Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  ‘Because … Keith is beautiful, and because … they’re so ugly, they’re attractive.’

  Their appearance on the Ed Sullivan TV show on October 26 presented Sullivan’s coast-to-coast audience with the interesting spectacle of a studio apparently being torn to shreds by its audience. Sullivan issued a statement, disclaiming responsibility for the Stones’ engagement and vowing they would never pollute his air time again. ‘I promise you, they’ll never be back on our show … Frankly, I didn’t see the Rolling Stones until the day before the broadcast. They were recommended by my scouts in England. I was shocked myself when I saw them.

  ‘Now the Dave Clark Five are nice fellows. They’re gentlemen and they perform well. It took me seventeen years to build this show. I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks.’

  Another TV clip shows Mick Jagger being interviewed, next to an anxious-looking Charlie Watts. The usual establishment interviewer, bald and bow-tied, speaks devoutly into his microphone, then thrusts it outward as if only half convinced Jagger is capable of speech. ‘Er, Mick … er, how are you all enjoying your first trip to the States? I’m sorry: your second trip.’

  ‘Yes, our second trip,’ Jagger replies. ‘Yes, it’s been very enjoyable. Highly enjoyable, yes.’ His voice is deliberately polite and hushed to semi-audibility.

  ‘But that’s not the way it was the first time you came over.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Jagger says, contriving in the same moment to be both emphatic and utterly uninterested. ‘When we first came over here, it was just to get ourselves known about, so to speak.’ His voice softens to a sing-song, little-boyish lisp, like Brian’s. ‘And then we went back. And things started happenin’ for uth.’

  ‘And, uh … why was that?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Jagger smiles his shy smile and shrugs. ‘Some … chemical reaction.’

  On the West Coast, between studio sessions at RCA, Hollywood, the Stones appeared on a TAMI (Teenage Music International) pop package show, filmed at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium and shown later in cinemas throughout America. Technically, they topped the bill, headlining above Gerry and the Pacemakers, Jan and Dean, Chuck Berry, the Beach Boys, Marvin Gaye and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Even James Brown, grand master and autocrat of all black soul singers, had his name in smaller type than the Stones. ‘We were all terrified about appearing on the same bill as James Brown,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘He’d told everybody that when he went onstage, he was going to make the Rolling Stones wish they’d never set foot in America.

  ‘We were all in the dressing room beforehand, really scared. And Marvin Gaye and Chuck Berry came in to see us. Marvin Gaye said, “Are you guys nervous?” We said, “Petrified.” He was really nice. He said, “Hey, go out there and just do your best. Nobody wants to know if you’re better than anybody. They only want to know that you’re on.”’

  They stood in the wings, a little comforted, watching James Brown steal the show as expected with his frantic energy and whooping lust, with shrieking and pleading and impossible preening, a sweat-shiny dynamo trapped on the moving staircase of his own feet. They watched the bizarre multi-encore finale in which Brown, on his knees, was forcibly wrapped in a cloak by bodyguards and strong-armed towards the wings, before turning and throwing off the cloak – exact to a drum roll – and starting to sing and dance and sweat anew.

  The Stones did not expect to surpass that. But they still gave a performance impressive enough for ‘Mr Dynamite’ to grant them an audience in the dressing room where he sat, surrounded by black retainers and stage shoes and tubs of champagne on ice. It was the first time that Mick Jagger had realized that a musician could be a monarch and despot also. Jagger, indeed, returned to London having learned the most crucial object lesson of his life. To Chuck Berry’s voice and Rufus Thomas’s grimaces were now added James Brown’s dance steps – the very way Brown boogied up to unclip his microphone.

  ‘That was when the Mick Jagger we know began,’ Giorgio Gomelsky says. ‘After that second trip to America. When Mick got off the plane back in London, he was doing the James Brown slide.’

  The presentation of the Rolling Stones’ new single, Little Red Rooster, on Ready, Steady, Go, had an avant-garde audacity which would have done credit to Samuel Beckett. At first, all the viewer saw was a mouth, unmistakable for its sullen and insolent, overstuffed lips. ‘I am the little red rooster,’ sang this oracle wetly, ‘too lazy to crow for days …’ The mouth on its own sang a full chorus before the camera pulled back to show Jagger’s face and, at length, the other Stones behind him, misty and subservient in the sleepwalking beat whose only ornamentation was the tremulous swoops and shocks of a lone bar slide guitar.

