by Marc Spitz
The Beach Boys, one of the biggest acts on the bill, delivered their standard set, highlighted by their new single, “I Get Around.” It’s hard to imagine today, what with the endless tours and lawsuits, but the Beach Boys were once every inch the teen idols the Beatles and the Stones were. In the T.A.M.I.footage, Mike Love proved to be a confident if uninviting front man, and a smiling Brian Wilson was a year and change shy of his mental breakdown. Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas followed, then the Supremes, and finally the Barbarians, a negligible but fun garage-rock blues band (who would have their only major hit with a British Invasion novelty track, “Are You a Boy or Are You a Girl,” which would appear on the monumental Nuggets compilation). Shortly after that . . . history.
“Ladies and gentleman, James Brown,” Dean announced. Backstage the five Rolling Stones, weary from endless touring and miles from home, looked like criminals about to face a firing squad. They exchanged a few wordless glances, a second language at this point, then decided to boldly face it, to walk as a group to the wings and face their fate.
“We went on, a little nervous because we didn’t think this audience really knew us, but when we went into ‘Out of Sight,’ they went straight up out of their seats,” Brown writes in his memoir, James Brown, The Godfather of Soul. “We did a bunch of songs, nonstop, like always.... I don’t think I never danced so hard in my life, and I don’t think they’d ever seen a man move that fast.” Brown knew the Stones were watching from the wings. Everyone was watching; all eyes were on him. Sliding in his patent leather shoes, putting his pinkie-ringed hand on his hip, he dropped to his knees in his checked jacket and vest, then jerked up again like a piston. With all the super-physicality, there did not seem to be one grunt or huff emanating from his throat. He seemed to be burning oxygen, breathing through hidden gills. Next Brown emoted wildly through “Prisoner of Love,” grimacing, and walking to the mic like it was a flotation device in a roiling Pacific Ocean. Next, he led the band through an impossibly fast, almost proto-punk version of “Night Train,” shouting out destinations “Miami, Florida! Raleigh, North Carolina!” the way Dee Dee Ramone would later count out the next Ramones song with a swift “1-2-3-4!” He finally exhaled at the end of that one, then sat on the drum riser and caught his breath theatrically as if to say, “Man, how about that?”
But he wasn’t finished. He got up and did his “good foot” dance back to the mic, then dramatically collapsed to the floor again, a signal for his band to pick him up and try to help him offstage. It was all a ruse, of course. Defiantly, he ran back to the mic, milking the crowd, which screamed even louder. The band picked him up again. And again he ran back to the mic. “When I was through, the audience kept calling me back for encores. It was one of those performances when you don’t even know how you’re doing it,” Brown writes. “At one point during the encores I sat down underneath a monitor and just kind of hung my head, then looked up and smiled. For a second I didn’t really know where I was.”
A mere fifteen feet away, Mick Jagger was as covered in sweat as Brown was, and he hadn’t even begun to sing. He felt light in his shoes; dizzy. “The Stones [were] standing between all those guards,” Brown remembered. “Every time they got ready to start out on the stage, the audience called us back. They couldn’t get on—it was too hot out there.”
“After James there was just enough time for the technical crew to get a smoke or a breather and to reconfigure the stage with the microphone setup or if they had their own drummer like the Stones did, bring their instruments on, twenty minutes,” Binder says. Twenty minutes . . . to follow that.
Jagger lit a final cigarette and warmed his voice with a little Jack Daniels as the crew prepped the stage for the Stones. The sound of the fans clamoring for the band only made him worry about the challenge ahead: How does one justify following what just happened out there?
Jan and Dean returned to the stage to welcome “those fine fellows from England, the Rolling Stones.” Looking nervous but resigned, the brave young men from South London assumed their headlining position. And they pulled it off. The Rolling Stones did the impossible and made the viewer forget Brown’s epochal spot. They were something so different, ironically derived from the same beat, but after a half dozen TV appearances they were adept at presenting a new breed of energy—and of making a viewer believe that they were watching some sexed-up space invasion. That’s how they matched James Brown. Surprise and sex. This isn’t to say that the future Mr. Sex Machine wasn’t carnally explosive. But there was a context for his performance, superhuman as it was, whereas the Stones, clunky and frightened, were like nothing anybody had ever seen before: male and female, familiar and strange, coming right at the viewer, leaving them no time to think, only to surrender themselves. Patti Smith, in the pages of Creem magazine (where she was a contributor), recalled the sensation years later:
“The singer was showing his second layer of skin and more than a little milk,” she wrote. “I felt thru his pants with optic x-ray. His was some hard meat. This was a bitch. Five white boys sexy as any spade. Their nerves were wired and their third leg was rising. In six minutes five lusty images gave me my first glob of gooie in my virgin panties . . . blind love for my father was the first thing I sacrificed to Mick Jagger . . . masculinity was no longer measured on the football field.” At the time, Smith was a closet rebel teen from Jersey, a good Catholic girl. The T.A.M.I. Show performance presented options.
