Old Gods Almost Dead (19 page)

Including Bob Dylan . . . who knew enough to keep his distance. But it still bothered Dylan when Edie went over and started to rub Brian's shoulders, muss his hair, whisper in his ear. Edie and Brian put their heads together and talked and laughed a long while on the famous Factory sofa while Dylan, glowering in the corner with his people, watched them carefully, stunned for once into complete silence.

Mick met Edie too, on another night at the Scene, the basement rock club on West 46th Street. The meeting was much anticipated by the Warholians, excited that their superstar was going to meet the sexy English singer. Their union seemed predestined, but nothing happened. Mick was in the vestibule when Edie arrived. She went right up to him.

“How do you do? I really like your records.”

Shy smile from Mick, eyes down. “Um, oh . . . Thank you.”

Eye contact . . . and an explosion of people burst into the tiny space. Flashbulbs blinded everyone. Manhattan frenzy, a swirl of hip-huggers, tight blue jeans, Pucci slacks, little-girl mod dresses. Edie fled. They never had a moment.

                

June 1965.
Back in London, Mick and Keith gave up their flat, unable to escape their fans. Keith bought a pad in St. John's Wood, while Mick stayed with David Bailey before moving into a new flat near Marble Arch. Mick bought Chrissie Shrimpton a white Austin Mini car, not knowing she'd been two-timing him with singer P. J. Proby while he was away. Keith bought a car for his mum. The Stones' new EP,
Got Live If You Want It
(a play on Slim Harpo's “Got Love If You Want It”) was released on June 11 with five tracks from the March U.K. tour and attendant chanting and screams. Despite blistering live versions of “Route 66” and “I'm Movin' On,” the record only sold moderately, as the Stones now competed with records by newer mod bands like the Yardbirds and the Who, which appealed to younger kids with their speedy, jamming energy.

“Satisfaction” was held off in England so it wouldn't hurt the EP, but in America it was on its way to no. 1 and instant anthem status, despite being censored on some radio stations. In New York, powerhouse WABC programmed their own two-minute version with the “trying to make some girl” verse edited out. It was the Rolling Stones' decisive moment, a cautious but somehow powerful statement of the individual against mass culture and sexual norms. “I can't be satisfied,” sang Muddy Waters in 1948, and by 1965 national alienation was so corrosive that even the postwar children, the baby boomers, members of the wealthiest, most secure, and best-educated generation in history, were saying no, we can't get any satisfaction either.

The deep roots of “Satisfaction” in Motown made it a great dance record. “It was the song that really
made
the Rolling Stones,” Mick said much later. “ 'Satisfaction' changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren't American, and America was the big thing, and we always wanted to make it there. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing.”

                

“Satisfaction” was huge
as Bob Dylan cut a new song with an electric band featuring Al Kooper (Dylan: “Turn that organ up!”) in New York on June 15. “Like A Rolling Stone” started out, according to Dylan, as ten pages long, “a rhythm thing on paper telling someone something they didn't know, telling them they were lucky.” None of the musicians present had heard the song before, the performance was completely improvised, and it was immediately recognized as arguably Dylan's most important, if not greatest, song.

Later that year, Dylan told an audience in Carnegie Hall that “Like A Rolling Stone”—which always closed his electric shows—was about Brian Jones. (“Ballad of a Thin Man” is also said to relate to “Mr. Jones,” and Dylan also recorded—but didn't release—a version of “I Wanna Be Your Man” titled “I Wanna Be Your Lover” late in 1965.)

“Like A Rolling Stone” was released as a seven-minute single in July 1965, got immediate airplay despite its length, and became an unlikely hit. It shattered the ironclad three-minute single format that dominated American radio, paving the way for longer songs and the looser FM format that took over pop radio later in the decade. For at least the next year, Dylan and the Stones operated in an unspoken, mutually influential alliance. Mick appropriated the flashing imagery of Dylan's lyric style, while Dylan adapted the Stones' electric clamor and immediacy, plus their sharp London look. The result for both Dylan and Stones was some of the best work of their careers.

