“No one expected it to go on and on and on. It just got bigger and bigger. It took over our lives.”
BILL WYMAN
By the fall of 1963, the revolutionary and self-indulgent exuberance in Britain was giving way to a new reality for youth’s prophets: success, fame, and notoriety. But these came at a price—responsibility, hard work, and the loss of innocence. The evolution raised their expectations, and hormones could only get them so far. Commercial demands and a new careerism took the form of ambition—something this generation had once eschewed.
Bill Wyman: By autumn ’63 we’d only made two singles. No album. The first one, “Come On,” went to number 20. “I Wanna Be Your Man” went to number 12. That’s all we had. We were a big band for the public, but no clout, no backup, no history.
The Beatles had number ones. We were better and more exciting than other bands, so we outsold everyone for the live shows. Except for the Beatles.
We got the same crowd as went to the Beatles. We were on tour when that second single [“I Wanna Be Your Man”] came out.
Peter Brown: They were boys, they were such kids. I mean, in 1963, George [Harrison] would have been only nineteen. Andrew [Loog Oldham] was nineteen in 1963 when he took on managing the Stones, and he’d already worked for Brian. We were doing all our own stuff, and Terry O’Neill was taking all the pictures. There were no boundaries.
You should talk to David Puttnam—he’s now a lord. He was a boy from the suburbs of London. I remember him telling me the story that because he didn’t speak properly or appropriately that he was always in the back office, and when this thing happened in 1963, he was put in the front of the office because he was “cool.” He was in the advertising field when it blew up so he was very much aware of the changes because he was watching.
Terry O’Neill: Advertising was very quick to pick up on the sudden changes in society. Some big names, like David Puttnam, Ridley Scott, Alan Parker, all cut their teeth in advertising and went on to do great things in other creative areas.
One minute you are young and insignificant, the next that youth makes you an asset. In 1962 the Sunday Times in London started a weekly color supplement. It was a bit of a disaster at first but by 1963 it was suddenly the coolest magazine on the planet. You’d have a Jean Shrimpton fashion shoot followed by a photo essay from some African war zone followed by a profile of a hip young band followed by a piece on furniture design or an investigation of life behind the Iron Curtain—all this was revelatory at the time, all designed in a very hip, cool way.
The clever agencies picked up on this new opportunity to make advertisements conform and reach out to the new audience. So if you were selling a washing machine, you didn’t pose a middle-class housewife next to it, you found an artistic fun way of selling it. And the agencies needed to mine the mind-set of young people.
Lord David Puttnam [film producer]: I was twenty-two in 1963. I’d left school at sixteen, and I was an assistant account exec at the advertising agency Collett Dickenson Pearce & Partners. In 1963 I was earning twelve hundred pounds a year, which wasn’t bad. I was married with a one-year-old daughter and living in a rented two-bedroom flat. We had a Dansette [record] player and some 45 rpm records, a black-and-white television set, a radio, and a Grundig tape recorder on which I recorded and played back music off the radio.
I had a white suit and longish hair, but generally they kept me hidden away, until one day the office door opened and there was the head of the agency showing some clients around, and he said, “And this is our young man.”
Sir Alan Parker: I was very “under-read” in 1963, and was continually reminded of this by my smarter, older colleagues, whose quotes I couldn’t reference—so I had a lot of catching up to do. However, by mid-1963 I could comfortably quote Yossarian’s witticisms in Catch 22 and Alex’s ultraviolence in A Clockwork Orange, and I even knew the ending of The Ipcress File before the film came out.
David Ogilvy’s Confessions of an Advertising Man [a how-to book] was required reading for us young advertising turks in our Brooks Brothers button-down shirts and wide-welted brogues. We were a long way from Madison Avenue, but at least we looked the part. We spouted his aphorisms in the toilets and in the pub. We were particularly fond of “If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys” and “People are more productive when they drink.” “Two or three brandies improves my copy no end.” This, of course, became the mantra for an entire generation of advertising folk.
