6

“VICAR APPALLED”

A few months ago, I went for a walk in Soho, London. I wanted to look into some of the places where the Stones got started. I stopped by the building that once housed Regent Sound, where the band cut its first sides, a slapdash establishment that once teemed with life. I stood before the Marquee Club and the Roundhouse, then wandered through London’s Tin Pan Alley, where, in the fifties and sixties, the coffee bars were jammed with songsmiths. In an alley off Denmark Street, I studied a bulletin board plastered with wanted ads and audition notices.

A few caught my eye, especially this one:

BASSIST AND GUITARIST

Looking for

Singer and Drummer

to Start a

Stoner Rock/Grunge Band

We’re two young guys (20–22) looking for a rough filthy pissed off singer/songwriter with a negative approach to life and a drummer with a powerful approach to the drums that hits hard as a beast, between 19 & 23 years old, to start a full-time kickass project.

Our influences are bands like Kyuss, Nirvana,

QOTSA, early Incubus, Snakepit, Korn, Snot and

RATM and RHCP as well

NO assholes, No excessively religious, NO moralists

Dirty hair required

It hit me, this notice, because yes and wow, but also because it expressed a truth about the Einsteinian nature of rock ’n’ roll. Simply put, there is no time. Rock ’n’ roll is quantum. The beginning is tangled up with the end, the exits are entrances, every moment is present in every other moment and it’s always now. How else can you explain the Rolling Stones filling stadiums decades after all the important stuff happened? Or the records released by long-dead stars? There is no progress—it never really got better than Elvis in 1956. Every band has to rediscover what’s already been discovered and forgotten. It’s a cycle: Elvis to Sedaka; Stones to Bee Gees; innocence to decadence.

Which accounts for the similarity between the notice above and the notice Brian Jones put in Jazz News in 1962, his call for musicians to form a rhythm-and-blues band. He’d already recruited Geoff Bradford to play guitar and Brian Knight to play harmonica. Brian asked Paul Jones to sing, but Paul Jones said no, which, over time, turned him into the man who could have been Jagger. “I had two reasons for saying no,” he told me, “the main reason being that I thought it ridiculously optimistic to think we could make a living playing blues. The other is that I had a good job with a dance band, singing the hits of the day. It was a mistake, but life is nothing but a series of mistakes. At least mine have been colorful.”

Auditions were held in the Bricklayers Arms, a pub off Wardour Street. Arriving early, Keith stood in the doorway watching a young man play boogie-woogie piano. This was Ian Stewart, a Scottish truck driver who rattled the keys like Professor Longhair on a swampy Delta night. He was barrel-chested and lantern-jawed, with big arms and bulging eyes. His lips were twisted, a lock of hair swung across his face. He looked less like a bluesman than a stevedore. From 1963 till his death in 1985, Ian Stewart—Stu!—was a crucial part of the band, the so-called sixth Stone, yet, for reasons that will become clear, he remains largely unknown. A shadowy figure, a forgotten man.

Keith entered the room quietly, strapped on his guitar, began to play. Stu looked up, smiling. Jagger turned up a short time later. “Jones said he didn’t think Jagger was a particularly good singer but had something,” Norman Jopling, a journalist who covered the scene for New Musical Express, told me. “And he did. Jagger could always front.”

Brian asked Mick to join the group. Mick said he’d come in only if Keith was included. The other members didn’t want Keith because Keith was a devotee of Chuck Berry, whom aficionados dismissed as pop, near beer. There was an argument. Geoff Bradford and Brian Knight stormed out, exiting history. As the band was now understaffed, Mick asked if he could also bring in Dick Taylor. “When I met Brian, he asked, ‘Can you play bass?’ ” Taylor told me. “I told him maybe, but I didn’t have a bass. He said, ‘Fix that.’ So I went out and bought a bass guitar, then learned by doing it.”

The musicians rehearsed all summer. Brian ran these sessions, setting the schedule, choosing the songs. It was his project, a second family to ease his loneliness. In the early days, the Stones were driven less by Mick’s ambition or Keith’s love than by Brian’s need. His life was a sickness that he believed could be cured by the blues.

—

Jones was born in February 1942, one of the worst months of the Second World War. His father, Lewis, was an aeronautical engineer at Dowty Rotol, an aircraft parts manufacturer in Cheltenham, a spa town on the edge of the Cotswolds. Lewis looked like Brian faded by worry, obligation. The life you lead is dependent on when you’re born. Being fifteen when Hitler becomes a Nazi makes you Lewis Jones. Being the same age when Elvis releases “Heartbreak Hotel” makes you Brian Jones. He had two sisters, including a baby that died before age three, a tragedy never sufficiently explained. Brian came away thinking the child had been sent away for transgressions unknown.

