Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 9

  The internal dynamics were ever-shifting, with just a couple of constants: the nankering – the ceaseless mockery of outsiders – and the strange, elusive behaviour of Mick Jagger, who’d watch, quietly observing and making mental notes, careful not to commit himself. Initially created by Brian as a shared language, nankering had by now become so highly developed that the slightest look or change in intonation cracked people up within seconds. The nankering look was a vacant leer; for fuller effect he’d pull down his eyes and pull up his nostrils. The nankering voice was an officious or wheedling tone. ‘You’d change to a yokeling, retarded kind of voice,’ says Phelge. ‘You’d take on the persona, to parody people’s attitudes, people who say, “I can’t let you do that, it’s more than my job’s worth” – people who can’t deviate from the script.’ It was a way of challenging authority – and of testing outsiders. Nankering bonded the band, but it was dangerous. Brian was the master, in control, with Keith ‘in awe of Brian’, says Phelge, while Jagger often ‘felt left out – you know, three’s a crowd’. But on one occasion, Phelge was looking at an official document with Brian’s full name on it, and the proliferation of middle names – Hopkins, why Hopkins? – caught his eye. When Brian noticed what was going on, he rushed over and snatched the paper out of Phelge’s hand, his face so contorted that Phelge was momentarily shocked. A few hours later, Brian sidled up to him again, studiedly casual: ‘Phelge, do me a favour . . . don’t mention the name. You know how people will take the piss.’ Phelge, as it happened, didn’t mention it again – but he was struck by Brian’s visceral terror of humiliation.

  Outside isolated glimpses of vulnerability, Brian’s command of the Stones seemed unchallenged. Although he soon started to disappear with Linda Lawrence, a tall dark-haired sixteen-year-old from Windsor he’d met at the Ricky Tick Club on 11 January, he and Keith played ‘incessantly’ at Edith Grove, working out interlaced guitar parts, harmonica and guitar parts, even vocal harmonies. When the two engaged in their more crazed antics, Mick would simply look on. The singer had his own little circle of college friends, girls too, and did his homework at the LSE library more and more often as Brian, Keith and Phelge dominated the vibe. ‘He’d always stand back and not leap in on anything first,’ says Phelge. ‘If you were taking the piss, he would take the piss. Occasionally he might take the lead, but he was more of a follower at that stage.’

  Keith, still a bit skinny and spotty, didn’t openly defer to Brian; rather, he listened intently as Brian mapped out manifestos and the pair worked on the music. Occasionally, Mick would sit in on rehearsals in the flat, but not often. ‘To be honest, I didn’t rate his singing in the flat,’ says Phelge. ‘Without a microphone, Mick was just dreadful.’ The band’s future manager, Andrew Oldham, would later allege that Brian schemed to sack Mick, but others remember he was zealous in his loyalty to the band’s singer. One typical example was the time Mick was suffering from laryngitis and couldn’t make a gig at the Station Hotel. ‘He called me up, said, “We’re singer-less,”’ says Paul Jones. ‘Then when I arrived, it turned out he’d also rung Andy Wren and Art Wood. Which was a very cunning move. I realized it was Brian’s way of showing you need three people to fill in for Mick Jagger.’

  As the band emerged from the winter, their confidence grew. Linda Lawrence, who had just left school and was drawn to the beatnik lifestyle, had first seen them in January and was overwhelmed by their power and confidence, especially the radical sound of Brian’s electric slide guitar. Brian walked over to her after the show, and bought her a soda; ‘he was calm . . . deep. I instantly felt close to him.’ Soon she was regularly getting the train into Soho to see the band at the Flamingo. With Charlie on drums, and Bill, and an increasing number of shows lined up, Brian was focused and re-energized. On 10 March, the Stones played Ken Colyer’s club at lunchtime, and Richmond’s Station Hotel (at that time a new venue) in the evening, booked by aspiring film director Giorgio Gomelsky, who would become a key supporter. The music had indeed shifted up a gear. Buoyed by a bigger, younger, hipper crowd, Mick started to look less serious, less self-conscious. He started to laugh. At times, he and Brian would be on maracas together, giggling at each other over long rhythmic freakouts that brought the standout songs, like Bo Diddley’s Pretty Thing, to a frenzied peak. At other times, Brian and Keith’s guitars punched out intricately synchronized riffs in quick succession, without ever losing momentum; while, for the first time, Charlie unlocked the secrets of the laid-back, gloriously greasy Jimmy Reed boogie, leaving tantalizing spaces in the hi-hat rhythm, the crisp snare sound ringing out clearly on the two and the four. Stu continued to stomp away on the piano, filling out the rhythm part, while Bill pumped out basslines that locked in with Charlie’s skipping rhythm. Even in these early days, the band had a lightness of touch their imitators would never quite master. ‘But they never got cocky,’ says Janet Couzens, who had followed them from the first Marquee shows, ‘just more confident.’

