Read 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Online
Authors: Andrew Grant Jackson
“I didn’t have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent, and I thought, ‘Well, I can do this.’ And I liked doing it. It’s a real buzz, even in front of 20 people, to make a complete fool of yourself. But people seemed to like it. And the thing is, if people started throwing tomatoes at me, I wouldn’t have gone on with it. But they all liked it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces.”
“Shocked by you?”
“Yeah. They could see it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time in these little places in the suburbs.”
12
Of all the English front men, Jagger was already the most animated onstage. Then he was nuked and mutated by James Brown’s radioactive waves when both were filming
The T.A.M.I. Show.
Brown was peeved that the newcomer Stones had been chosen to close the show over him, just because they were young white teen idols, and he vowed to make them wish they’d never left England. The Stones wisely wanted to change their slot, but were denied.
Brown writes in his memoir that he didn’t think he’d ever danced so hard in his life, and the audience kept calling him back for encores. “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 … By that time I don’t think Mick wanted to go on the stage at all. Mick had been watching me do that thing where I shimmy on one leg, and when the Stones finally got out there, he tried it a couple of times. He danced a lot that day. Until then I think he used to stand still when he sang, but after that he really started moving around.”
13
When one compares Jagger’s performances on TV shows before and after
T.A.M.I.
, it becomes clear how direct (and skillful) his copying of Brown was, from the way he held the microphone stand to the undulating knees to the clapping, jumping up, and doing the half splits. After Ike and Tina Turner opened for the Stones, Jagger would absorb Tina’s style in the same fashion.
The success of “Satisfaction” also drove Jagger to new levels of exhilaration. On
Shindig!
on May 20 (before the song’s release), Jagger pumps his knee and does a few flamenco claps over his head, but he’s rather subdued. By the fall, he’s gliding, legs flying out to either side; bobbing his head like a chicken and pointing; slapping an imaginary face with upraised hand like a haughty baron; jack-knifing over with the mike and then flipping the stand upside down above his head. For the “satisfaction” bit, he alternately glares or licks his lips.
He began jumping around more than even Brown, and then started adding in-your-face pansexuality. Promoting “Get Off of My Cloud” on TV, he tossed his hair and stared with big, wide Diana Ross eyes while draping his mic cord over his shoulder, pouting with delicate waves of a limpish wrist, and sticking his butt out with the flamenco claps.
He’d gone through a big camp phase when he first moved out of his folks’ house and was living with Richards and Jones in a squalid two-bedroom flat in Chelsea, before the band made it. Jagger would put on pancake makeup, lipstick, mascara, a powder-blue linen housecoat, a lavender hairnet, stockings, and high heels and, Richards recalled, would be “wavin’ his hands everywhere—‘Oh! Don’t!’—a real King’s Road queen for about six months. Brian and I immediately went enormously butch, sort of laughing at Mick.”
14
Because they had no heat, in the winter they all slept in the same bed together, and Richards’s former partner Anita Pallenberg said Jagger and Jones had a brief fling, though both were extreme womanizers.
15
(Jagger even seduced the mother of one of Jones’s illegitimate children.) Later, Jagger would periodically share a bed with manager Oldham.
It took more balls for Jagger to act gay than it did to act black. In the early days, people in the audience would shout “Queer!” and “Homo!” People spat at him in New York. Yet later bios claimed that by 2010 he had slept with more than four thousand women, including Carla Bruni, Angelina Jolie, Uma Thurman, Farrah Fawcett, and Carly Simon.
16
Back in the mid-1960s, he was at a King’s Road restaurant with gay interior designer Nick Haslam when a snide older man asked Jagger, “Are you a man or a woman?” Jagger glared at him for a beat and then rose, unfastened his trousers, and let it all hang out.
17
He was the forefather of the glam rock era of David Bowie and
Rocky Horror
’s “Sweet Transvestite” from Transylvania. In
Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender
, Sheila Whiteley writes that Jagger “opened up definitions of gendered masculinity and so laid the foundations for self-invention and sexual plasticity which are now an integral part of contemporary youth culture.”
18
He absorbed both gay and black culture to smash through repression and liberate a lot of white men, gay or straight, showing you could dance free and still rock—and even do the funky chicken if you wanted.
