Broke but resourceful, Oldham obtained lists of which stores reported sales to the charts. He sent in friends to buy copies on Thursday and Friday, then had them return on Saturday knowing the store was out of stock and would order five more copies on Monday. This scam got “Come On” a chart position at No. 49.
The corny American apostrophe on the end of “Rollin’” had always irked Oldham. “How can you expect people to take you seriously when you can’t even be bothered to spell your name properly?” he asked. They added the g. He then convinced Jones and Jagger to ditch Ian Stewart. “Five is pushing it, six is impossible. People work nine to five and they couldn’t be expected to remember more than four faces. This is entertainment, not a memory test.” Ian Stewart held back his tears as the band broke the news.
Pumped up by Oldham’s theatrical sense of entitlement, the five brutish, correctly spelled Rolling Stones were repackaged just in time for their first TV appearance on Thank Your Lucky Stars. While they were nervously hanging around the studio waiting for their slot, Keith Richards walked past an Irish show band dressed up in blue uniforms and joked, “Oh the Irish fucking navy.” The Irish musicians got so frisky, the producer rushed in to keep a fight from breaking out. “Look, boys, let’s pull together,” he implored, as Keith Richards persisted, “Well, they shouldn’t be in the Irish fucking navy, should they!” Once things settled down, remembering Epstein’s confidence-building effect on the Beatles months earlier in the same studio, Oldham ordered one of the stagehands to move the drum set four inches to the right, “daaaarling.” Feeling invincible, the Stones mimed with attitude.
With a major TV appearance scheduled for broadcast the following Saturday, Oldham urgently needed a major newspaper’s endorsement. Because the Daily Mirror had a circulation of 5 million, he begged for help from a powerful PR agent, Leslie Perrin, who reluctantly arranged a meeting in a Fleet Street pub with Mirror columnist Patrick Doncaster. With an unnerving smirk, Perrin introduced Oldham to Doncaster and duly left. Wearing the same smirk, Doncaster got straight to the point. “When Leslie called me about you, we both laughed and said you should be able to get into the column on cheek alone, so you can relax, I think you’ll be very pleased with next Thursday’s Mirror.”
When the article appeared, the Stones not only got the headline—BAD NEWS IS GOOD NEWS FOR THE STONES—but Doncaster played along with Oldham’s bad-boy strategy. For the better part of a page, he showered praise on the band, which in fairness didn’t deserve such exposure. In Oldham’s own words, “That Thursday when the Rolling Stones rolled over England’s breakfast tables and bus queues with Doncaster’s stamp of approval, the nation—had it been listening closely—would have heard the distant sound of thunder.”
Then came the bizarrest of coincidences. At a rehearsal in search of a new single, Oldham and the Stones were getting nowhere. After hours trudging through their repertoire of blues and R&B covers, Oldham started feeling depressed. Stepping outside to take a breath of fresh air, he began walking aimlessly toward Charing Cross Road. Suddenly, two familiar faces stumbled out of a taxi. It was John Lennon and Paul McCartney—drunk and trying to pay the cabby with fumbling fingers. They were coming from a luncheon where the Beatles had received Melody Maker’s Best Vocal Disc of the Year award.
Oldham sauntered over, and they exchanged hellos. Despite their state, they noticed Oldham wasn’t looking himself. “What’s wrong?” they asked. Oldham explained he was at a Stones rehearsal just around the corner and they couldn’t come up with a suitable song for their next single. Lennon and McCartney exchanged twinkling glances. “C’mon, take us there,” they said. The three pairs of Cuban-heeled boots strutted back down the road and into the basement where the Rolling Stones were sitting around glumly. Borrowing their instruments, Lennon and McCartney offered the Stones one of their own previously unreleased songs, “I Wanna Be Your Man.” The two Beatles were, however, in a rush to get somewhere and were gone almost as quickly as they came. As the door shut behind John and Paul, the Stones smiled at each other, jaws dropped. They had their first potential hit single for the taking.
Although relieved their lucky star had shone, Oldham was feeling a familiar sensation. Another depression was rolling down its iron curtain. He took the ferry from Dover and walked his suicidal thoughts around Paris for a few days until he felt like himself again. He missed the recording session for “I Wanna Be Your Man” but at least returned to London with a spring in his step. The Stones couldn’t understand why he’d disappeared. Eric Easton didn’t care.
