by Paul Trynka
Keith and Brian’s relationship deepened from September, when Mick returned to his Economic History course at the London School of Economics, and Dick Taylor decided to resume studies at Sidcup and focus on winning a place at the Royal College of Art. Stu was as dependable and cheery as ever, but still maintained his desk job at ICI. Keith was the only Stone to give up on his other options. He wasn’t fixed on fame or glory, like Brian. But he was the first to join him in turning their backs on the conventional careers their parents had mapped out for them.
Mick remained close to his dad, Joe, who was forthright but reasonable, and unlike Lewis Jones had no objections to his son pursuing his hobby as long as he didn’t neglect his studies. The idea of courting his disapproval was unthinkable; besides, Mick’s student grant was the band’s most regular source of income. It allowed them to rent that first (and most infamous) shared flat, at 102 Edith Grove in Chelsea. By September, Brian, Keith, an occasionally absent Mick and a string of guests, sharing two rooms (with Brian commandeering the best bed), had embarked on their journey to local notoriety.
Dick Hattrell was one of the first companions to join Brian’s ragtag crew at Edith Grove. He’d just returned from Territorial Army summer camp with a cash bonus which the band were ready to help him spend, and remembers their increasingly desperate straits as the winter of 1962 took hold. ‘The guys were literally starving to death, no exaggeration, so I decided to stay for a few days. They couldn’t afford milk, so when I heard the milk float in the morning I’d get up and pinch a pint. I used to buy potatoes cheap from local growers, then a few cans of baked beans, to help them survive.’
Dick was sweet, loved hanging out with musicians, and was eager to please. Too eager, maybe: as Brian and Keith built up their us-against-the-world mentality, Dick became the butt of their humour, and began to see a side of Brian he hadn’t seen before. ‘He had a very changeable, almost split personality. He could be really nice, pleasant and friendly. Then at other times he could be a right bastard.’
Dick and James Phelge, who joined the household later, remember long hours of Brian and Keith playing together, working out textures and voicings. The collection of albums they’d assembled as source material was basic, says Keith, ‘Not big. We had our Robert Johnson, that I heard for the first time at Edith Grove, Muddy at Newport, the best of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, some Slim Harpo, and most of Chuck Berry’s and Jimmy Reed’s that were available. That was the basic diet.’ Mick was away at the LSE most days and was often a spectator when he returned, watching intently and thinking as Brian and Keith worked on a song, or laughing in disbelief at their antics. For this was the winter of ‘nankering’ – taking the piss. James Phelge became a master: ‘A nanker was a person we regarded as a jobsworth, people who can’t deviate from the script. So it was a parody of those people’s attitudes.’
Brian had been taking the piss out of nankers for years – by now, rebellion was intrinsic to his psyche. Keith, in contrast, was ‘absolutely not someone you’d find at the centre of a rebellion’ according to Dick Taylor, ‘but he was definitely his own guy’. Keith’s upstart image was for the time being confined to sitting in a prominent place in a bar or shop scattering cigarette ash, or else picking his nose and ostentatiously flicking the bogeys around. Such obnoxiousness was their way of dealing with establishment figures, and with rejection, which seemed omnipresent. By the end of 1962, the band’s most regular gig was the Marquee interval slot, filling in for Cyril Davies, who’d now split from Alexis Korner. Davies was taciturn and famously grumpy, although he was helpful enough to suggest to his bassist, Rick Brown, that he fill in for the upstart band now that they lacked a bassist. Brown enjoyed the set, but found it all ‘a bit Heath Robinson’.
The Flamingo, a long-established R&B club on Wardour Street where Korner now headlined regularly with his own band, was another possibility, but their first show there was shaky. The gangster-backed club had long been the haunt of off-duty American GIs; they were a tough crowd, and didn’t seem to take to the Stones’ R&B. Brian was shaken. ‘He was virtually in tears,’ says Cleo Sylvestre, who’d followed the band since the summer, ‘saying, “Cleo, do you ever think we’ll make it?”’ Cleo had got to know Mick, Keith and Brian well, and considered Brian ‘the most sensitive’ of the Stones. Yet in public, the sneer, the aggression, masked his worries.
