The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ we are all different persons,’ Mick Jagger answered in the lisping public school accent he had adopted for transatlantic use.

      Worse was to come in Los Angeles two nights later, when the Stones appeared on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace TV show, sharing the bill with circus elephants, acrobats and rhinestone-studded cowboys. As the show was pre-recorded in separate segments, the Stones could not know that Dean Martin’s script was full of ponderous attempts to be funny at their expense. ‘Their hair isn’t long,’ quipped the crooner. ‘It’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows …’ ‘Now don’t go away, everyone,’ he pleaded humorously as the show broke for commercials. ‘You wouldn’t want to leave me with these Rolling Stones, would you?’ Later, introducing a trampolinist, Martin quipped, ‘That’s the father of the Rolling Stones. He’s been trying to kill himself ever since.’

      The West Coast pop fraternity, by contrast, provided good friends and still better object lessons. As protégés of Phil Spector, the Stones were received as VIPs in what was, after New York, the world’s recording capital. Spector’s advice to Oldham at the Not Fade Away session had been to get the Stones with all speed into an American recording studio. In addition to touring, they were booked for a session at RCA’s Hollywood studio and, later in Chicago, at Chess Records, the self-same studios used by Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and virtually every other blues master they had ever idolized.

      A good friend on the West Coast was Sonny Bono, soon to find fame with his wife as Sonny and Cher, but at this time merely an energetic music PR and promotion man. ‘Sonny met us at the airport in these way-out clothes – striped trousers and scarves and bangles,’ Oldham says. ‘The Stones had never seen clothes like that before. When Sonny opened the boot of his car, there were stacks of records in there – about a thousand. That blew our minds as well. In England, you never saw the records like that, actually on their way to the punters.’

      From the West Coast, the Stones embarked on what was not so much a tour as a series of random one-nighters, booked by Eric Easton in London, often with no knowledge of the event, the promoter or the venue. Their first American performance, at San Bernardino on July 5, was in an old-fashioned pop jamboree, sharing the bill with Bobby Goldsboro, Bobby Vee and the Chiffons. Here, the omens seemed promising. They easily outplayed their competition and finished their show fronted by kneeling, crash-helmeted police to fend off hundreds of entreating arms. ‘It was a straight gas that night,’ Keith remembers. ‘The kids knew all the songs and sang along with them. Especially when we got to Route 66 – they roared out ‘San Bernardino’ like a football crowd.’

      That euphoria was to be short-lived. At the Stones’ next date – a ‘teen fair’ in San Antonio, Texas – they were required to play standing on the edge of a water tank full of trained seals. In a 20,000 capacity arena, only a few hundred seats were filled. The London Daily Mirror reported that the Stones had been booed – although an acrobatic act and a performing monkey on the same bill were both called back for encores. The Mirror quoted a local seventeen-year-old’s scornful remark about the ‘New Beatles’: ‘All they’ve got that our school groups haven’t got is hair.’

      In Omaha, Nebraska, the arrival of the New Beatles was taken ludicrously in earnest. The Stones were met at the airport by a squad of twelve motorcycle cops and delivered, with wailing sirens, to a 15,000-seat auditorium where approximately 600 people awaited them. ‘We couldn’t see it at the time, but all that was really doing us some good,’ Keith says. ‘In England, we’d been used to coming onstage, blasting off four numbers and going. America, that first tour, really made us work. We had to fill up the spaces somehow.’

      In New York and Los Angeles, the Stones had seemed wild enough. In the American Midwest in 1964, their effect was literally traumatizing. Incredulous revulsion, on the faces of policemen, town sheriffs, hotel clerks and coffee-shop waitresses, greeted them wherever they went. ‘I’ve never been hated by so many people I’ve never met as in Nebraska in the mid-Sixties,’ Keith says. ‘Everyone looked at you with a look that could kill. You could tell they just wanted to beat the shit out of you.’

      * * *

      The bright spot of their journey was to be their recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago. Oldham had been determined not to waste this precious opportunity on run-of-the-mill r & b material, and had succeeded in finding the Stones a first-class soul song to record at Chess as their next single. The song, It’s All Over Now, had already been a minor hit for its composer Bobby Womack and his group the Valentinos. The publishing rights, Oldham learned, were controlled for Womack by his business manager, a New York accountant named Allen Klein.

      Chicago was all but poisoned for the Stones by the spectacle of themselves on the Hollywood Palace TV show, recorded a week previously. Even after doing the show, they had not realized the extent to which they had been just fodder for Dean Martin’s boozy jokes. Jagger was particularly outraged that they should have been set up as stooges, and at once telephoned Eric Easton in London to scream at Easton for having booked the spot. In fact, as Oldham said, the Stones probably gained fans as a result of Martin’s behaviour.

      Next day, they arrived at Chess Studios, on South Michigan Boulevard. As they walked in, so did a black man with a chubby, kindly face and a small Oriental moustache. ‘It was Muddy Waters,’ says Bill Wyman. ‘He helped us carry our gear inside.’

      Two formative days passed at Chess, under the supervision of Ron Malo, a house engineer responsible for some of the greatest work ever recorded by Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. What Malo had done in the Fifties for Berry and Diddley, he now did for the Rolling Stones, cutting back their native looseness and disorder, focusing tight on the essentials which they themselves still could not see. Under Malo, for the first time, they played, not as a scrabbly rhythm section but in the broken-up style developed by blues masters who had sung and played lead guitar simultaneously. The first few seconds of It’s All Over Now, with Keith Richard’s bass tremolo growling like the bark of a large dog against Brian Jones’s country pizzicato, represents the start of the Stones as, above all, an irresistible compulsion to dance.

      No less formative was the mood of the song itself: a lyric about losing love, sung by Mick Jagger with a triumphant and delighted sneer, released at last from the tedious affair and its tiresome ‘half-assed games’. Perfectly in counterpoint with the fang-sharp sound, that callow voice grimaced its poison-pen phrases, uncertain – as it would ever be – whether it spoke as victor or victim. The mimic was becoming his own man at last.

      Muddy Waters dropped in frequently to talk to the Stones during their session. So did two more of their great Chicago blues idols, Willie Dixon and Buddy Guy. The bluesmen were naturally full of benevolence towards the young Britishers who had given their songs a new lease of life. Later on, even the great Chuck Berry came in to inspect them. Rock ’n’ roll’s poet laureate, though not best known for charity towards young musicians, thawed considerably in the light of the composer’s royalties the Stones were earning him. He praised their version of Reelin’ and Rockin’, stayed to watch them work on an EP track, Down the Road Apiece, and invited them to visit his nearby estate, Berry Park.

      The session concluded, the Stones euphorically called a press conference outside the Chess building on South Michigan Avenue. Several dozen screaming girls turned the occasion into a riot which ended only after a senior Chicago police officer strode up to the Stones and snarled, ‘Get outta here or I’ll lock up the whole goddamned bunch.’

      They had been back on tour only a day or two when Phil Spector, in New York, picked up his office telephone to hear Mick Jagger’s voice, speaking from a hotel room in Hershey, Pennsylvania. ‘Everything here,’ Jagger moaned, ‘is fuckin’ brown!’ The Stones that night were performing in a town named, and largely decorated, in honour of its principal product, the Hershey chocolate bar. ‘The phones are brown,’ Jagger wailed, ‘the СКАЧАТЬ