True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (19 page)

“I remember it was the New Victoria 'cause that's where the Black and White Minstrels were showing,” said Shirley Arnold. “My friend Paula and I had tickets about six rows from the front for the eight o'clock performance, but we came about eight o'clock in the morning just to hang around the stage door and catch a glimpse of the boys. About two o'clock in the afternoon they started to arrive. I never had the courage to go up and speak to them. You see girls run up and grab Mick—I could never have done that, I'd have felt too embarrassed. The boys were in and out all day. And then Stu arrived. I'd seen Stu before and I knew that he was the roadie and he would be the best one to talk to. So I said, Tm doin' the fan club,' and he gave us tickets to the first show and told us to come backstage after.”

The tour, an attempt to cash in on the current, ill-defined, “beat-music” craze in England, opened with a vocal group called the Flint-stones, followed by Mickie Most, who sang three Chuck Berry songs, after which a girl singer named Julie Grant, and then the Rolling Stones. It was a great occasion for them; mothers, fathers, uncles, and aunts—Bill's and Charlie's, anyway—came to see their boys pump out the rhythm on the giant stage of the New Victoria.

“By the time the boys came on we were so excited,” Shirley Arnold said. “Then they did ‘Route 66.' It was too much. People were screaming. Paula and I ran to the front of the stage and went ‘Aaah . . . '” The Stones were amazed, Shirley said. “If you could have seen their expressions—because nobody had done it before. Men were pulling us back. Finally we got back to our seats.”

Though the Stones were playing regularly, and their names were frequently in the newspapers, they were a long way from being a familiar act. The same was true of Bo Diddley, who closed the first half of the show. He had appeared on the Ed Sullivan television program, but not even in America was he a familiar performer. He worked with a maracas player named Jerome Green and his own sister, who wore sheath dresses and was called the Duchess. They usually travelled in a Cadillac, with fishing poles.

After the intermission, the Rattles, “Germany's answer to the Beatles,” opened, followed by the Everly Brothers, themselves not exactly household names in England, having had only minor hits there. But
they were known to have influenced the Beatles, and they closed the show.

“Then we went backstage,” Shirley Arnold said. “They all came in and I was nervous, but they were so nice. Mick said, ‘You were the girls who came to the front of the stage.' Keith and Brian were talking about it. I told them I was doing the fan club and Mick told me, ‘If you're gonna do it, you've got to do it properly,' blah blah blah. I'd already been a member of Tommy Steele's fan club, so I knew how things would go. So I started doing it from home.

“Everyone was saying they were ugly at the time—I was working in a warehouse and all the people were older than me, and I had this photograph, one of the very first ones, from
Mirabelle.
I was such a screaming fan. I'm not embarrassed by it because I'm not now, I never freak out now. There was me goin' around saying, ‘Look at their faces, don't you think they're fantastic?' I always loved them.”

When the tour was announced to the press “spokesman Brian Jones” had said that “It won't be a case of the pupils competing with the master. . . . We're dropping from our act all the Bo Diddley numbers we sing.” Playing on the same bill with Bo Diddley might have paralyzed the Stones—“He's been one of our biggest influences,” Brian said—but they were too busy, too many things were happening to them as the tour began. At the Southend Odeon Keith left a bag of fried chicken in the dressing room after the first show and returned from where he'd been—“with a well-known groupie,” he said—to find the bag of chicken now only a bag of bones. “Who et me chicken?” Keith asked, as well he might. “Brian et it,” said Bill, telling the truth but telling. “And just at that moment,” Keith said, “the stage manager sticks his head in the door and yells ‘You're on!' So we're picking up guitars and heading for the stage, and as we're walking downstairs Brian passes me and I say, ‘You cunt, you et me chicken!' and bopped him in the eye. We went onstage, and as we're playing Brian's eye starts to swell and change colors. In the next few days it turned every color of the rainbow, red purple blue green yellow. . . .” Before the show the next day, at the Guildford Odeon, Brian, only slightly daunted, joined the other Stones, Bo Diddley, and the Everly Brothers' backing group for a bit of playing backstage. “I'll never forget Bo's face when Brian played some of those Elmore James things,” Stu said. If the Stones were astonished to be playing with Bo Diddley, how must Bo Diddley (born Ellas McDaniel near Magnolia, Mississippi) have felt, seeing a blond English cherub with a bruised and swollen eye, playing guitar just like Elmore James, who had learned from Robert Johnson, who had learned at the crossroads from the Devil himself.

