Life (16 page)

Back then I used to rag Stu and Charlie wicked about jazz. We were supposed to be getting the blues down, and sometimes I’d catch Stu and Charlie listening to jazz on the sly. “Stop that shit!” I was just trying to break their habits, trying to put a band together, for Christ’s sake. “You’ve got to listen to blues. You’ve got to listen to fucking Muddy.” I wouldn’t even let them listen to Armstrong, and I love Armstrong.

Bill always felt looked down upon, mainly because his real last name was Perks. And he was stuck in this dead-end job in south London. And he was married. Brian was very class conscious, you see. “Bill Perks,” to him, was some lowlife. “I wish we could find a new bass player, this one’s a right fucking Ernie with his greasy hair,” Phelge remembers Brian saying. Bill was still a bit of a teddy boy at the time, with the quiff. But that was all so superficial. Meanwhile Brian was the king rat of the whole gang.

By February we were paying off hire purchase. I bought two guitars in the space of a month:

Jan 25

Day off

Buy new guitar, Harmony or Hawk?

Harmony has good price but do you get guarantee. “Hawk” has and also has case supplied.

Both models £84.0.0

Got 2 thumbpicks—bought Harmony with two P.U.’s sunburst finish in 2-tone case £74.

Wednesday 13 (February)

Rehearsal

Got new gitty from Ivor’s! Lovely instrument!! What a sound!!! New nos “Who Do You Love?” & “Route 66” Great! Revised “Crawdaddy” fabulous (all Brian’s ideas).
[At least I give credit.]

And the venues were beginning to jump.

Saturday 9

18:0:0

Amp payments due

Ealing

Collyers’ All-niter?
[crossed out]

Must have been near record steaming hot and packed full

Band raved. Get real little girl fans there

£2

Stopped at flat

Paid Bill £6 for Vox

Monday 11

Day off. Dead bored
.

The last two entries are the key to what was happening, all of a sudden. We were going to record and we were about to take up the Richmond gig.

Thursday 14

Manor House

Quite good. Small crowd. Blues by 6 frightened them all away

New gitty takes some getting use to. New nos. went well.

Stu says Glyn Johns will record us Mon or Thurs next week with ideas of selling them to Decca.

£1

Friday 15

Red Lion

Can’t get any sound out of this place.

Punch up during session.

Offered Richmond Station Hotel every sun. from coming sun. Windfall.

On the inside cover of the diary is written the phrase “Wongin’ the pog.” And next to that, under the personal-notes section, “In Case of Accident Please Inform,” I’ve written, “My Mum.” No details.

“Wongin’ the pog” was when we’d look at all these people dancing around, hanging from rafters, going crazy. “What are they doing?” “They’re wongin’ the pog, ain’t they?” “At least we got them wongin’ the pog.” It meant you got paid. The gigs were getting tight and hot. We had this groundswell going on in London. When you’ve got three queues going round a whole damn block waiting to get into a show, you say we’ve got something going here. This is no longer just us begging. All we need to do now is nurture this thing.

The spaces were small, which suited us. It suited Mick best of all. Mick’s artistry was on display in these small venues, where there was barely space to swing a cat—perhaps more so than it ever was later. I think Mick’s movements come a lot from the fact that we used to play these very, very small stages. With our equipment on stage, we’d sometimes have no more room than a table as a viable space to work. The band was two feet behind Mick, he was right in the middle of the band, there were no delay effects or separation, and because Mick was playing a lot of harmonica, he was part of the band. I can’t think of any other singer at the time in England that played harp and was the lead singer. Because the harp was, still can be, a very important part of the sound, especially when you’re doing blues.

Give Mick Jagger a stage the size of a table and he could work it better than anybody, except maybe James Brown. Twists and turns, and he’s got the maracas going—c’mon, baby. We used to sit on stools and play, and he would work around us because there was no room to move. You swung a guitar, you hit somebody else in the face. He used to play four maracas while he sang. It’s a long time since I’ve reminded him about the maracas. He was brilliant. Even at that age I was astounded by how he used that small space to do so much. It was like watching a Spanish dancer.