                

In July,
“Satisfaction” went to no. 1 and London released the new Stones album,
Out of Our Heads,
with a David Bailey band portrait that endearingly spotlit Keith's acne.
Heads
was a compilation album—singles and B sides, soul covers—but it was also one of the pivotal records in America in 1965. For the first time, a pop group represented themselves as artists whose black influences were as crucial as the new songs they were writing for their white audience. In America that year, torn by race riots and civil rights protests, this counted for something. It was the zenith of the Rolling Stones' greatest achievement, showing its huge white audience that black music had been ignored and despised and segregated for too long. Nothing the Rolling Stones ever did was as important as their giving respect to the music that had inspired them.

Out of Our Heads
quickly became a no. 1 album and stayed in the American charts for the next nine months.

The Bounty Hunter

July 1965,
and the Stones' loony young manager was trying not to lose his mind. Coping with mounting pressure and increasing manic-depressive episodes, his psychic resources stretched thin, Andrew Oldham took anything that kept his flash, anarchic flame on full burn. He was driven around London in an aquamarine Chevrolet Impala by his bodyguard, Reg “the Butcher” King, scattering pedestrians as they roared through the sooty streets. Andrew had a mean streak and enjoyed playing with it, insulting and pushing people around when he could get away with it. His twenty-one-year-old tycoon's brain was full of plans for the Stones, new bands like the Small Faces, and even his own record label, but he knew he wasn't equipped to cope with the complex financial dealings required to fulfill his ambitions. So in July 1965, Andrew hired a New York accountant to manage his, and the Stones', business affairs. Allen Klein's first task was to negotiate the Rolling Stones' new recording contract.

Keith: “Andrew got Klein to meet us, to get us out of the original English scene [contract]. The first time we met was in London. The only thing that impressed me about him was that he said he could do it—get us the money we were making. Nobody else had said that to us.”

Mick: “Andrew sold him to us as a gangster figure, someone outside the establishment. We found that rather attractive.”

Indeed, no one was more outside the establishment than Allen Klein, an accountant and talent manager who described himself as a bounty hunter. Klein had been raised in a New Jersey orphanage and struggled through college with an appreciation for the mysteries of cash flow. Breaking into show business, he'd made a successful career of signing on as a performer's business manager, then ransacking his record company's usually crooked books to ferret out unpaid, often substantial royalties. The tools of his trade were lawsuits, writs, and sometimes U.S. marshals if the company was recalcitrant about letting him into its accounts. Klein had started with singer Bobby Darin in 1962, got into big-time soul music with Sam Cooke, then made his move into the hot London scene. By mid-1965, Klein had a piece of the British Invasion as business manager for the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Donovan, and Herman's Hermits. He wanted the Beatles too, the premier act of the whole movement, but had been rebuffed by Brian Epstein. So he settled for the Rolling Stones.

The band was eager. They'd sold roughly 10 million singles and 5 million albums by July '65, and reportedly earned about $5 million on the road. But they were each drawing fifty pounds a week in salary from Impact Sound and were chronically short of cash. Keith in particular was tired of being broke and ripped off. He'd recently punched promoter Robert Stigwood in a London nightclub after Stigwood failed to pay the Stones their percentage from the recent Australian tour.

Klein would negotiate the Stones' new record deal and take over as business manager. Eric Easton would be completely forced out. Andrew would be free to manage the Stones and start his own company, Immediate Records, the first independent label in Britain.

Most people who knew what was going on assumed that Allen Klein would sideline Andrew and take over the Stones within a year. Actually it took two.

                

Mick, Keith,
and Andrew met with Allen Klein in his suite at the London Hilton on July 24, just after the Stones had been fined and scolded by a judge for the pissing incident at the gas station the previous spring (which was front-page news in London for two weeks).

“Which one makes the records?” Klein pointedly asked Oldham when they were all sitting down with a drink.