Thanks to the older agent, the Stones embarked on their second tour in the autumn of 1963—thirty-two dates with just three days off. Although the Stones were at the bottom end of the bill, the tour promoter began noticing that his headliners, the Everly Brothers, Little Richard, and Bo Diddley, were not selling out. Then Oldham organized a Rolling Stones stage rush when the tour was in London, with all his friends’ girlfriends and all their friends feigning Beatles-style hysteria; the NME reporter went home thinking the Stones had provided the highlight moment of the star-studded lineup. Another journalist, Sean O’Mahony, remembered, “At Hammersmith, the bouncers dragged girls out of the audience and parked them along the wall backstage. There were about seventy girls sprawled on the floor showing their knickers—it was an appalling sight.”
With a buzz growing, “I Wanna Be Your Man” reached No. 30. Unfortunately, Eric Easton and Brian Jones, who saw themselves as the rightful leaders of the enterprise, were getting greedy. Easton had been pocketing kickbacks from the tour promoter; Brian Jones demanded special hotel rooms, alternative transportation, and £5 more per week than his bandmates.
As the smell of success grew stronger, a serious rift was forming—further accentuated by Oldham’s moving in with Jagger and Richards. Getting to know the secretive, brooding Mick, Oldham had less of a relationship with Keith, who spent his whole time either sleeping or practicing the guitar. Although most of their waking hours were spent in vans, it was at this address that Oldham put Jagger and Richards in the kitchen and warned, “I’m not letting you out or giving you any food until you write something.”
Apart from their own material, the other vital ingredient they didn’t have was a suitable, cheap studio. Oldham found Regent Sound, one of the smallest and filthiest dumps in London’s Tin Pan Alley district near Denmark Street. It was where songwriters came to record their demos. The place probably hadn’t been cleaned since the day it was built; there were, according to witnesses, “stains on the stains.” The control room was so small you could barely fit a chair between the console and back wall. Because the studio had no baffling and fed into a two-track mono machine, all the instruments bled into what Oldham described as his “wall of noise.” Inside this dump, the Stones recorded a four-track EP featuring “You Better Move On,” which, thanks to BBC airplay, got to No. 11 in the singles charts.
It was with these early successes that his contacts at the Record Mirror reported, “Andrew Loog Oldham predicts he will be the most successful independent producer in the country by autumn.” He was going to have to move fast. Throughout January 1964, the Stones went on their second ballroom tour, supporting the Ronettes, meaning Oldham and Spector were again getting into trouble all over London. The Stones also headlined their own privately run shows, supported by the Detours, a mod group who later became the Who. Brian Jones even appeared with the Yardbirds, still resident at the Station Hotel in Richmond, where Oldham first saw the Stones play.
At Regent Sound, they recorded a shuffling number, “Not Fade Away.” Their first major hit, it reached No. 3. Oldham’s next brilliant move, in the spring of 1964, was the Stones’ first album cover. Recorded in January and February 1964, the album was mainly cover versions of old blues and Motown, with one song credited to Jagger and Richards and two to “Nanker Phelge,” a collective pseudonym for the band. The sleeve photo by Nicholas Wright was dark, ominous, and stylish. Oldham was convinced that for maximum visual impa
ct, the sleeve should not include any title or even the band’s name, just five faces. When Decca refused the idea, Oldham refused to hand over the masters. The standoff continued until Decca, sensing that Oldham just might be right, finally relented.
The effect was instant. While the Beatles were breaking all records in America in April 1964 with songs that had been hits in England the previous year, the Rolling Stones’ nameless album was released and shot to No. 1 on the U.K. album charts, where it stayed for twelve weeks. “The Stones’ role in music is a powerful one,” announced Oldham’s press release. “They have the anger of the parents on their side. Young fans now realize that their elders groan with horror at the Rolling Stones. So their loyalty to the Stones is unswerving.” The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who witnessed the Stones’ ascension up close, felt that generational rupture; “the Stones finally cemented the huge fucking wall that we wanted to build between the previous generation and everybody who was to follow.”
Decca producer Tony Meehan remembered, “The Stones were in one studio, and I was in another doing some mixing, the first time I met them. They looked very sort of wild, like beatniks. They were having great trouble tuning up. And I said to Andrew, ‘That’s out of tune.’ He looked at me and just laughed—his inimitable sense of anarchy. He said, ‘Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it?’ He couldn’t give a shit. It was great, people were fooled by it. It was the image—he was selling an image and he did it very well. It was almost like punk.”
The other joke was that the Rolling Stones had a much better deal with Decca than the Beatles had with Parlophone. One of Oldham’s associates in his PR agency, Tony Calder, believed that “even if Andrew was operating more on instinct and luck than suss [knowledge] the deals the Stones got on paper were absolutely sensational—they had the greatest deals, fair to this day. The Beatles were on a shit deal, probably because they came first. The pioneers always get the arrows in the back.”
With a hit album under his belt, Oldham was determined to fulfill his own prophecy of becoming the biggest independent producer in England before autumn. He was working on his experimental Andrew Oldham Orchestra, a sort of baroque pop that reworked Stones hits with wacky orchestral arrangements. He had also discovered a seventeen-year-old beauty called Marianne Faithfull, for whom he reworked the lyrics of a Jagger-Richards composition into “As Tears Go By.”
Needing money to bring all his dreams to life, he presented his projects to Dick Rowe, then talked his way into a meeting with Sir Edward Lewis, the mogul who set up Decca in 1929. In an impressive antique office overlooking the Thames, Oldham studied the old man’s wrinkled face. So this was the dinosaur behind the colonial civil service that was Decca. Everyone in London’s record business knew Sir Edward loathed rock ’n’ roll and hoped it was just a passing fad.
Sir Edward took a newly pressed copy of “As Tears Go By” and placed it on an antique Gramophone. Oldham watched his reaction as the English horn announced the song’s baroque-pop melody. As the sun shone down on the Thames, Andrew Loog Oldham, just nineteen years old, stood glowing, as if all of London were smiling back at him through the window. When the song faded out, Lewis picked up a telephone and asked to be put through to Dick Rowe. “Give the boy the money” was all he said.
14. A SLOW ECLIPSE
It was in January 1964, just before they exploded in America, when the Beatles first heard The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. As John Lennon put it, “For three weeks in Paris we didn’t stop playing it. We all went potty about Dylan.” Later that momentous spring, Lennon was interviewed in London by an American journalist, Al Aronowitz, who happened to be a friend of Dylan’s. In their conversations, Lennon admitted he wanted to meet this enigmatic songwriter from Minnesota.
In August 1964, the Beatles returned to America. They had just released the film A Hard Day’s Night to critical acclaim and were on the cover of Life magazine. Back in April, Lennon had even published his very own book of drawings and stories, In His Own Write. It had been an eventful few months in Lennon’s life as an artist. Feeling buoyant, he sent out a message to Aronowitz to arrange the meeting.
The year had also been a transitional one for Bob Dylan. He had lost interest in writing “finger pointin’ songs,” and much of his new material was autobiographical. In February, he and three friends had embarked on a twenty-day adventure driving across America; typing away in the backseat, Dylan completed the material for his June 1964 album, Another Side of Bob Dylan. He started writing “Mr. Tambourine Man,” his most ambitious lyric of the year, at the New Orleans Mardi Gras and first performed the song at the Newport Folk Festival that summer.
The meeting was set at the Delmonico Hotel in New York on August 28, the evening after a Beatles concert. Aronowitz, Dylan, and his road manager, Victor Mamoudas, drove down from Woodstock and parked their station wagon around the corner from the hotel, pushed through the crowd of Beatles fans, and gained access into the relative calm of the hotel lobby. Once official contact had been made with their hosts, two policemen escorted them up to the Beatles’ floor. When the lift opened, Dylan was ushered past more policemen posted along the corridor. Beyond them, a group of journalists, disc jockeys, and musicians poured out of an open room where drinks were being served. Dylan was led into a closed suite where Brian Epstein and the four Beatles had just finished eating dinner.
As he came through the doorway, the Beatles were first struck by Dylan’s small stature and hooked nose. Trying to break a palpable tension, Epstein invited his guests into the living room, asking them what they’d like to drink.