Richmond is where we learned the gig. That’s where we realized that we really did have a good band, and we could really release people for a few hours and get that reciprocation between the stage and the audience. Because it’s not an act. Whatever Mick Jagger thinks.

M
y favorite place,
looking back, was the Station Hotel, Richmond, just because everything really kicked off from there. The Ricky Tick Club in Windsor was a damn good room to play. Eel Pie was fantastic, because basically it was the same old crowd—they just moved around wherever we were playing. Giorgio Gomelsky, there’s another name that resonates from this period. Giorgio, who actually organized us and got us gigs in the Marquee and the Station Hotel, a very important person in the whole setup. A Russian émigré, a great bear of a man, with incredible drive and enthusiasm. Brian led Giorgio to believe that he was the de facto manager of something that we didn’t think needed managing. He did amazing things, put us up, got us gigs, but there was nothing more to promise at the time. It was just “We need gigs, we need gigs. Spread the word.” And Giorgio was very instrumental in that, very early on. He got booted out by Brian once Brian saw bigger things coming. Unbelievable how much Brian was the manipulator, thinking about these things. One had the feeling that Brian had made promises to people that nobody else had. So when the promises weren’t delivered, we were all assholes. Brian was a bit free with promise land. Giorgio later became manager of the Yardbirds, including Eric Clapton, who were already picking up our spots. And then Eric left the Yardbirds and went away on a sabbatical for six months and came back as God, which he’s still trying to live down.

Mick has changed tremendously. Only thinking about this time do I remember with regrets how completely tight Mick and I were in the formation, the early years of the Stones. First off, we never had to question the aim. We were unerring in where we wanted to go, what it should sound like, so we didn’t have to discuss it, just figure a way to do it. We didn’t have to talk about the target, we knew what it was. It was basically just to be able to make records. The targets get bigger as things happen. Our first aim as the Rolling Stones was to be the best rhythm and blues band in London, with regular gigs every week. But the main aim was somehow to get to make records. To actually get into the portal, the holy of holies, the recording studio. How can you learn if you can’t get in front of a microphone and a tape recorder in a studio? We saw this thing building up, and what’s the next step? Make records, by hook or by crook. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, they were who they were, there was no compromise. They just wanted to make records, just like me, that’s one of my connections with them all. I’ll do anything to make a record. It was really narcissistic in a way. We just wanted to hear what we sounded like. We wanted the playback. The payback didn’t come into it, but the playback we really wanted. In a way, in those days, being able to get into the studio and get an acetate back sort of legitimized you. “You’re now a commissioned officer” instead of being one of the ranks. Playing live was the most important thing in the world, but making records stamped it. Signed, sealed and delivered.

Stu was the only guy that knew somebody that could actually open a door to a studio late at night and get an hour there. In those days it was like going into Buckingham Palace or getting an entrée into the admiralty. It was nearly impossible to get into a recording studio. It’s bizarre that now anybody can make a record anywhere and put it on the Internet. Then it was like leaping over the moon. A mere dream. The first studio I actually went in was IBC in Portland Place, right across the road from the BBC, but of course there was no connection. With Glyn Johns, who happened to be an engineer there and just wangled us some time. But that was just a one-gig thing.