Again, technically, it’s far less accomplished than Brown’s acrobatic marvel. They started right into “Around and Around” with skinny Mick dressed in a sweater and clapping along to the beat at the mic. He looked much amused at all the sexed-up chaos; soon that old smirk returned to his lips as if to say, “This wasn’t so bad after all.” Brian burned with hard charisma. Keith looked geeky. Charlie and Bill looked like gargoyles in training. The Stones slowed it down for “Time Is on My Side,” recorded on the previous tour and now a hit single. Next they played “It’s All Over Now.” Mick, finally having fun, changed a lyric from “She hurt my eyes open” to “She hurt my nose open.” Sprung from his dread and fear, he found his body behaving oddly. He repeatedly jumped into the air as if trying to use the stand as a pole-vaulting stick. He danced a bit more than usual; you can see him experimenting with his own body. Here, perhaps, the Mick Jagger of’ 69 was truly born—out of necessity and, in a way, an innate sense of morality. He kept up with James Brown by becoming . . . James Brown. It wasn’t perfect. “Mick cloned himself into James—with all the dancing and jumping,” Binder agrees. For the finale, the Stones launched into “It’s Alright,” an under-rehearsed Bo Diddley beat, with Mick shaking a pair of maracas as the rest of the cast of the T.A.M.I. Show and the dancers joined them onstage for a singalong, everyone together, black, white, young, slightly less young, a symbol for the times. James Brown was again conspicuously absent, but later in his memoir, the Godfather of Soul would be magnanimous, offering words of brotherhood to the Stones and confessing that when he saw them, he “saw the future.”
Ironically, it would be Mike Love who never got over having to play before the Rolling Stones that day. Twenty-five years later, during both bands’ induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an apparently drunken Love raged from the podium, “I’d like to see Mick Jagger get out on this stage and do ‘I Get Around’ versus ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ any day now. I know Mick Jagger won’t be here tonight, he’s gonna have to stay in England. But I’d like to see us in the Coliseum and he at Wembley Stadium because he’s always been chicken shit to get onstage with the Beach Boys.”
They’d already proved otherwise, by the beach in ’64. “If they preceded James Brown, we wouldn’t have had half of the performance that the Stones gave. It inspired them.” Of course, once “It’s Alright” ended and the bands went to their respective corners, tour buses, recording studios, and homes, integration resumed its maddeningly slow pace. Even the T.A.M.I. Show itself met with a divided audience. In the black neighb
orhoods, they thrilled to James Brown; he was the headliner no matter who played after him. In the white areas, it was the Stones. But by 1965, Brown would have his first Top 10 pop hit, “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” He’d notch another by year’s end, “I Got You (I Feel Good),” which he’d perform alongside super-vanilla teen idol Frankie Avalon in the film Ski Party. Even the Stones would be on their way toward gaining hard-won credibility in the black community, all without a drop of red blood being shed.
4
“As Tears Go By”
“We’re gonna do a real old song,” Mick Jagger, sixty-five years of age, dressed in very tight black T-shirt and trousers, informed the crowd at New York City’s art deco Beacon Theater, “one of the first we’ve ever written. In fact we gave it to someone else—because we felt slightly embarrassed by it.” Watching Mick sing “As Tears Go By” in Martin Scorsese’s 2006 documentary Shine a Light some forty-two years after it was written is one of the few instances of subtlety and reflection the modern Rolling Stones show offers. It’s a nostalgic moment, sure, like a lot of such concert experiences, but it accomplishes the very same thing it did in’64 when he and Keith awkwardly composed it (Mick writing much of the words and vocal melody, Keith its melancholy chords). It slows the pageant down and presents a less widely considered Rolling Stones to their larger live audience: the brooding folkies. The stadium shows tend to ignore the moody, downbeat poetic numbers. The players who in the mid-’60s crucially wrote “Heart of Stone” and “Play with Fire,” in addition to “Get Off of My Cloud,” are all but absent. At theater shows like the one at the Beacon, they unpack this incarnation and we remember how emotionally complex this band is.