Lord David Puttnam: Suddenly, youth was fashionable; the bosses wanted to show us off. Looking back, that’s when it became apparent something was happening, that 1963 was a pivotal year. The world was changing, and changing in our favor. We mattered. Nineteen sixty-three was the greatest year of my life. I was working with Terry Duffy, the Vogue fashion photographer, David Bailey, Tony and Ridley Scott.
Sir Alan Parker: David Bailey was the epitome of “working-class Cockney boy made good,” and I had his photographs taped to my wall in Islington.
Suddenly it was OK to have an accent, which until then had denoted class and stuck you at the bottom of society. Traditionally, if you spoke [with an accent] you had to be thick. All this changed, not least of all because of the Beatles, who made not just Scouse [slang for people from Liverpool] and their dialect, but all regional accents, acceptable and even attractive.
Also, I was lucky to land in advertising, which was a new and an entirely egalitarian business. In advertising, no one cared about accents in the creative department. No one cared if you had a degree. All that mattered was the portfolio and how good the work was. My contemporaries, like David Puttnam and Charles Saatchi, were all misfits who were not conventionally schooled but soon caught up.
The account executives in advertising were a different breed, and being posh was a prerequisite. They had to meet the clients, after all, who were kept away from us oiks [people of a lower class]. Many account men were ex-army officers, so it must have been odd for them, as the creative department would have been decidedly “other ranks,” but now we were suddenly in charge.
Considering my eventual profession, I don’t remember too many epiphanies at the cinema in 1963. I was not a smart film student. I had tried to catch up with the art stuff I’d missed, and was urged by the senior creatives in the agency to see Fellini’s 8 1/2, which was too clever for me. Similarly, the social realism British films of that year seemed very unreal: This Sporting Life and Billy Liar. This Sporting Life was particularly baffling, as it seemed to have very little accuracy to the North, the working class, or, indeed, sport. Mind you, I did see Lawrence of Arabia three times, which probably made up for my lack of inspiration elsewhere.
Terry O’Neill: I don’t remember going to the cinema much in 1963. That’s what moms and dads did on a Saturday night, or we used to do with a girlfriend. I remember photographing Elizabeth Taylor on the set of Cleopatra, which was premiered in 1963, but by then we had clubs to go listening to bands and hanging out. A lot of the young bands were breaking into the established touring scene where promoters would package acts and take them around the country. Mainly they had been American middle-of-the-road mainstream acts, but the British bands like the Stones were getting on the bill too.
Norman Jopling: The Everly Brothers were touring the UK that autumn, and Don Arden [Sharon Osbourne’s father] was the promoter. He brought over Bo Diddley, hired the Rolling Stones for their first major tour, and filled the cracks with Mickie Most. It still wasn’t enough. When ticket sales for the first few dates looked disappointing, he brought over Little Richard to share top billing.
Chrissie Most: Mickie was producing as well as playing. We’d booked the studio for the Animals, but we still had to pay the rent. We began touring with Don Arden, Mickie Most, and the Motormen. We used to drive in the Porsche. Mick Jagger would ask for a lift back to London to see his girlfriend—then it was Chrissie Shrimpton, the sister of Jean, the model. We got him in the back of the Porsche, somehow—it was a two-seater. After we dropped him off Mickie said, “Shame that boy is so ugly.”
“No way,” I said. “He is sexy.”
“Sexy?” he screamed.
We had murders [heated arguments]. Mick had a bad complexion but he still had sex appeal. Andrew Loog Oldham was a brilliant manager and saw that Mick had that and [Andrew] played it up. Girls screamed for the Stones but they also screamed for Mick, and he started to play it up himself onstage.
Don Arden had paid a fortune for the Everly Brothers, and Bo Diddley was a big draw, but Don didn’t need them once he’d sold the tickets, so he organized people who screamed for the Rolling Stones and he got others to boo the Everly Brothers offstage.
Georgie Fame: I played a few gigs for Don Arden, but he never gave me a hard time because my manager was harder than him.
