Old Gods Almost Dead (13 page)

Tell Me

It was probably
no accident that the appearance of Marianne Faithfull on the scene inspired Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to begin writing good songs. Young artists need muses to achieve creative goals, and Marianne was born for the role. Her mother was a war refugee with an obscure Austro-Hungarian title—Baroness Erisso—the granddaughter of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose 1870 novel,
Venus in Furs,
inspired the term “masochism” for pain-is-pleasure syndrome. Marianne's mother married a British army major of Welsh extraction, Glyn Faithfull, and Marianne was born in December 1946. She was raised at her professor father's socially progressive school/commune on an old country estate, Brazier's Park, in Oxfordshire. Her parents split and she was enrolled in a convent school to be educated by nuns. Marianne developed into a lovely teenage actress and coffee bar folksinger. She met John Dunbar at a Cambridge University ball, which led to her fateful discovery in Windsor.

Andrew was frothing to get this girl into a recording studio and then on TV. “I saw an angel with big tits and signed her” was his favorite line on Marianne. He began pestering Mick and Keith for a song for her, metaphorically locking them in the kitchen of the Mapesbury Road flat until they emerged a few hours later with “As Time Goes By,” which became “As Tears Go By.”

Keith: “The force of Andrew's logic was already apparent to us: you've either got to capture a songwriter or start doing it yourselves, which was quite a shocking thought. So he put us in a room and said, 'Don't come out until you've got a song.' I don't know if he actually turned the key or not. So Mick and I sat there staring at the tape recorder. We smoked. [Eventually] we really had to pee. So we finally put something together and banged on the door. Andrew got up from watching TV, we gave him the tape and headed for the bathroom.”

Marianne recorded the simple, melancholy song in her cool, vibratoless alto voice. Mick and Keith came to the session but didn't say a word. The arrangement was done by Mike Leander, who had worked on other Stones demos with Andrew. As Andrew foresaw, “As Tears Go By” was a hit record that summer and launched Marianne's long, dangerous, and often-brilliant career.

Mick Jagger was hanging out with David Bailey, enjoying the fast action and the girls at Bailey fashion shoots. Bailey took the scruffy singer to a French
Vogue
job in Paris, where they were thrown out of their hotel when a drunken party with some girls got too crazy. In the spring of 1964, Bailey took Mick to New York with him. He brought Mick by the offices of
Vogue,
which would run his shot of the full-lipped English singer as the Stones were about to make their American debut. Bailey also introduced Mick to the hip Manhattan nexus of fashion and pop art, and Mick made a deep impression on that scene's principal avatar, the pope of pop, Andy Warhol.

Warhol had come to New York from Pittsburgh ten years earlier and made his name as a successful commercial artist. When he arrived, the New York art world was still dominated by the abstract expressionists, a bunch of macho, brawling drunks like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. But by 1960, the New York style was turning away from introspective abstraction and embracing the stark imagery of advertising and commercial art. Pop artists like Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg produced images that anyone could recognize—flags, comic strips, celebrities, Coke bottles—the stuff the abstract expressionists tried so hard to get away from. Andy Warhol's first shows of his silk-screen paintings in New York and Los Angeles in 1962 were a sensation because he played with the raw imagery of national icons and TV ads: Campbell's soup cans, Green Stamps, Elvis, Marilyn Monroe, Jackie Kennedy. “Once you 'got' Pop,” Warhol wrote, “you could never see a sign the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.”

Pop artists like Warhol were a different breed. Their undeclared manifesto held that the post–abstract expressionist sensibility would be homosexual or ambivalent, not hypermasculine. This sensibility would color the Rolling Stones' own vivid streak of pop art singles beginning in 1965 and would echo down through Warhol's pet band, the Velvet Underground, and on through David Bowie in the decade to follow.

Warhol and Jagger met at the apartment of a twenty-two-year-old New York socialite, Jane Holzer. Nicky Haslam,
Vogue
's trendy English art director, brought Warhol and invited Mick and Bailey, who were staying in Haslam's apartment. “At Jane Holzer's dinner I noticed Bailey and Mick,” Warhol wrote. “They each had a distinctive way of dressing: Bailey all in black, and Mick in light-colored, unlined suits with very tight hip trousers and striped T-shirts, just regular Carnaby Street sports clothes, nothing expensive, but it was the way he put things together that was so great—this pair of shoes with that pair of pants that no one else would have thought to wear.”