Then came the day that Andrew Loog Oldham came to see us play at Richmond, and things began to move at devastating speed. Within something like two weeks we had a recording contract. Andrew had worked with Brian Epstein and was instrumental in creating the Beatles’ image. Epstein fired Andrew because they got into some bitch argument. Andrew took a large step to the left and branched out on his own: “Right, I’ll show you.” We were the instrument of his revenge on Epstein. We were the dynamite, Andy Oldham the detonator. The irony is that Oldham, at the start, the great architect of the Stones’ public persona, thought it was a disadvantage for us to be considered long-haired and dirty and rude. He was a very pristine boy himself at the time. The whole idea of the Beatles and the uniforms, keeping everything uniform, still made sense to Andrew. To us it didn’t. He put us in uniforms. We had those damn houndstooth, dogtooth check jackets on
Thank Your Lucky Stars,
but we just dumped them immediately and kept the leather waistcoats he’d got us from Charing Cross Road. “Where’s your jacket?” “I dunno. My girlfriend’s wearing it.” And he did cotton on real quick to the fact that he’d have to go with it. What are you going to do? The Beatles are all over the place like a fucking bag of fleas, right? And you’ve got another good band. The thing is not to try and regurgitate the Beatles. So we’re going to have to be the anti-Beatles. We’re not going to be the Fab Four, all wearing the same shit. And then Andrew started to play that to the hilt. Everybody’s too cute and they all wear uniforms and it’s all showbiz. And it was actually Andrew that disintegrated the way you can present yourself—do everything wrong, at least from a showbiz, Fleet Street point of view.

Course we had no idea. “We’re too good for this shit, man. We’re blues players, you know, at all of eighteen years old. We’ve done Mississippi, been through Chicago.” You kid yourself. But it was really flying into the face of it. And of course the timing was dead right. You’ve got the Beatles, mums love them and dads love them, but would you let your daughter marry
this?
And that was pretty much a stroke of genius. I don’t think Andrew or any of us were geniuses, it was just a stroke that hit the mark, and once we had that down, it was OK, now we can get into this game of show business and still be ourselves. I don’t have to have the same haircut as him or him. I always looked at Andrew as the absolute PR man par excellence. I saw him as a sharp blade. I liked him a lot, neurotic and sexually disoriented as he was. He’d been sent to a public school called Wellingborough, and at school in general, like me, he hadn’t had a very good time. Andrew, especially in those days, was always a bit jittery, like crystal, but he was very, very sure of himself and what we should do, all the while with this certain fragility inside him. But he certainly put up a lot of front. I liked his mind; I liked the way he thought. And having done the art school bit and studied advertising, I saw the point immediately in what he was trying to do.

We signed a deal with Decca. And days after that—getting paid to do this!—we were in a studio, Olympic Studios. But most of our early stuff at this time was recorded in Regent Sounds Studio. It was just a little room full of egg boxes and it had a Grundig tape recorder, and to make it look like a studio, the recorder was hung on the wall instead of put on the table. If it was on the table, it wasn’t pro. But actually, what they did there was advertising jingles—“Murray mints, Murray mints, the too-good-to-hurry mints.” It was just a little jingle studio, very basic, very simple, and it made it easy for me to learn the bare bones of recording. One of the reasons we picked it was because it was mono, and what you hear is what you get. It was only a two-track tape recorder. I learned how to overdub on it, by what they call ping-ponging, where you put the track that you just recorded onto one track and then overdub. But of course you’re losing generations by doing that, sound-wise. You’re letting the thing go through the mill one more time, and we found out that wasn’t such a bad idea. So the first album and a lot of the second, plus “Not Fade Away,” which was our first big chart climber at number three in February 1964, and “Tell Me,” were made surrounded by egg boxes. Those first albums were recorded at several studios with incredible people walking in, like Phil Spector, who played bass on “Play with Fire,” Jack Nitzsche playing harpsichord. Spector and Bo Diddley came around and Gene Pitney, who recorded one of the first songs I wrote with Mick, “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday.”

But the Decca deal meant that Stu had to be dropped from the band. Six is too many and the obvious odd one out is the piano player. That’s the brutality of the business. It was Brian’s task, since he called himself the leader of the band, to break it to Stu. It was a very hard thing. He wasn’t surprised, and I think he’d already made his own decision about what he would do about it if it turned up. He understood it totally. We expected Stu to go, “Fuck you. Thanks a lot.” That was where the largeness of Stu’s heart really displayed itself. From then on, OK, I’ll drive you about. He was always on the records; he was only interested in the music.