Norman Jopling: Every week of the tour, each of the Rolling Stones wrote a longish column for New Record Mirror. Mick reported “Little Richard played to two packed houses and drove the whole audience into a frenzy. . . . [H]is hypnotic hold on the audience was reminiscent of an evangelist meeting. . . .”
Next came Bill: “We took a day off to record our new single, which the Beatles offered us some weeks ago. Brian plays steel guitar on “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and it is an entirely new sound for a British disc. . . . Our new van arrived last week and already it has been attacked by eager fans, and bits and pieces disappear every night.”
Keith: “We should like to thank the girls who sent us the cigarettes. Brian announced he has given up smoking—in fact he has only given up buying them. . . .”
Charlie summed things up: “Mickie Most always gives a tremendous opening. . . .”
Charlie was right: Mickie Most was a tremendous opener, a good all-rounder, and a convincing rock and roller. Mickie was a shrewd, likable guy—he’d been around since the late fifties, cut singles for Decca as the Most Brothers. But no chart action. Then he met a South African girl, Chrissie, and decided to try his luck there. Mickie managed to notch up eleven straight number ones in a row in South Africa.
Mickie was now doing something similar to what Andrew Loog Oldham had pioneered—producing his own records and selling them to the major companies. He added that he wanted to be a producer of good records. His wish would shortly come true, in spades.
Keith Richards: The Everly Brothers and Little Richard and Bo Diddley. That was an education. Six weeks on the road. Superb!
We had just come out the clubs. We could barely hack it. But we had this great groundswell, and we ended up finishing the show by the time it got back to London. The Everly Brothers said, “You better finish the show. It’s your time.” But listening to Little Richard, listening to him every day, and Bo Diddley, especially—so superbly professional, and those voices like angels.
Andrew Loog Oldham: Keith is quite right when he says that tour was like going to university, I mean, come on, six weeks with Bo Diddley, the Everly Brothers, it was great. Mickie Most was an act on that tour. He and the Stones were bottom of the bill. They were only getting fifty pounds a night on the tour, so it’s less than ten pounds a night each. They got to pay for bed and breakfast, getting around in a van which Ian Stewart was driving—except Brian, the parents of his girlfriend would lend him their car.
There was no money, remember this: even if you sold a record, the way the record companies had the contracts is you got paid in about a year, and then if you happen to be selling any records in France and Belgium or anything like that, you wouldn’t get that for eighteen months. And the Stones hadn’t written any songs.
Bill Wyman: The Everly Brothers were booed. Masses of fans were there to see us. They didn’t like the Everly Brothers anymore. A great shame, as they were magnificent. We came out the heroes. The press said we were fantastic.
Keith Richards: Unbelievable! We were playing black music and being black cats. We learned how to play the audience a little bit, we just got to hang in the rafters and watch Little Richard and Bo Diddley get off and we’d say, “We learned a bit today.”
We would crawl high up in the theater. These were all old cinemas—two-thousand seaters. We’d find a way up, look at the stage and watch Little Richard—he was outrageous. He is one of our greatest friends. I always got great encouragement from those guys. They starred, but backstage that’s where we learned what counts from them.
What goes on onstage is one thing, but what goes on backstage and how everyone reacts to each other? There was no hierarchy backstage, and you could walk into any one dressing room and say, “Show me how to play that. Show me that note. What’s that link you’ve got there?” Bo Diddley was the same. Absolute gentlemen.
Then I met Muddy Waters, and that’s what sealed it for me. These guys, they changed me. I saw how they conducted themselves and the respect that they got—that’s what I want to be like. Of course, my image was totally different. Keith Richards, nutty dope addict—you live with it. What I’m saying about these times is Little Richard would be totally outrageous but always respectful, always had time for other people, none of this, “Can you shut the door on your way out.” I have always tried to remember that.
It’s not just a matter of politeness; they were so solid about what they know, what they were. They didn’t have to put on any airs. So solid in their talent. I was just nineteen—a kid. They were always sweet to me. It was unique. I am thankful that I was there and got to play and learn from people that I thought I would never meet. People whom I basically idolized, and then suddenly I am working with them and I’m being taken on the same level. To be accepted amongst some of the greats, that was the most amazing thing for me right then. They gave me so much confidence.