  Only a few weeks after finally establishing their definitive line-up, the Rolling Stones walked into their first professional recording studio, IBC, an impressive establishment spread over four floors of an elegant Georgian terrace house opposite the BBC’s gleaming white HQ on Portland Place. In later days, the Who and the Kinks would make their breakthrough recordings here; in early 1963, though, IBC had only just started breaking into British rock’n’roll, thanks to an enthusiastic young engineer named Glyn Johns, a blues fan who happened to be friends with Stu. Johns was really just an upstart kid, he explains, ‘but the new owners very kindly let me go in on a Sunday and record things. It was the only way I could learn. So the word got out there was this young lad giving free studio time.’

  The Stones were the first band to use Johns’ after-hours service. He had seen them play many times, at Ealing and at the Red Lion in Sutton, Surrey. He also owned albums by the acts who inspired them, like Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley, but from the outset he was well aware this was something very different. ‘It sounded really authentic – and bloody great. For one thing, they had youth on their side. Jimmy Reed’s original stuff was far more laid-back, and they had more energy, absolutely.’ These songs, including Bo Diddley’s Road Runner, Muddy’s I Want To Be Loved and Reed’s Baby What’s Wrong and Bright Lights, Big City, were staples of the live set. There were no drawn-out technical discussions; Brian simply sorted out what songs were played, in what order, the tempo, the density of the sound. ‘He had a complete grip on it,’ says Johns. ‘He was very much the leader, quite specific about what they wanted or didn’t want to do.’

  British blues had finally arrived. In their first recording as a band, the Stones captured a sound that would take others years to master. There was a dirty, sexy swing to the music, along with a snotty attitude that would come to define their early work. The interplay between the two electric guitars was as finely honed as the great Chicago teams like Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin, and on these very early recordings Stu’s piano adds a rollicking, exuberant extra strand to the melodies. The vocals are a little bland, over-treated with doubletracking, but the tracks marked out the Stones as a band ready to make their mark on the world. The first time their music hit tape, it was pretty much all there.

  Sadly, even as their music came together, the rifts that would tear the band apart began to open.

  *

  In the early history of the Rolling Stones, the character of Mick Jagger seems slight, thin, only sketched in. He was a dutiful son, an earnest, nicely spoken music enthusiast, a boy who was, almost uniquely in his circle, fleeing no family traumas. But in one respect the Mick Jagger of legend was already being formed – his pursuit of women with a cheeky, seductive persona. Cleo Sylvestre is one of many who sum up his appeal in this way: ‘energy and warmth and naughtiness all combined’.

  Mick was, say their friends, a bit in awe of Brian as the Stones came together, deferring to him, paying close attention as Brian unveiled the secrets of
cross-harp and listening even more intently whenever he passed on tips about how to bring a woman to orgasm. ‘I was sitting nearby one night,’ says Linda Lawrence. ‘Mick really wanted to have that connection with women, and I heard Brian saying things to him, like how to make a girl get excited sexually, how to touch a girl and other things. I really thought Mick liked Brian, a lot.’

  Mick did indeed like Brian, but his respect was always mixed with rivalry. Mick was competitive with other males when it came to women. And in the Rolling Stones, it was natural that he would be competitive with Brian, too.

  The earliest – and, it turned out, deepest – rift had started in the wee small hours of a Friday night in the summer of 1962, when Brian and Pat were still living in Powis Square. The doorbell rang, and Brian answered the door to see Mick standing there. He explained he’d been singing with Alexis Korner, had missed the last train home to Dartford and needed a bed for the night. The couple showed Mick to the couch, where he bedded down. It was only a few hours later that Brian got up – he had an early start, for the half-day opening of the Civil Service Stores on the Strand. He was wary about leaving Pat alone with Mick, she says today, but had little choice.

