5
UNBROKEN
Mick Jagger had already changed. Imagine it happening in a series of time-lapse photos, the good manners and careful training, the inhibitions and breeding of a thousand years of civilization fading away. His hair grew long, his shirts came undone, his mouth went slack, his limbs languid. The music had gotten underneath, the funk, rhythm and beat, the nasty sentiment and vulgar verse. It turned the inside out, exposed what had been hidden. Lust and appetite. A teacher at the London School of Economics named Walter Stern, who witnessed the transformation, was horrified to see this “scrupulously polite boy from the provinces [turn] to a Ted, who lounged around and smoked his way through our appointments.”
The parents of the 1960s were right to fear rock ’n’ roll. It turned their children against them. Over time, it undid everything. Imagine winning the World Wars only to watch the power abdicated in the London dives. An eighteen-year-old at the Marquee Club in 1962 would have been twelve when Elvis broke. Having been blown away by the King, he would be an entirely different creature than his parents had been at the same age. He would be a rock ’n’ roll native in the way kids who grew up with the Internet are said to be natives of cyberspace. He would have been the product of scarcity and hunger. He would have two parents: Churchill and Presley. “A certain kind of guy came out of England at the end of the Second World War,” Sam Cutler, who later worked for the Stones as a kind of stage manager, told me. “The country was hard in the late forties and fifties. If you look at all the English rock ’n’ rollers that survived it, from Pete Townshend to what’s his name, you find tough, lean guys with bad teeth because we didn’t get to eat properly; they came through a fire, which made for a unique group.”
Eighteen-year-old boys had been drafted into the British military since time out of mind. Conscription filled the ranks, but, more important, it broke the rowdies, crushed their spirit, and remade them for the machine. (“Your whole life you’d heard, ‘When you’re eighteen, you’ll be in the service, and that will sort you out,’ ” McLagan told me.) But after the war, England could not afford to maintain a large standing army. The country was busted, the Empire, that vast archipelago of subservience, painstakingly dismantled. Instead of being sent to patrol in distant lands, the young men of working-class England were cut loose, set free. In this manner, a generation slipped away, undrilled and unbroken. In England, their energy became an important factor. In the past, it would have been spent in Burma, Egypt, India. These boys went off to the blues clubs instead. England lost the Empire but got rock ’n’ roll—yet another unintended consequence of war.
As all Russian literature is said to have come out from under Gogol’s “Overcoat,” all British blues can be said to have come out of Chris Barber’s trombone. “When people talk about the British blues boom, they don’t go back far enough,” Paul Jones, the British blues legend who fronted Manfred Mann, told me. “They only go back to John Mayall. As if everything comes from John Mayall. But it really started in the fifties with Chris Barber and his band.”
Chris Barber is gray: gray face, gray fedora, gray eyes, trembling gray fingers. You’d never pick him out of a crowd and say, “There’s the guy who started it!” He’s the last pioneer still out there performing. A slide trombone solo executed by a man in his eighties is something to admire. I met him in London, where we spent a day talking. He told me about his life. He grew up in the English countryside, where the only escape was the albums that turned up in the general store like birds blown off course. Sidney Bechet was his favorite. The melodic runs of the clarinetist. Songs that break your heart. Songs that make you wish you were outcast so your heart could be properly broken.
He listened, then taught himself to play. He performed in small combos, then big combos. By the early 1950s, he was leading the most popular jazz band in Britain. It took him to America, where he saw Muddy Waters play on the South Side of Chicago. Ripple and rotgut. The blues master on his knees. Barber raised money to bring Muddy and other American musicians to England. Big Bill Broonzy, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee. It was these shows that gave Barber the idea for the blues break. During intermissions, when his band knocked off to smoke or whatever, a few players would remain onstage—a band within a band—to perform a primitive variety of blues known as skiffle. It lacked sophistication—the instruments were often homemade—but it reeked of emotion. Though Barber meant the break as a novelty, it began to get a bigger response than his regular set. The breakthrough came when he recorded a handful of skiffle songs: “John Henry,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Nobody’s Child.” Cyril Davies on harmonica, Alexis Korner on guitar, Barber on bass, Lonnie Donegan sang. “Rock Island Line” was the standout. Released in 1955, it launched a craze. “Everyone started a skiffle group,” Peter Asher, who became famous with Peter & Gordon, told me. “It was easy to play and you had everything you needed to make the instruments in your house. You’d get a wooden tea chest and strap a broom handle to it and string it. You’d have multiple guitars playing three chords. You could take any American folk song and skiffle it up.”
With its low bar of entry, skiffle was the perfect musical gateway drug, the schoolyard joint that leads to the heroin of rock ’n’ roll. The pantheon is filled with artists who came into the fold via the skiffle of the Chris Barber blues break: Van Morrison, Paul McCartney, Cliff Richard, Eric Clapton, Brian Jones, Chas Hodges, Bill Wyman.
