by Paul Trynka
Oldham’s memories of that fateful evening are heavily homoerotic. When the nineteen-year-old walked out of Richmond train station, Mick Jagger and his new girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, were having an argument in an alleyway to the side of the Station Hotel. As Oldham walked by them, he remembered later, Mick gazed at him; Oldham took in the narrow waist, the lips and a look that said ‘What are you doing with the rest of your life?’ He watched the band play a form of music he didn’t quite understand; but he did, he would declaim, understand the erotic appeal of Mick Jagger, who was ‘the hors d’oeuvre, the dessert and the meal in between’. The others were just the supporting act to Mick’s urchin sexuality – Bill a stony monument, Charlie a neat suit, Stu an incongruous chin and bad haircut, Keith a source of barely understood riffs, and Brian a blond presence who looked hungrily around the room, Oldham reckoned, seeking sex, adoration and validation. How many of those initial impressions, described in his entertaining, contradictory memoirs, were the product of hindsight and revisionism is open to question – but a fair guess would be most of them. The Stones’ story is full of unreliable narrators. Oldham’s own account is engaging but full of blanks, a situation he explains with the statement, ‘I only remember what I want to remember.’
Most of the revisionism applies to Brian, and Eric Easton, the agent who also visited the Station Hotel and became the Stones’ co-manager. In earlier accounts, Oldham mentioned that, like most people in the audience, he saw Mick and Brian as twin beacons, commanding attention. In his three volumes of memoirs, Oldham progressively downgraded Brian; he has kind words for notorious thugs and criminals but none for the Stones’ founder. Asked if that’s reasonable, he replies: ‘An older cunt in a school in the next barrio does not interfere with your life. But if he’s the same age and going to the same school, then fuck him. He may be able to score brilliant goals, but you cannot rely on him.’
The reason for the rancour is simple: the idea of another leader is anathema to the Oldham creation myth, that he was the originator of the Stones’ snottiness and outrage. Yet, for all the narcissism and contradiction, Oldham was a crucial force in breaking the Stones. Brian Jones seemed to realize his potential when Oldham went over to introduce himself the following Sunday night, accompanied by Easton. By Tuesday they were discussing a management deal in Easton’s office.
Eric Easton – the forgotten man of the Stones story, once he was pushed out in favour of the far more predatory Allen Klein – was central to the deal, an established agent who was calm, dependable and knew the ropes. As Brian and Mick listened to the pair map out their case, it was the combination of Oldham’s energy and Easton’s experience that won them over. Oldham would later mock Easton as a one-time theatre organist and small-time agent who entirely lacked vision – but it was Easton who had the money and the know-how. As Harold Pendleton puts it, ‘Eric Easton was a run-of-the-mill manager, calm, cold and efficient. Loog Oldham was a temperamental chancer and a fellow who understood artistic people. The combination of the two was better than either of them apart.’
But if Oldham was cut-throat, so was Brian. He had got on well with Giorgio Gomelsky, who was a big ball of energy, acting as a de facto manager. At Easton’s office, though, Brian assured Oldham the band had no long-term commitment to the Crawdaddy’s owner. The decision was brutal but realistic. He ‘ran a great club – [but he] wasn’t really a manager type’ says James Phelge; Pendleton, who booked Gomelsky’s later protégés the Yardbirds into the Marquee, remembers he was famously temperamental: ‘if you wanted to cast somebody in a film as a mad genius you would have picked Giorgio. He filled the part beautifully. But as to efficiency, of being a good manager – he didn’t fit the bill at all.’
Gomelsky was the first friend thrown under the bus to serve the Stones’ ambition. He wouldn’t be the last.
As the most focused band member in those early months, Brian was the most enthusiastic about the new managers; that spring of 1963 he remained the Stone with whom Oldham and Easton would huddle and share plans. Keith was concentrating more on the music, and Mick was still attending daytime lectures at the LSE, bringing his coursework home in the evenings. Jones and Oldham shared a similar ambition, manic energy, extreme narcissism and an obsession with gangsters. ‘It was one of the most distasteful things about the Stones,’ says Jeff Dexter, the band’s first stylist, ‘this posh boys’ fascination with tough guys.’
