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  The second footnote occurred when Murray the K burst into the dressing room to say that the police were insisting that the Stones open the second show so that they could be safely escorted out of the theater during the intermission.

  SID BERNSTEIN: I offered to take them next door where there was a German-style beer-and-sandwich pub, but only Brian Jones seemed interested. Brian and I exited Carnegie Hall through a backstage door that was only a few feet from the pub. We sat in the most out-of-the-way booth we could find. After just a few minutes I could see several young faces pressed up against the front windowpanes of the pub. In no time at all, the number of faces multiplied. I motioned for Brian to follow me and we made a mad dash across Seventh Avenue. A mob of kids ran after us. They were all grabbing at Brian’s beautiful strawberry blond hair.

  The plan to have the Stones open the show had one fatal flaw: the audience got up and left en masse to catch them at the stage door, leaving Jay and the Americans to close the show in a nearly deserted Carnegie. Kenny Vance took some consolation from the fact that at least the Stones looked better under the lights at the second show than they had at the first . . .

  SID BERNSTEIN: After the show ended, some members of the press were interviewing me when [head booker] Mrs. Satescu came over. “Mr. Bernstein, the pictures on the walls were shaking. The kids were jumping on our plush seats and the armrests. They were rude and disobedient to the ushers. And you are lucky, Mr. Bernstein, that no one was hurt here today. Please, do not bring any of your presentations here again!”

  Two days later, the Stones were back home in England, a little bit battered, a little bit bruised, from their first adventures in America, but ready to regroup and take the next steps toward nothing less than total world domination.

  CHAPTER 6

  SING THIS ALL TOGETHER

  T.A.M.I. SHOW (TEENAGE Awards Music International) was the first rock ’n’ roll concert film. It featured a host of popular acts from many genres including the Beach Boys, Chuck Berry, James Brown, Lesley Gore, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, and . . . the Rolling Stones. Directed by Steve Binder, who would go on to work with Elvis on the ’68 comeback special, and produced by Bill Sargent using a new technology known as Electronovision (a precursor to both digital and closed-circuit/pay-per-view broadcasts), the show was filmed over October 28 and 29, 1964, at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.

  JOHN LANDIS: I went to Emerson Junior High and one of the girls-in-my-class’s father produced this so the entire seventh grade went. David Cassidy was in my class. He was there. One of the go-go dancers was Teri Garr. It was hosted by Jan and Dean.

  DEAN TORRENCE: Once we had an opportunity to review the whole concept, we thought, “Why wouldn’t we do this?” It had never been done before. This was kind of a forerunner to something like Woodstock.

  JOHN LANDIS: It showed how this time in music was extraordinary in its diversity; you have surf music, British music, pop music, soul music, Motown.

  BILL WYMAN: There were an awful lot of black artists, which was great for us, but it wasn’t the accepted thing at the time.

  Steve Binder made a curious decision. Despite the dazzling array of more-established talent on hand, he wanted to close the show (and film) with the Rolling Stones.

  BILL WYMAN: We were hardly known in America at that time—we’d never had a big hit—and they put us on top of the bill and in front of people like Chuck Berry, Marvin Gaye, the Supremes, James Brown, the Miracles.

  Were the Stones happy about the opportunity?

  BILL WYMAN: No! We wanted James Brown to top it. Especially after we saw him (laughs). But they insisted that we top it, and before he went on, James Brown came over to us and said, “I’m going to make you Rolling Stones wish that you’d never, ever come here to America!”

  The Stones rehearse for T.A.M.I. Show

  DEAN TORRENCE: A lot of groups probably thought they were strong enough to close the show until they saw James Brown. We had played with James Brown before, so we knew what to expect. There was no way we would have wanted to follow him.

  STEVE BINDER: I mean, to be really honest with you, I remember saying that I wanted the Rolling Stones to be on after James Brown, and I remember Mick coming to me and saying, “We can’t.” Because James Brown was obviously the king, and James and I, when we met, we hit it off really well; we’ve been friends ever since, and his manager had sorta come to me and said, “Nobody can follow James.” And I, for whatever my instincts were, whatever my feelings were, I just felt that we should put the Stones on to close the show.

  Considering the audience, the choice made some sense.

  DEAN TORRENCE: The audience was 99 percent white and of course they were going to scream like crazy for any group that came from England. I’m sure some of those screaming fourteen-year-old girls looked at James Brown and really liked it. On the other hand, they had no idea what was coming. They were there to scream at the teen idol types. An English band was safe.

  Many consider Brown’s performance that night the finest one of his ever captured on film.

  BILL WYMAN: Then he went on and did this incredible twenty-minute set and scared the shit out of us. We were literally shaking in our boots; we couldn’t face it.

  JOHN LANDIS: The guy who blew me away though was James Brown. I’d never seen anything like that before.

  BILL WYMAN: Marvin Gaye said to us backstage, “People love you because of what you do on stage. So just go out there and do it, and forget about James Brown. Go do your thing. That’s what I do.”

  There are a variety of opinions on how the Stones played that night, even within the band itself.

  KEITH RICHARDS: It was the biggest mistake of our career.

  JOHN LANDIS: It was one of the first US performances of the Rolling Stones, who were kind of boring after James Brown. We just thought, “Who is this English twerp?” Bring James Brown back on the stage.

  Weekly Variety tended to agree with Landis: “What must surely be England’s revenge for losing the 1776 Revolution, the Rolling Stones.”

  But the reality is the Stones were excellent. They played a terrific five-song set, opening with Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” and ending with their version of Bo Diddley’s “I’m All Right,” which segued into all the acts dancing and playing with the Stones on an ensemble version of “Let’s Get Together.” It’s a great window into the early Stones performances and a fascinating cultural moment.

  James Brown chats with Brian, Keith, and Mick at T.A.M.I.

  THE STONES MEET THE MASTER

  The Stones at the foot of the master, Howlin’ Wolf

  When the Rolling Stones were slated to appear on Shindig in December of 1964, producer Jack Good wanted Howlin’ Wolf on the show, but someone at the network didn’t like the idea. The Stones put their foot down: if Wolf wasn’t going to appear, neither would they.

  In their wonderful book Moanin’ at Midnight, authors Mark Hoffman and James Segrest describe the scene:

  MARK HOFFMAN AND JAMES SEGREST: A top-notch studio band—Billy Preston on piano, James Burton on guitar, Larry Knechtel on bass, and Mickey Conway on drums—recorded tracks for the taping. Dressed in a dark suit the next day, Wolf strode majestically onstage, and with the Stones and a bevy of go-go dancers sitting at his feet, launched into an incandescent version of “How Many More Years.” As the band play-synched behind him, Wolf sang and played live, stabbing his massive finger at the camera, shaking his gargantuan rear end, and blasting blues out into prime-time America.

  KEITH RICHARDS: Here was this enormous man who looked like an elephant without a trunk, and very polite. Then he starts playing the shit. Oh, man—here comes another education! I was incredibly impressed by him. It was that voice, man, and the attitude. All you had to do was put a microphone in front of him and he did the stuff. There was no tricks involved.

  The sight of this literal giant of a bluesman offering up this almost feral performance on a show normally associated with teeny-bopp
ers was arresting. In fact, music critic Peter Guralnick has described it as one of the great cultural moments of the twentieth century.

  PETER GURALNICK: What was so great about seeing Wolf on Shindig was it was in a sense reality imposing itself on this totally artificial setting. While I was a big fan of the Stones, it was altogether appropriate that they would be sitting at Wolf’s feet. And that’s what it represented. His music was not simply the foundation or the cornerstone; it was the most vital thing you could ever imagine.

  Years later, in 1981, Wolf would appear with the Stones once again, at the Rosemont Horizon in Chicago. Mick acknowledged Wolf’s importance to the Stones’ musical heritage.

