Old Gods Almost Dead (8 page)

And then there was Tara Browne. By 1963, Tara was a deliciously rich and fey eighteen-year-old heir to the Guinness brewing fortune. He lived in Paris with his mother and in a castle in Ireland. When in London, he was installed in a suite at Claridge's. He got around town in a chauffeured Lincoln equipped with a rare, battery-powered singles changer that played fresh American pop hits that Tara had flown in monthly. It was Bobby Vee's “Rubber Ball” and “Take Good Care of My Baby” and the Beach Boys' “Surfin' USA” as Tara cruised the West End and Chelsea in lavender silk shirts from Paris, starting instant disco parties in train stations when he and his friends set up the little record player and danced around the photo booths. Tara was golden, aristocratic, warm, generous, beautiful, and a little crazed. If anyone typified the instinctive hedonism and expansive personality of Swinging London, it was young Tara Browne. He helped tune in the essential romantic signal of the times, and both the Beatles and the Stones loved him to death.

Pandemonium in Richmond

With Bill Perks
now in the band (having adopted the Stones' daring, combed-forward hairstyle), the Rollin' Stones began to sound good. If only they could score a decent drummer  .  .  .

Brian Jones kept hustling with jesuitical fervor. Right after the start of the new year, 1963, he wrote to the BBC asking for an audition so the Stones' “authentic Chicago rhythm and blues music” could get on the radio. Brian was tireless in looking for gigs to keep the band together. He also collected and paid out the band's money and, like any good rock and roll manager, started padding the group's expenses, stealing whatever he could. “He conned us,” Wyman later said, “and we knew it.” The Stones played Ealing, the Flamingo in Soho, and the Red Lion, where Charlie Watts turned up; once again Brian, Mick, and Keith begged him, without much hope, to join them. They desperately needed him. According to Keith, “The desire to get Charlie was one of the driving forces that nailed this band together. It was a conspiracy on our part. 'We've got to keep going long enough to offer Charlie Watts five pounds a week.' ” Charlie liked their music and told them they needed “a fucking great drummer,” but he was still working with Blues by Six and was reluctant to give up his secure job. He asked Bobbie Korner what he should do, and she told him to give the Stones a go. Charlie was tired of hauling his drum kit around on the tube anyway. Stu later recalled, “We said to Charlie, 'Look, you're in the band. That's it.' And Charlie said, 'Yeah, all right then, but I don't know what my dad's gonna say.' ”

After two more gigs with drummer Tony Chapman, they fired him at the Ricky Tick in Windsor. “Sorry, man,” Brian told him, “but you have to fuck off.” Chapman was angry and turned to Bill, whom he had brought into the band. “Right, Bill, come on—we can start a new band.” But Bill looked away and kept wiping off his bass guitar. “Sorry, Tony, but I'm happy where I am, and I think I'll stay for a while.”

Charlie Watts's first show with the Rollin' Stones was at the Flamingo in Piccadilly on January 14, 1963. The band watched in near disbelief as smiling Charlie, head tilted characteristically to his right, locked into a locomotive groove with Bill that made them really cook. Stu realized the Stones now had the best young drummer in England and that this could be the making of the group.

The next night, they played the Marquee, opening for Cyril Davies's All-Stars, a powerful blues band (with future Stones sideman Nicky Hopkins on piano). The new Stones blew Davies off the stage and into oblivion.

Charlie started hanging out in frigid Edith Grove, where the only heat came from a gas meter on the wall fed with scarce shillings. Compulsive Brian infuriated his mates by using all their hot water to constantly wash his hair (they called him “Mr. Shampoo”). Brian and Keith spent their days wrapped in blankets, trying to practice guitar with gloves on. Charlie furthered his R&B education with the records Brian played for him, hour after hour.

“By the time I joined the Stones, I was a bit used to rock and roll,” Charlie recalled. “I knew most of the rock and roll guys, people like Screaming Lord Sutch [whose act lampooned class pretentions], though I'd never had any desire to
play
it myself. But by the time I joined them, I was quite used to Chuck Berry and that. It was actually sitting up endlessly with Keith and Brian, waiting for jobs to come up, just listening to Little Walter and all that, that it got really ground in.”

