50 Licks Page 3

  I asked him if, at that point, the group had done any recordings at all.

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: They had tried. They had done a few things on home tape recorders but not really much had come of it. This was really the first time at this stage. Their material was all the blues and R&B things they were weaned on. Because this thing was put together—I mean I was twenty-four hours ahead of the rest of the world!—it was as close a margin as that. It was sped up by the fact that we went to the record company that turned the Beatles down, so we knew that they probably would not make the same mistake twice, regardless of what they were looking at.

  MICK JAGGER: Andrew was a publicist for Brian Epstein, although we didn’t know that. He probably said, “I am the Beatles’ publicist”—how about that as a line? Everything to do with the Beatles was sort of gold and glittery, and Andrew seemed to know what he was doing.

  KEITH RICHARDS: Andrew pulled together the innate talents within the band. He turned us into a gang, and he broadened our horizons. Our biggest aim at the time was to be the best blues band in London, and that would have done it for us. But Andrew said, “What are you talking about?” He had the experience—even though he was just as young as we were—but he was very precocious; a sharp fucker and a right little gangster. Also he really wanted to be one of the band. At one time he called himself “the sixth Rolling Stone,” so as well as the management side, he thought of himself as part of the gang.

  I asked Andrew what that first time in the studio with the Stones was like.

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: I just said, “Play me some of your things—the five that you think are the most commercial.” Well, out of the five or six songs that they played me, “Come On” by Chuck Berry was the best-known song, the most “whistleable” ditty, and they actually had a slant and an arrangement for it, whereas the other things they played were more out of total respect to the way they had originally heard them. In other words, there was nothing else original. So, we went to record it on a four-track at the original Olympic Studios in London. We had about forty quid and two hours and at the end of it—about five to six—they were in a real hurry to get through it, as you can hear on the record. And five minutes to six I said, “Right, let’s go.” And the engineer said to me, “What about mixing it?” And I said, “What’s that?” and he politely explained it to me. And, thinking that if I weren’t there I wouldn’t have to pay for it, I said, “Oh, you do that. I’ll come back in the morning.”

  Andrew Loog Oldham in the studio

  Both Andrew and the boys were quick studies.

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: A year and a half later we were experts. But in that year and a half we decided we’d better go to straight, cruddy mono and just deal with “what you hear is what you get.” And that’s how we worked right through “Not Fade Away.” “Come On” had gone to number eighteen in England. It took a while before we got to the reality of what plastic was here (in the States). Plastic in England was plastic plus an “image”!

  Ah, there’s the word that might best capture Andrew’s biggest contribution to the group: “image.”

  Ever the orchestrator, Oldham conducts a promo photo shoot for the Stones

  CHARLIE WATTS: He always was sharp. He had great taste and style, which reflected on us, he reflected what London was like at the time. We were in the world of the Beatles because of our age, but we were a totally different band. We were a live band for a start—much better than they were live—and Andrew, compared to Brian Epstein, was younger and he looked much hipper. That doesn’t mean to say he was cleverer than Brian, because no one has matched the popularity that the Beatles still maintain. Brian set all that in motion, but then in another way Andrew set up the Rolling Stones for forty years!

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I met Andrew Oldham, who was always with the Stones. He wasn’t only their manager, but he was also their influence. He was the sort of person they copied a lot to do with his kind of outlaw way of looking at the world.

  Lindsay-Hogg, a director who has worked with the Stones extensively over the years, shares this memory:

  MICHAEL LINDSAY-HOGG: I remember when Andrew was still their manager and after a show we’re in the bar having a drink. And I noticed, over in one corner was Mick and Keith and Andrew, and Andrew was talking about something. And Mick and Keith were leaning into him like baby birds getting seed from their mother. They were very influenced by Andrew and his take on the world. I think that fed into the way they related to the audience, which was slightly antagonistic and at the same time seductive. Andrew was a very important initial role model for them. He knew that. And they were grateful for it. Brian Epstein of the Beatles was much more of a protective person . . . Andrew was saying to them, “Don’t be careful.”