Bill Wyman: Top of the bill was the Everly Brothers. Fantastic. Second was Bo Diddley. Our idol. We’d been playing his songs every night. Then they brought in Little Richard. We spent every show in the wings watching what they did and how they did it. All over England. Bo Diddley was stunning. But kids raved over us. Our three little songs. Cheering and getting mobbed outside. It was fun. We all laughed about it. They tore my jacket. Charlie lost his buttons. He’d be furious. You had your hair pulled out in handfuls. We didn’t wear scarves because the girls got the ends and we were getting strangled.
Andrew Loog Oldham: Okay, the end of ’63 is “I Wanna Be Your Man,” and that still didn’t really open the gates for us; this is still a very provisional time for the Rolling Stones. We don’t go top 5 with a single until February or March of 1964, with “Not Fade Away.”
So what that means is that every time we go above Birmingham, we’re in danger land, man, because that’s Beatles territory. I would say our audience is still sixty percent boys going nuts. But it was still, “Are they going to make it?” I mean, the jury was still out.
Anthony Calder: Sixty-three was just sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We were in vogue. “Can you do this? Or help us with that?” “We have this record. What can you do with it?” It was nonstop. It was exciting, because the Stones broke, then Marianne Faithfull broke. We’d done the Beatles’ publicity. Andrew and I had the talent—entrepreneurial. And we loved it. We could smell it. We picked up Cilla Black, and later Jimmy Page, Rod Stewart, Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Peter Frampton. Andrew idolized Jeff Beck. I thought Eric was better.
Peter Frampton: The fork in the road for me was the Preachers with Bill Wyman. Bill was with the Stones but he produced and managed this band. They were offered a residency at the Flamingo every Saturday night. I was working in the music shop on a Saturday. “You want to join a band? We’re all semipros.” I was still thirteen. And I said, “Yeah!”
We started gigging while at school. Saturday and Sunday we’d go to Birmingham. The neighbors said to my mother, “How do you allow this?” And my mother said, “Never try to stop Niagara Falls.” We were doing two gigs a night in Leicester and Birmingham. The others were older and very protective of me. The English teacher would go to the teachers’ lunchroom and complain to my father how I was dozing off in English on Monday morning. He read her the riot act and said, “Don’t tell me any more. I don’t want to hear about it.”
Then Bill gets involved and we go up to town, Decca Studios. End of ’63. So much happened in such a short space of time. We’ve got to record a single—two tracks. This was my first big session. With Glyn Johns [a legendary British recording engineer who has recently been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame]. It was starting at the top. The Stones’ bass player is managing the band and Johns is producing us.
We did Ready Steady Go with the Stones. It was before my fourteenth birthday. I remember sitting and watching Keith Richards getting his sound check. After the show we all went to watch the playback before it was broadcast. I am thirteen and standing between Mick and Keith, and they are watching me. It was freaky.
I would go see Davy [Bowie] playing. He was in the Comrades, a big local band, playing sax. Davy was such a role model for me. He had the poses. He was so good.
During the summer holiday the Herd come and watch me in the Preachers and ask me to sit in with the band, as they are losing a rhythm guitarist during the summer, and if it worked out they’d offer me a place in the band. I said, “Fantastic, but I don’t know what my dad would say. I’m supposed to go back to school and the music college.”
My dad speaks to the manager and he does a deal. He says, “Look, I’m not thrilled about this. If you left school at fifteen and got a regular job at the post office you’d make fifteen pounds a week. Can they guarantee you fifteen pounds a week?”
The Herd agreed to it. I’d get fifteen pounds—they wanted me in the band that badly. The going rate was forty pounds for the whole band. We were on Top of the Pops [a BBC television show]. Davy Jones is watching from home, and he says, “That’s Peter! What the hell is he doing on TV? He should be at school.”