It’s been said that if Brian Jones had had his way, the Stones would have continued to play nothing but the dirty Delta and Chicago blues. This is likely why Andrew Oldham paired Mick and Keith and not, say, Keith and Brian, or Mick and Brian. Once Mick and Keith began writing original material, Jones certainly emerged as their greatest instrumentalist and arranger, adding an almost second vocal via the gorgeous, plaintive recorder of “Ruby Tuesday,” the jazzy marimba of “Under My Thumb,” the elegant dulcimer on “Lady Jane,” or the buzzing, gloomy sitar on “Paint It, Black,” and even imprinted would-be standard blues or acoustic tracks with avant-garde touches (“Stray Cat Blues” and “Street Fighting Man” both on Beggars Banquet, his final curtain as a vital Jagger-Richards contributor). There was a one-song creative hurdle all three had to clear first.
“As Tears Go By” is the moment when it all begins; a point of serendipity, the instant the Stones delineated themselves as not just songwriters, not merely rebels, but romantic figures, never again to be easily dismissed as thugs. Here, Mick Jagger, already a sex object, became a poet. It’s an amazing feat for something basically written on demand for Oldham. Oldham, who saw how much money the Beatles were making off sheet music and other publishing revenue streams, had money on his mind, and Mick and Keith gave him art.
“As Tears Go By” was a song for a woman; a “girl’s” song; one that Mick and Keith didn’t dare present to the band as a possible number for them to record (the first one that was deemed Stonesworthy would be “The Last Time,” written in early ’65). If the Stones had been writing something for themselves, they surely would not have come up with something so delicate and sophisticated. Sometimes the best art comes from the need to impress girls. This particular exercise was written for Marianne Faithfull, then a buxom, sweet-faced former convent student, or “angel with big tits,” as Oldham succinctly described her. Faithfull intrigued the young Stones and their manager in other ways too. She was the daughter of Eva von Sacher-Masoch, a Viennese baroness. Her father, Major Robert Glynn Faithfull, was a respected military officer and intellectual. Faithfull’s great uncle was notorious Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose erotic writing (most famously the nineteenth-century novella Venus in Furs) inspired the term “masochism.” In person, the teenager was well spoken but erotically primal, an ideal daughter of the new age. She was also (and this would be proven over and over again to Mick, who found her irresistible) perfectly unavailable. Faithfull would soon marry London art and social scene-maker John Dunbar, three years her senior.
“John called me and said he’d met this extraordinary girl and was desperately in love. She was so beautiful and amazing and I had to meet her,” says Peter Asher. “So I did and everything he said was true. I thought, ‘Boy, John’s really scored. She’s totally gorgeous. Intelligent. Perfect in every way.’ ”
Asher accompanied Dunbar and Faithfull to the record release party that would change the alluring teenager’s life forever. It was a fete celebrating a record release by Italian chanteuse Adrienne Posta in March of ’64, and both Andrew Loog Oldham and the Stones would be in attendance. “Marianne hadn’t met them. It was Andrew who spotted Marianne first, but I’m sure she caught Mick’s eye. She was spectacular. Lit up a room. Andrew walked over to her and asked, ‘Can you sing? We will make a record with you. You’re going to be a star.’ Then [he asked] the Stones, ‘Will you write a song for this girl?’ ”
The Stones, already inspiring hundreds of teenage girls to urinate on themselves whenever they played, did not make much of an impression on Marianne. “At this point the Stones were not much more than yobby school boys,” Faithfull recalled in her memoir, Faithfull. “They had none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney and compared to my John they seemed very crass and boorish indeed.”