For all his inconsistency, Oldham had one all-encompassing skill: he knew how to seize the day, keeping up the momentum. The Station Hotel show and the IBC tapes were enough to convince him the band were his Beatles. But he was concerned to discover that, in return for studio time, the band had signed over a contract option to Glyn Johns’ employers, George Clouston and Eric Robinson. It was Brian he fixed on to extract the band from the deal.
For Brian Jones, this was a cinch. He was already a master of wheedling money out of people – and this time he had £100, provided by Easton, to buy back the tapes. He put on his best apologetic tone, explained that he had found the music business all too commercial and unpleasant, and offered them a cheque so they wouldn’t lose out. The pair agreed to his oh-so-reasonable request, then within two or three days found out that the band had been signed to a major record deal. Glyn Johns was yet another man stitched up by the Stones. ‘No one even talked to me about it,’ he says today. ‘There’s gratitude for you. Bastards.’
Oldham’s speed and aggression were vital. It turned out that even as Brian was negotiating with IBC, Dick Rowe, the most maligned record company executive in history, was attempting to atone for his biggest failure by pulling off his biggest coup.
Rowe, head of A&R at Decca, was doomed to go down in history as the man who turned down the Beatles with the infamous words ‘groups of guitarists are on the way out’. In fact that phrase was probably fabricated by Beatles manager Brian Epstein, while the decision to reject the Liverpool group was taken by Rowe’s assistant, Mike Smith. The extent of Decca’s mistake only truly dawned on 4 May 1963, the day From Me To You became the band’s first number 1 hit. Rowe didn’t mess around. The next day, by chance, he was up in Liverpool judging a talent show alongside George Harrison. The Beatles guitarist bore no grudges; instead, he told Rowe about the blues band he’d seen at the Station Hotel. One week later, Rowe turned up in Richmond to find the hotel packed, ‘like the black hole of Calcutta. I’d never seen anything like that. It was incredible.’ Rowe knew Eric Easton well, and called him immediately; the deal was signed a few days later.
Easton was the man Rowe respected, a steady pair of hands he could rely on. But it was the upstart Andrew Oldham who gave an adrenalin shot to the negotiations, bullshitting Rowe, insisting on a tape licensing deal and even, with insane chutzpah, insisting he produce the band himself. The experienced Decca man reflected later that he actually relished the thrill Oldham brought to the talks: ‘He drove me. He was exciting and had tremendous flair.’
Oldham’s first session as producer to the Rolling Stones would become infamous – the way he seemed to think that electric guitars plugged directly into the mains socket, or didn’t realize that the four-track recording had to be mixed down to mono. Engineers are often disparaging about his talents: Glyn Johns, for instance, simply remarks, ‘His abilities? I have no comment on them.’ As a producer, Oldham was reliant on the talents of others, like arranger Jack Nitzsche, and George Chkiantz, engineer on Oldham’s greatest post-Stones hit, the Small Faces’ Itchycoo Park. Yet, as Chkiantz points out, ‘Andrew had the best ears. He knew a hit when he heard one.’ In the case of the Stones’ debut single, Oldham’s role was mainly to inject excitement, some buzz, into the process, insisting the band record quickly. He was content to stick with a song already picked out by Brian at IBC, a stripped-down, simplified version of Chuck Berry’s Latin-flavoured Come On, dominated by Brian’s harmonica.
Glyn Johns is insistent that the new Oldham-produced version was �
��exactly like [the one] I’d done’. Yet the two weren’t identical. On the IBC sessions, Ian Stewart’s piano adds an insistent, jiggling, almost funky counter-melody; on Oldham’s recording, the pianist is virtually inaudible. The band’s new co-manager had already decided that Stu was one Stone too many, with a face that didn’t fit.
The sacking of Ian Stewart was the third time the snake had entered the Rolling Stones’ little Garden of Eden, but this parting was tougher than Gomelsky’s and Johns’. Stu was the first Stone to join Brian’s cause, and his departure would leave enduring damage. Oldham’s demand that he be booted out was issued just a few days after the recording of Come On, and had the force of cold, hard logic: Oldham knew he was selling sex, and Stu’s 1950s hairstyle and Fred Flintstone chin could never fit the bill. He also insisted that from now on, the band use the name the Rolling Stones.
