They played ‘Route 66’, ‘Road Runner’ and ‘Walking the Dog’ and they were right at the top of their game. Brian Jones hadn’t yet fallen by the wayside as a musical contributor and he, Jagger and Keith Richards presented a unique three-pronged attack as live performers. Jones - the most conventionally good-looking - minced menacingly on the left whilst Keith perfected a kind of big-eared borstal strut to his far right, endlessly winding and unwinding his coiled frame around the guitar rhythms he was punching out.
The two of them perfectly bookended Jagger, who at that point in time was one scary motherfucker to behold. No one had seen features quite like his before: the pornographic lips, the bird’s nest hair. The Stones had a disturbing ‘Village of the Damned’ quality about their combined physical presence but Jagger had the most radically alien looks of the quintet.
And his was by far the most overtly malevolent presence in the house. At one point in the set, a spectator-I couldn’t tell if it was male or female - rushed the stage and attempted to grab Jagger’s legs in a sort of rugby tackle manoeuvre. The singer responded by calmly driving his mike stand into the interloper’s
face, causing blood and several teeth to arc across the spotlight. It was shocking to behold but also somehow perversely appropriate. We were all in the grip of something that was completely out of control, a sort of mass delirium, a voodoo ceremony for the white adolescent libido to come alive to.
By the end, all the barriers had come tumbling down. When they left the stage, they’d obliterated every performer and every note that had preceded them. I saw the other acts leaving the building with their instruments and suitcases at the end of the evening and they had to run a gauntlet of rabid female Stones fans outside the stage door who were only too willing to call attention to their various musical and image shortcomings.
The rules were all changing. ‘Tame’ was out. ‘Audacious’ was in. The Zeitgeist pendulum had moved to the other end of the culture spectrum, the one diametrically opposed to notions of conformism and bourgeois uniformity. And the Rolling Stones were at the centre of this cultural youth quake, its designated dam-busters.
I actually got to meet them that night too. The promoter took me and his son into their dressing room, which wasn’t much bigger than a toilet cubicle, about a quarter of an hour after they’d vacated the stage. ‘Why is that little cunt getting to meet them and not us?’ screamed an enraged female, one of many being blocked from entering through the adjacent stage door. But hey, I couldn’t help it if I was lucky.
At first glimpse the group looked utterly shattered, wrung dry by the exhausting routine of travelling around the British Isles in a cramped and underheated Transit van night and day. Keith Richards was stretched out on a makeshift sofa, eyes closed, mouth slightly agape, an open bottle of brown ale balanced
precariously on his lower torso. Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman were towelling the sweat from their hair and necks and staring blankly at their dressing-room walls as if under hypnosis. They didn’t exactly radiate approachability but when I timidly offered them a piece of paper to autograph, they obliged without complaint, even though I had to gently nudge Keith in order to wake him up.
Mick Jagger was the one I was wariest of. I’d just seen him literally smash someone’s face in and now he was standing directly before me looking extremely angry about something or other. For an insecure second, I thought he might be experiencing an allergic reaction to my overcoat but then I noticed that his livid expression was aimed squarely in the direction of Brian Jones. Jones was surrounded by three young female fans, all of whom were clearly captivated by his genteel Cheltenham-bred manners and blond-haired pretty-boy insouciance. I could tell these girls were attracted by Jagger too - they kept shooting awed glances his way - but he frightened them with his contemptuous eyes and sullen expression so much that they never dared actually approach him. This set off a tense dynamic in the room: Jones swanning around these girls like the cat who stole the cream and Jagger staring at him with murder in his eyes.
Of course, Brian Jones had started out as the undisputed ringleader of the Rolling Stones and was certainly acting as though this continued to be the case. He was still physically strong and mentally focused: the drugs and alcohol hadn’t yet diminished him. In fact, he was possibly at his all-time happiest at this precise juncture of his life. All his dreams were coming true and the Stones were still fundamentally ‘his’ creation. The Jagger- Richards songwriting partnership had yet to reach commercial
fruition and so he could still kid himself that he held the reins and was directing the whole operation. It would take only two or three months for this to end all too dramatically. From then on, he was a lost boy, a dead fop walking.