Every day brought new marvels. On Saturday Little Richard joined the tour: Richard Penniman, from Macon, Georgia, the Georgia Peach,
who went from washing dishes at the Greyhound Bus Station in Macon to the throne of fame and fortune—at his peak, he had a throne carried with him and sat in it wherever he went—singing his superpowered songs such as “Tutti Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” and “Slippin' and Slidin'.” In the early 1950s he was, like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, one of the founding fathers of rock and roll, dressed in his mirror suits that threw little rainbows of light all over the house, playing the piano with two hands and a white-slippered foot. Then, in 1957, when he was on a tour of Australia with Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent, the Russians sent into orbit the first man-made earth satellite, Sputnik, and Little Richard said, “I had a dream, and I saw some tumble things in this dream.” He threw away his fancy clothes and jewelry, and when he came back to the United States started preaching and singing gospel songs in churches. Now, in England, he was coming out of retirement, back into show business, and everyone was looking forward to seeing him because they had heard that during his performances he ripped off his clothes and threw them to the audience. Jo Bergman was there that night, and she remembered hearing Little Richard tell the manager of the Watford Gaumont that he wanted the place, the entire theatre, perfumed with lavender so it would be smelling nice when he came onstage. He was still dressed in his church clothes, performed in a little mohair suit, Little Richard who used to appear at the Beaux-Arts balls in Macon dressed in a leather G-string and a giant feather headdress, but he was still Little Richard and the audience screamed for his tie, his shirt, anything.

“This is our first contact with the cats whose music we've been playing,” Keith said. “Watching Little Richard and Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers every night was the way we were drawn into the whole pop thing. Before, there was this division between people who played in clubs and people who played the ballroom circuit. We never had to present ourselves onstage before, we'd just gone out there and played where people danced. But now we were playing for an audience that was sitting. That was when Mick really started coming into his own. We didn't feel we were selling out, because we were learning a lot by going into this side of the scene.”

The day after Little Richard joined, the tour went to Cardiff. The Stones drove there in a new Volkswagen van, one with a seat and windows in the back, provided by Eric Easton to replace Stu's dilapidated, comfortless one, “which I thought was very good of him,” Keith said, “considering he was making a heavy fortune off us.” At an S-bend in Salisbury the van went out of control, thumped off a bridge but stayed upright. “We nearly died,” said Stu, who was driving. “We should have all been dead.”

The next night, a night off from the tour, the Stones went to Kings
way studios in London and recorded their second release. Easton produced, Stu said, “because he didn't trust Andrew,” who was in the south of France, pouting. “Poison Ivy” and “Fortune Teller,” planned as the next single, had been cancelled four days before the scheduled release date, and the Stones cut as replacements an instrumental called “Stoned” with Stu on piano and the Beatles' song “I Wanna Be Your Man,” which is unforgettable only because Brian Jones plays on it an eight-bar break like nothing ever before played on a record by an Englishman. “I quite dig that steel solo,” Keith said, years later. “I think Brian made that record, really . . . with that bottleneck.”

The next day, before going to play a tour date in Cheltenham, the Stones went to Easton's office, where a new way of getting paid was started. They were to be paid every Thursday, with the money coming from the office and no longer from Brian. As October lengthened, the Stones' lives consisted of two shows a day at an Odeon or Gaumont cinema in another British town. They loved Bo Diddley and especially Jerome Green, his maracas player, and spent as much time with them as they could. On Halloween night George Harrison, one of the Beatles, came to see the Stones at the Lewisham Odeon. Bill's diary for these days is filled with such notations as “plagued with fans,” “loads of fans again,” and Keith remembered this time as “the start of a siege that went on for years.”

