8

EDITH GROVE

In the late 1980s, I lived with a half-dozen friends in a house on a side street near Tulane University in New Orleans. Most of my housemates had dropped out of school. A few had come for the orientation but never enrolled. They’d gone to the French Quarter, turned around twice, and were lost forever. Everyone had a guitar. They’d sit on the porch playing Lefty Frizzell songs as the streetcar went by. In the morning, you could smell the Mississippi River, the unprocessed bile, the innards of America vomiting into the Gulf. It must’ve once been a beautiful house, but, like us, had been allowed to dilapidate. There were rotten dormers and eaves, a weedy carport glistening in the tropical rain. Rats scampered along the power lines and the trash cans overflowed with empties. A thin narcotic haze hung over everything. I saw a kid named Travis, attempting to get off a couch, punch a hole in it with his elbow, then puke into the hole. I saw a cockroach nailed to a wall under the words “He died for your sins.”

In the mornings, we spoke in the mock-heroic way of characters in John Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat. At night, we went to hear music. The jazz band at Preservation Hall. Walter Wolfman Washington at the Maple Leaf. Jerry Jeff Walker at Tipitina’s. A friend of mine knocked on Charles Neville’s door and asked if he could interview him for a school paper on Mardi Gras Indians. The musician sighed and said, “Yes, but first we smoke-um peace pipe.”

Though there were arguments and rivalries, we considered ourselves brothers, a gathering of Huck Finns who’d broken from the bourgeois path and were making our own way, though most of us were in fact proceeding in a rather orderly fashion toward prescribed destinies. We spoke in a secret language made of terms picked up in French Quarter bars, from the most degenerate of the regulars, from movies and songs, or invented from scratch. Rotgut alcohol was “blue ruin.” An especially reckless spree was a “death tango.” If you were clueless we’d call you a Melvin or a Marty. If you were in possession of that kind of understanding that seemed like the key to everything, we’d call you keek.

Then we left—some to Texas, some to California, some to New York. I never spoke to any of them again. It was as if we’d been conspirators in a crime. Or just forgot. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than a party. It’s what you’d do if you did not have to wake up, pay bills, or be anywhere. Only later did I realize that we’d actually been doing something important in that house—shifting from the lives our parents made for us to those we’d make for ourselves. I’m not a Masai warrior. I never went on a night ramble or a sacred hunt. Nor am I a Sioux from the Black Hills. No sweat lodge for me, no vision quest. I’m an American born in Illinois after World War II and before the Internet: my rite of passage was my sojourn on Cromwell Place in New Orleans, getting hammered, making vows, debauching my way to transcendence. Search the past of many Americans and you’ll find a version of that house, a place where they let themselves go, sought justice, and made promises they could never keep. I mention it only to draw attention to the flat where Mick, Keith, and Brian lived from the fall of 1962 to the summer of 1963, where they drank, listened, played, vomited, argued, and became the Rolling Stones.

—

Number 302 Edith Grove is a three-story townhouse on the edge of Chelsea in London. The Stones lived on the second floor: two parlors, a kitchen, a bedroom in back. It cost seventeen pounds a month, most of it paid by Jagger, who was receiving a college stipend. He split time between classes, the flat, and his parents’ house in Dartford, where he’d retreat to wash clothes and recover. Keith had left home. Brian had been kicked out by his girlfriend—not the one who’d given birth to his third child, but yet another woman. He moved into Edith Grove soon after. There was a shared bathroom, but no central heat. Decades later Mick and Keith were still talking about how cold they’d been at Edith Grove—coats and blankets, newspaper shoved between long johns and trousers for insulation, the blue flame of the kerosene burner. The boys snuggled for warmth, sharing a bed like the aunts and uncles in Willie Wonka. Filth and stench—a scene familiar to anyone who’s ever been in a fraternity house. Boys without parents. No law, no rules. Garbage in the hallways, puke in the sinks, trash out the windows. Now and then, they came home to find the landlord in the entry, shaking his head.

At some point, they decided they needed a roommate to help shoulder the costs. Mick made an announcement during a show. Later, as the Stones were putting away their gear, a shy young man appeared before them. Mick explained the situation, gave the address. James Phelge turned up with his suitcase a few days later. He has since become a myth. Having neither the talent nor desire to succeed as a musician, he made his name by grotesque outrage. It was Phelge who went through the rooms naked, peed down the stairs, spat on the walls. A stand-in for fans, an eyewitness to the band in its first home, which he chronicled in his memoir Nankering with the Rolling Stones: The Untold Story of the Early Days. “Nankering” was their term for making faces—faces of a particular kind, lower lip thrust over teeth, eyes bugged out. If you look at old pictures of the band, you’ll see many in which the Stones are nankering. When they began to write music, the songs composed in the studio by the entire group were credited to James Phelge. When they formed a corporation, they called it Nanker Phelge, after the civilian who represented the crude spirit of the band in infancy.

According to Phelge, the Stones’ principal pastime in those months was hanging around, keeping alive. They slept late, then spent the day searching for warmth, sustenance. They lived on potatoes and beer. They stole food from stores and scavenged parties for empty bottles, which they returned for the deposit. That’s how they made the rent. “Mick, Keith, and Brian were starving,” Ian Stewart said. “Bill and I were buying them food with what little money was left out of our wages. I used to go there straight from work at about six, and they’d still be in bed. When Bill and I arrived we would take them around to the Wimpy Bar for something to eat.”

