That night, Brian Jones picked up a beautiful young girl, a model, in the bar of the motel. The next morning, she emerged from Brian’s room in tears, covered in bruises, both her eyes blackened. She told her girlfriend, who’d spent the night with Bill Wyman, that Brian had raped her and then beat her up. The girlfriend told Bill and said something about calling the cops. Panic! They were all so disgusted by Brian’s brutality that, after a quick conference (Andrew: “Don’t mess up his face!”), one of their English roadies, Mike Dorsey, stormed into Brian’s room and thrashed him, breaking two of Brian’s ribs. They took Brian to the hospital, where he was taped up and given painkillers. They made up a story that he had fallen while practicing karate by the motel pool. Brian spent the rest of the tour depressed, humiliated, schwacked on pills and drink.
By May 9, the Stones were in Chicago for a gig at the Arie Crown Theater. The next day, they went to Chess Studios for a round-the-clock session with engineer Ron Malo that produced cover versions of Don Covay’s “Mercy Mercy” and Otis Redding’s “That’s How Strong My Love Is.” They also cut the hilarious put-down “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man” (supposedly about London Records’ lazy promo guy George Sherlock: “sure do earn my pay, sittin’ on the beach every day”); and the first acoustic reference track of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” which sounded to Keith suspiciously like contemporary California folk rock, which he hated. They also cut six R&B covers, including Little Walter’s “Key to the Highway” and “Fannie Mae,” whose riff they took from “Promo Man.” This was the Stones’ last recording session in Chicago. Brian, sick and stoned on pills, didn’t play on them.
A couple days later, they flew to L.A. and went back into RCA Studios with Jack Nitzsche and Dave Hassinger to finish “Satisfaction.” In the studio, Keith hollered for more distortion on his guitar. “This riff’s gotta hang hard and long,” he kept saying. They turned the amps up, burning them to get a jagged sound, but it still wasn’t rough enough. Ian Stewart went over to Wallach’s Music City and came back with a new Gibson fuzz box, the first one the company made, and told Keith, “Try this.” It made the record, goosed Keith’s double-tracked guitar into the mechanized roar of a Panzer division cruising the Autobahn. The acoustic track from Chicago was buried under fuzz-tone guitar, a new bass line from Bill, and harder drum and percussion tracks. Mick’s vocal track was deliberately buried in the mix by Dave Hassinger on orders from Andrew, who was worried about censorship if it was too obvious that lack of sexual satisfaction was what was really on Mick’s mind.
Jack Nitzsche played tambourine on the new backing track. Brian Jones was loaded on pills and didn’t play much on these crucial sessions. Higher-echelon L.A. scenesters visited and brought cocaine to the Stones’ sessions for the first time.
The final stereo mix of “Satisfaction” was finished by 5 A.M. on May 11, 1965.
These sessions also produced much of the Stones’ next album: Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me,” the Temptations’ “My Girl,” Sam Cooke’s “Good Times” (only a few months after Cooke’s murder in a local motel). They also cut two new Jagger/Richards songs: “One More Try” and “The Spider and the Fly.”
In San Francisco, where the Byrds opened for the Stones, the Diggers—a proto-hippie anarchist street commune led by Emmett Grogan—published broadside flyers saying the Rolling Stones were “the embodiment of everything we represent, a psychic evolution . . . the breaking up of old values.”
In Long Beach on May 16, the Stones did a complete show for nine thousand kids, who rioted outside afterward. The Stones’ limo was engulfed in a terrifying crush of humanity as the kids threw themselves on the car. The band began to scream as the roof caved in and had to push it back up with their legs to keep from being crushed. Keith: “We could hear the roof cracking. We’re all panicking! A hundred kids on the car, everywhere, outside, trying to force the door handles, trying to smash in the windows. We couldn’t move or someone would get killed . . . the most frightening thing of my whole life.” Police waded in with nightsticks and started to beat people. Blood spattered on the windows as the horrified musicians cringed. A cop was knocked off his motorcycle and badly injured; one girl lost part of her hand. Finally a helicopter landed next to the almost flattened limo; the Stones climbed aboard and were flown to safety back in L.A.
Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters had driven down from Frisco to party with the Stones, and they gave Brian a load of acid. The still-legal LSD-25 was billed as the door to a new consciousness by such apostles as Harvard’s Dr. Timothy Leary, who under its influence advised the young to turn on, tune in, and drop out, reject the constipated values of the older generation, and build a new society based on expanded consciousness and communal, millenarian values.
Brian took to acid like someone who’d found God. Tripping his brains out, stepping over hallucinatory snakes, he took his harmonica to the clubs along Sunset Strip and spent his nights jamming with any band that would let the dissolute, wild-eyed young rock star onstage. After dropping a few cubes of Orange Sunshine, Brian even disappeared for a few hours, causing a frantic search so the Stones could make their May 17 gig in San Diego. They were so late for the show that the Byrds began to play Stones songs to placate an angry and restless crowd of kids.
Shindig was the big pop music network TV show in America in 1965, appearing Wednesday nights on ABC. Taping in Los Angeles on May 20, the Stones lip-synched “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” and “Little Red Rooster” on a set decorated with a new Rolls. During rehearsals, the Stones met Billy Preston, the keyboard player for the show’s house band, the Shindogs, who later became a regular Stones collaborator. The Stones had pressured the show’s English producer, Jack Goode, to feature a real blues musician on the program with them, and chose Howlin’ Wolf when Goode told them to take their pick. Wolf arrived from Chicago with his great guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, and another man whom no one recognized.
Mick: “During rehearsal, Howlin’ Wolf said to me, ’I want you to come meet somebody.’ We went up into the audience—all these children—and this old black man wearing worn denim overalls—before it was fashionable—was sitting with all these kids. And Wolf said, ’This is Son House.’ ” Son House, sixty-three at the time, was the primeval Delta bluesman, one of the teachers of Robert Johnson, the source of his devil-at-the-crossroads story. “He said, ’This is Son House, and Son House did the original “Little Red Rooster.” ’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, because he [Son House] was a little recherché at the time. But he told me not to worry because he wasn’t the first person to do the song anyway.”
Howlin’ Wolf made his network TV debut with a raspy, spat-out “How Many More Years?” as the Stones symbolically sat at his feet. Brian cut short an interview and told Shindig’s host to be quiet so Wolf could begin the number. It was a great moment.
Before the band left California, they struggled over “Satisfaction.” The label said it was the best Stones song ever and wanted it out immediately. Keith didn’t even like it. “It sounded like a dub [demo] to me,” he recalled. “I couldn’t get excited about it. I’d really dug it that night I wrote it in the motel, but I’d gone past it. I didn’t want it out. It sounded all right, but I didn’t really like that fuzz guitar. I wanted to make that thing different . . . you needed either horns or something else that could knock that riff out. The riff was going to make the song or break it on the length you could drag it out, and it wasn’t meant for the guitar. Otis Redding got it right when he recorded it, because it’s actually a horn riff.”
Keith was adamant. He didn’t want it as a single, but was outvoted. (Only Mick sided with Keith. The band was still a nominal democracy—even Stu had a vote.) So a monaural mix of “Satisfaction” was released in America later in the month and became the Stones’ first no. 1 record in the U.S.
Brian Jones was disturbed by this. He still wanted the Stones to play R&B, the only thing that interested him. Later, while the ban
d did “Satisfaction” at the end of their shows, Brian would play “Popeye the Sailor Man” as a countermelody because it’s what he thought “Satisfaction” sounded like. It made the rest of the band crazy, and there was more talk (mostly from Andrew) of getting rid of Mr. Jones.
After the final California shows in San Jose, Fresno (cut short by police), and Sacramento, the Stones split up and traveled back to New York separately. Brian stayed in L.A. and dropped as much acid as he could, trying to develop new music under LSD’s lysergic veil. Frustrated by these often-tuneless or modal experiments, Brian always erased his tapes the next day. Brian was a high-concept musician, great at coming up with a hook or a color, not good on details, and his total inability to write songs would help seal his fate in the Rolling Stones.
* * *
Like a Rolling Stone
The Stones regrouped in Manhattan the day before the first of three sold-out shows at the Academy of Music and found themselves the focus of intense interest by the downtown demimonde. London Records rushed out “Satisfaction” (“Promo Man” on the flip), and Keith’s roaring fuzz-toned riff was buzzing out of radios everywhere. Bob Dylan was back in New York after his English tour. Wanting to meet Brian, whom Dylan regarded as the Rolling Stone, he arranged an introduction through reporter Al Aronowitz, who brought Dylan and entourage up to Brian’s room at the Lincoln Square Motor Inn.
Dylan was in his 1965 speed-driven prime, about to stun the pop world by strapping on an electric guitar and playing his visionary, Stones-inspired rock and roll in public. Bushy-haired, hawk-beaked, nasal-voiced, black-shaded, sharp-dressed poetic champion bonded with articulate, pilled-up acidhead Welsh bluesman. Guitars came out and joints were lit by Dylan cohorts Bobby Neuwirth and Al Kooper. Brian’s nervous paranoia about marijuana tickled Dylan. Jones had been told he was out of the group if he got busted for pot in America and couldn’t work, so he was very uptight. Dylan couldn’t believe it and teased him. “Brian, man, fuck, you’re even puttin’ me uptight.”
Another night Dylan and Brian hung out at Andy Warhol’s midtown studio during a big party. Warhol, ultimate voyeur and reporter, was filming the lost moths drawn to his flame as they destroyed themselves acting out sex and drug fantasies. It was the only scene in town. Rudolph Nureyev was there, dancing with pretty men to “I Get Around,” “The Name Game,” “Come See About Me,” and the Kinks blasting “You Really Got Me.” The sexual tension in the Factory was intense. Edie Sedgwick was there, the “Girl of the Year,” a lithe, half-mad, self-absorbed heiress type from an ancient Massachusetts family. Her starring roles in Warhol’s underground movies had catapulted her into Vogue fashion spreads and general subterranean goddesshood. She had a low, sexy voice that always sounded like she’d just stopped crying. With her cropped hair dyed platinum, Edie was the promiscuous young queen of the Warhol superstars, an American icon at twenty-two. Every young man in New York wanted her.
Including Bob Dylan . . . who knew enough to keep his distance. But it still bothered Dylan when Edie went over and started to rub Brian’s shoulders, muss his hair, whisper in his ear. Edie and Brian put their heads together and talked and laughed a long while on the famous Factory sofa while Dylan, glowering in the corner with his people, watched them carefully, stunned for once into complete silence.
Mick met Edie too, on another night at the Scene, the basement rock club on West 46th Street. The meeting was much anticipated by the Warholians, excited that their superstar was going to meet the sexy English singer. Their union seemed predestined, but nothing happened. Mick was in the vestibule when Edie arrived. She went right up to him.
“How do you do? I really like your records.”
Shy smile from Mick, eyes down. “Um, oh . . . Thank you.”
Eye contact . . . and an explosion of people burst into the tiny space. Flashbulbs blinded everyone. Manhattan frenzy, a swirl of hip-huggers, tight blue jeans, Pucci slacks, little-girl mod dresses. Edie fled. They never had a moment.
June 1965. Back in London, Mick and Keith gave up their flat, unable to escape their fans. Keith bought a pad in St. John’s Wood, while Mick stayed with David Bailey before moving into a new flat near Marble Arch. Mick bought Chrissie Shrimpton a white Austin Mini car, not knowing she’d been two-timing him with singer P. J. Proby while he was away. Keith bought a car for his mum. The Stones’ new EP, Got Live If You Want It (a play on Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It”) was released on June 11 with five tracks from the March U.K. tour and attendant chanting and screams. Despite blistering live versions of “Route 66” and “I’m Movin’ On,” the record only sold moderately, as the Stones now competed with records by newer mod bands like the Yardbirds and the Who, which appealed to younger kids with their speedy, jamming energy.
“Satisfaction” was held off in England so it wouldn’t hurt the EP, but in America it was on its way to no. 1 and instant anthem status, despite being censored on some radio stations. In New York, powerhouse WABC programmed their own two-minute version with the “trying to make some girl” verse edited out. It was the Rolling Stones’ decisive moment, a cautious but somehow powerful statement of the individual against mass culture and sexual norms. “I can’t be satisfied,” sang Muddy Waters in 1948, and by 1965 national alienation was so corrosive that even the postwar children, the baby boomers, members of the wealthiest, most secure, and best-educated generation in history, were saying no, we can’t get any satisfaction either.
The deep roots of “Satisfaction” in Motown made it a great dance record. “It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones,” Mick said much later. “ ’Satisfaction’ changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was the big thing, and we always wanted to make it there. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing.”
“Satisfaction” was huge as Bob Dylan cut a new song with an electric band featuring Al Kooper (Dylan: “Turn that organ up!”) in New York on June 15. “Like A Rolling Stone” started out, according to Dylan, as ten pages long, “a rhythm thing on paper telling someone something they didn’t know, telling them they were lucky.” None of the musicians present had heard the song before, the performance was completely improvised, and it was immediately recognized as arguably Dylan’s most important, if not greatest, song.
Later that year, Dylan told an audience in Carnegie Hall that “Like A Rolling Stone”—which always closed his electric shows—was about Brian Jones. (“Ballad of a Thin Man” is also said to relate to “Mr. Jones,” and Dylan also recorded—but didn’t release—a version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” titled “I Wanna Be Your Lover” late in 1965.)
“Like A Rolling Stone” was released as a seven-minute single in July 1965, got immediate airplay despite its length, and became an unlikely hit. It shattered the ironclad three-minute single format that dominated American radio, paving the way for longer songs and the looser FM format that took over pop radio later in the decade. For at least the next year, Dylan and the Stones operated in an unspoken, mutually influential alliance. Mick appropriated the flashing imagery of Dylan’s lyric style, while Dylan adapted the Stones’ electric clamor and immediacy, plus their sharp London look. The result for both Dylan and Stones was some of the best work of their careers.
In July, “Satisfaction” went to no. 1 and London released the new Stones album, Out of Our Heads, with a David Bailey band portrait that endearingly spotlit Keith’s acne. Heads was a compilation album—singles and B sides, soul covers—but it was also one of the pivotal records in America in 1965. For the first time, a pop group represented themselves as artists whose black influences were as crucial as the new songs they were writing for their white audience. In America that year, torn by race riots and civil rights protests, this counted for something. It was the zenith of the Rolling Stones’ greatest achievement, showing its huge white audience that black music had been ignored and despised and segreg
ated for too long. Nothing the Rolling Stones ever did was as important as their giving respect to the music that had inspired them.
Out of Our Heads quickly became a no. 1 album and stayed in the American charts for the next nine months.
* * *
The Bounty Hunter
July 1965, and the Stones’ loony young manager was trying not to lose his mind. Coping with mounting pressure and increasing manic-depressive episodes, his psychic resources stretched thin, Andrew Oldham took anything that kept his flash, anarchic flame on full burn. He was driven around London in an aquamarine Chevrolet Impala by his bodyguard, Reg “the Butcher” King, scattering pedestrians as they roared through the sooty streets. Andrew had a mean streak and enjoyed playing with it, insulting and pushing people around when he could get away with it. His twenty-one-year-old tycoon’s brain was full of plans for the Stones, new bands like the Small Faces, and even his own record label, but he knew he wasn’t equipped to cope with the complex financial dealings required to fulfill his ambitions. So in July 1965, Andrew hired a New York accountant to manage his, and the Stones’, business affairs. Allen Klein’s first task was to negotiate the Rolling Stones’ new recording contract.
Keith: “Andrew got Klein to meet us, to get us out of the original English scene [contract]. The first time we met was in London. The only thing that impressed me about him was that he said he could do it—get us the money we were making. Nobody else had said that to us.”
Mick: “Andrew sold him to us as a gangster figure, someone outside the establishment. We found that rather attractive.”
Indeed, no one was more outside the establishment than Allen Klein, an accountant and talent manager who described himself as a bounty hunter. Klein had been raised in a New Jersey orphanage and struggled through college with an appreciation for the mysteries of cash flow. Breaking into show business, he’d made a successful career of signing on as a performer’s business manager, then ransacking his record company’s usually crooked books to ferret out unpaid, often substantial royalties. The tools of his trade were lawsuits, writs, and sometimes U.S. marshals if the company was recalcitrant about letting him into its accounts. Klein had started with singer Bobby Darin in 1962, got into big-time soul music with Sam Cooke, then made his move into the hot London scene. By mid-1965, Klein had a piece of the British Invasion as business manager for the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Donovan, and Herman’s Hermits. He wanted the Beatles too, the premier act of the whole movement, but had been rebuffed by Brian Epstein. So he settled for the Rolling Stones.
Old Gods Almost Dead Page 15