Mick, Keith, and Brian, as well as Oldham, were smitten by this “poised, well-brought-up, upper-class English girl,” according to Asher. But Faithfull did not want to be a pop singer, and despite her beauty, Mick and Keith didn’t particularly want to spend their rare bits of free time working. And yet Oldham, in a constant state of device, had a synergistic and potentially very lucrative vision for all four of them. “I had this thing that whatever I decided people could be, they became. I got nothing but moans and groans from Mick and Keith. They were too tired from the gigs to write songs.” Oldham, with his camp “Darlings,” intrigued Faithfull. She didn’t think much of his promises and plans, but sensed that there was a person who was a total original, a rarity, and someone she should explore. She left the party with a vague idea that she might see Oldham again. Numbers were exchanged but no hard commitments made.
Mick was also unavailable, not that this really mattered to Faithfull at the time. He was nearly two years into his relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton, such a catch when the Stones were just on the bubble of fame. Some have suggested that Mick, already establishing his social-climbing tendencies, was looking to trade up (and Faithfull seemed certainly to be a trade-up). Most likely, the Jagger-Shrimpton affair, begun when both were so inexperienced, had now run its course. Shrimpton, who was for a time employed by Oldham and the band’s label Decca, could not help but feel estranged from her ceaselessly busy paramour. The constant touring and its temptations created a divide that they couldn’t bridge. From the moment that Mick met Faithfull, he began to fantasize about having a girlfriend who didn’t seem to need constant reassuring. She seemed, especially for a teenager, perfectly independent. Surely someone like that would be able to understand and keep pace with his own life and maybe even help him evolve out of a sweaty, down-and-dirty blues scene into a different London: one of wealth and culture. If he wasn’t pursuing this, he knew instinctively that it had become necessary. And so in his fantasy, she’d give him books to read, tell him what paintings to ponder and what films to take in. She’d help him grow up some but wouldn’t require that he dispense with the low culture he so sincerely adored. His time at the L.S.E. and recent sortie through New York City’s society gave him a window into such a world, and he’d liked what he saw. With Faithfull on his arm, Mick could evolve into a mod Lord Byron figure; romantic and searching, but also able to talk trash with the boys, shoot pool, and drink in pubs. Now that would be something. It was an ideal, and from the moment he met her, he pursued it aggress
ively. Mick wanted her not just as a sexual partner but as a key to his new self. The poetic romance of the imagery in “As Tears Go By” was perhaps unconsciously designed to release this figure from the cocoon.
When Oldham demanded that Mick and Keith come up with a song for her, there was no real precedent, only projection (“I want a song with brick walls all around it, and high windows, and no sex” were the only instructions Oldham offered). “As Tears Go By” was projected, out of Mick’s frustration, fantasy, and natural intelligence. It was nothing he felt yet, but like all great artists, he could convincingly present something that he knew someone would feel because it was true. Not his truth, per se, but a universal truth. Mick and Keith worked on the song, smoking cigarettes, locked in the kitchen of the flat they all shared, with nothing but a guitar.
Shrimpton was kept away as they wrote, Keith strumming, Mick humming the vocals and scribbling lyrics with a pencil. Keith’s chord changes were magisterial and Mick’s lyrics were surprisingly gentle and reflective. They called it “As Time Goes By,” showing little concern about the association with the worldfamous ballad from Casablanca. “What have you got?” Oldham asked upon returning to the kitchen after having left them all night. “Mick, who was pissed off and hungry, told me they’d ‘written this fucking song and you’d better fucking like it,’ ” Oldham wrote in his memoir.
Oldham was already moving and shaking: He booked studio time, sent word to Faithfull in the country, and signed up Lionel Bart, the hottest songwriter in Tin Pan Alley and composer of the smash musical Oliver!, adapted from Dickens’ Oliver Twist, to fortify Faithfull’s debut single with an original composition called “I Don’t Know How to Tell You.” It had only been a week since the party, but there was already a master plan in place. Marianne Faithfull, Andrew Oldham, Mick, and Keith convened in Olympic Studios, where the Stones would later record several of their peerless full-length albums, to lay down the tracks. Faithfull noticed Jagger and Richards in the control room intriguingly sullen, and certainly nervous. They seemed new to her. They played her a recording of the song with Mick on vocals and a studio musician on acoustic guitar. The tune immediately afforded the pair a depth she didn’t really expect. Tears don’t “fall” they “go by.” They pass into memory. The narrator watches children from a distance as the sun begins to set. They are “doing things I used to do, they think are new” Mick sang, delivering the amazing line with sincerity on the demo, sounding nothing like his “bay bay,” bluesman self but more like a gentle folk singer or even a female chanteuse.