  Perhaps one of Andrew’s most brilliant ideas was to position the Stones as a kind of “anti-Beatles.”

  KEITH RICHARDS: Andrew also realized how easily you could manipulate Fleet Street. He would call a few of the papers and say, “Watch the Stones get thrown out of the Savoy,” and then he’d say to us, “We’ll just go dressed as usual and try and get lunch.” And of course with no ties you’d get chucked out of the Savoy and there’s the press with their story: THE STONES THROWN OUT OF THE SAVOY. Just silly things like that.

  Or how about “silly things” such as manufacturing the headline, WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? Or encouraging fans to mug blind beggars for money to buy Stones records? The Beatles just wanted to hold your hand! Parents could only imagine with horror what mayhem the Stones might want to attempt.

  But the strategy worked. It gave the Stones an identity that separated them from all of the other myriad British Invasion bands, especially the Beatles.

  Another undeniable Oldham stamp on the Stones was his insistence that they move away from covering songs penned by other artists, and that Mick and Keith begin to write their own. He also oversaw the very mercurial shifts in the ever changing leadership roles within the group.

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Yeah, well it went from variations of Brian; to Mick, Keith, and Brian; to Mick/Keith; back to Mick, Keith, and Brian again. Brian was definitely the leader up to that time.

  Shepherded by Oldham, the Stones were ready to take their next step.

  THE RISING STONES

  MICK JAGGER: I was studying economics in college and I was just singing. After two years I was just too interested in playing, and when I finished my second-year exams I said I wasn’t interested anymore in doing any more work at college on economics. We’d been playing six or nine months and we had a record out, “Come On.” When it got in the charts I just quit. Well, they were very sweet to me. I was given the best of both worlds because when I went to see the registrar of the college he said, “Well, if it doesn’t work you can always come back next year.” So I didn’t see how I had anything to lose.

  After “Come On” managed to chart, the Stones played outside of London for the first time. The crowds knew who they were.

  MICK JAGGER: In Liverpool, we saw girls with “Rolling Stones” on their handbags, and we realized they knew about us, which was a surprise because we were a London band. Something was happening that we weren’t aware of. We had never played there, and Liverpool had the most bands in the country, so we were very surprised.

  BILL WYMAN: The first time we ever had an article in an English music paper was March or April of ’63, in the New Record Mirror. We were in town shopping one day and we bought one and there was our picture with the headline, NEW RHYTHM AND BLUES BAND IN RICHMOND DRIVING PEOPLE CRAZY, or whatever it was. So when I went home on the train that night, I neatly folded the magazine so that the picture was uppermost, and I sat there with it on my lap waiting to be recognized. That’s how naïve I was! And it didn’t happen (laughs). And then when it finally did start happening, I wished to hell it hadn’t because it’s so boring, with people bugging you all the time for this and that.

  I guess some people in that situation would have run up and down th
e platform saying, “Oi!! This is me. Everybody, this is me!” And some people would have just folded it up, put it in their pocket, and looked out the window at the view, and not even thought about it. It’s just in the way it gets to you.

  As the band got bigger, so did the venues, and the Stones choice of material changed as well.

  MICK JAGGER: When we started, we were just playing rhythm and blues because that’s what we liked. We were playing it well, and nobody else seemed to be doing it. At the time, we were doing up to three-hour sets. Now when we went into the ballrooms we listened to what other bands were playing, and picked up a lot of new numbers. Things that might not have been current like “I Can Tell,” “Poison Ivy,” and “Fortune Teller.” We knew ’em anyway but had never gotten around to actually playing them. I can remember buying Barrett Strong’s “Money,” which was a really big R&B hit in America, but didn’t happen when it came out in England. When we saw that those things were, like, popular, we said, well—let’s do that. So we did and people liked it.