But the Stones wouldn’t have sustained without the Jagger/Richards songwriting partnership. By the middle of the year, their pop and R&B sensibilities had entwined. Had the best of their originals been collected on one coherent album, it would have equaled Dylan’s and the Beatles’ releases: “Satisfaction,” “Get Off of My Cloud,” “The Last Time,” “Play with Fire,” “Heart of Stone,” “I’m Free,” “The Spider and the Fly,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” “Ride on Baby,” “Sitting on a Fence,” and “As Tears Go By.”
On December 3–5, the Stones played Sacramento, San Jose, San Diego, and LA, and then went into RCA Studios in Hollywood to record through December 8.
Rubber Soul
and
The Who Sings My Generation
were released on the third of the month, the Byrds’
Turn! Turn! Turn!
album released on the sixth. Ken Kesey had given Richards and Jones acid after their San Jose gig. Some girls whom the band knew from Phoenix showed up, and Wyman encouraged them to walk into the studio naked to surprise the band. Oldham took one into the control room and had sex with her in front of everyone.
19
The track “19th Nervous Breakdown” was a further rewrite of “Play with Fire” mixed with “Like a Rolling Stone.” A socialite whose mother owes a million dollars in taxes has been emotionally damaged by her ex. But when Jagger tries to help her on an acid trip, he realizes she’s actually disarranging his mind.
“Mother’s Little Helper” was a preemptive reply to the charge that the Stones were leading kids to drug abuse, a portrait of a stressed-out housewife addicted to Valium. In it, Jagger warns the frazzled mother that she’ll get an overdose if she doesn’t dial it back with the pills—one of the few times the Stones advocated just saying no. Richards imitates the sitar of “Norwegian Wood” with his electric twelve-string.
Other tracks reflect Jagger’s deep antipathy to marriage, not least because his two-year relationship with Chrissie Shrimpton (model Jean Shrimpton’s sister) often degenerated into screaming matches. Once, she even kicked him down the stairs.
20
Shrimpton was one of a number of his girlfriends who would attempt or succeed in suicide. In “Sitting on a Fence,” Jagger watches his friends from school settle down and get a mortgage because they can’t think of anything else to do. Then they realize the choice wasn’t right and they go out at night and don’t come back. Richards accompanies him in the Appalachian style of folk guitarist Bert Jansch. Jones joins in on harpsichord at the end.
Jones plays the harpsichord in “Ride on Baby” as well, a breakthrough to the Stones’ next formula: Jagger savaging women with misogynistic lyrics while Jones plays catchy pop on a cornucopia of exotic instruments. A young lady walks up to Jagger and, despite her bloodshot eyes, tries to act shy, but Jagger’s already seen her before, in a “trashy magazine.” When they get together, she smiles vacantly but looks through him. He kicks her out and condenses “Like a Rolling Stone” into one line, saying she’ll look sixty-five when she turns thirty and won’t have any friends left. In the New Year, Jagger would turn his venom on Chrissie Shrimpton with songs such as “Stupid Girl,” “Under My Thumb,” and “Out of Time.”
When the Stones were in the studio a few months earlier, Jones had been frustrated. Closed out of the songwriting partnership, he felt he’d lost hold of what had once been his band. He could be the most handsome and striking Stone, but his life of excess and cruelty was catching up to him, and he sometimes appeared to be in a trance, with bags under his eyes like a degenerate Morlock
.
But then, on September 14 in Munich, he met the darkly alluring model Anita Pallenberg. “I got backstage with a photographer,” Pallenberg remembered. “I told [Brian] I just wanted to meet him. I had some Amyl Nitrate and a piece of hash. I asked Brian if he wanted a joint, and he said yes, so he asked me back to his hotel, and he cried all night. He was so upset about Mick and Keith still, saying they had teamed up on him. I felt so sorry for him.”
21
The support of a hip and intelligent beauty revitalized Jones. To “Ride on Baby” he piled on the marimbas, Autoharp, congas, twelve-string Rickenbacker, and koto, and began his quest to fuse Delta blues with Elizabethan lute music.