From the beginning, Charlie changed the Stones. Before, they had basically been copying the records they liked. But on a song like Chuck Berry's “Talkin' 'Bout You,” Charlie would tap out a counterrhythmic shuffle beat under the Stones. Bill would play fast eighth notes to keep up with him, and the two guitars followed them. The phrase “shuffle and eighths” soon became an in-band description of the new style they were learning to play over Charlie's more sophisticated time.

Brian, meanwhile, ordered Charlie to grow his hair longer and start combing it forward.

                

Early in February
1963,
Brian contacted filmmaker and R&B impresario Giorgio Gomelsky, who entered the scene when he made a film of the Chris Barber band at the first Richmond Jazz Festival in 1961. Brian heard he was starting a jazz club in suburban Richmond, just southwest of London, and started to pester him.

“Giorgio,” Brian would whisper, “you
must
come hear my band, best thing in London, we're playing rhythm and blues, Chicago, you'll dig it.” Russian-born, beatnik-goateed, with instinctive cosmopolitan tastes in music, Gomelsky came to a Stones gig at the Red Lion in early February and was impressed with the new kick that Charlie brought into play. But when Brian asked for Gomelsky's Sunday evening slot at his new club, he was turned down because it had been promised to another band . . . which never showed up.

Giorgio called Stu on Monday morning. “Tell everybody in the band you guys are on next Sunday for a quid apiece.” So on February 24, the Rollin' Stones made their debut at Gomelsky's yet-to-be-named club in the back room of the Station Hotel, across from the Richmond tube stop. Playing for about thirty kids, the Stones rocked through “Talkin' 'bout You,” “Mona,” “Pretty Thing,” and others, finishing with their new, orgasmic Bo Diddley showstopper, “Hey Crawdaddy.”

“Ah gotta line an' yew gotta pole, less go fishin' at da crawdad hole .  .  .”

What Charlie Watts could do with the Bo Diddley beat can't be put into words. Any drummer who mastered the primitive rhythm saw what it could do to a party. Gomelsky saw what it did at the Station Hotel, with kids jumping around and dancing, and he offered the Stones a Sunday residency. Word spread like a disease. Sixty kids showed up the following week, and it doubled after that. You had to arrive early and queue to get in.

Sundays at the Crawdaddy, the name Gomelsky gave his club when he saw the mayhem the Stones' “Crawdaddy” vamp caused, quickly became a tribal rite. At first, the larger crowd of kids, trying to be cool, didn't know how to react. Then a Crawdaddy employee got up during “Mona” and started dancing on one of the tables. The Stones loved this anarchic move and revved up the music even higher. The room just
exploded.
It started an audience-participation dance called the shake that became a sweat-soaked ritual when the Stones launched into their hypnotic, Diddley-pumping finale, throbbing with lust and hoodoo jive.

By early March, the Stones were also playing paid rehearsals on Sunday afternoons at Ken Colyer's club, Studio 51, on Great Newport Street in Soho, from four until six. Then they had to get across London to play in Richmond that evening. So Ian Stewart took a bonus he'd earned from his job at the chemical company and used it as a down payment on a Volkswagen bus so he could haul the amps, the drums, and the guitars over to the next gig.

                

Brian Jones was
telling everyone that with Charlie Watts in the band the Stones were unstoppable. The Beatles were the biggest act in England, and Brian was anxious to get there too. The Stones needed some national exposure, so Brian kept calling and writing the BBC to get the band on the radio.

When the BBC told Brian it would be easier to get the Stones an audition if they had a new demo tape, he hustled an hour at IBC Studios in Portland Place. The sessions were set up and produced by Glyn Johns, who worked as a tape operator at IBC. On March 11, the Stones recorded straight-up readings of Bo Diddley's “Road Runner,” “Crackin' Up,” and “Diddley Daddy,” Jimmy Reed's “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Honey What's Wrong,” and Willie Dixon's “I Want to Be Loved.” These tapes reveal the early Stones as a rhythm band, with Brian's Hohner Echo “Super Vamper” harp as the lead instrument. Stu's barrelhouse piano drives the music, and Brian plays the guitar solos on “Honey” and “Road Runner,” currently a big Stones jam at the Crawdaddy Club.

Copies of the Stones' tape made the rounds of the record companies, all of whom passed. They wanted pop groups in suits, not an artsy R&B band.

