming English tour in May. Dylan even phoned Brian from New York, but the paranoid Mr. Jones didn’t believe it was really Dylan until Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, came on the line and convinced him. Dylan told Brian that the Stones were the best band in the world. Brian explained to Dylan that the Stones would be touring the United States in May; they could get together when Dylan came back to New York. (Brian spent so long on the phone with Dylan over the next year that the Stones’ office staff dreaded getting the bills.) Inspired by the Stones, Dylan would make this his last solo tour. Soon he would put on a modernist checked suit, Chelsea boots, and an electric guitar—like a rolling stone—to howls of protest from his fans.

  The Stones returned to L’Olympia theater in Paris for three sold-out shows.

  Mick: “The Beatles had done very badly in Paris. They did a very unsuccessful series of shows with a terrible bill. Typically French, they knew that everyone else loved the Beatles, so they didn’t. And we did this series of shows at the Olympia, which was great.”

  Mick did some soul-style preaching on “Everybody:” “Listen to mah song, it’ll save the whole world!” Keith played a country-style guitar solo on “It’s All Over Now.” Mick sardonically introduced Charlie to the French fans: “Charles ne parle pas la Francais,” he drawled as Charlie Watts ambled up to introduce “Little Red Rooster.” The crowd was out for blood, chanting between songs in Gallic delirium. The last song of the night was “Hey Crawdaddy”: Mick sang one verse and then did the crawdad dance as the band vamped on the Diddley rhythm while the stomping, clapping, chanting audience got its rocks off. YEAH! Mick yelled at the end, running for the wings as the band unplugged and followed him off.

  After the last show, English friends took the Stones to an intimate party at the apartment of Donald Cammell. A bit older than the Stones, the formidably hip Cammell was a talented English portrait painter who’d forsaken his studio in Flood Street, Chelsea, for a Left Bank atelier. Cammell was brilliant and attractive, with wide social connections and esoteric knowledge of the occult and the far out. Cammell and his beautiful girlfriend, fashion model Deborah Dixon, were avant-garde stars and very much a team. The party was chic and bohemian—low lights, hashish smoke, Miles Davis on the stereo—and the uncouth Stones were the least cool of Cammell’s guests. But Cammell was interested in the Stones because he was getting into the movie business, and he befriended first Brian, then Mick, with fateful consequences down the road.

  When the band returned to London, Brian stayed behind to hang out with his actress girlfriend Zou Zou and French pop star Françoise Hardy at Castel, the hot Paris club that year, basking in the atmosphere and adulation he enjoyed in Paris. He may have been the outcast of his band, but Paris treated Brian Jones like a god.

  The Rolling Stones’ third North American tour began in Montreal on April 23, with “The Last Time” radiating its bitter energy from America’s fifty-thousand-watt clear-channel radio stations. It was scream-a-rama at the Academy of Music on 14th Street in New York City as Mick stepped over the footlights and jabbed a finger into the steamy bedlam during the Stones’ first number, “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love.” A piercing inhuman din was the audience’s response to his torrid declaration—“I want you! You! You!” Ticket demand was so intense that promoters booked three more New York shows for the end of the tour.

  The next day, the Stones were driven to Philadelphia for a concert featuring Little Anthony and the Imperials, Reperata and the Delrons, Bobby Vee, and the hot English headliners Herman’s Hermits. The Hermits were a British Invasion bubblegum group with a current hit record, “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter.” Their singer was a younger, cuter, friendlier
Jagger clone, and they were so popular that they would outsell both the Beatles and the Stones in America the following year. Mick hated the Milquetoast, teenybopper band so much that he still recalled, thirty years later: “Herman’s Hermits were top of the bill and we were second, and there was some argument about the dressing rooms. Herman [Peter Noone] was complaining because his wasn’t big enough. There we were, and he was top of the bill because Herman’s Hermits were huge. And then the most impossible thing was going out to have a hamburger, and some guy would go, ’Are you guys Herman’s Hermits?’ It would kill us! We’d say ’Fuck you! Herman’s Hermits is shit!’ ”

  If this touched a nerve in twenty-two-year-old Mick Jagger, it may have been because the similarities between the artistically valid Rolling Stones and the manufactured pop of Herman’s Hermits (and other, younger English groups flooding into America) were much closer than anyone wanted to admit in 1965.

  * * *

  No Satisfaction

  May 1965. The Rolling Stones were so big in America now that mighty Ed Sullivan had to eat his words. On May 2, they played “The Last Time,” “Rooster,” and “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” on Sullivan’s Sunday night show.

  On the southern leg of the tour, at the Gulf Motel in Clearwater, Florida, Keith woke out of a fitful sleep with a riff in his head. Half-awake, he reached for his guitar and recorded the riff—like a reversal of the clarion horn vamp of “Dancing in the Street,” Martha and the Vandellas’ current hit record—on the cassette player next to his bed. Then he fell back into a deep sleep. When he woke in the morning, he rewound the tape and discovered the little riff. Later in the day, Keith played it for Mick and told him, “The words that go with this are ’I can’t get no—satisfaction’ ” a line in Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days.”