Since the group had recorded “Play with Fire” the January before, chamber pop had gathered steam: in the Beatles’ “Yesterday” and “In My Life”; the Beach Boys’
Today
album; the Yardbirds’ Gregorian chants in “Still I’m Sad” and Spanish scales in “Evil Hearted You”; the Henry Purcell influence on the Who’s “The Kids Are Alright”; the flute solo in “California Dreamin’”; the harpsichord in Simon and Garfunkel’s “Leaves That Are Green.” The Zombies’ minor-key electric piano in “Tell Her No” inspired five New York teens to form the Left Banke. The group began recording their first album
Walk Away Renée/Pretty Ballerina
in December; the title track features both harpsichord and string quartet. With the Stones, Jones would be one of the major forces in baroque pop. Even if he wasn’t writing the songs, they would be unimaginable without his instrumental embellishments. Playing unusual instruments also earned him more camera time. Briefly, Jones was back.
Oldham originally wanted to call the Stones’ next album
Could You Walk on the Water
, with a shot of the band members up to their necks in a reservoir. The label put the kibosh on that, and it was eventually titled
Aftermath
. But no doubt the Stones were floating a little in their minds the day Jagger, Oldham, and publicist Tony Calder cruised along the Pacific Coast Highway in a red Ford Mustang. Each time they hit the radio button to change the station, “Satisfaction” was playing.
22
They must have felt like “I’m Free,” the B side of “Get Off of My Cloud.” In the song, Richards’s tremolo’d guitar grooved with Jones’s organ and the group’s harmonies, halcyon like the cloudless blue.
MLK takes on Chicago while Stokely Carmichael and the SNCC introduce the Black Panthers. Nina Simone embodies “Black Is Beautiful,” and Coltrane flies into the free jazz stratosphere. Ska lays the foundation for hip-hop.
Thanks to the Civil Rights
and Voting Rights Acts, Martin Luther King Jr. believed that “Old man Segregation is on his deathbed,” so he changed his focus to poverty. “What good does it do to be able to eat at a lunch counter if you can’t buy a hamburger?”
1
After a “People to People” tour of northern cities, in September he announced the Chicago Freedom Movement, which would focus most of its energy on ending housing discrimination that prevented blacks from moving out of the slums and into the suburbs. At the end of the year he moved his family into a tenement in the West Side ghetto. But while northerners professed to abhor the bigotry of the South, they also feared for the property value of their nest eggs, and in the months to come the demonstrations would be swarmed by angry white folks as twisted with rage as the rednecks. During one Chicago march, someone threw a brick at King’s head and knocked him down. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South, but I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today,” he said.
2
As the struggle shifted from the ability to vote to issues such as housing discrimination, busing, and affirmative action, consensus on the best course of action began to splinter. At the same time, many blacks became impatient with King’s nonviolent ethos. The leader who would first articulate the new era’s defiance was Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Singer Nina Simone called him the most handsome man in America.
3
He had been a Freedom Rider, and then worked to register black voters in Alabama. In March, when King marched through Lowndes County on the way from Selma to Montgomery, Carmichael approached all the blacks who came out to see MLK and got their contact information to register them.
Despite (or because of) the passage of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, Alabama was as dangerous as ever. On August 13, twenty-nine civil rights activists protested a whites-only store and were jailed. When they were released on August 20, a white Episcopalian named Jonathan Myrick Daniels, who had come down from Harvard with his wife to help, attempted to enter Varner’s grocery store with a seventeen-year-old black girl to buy a soft drink. An engineer for the state highway department named Thomas Coleman was working as a special deputy at the door and pointed a shotgun at the girl. Daniels pushed her down and took the blast. Another civil rights worker tried to flee with Daniels’s wife, and the deputy shot him as well. The jury accepted the deputy’s claim that he had acted in self-defense, and he was acquitted.
Alabama was basically a one-party state, and the flag of the state’s Democratic Party had the words “white supremacy” written on it. So Carmichael and the SNCC knew they needed their own independent political party, and in December they announced the formation of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization.
4
They started holding voter drives and political classes for the residents, 80 percent of whom lived under the poverty line. For their symbol, they picked a leaping black panther, claws bared. Even if the voter couldn’t read, he could see the symbol and know which way he should vote.
5