But the Stones' reputation as a hot live band began to really build. They got more gigs and drew big crowds of younger fans—art students from the Kingston College of Art and teenagers who'd been excluded from the cultish milieu of R&B fans. One of these was Chrissie Shrimpton, the fifteen-year-old sister of supermodel Jean Shrimpton—“the Shrimp,” as she was known to Swinging London. At a club in Maidenhead, a friend dared lively and precocious Chrissie to go up and kiss the Stones' sexy, big-lipped singer after the gig. Mick kissed her back and promptly asked her out. Soon Chrissie and Mick Jagger were an item.

Jean Shrimpton's boyfriend then was David Bailey, the hottest fashion photographer in London. Though he was already married, Bailey and the Shrimp were the royal couple in the hot clubs of Swinging London. Bailey recalled, “Mick and I became friends, though I think I was lacking in his eyes because I wasn't a musician; but I became his link to another world—and I knew this rude, longhaired git was on his way. By this time I was a man of the world, so when Mick wanted to go to a proper restaurant, I took him to Cassarole in the Kings Road. He slopped his food like a good lower-middle-class boy. I, being working-class, noticed bad manners more than most. To Mick's amazement I told him he had to leave a 15 percent tip. I think that was his first realization of things to come.

“[Actor] Terry Stamp had taken Jean and me to a place in the sky called the Ad Lib, a Soho penthouse converted into a discotheque with loud music, mirrored walls, and a huge window looking down on London. The clients were pop stars, young actors and actresses, artists and photographers. I took Mick, and soon, like a fifties debutante, he came out with a little help from his friends.”

Doing the Crawdaddy

By April 1963,
R&B was killing trad. The jazz club on Eel Pie Island in the Thames near Richmond was down to two nights a week from four. The rebels were on the outskirts and closing fast. Ground zero of the scene had moved to Richmond. Sunday night was a jungle grope lit only by a red spotlight. Half an hour of the Stones doing Bo Diddley's “Pretty Thing” turned the place into a torrid steam bath. Younger musicians—the Who, the Yardbirds, the Pretty Things, the Small Faces—jammed into the Crawdaddy, learning the moves. The raw power of the Stones energized London for years afterward.

First Stones article,
Richmond and Twickenham Times,
April 17, 1963:

. . . Hair worn down Piltdown-style, brushed forward from the crown like the Beatles pop group—“We looked like this before they became famous” [says Brian]—the rhythm section provides a warm, steady backing for the blues of the harmonica and lead guitars.

Save for the swaying forms of the group on the spotlit stage, the room is in darkness. A patch of light from the entrance doors catches the sweating dancers and those who are slumped on the floor.

Outside in the bar, the long hair, suede jackets, gaucho trousers and Chelsea boots rub shoulders with the Station Hotel regulars, resulting in whispered mocking, though not unfriendly remarks about the “funny” clothes.

By mid-April, Giorgio Gomelsky thought he had a handshake deal with the Stones to manage the band, who told everyone he didn't. He started hustling for them. Hearing that the Beatles were taping “From Me to You” for the TV show
Thank Your Lucky Stars
on Sunday, April 14, he went to the studios to pitch a Beatles film to Brian Epstein, and invited the boys to come see the Stones at the Crawdaddy Club that night.

Later at the steamy club, the Stones, playing in jackets and ties, were drenched in sweat as they launched into the last twenty minutes of the night, Bo Diddley's “Mona,” with the dancers packed together like goats, shaking up and down with arms pinned to their sides, since there was no room to move to the dark throb of the beat. Mick was in front, wiggling and twisting, with Brian and Keith seated on barstools on either side. Bill and Charlie were at the back, Stu playing maracas beside them. The scene was loud, raw, and raving.

Suddenly Mick and Brian noticed that a space had opened in front of the stage and four longhaired men in long black leather coats were standing there looking at them. Bill turned to Charlie: “Shit! Them's the Beatles.” Brian was grinning madly, playing his ass off. The Beatles were checking them out! The audience picked up on it and began to shake even harder. Another explosive night at the Crawdaddy.

They finished the set, and John, Paul, George, and Ringo came back to say hello. Paul was effusive. George told them they were the best new group he'd seen. John was a little distant. He wasn't keen on Jagger's sex appeal, thought his gyrations passé—“bullshit movement,” as he put it—something the Beatles had left behind in Hamburg. But they all got on well, so Brian invited the Beatles back to Edith Grove.