  After Pat had got up and tended to Mark, she boiled the kettle and made a couple of cups of coffee for her and Mick. There was only one place to sit in their tiny living room – on the sofa. And it was as she sipped her coffee that Mick put his arm round her. ‘I laughed him off, said, “Don’t be silly” or something like that,’ she says. ‘I was so embarrassed, I basically didn’t even know what to do.’

  Half a century on, Pat is adamant that Mick’s pass at her, quickly rejected, is as far as it went. And half a century on it still matters, thanks to Keith and Mick’s claims that the Stones singer did indeed seduce her. ‘Mick came back drunk,’ Keith wrote in Life, ‘found Brian wasn’t there, and screwed his old lady.’

  We all know about playground boasts, like the ones Mick started spreading about Pat a few months after their supposed fling. They’re meant to assert superiority, to help in the pursuit of top-dog status, and also to demean the women in question, make them mere chattels. Mick had sat back and observed Brian, so he knew how to play him, dropping hints to worry the Stones’ leader before laying out the tale in its entirety a month or two later, at a time when Pat was back with her parents in Cheltenham and unable to give her side of the story. It was around April 1963 that Pat discovered Brian believed Mick’s claims, and the consequences for her were devastating. ‘Brian and I had agreed, in London, we’d always be best friends. Then suddenly I never heard from him again. Brian was never vindictive like that. Then I realized Mick had done this, spoiled the years his son could have had with his father. I felt such great sorrow.’

  Most people, even Marianne Faithfull, who suffered at his hands, agree that ‘Mick is not a bad person’. Maybe that competitive sexuality was instinctive. But as one contemplates the emotional carnage of that moment, Mick’s claim that Brian’s problems stemmed from the fact that ‘He was so very jealous – that was his character failing’ is as perfect an example of his coldness as you could ask for.

  Mick enjoyed the naughty thrill of messy affairs. This was messier than most. Perhaps his boasts were aimed at destabilizing Brian’s friendship with his old primary school pal Keith. If so, they succeeded beyond his wildest dreams, because in his attempt to reclaim his top-dog status Brian fixed on Keith’s girlfriend, Sal, who was fifteen and still a virgin.

  Pat heard this messy story from Sal during her final visit to Edith Grove, later in 1963. Sal and Keith had been an item for months, a sweet, romantic, quiet couple who’d hold hands like little kids. But then they had a tiff. In a game of sexual oneupmanship which would become a band trademark, Brian charmed Sal into bed. Pat already disliked Mick, but now, witnessing Keith mute, Mick a ‘sexual predator’, and Brian concealing his relationship with Linda Lawrence but engaging in revenge sex, she was disgusted by the lot of them.

  Sitting in a picturesque pub overlooking the Thames, Pat shows little self-pity as she recounts this sad tale. But there’s a sense of damage running deep. She’s been one of the most vocal champions of the legacy of Brian Jones, leader of the Stones, even though she’s one of a string of people whose lives were irrevocably damaged by contact with the band he founded. Every few months there are new newspaper headlines, or flurries of gossip on the Web, that cement her status as another of Mick’s sexual chattels, just another stupid girl. Although her affection for Brian endures, her revulsion at the ‘sexually predatory atmosphere’ around the Stones remains visceral. It’s something of a shock to realize that a band notorious for messy internal battles is even messier and nastier than you thought.

  4

  I Can’t Be Satisfied

  IT HAD BEEN a long two years since Brian was thrown out of the family home. A couple of people, Ian Stewart among them, reckon that throughout that time he’d been writing to his parents, trying to convince them he was doing something worthwhile with his life. It’s likely there were moments of doubt – although he rarely mentioned his mother, Brian was too much like his dad to escape his influence completely – but flatmate James Phelge remembers no such backwards glances. ‘Brian would never mention going to see his parents. He would have these mood swings, maybe because he had some issue with them. But he would join in, we’d have fun, staying up all night.’ As the two years of hard graft, petty thieving and an almost desperate search for like-minded musicians finally seemed to be paying off, new supporters flocked around. Things were about to happen fast, yet it was only Brian who retained a sense of urgency, desperation almost, as the breaks started to cascade.

  The tracks the band had recorded at IBC were a near obsession for Brian. He had brought back an acetate that must have worn out within weeks, so relentlessly did he cue it up. There were setbacks: IBC’s owners, George Clouston and Eric Robinson, had promised to shop the tapes around their record company contacts but none of them nibbled at the bait. Yet there were enough enthusiasts around the west London scene to keep their momentum going, most notably Giorgio Gomelsky, whose ebullience had helped build a scene around the Station Hotel (soon to be billed as the Crawdaddy Club) from a standing start. He and Brian huddled together, making plans, starting with a film based around the band. Within weeks they had an encounter which held out some tantalizing possibilities.