With the release on the first of November of their second record, which naturally they couldn't find in the stores for days, there were reviews and articles about the Stones in the
New Musical Express, Melody Maker, Pop Weekly, Beat Monthly, Teenbeat,
and national and local newspapers. Giorgio Gomelsky, through whose fingers they had slipped, published an interview with them taped some months before, in which “Brian Jones, the leader,” answers the question, “How did you come to play R&B?” by saying, “It's really a matter for a sociologist, a psychiatrist, or something. . . . If you ask some people why they go for R&B you get pretentious answers. They say that in R&B they find ‘an honesty of expression, a sincerity of feeling,' and so on, for me it's merely the sound. . . . I mean, I like all sorts of sounds, like church-bells for instance, I always stop and listen to church-bells. It doesn't express damn-all to me, really . . . but I like the sound. . . . ”

The tour ended on November 3 at Hammersmith. “There we were again at the dressing room, screaming up at the dressing room window,” Shirley Arnold said. “They were about four rooms up and we're screamin' and they were lookin' out the window and I was sayin' to Keith, ‘I do the fan club! I do the fan club!' so excited—'cause he was talkin' to me out the window. He said, ‘Oh, yeah, I remember.' Finally they came out, we'd seen the show, we'd done our screaming, we chased their van up the road.”

There was no time for the Stones to rest. The night after the last show of the tour, they played, still in their black leather vests, at the Top Rank Ballroom in Preston, where the stage revolved; the night after that, they played the Cavern, the Liverpool basement nightclub where the Beatles used to play. “It was like playing a Turkish bath, all stone, had a terrible sound,” Keith said. “You can't imagine what a myth was built around it.” Then, after playing a ballroom in Leeds the next night, the Rolling Stones had a day off, their first in ten days, another not to come for ten more days.

On their day off, the Stones drove from London to Newcastle, where the following two nights they played the Whisky-à-Go-Go and Whitley Bay clubs, both places run by the same people, who had for the Stones what Keith called “unbelievable devotion.” Bill said, “They'd lay on birds, guard you with dogs, one guy yelled at us, ‘Get a haircut,' and about eight bouncers took him out and creamed him.”

The Stones were playing almost every night, to steadily increasing decibels of screams. On November 13 three thousand people showed up at the Sheffield City Hall and the Stones threw away their black vests. The next night they spent at Kingsway Studios, where with Eric Easton “producing” they recorded their first extended-play record, a stepping-stone to a long-playing album. All the songs were cover versions of American rhythm & blues or rock and roll hits. A newspaper had quoted Mick as saying, “Can you imagine a British-composed R&B number—it just wouldn't make it.” But Andrew, with plans to publish Jagger/Richards songs, was according to Keith “very much into hustling Mick and me to write songs, which we'd never have thought of doing. Brian wrote one once. . . .”

The next day the Stones played two shows at the Nuneaton Co-op, the afternoon show filled with little kids throwing cream buns, something different happening all the time. The others were able to move around and do a bit of dodging, but Charlie, rooted to his drum stool, by the end of the show was “covered in cream cakes,” Keith said. “So pissed off.” To show how far beyond the bounds of reason the Liverpool-Beatles myth had gone, sharing the bill with the Stones at Nuneaton were four girls from Liverpool called the Liverbirds, who did all Beatles songs, regular female Beatles. “Real slags,” Keith said.

In Birmingham they taped a television appearance on
Thank Your Lucky Stars
with, among others, Cliff Richard and his band the Shadows, and the American singer Gene Pitney, who was being publicized by Andrew Oldham. After a day off the Stones played the State Cinema in Kilburn, and next day on the front page of the local newspaper there was a photograph of the mob of girls held back from the stage by beefy brass-buttoned ushers with their arms clasped together, their backs to the keening crush. “When, finally, the spotlight was switched off them,”
the accompanying story said of the Stones, “there was a chase for the dressing room. Who would win, the group or the girls? Four of the group made it but the drummer was pulled to the ground and lost his shirt and half his vest. Girl fans fell on top of him. . . . Eventually the bouncers employed to keep patrons in order managed to free him and rush him to the dressing room, where his own girlfriend looked after him.” His own girlfriend was Shirley Ann Shepherd, an art teacher, his wife-to-be. But Charlie was for the moment inconsolable, walking around holding a few shreds of cloth, muttering, “They tore me shirt.”