  It had seemed like a gamble for the Stones to follow up a pop hit like It’s All Over Now with an unreformed blues classic, written by Willie Dixon and first recorded by Howlin’ Wolf. In the event, Little Red Rooster proved the ideal vehicle, both for the Stones as blues purists and for Mick Jagger as an increasingly audacious purveyor of sexual innuendo. It was a production as compulsive instrumentally as vocally, with Brian Jones’s slide guitar see-sawing from a low throb, like blood through an artery, up to its palpitant, quivering high.

  Jagger, performing the song on Ready, Steady, Go, seemed less like a pop vocalist than a young lord posing for some Mayfair portraitist with barely good grace. It confirmed what the pop audience was beginning to suspect – that he and the Stones inhabited a world more private and privileged than even Associated-Rediffusion’s Kingsway studios. The fact was corroborated by the London Daily Express’s William Hickey column, hitherto the exclusive preserve of society hostesses, playboys and debutantes. ‘There’s no harm these days in knowing a Rolling Stone,’ the Hickey columnist wrote. ‘… some of their best friends, in fact, are fledglings from the upper classes …’

  Robert Fraser, the London art dealer, was such a friend, though scarcely a fledgling. The son of a Scots merchant banker, he had been educated at Eton and then taken a commission in the army, serving with distinction in the Kenya Mau-Mau emergency. In 1964, he already enjoyed high standing in the London art world for his prescient championing of American pop artists like Andy Warhol and Jim Dine. Slight and dark and nervous-looking, he combined formidable taste with a passion for novelty, adventure and low life. With these the Rolling Stones would furnish Robert Fraser in all too great abundance.

  He had met them first in Paris after their Olympia concert, while police were still scooping up rioters from the debris of wrecked pavement cafés. ‘I’d bumped into Teddy, the disc jockey from the Ad Lib, who’d come over specially to see the Stones. They knew Teddy well, of course, because he was so into their black music. Through Teddy I got talking to Brian Jones – who even then seemed very paranoid. Later on, I took them all to a party at Donald Cammell’s studio.’

  Cammell, an American painter and would-be film-maker, would also figure prominently in the Stones’ social conversion. That night in 1964, he was simply host at a party where five British pop musicians were the very least glamorous and fashionable guests. ‘They all looked very ugly, very scruffy,’ Robert Fraser later remembered. ‘Mick was just a rude slob. You could tell it was the first time any of them had been to a place like Donald’s or to a party like that – big studio … low lights, wonderful-looking women … drugs …’

  Fraser subsequently introduced them to his Old Etonian friend Christopher Gibbs, a young antique dealer whose Chelsea shop was credited as source of the current mania for Moroccan decor in fashionable Mayfair and Belgravia homes. Gibbs was nephew of the Governor of Rhodesia, a friend of Cecil Beaton, whose diary describes him as ‘a most cultivated young man’. He was also a unique mixture of modern wit and old-fashioned courtliness. With Fraser and Cammell, he was the Stones’ initiator into an older metropolitan clique whose raffish doings had titillated society columns during the middle and late Fifites. Brian, Mick and Keith, as modern counterparts – with the added attraction of money to burn – were w
elcomed with open arms into the ‘Chelsea Set’.

  John Lennon, with his infallible gift for an apt phrase, said that fashionable young London in 1964 was ‘like a gentleman’s smoking club’. The in-crowd, yearningly celebrated by pop song and newspaper report, in fact consisted of no more than a dozen faces, moving in a pack around the same tiny circuit of late-night West End clubs. And no club was truly ‘in’ until its high-priced darkness could disclose the chalk-pale face of a Beatle or a Rolling Stone or – in the innermost in-ness – a Beatle and a Stone conversing together.

  The deadly rivals of the Top Twenty and music press popularity polls were, in private life, very good friends. The Stones readily admitted that without George Harrison they might never have got their Decca contract, just as without Lennon and McCartney, they would never have had a hit single. The Beatles, on their side, felt sneaking envy of the Stones’ refusal to compromise themselves with stage suits and insincere smiles, the way even John Lennon had been forced to do.