In later years, I would talk at length to many of Brian Jones’s closest acquaintances and they would almost always depict him as a ruinously flawed specimen of humanity. Some called him ‘sadistic’, others ‘pathetic’. In his defence though I have to say - he was incredibly nice to me. He was the only member of the Stones that night who bothered to engage me in conversation. He wasn’t condescending in the least; he told me he thought it was ‘fantastic’ that someone so young was coming to their shows. He said ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ repeatedly. He took his self-appointed role as the Stones’ good-will ambassador so seriously it was almost quaint to behold. He was so clean, courteous and daintily expressive it seemed unthinkable that he might be harbouring dark intentions under all that golden hair. He had me smitten anyway. Suddenly I had my future adult agenda mapped out before me. This was exactly the kind of person I was determined to grow up and become.
It was providential indeed then that my parents hadn’t actually heard of the Rolling Stones when they reluctantly agreed to let me attend the concert I’ve just described. If they had, I would never have been allowed near the venue. In the following months, however, they became aware of the group’s existence and began loudly regretting the fact that I’d been exposed to their worrisome influence.
Things reached a head in early ’65 when three group members were brought to court in order to answer charges that they’d urinated all over the forecourt of a garage somewhere out in the
provinces. ‘These people you seem to idolise - they’re nothing but degenerates,’ my mother scolded. My father went even further, invoking a word I’d never heard before. ‘There’s something decadent about that bunch of animals,’ he said one evening as images of the group exiting their trial were broadcast on a TV news report. He was ahead of his time with that evaluation: the Stones’ decadent phase wouldn’t kick off for another four years.
There was one incident where my dad truly freaked out. We were both watching the television one evening in 1965 when
Ready, Steady, Go!
, the London-based weekly pop show, came on. That week, James Brown was the special guest: he and the Famous Flames performed live throughout its entire half-hour-long duration. It was Brown’s first-ever TV exposure in the British Isles and he rose to the occasion with a performance that gave new meaning to the word ‘torrid’. The cameras couldn’t help but linger on the predominantly female audience, who were experiencing the same kind of shared sexual psychosis that I’d witnessed first-hand with the Stones. After about twenty minutes, steam started spouting from out of my father’s ears. He bolted out of his chair, turned the TV off and told me in no uncertain terms that I was henceforth forbidden from watching
Ready, Steady, Go!
ever again. I still watched it though because it was usually broadcast at 6 p.m. on a Friday-a time when he was returning from work and I was alone in the house. Sometimes he’d arrive back just a minute or two after its conclusion and he’d always feel to see if the valves at the back of the TV were still warm. If they were, there was hell to pay.
In 1966, I saw Bob Dylan live backed by what became the Band on his seminal electric tour of Britain that spring. They played a single show at Cardiff’s Capitol Cinema. A friend at public
school bought me the ticket so that I could tell him what transpired by phone the next day. It was the first time I’d ever seen another human being under the influence of drugs. Dylan rambled a lot between songs and his speech was seriously impaired. And the music was so loud that it was impossible to take in on any kind of aesthetic level. It was like standing in a relatively small room whilst a jet-aircraft engine was set into motion. ‘Tumultuous’ doesn’t even begin to cover it. I couldn’t hear properly for a week afterwards.
In 1967, another epiphany: I attended a special ‘psychedelic’ package tour - once again at Sophia Gardens - that featured the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, the mighty Move from the Black Country and prog-rock pioneers the Nice. Best bill I’ve ever witnessed. Four mind-boggling performances. Seeing Syd that night ignited something within me that I’ve been obsessed with all my adult life. The sense of mystery he projected from that stage was something I felt an overwhelming compulsion to solve. His story - however it developed - was mine to tell.