  STEVE BINDER: And, as it turns out, to this day, I think it is one of the great performances of the Stones. Because I think, at the time that they went on, either they were so stoned-out or whatever, they just literally . . . Mick was impersonating James, almost, with all the dancing and the shenanigans and so forth, and that performance would’ve never happened if I had them on before James.

  BILL WYMAN: We went out there and somehow or other it worked, everybody gave everything they had—Keith and Mick were fantastic. They really tried. Then afterwards James Brown came over and congratulated us, and we were all mates after that. We saw quite a bit of him over the next two years. But anyway, that show captured, all in one shot, where music was at in ’63–’64, and you can always go back and see those acts doing their hits and get an idea of how exciting it all was. Since then, I don’t think I’ve really seen anything comparable to that—where you’ve had fifteen top acts on the same show, and it’s come off as well as that.

  CHAPTER 7

  RIP THIS JOINT

  REMEMBER MICK’S OBSERVATION about the Stones’ first trip to the States in 1964? “It takes time to conquer America.” Well, later that same year, the second trip to America was quite a different story. This time, the Stones were more than just a blip on the radar of American media. This time their songs “Tell Me” (a Jagger/Richards original) and “It’s All Over Now” (a cover of the Bobby and Shirley Womack song Murray the K suggested they record) had both spent time on the US Top 40 charts and “Time Is on My Side” (written by Jerry Ragovoy under the pseudonym of Norman Meade) was on its way to becoming the group’s first Top 10 hit in America. And this time, the band was visible enough and important enough to be invited on The Ed Sullivan Show (described in chapter 4), and also important enough to headline and close the T.A.M.I. Show (see chapter 6).

  But something else was happening as well. The group was transforming and reinventing itself right before our eyes and ears. No longer content with being the top-tier British interpreters of American rhythm and blues music, the Stones were forging a new identity that relied heavily on the burgeoning songwriting talents of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

  There’s a famous quote from the John Wayne/Jimmy Stewart cowboy movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that came out the same year that the Stones got started: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

  Following that bit of wisdom, here’s the legend. Andrew Loog Oldham figured out that the only true way the Rolling Stones could realistically compete with the Beatles was to slightly change course and move in a different direction. They had already loaded their first three albums with amazing American R&B covers, but that process could not possibly continue indefinitely. The group had to follow the Beatles’ lead and begin incorporating much more new, exciting, and original material into their repertoire. Bill complained the most about not being able to get more of his original songs on a Stones album. Brian was always more interested in covering the masters. And Charlie had no desire to write.

  Mick and Keith were quite a different story. Early on, Andrew determined that they had the potential to rival Lennon and McCartney, or, at the very least, take the Stones to the next level of success. To accomplish this (Look out! Here comes the legend!), he supposedly “locked” Mick and Keith in the kitchen of his flat and told them not to come out until they had an original song finished.

  Keith is the one who relishes telling the “locked-in-the-kitchen” story:

  KEITH RICHARDS: With the pressure of the game, Andrew Oldham boxed Mick and me in a kitchen and said, “Come out with a song.” I said, “Well, we’ve got some food, so I guess we can last for a while.” Eventually, we did come out of the kitchen, with “As Tears Go By,” which within six weeks was in the Top 10 by Marianne Faithfull. Before that I thought of songwriting as a totally separate job—like there’s the blacksmith, and there’s the stonemason, and you did this, and I did that. So at that point I integrated that I was not only a guitar player, but that I could write what I was going to play, instead of just revamping all the time. It was an eye-opener.

  Mick demurs:

  MICK JAGGER: Keith likes to tell the story about the kitchen, God bless him. I think Andrew may have said something at some point along the lines of “I should lock you in a room until you’ve written a song,” and in that way mentally he did lock us in a room, but he didn’t literally lock us in.