  CHAPTER 4

  I WANNA BE YOUR MAN

  PERCEPTION IS REALITY. And good marketing controls perception. In the words of one pundit, “The Beatles were thugs who were put across as nice blokes, and the Rolling Stones were gentlemen who were made into thugs by Andrew [Loog Oldham].” There is some truth in this black-and-white depiction of the rivalry, but, just as in life, there is also plenty of gray.

  It is, of course, the greatest argument starter in the annals of rock ’n’ roll history: the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—who’s better? (If your answer is the Who’s better, well, that’s another book entirely.)

  A writer named John McMillian came to a very salient conclusion in his “Beatles, Or Stones?” essay in the June/July 2007 issue of the Believer magazine. He states that by 1968, “the mostly good-natured rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones had been ongoing for several years. Although the Beatles were more commercially successful, the two bands competed for radio airplay and record sales throughout the 1960s, and on both sides of the Atlantic teens defined themselves by whether they preferred the Beatles or the Stones. ‘If you truly loved pop music in the 1960s . . . there was no ducking the choice and no cop-out third option,’ one writer remarked. ‘You could dance with them both,’ but there could never be any doubt about which one you’d take home.”

  Let’s offer a bit more background. On February 9, 1964, way before Facebook, more than seventy-three million of my dearest, closest friends and I tuned in to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was—no exaggeration—a truly life-altering experience. If you lived it, I don’t have to explain why. If you didn’t, there are many credible print, audio, and visual accounts and resources to consult. Let it suffice to say that the Sullivan show rapidly became the Ellis Island of the British Invasion.

  Sullivan’s contract with Brian Epstein called for three appearances: the live debut on February 9; another live performance from Miami Beach on February 16; and a prerecorded third visit on February 23. As 1964 was a leap year, the next open slot for a musical guest was Sunday, March 1, and the group chosen to fill it was the Dave Clark Five—whose bombastic first big American hit “Glad All Over” was zooming up the charts. Sullivan immediately invited them back for a second appearance on Sunday, March 8. Gloria Stavers, editor of the then-influential teen magazine 16 chronicled the group’s accomplishment:

  GLORIA STAVERS: On the first day of March in 1964, five polite, fascinated, enthusiastic lads from Tottenham, England, deplaned at Kennedy Airport in New York City. Dave Clark, Mike Smith, Rick Huxley, Lenny Davidson, and Denny Payton had come to America to sing their first number one hit record, “Glad All Over,” on The Ed Sullivan Show. Since that time Dave and the boys have been invited back again and again to perform on that top-rated variety show. In fact, they are the only English singing group to be invited to appear on Sullivan’s show over ten times! [A record that was never toppled.]

  RICK HUXLEY: Ed Sullivan was a major player in our success story in the USA. His word was law on his program and if he didn’t like you then your future career could be in jeopardy. Fortunately he liked us, and after our first show he announced we would appear the next week too. Even though we had prior commitments, such was his standing and power that we were back the next week. I wonder how it would have affected us if we had not returned the following week?

  The Stones’ first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show—note Mick’s infamous sweatshirt

  No question about it, the floodgate was now opened for a non-stop parade of Englishmen (and women) across the stage of CBS Studio 53 (later renamed The Ed Sullivan Theater). Firmly established as the launchpad for any and all rock ’n’ roll groups with a British accent, the Sullivan show hosted every major (and minor) player from across the pond until it was canceled in 1971 after a twenty-three year run. It was inevitable and just a matter of time before the Rolling Stones would take the plunge. It happened on October 25, 1964, but with markedly different results than the Beatles debut over nine months earlier.

  The Stones had already appeared on network television in the US in June. It was a somewhat disastrous visit to ABC’s The Hollywood Palace, guest-hosted that week by a mocking, eyeball-rolling Dean Martin (see chapter 5 for more on this). So would the Sullivan show provide a friendlier opportunity for the Stones to be showcased on national television in America? Not so much.