According to Chas McDevitt, a skiffle star and the author of Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story, thirty thousand to fifty thousand skiffle groups were started in the United Kingdom in the wake of “Rock Island Line.” The names have the flavor of the old East Side street gangs: Terry Kari and the Cruisers, Derry and the Seniors, Cass and the Casanovas, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Kingsize Taylor and the Dominoes, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Silhouettes, the Four Jays, the Bluegenes. The Beatles began as a skiffle group, first called the Blackjacks, then called the Quarrymen. A typical Quarrymen set included skiffled-up versions of “Cumberland Gap,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Midnight Special,” and “Rock Island Line.”
When I asked Chas Hodges—he’s had numerous hits as part of Chas & Dave—to describe skiffle, he asked if I’d ever listened to the Traveling Wilburys, the supergroup that included George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty. “Because the Wilburys were basically a skiffle group,” he told me. “The way they gathered together, a band with a hundred guitars, each guy shouting a verse for a laugh. You go from there right back to Chris Barber, who, really, I mean, has any man ever been so screwed out of proper credit?
“The musicians of my era—Albert Lee, Eric Clapton, I can’t name them all—started out in skiffle,” Hodges continued. “The ones who found they could play went on to rock ’n’ roll. I was in the Horseshoe skiffle group. I bought a banjo at a rummage sale for a shilling. I strung it with fishing wire. I was twelve, and in the window of the local paint shop was an advert for a guitar or banjo player for a skiffle group. And my mum said, ‘Go audition for it.’ I said, ‘Mum, I’m not good enough.’ ‘Yes, you are,’ she said. I auditioned and was the best guy in the band. I floated out. I said to me mum, ‘They want me.’ And she said, ‘Of course they do.’ ”
For Barber, the success of “Rock Island Line” was disorienting. In its aftermath, there was a tidal pull in that direction. But the trombonist stuck to jazz, which created a rift with his guitar player, Alexis Korner, who was tired of patiently waiting, night after night, for the blues break. There was an argument: Dixieland or skiffle. To jazzmen, the blues presented a threat. Qualities that had always been treasured—ability to read music, proficiency—lost value. The blues is not about skill, it’s about attitude. “It was rather disconcerting to young jazz players when rock ’n’ roll came on the scene,” Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham writes in his memoir Stoned. “It put a lot of guys off, because there they were studying their instruments and all of a sudden a music came on the scene where, if you were game enough to learn two or three chords on a guitar and dye your hair blond, you could stand up on the stage and earn a lot of money.”
After quitting the Chris Barber Band, Alexis Korner, along with the harp player Cyril Davies, formed Blues Incorporated, a loose outfit fleshed out on any given night by whoever felt like getting up to play. “It was always in a state of flux,” Paul Jones told me. “For a while Alexis had Jack Bruce [who later played in Cream] on bass. He had Spike Heatley. At different times, he had Ginger Baker [who later played in Cream and Blind Faith] and Charlie Watts, who was very young and a step ahead of everyone, on drums.”
“That was the first electric blues band in England,” Dick Taylor explained. “It was pretty much our version of the Muddy Waters band. There was nothing else like it here. You’d hear them play and think, ‘My God…’ ”
“Alexis came out of the Chris Barber Band on a mission,” Paul Jones told me. “Like Eddie Condon and a bunch of other leaders, he tended to recruit people better than himself. His major talent was not as a guitar player or as a singer, but as a bandleader and a scout. He had amazing ears. He didn’t have to hear much of somebody to know, ‘I want him.’ ”
“I played with [Alexis] in a coffee bar, the Troubadour in Earls Court,” Charlie Watts said later. “There was a crowd of us who used to play in a band that was a straight nick of the Thelonious Monk group, and Alexis used to sit in. Six months later, I was in Denmark working in advertising and I got a call from Alexis saying he wanted me to come back and start this band.”
Blues Incorporated began by playing music from the blues break: skiffled-up versions of American folk. They had a residence in a Soho club called the Roundhouse. The early crowds were small, but word spread and soon the place was packed. It got so loud the music was lost, at which point Korner made a decision once made by Muddy Waters, for the same reason. He’d plugged in to be heard. But you can’t dabble in electricity. Once you’re wired, noise becomes the point. In this way, the music got louder and louder until Blues Incorporated was evicted from the Roundhouse. Korner found a new home for the band across from the Ealing tube station in West London. Between numbers, you could hear the rumble of feet, a million nine-to-fivers unaware of the revolution being hatched below. The entrance was easy to miss. For many musicians, going down the steps was like slipping through the wardrobe into Narnia. It was a rectangular cellar, with a bar in back and a tiny stage. Water dripped from exposed pipes and pooled on the floor; concrete walls echoed everything into rockabilly. As Lake Itasca is the headwaters of the Mississippi River, this cave in West London was the headwaters of the British blues.
A few days before the club opened, an ad ran in the New Musical Express, a sort of bible for the trade that began publishing in 1952:
ALEXIS KORNER’S
BLUES INCORPORATED
THE MOST EXCITING EVENT OF THE YEAR
G CLUB
Ealing Broadway Station.
Turn left, cross at Zebra and go down steps
between ABC Teashop and Jewellers.
Saturday at 7:30 pm.
