14

FIRST LICKS

George Gershwin wrote his early melodies at the family piano on the West Side of Manhattan. Jack Kerouac banged out On the Road at his mother’s house in New Jersey. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards did their first composing in their London flat—33 Mapesbury Road, Chelsea—where Andrew Oldham had locked them in with the admonition: “Don’t come out without a song.”

Oldham did not understand the absurdity. “I was not a songwriter,” Keith told me. “I played guitar. I stood on the stage. But Andrew didn’t know that.” Mick and Keith were performers, not composers. They played traditional numbers that developed by accretion, in the way of a rubber-band ball, new material added to old material until it became impressive and strange. A song like “Stagger Lee” does not belong to anyone. It’s a found object. It washed up on the shore. Writing an original blues song would therefore be a forgery—a new work made to sound old. A fake.

Why did Oldham insist?

It really had to do with the blues catalog, that pool of numbers the Stones could draw on for their records. Oldham believed the band had already used most of the songs that could cross over as pop hits. That’s why he’d had to wrangle that second single from Lennon and McCartney. What’s more, creating originals, owning the publishing, was the obvious next step. The Beatles had changed the rules: a band had to write songs. Bob Dylan made it even more important. It was about authenticity. A singer singing his own words is an artist; a singer covering someone else’s words is an actor.

Why did Oldham tap Mick and Keith to write that first song, a decision that would upset the dynamic of the band? There were five Stones, after all, six if you included Ian Stewart. Mick and Keith were not even the logical choice. It was Brian who had started the group, spoke to the press, had the burning sense of mission. Oldham later said it was because he’d seen Mick and Keith arranging in the studio, thus knew they could write. But you should also consider proximity. In 1964, Oldham had moved in with Jagger and Richards. When he decided to order up an original tune, Mick and Keith were close at hand. Geography is destiny. Besides, Brian was too pure. His staunch defense of traditional blues made him less willing to write the kind of material needed. What would be a challenge for Mick and Keith would reek of sellout to Jones. There was also the matter of talent. According to Oldham, Brian just didn’t have it. He prospered when musicianship was everything, but struggled when writing became paramount.

Jagger and Richards were not natural writers in the way of Lennon and McCartney, who would’ve been composers in any era. Having come to it as a result of a demand, they made their way by trial and error. Their early songs tended to be ballads—“It Should Be You,” “That Girl Belongs to Yesterday”—entirely inappropriate for the image Oldham had crafted for the Stones. Oldham farmed these early compositions out to other clients. The first Jagger/Richards tune to break the Top Ten was “As Tears Go By” by Marianne Faithfull. It took Mick and Keith months to figure out how to write for their own group. The breakthrough came not from imitating the blues but from emulating the approach of the blues musicians, whose lyrics achieved power by including the particulars of their lives. Whereas pop writers tended to linger on the universal—love and heartache—the bluesmen named names, clubs and taverns, certain women in certain towns. When Robert Nighthawk sings, “I went down to Eli’s, to get my pistol out of pawn,” you can see the blood that will flow on Maxwell Street. It was only when Mick and Keith began plugging in their rock star particulars that their sound emerged.

They were reluctant to bring one of their own tunes into the studio. “It was not like fooling somebody in Tin Pan Alley and letting them add a nice arrangement,” Keith said later. “We had to lay this song on the Stones. We hoped Charlie wasn’t going to kick us out of the room and that we’d get a smile of approval rather than a slight frown or that look of confusion that is even worse than an outright ‘No way.’ ”

“Tell Me” was the first Stones original, brought to the others eight months after Oldham had reportedly locked Mick and Keith in the kitchen on Mapesbury Road. Keith opens the song on a twelve-string guitar. Then Charlie on the big drum. Then Mick, that lazy drawl:

You said we were through before

You walked out on me before

You want to read personal details into it, Mick and Keith, the unprecedented lives of young rock stars, but it’s not the lyric that you remember. It’s the purple menace behind the words, Keith and Brian singing in the background, the guitars, the cacophony of a great bar band. The production is rudimentary, homemade—as if ruffians had broken into the studio—which gives the single the sort of power the Sex Pistols and the Clash would achieve a decade later. Released in February 1964, “Tell Me” was the first Stones song to break into the American Billboard Hot 100.

The Jagger/Richards process was already in place. A Stones song usually begins with a riff, a three- or four-note sequence that Richards cooks up on guitar. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” “Beast of Burden.” “Start Me Up.” Keith’s ability to devise a seemingly infinite number of indelible licks has been one of the miracles of rock ’n’ roll. He’d goof with it for weeks or months, add chords, and record it on his portable tape machine. “I can’t write a note of music,” he explained, “but neither could most of the best songwriters of the last fifty years.” After appending a characteristic phrase—say, “Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday”—he’d hand it off to Jagger, who filled in the rest: lyrics, bridge, everything.

It’s impossible to name a single Keith Richards antecedent, but certain precursors stand out. It was Chuck Berry who established the pop electric-guitar tune. In a sense, every Stones riff is just a play on Berry’s greatest songs: “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Carol,” “Brown Eyed Handsome Man.” “Even his leads are rhythm,” Richards told Interview in 1988. “It’s all two-string stuff, beautiful….Chuck Berry’s solos take off as an extension of his rhythm work without losing the drive or point of the song.” Of course, Chuck Berry did not invent his style from scratch. His tricks were elaborations on other artists, instruments, genres. In him, you hear the saxophone solos of Louis Jordan and the playful fills of his own pianist, Otis Spann, as well as the guitarist T-Bone Walker, who learned to play on the streets of Dallas, Texas, early in the twentieth century from Blind Lemon Jefferson, who might well have invented country blues. You feel all this history in the best of the Stones: the peripatetic lives, the juke joints, the riverbank where the blind man sings beside the boy. “Everybody passes it on,” said Richards. “If Chuck passed it to me, for instance, who turned Chuck on? Louis Jordan and Nat King Cole. Who turned Nat King Cole on?…It goes back and back and back, probably to Adam and Eve.”

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As Mick and Keith’s songwriting proficiency increased, Brian’s confidence decreased. Bill Wyman said the band’s power structure began to change as soon as Jagger and Richards brought that first song into the studio. When Brian tried to respond with songs of his own, they were dismissed. Oldham had decided: Jagger and Richards were the writers.

“They won’t even listen to anything of mine,” Jones told James Phelge.

According to Oldham, Brian’s songs were just not good enough. That is, he did not fail because he was rejected; he was rejected because he failed. Oldham even brought in an American singer and composer who’d had hits in the 1950s to work with Brian. But it didn’t help. Brian Jones simply could not write a pop tune.

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Richards considers “The Last Time,” recorded in the spring of 1965, the first real Stones song. It has all the elements that would become characteristic: the opening riff, the groove, and the subject matter, which is lowdown and particular. Yet if “The Last Time” is not a cover, it’s as close as you can get without ending up in court, closely mimicking the Staple Singers’ version of the gospel song “This May Be the Last Time.” Keith reworked it, adding steel and speed. In this way, the Stones broke through via cover, tracing so far outside the lines that an old song became new. But the signature movement remains the same, the decrescendo, the lament of the vocal declining from verse to chorus: “This could be the last time, this could be the last time, maybe the last time, I don’t know.” The biggest change was lyrical, an adjustment that replicated a broader shift from church music to rock ’n’ roll. A hymn about Jesus and Judgment Day had become a pop song about girls and teenage comeuppance. It’s why preachers assigned this music to a special circle of hell. Hammond organs and hand claps, call-and-response—defining tics of rock ’n’ roll had been swiped from the house of God, dragged from the altar into the street.