Friends remember different versions of Stu’s sacking. Glyn Johns says it was done in his earshot, at Decca studios, and delivered brutally; ‘I went in and told Andrew what an arsehole he was’. James Phelge, meanwhile, recalls Oldham instructing the band to inform Stu, a task which Keith and Brian put off for a few days – so it’s likely they never did the deed and simply left it to Oldham to deliver the news.
Stu’s reaction was complex. On one level ‘he wasn’t bothered at all’, says Johns. Stu showed little ego or vanity. But another close friend, Keith Altham, says that in quiet moments ‘it was obvious that he was deeply hurt’. Yet the resentment that festered was not directed at Oldham; it was Brian’s attempts to soothe the humiliation that provoked the enmity. ‘Don’t worry, Stu,’ he’d told the pianist, ‘we’ll see you all right. You’ll have a sixth of everything.’ Brian was known for making promises he couldn’t keep. This was one of his most ill judged. His attempt to placate Stu came from the band’s continuing need for him to help out on piano; in addition, they offered him the job of road manager. Stu’s dry humour would sustain the Stones for decades, as he opened dressing-room doors the world over and alerted the band with phrases like ‘you’re on stage now, my little three-chord wonders’. Yet the humour never really extended to Brian. From that point on, Stu essentially hated him.
The psychology and logic behind Stu’s sacking are all the more complex and fascinating when we include the perspective of Stones confidant Keith Altham for he believes that Mick was involved: ‘Mick must have realized that one into six was not as good as one into five in terms of shares. I suspect that Andrew and Mick made the decision.’ Stu quite probably knew Mick was responsible, but his resentment centred on Brian because he had made a promise he wouldn’t keep. And that was ultimately Brian’s problem, says Altham: he lacked the true killer touch. ‘Brian could be duplicitous, but Mick was capable of being duplicitous and cunning. Brian wasn’t terribly good at cunning. People saw through it quite quickly. Brian wasn’t good at being bad. Mick was.’
*
With the hostility generated by Stu’s sacking, plus the fall-out from the main members’ sexual games, the thrilling prospect of a breakthrough was laced with darker feelings. But the long-term repercussions of the band’s fragmentation were far from anyone’s mind as summer arrived. Come On was released on 17 June 1963 and became a hot song in the London clubs, but it was a slow burner. Oldham’s first attempt at marketing the Stones was a failure. His plan was to make them ‘hipper but smarter than the Beatles’, says Jeff Dexter, a nascent mod and future mainstay of Swinging London who was called in to help style them: he took them down to Wardour Street to get custom shirts made, plus ‘those dodgy houndstooth jackets and pants. But that’s what Andrew wanted.’ Brian was ‘more careful with his choices than the others. Although Charlie was already buying nice shirts.’ Brian and Keith conspired to mess up Oldham’s nice new suits – ‘so all that bollocks of how Andrew made them the anti-Beatles, that was just an accident,’ Dexter concludes.
Oldham’s misstep was obvious even to his band’s greatest rivals, who were sitting in a hotel lobby on 13 July watching TV for the Stones’ appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars: ‘John [Lennon] was shouting out, “What have they done?”’ remembers Tony Bramwell. ‘They were wearing tweed jackets, and houndstooth shirts, whereas when we first saw them they were in jeans and striped T-shirts!’ Oldham was smart enough to drop the suits and roll with Brian’s vision of the band as anti-heroes. ‘Andrew didn’t get everything right – he was naive, just a hustler,’ says Keith Altham. ‘But he was a very good hustler.’
Oldham later boasted about how he bought Come On into the charts – a tradition as old as rock’n’roll. Still, by 11 August, when the Stones headlined at the third National Jazz and Blues Festival at Richmond Athletic Ground, the key event in the jazz calendar, established by Chris Barber and Harold Pendleton, it was obvious that, in the south at least, an unstoppable momentum was building.
It was one of Brian’s old trad jazz friends, on the bill that Sunday afternoon, who noticed – to his mild chagrin – that ‘things were about to change’. John Keen had played with the River City Stompers to a modest crowd in one section of the large field, then noticed a large queue building up further over. ‘They were all youngsters, teenagers, and there were a lot more people than in our part of the ground, and you could see something was going on. So I wandered over, trying to work out “Why aren’t they listening to us?”’