“Cheap wine,” replied Dylan.
Unsure if Dylan was joking, Epstein dispatched his assistant Mal Evans to procure some cheap wine. During the wait, it was suggested that amphetamine pills were available. The guests declined, but Dylan seized the cue to suggest they all smoke some fantastic grass he had brought down from Woodstock.
Stuck for words, Epstein and the Beatles looked at each other. “We’ve never smoked marijuana before,” admitted Epstein with embarrassment.
“But what about your song?” Dylan asked. “The one about getting high?”
“Which song?” asked Lennon.
“You know … ‘and when I touch you I get high, I get high,’” sang Dylan in reference to “I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”
“Those aren’t the words,” explained Lennon. “The words are ‘I can’t hide.’”
Epstein spent half an hour securing the hotel suite before Dylan was even allowed to produce the grass from his pocket. The doors were locked; then towels from the bathroom were stuffed into every crevice around the door frame. The blinds were shut tight and the curtains drawn, obscuring the majestic views of Park Avenue. Once Epstein felt they were securely airtight, a bemused Dylan was allowed to roll a joint.
Dylan lit up, passing it first to John Lennon. Too apprehensive to take a puff, Lennon passed it on, joking that Ringo was his royal taster. Unaware of joint etiquette, Ringo proceeded to smoke the entire joint himself. So Dylan and Aronowitz rolled half a dozen joints and passed them around. As the other Beatles began smoking the strong-smelling herb, they thought, “This isn’t doing anything,” until Ringo started laughing uncontrollably.
Within minutes, the hotel suite was a madhouse. Epstein was clutching his seat repeating, “I’m so high I’m on the ceiling. I’m up on the ceiling…” At the center of this bedlam, Dylan kept his hosts in convulsions by pretending to answer the telephone, “Hello, Beatlemania here!”
The Beatles’ weapon against stress was humor, and on this historical night, everyone had a sore belly from so much laughter. When Dylan and his friends eventually left, they all promised each other to meet up at the end of their tour. For the Beatles, and especially John Lennon, the encounter marked the beginning of a bizarre relationship with the musician every interesting songwriter in the business was starting to notice. These little events, hidden from the public eye, sowed the seeds of what in time would grow into a brand-new musical g
enre, psychedelia.
Something was in the air. Just a month later, a British group from Newcastle called the Animals scored a smash-hit No. 1 in America with “House of the Rising Sun,” a traditional air that Dylan had recorded for his debut album, cleverly reworked with electric guitar, bass, ride cymbals, and some stirring organ playing by Alan Price. Then Beatles for Sale, released in December 1964, contained the first of many audibly Dylan-inspired songs by John Lennon—“I’m a Loser,” complete with a harmonica solo. By the time the Beatles started filming Help! in the new year, John Lennon had become such an unashamed Dylan freak that he wore a Greek fisherman’s hat and a suede jacket and even traded in his Rickenbacker for an acoustic guitar.
Always one step ahead of the posse, Dylan himself was exceptionally prolific in this period. As the brilliant Bringing It All Back Home hit the streets in the spring of 1965, a cover of “Mr. Tambourine Man” by a young Californian group called the Byrds was climbing the charts, eventually reaching No. 1 in June. Signed to Columbia at the end of 1964, the Byrds were originally billed as an American answer to the Beatles but quickly cultivated their own image. David Crosby crafted distinctive harmonies; Roger McGuinn contributed the bright sound of a twelve-string electric guitar.
Dylan’s own breakthrough came with “Like a Rolling Stone,” a six-and-a-half-minute sledgehammer describing a Greenwich Village hipster’s decline. Columbia’s sales and marketing staff had been cautious about releasing it as a single due to its length and raucous sound. Fortunately, before condemning the recording to a lesser fate as an album track, release coordinator Shaun Considine took an acetate to a happening club, Arthur, whose in-crowd of deejays and journalists duly wore it out. Lo and behold, the next morning, a programming director from a Top 40 station telephoned Columbia for copies. So, on July 20, 1965, Columbia released all six-plus minutes of “Like a Rolling Stone”—a precedent in pop music.
Cowboys and Indies: The Epic History of the Record Industry Page 17