Alexis Korner kept his eye on the Stones that year. Like others, he saw the British music scene changing – and as the Beatles’ take on American R&B threatened to take off that winter, he worried his own purist vision would become outdated. Korner had never envisaged playing blues the way the Stones did – ‘for him, blues was like the Bible, and you don’t fuck with the Bible’, says Pretty Things vocalist Phil May. Yet Korner was open-minded enough to appreciate the band’s power and energy. He and Bobbie liked Mick, but it was Brian they most admired. One night Korner was in the audience at the Marquee watching Brian play when the guitarist suddenly swung round, a casually evil look on his face, and brought his guitar right up to his face, inspiring a sudden shiver of panic, excitement and sexual tension. Bobbie shared the sensation with her husband: ‘I remember the way he would step forward, and snap a tambourine, staring at you. Very aggressive – a real come-hither thing. It was incredibly sexy.’
Ginger Baker also recalls Brian’s aggression, his instinct for firing up an audience. ‘Brian was doing all the showmanship. Jagger was just standing there and singing, Brian was running into the audience with his guitar. Mick got it from Brian, bit by bit. I was watching with Jack [Bruce, bassist]. We weren’t terribly impressed with the music – but it was so raw, there was obviously something about it that would take off.’
The band inspired a gamut of reactions from their audiences. Some girls, like Cleo, were fascinated by Mick, others found him ‘constrained’, says Janet Couzens, another Ealing and Marquee regular – ‘it took time for him to develop that confidence’. Brian, though, was ‘the one in control – more confident. He’d have a slight smirk on his face, as if he knew he was sexy. And he was definitely sexy.’ Couzens, like many, couldn’t know for sure – the Rolling Stones might well burn out in a year or two – but she was convinced they were the harbinger of something significant, that ‘what was happening was changing society in a way we hadn’t known before’.
Harold Pendleton, manager of the Marquee and a key figure in the birth of British blues and rock music, was no uncritical fan. ‘Bear in mind,’ he insists, ‘when they started, the Stones were rubbish! Nothing like what they were later!’ But he is certain that the main elements of their notoriety were established long before their celebrated manager Andrew Oldham appeared on the scene, and he is unequivocal about who was responsible: ‘Brian Jones was the genius of the Stones. It was his extremely brilliant idea that they should be the opposite of the Beatles; that they should lurch on stage in street clothes, all leery. A deliberate marketing ploy.’
Pendleton claims only a passing acquaintance with the band’s music from their Marquee dates – ‘We didn’t have a [alcohol] licence, so I was always coming back from the pub just as they finished their set.’ But he met the band often throughout 1962, and was in no doubt about who was in charge. ‘Brian was clearly the leader. It wasn’t Mick. Brian called the tunes, Brian called the shots.’
He made a powerful impression on the Marquee boss. Witty and acerbic, Pendleton has a hilarious way of dismissing mediocrities with withering put-downs. Not Brian, though. Brian was a force to contend with. ‘An evil genius’ is how Pendleton describes him. Asked to elaborate, he adds simply, ‘It’s just from meeting, and speaking to him, I got the impression he was not a nice person. The rest of them, Mick for instance, were reasonably nice people, even when they pretended to be urchins. Brian Jones was coldly, cynically evil.’
Coldly, cynically evil. This description could apply to many in and around the Stones in the years that followed. But in the early ones it atta
ches itself most often to Brian, the boy his fellow pupils believed had something of the night about him. He liked cats, people remember, responded to them, their sensuousness and narcissism. People loved him in the way they’d love a cat, for its charm, elegance and intelligence – people like Ginger Baker, not known for his patience with time-wasters. ‘He was a cool guy. We really got on well.’ Doggy people, no-nonsense dependable types like Ian Stewart who liked pubs and blokey talk, sometimes came to hate him for that feline selfishness, the way he loved keeping people on edge.