The stage, in front of which stylish teenagers were queueing patiently, was packed with impressive new Vox amplifiers, shiny square Reslo microphones, and a neatly dressed group of musicians; in the midst of them Keen recognized the distinctive blond barnet of his old guitarist. Stepping over the ropes that sectioned off the younger kids, Keen walked towards the stage. When he spotted him, a delighted, smiling Brian Jones beckoned him over. ‘This is my rhythm and blues band!’ he proclaimed proudly, before calling over Mick and Keith to introduce them to his old Cheltenham chum. They both deferred to Brian, asking how long they had until showtime. Brian was effervescent, bubbling with happiness. Keen took in the suit and the buzz of excitement, impressed and confused at how the arcane music Brian had championed back home barely a year before could already be attracting such a crowd. ‘It was the birth of a phenomenon. Before you’d had serious music, jazz, and you had pop music, Cliff and the Shadows. And suddenly this fringe music was about to become massive, and you could see already it had significance and status.’ Brian told Keen he was playing only his beloved R&B, no trad jazz numbers thrown in to please the crowd. His manner was joyous rather than boastful as he explained how he’d found a bunch of like-minded souls, and finally an audience that appreciated what he did. ‘He was in his element,’ says Keen.
The trumpet player was pleased for his old friend, but there were pangs of jealousy, too, as he looked at all the attractive women waiting to see Brian play, and the realization dawned that the traditional jazz to which he’d committed himself was now the music of the past. All the ambition, the focus that Keen had seen up close the previous year had, it seemed, paid off.
This appreciative audience had built up steadily – slowly at first, all via word of mouth. Come On was in fact the opposite of a hustled hit: it sneaked its way into the UK Top 50 on 22 July, took a full two months to haul its way up to number 21, and nearly as long to drift out of the Top 50. With Eric Easton now booking the band on the ballroom circuit, the Stones made their first tentative steps out of London, starting with the Corn Exchange in Wisbech, north Cambridgeshire, in late July. Soon after the Richmond festival performance, on 23 August, the band made their first appearance on the recently launched ITV programme Ready Steady Go! (it would become the definitive sixties British music show). Throughout this time Mick Jagger was still a student at the LSE; it wasn’t until the end of the summer that he decided not to re-enrol for the September term. Brian, says Linda Lawrence, was delighted. Not until later did he, or anyone else, notice that this was a fated turning point in his own life: even as success and fame beckoned, he would
be manipulated into a minority position within his own band. As James Phelge points out, ‘it just broke the wrong way when they left Edith Grove.’
Although the nankering vibe at Edith Grove had been established by Brian, Keith and Phelge, with Mick only dipping in and out of the camaraderie – sometimes joking with the others, sometimes earnestly studying his textbooks – Brian also was occasionally aloof, disappearing with Linda or telling the others to sod off when she arrived. He could be snooty, too. Already the others had started to mock his obsession with shampooing his hair, which he was starting to grow longer, figuring it was his most striking asset. Even before his photo was being reproduced in teen magazines, he was an obvious narcissist. ‘I remember he was, not a control freak, but he was very fastidious as a person,’ says Paul Jones. ‘I never knew anyone who was more fastidious about his appearance, his hygiene, or his clothes. He told me he picked girlfriends on the basis of how well they would do his laundry! And for some people that’s quite hard to live with on a daily basis.’ However much he’d slummed it at Selkirk House or Edith Grove, Brian was at heart a sybarite. Hence, when the band members finally decided to leave Edith Grove for plusher pads, he opted at the last moment for home comforts and moved in with Linda and her parents, at 90 St Leonards Road in Windsor. Mick found a flat for himself and Keith at 33 Mapesbury Road, in north London. In the months since he’d first signed up the Stones, Andrew Oldham had been living with his mum, Celia, with whom he’d always maintained a complex, strained relationship. It wasn’t until the autumn that Oldham asked Mick and Keith if he could move in with them. ‘It was decided that way, and I don’t think Brian even thought about it,’ says Phelge, who stayed on in the Edith Grove flat but continued to hang out with the band.