  Brian had been keeping tabs on the Beatles from at least the previous autumn. As it turned out, the Stones’ open championing of purist blues, now regularly advertised in Melody Maker and elsewhere, had caught the Beatles’ attention, probably via Gomelsky, who’d enthused about the band at a filming of the ITV pop music show Thank Your Lucky Stars. ‘We’d heard about this blues band, and we were into American blues, so we turned up at the Station Hotel,’ says Paul McCartney. ‘And there they were.’ All four Beatles, clad in long leather coats and peaked caps, stood at the back of the hotel, huddling around each other as the Stones finished Bye Bye Johnny so the crowd wouldn’t recognize them as they filed out of the venue. Pat Andrews had dropped in to see Brian, and ended up directing Paul, who was driving the band’s van, back to Edith Grove. There was little self-consciousness – the Beatles had only just finished their first nationwide tour, promoting Please Please Me, their first bona fide hit – and the two sets of musicians chatted comfortably. Paul spent most of the evening talking with Jay Reno, an aspiring Philadelphia songwriter who was hanging out at Edith Grove, while John asked about Brian and Pat’s baby – perhaps the name Julian stuck in his mind when it came to naming his own son, born that August. All four Beatles listened as Brian played them their demos, including a version of Come On recorded at IBC, as well as some of his beloved Jimmy Reed. Brian and Mick were the two Stones the Fab Four took note of. ‘Brian was the multi-instrumentalist, like John, Paul and George were,’ says the Beatles’ friend and road manager Tony Bramwell, ‘which they liked.’

  A few days later, on
18 April, according to legend, Brian Jones had his own eyes opened when he, Keith and Mick tucked guitars under their arms and snuck into the Beatles’ show at the Albert Hall. Brian was transfixed. ‘This is what we like,’ Bill Wyman remembers him saying. ‘This is what we want!’ The yearning for fame and recognition was hardly a new addition to the Brian Jones psyche, but the Beatles were showing him the prospect was real. Not too long after that, an encounter with a cranked-up, skinny, self-mythologizing nineteen-year-old PR offered the chance of making it happen.

  Andrew Loog Oldham had heard about an up-and-coming R&B band called the Rollin’ Stones when he was pitching some PR ideas to Record Mirror’s Peter Jones at De Hems, a musicbiz hangout in Soho. Despite smarting after Jones turned down his two stories, he none the less was intrigued by Jones’s mention of the band and decided to check them out in Richmond. ‘My reaction,’ he says, ‘was basically: this is what the preparation was all about. I am saying hello to the rest of my life.’

  Right from birth, Andrew Oldham was an intriguing, contradictory character. His mother, Celia, was an enigmatic woman; he was never quite sure whether his dad was Andrew Loog, an American airman shot down over the Channel in 1943, or Alec, a Jewish businessman who kept his mum as a long-term mistress and regularly took the young Andrew to dinner at the Ivy.

  From the time he was ‘young and unbearably precocious’, Oldham’s was a curious personal chemistry, both novel and old-fashioned. His savoir faire and camp cool came straight from private boarding school. Wellingborough, an ancient establishment in Northamptonshire, benignly overlooked his love trysts with pretty schoolboys but frowned upon his obsession with rock’n’roll. He performed once as a singer, a cover of Tell Laura I Love Her, its maudlin melodrama a touchstone of his personal taste. But even at fifteen he was drawn to management, once turning up on the doorstep of Shirley Bassey’s husband and manager Kenneth Hume to ask for tips. Oldham’s life would always be defined by inspired leaps of faith and hubristic missteps. The young man realized – astutely – that designer Mary Quant was the embodiment of Swinging London style even before such a thing existed, and a brief summer spent window dressing in her King’s Road shop morphed effortlessly into a career in PR. By the spring of 1962 he’d hung out with Phil Spector and worked PR for Brian Epstein and impresario Don Arden – who sacked him after Oldham sent out a press release promising riots and ripped-up cinema seats during an imminent Sam Cooke/Little Richard tour. Oldham was looking for the hustle of his life – and when he walked into the Station Hotel on 28 April 1963, a day when Giorgio Gomelsky happened to be in Switzerland for his father’s funeral, he found it.