This was the start of a long, sometimes-fruitful, sometimes-contentious liaison between Mick and the Stones and the febrile Manhattan-chic style of Warhol and his Factory.

                

The Stones' first album,
The Rolling Stones,
came out in England in April and in the United States in May, where Decca's American subsidiary, London Records, retitled it
England's Newest Hitmakers.
The album cover photo by Nicholas Wright was dark, almost black, with the band's faces half in shadow. Long hair, longer than the Beatles', vests, jackets, and ties. There was a brief liner note—“The Rolling Stones are more than just a group, they are a way of life”—from newly renamed “Andrew Loog Oldham,” whose middle name conveniently rhymed with “droog,”
A Clockwork Orange
's term for hoodlum.

The album was a blast of R&B energy, a stark alternative to the Beatles' tuneful love songs. “Not Fade Away” lifted off with Keith's acoustic chop and Brian's wailing harp. “Route 66” and “I Just Want to Make Love to You” were furious jams, the latter a sped-up Delta blues for the Atomic Age featuring Brian on harp. “Honest I Do” was a slow Jimmy Reed blues. The first side finished with two of the “filler” tracks recorded with Spector and Pitney, “Now I've Got a Witness” and “Little by Little.”

“I'm a King Bee” opened the second side, driven by Bill's buzzing bass line. Brian deployed a stinging slide guitar part and some more harmonica on the fade. The momentum picked up with some sped-up Chuck Berry on “Carol” with an overdrive fueled by handclaps.

“Tell Me” was in many ways the showpiece of the album and the first Jagger/Richards song to be released by the Stones. A dark, acoustic folk rock ballad of pleading love with a soft/hard dynamic, moving from intimacy to insistence, “Tell Me” was written in the studio, one of the first seeds of the modern Stones sound. Keith played twelve-string guitar and sang harmonies into the same microphone as the twelve-string. With its off-key, echolike atmosphere, “Tell Me” was especially big in the United States when it was released as a single in May. The song conveyed an aggressive longing and sexual malaise (“I hear the telephone / that hasn't rung”) that appealed to young men bored with soppy emotional responses to unobtainable girls. “Tell Me” was described by Andrew as “a blues traveler resting his head in a commercial space.” It was so unlike the surf pop and post-folk optimism prevalent on American radio in 1964 that it eclipsed even the Stones' powerhouse R&B interpretations.

England's Newest Hitmakers
finished with Stu playing piano boogie and Mick the tambourine on the Motown hit “Can I Get a Witness”; Mick playing soul singer on Gene Allison's obscure “You Can Make It If You Try”; and the Stones' epochal take on Rufus Thomas's “Walking the Dog.” Unlike Thomas's funny novelty tune, the Stones' version played it straight to the groin. Brian whistles and sings harmony (perhaps his only vocal on a Stones record), and the clapping dance rhythm came close to matching the infectious energy of the Stones onstage. “Walking the Dog” launched thousands of garage bands, particularly in America. Aerosmith covered the Stones' unironic version on their own first album, almost ten years later.

The Stones' first album located its audience within days of release. By the end of April, it knocked the seemingly invincible
With the Beatles
down to no. 2 on the English charts, only a week after it first appeared in the shops. In England, the album was no. 1 for twelve weeks, dethroned only by the soundtrack album of the new Beatles film,
A Hard Day's Night.
If '63 was the year of the Beatles, '64 would be the year of the Stones.

                

From April
to June, the Stones stayed on the road, the gigs getting shorter and weirder as rabid young fans rioted and the cops stopped the shows.

Keith: “There was a period of six months in England where we couldn't play in ballrooms anymore because we never got through more than three songs every night. Man! Chaos. Too many kids in the places, and the girls are fainting. We'd walk into some of these places and it was like the battle of the Crimea going on: people gasping, tits hanging out, chicks choking, nurses, ambulances. We couldn't hear ourselves. It became impossible to play as a band onstage.”