  The Stones’ challenge to the Beatles as a pop attraction had, if anything, increased the bond between them. Being so famous that one constantly risked being torn limb from limb was a predicament that no one else understood quite so well. Likewise, the predicament of being showered with pocket money while, at the same time, vaguely realizing one was not half so rich as one might think. In the expensive darkness of the Ad Lib, Beatles and Stones first compared notes about their record contracts and royalty rates. The surprise was that the Beatles, for all their international money-spinning, actually earned less per copy of each single and album than did the Stones.

  Robert Fraser was a friend of both Beatles and Stones – one of many they had in common. Andrew Loog Oldham’s crony Peter Asher was the brother of Paul McCartney’s actress girlfriend, Jane Asher. Paul had for some months lodged at the Ashers’ Wimpole Street house, in an attic room occupied by a bed, a wardrobe, two Cocteau drawings and a cache of Gold Discs. Paul was friendly with John Dunbar, boyfriend of Oldham’s protégée, Marianne Faithfull – herself the strongest infusion of gentility into the Stones’ background. When Marianne broadcast a charity appeal on Radio Caroline in the winter of 1964, it was with all the quiet, self-effacing dignity of minor royalty.

  The Beatles were now making their second feature film, Help!, in a state of helpless hilarity which even their director, Richard Lester, did not recognize as their first high from smoking marijuana. Bob Dylan, a rising American folk singer, had introduced them, in New York, to this traditional resort of American jazz and blues musicians. Illegal in Britain, it was supposed – by the police as much as anyone – to have died out with the novels of Sax Rohmer. The small, draggled cigarette thus carried minimal risk, passing from the Beatles to their friends the Rolling Stones, the next novelty after hipster trousers or tinted sunglasses or Mateus rosé wine or Scotch and Coke.

  Those little transparent packets of grass added the merest wavelet to a narcotic ocean which, long before 1964, had made London the drug capital of the Western world. It had begun in Victorian times, when Britain’s imperial possessions encompassed the Chinese opium trade, and every local tobacconist sold ‘opium lozenges’ as a cough remedy available to all. Narcotic substances, long outlawed in other countries, continued to be present in mundane British products like nose inhalers, stomach mixture, even laughing powder from joke shops. Britain was the only country where pure heroin was available by prescription from any doctor, and could be bought on the street with considerably less risk than attended the passing of a bet for horse racing. ‘I remember when you could buy heroin jacks [tablets] for a pound each,’ Robert Fraser said. ‘A phial of pure cocaine for fifty pounds. There were smart doctors all over Mayfair who’d prescribe it for you.’

  Hard drugs, in other words, had been an upper-class pursuit long before pop musicians started giggling over marijuana. Fraser himself had smoked grass years before, in New York’s avant-garde art circles. Like others before, and since, he was not so much hooked by heroin as seduced by it. Long cured from addiction, he still shuddered to remember that first ‘rush’, so very different from soft-drug fuzziness. ‘That’s the thing about heroin. It doesn’t disorient you. It seems to stabilize you. It’s a feeling like you’ve been wandering around in the Antarctic for days, and you suddenly walk into a nice warm room with a bar.’

  As Andrew Loog Oldham stood in the howling throng, his bodyguard, Reg – alternatively known as Reg the Butcher – would struggle up to join him, looking cautiously over one shoulder and speaking, as far as possible, in an urgent undertone. ‘Don’t move a muscle, Andrew,’ Reg the Butcher would caution. ‘There are eight blokes standing right behind you …’

  It was the newest of Oldham’s fantasies that he needed a muscle-bound protector, like those Phil Spector employed, to shield him from the righteous fury, or murderous envy, of the world on which he had unleashed the Rolling Stones. So Reg the Butcher rode around with him in his powder-blue American Chevrolet and sat in on his business meetings. The idea was that Oldham, whenever thwarted, would say ‘Go and thump that guy, Reg,’ and Reg would go and thump the guy.