Jeff Lynne: In ’63 there was a different feeling in the air. Things were suddenly coming okay and music was going to take over everything. I hoped it would become a profession. I knew I was good—I was learning things quicker than most. My dream was to have my own band and perform. There was nothing else I wanted to do. I dreamed about that life and not having to go to work—to get in the van and go to a gig.
I was doing all those funny jobs in offices and warehouses and playing my guitar, and then in the newspaper it said, “Lead Guitarist Wanted for Nightriders.”
No. That’s me!
I was so adamant it was me. That’s my job. I went for the audition, and I was really scared. They were my favorite local group, and, how could I be with them? The singer Mike Sheridan had left a few months before so they needed another vocalist and a lead guitar. I auditioned in the drummer’s front room. And I got the job. Who would have thunk it?
I was trying to write in ’63. I had bought a Fender Esquire: 115 guineas—a lot of money—and I bought it on the drip [installment plan]. I had to get an amplifier. I got a Vox AV 30 on the drip. And I got into trouble. Every week there would be a letter saying how much I owed. It would be worse every week. On Wednesday I’d get up at six a.m. to get the mail so my dad wouldn’t find the letter. I was in debt, but once I joined the Nightriders I could pay it off in a matter of weeks. I was earning fifteen pounds a week, which was much better than the average wage. The debt was a big worry to me. It haunted me. I’d apologize to the guy in the shop. I just used to blatantly not pay him back and then suddenly pay it all off and buy an acoustic at the same time.
Eric Stewart: By the time the Mindbenders happened I was earning more in one night than my father did in a week. It was nice to do stuff with the money eventually, but at that stage it was about getting onstage and having a ball.
The Stones told us that when you got paid you went straight to the Mayfair fashion designer Mr. Fish and bought clothes and bought records. We did. We’d come down to London and to Carnaby Street. We’d buy just everyday clothes, and we’d just be copying the Beatles. We had blue suits with leather waistcoats.
Hilton Valentine: We were gigging. Our money went up to twenty-five pounds, then to fifty—the big time. It was the time to be in London for sure. It was the start of the drug days, I suppose. There was a gig in Manchester at a place called the Twisted Wheel. It was a club on the circuit. My first time smoking hash.
This was the beginning, in late ’63 and before we are well-known. What happened was I had the toke on it and felt my mind going wow, and then I felt nauseous and I was going to throw up, so I went out of the dressing room, up the stairs to the blackness of the street, and right next to it was a shop doorway.
I got myself in there and heaved, and pulled myself together, and then I heard, “Oi, what’s going on here?” And it was a copper. I said, “I’m playing in the band and I must have had too much to drink.” So he said, “Ah, well you’d better get yourself back down there.” So I went back, got plugged in, and started off on the first song, and I thought, “I’ve never heard anything like this in my life.” The sound was incredible, and I was really flying high. I had the bad scenario spewing up and then I got back on and it was Technicolor. Just me. I was elated and blown away by it.
It became a habit. I wouldn’t say I was addicted, but it sounded better when I was stoned. It wasn’t like I had to have it. There were many nights when I didn’t have it. But when it was available I would do it. I did lose myself down the road with LSD. Brian Jones turned me on to it.
Eric Stewart: We were traveling a lot, touring. Recording an album was done in four days. You rehearsed before hitting the London clubs—the Marquee, the Ad Lib, Dolly’s, and the Flamingo.
We were in control of our own lives. We had fire in us and we had money. I could buy a four-hundred-pound car. A serious luxury. My family had never owned a car.
At sixteen I’d gone to my headmaster to get a job reference. In those days you needed a character reference from your headmaster or a professional person who could speak for you to get a job. Of course, I didn’t know then that I didn’t need one to be a musician. I just assumed I would and asked for it.
He said, “What do you want to be?” I said, “A musician.” He said, “Be serious.” I mean, nobody had ever asked him for a reference to be a rock star before—he wrote character references for sixteen-year-olds addressed to employers like banks or factory managers, but then he’d said, “Oh, for chrissakes, you write the reference and I’ll sign it.”