The family was musical. Brian’s father played organ at church. His mother taught piano. Brian started piano at six, but switched to clarinet when he heard jazz. He was restless, jumping from instrument to instrument.

Girls loved him in a way that made him the enemy of boys. He was pretty, with blond hair and long lashes, but it was the neediness they found irresistible.

So what fucked him up?

The blues, of course, the Delta funk heard on the radio late one night. Like Mick and Keith, he began to haunt the dime stores in search of obscure sides. His mother bought him a guitar for his seventeenth birthday. It became an obsession. Listen and play. Listen and play. He formed a skiffle group, but also played jazz. He fronted combos: the Cheltone Six, the Ramrods. He began drinking in pubs after the shows in search of sex, excitement. He bragged about his disdain for condoms. The old jokes. Raincoat in a shower, etc. When he was sixteen, he got a fifteen-year-old girl pregnant. It caused a scandal, first locally, then nationally. The story appeared in the London Times under the headline VICAR APPALLED. Brian was not allowed to see the baby. He became a pariah, shunned by friends, denounced by family. Forced to leave school, he went wandering. Thus began the period of exile that turned him into a legend. He’d been the suburban son of an engineer. He became just the sort of girl-ruining rapscallion who populates the ballads. As if he’d planned it. He spent months in Europe—Sweden, mostly. He raved about the local girls, worked part-time, dined and ditched, lit out of hotels without paying. According to Bill Wyman, Brian’s vagabond early life, by approximating that of the blues greats, gave the Stones authenticity. Brian lived it so Mick and Keith could write about it.

Jones returned to Cheltenham in 1960, where he frequented clubs with names that flicker in neon: the Aztec, the Waikiki. When not playing, he worked odd jobs. An unreliable employee, he slacked off, turned up late. On occasion, he stole. His second illegitimate child was born before he was twenty. A nickname preceded him ever after, reaching rooms before his arrival: “the Cheltenham Shagger.”

Looking through the newspaper one day, Brian’s girlfriend noticed that England’s only authentic electric blues band, Blues Incorporated, was scheduled to play at Cheltenham’s town hall. Brian got a seat in back, then worked his way up front. He hung on each note of each song: “Got My Mojo Working,” “I’m a King Bee,” “Walking Blues.” He went backstage to meet Korner but was told he’d gone to the bar across the street. Brian followed in the way of Johnny B. Goode—with a guitar in his hand. He bought Korner drinks, then started asking questions, sharing opinions and schemes. Korner described Brian as a “pent-up ball of obsessive energy, talking away in an incredibly intense manner.”

Korner told Brian to “take out the stick and play me something.” Brian set his guitar case on a chair and opened it with a cascade of buckles. Korner sat back as Brian played, considering him in the way of a radar-gun-wielding scout in the bleachers of a Dominican ballpark. It’s not control that matters, it’s power. Brian had it from the beginning, that raw thing. Korner wrote his address on a napkin: If you’re ever in London…Five days later, Jones knocked on Korner’s door.

There’s a moment when your real life starts, when you realize that what came before was prelude. Old friends and mentors—you shed them like baby teeth and you’re free. Jones became a regular presence at Korner’s apartment. He’d been taken under the wing—to be trained in the dark arts. Alexis escorted him to clubs, introduced him around, jammed with him. In the wee hours, Brian, who slept on the couch, worked his way through Korner’s encyclopedic record collection. The big moment came when he happened across Elmore James’s “The Sky Is Crying,” a song driven by a single-string guitar solo that fades into a slide. It blew him away, as it will blow you away if you come across it on a night when you are feeling sorry for yourself. It’s haunting, strange. It’s like the cry of a killer on his lonesome getaway, the lament of a man who’s blown his last chance. It’s not just music you hear—it’s the studio where it was recorded, Chicago, the elevated trains and tenements, the factories, the migrants who ascend to heaven each night and return to hell each morning. It was a new sound for Brian, a new tone. It was like discovering a color he never knew existed. When he got back to Cheltenham, he told his girlfriend, “Elmore James is the most important discovery I’ve ever made in my life.”

