The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ as being sexually suggestive. ‘We got a letter back from the producer in the end,’ Bill Wyman says. ‘He said they liked us as a group but they couldn’t book us because “the singer sounds too coloured”.’

      Wyman still did not quite know why he stayed on in the Stones, especially now that his friend Tony Chapman had left. The country-wide thaw, and consequent improvement in suburban club dates, only emphasized their desperate need of a regular drummer even as semi-reliable as Chapman had been. Brian’s idea was to bring in Carlo Little, a bravura performer with Cyril Davis. But to Mick, Keith and Ian Stewart, there was only one possible candidate. ‘One night, we all just looked at each other and that did it,’ Stew says. ‘We went up to Charlie Watts and said, “Right, that’s it. You’re in.”’

      The boy with the long, thin, dourly soulful face and the neat mod three-piece suit came from several social worlds away. Charlie Watts was a true Londoner, born at least within a rumour’s distance of Bow Bells, and with that air peculiar to many cockneys of being older than his years. His father worked for British Railways at King’s Cross station as a parcel deliveryman. His mother had formerly been a factory worker. The family lived in Islington, North London, in a house which, however modest, was ruled by Charles Sr’s punctilious tidiness. ‘My dad made me cover all my books with brown paper,’ Charlie says, ‘– even my Buffalo Bill annual.’ He cherished that annual, with its colour portrait of William F. Cody, looming ferociously from a Wild West that was – and remains – Charlie Watts’s abiding passion.

      Charlie, at twenty-one, seemed set on a promising professional career. Since leaving Harrow Art College, he had worked as a lettering and layout man for the Regent Street advertisement agency Charles Hobson and Gray. It was a prestigious and – for that time – well-paid job which Charlie was reluctant to jeopardize, even for his beloved jazz. He had, indeed, recently given up playing with Blues Incorporated for fear that too many late nights would impair the daytime steadiness of his hand.

      For the Stones, it was not simply that Charlie Watts owned a handsome set of drums and played them with an unobtrusive skill that held each ramshackle blues song together like cement. He was also warmly liked by each of them. He seemed to get on best with the group’s shyest and most uncertain member, Keith. Dapper as Charlie himself was, something in Keith’s incorrigible raggedness stirred him to wistful admiration. He would sit for hours at Edith Grove, listening to Keith play guitar duets with Brian, listening to their accumulated wisdom concerning Chuck Berry B-sides and, every so often, putting another shilling in the electric meter.

      The drawback, in Charlie’s eyes, was that he loved jazz above everything, and saw no prospect, via these hard-up student types, of realizing his ambition to visit New York and see Birdland where Charlie Parker used to play. At the time the Stones pounced on him, he was also considering the offer of a regular place in the far more respectable Blues By Six. ‘He came to me, agonizing about it,’ Alexis Korner said. ‘I told him I thought the Rolling Stones were likely to get more work than the others, in the long run.’ So at last, with that resigned shrug – that look of placidly expecting the worst – Charlie Watts was in.

      On Sunday evenings in the sedate Thames-side borough of Richmond, crowds of teenage boys in corduroy jackets and peg-top trousers, accompanied by white-faced, bare-kneed, shivering girls, could be seen emerging from the railway station and streaming up a narrow passageway by the side of a Victorian pub. At the end, under an improvised sign, CRAWDADDY CLUB, a black-bearded young man, somewhat like Captain Kidd in the comic books, stood guard on the door into the pub’s mirror-lined committee room, chaffing his customers in an accent exotically and indeterminately foreign. ‘Any girls who want to come in …’ Giorgio Gomelsky would say, ‘we’re so full, you’ll have to sit on your boyfriends’ shoulders.’