  They were ALL making it up as they went along. That goes for all four of the Beatles, all one of Bob Dylan (although it took five actors and one actress to portray him in the 2007 biopic I’m Not There!), and all five Rolling Stones. But myths and legends aside, the new formidable songwriting team of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was poised to take its place in the pantheon of great rock writers.

  There were other factors that were contributing to the redefinition and redirection of the Rolling Stones in 1965. The balance of power in the group was changing dramatically and swiftly. What began as Brian Jones’s band of purist blues interpreters was morphing into Mick and Keith’s band of pop prophets and profiteers. Brian’s growing frustration with his change of status was undeniable.

  BILL WYMAN: There came a time when he wanted to write for the band but he couldn’t. He was just not able to produce a song for the Rolling Stones, which frustrated him. Remember, he was the leader of the band in the beginning. Brian Jones formed the Rolling Stones, not Mick Jagger. And Brian got more fan mail during the first year and a half than anybody else. When the limelight went away from him, and Mick started getting the attention, Brian found it difficult to deal with.

  Simultaneously, Mick and Keith, even more than the Beatles, had their fingers on the pulse of US culture. The romantic notion of America as some sort of dreamlike fantasy world was giving way to a much more realistic, harsher view of the colonies. As they crisscrossed the country for the third time in twelve months, they witnessed firsthand the commercialism, racism, and materialism in abundance in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  There is no formula for tuning into the zeitgeist of a country—the cultural, ethical, intellectual, political, or spiritual climate of an era. It is not something that can be conjured or willed. It is a multiplicity of circumstances and events usually resulting in the rise of a force that is unstoppable. Such a vacuum was created in the 1960s and the Stones were primed to fill it. Building on an image that was partly truth and partly fiction, they ultimately found a voice and gave a voice to a burgeoning global youth culture. They became the conduit to express the angst, frustration, rage, and uncertainty of the times for a generation aching to express itself artistically, sexually, and socially.

  AS TEARS GO BY

  “As Tears Go By” was among the first Jagger/Richards compositions

  Marianne Faithfull became involved with Mick from 1966 to 1970 and must be counted as one of the great muses in rock history, as well as a legendary singer and performer in her own right. She spoke to us for the book (briefly). Here’s what she had to say about “As Tears Go By.”

  MARIANNE FAITHFULL: This is a song I first sung when I was little. I was seventeen years old. My friends Mick and Keith wrote it for me. Last night even, as I sing it, I feel it. What a beautiful song. And how wonderful it is for the audience. There are moments I can tell you where I’d like to retire i
t. But there are certain songs that I have to sing and “As Tears Go By” is definitely one of them . . . If you are going to have a song slung around your neck for life, you could do a lot worse . . . What if my hit song was “Wooly Bully”?

  The Stones’ rebellion against the establishment finally came together with a single declaration, one that completely changed their future as a band: “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” That line said it all: who they were, what they wanted, where they were headed. It screamed non-stop, 24/7, from the phonographs and radios, first in the United States, and soon thereafter all over the world. Dylan liberated songwriting, the Beatles redefined pop stardom, and both gave the Stones a launchpad for their unique brand of insolence, rebellion, and decadence.

  Another side of Mick Jagger

  Tom Wolfe once brazenly suggested: “The Beatles just want to hold your hand. The Rolling Stones want to burn your town down.” “Satisfaction” gave them the match to do it with.

  MICK JAGGER: It was the song that really made the Rolling Stones, changed us from just another band into a huge, monster band. You always need one song. We weren’t American, and America was a big thing, and we always wanted to make it here. It was very impressive the way that song and the popularity of the band became a worldwide thing. It’s a signature tune, really . . . a kind of signature that everyone knows. It has a very catchy title. It has a very catchy guitar riff. It has a great guitar sound, which was original at that time. And it captures a spirit of the times, which is very important in those kinds of songs . . . Which was alienation. Or it’s a bit more than that, maybe, but a kind of sexual alienation. Alienation’s not quite the right word, but it’s one word that would do.