His name was Mr. Organ. He signed it and said, “Good luck, Stewart.” I passed the school a few years later. I’m making good money with a band, I’m in my own car, a Ford Zephyr—it was a big thing to be a teenager with your own car in those days, a car meant you’d made it—and he was standing in the rain. And I stopped and wound down the window and said, “Hello, Mr. Organ,” and he just glared at me. At eighteen. It was phenomenal.
Drugs were appearing. Keith Moon scoffing handfuls of pills—off his face. Keith would take mouthfuls of pills. He stood next to me in the bog [restroom] in the Cromwellian and he said, “Do you want some stuff, Eric? I’ve got blues, I’ve got purples and . . .”
“No thanks, I’ll stick to scotch and coke.” And he just whacked a whole mouthful down.
Peter Brown: They were all on amphetamines—the Beatles, and Brian, they all used to do it—but I didn’t. I liked to have wine. The only time I actually did occasionally attempt it is when I was going down to London so much, and I would come back to Liverpool and I would be tired from partying, I’d have to get the early train back. I’d start to wilt, and I’d take an upper. But fortunately I never got hooked on them. I never took that many of them.
They were so young, and we’d hang out at the various clubs, the Ad Lib, Dolly’s, so you’d end up with the Stones in that corner, a couple of Beatles in this corner; the atmosphere was very cool. You didn’t circulate, you were just hanging out having a good time, and the records were playing and everyone is drinking and smoking. It was somewhere to go. We were all equal.
Chrissie Most: Now [that] we’d found the Animals, I said, “We have to get something in writing. Mickie was dyslexic and didn’t do stuff on papers. And he said, “No. We are all friends.” I said “You’ve got to have a contract.” I had a typewriter, and I just typed out this agreement. I couldn’t spell. We never thought of a lawyer. They all signed it.
This guy from Manchester drove me mad and wanted Mickie to record his band, Herman & the Hermits. He kept phoning me, and I was at home dealing with the baby. “Mickie, for chrissake do something with this man and get him off my back.” He sent a photo of this man, Peter Noone, and Mickie said, “He looks like a young Kennedy. He will appeal to the Americans.” And so they came to London and he recorded them.
He’d cottoned on that they could be a big success by then. Their first hit was a Carole King song from the Brill Building Mickie brought back from a trip to New York. Mickie always said the [hit] songs are in America. He always had this thing for America.
Eric Stewart: We hung out just talking about the music in the Ad Lib and the Cromwellian. You had to pay to go into the Ad Lib—it was classy and there were actresses and actors and film stars. The money set. The other set. You really had to have someone to let you in. That wasn’t my scene. The fun places were the Flamingo and the Marquee.
The pill. That was the other link to freedom, for the girls. The posh birds were after a bit of rough trade. They wanted the working-class lads—they were glamorous then. I was never the front man, not even in 10cc. I never wanted to be. I was the moody guy in the back just getting off on that. It was a very enviable profession. Adoring fans and people were throwing money at you. My mum was astounded by it.
Cilla Black: My first trip to London to promote the single I stayed at the Russell Hotel on Russell Square. I was just so excited because there was a phone by my bed. Most people didn’t have phones in Britain in those days because they were expensive, and I remember picking the phone up to call someone, but everybody that I knew or that I wanted to talk to didn’t have a phone.
I mean, how I heard I was number one was in Liverpool. Brian said, “I’ll call you to tell you whether you’re gonna be number one,” because the amount of records you’re selling per day was a hundred thousand. It was a cover version of Dionne Warwick’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” by Bacharach and Hal Davis.
So I said to Brian, “I know the number of the phone box outside the post office. What time do you want to call? I’ll be there at one o’clock.” I was hoping and praying that nobody would be on the phone at one o’clock. There wasn’t, and that’s how I heard.