“That one,” Andrew said, pointing to Keith. At first, Mick and Keith were unsure about the thirty-two-year-old accountant. Klein was short and chubby with greasy hair, a thick New Jersey accent, and wore what Keith described as “diabolical” clothes, usually a turtleneck shirt under a mismatched cardigan. Klein smoked a briar pipe, was rough, brusque, and rude, and there wasn't much eye contact. But he also was a charmer, a character, and made them laugh with his streetwise act. He told them he'd double their royalties, clean up their taxes, make them millionaires within a year. He'd be their Big Daddy, look after them, take care of things. He'd promised Andrew a Rolls-Royce with tinted windows like John Lennon's. He promised the Stones the moon if they went with him.

Two days later, Monday, July 26, there was a band meeting in Andrew's office in Gloucester Place. Brian, Bill, and Charlie were informed that the others had hired Klein without bothering to check with them first. It was a done deal. Wyman suggested that they get a lawyer to negotiate with Klein. “Don't be so fucking mercenary,” Keith shouted at him. “We've got to trust
some
one.”

Keith: “I really pushed them. I said, 'Let's turn things around. Let's fucking
do
something. Let's go down to Decca with this guy and scare the shit out of them.' ”

So the band accompanied Klein to the showdown at Decca House, the company headquarters on the Thames Embankment. Deploying his New Jersey gangster face, flanked by his New York lawyer, who looked like a hungry barracuda, Klein refused to negotiate with anyone but Decca's chairman, Sir Edward Lewis. In a paneled boardroom overlooking the river, Klein spewed a torrent of profanity, insults, and threatening demands at Lewis and Decca's senior executives.

Keith: “He told us each to get a pair of shades and just stand behind him in a row while he talked. 'Whatever you do, don't say a
word.
Don't open your mouth.' So we stood there, and they just crumbled in front of our eyes, these hard-boiled English lawyers. And we came out of there with the best record contract anyone had. That impresses a guy. He did a good job.”

The Stones' new deal with Decca was for $1.25 million for world rights to their recordings, exclusive of North America, to be paid in New York by London Records to Nanker Phelge Music Ltd., the Stones' publishing entity. Klein also negotiated a 9.25 percent royalty, higher than the Beatles were getting. Their new contract guaranteed annual payments of $35,000 ($7,000 per Stone) for the next ten years.

On July 29, the band and Andrew signed the Stones' five-year deal at Decca House. Klein returned to New York, where he got another million from London Records for their American rights. Klein, true to his word, had done what he'd promised.

When these advances were paid sometime during the autumn of 1965, Klein had the checks made out to “Nanker Phelge Music USA,” a different company, owned and controlled by Allen Klein.

This turned out badly for the Stones and later became a disaster. For the next five years, Klein kept their money in his pocket. He made them beg for it. According to Bill Wyman, if one of them wanted to buy a car or a house, Klein loaned them their own money and charged them interest. They were completely dependent on him and his New York office, and often desperate for cash. At the end of the deal, the Stones never got their money, and had to pay Klein to go away. They lost control of their publishing rights and their back catalog as well. For the Stones, negative repercussions from their 1965 deal with Allen Klein still echo, many years down the road.

But . . . at first they were all happy. They thought they were in Fat City. This crude Yank was Taking Care of Business and making them rich. Charlie Watts bought a Tudor mansion in Sussex. Bill Wyman moved into a house in Kent. They got new cars and spent real money on clothes. The Rolling Stones had turned a giant corner, and over the next few years Klein ratcheted them up many levels, turning the Stones' “brand” into a global money machine and worldwide legend. The Stones, and later the Beatles, would pay dearly for his services.

Fraser the Razor

August 1965.
Two shows at the London Palladium. Brian, splendiferous in white, his amps turned so loud they drowned out Mick. With their new management in place, the Stones took a break. Keith and Linda vacationed in the south of France, while Brian and Linda Lawrence flew to Tangier to escape a paternity suit over Brian's other son Julian. They were joined by Mick and Chrissie, who went to Tangier at the urging of their friends Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs.