The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman
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Название: The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography
Автор: Philip Norman
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007477074
isbn:
With the release of another US single, Tell Me, and strategic plugging of their ‘England’s Newest Hitmakers’ album, the Stones, at long last, seemed to be penetrating the consciousness of teenage America. The tour ended in New York on a definite high note with two concerts at Carnegie Hall, scene of the Beatles’ triumph six months earlier. Both concerts were promoted by Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the influential New York disc jockey whom John Lennon had first introduced to the Stones (largely to get the egregious deejay off the Beatles long-suffering backs). Thanks to Murray the K’s promotion, the Carnegie Hall concerts were each an immediate sell-out. At the first, Stones fans started running wild before a note had been played. The police forbade the Stones to close the show as planned: instead they were forced to appear halfway and escape during the first interval.
Their return to London, just as America was waking up to them, struck converts like Murray the K as perversely ill-advised. The truth was that Oldham could not afford to keep them, or himself, in New York a minute longer. Oldham had already calculated that, for the whole tour, he and the Stones would receive earnings of approximately ten shillings (50p) each. The story for the British press was that the Stones were returning – £1,500 out of pocket in air fares – to honour a booking, made months earlier when they weren’t famous, to play at the annual commemoration ball of Magdalen College, Oxford.
At Heathrow, they were met by a hundred girls and a bevy of newspapermen whose interest was now something more than perfunctory. To one reporter, Keith ingenuously showed the handgun he had bought in America, he said ‘as easily as candy floss’. Mick Jagger was met by his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton and on enquiries about how he felt at having been placed sixth in Record Mirror’s Best Dressed Pop Star list. ‘It’s a joke,’ Jagger replied, speaking in a cockney accent once again.
It’s All Over Now was released in Britain on June 26. Advance orders of 150,000 copies put it instantly into every trade paper’s Top Ten. Within a week it had risen through the Merseybeat barrier, to challenge and then displace that summer’s big surprise hit single, the Animals’ House of the Rising Sun.
The organizers of the Magdalen College ball were therefore not a little astonished when, halfway through the night’s open-air junketings, it was reported that the Stones had turned up as arranged and were bringing in their equipment. Even the Beatles, generally honourable about bookings, had, the previous year, accepted £500 to play at Christ’s College May Ball and had then failed to appear. The Stones’ fee had likewise been settled months earlier when they were still only semi-famous. None the less – for reasons never fully apparent – they insisted they must keep their word. It doubtless weighed with them that a major blues artist, Howlin’ Wolf, was also due to appear at the Magdalen event, and that they ought not to give ground to its other main pop attraction, Freddie and the Dreamers.
The writer John Heilpern was one of Oxford University’s few dedicated Stones fans who purposely crossed the floodlit college lawns, uproarious with patrician cries and steel-band music, to the marquee where the Stones were setting up their equipment in a mood of evident disenchantment. ‘They were all deeply pissed off about having to play,’ Heilpern remembers. ‘They’d been booked to do an hour, so they managed to spend at least the first forty minutes tuning up. Brian Jones already looked zonked out of his mind. There was a sense of vague leadership from Mick Jagger. When he started, everyone did. At first, they didn’t try; they were hissed and booed, which obviously delighted them. Then, all of a sudden, they all snapped into it.’
It was a moment, for Heilpern and many others, signifying the start of what would one day be termed ‘the counterculture’ but what, that night at Oxford, seemed more a question of class turned upside down. The surly, middle-class boys, playing American r & b, were patently a new aristocracy, just as the dinner-jacketed throng, jigging up and down before them, would become part of a willing new proletariat. The noise spread, through the canvas walls, across grass strewn with debs and duckboards, drowning the steel band. More and more young men in tailcoats, clutching girlfriends and champagne bottles, came in to hear the Stones, and dance.
Until the 1960s, the Berkshire industrial town of Reading was one of the quietest, most boring places to be found in the entire British Isles. Its only notable architectural feature was the grim Victorian prison where Oscar Wilde was incarcerated and wrote his famous Ballad of Reading Gaol
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