  ‘Actually,’ Oldham says, ‘he got me into more fights than he got me out of. Like when he’d come up and say “Don’t move. There are eight people behind you …” “Reg,” I’d say. “We’re at a concert. This is a crowd. There are bound to be eight people standing behind me …’”

  The Stones’ second album, released on January 30, 1965, launched Oldham into a new phase of egotistical fantasy. Once again, Decca’s art department had been compelled to accept a front cover devoid of the title artists’ name, and adorned by a David Bailey photograph calculated to make every British parent reach for the DDT. Five faces in close-up glowered from deep shadow that still did not hide the many scars and pimples and craters left by former pimples on Keith Richard’s face. Mick Jagger stood right at the back, craning his neck to see over the others’ heads. ‘I put Mick there deliberately,’ Bailey says. ‘I didn’t want the others to think he was getting special treatment because he was a friend of mine.’

  On the back of the album was Oldham’s literary debut: a sleeve note written in the prose style of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange:

  It is the summer of the night London’s eyes be shut tight all but twelve peepers and six hip malchicks who prance the street. Newspaper-strewn and gray which waits another day to hide its dingy countenance the six have been sound ball journey made to another sphere which pays royalties in eight months or a year.

  … This is The Stones’ new disc within. Cast deep in your pockets for loot to buy this disc of groovies and fancy words. If you don’t have the bread, see that blind man, knock him on the head, steal his wallet and lo and behold, you have the loot. If you put in the boot, good. Another one sold.

  The album itself was rather routine – predominantly r & b in content, yet somehow lacking the manic live quality of its predecessor. The tracks had been made at three different studios, so varied in texture from the discipline of Chess, Chicago – evident on a version of Chuck Berry’s Down the Road Apiece which Chuck Berry himself had heard and commended – through rather muted soul gushers, recorded at RCA, Hollywood, with Phil Spector’s arranger Jack Nitzsche on piano, to Regent Sound’s egg-box echo, featured on a limp Jagger–Richard effort, Grown Up Wrong. Mick and Keith were wholly successful, however, with Off the Hook, a bed-sitting room vignette suffused with Jagger’s sneering imperviousness to feminine wiles. Conversely, Time Is on My Side – copied from the Irma Thomas version – reminded him of close moments with Chrissie, and became a tender soliloquy more personal than anything he would ever write for himself.

  Oldham cannot now remember whether it was a conscious or merely subconscious instinct to galvanize their rather anti-climactic production with a sleeve note recommending people to knock down blind men and steal their wallets. Certainly the ensuing furore had a stage-managed element, not breaking out until a full month after Rolling Stones No. 2 had hit the shop
s. Then all at once a Mrs Gwen Matthews, secretary of the Bournemouth Blind Aid Association, was quoted as saying ‘They’re horrible. It’s putting ideas into people’s heads. I’m writing to Decca to ask them to change the cover …’

  Within a week, Oldham had a scandal which, for the first time, caused his name to appear in print as many times as the Stones’. The Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying he had written the offending passage ‘for fun, in the bath’. Decca, bowing to pressure from Mrs Matthews and others, called back as many copies of the LP as possible, and reissued them in a new sleeve with the offending paragraph deleted. But the scandal would not subside. In the House of Lords, a former Conservative minister asked for the Director of Public Prosecutions to investigate what appeared to be ‘a deliberate incitement to criminal action’. A Home Office spokesman replied that there were insufficient grounds, adding: ‘If it is any consolation to the noble lord, research I made at the weekend supports the view that, even when they are intelligible, the words of a pop song are not considered important, and teenagers have even less regard to the blurb on the envelope.’

  On their first Australasian and Far East tour earlier in January, Oldham had definitely cast himself as the sixth Stone – if not the first. ‘The boys and I,’ he told pressmen, with mock-regal sarcasm, at Sydney airport, ‘were moved as we stood on the steps of the airliner which had brought us to this distant land, receiving a tremendous welcome from these warm-hearted and wonderful colonials.’ The warm-hearted colonials, 3,000 of them, were even now tearing down a chain-wire perimeter fence and wrenching up rails from their steel floor bolts.

  The thirty-day tour of Australia and New Zealand established the Stones as a menace to antipodean stability, with newspaper headlines like SHOCKERS! UGLY LOOKS! UGLY SPEECH! UGLY MANNERS! on the one hand and on the other, hysteria-sodden concerts in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Wellington. By the end of the tour, the Stones had four records in the Australian Top Ten, including their weak cover version of the Drifters’ Under the Boardwalk. A disbelieving Britain had meanwhile seen wire service photographs of them immersing themselves in Auckland’s hot springs and all five – even Keith Richard – apparently enjoying the sunshine and open air.