  What happened is very simple to understand and explain. The Stones were the Stones. They came off sullen, sexual, and threatening. The CBS switchboard was jammed with damning calls from angry parents about the group’s performance.

  ANTHONY DECURTIS: The Rolling Stones looked tough. They looked scary. And that’s what made them enticing . . . I remember the first time they were on The Ed Sullivan Show, when Mick Jagger wore a sweatshirt. The response to that was incredible. At my Catholic school the next day, every single one of my teachers gave a lecture about the Rolling Stones and how repulsive they were. They’d pat you on the head for liking the Beatles. They got a kick out of them. They didn’t get a kick out of the Rolling Stones. Liking the Rolling Stones radicalized you. It made you make a stand. Whatever my teachers had to say, that only stiffened my spine. That was the element of the Rolling Stones that was thrilling.

  Here is the content of one of the actual telegrams sent to CBS on October 25, 1964: “Stop presenting crude ignorant demoralizing disgusting groups like the Rolling Stones and causing frustration to clean American youth struggling to achieve a spot on a decent show. You disturb parents and morally sicken our youth while you greedily pursue TV ratings with odoriferous arrogance towards the moral conditions you help create in this country.”

  Unlike his blanket endorsement and praise of the Beatles, Sullivan reverted to his “Elvis era” moral-guardian guise, and issued the following statement to the press:

  ED SULLIVAN: I promise you they will never be back on our show. If things can’t be handled, we’ll stop the whole business. We won’t book any more rock ’n’ roll groups and will ban teenagers from the theater. Frankly, I didn’t see the group until the day before the broadcast . . . It took me seventeen years to build this show, and I’m not going to have it destroyed in a matter of weeks.

  It was all talk. Sullivan rebooked the Stones for a second appearance on his May 2, 1965, telecast. They ultimately appeared six times on the show between 1964 and 1969.

  Bill Wyman once told me a funny story about the Stones appearance on Sullivan in February 1966.

  BILL WYMAN: So they wanted to beep out a word in “Satisfaction” and they just wound up making everything that much worse. We were miming to the record and Mick was singing live, and when he came to the line “trying to make some girl,” they beeped it so it came out, “trying to BEEP some girl,” which made it so much worse because everybody’s vivid imaginations were trying to figure out what he really said (laughs). “What did he say?” “Did he say . . . ‘fuck’?” In the end it kind of helped our image in a way
(laughs). I mean, it’s still talked about now, right?

  Promo ad for “I Wanna Be Your Man,” the Stones’ second single, given to them by Lennon and McCartney

  There can really be no question or debate about the trailblazing role that the Beatles played for the Rolling Stones and every other British band. And the Stones also benefited mightily from the support (however self-serving it was) that the Liverpool quartet gave to the London quintet.

  First of all, it may have been George Harrison himself who helped the Stones get their first recording contract.

  GEORGE HARRISON: There was a big showcase at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. The Beatles had become famous . . . Anyway, I remember meeting some executives from London, one of whom must have been Dick Rowe [of Decca]. He said, “You’ll tell us who the good groups are, will you?” And I said, “I don’t know about that, but you want to get the Rolling Stones.”

  Then there’s the story of the Stones recording the Lennon and McCartney–penned tune that gives this chapter its title, “I Wanna Be Your Man.”

  ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: The Rolling Stones were in this rehearsal place in Leicester Square and we had nothing to record. Can we do “Poison Ivy”? No. “Fortune Teller”? No. I went out for a walk pissed off, and ran into John and Paul who were coming—being very nice—coming from a Variety Club of Great Britain. I think they’d been honored for something for the first time, and they said, “What’s wrong with you?” So I told them and, out of the good old Brill Building/Liverpool training they had, they said, “Well we’ve got something.” And they came down and finished [“I Wanna Be Your Man”] off in front of them—which was a great lesson in songwriting for Mick and Keith as well—and I felt so good about it that I went to Paris. I didn’t even go to the session . . . I think “I Wanna Be Your Man” went to number nine or ten in England.