He was also the second person I’d ever witnessed who was clearly in a chemically altered state. He was so out of it he couldn’t sing or even play his guitar coherently. Jimi Hendrix - who followed the Floyd ten minutes later - was the third. But Hendrix was a pro. Being on acid didn’t prevent him from pulling out all the stops in his voluminous trick-bag of guitar wild man theatrics - it only emboldened him to take the whole shtick further until he’d incited mass hysteria in the house. There was a sexual bravado about Hendrix live that night that was so palpable it made my jaw drop. I was even more thunderstruck when I witnessed several young girls surrounding him at the lip of the stage who had become so aroused they were trying to fondle his
genitalia whilst he played. I’d seen these same girls week after week timidly accompanying their parents to Llandaff Cathedral throughout my early teens.
In 1968, glad tidings. Harlech’s contract with ITV expired and my dad moved us back to the South of England, close to London. I left Wales that summer with a spring in my step and nine O levels under my belt. My folks were well chuffed. And I was happy to be closer to the heart of the counter-cultural revolution. London was abuzz with magical concerts, many of them held for free in Hyde Park. I saw Traffic, Fleetwood Mac, the Pretty Things and the Move give great shows in an idyllic setting.
And then in August I got to go to my first extended gathering of the rock tribes - the Reading Jazz and Blues Festival, a three-day slog that I misguidedly chose to attend without bringing along a canvas tent. I spent the first night there sleeping on the side of the road. It was a fitful slumber. My big recollection of the audience was the preponderance of youths in greatcoats with ‘Did J. P. Lenoir Die For Nothing?’ stencilled on the back. It was a slogan that had been featured prominently on the cover of a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album called
Crusade
. Lenoir had been a hard-done-by black blues singer that Mayall was currently championing and so he was suddenly the new de rigueur totem of authenticity for the white middle-class blues-rock poseur.
Blues-rock was the sound of ’68 and this festival became a kind of designated showdown for all the white guitar-slingers infiltrating the genre. Alvin Lee and Ritchie Blackmore made their fingers bleed to keep the crowd baying for more. Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac told dirty jokes and made a raucous fist of relocating Elmore James’s Delta blues to the more sedate English suburbs. Jeff Beck
dazzled everyone with his string-bending showmanship but his singer Rod Stewart was so shy he spent half the group’s performance vocalising from behind a large amplifier.
At the climax of one evening, an unannounced Eric Clapton suddenly appeared - ‘God’ himself looking suitably messianic in a white suit and hair well past his shoulders - and plugged in to add fiery solo guitar accompaniment to a frantic drum battle being waged on the stage between his Cream acolyte Ginger Baker and Baker’s drug buddy, the infamous junkie jazzer Phil Seaman. The hands-down winner though was Richard Thompson. His band Fairport Convention did a version of Richard Fariña’s ‘Reno, Nevada’ that afforded Thompson the ample opportunity to stretch out and play an extended solo on the guitar that - for sheer inventiveness and musicality - put to shame everything else that had been ripped from a fretboard that weekend. He was seventeen years old.
1969 was another fine year to be a teenaged middle-class bohemian wannabe. That was when I read Kerouac’s
On the Road
and started hitch-hiking hither and yon, mostly to Brighton. On weekends I’d use my dad’s train card and travel to London, where I’d haunt One Stop Records in South Molton Street and Musicland in Berwick Street - the only two outlets for American imports in the city. They were also the first places to ever stock copies of the San Francisco-based fortnightly publication
Rolling Stone
in Great Britain.
Summer meant more festival-hopping: I first made it down to the Plumpton Jazz and Blues Festival. It was a glorious weekend marred only by reports that were circulating via the daily press available on the site that the actress Sharon Tate and several companions had just been sadistically executed in Roman Polanski’s
Hollywood homestead. It would still be some months before the culprits - Charles Manson and his repellent Family - were caught and revealed to the world at large. The shock of seeing longhairs capable of cold-blooded murder would send a bullet ricocheting into the heart of hippiedom.
But that was all in the immediate future. For the moment, young people were still merrily uniting in benign displays of mass bohemianism centred around live music without fear of being ripped off and brutalised by their own kind. The Isle of Wight Festival that year was the key UK event of the season. The promoters had even snagged an appearance by Bob Dylan, his first paying performance in three years, and this was a most significant turn of events for we new-bohemians who’d been praying for his return to active music-making and getting only bad country music like
Nashville Skyline
as an occasional response.