The worst some friends, like John Keen, recall of Brian is that when he didn’t want to do something, he simply wouldn’t do it. James Phelge well remembers Brian’s maddening unreliability. Any arrangement you’d made with him would be forgotten the moment something more interesting came along. ‘It’s like me saying to you, “Come over.” I go all the way over, finally I’m there. And Brian would say, “Sorry, I’ve got to go out now.” That’s what Brian was like. He would say, “Let’s go somewhere.” We maybe get halfway and it’s, “I’ve changed my mind, I’ve got to go over to Linda’s, I’ll drop you off here.”’
This distracted youth could bristle on occasion. From his teens, Brian had mimicked yokels and straights, laughing at them – it was an integral part of the Stones’ us-against-the-world gangster mentality. But when Brian felt threatened – for instance, when he felt his fellow Cheltonian Dick Hattrell’s guileless behaviour meant that he too would be labelled a provincial bumpkin – then the nasty side of the wannabe gangsterism could surface. ‘He could be the sweetest person ever,’ Dick recalls, ‘then, just like that, click of the fingers, he’d lose his temper completely and be the most horrible person you could ever be with. Then three quarters of an hour after that he’d say, “Why is everyone looking so glum?”’
That winter of 1962/63 was harsh, and the two-room apartment was freezing. One night in January, Dick missed his lift to the gig with Stu in the pianist’s van. As the long dark night dragged on, he left his normal place on the living-room couch for the relative warmth of Brian’s bed, and drifted off to sleep. Some time later he was shaken awake. Brian’s face was right in front of him, contorted with rage. Struggling to register what was happening, Dick saw that Brian was holding two electrical wires in front of his face. ‘Two hundred and forty volts,’ he spat at his old buddy. ‘Let’s see how you like two hundred and forty volts through you!’ Terrified, Dick ran from the room and out of the house, and ended up on the front doorstep, shivering in his underpants in the freezing cold, listening to Brian and Keith cackling with glee through the first-floor window. It seemed like hours before the pair relented and let him back in. Even today, Dick is mystified by Brian’s behaviour. ‘I don’t know why he did it. Maybe he thought it was something sexual. I can assure you it wasn’t.’ Brian did apologize, as he always did, and Dick forgave him. But why did he put up with such treatment? Dick replies, ‘I don’t know. I guess I just liked musicians.’
Keith, who shared in the bullying, would later cite their treatment of Dick Hattrell as evidence of Brian’s mean streak. Which it was, but Dick’s naive name-dropping and general behaviour did, in fairness, often affect people that way. Characters on the Cheltenham scene ‘were very mean to him’ according to Jane Filby. ‘He’d been saying he was friends with Acker Bilk one time, then when he fell asleep someone scribbled in biro on his face. He often got teased – it was a different world then.’ Although Dick learned to be more careful of Brian, he none the less remained anxious to please. Throughout that winter Brian was intent on buying an electric guitar to replace the acoustic with a pickup. Dick half-volunteered and was half-persuaded into funding the purchase, and he ventured into Bill Lewington’s shop in Soho with Brian to pick out the Les Paul-shaped Harmony Stratotone that would be used on all the Stones’ early recordings.
For all the unpredictable behaviour, Dick loved being part of the crazed Stones circus. He felt he belonged, but although he says he was offered the job of road manager, he didn’t have the physical stamina to stay at Edith Grove: ‘I couldn’t live like that. Really, my health was broken.’ As 1963 dawned, Dick returned to his native Tewkesbury, to be replaced by the much less pliable James Phelge. The new housemate, who instinctively understood, ‘You could never be in a situation where you didn’t give as good as you got,’ would witness how, as the long-awaited thaw came and spring took hold, the Stones’ prospects finally started to blossom.
*
Some of the change came with the departure of Tony Chapman, the drummer who’d had a question mark over his head since the summer, who finally disappeared, presumably back to Liverpool. For several gigs before his departure he’d usually worked alongside Colin Goulding on bass, but by December 1962 the band had fixed on a far more potent rhythm section. Rick Brown (aka Ricky Fenson) and Carlo Little, both of them from Cyril Davies’ band, took the intensity up a notch: Fenson had mastered walking basslines, and Little not only swung but added another level of aggression, propelling the band forward. They continued to help out the band, mainly at the Marquee but also at the Flamingo – but there was a big problem. With Davies, they made £40 a week. There was no way the Stones could match that, so Brian didn’t even raise the subject of Fenson and Little joining permanently. ‘We didn’t seriously consider it even for one microsecond – I don’t think we even discussed it,’ says Fenson, who went on to join Lord Sutch’s band. ‘We were on a good living wage with a working band. The Stones couldn’t even guarantee us £10 a week. Why would we want to join them?’
