9

GIORGIO!

And here comes Giorgio Gomelsky! In a floor-length black coat and skinny jazz tie, goatee, handlebar mustache, leather boots and suspenders, cigarettes and a cackling Middle European laugh! Tall and skinny, gaunt, with cavernous eyes. He bounds into this book as he bounded through London, spreading fantastic stories of faraway places, tyrants and czars, Nazis and opium dens. He chats, befriends, listens, hugs, and hums, shuffling to an internal beat that’s driven him across the Continent in search of an authentic sound, a music that will finally flush out the last memory of war. If you followed him around a room, you’d see people light up in his wake. He made everyone feel included, a citizen of his special nation. His smile changed the weather. And his voice? Well, once, years ago, when I asked the talk show host Larry King how, though being a froggish man, he’d been able to romance so many beautiful women, he said, “Never underestimate the power of the voice.” Giorgio Gomelsky had a voice like that, syrupy, yet punctuated with the percussive consonants of the Warsaw Pact.

When he turned twenty-eight in 1962, he was at peak energy, on a mission from God. He wanted to spread the music he loved, the sound of black America, which, when he was living under a military curfew in France as a boy, breached the walls via American Armed Forces Radio—a pure expression of freedom. He’d been born in Tbilisi, Georgia (the country, that is, which at that time was part of the Soviet Union), but the family drifted. Syria. Egypt. Italy. Switzerland. He began subscribing to British music newspapers after the war, following the scene at a distance. He moved to London in 1955. Harry Pendleton hired him to make a film about Chris Barber in 1962, but Giorgio became convinced the future lay not with the aficionados but with the kids who made Pendleton want to puke. He rented a room in back of the Station Hotel in Richmond, a swank London neighborhood, and began putting on shows every Sunday.

One night, because of a tremendous snowfall, Giorgio’s house band, an early version of the Kinks called the Dave Hunt R&B Band, had to cancel. As he scrambled for a replacement, Giorgio called Ian Stewart—Brian Jones had been hounding him for a gig. An hour later, the Stones were setting up onstage. The snow was still coming down, the streets deserted. No more than a handful of people turned out. Gomelsky puts the number at three. When Brian asked, “What should we do?” Giorgio said, “What do you mean? Play!” You don’t punish the people who showed up for the sins of those who stayed home.

Afterward, Giorgio asked each member of the audience to return the following Sunday with two friends. Which they did. This process was repeated until, a few months later, the shows were packed. By then, the Stones had taken over as house band. “At first, most of this new audience was boys, blues fans, and collectors,” Gomelsky said later. “Some were budding musicians. Like the soon-to-be Yardbirds and Eric Clapton, who often showed up with hard-to-find albums under their arms, [but] word of mouth worked like a dream. The place got so popular people had to stand in line from two o’clock in the afternoon to get into the place five hours later.” In this way, Giorgio’s club became a landmark, as important to rock ’n’ roll as Café Wha? or Max’s Kansas City in New York. As the Cavern Club gave us the Beatles, the Station Hotel would give us the Rolling Stones. “At Richmond we became a cult in a way,” Charlie Watts said. “Not because of us—it just happened. We followed the audience, then the audience followed us.”

The room was licensed for a hundred people but Giorgio crammed in three or four times that many. “One night, when the band was really giving out, I signaled my friend and assistant Hamish Grimes to get up on a table so everyone would see him, and start waving his arms over his head,” Giorgio said. “Within seconds the whole crowd was undulating. This was perhaps the single most important event in the development of the Stones’ ability to build a link between stage and floor, to connect and become joined to an audience, to bring about something resembling a tribal ritual, not ‘unlike a revivalist meeting in the deep South,’ [as a journalist said].” Black-and-white film of this dance is often shown in documentaries about Swinging London, as if it alone tells the story. Because the dance was usually performed during the Stones’ cover of Bo Diddley’s “Crawdad,” it came to be known as the Crawdad, as did the room itself.

The Crawdaddy was a furnace in which the Stones cooked to perfection. Everyone who saw them there remembers it vividly. “There was a very low stage, a foot or two high,” Ian McLagan told me. “You could stand in front, watching their hands, studying how they did it. Brian played that slide guitar. Oh my God! I’d never heard anything like it. We were astounded. Keith? We never looked at him. He was over there. Bill was stationary. You couldn’t hear [Ian Stewart]. It was Brian and Mick. Mick, who would lean over the crowd and tease us and get us going. Nobody else was playing that sort of music in England. Not like that. Chuck Berry, fuckin’ Jimmy Reed….The whole place used to throb. I’d get drunk on two pints and wait for them to play ‘Route 66.’ They wouldn’t play it till the end. It was fuckin’ amazing. Watching them, we were all thinking the same thing: ‘Maybe I can do that.’ ”

If you love music, you probably had a night like that, a place like that, a bar and a band that blew you away. For me, it was Dash Rip Rock at Carrollton Station in New Orleans in 1988. Dash, who played a variety of music they called “cowpunk,” descended, in a roundabout way, from the Stones, though I did not know it at the time. All I cared about was the energy of the musicians and the crowd, the communion. It was transcendent, being packed in, swaying together, greeting each song with recognition, drunk but clear, the music working as the prayers never did. I especially liked Dash’s rockabilly version of the Hank Williams gospel song “I Saw the Light.” I’d been at Jazz Fest all day, cooking in the sun. I was angry at my girlfriend, or she was angry at me. I’d driven her BMW along the streetcar tracks into a tree. I was wearing a shirt that said I DRINK, THEREFORE I AM. But I forgot all that when they played that song, which burned into me like a brand. If you’re lucky enough to see a show like that when you’re nineteen, you’ll never be the same.