Jeff Lynne: My mum used to love thumping up the stairs. “Get up you lazy bugger, go to work!” Then I found out I got the Nightriders job. And me mum bounded up the stairs, and I remember her face. I said, “Hold it—before you start, I never have to get up ever again because I’m now a professional musician.” And I went back to bed. Her face! She couldn’t do anything about it. The band was earning, and I was earning fifteen and then twenty pounds a week within a few months.
All I ever wanted was that chance to be professional, and we played all ’round Birmingham. You could play all ’round there for a month and never play the same place twice. That was the best feeling and the happiest you could be: having just gone professional, and getting confident and getting good on the guitar and singing good. I had a tape recorder. I made demos, and that was how I recorded music. The tape recorder was what made me—made my life, really.
Eric Clapton: I had no aspirations for the future. I never thought I’d live past thirty, for a start. We were doing a lot of drink and drugs. My ambition was to do this for as long as I could get away with it. I didn’t see a profession or a career as a musician. I was always going from one band to another. I liked being a sideman; there was more freedom. I bummed around or slept on girls’ couches. A career didn’t matter. It was the last thing I wanted. Of course, it’s what we’ve ended up with.
We thought it might last a couple of years and let’s enjoy it while we can. That was exciting to me. I loved being able to go into a club, say Soho or somewhere, and see who was playing and just disappearing into the wallpaper. And someone would say, “Do you want to play?” And I’d go onstage and play and then get off and stand in the corner, and no one would even bat an eyelid. There wouldn’t be any palaver [commotion] about it. It was, in the pure sense, about the music.
In October 1963, I knew these guys from the pubs I was playing with —the Roosters and Casey Jones. One of my local haunts was in Kingston. The songs I was learning as an individual musician were folk and old blues. And these guys would be around that circuit, so they asked me to join the Yardbirds. My understanding is that we would be creating a nucleus to play serious music—jazz, R&B, or whatever—but serious. There was a guy, their manager, Giorgio Gomelski, and he had the Stones before Andrew Loog Oldham, and lost them, and I think with the Yardbirds he decided he would never let that happen again.
So when the opportunity came he started to steer us in a commercial way. We were part of a very strong underground, and the singer had a pretty astute understanding of R&B and blues, but he wanted to be popular. So we met that fork in the road.
Eric Stewart: I think people like Keith or Eric or myself were really into this whole thing for the music, not the fame or adoration. Jeff Lynne’s the same. I mean, success and money are great, but exploring music and what you are capable of working with others drives us.
Serious musicians love their guitars; like Jeff or Eric, they are tools to be cared for and cherished. Les Pauls had something—the way the wood was made and the way the neck was connected, there was a sustain that happened naturally. And the Les Pauls had this fabulous quality, and that’s why they sell for 450,000 pounds now. Stratocasters were great because they were designed by an airplane engineer. It was an Apple compared to a PC.
The really great guitarists are all self-taught. None of them read music. I can’t. Every great musician I have ever worked with can’t read music. Clapton can’t. McCartney can’t. Lennon couldn’t. Paul might have learnt to read since, but he couldn’t read dots then, and I couldn’t read dots. We played from the soul rather than through the eyes.
Eric Clapton: For me, to be in a band was to make it sound right in the space we were in. Everyone to be in tune, in time, and if possible, to create something different every night. That was the ideal. It had nothing to do with popularity.
I still sometimes prefer rehearsals to the show. The audience introduces that dynamic— “Oh, do they like it?” All musicians who I have ever respected have done it for very selfish reasons. We do it to express the way we feel and to do it in harmony with other musicians.
If I consciously figure out how to engage or touch that guy over there with the glasses on, I will go crazy. I don’t know what he’s in tune to, so it’s better if I follow my intuition and express what I’m feeling. It may be coincidental that he experiences something he likes and it resonates, but I can’t control that.
I didn’t have the confidence to do it on my own. I was very shy. Even if I played in a club, I was always facing a wall. I had no stagecraft. I’ve never tried to work or understand what makes an audience tick. So I don’t think I could even do it now. A lot of my contemporaries, Neil Young and Elton, went on the road on their own, but I had no idea how they pulled that off. It takes an awful lot of courage. I’m always with the lads. You’ll never see me alone.