      Giorgio was a twenty-nine-year-old Russian emigré, born in Georgia, exiled to Switzerland, educated in Italy and Germany, and now one of the best-known figures on the London jazz scene. He had worked for Chris Barber in the Fifties, helping to set up the National jazz league and, later, organizing the first of the League’s annual Jazz Festivals at Richmond Athletic Ground. He had discovered blues while working as a courier, escorting American blues singers on from London to Continental dates booked for them by Barber’s organization. ‘Sonny Boy Williamson lived in my house for six months. I travelled all over with him. We were in Liverpool when the Cavern was still only a Trad Jazz club.’

      In the early Sixties, Giorgio combined the role of assistant film editor and West End Jazz Club manager, running the old Mississippi Room, with earnest attendance at classes to study Stanislavsky’s Method acting. Among his fellow students in the class was a young Irishman named Ronan O’Rahilly, whose family was rumoured to own the greater part of County Cork, and who was also trying to crash into the London entertainment scene by managing Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

      Gomelsky’s first blues club was the Piccadilly, set up on a Russian shoestring in the old Cy Laurie folk cellar. The Rolling Stones played there just once, shortly before Harold Pendleton and Cyril Davies squeezed them out of the Marquee. Much as Gomelsky liked them as individuals, he thought their playing ‘abominable’. Counting Mick Jagger’s younger brother, Chris, only twenty or so people turned up that night to see them.

      In early 1963, the Piccadilly Club had closed and Giorgio needed a new venue that could be hired with the single five-pound note he had in his pocket. He knew the landlord of the Station Hotel in Kew Road, Richmond, and knew that the pub’s substantial back room had not been in use since its regular trad jazz sessions had petered out. ‘I said, “Let me try blues here, just for one night …”’ The club was called the Crawdaddy, after a Bo Diddley song, Do the Crawdaddy. Sessions took place on Sunday nights within the Station Hotel’s licensing hours, 7 to 10:30 p.m. Its first resident attraction was the Dave Hunt Group, featuring Ray Davies – who would one day lead the Kinks – and playing in Louis Jordan’s 1940s ‘jump band’ style.

      Brian Jones had long been pestering Giorgio to do something to help the Rolling Stones. ‘He had that little speech impediment – kind of a lisp. It used to be part of his charm. “Come and lithen to us, Giorgio,” he’d plead with me. “Oh, Giorgio, pleathe get us some gigs.”’

      Since their first disastrous tryout at the Piccadilly Club, Giorgio had seen the Stones again – at the Red Lion in Sutton – and had noticed a vast improvement. ‘But what could I do? Dave Hunt’s group already had the Richmond gig.

      ‘It was the weather, really, that got them their chance. Dave Hunt’s band couldn’t make it, because of the snow – and anyway, I didn’t go so much for that jump-band stuff Dave was playing. So, Monday, I rang Ian Stewart – it was so funny: to get the Stones you had to go through to ICI. I said, “Tell everyone in the band you guys are on next Sunday.”’

      That first Sunday night when the Rolling Stones played the Crawdaddy instead of Dave Hunt’s group, attendance was disastrously reduced. ‘I even went through to the main pub to try to round some more customers up,’ Giorgio says. ‘Anyone who’d buy a ticket was allowed to bring in another person for nothing.’

      Giorgio himself stood in the half-empty room, watching a group that, in the few weeks since their Red Lion date, had changed almost beyond recognition. The principal change was Brian Jones with his new, heaped, yellow Beatle cut, coaxing and caressing the blues harp in his cupped hands to produce sounds like silvery minnows darting in and deftly out of Keith’s guitar riffs. Another change was the boy in the dapper three-piece suit, seated behind his drums with all the pleasure of a convict trying out an electric chair, yet playing with an impeccable, light-handed touch that pulled every loose thread together and closed up every crack. Everything had come right behind the lead singer who was so far from right, but compulsively wrong, in the sweater that slipped off one shoulder like a teagown, his smear of a mouth parroting a black man’s words as his opaque eyes searched for his reflection in the mirrors all round him. That СКАЧАТЬ