                

The English papers
also began to press an offensive against the Stones. Conservative critics were aghast at the Stones' hair and clothes, especially Mick's preference for performing in a loose sweatshirt and corduroy trousers. The
London Evening Standard,
March 21, 1964: “This horrible lot have done terrible things to the music scene, set it back about eight years. Just when we'd got our pop singers looking all neat, tidy and cheerful, along come the Stones looking like beatniks. They've wrecked the image of the pop singer of the Sixties . . . They're a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.”

Brian tried to explain: “We seem to arouse some sort of personal anxiety in people. They think we're getting away with things they never could. It's a sort of frustration . . . A lot of men would like to wear their hair long, but they daren't. I am one of the few people who is doing what he wants.”

Stones shows were now so truncated by riots that the band was forgetting how to play a whole set of songs. The shortest Stones show happened on April 30, 1964, in a ballroom in Birkenhead, near Liverpool. The Stones were onstage, the curtain down, Keith's hand raised over his head, ready to strike. The curtain went up, the band played
three bars
of “Talkin' 'bout You,” and the place erupted. The fans launched a frontal assault at the stage, the curtain was dropped, and before Mick sang a word the show was over, the band hustled backstage, protected by a cordon of pissed-off cops. The Rolling Stones still talk about Birkenhead, even though a lifetime of gigs has gone by.

May 1964. “High Heel Sneakers” and “I'm All Right” aroused passions that made for the band's craziest nights. “Bye Bye Johnny” closed the shows. Some nights Keith was pulled off the stage and had to be rescued. “I Just Want to Make Love to You” was a sensation on
Top of the Pops.
The Stones recorded the demo for “As Tears Go By” on May 4. On May 9 the whole band went to see Chuck Berry, released from prison and touring England with fellow ur-rocker Carl Perkins,
auteur
of “Blue Suede Shoes.” Expecting mellow showbiz backstage bonhomie, the Stones were disappointed and hurt when famously ill-tempered Chuck Berry snubbed them, refusing to meet his worshipful young disciples. Two weeks later Mick and Charlie encountered Berry in a hotel elevator. Chuck turned his back on them and didn't say a word.

On May 14, in Bradford, the Stones were forced to make a dash for their hotel, across the road from the hall they were playing. Mick and Keith won their race, but Bill and Charlie were forced back through the stage door by a howling mob of Bacchae. Brian was caught alone, knocked down, and the girls almost tore his clothes off before he was rescued by the cops and hustled away from the danger.

Four thousand fans, many with forged tickets, rioted outside the hall the Stones were playing in Scotland four days later. Dozens were taken to hospitals, some with serious injuries. This scene would be repeated all over England for at least another year, as the Furies began to gather wherever the Rolling Stones played their hopped-up sex machine songs.

A Sore Pimple in Omaha

The Rolling Stones
followed the Beatles to America as best they could in June 1964. The Beatles had arrived in New York the previous February, three months after the Kennedy assassination, and seemed to miraculously wipe away the national shock and grief over the president's murder with their sharp looks, cheeky repartee, and bag of cheery, innocent love songs. It was almost as if the Liverpool pop quartet had responded to an occult summons to confound America's darkness and personify teenage lust on a scale as yet unimagined. Their presence in New York City inspired molten crowds of girls to ring their hotel in hysterical demonstrations of female desire that threatened to dismember the band if they were caught alone. The Beatles charmed everyone by taking this mania in stride and seeming to enjoy the moment among themselves, like a private joke.

On June 1, 1964, the Rolling Stones flew to New York to begin their chaotic first American tour, hastily organized by Eric Easton and Decca's hapless American branch, London Records. London's best-selling act was Mantovani, king of mood music, and the label was clueless when it came to marketing the hot English acts it now got from Decca. London had already botched the Stones' first U.S. single when it pressed the instrumental “Stoned” as the flip side of “Not Fade Away.” The record was suppressed when the label's president objected to “Stoned,” and “Not Fade Away” was reissued with “I Wanna Be Your Man.”