Brian taught himself to play the slide guitar with the neck of an old Coke bottle, then with a knife. As neither approximated Elmore’s sound, he switched to a length of steel tubing he found in a scrap heap on the outskirts. It was the last thing Cheltenham gave Brian, who quit the town soon after. He moved to London in 1961 and lived with Korner until he found a place. He got a job and a new girlfriend, whom he soon impregnated. Child number three. He played in blues bands at night, including Thunder Odin’s Big Secret, with Paul Jones. When Mick and Keith saw Brian at the Ealing Club, he was already an established figure, the Cheltenham Shagger, a rising star on the scene. But the pace quickened when he got together the new band. They rehearsed four or five times a week. Brian was the best musician. He taught the others how to play. Keith had a handful of licks down cold but was otherwise green. He now describes his work with Ron Wood as an “ancient form of weaving,” two guitar lines turning around each other like strands in a double helix, but that began with Brian Jones demonstrating, explaining: you’re the rhythm; you establish the floor, the beat beneath the song; I’m the lead; I carry the melody in the way of a singer—for what is the guitar if not a human voice? Brian instructed Jagger, too. “I’d just met Brian at the [Ealing] club,” drummer Ginger Baker said later. “He’d just got together with Mick Jagger and they were going to play the interval. Alexis asked Jack Bruce, Johnny Parker, and myself if we could help them out. I didn’t like Jagger, but we agreed. It was really quite amusing. Jack and I got into some pretty complicated time patterns with the evil intent of throwing Jagger. And it worked! Then, to my surprise, Brian went over and stood beside Mick and shouted, ‘One, two, three, four,’ showing Mick where the beat was!”

On another occasion, when Jagger was struggling with the harp, Jones “pulled his harmonica out of his pocket and said, ‘Mick, I think you should play it this way,’ ” Pat Andrews, Brian’s girlfriend at the time, said. “I’ll never forget the look on Mick’s face. It was like, ‘Oh, shit. What else can this guy do?’ ”

Brian was the band’s spirit. It was his vision, his dream: a blues engine—two guitars, a backbeat, amplified harp, a singer on his knees. They played their first show July 12, 1962, at the Marquee in Soho—a last-minute fill-in for Blues Incorporated, who had to skip their regular Thursday night gig to appear on the BBC. The notice appeared in Jazz News on July 11. “R&B Vocalist” Mick Jagger will perform at the Marquee Club with his band—“Keith Richards and Elmo Lewis (guitars), Dick Taylor (bass), Ian Stewart (piano) and Mick Avory (drums)…the Rollin’ Stones.”

Jones had come up with the name when the reporter asked, “What do you call your band?” Panicked, he looked here and there till his eyes fixed on the back of an LP, The Best of Muddy Waters. Side one, song five: “Rollin’ Stone,” Muddy’s version of “Catfish Blues.” Though coined on the fly, the lyric did express the swagger Brian had in mind for his group: “I got a boy child’s comin’/ He’s gonna be, he’s gonna be a rollin’ stone.”

As for the personnel at that first show, there’s disagreement. Brian, Mick, Keith, Ian Stewart, and Dick Taylor—that much is agreed. But who was on drums? Jazz News said it was Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, but Avory says he never played with the Stones. “It’s a big mystery,” Dick Taylor told me. “Stones fans obsess over it. Who the hell was drumming at the very first gig? I always thought it was Charlie Watts. Then it got around, ‘No, it wasn’t Charlie Watts, it was Mick Avory.’ Only trouble is, Mick Avory denies it. So in the last few years it’s been like, who, who? No one seems to know. Upon reflection, I think it might well have been Mick Avory. I speak from experience about memory. There’s whole years I can’t remember.”

Ian Stewart wrote the set list in his diary. It reads like code. It tells you who the Stones loved, what they wanted to be. They opened with “Kansas City,” a Leiber and Stoller song that had been a number one hit for Wilbert Harrison in 1959. Leiber and Stoller, the composers of “Hound Dog” and “Poison Ivy,” were brilliant white mimics of the black sound. From the first song at the first show, the Stones were therefore neither black nor white—they were black and white, a mash-up, covering the hit of a black artist composed by white writers who’d been imitating still other black artists. The band went on to play a score of tunes, including “Honey What’s Wrong,” “Hush, Hush,” “Ride ’Em Down,” “Up All Night,” “Bad Boy,” “Tell Me That You Love Me,” “I Want to Love You,” and Chuck Berry’s “Back in the USA.” They closed with the Elmore James number “Happy Home.” Melody Maker dismissed the show as consisting of little more than “well-meaning but interminable songs about share croppers.” “If I had known Jagger and company were going to play R&B the way they did,” Harry Pendleton, who owned the Marquee, said later, “I would never have booked them.”