Instead, it would be a friend of Fenson’s and Tony Chapman’s who’d make up half of one of the greatest rhythm sections in rock’n’roll. Bill Perks turned up for a rehearsal at the Wetherby Arms on 7 December and stayed on the scene, dropping in to see the band members at Edith Grove. The potential bassist obviously found the scene ‘distasteful’, says James Phelge, but according to Bill he was ‘sucked into something that had its own momentum’. Bill made his debut, with Chapman on drums, on 15 December. It was a decent show, but the pair didn’t match up to Ricky Fenson and Carlo Little. For just a few weeks, as the band played the Marquee, the Flamingo, Ealing (where they’d now taken over as headliners) and other odd gigs, they flipped between the two rhythm sections.
Then the drummer Brian had first spoken to back in May found his interest piqued. Charlie Watts still lived with his mum and dad in Neasden, which happened to be close to Carlo Little, and the word spread around that part of town that Little and Fenson were a hot ticket with the Stones. Suddenly, the idea of Brian’s band seemed more attractive to the quiet, modest drummer who’d practically handed the role in Alexis Korner’s band to Ginger Baker, convinced he was a better player. ‘He’s quiet, yet assertive,’ insists his Korner bandmate Andy Hoogenboom, ‘in both his demeanour and his playing.’ Baker, who’d seen the band with Tony Chapman several times, reckons he helped broker the deal. ‘I said, “You’re OK but the drummer’s fuckin’ awful! Why don’t you get Charlie?”’
Charlie Watts and Bill Perks – who’d soon try out the name Lee Wyman before settling on Bill Wyman as his stage name – debuted as the rhythm section at the Flamingo on 14 January 1963, according to Bill (Keith Richards reckons it was 2 February). It took a few weeks for everyone to decide it worked. Bill was a good bassist, but Keith and Brian wondered whether he was ‘a bit of an Ernie’. Keith would remain pretty much undecided on that point for fifty years. As for Charlie, Keith’s recently rediscovered diary revealed he initially compared him unfavourably to the raw power of Carlo Little. But eventually, says Keith, he realized that ‘he never hits ’em hard but he comes out with a more powerful sound than some guy ramming his fist through the drums’. It had taken a while, ten months, but over all those occasional rehearsals and shows Charlie had finally come to believe Brian’s line that ‘R&B was going to be a big part of the scene’.
There was no overnight revelation when the new line-up began to play, but
as the band strung more shows together over January, February and March, their sound changed, and with it the sound of British blues. Alexis Korner still played a lot of slower blues numbers, watched intently by an audience that hardly moved; the Stones were more up tempo, even without the inclusion of the Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley numbers that Korner wouldn’t touch. James Phelge watched the band as they progressed from Marquee interval slots, to Ealing on Tuesday nights, and finally on to Richmond’s Station Hotel. ‘That period is when the Stones took over,’ he says. ‘The Marquee, when they first went, sometimes there’d be seven people downstairs and you had plenty of room to wander around. Then with the Richmond thing, there was one big space, and now people weren’t standing around watching, everyone was dancing. The whole place was a dancefloor. Then at the end you’re getting three hundred people and could hardly move.’
Phelge, an aspiring drummer himself, would become part of Stones mythology thanks to his outrageous antics at Edith Grove, which included miking up the toilet, greeting visitors with underpants on his head, and other imaginatively twisted shenanigans. He was the closest, most intimate observer of the band in their pre-fame days. He understood immediately that any weakness would be seized upon. ‘It wasn’t like a competition,’ he says of their behaviour, ‘but you were gonna get swamped by those guys if you tried to meet them on equal terms – they were gonna run you over.’