Early in the twentieth century, when the blues pioneer Buddy Bolden wanted to gather a band in New Orleans, he’d stick his cornet out his window and blow three to five bars. He described it as “calling my children home.” Korner’s ad had a similar effect. It was underlined and clipped in towns all over England, little places where Korner never dreamed the blues had penetrated. It was as if, in every province, kids suffering the same malaise had found the same cure.
Jagger and Richards traveled from Dartford for the opening. Charlie Watts was there. Ditto Ginger Baker, Eric Clapton, Long John Baldry, Ray and Dave Davies. “There [were] only about a hundred people in London that were into the blues,” Korner said, “and all of them showed up at the club that first night.” Alexis Korner was not just playing music; he was building a movement. He’d audition musicians at the bar, then invite the most talented up to play. Jagger made his first appearance a few weeks after the club opened. He sang Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around” and Muddy Waters’s “Got My Mojo Working,” a doe-eyed nineteen-year-old in a cable-knit sweater. “In general terms, Mick wasn’t a good singer then, just as he isn’t a good singer now,” Korner said. “[But he] had this tremendous personal charisma—which is what the blues is about, more than technique.”
Jagger became something of a regular at the Ealing, doing the same two or three songs every week. In the spring of 1962, a newspaper identified him as “Blues Incorporated’s 2nd string singer.” Mick’s first press clipping alarmed his parents. “I remember his mother ringing me up one night and saying, ‘We’ve always felt that Mick was the least talented member of the family, do you really think he has a career in music?’ ” said Korner. “I told her I didn’t think he could possibly fail.”
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Dick Taylor went to Ealing one night in April 1962, two or three weeks after the club opened. They slouched and smoked in doorways, but it was a pose. Mick and Keith still lived at home and kissed their mothers good night. You grow your hair and neither shower nor shave, letting dirt accumulate, or roll in the mud in search of character, but scratch away that top layer and it’s clean underneath. They stood through the first set but were bored and ready to leave when Korner stepped to the microphone: “And now, folks, a very fine bottleneck guitar player who has come all the way from Cheltenham to play here for you tonight…”
The incongruity will be lost on Americans. Bottleneck guitar meant black Mississippi, cotton fields, the river on a rank afternoon—“bottleneck” being a utilitarian term, derived from the skinny end of the pop bottle that musicians broke off and fitted over a finger—often the ring finger—and used as a slide; moved along the guitar strings, it slurs and distends each note, rendering even a simple tune spooky and strange. Cheltenham meant resort life, antiques shops, and tree-lined streets. A bluesman from Cheltenham was like a rapper from Amagansett. It didn’t work. Of course, the intro was a setup, a bit of misdirection, because, hearing “a bottleneck guitar player…from Cheltenham,” you expect a lightweight. He did look like a wannabe, small and blond and impossibly young, a guitar positioned high on his chest. His shoulders were broad, but his waist was narrow and his legs were short and his hands were small, as if the architect designed big but the contractor ran out of materials. But when he played, you forgot all that. “He was absolutely incredible,” Taylor told me. “No one else in England knew fuck-all about slide guitar. We loved the sound but could never think of making it. It was otherworldly, mysterious. And then here’s this strange little guy from Cheltenham—fuckin’ Cheltenham!—who’d actually mastered the thing.”
Brian Jones had not been introduced as Brian Jones, but as Elmo Lewis, a stage name meant to evoke his hero, the great Chicago bluesman Elmore James, who recorded the definitive version of “Dust My Broom,” the first song Brian played that night. Like most traditional songs, the origins of “Dust My Broom” are unknown. The harder you look, the older it gets. Robert Johnson recorded it in 1936, but he’d taken the lyric and melody from earlier songs, some incredibly dirty. The version Elmore James recorded in 1951—the old tune remade by electricity, engorged with voltage—is defined by an opening lick as recognizable as the sound of a freight train at night, a two-chord scream that echoes through rock ’n’ roll. You hear it on the Beatles’ “Revolution” and on Bob Dylan’s “Crash on the Levee.” That lick took hold of Brian Jones like a demonic possession. He taught himself to play the slide to exorcise it.
Brian Jones was tiny, maybe five foot six and a shade over 120 pounds in boots. He had a porcelain quality. He was beautiful, but you imagined him shattering. He was bathed in light at the Ealing club, slurring chords as if his guitar were drunk. To Mick and Keith, he seemed untouchable, beyond real. “[Brian] picked up this Elmore James guitar thing, which knocked me out when I first heard him,” Jagger once said. “I’d never heard anyone play it live before—I’d only heard it on records. And it was really good. He really had that down and he was very exciting. The sound was right. The glissandos were all right. There was a really good gut feeling when he played it in the pub….It’s all to do with getting the right tone out of the guitar….He was good at that, he definitely was.”
After his set, Brian put down his stick like a gunslinger and walked to the bar, where he was swarmed. Mick and Keith worked their way into his presence, then peppered him with questions. Though only a few months older, Brian was light-years ahead. “He was already out of school,” Keith explained, “he’d been kicked out of university and had a variety of jobs. He was already into living on his own and trying to fund a pad for his old lady. Whereas Mick and I were just kicking around in back rooms, still living at home.
“When I first met Brian he was like a little Welsh bull,” Keith added. “He was broad, and he seemed to me very tough.”