“Keith and I had grown into the habit of going to bed at around midnight,” Phelge writes. “We would stick a pile of singles on the record player and lay there listening to them and making comments. It was always the same selection of records…‘Donna’ by Ritchie Valens, Jerry Lee’s ‘Ballad of Billy Joe,’ Ketty Lester’s ‘Love Letters,’ Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’ and Jimmy Reed’s ‘Goin’ by the River.’ ”

Life at the house was about listening to music and learning to play together. Brian and Keith would keep at it for hours. Bewitched by the Everly Brothers—“Wake Up Little Susie,” “Love Is Strange”—they’d spend weeks perfecting a single song. Every few days, a new record would arrive by mail: Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley. The Stones passed it around, carefully examining the cover, the liner notes. Eventually, they’d put it on the turntable. If a song moved them, they’d add it to their show.

The tensions that would trouble the band later were already evident. Jones was moody. Jagger was aloof. His insistence on continuing at school raised doubts. The way he sneaked off to class each morning as Jones and Richards slept suggested a certain craftiness. He was hedging, keeping both paths open. Jagger did not quit school till the fall of 1963, by which time the Stones were on their way. And even then, he took a leave of absence, just in case. It irritated Richards, who’s a rock ’n’ roll Cortés: Burn the boats! “Keith is a man of belief, and Mick is a man of fear…‘What if I fuck up?’ ” Alexis Korner said. “It’s a lot easier to be like Keith than it is to be like Mick.”

The Stones lived at Edith Grove for less than a year, but the experience resonates. Because it was the cradle, because we all had a place like that. If you go there today, you’ll see the same house, the same stoop, the same faded rooms, but it feels diminished, like a body without a soul.

—

Meanwhile, the Stones were playing almost every night. Eel Pie Island. The Flamingo. The Railway Club in Harrow. A cover band of the most brilliant variety: it was not their musicianship you trusted, but their taste. When I complimented Charlie Watts on the band’s creativity, he frowned and asked, “Where are you from?”

“Chicago.”

He laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“Well, I’ll tell you. All we’ve ever done is play a version of Chicago music. It’s all we wanted to do. In other words, you have had to travel, musically speaking, all the way to England just to hear your own music. I find that funny.”

But even in the beginning, the Stones were doing more than cover and copy. That’s indeed what they intended to do, but it’s not what they accomplished. In attempting to mimic the Chicago blues, they created something distinct, unique to them, in the way that no matter what Frank Sinatra sings, it becomes a Frank Sinatra song. When the Stones played Chuck Berry, it sounded like the Stones. In trying to imitate their heroes, they infused the songs with their own experiences and personalities and invented something new.

—

The Stones first heard the Beatles in the winter of 1962, while living at Edith Grove. Phelge called them into the parlor to listen to the BBC, which was playing “Love Me Do,” the Beatles’ debut single, released on Parlophone, where the Beatles had signed after being rejected by Decca. According to Phelge, Brian and Mick panicked. The lyrics were bubblegum, but the music hit like a hammer. It was everything the Stones were working for.

Jones: “Oh, no. Listen to that. They’re doing it!”

Richards: “Hang on, let’s hear the guitar.”

Jones: “They’ve got harmonies, too! It’s just what we didn’t want.”

Phelge: “What’s the problem?”

Richards: “Can’t you hear? They’re using a harmonica—they’ve beaten us to it.”

Jones: “They’re into the same blues thing as us.”

Keith later said that “Love Me Do” caused him physical pain. The shock was less musical than philosophical; it was Robinson Crusoe discovering footprints in the sand. “We thought we were totally unique animals,” Jagger said in 1988, while inducting the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. “Then we heard there was a group from Liverpool…this group…they had long hair, scruffy clothes, but they [also] had a record contract and a record in the charts with a bluesy harmonica on it called ‘Love Me Do.’ When I heard the combination of all these things, I was almost sick.”

Every band in London was unmoored by “Love Me Do” and the string of Beatles hits that followed: “From Me to You,” “She Loves You,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Here were the Stones, the Kinks, and the Yardbirds paying their dues in the capital, when, out of nowhere, they’re beaten to the prize by provincials—Liverpool being to London what Pittsburgh is to New York City. It presented dozens of musicians with the same question: Is there room for another British blues band, or have the Beatles done it?

It would have been easier if the Beatles had been popular but not good, like so many Top Forty acts. But the Beatles were popular and great. Every aspect of their sound was polished, perfect…it was intimidating. Some people were convinced they must’ve had help. When I spoke to Paul Jones, he talked about this while explaining the seismic shock registered by the first Parlophone sides. “John Lennon was much better on the harp than people realize,” he told me. “He was so good, in fact, that I suspect that it wasn’t him on that first record. I even have a theory. Delbert McClinton was in [England] in 1962. He’d come for a short tour and one of the gigs was at the Adelphi Theatre in Slough, a town where I happened to be playing with a dance band. I was a fan of Little Walter, Sonny Boy Williamson, and a bunch of other guys. But when I heard Delbert play harmonica I thought he was as good as any of them. Now, it’s a known fact that the Beatles also went to see Delbert McClinton. So, when I heard ‘Love Me Do,’ I thought, ‘You’ve sneaked Delbert McClinton into the studio! You know you have, you little buggers!’ ”

In the end, the success of the Beatles would prove a boon for all British bands, even those who resented them. It was the Beatles who showed the record executives that the kids in the clubs were something more than the detritus of an evening tide.