Bill Wyman: I miss the naïveté and the newness—this magic thing was happening and you didn’t know where it was going. No one expected it to go on and on and on. It just got bigger and bigger. It took over our lives.
Sir Alan Parker: The revolution of the times allowed us to have other aspirations, and I don’t think I thought much about it—there were explosions of opportunity going on all around you, so you just marched on.
I lapped up anything that was American. In advertising our heroes were Bill Bernbach, George Lois, and Howard Zieff. We couldn’t wait to get the new copy of The New Yorker, not for the essays or cartoons, but the new Volkswagen ads. [The ad campaigns were innovative, humorous, and irreverent.]
Peter Brown: The Beatles did this gig at Hammersmith that was a big deal. The girls were going crazy at that point, they were top of the bill and then, you know, they didn’t do more than thirty-five minutes in those days, so you’d have about five other acts, and that was the show.
I don’t think that a lot changed the Beatles in 1963; they were still a band of brothers. They hadn’t got wives or children or distractions in that way, and of course, they had to be on the road, and in between make a record. It was back to back, very hard work. They were working all the time.
The mood was very excited. But there was always anxiety because as an artist, you’re always only as good as the last thing you did. That was successful, but what about the next one? Will we be able to keep up?
Norman Jopling: I got to see the Beatles perform in the final month of their first big year—saw them but hardly heard them. The Southern Area Fan Club get-together was held on a cold Saturday at Wimbledon, and for three shillings and sixpence the fan club members—90 percent female—could queue up and shuffle past the Fab Four, shake their hands, get their autographs, exchange a few words. I wrote it up: “Oh! What a Day It Was for the Beatle Fan.” There were faintings galore, and even the burly attendants couldn’t stop a few determined fans from leaping over the tables and caressing their particular fave.
You had to hand it to the Beatles, who were the souls of good humor and patience throughout what must have been, for them, an ordeal that went on for hours and hours. They smoked a lot of cigarettes. And when every fan was satisfied, they got up and played for nearly three-quarters of an hour, longer than for any gig, serenaded by continuous screaming, rising and falling.
Phenomenal was the only word to describe it. And troopers that they were, they played the Wimbledon Palais that same evening. This was also the first year the Beatles sent out a specially recorded Christmas record to their fans, a thoughtful tradition that would be kept up to the end of their career. Epstein certainly knew about building fan loyalty, I guess because, really, he was the biggest fan of all.
Cilla Black: They could have sang the national anthem, the kids wouldn’t have known because of all the screaming and the hysteria, and that’s what the Beatles didn’t like. I could tell that, ’cause I did three weeks with them at the Astoria Finsbury Park in London, where we were all together, all the Liverpool acts on one bill.
We all wanted to go home to Liverpool for Christmas Day, and Brian had hired a private plane for us. It was great for us just to have Christmas at home, a Christmas Day at home with our family. We were back on the following day doing two shows a night, and that’s when we all realized that’s probably the last time we’re all going to be here together on one bill. It was the end of an era, ’cause the rest is history.
Peter Brown: When the Beatles came back from Stockholm [for the Christmas shows], Ed Sullivan saw them. The story is that he was in London Airport going back to New York. In those days you didn’t have jetways, you went up and down the stairs. And the airport was brought to a standstill because the Beatles were coming back from a gig in Sweden. [An estimated fifteen hundred girls were on the roof of the terminal.] And Sullivan said, “Who are these people? What is this all about?”
Cilla Black: Brian had said to the producer of The Ed Sullivan Show, “Well, you can’t have the Beatles unless you have Cilla.” I went in to record Burt Bacharach’s “Anyone Who Had a Heart” in early ’64. Dionne Warwick recorded it in the States. I went to number one in the UK in February while the Beatles were doing Ed Sullivan. They paved the way.
Peter Brown: Now of course, everyone in America of a certain age says they saw that show. It changed everything.