EVERY GREAT STORY has to start somewhere. So where does this great story start?
July 12, 1962, was the first time that an entity publicly described as “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones” took the stage. It happened at the fabled Marquee Club in London, opening for the late, great Long John Baldry (known for a tune that went, “Don’t try to lay no ‘boo-jee woo-jee’ on the king of rock ’n’ roll!”).
Wait a minute. “Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones”? In the early days, the Rolling Stones were very much Brian Jones’s band.
DICK TAYLOR: Brian Jones pulled Mick and Keith and then myself into the band. We were definitely Stones at that point. All the elements were there, apart from Bill Wyman, because at various rehearsals Charlie played.
Brian’s head must have exploded when he saw that billing, but it is explainable.
BILL WYMAN: Brian was the leader of the Rolling Stones for a year and a half. He formed the Rolling Stones.
CHARLIE WATTS: He worked very hard, Brian.
BILL WYMAN: He organized the whole thing when nobody would accept us, nobody would book us in clubs, nobody. He used to write letters to the magazines and things.
HOW LITTLE BOY BLUE AND THE BLUE BOYS BECAME THE ROLLIN’ STONES
DICK TAYLOR: Mick and I first met when I was eleven. Myself and another guy, Robert Beckwith, were both into rock ’n’ roll and rhythm and blues. We met Mick and we had a mutual liking of such music. When we got to be about thirteen, we were all very much into that. Eventually, we started a little band where Mick sang and Robert and I played guitar, and a guy called Allen Etherington had a little drum kit. We had a little band that didn’t really have a name.
Keith knew that I was doing this band and he was too shy to ask if he could come to rehearsal. Then, he met Mick again at Dartford station—they had known each other when they were very young. And one of them had a Chuck Berry record. They started talking and Keith came up to our next rehearsal. So we then had Keith, Mick, myself, occasionally Allen Etherington, and Robert Beckwith, and we were all playing together.
One night we all piled in Mick’s father’s car to watch Alexis Korner and Blues Incorporated play the Muddy Waters–type stuff. We thought we could do at least as well as that. Prior to that, we recorded stuff and we needed a name so we just decided on Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.
What happened next was we met up with Brian Jones. Mick went along to Brian’s band. Brian, at that time, had a guy called Brian Knight singing, Geoff Bradford on guitar, and Ian Stewart on piano. Mick dragged Keith along. Brian asked me about playing bass. We needed a name. Someone said, “How about Rollin’ Stones?” I think it was Brian. I can’t really swear who it was. I think it may well have been Brian.
CHARLIE WATTS: I was in this very strange situation with the Rolling Stones because I used to play in a band that the Rolling Stones used to knock because they had all the gigs: Alexis Korner. We had somewhere to play. It was a bum jazz night, which was Thursday, a no-money night, and Alexis turned it into the biggest night of the week financially for the club, which was a big thing in London. And there was a helluva lot of animosity about it all. And Brian thought that the Rolling Stones were as good as Alexis’s band and he wanted the club owners to give his band a chance. Alexis got all these people together really. He gave you a stage to play on. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about when I used to play with him. It was a really good band at one time, but you’re talking about real history now. That’s when Brian was really fighting.
As Charlie points out above, actual Thursday night residency at the Marquee belonged to Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, but on this particular July Thursday the group was booked for a very high-profile appearance on the BBC Jazz Club broadcast. So Baldry was bumped up to headline at the club, and an opportunity was thus created for this shiny new ensemble revolving around Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ian Stewart, Dick Taylor, and Tony Chapman. But still, shouldn’t it have been “Brian Jones and the Rolling Stones”? Or rather “Elmo Lewis and the Rolling Stones,” since Jones was still using his pseudonym at the time?
THE GREAT DRUMMER MYSTERY
We can pinpoint five of the musicians who took the stage at the Marquee Club on July 12, 1962:
Mick Jagger—vocals, harmonica
Elmo Lewis, aka Brian Jones—guitar
Keith Richards—guitar
Ian Stewart—piano
Dick Taylor—bass
There was a sixth musician on that stage, sitting right behind the drum kit. Before we get to who it was, a little background:
ALAN CLAYSON: A drummer was a very prized commodity in early ’60s beat groups in Britain. Partly because the amount of money you had to spend on a drum kit was considerable. And often, drummers were taken on regardless of their skills simply because of their ownership of the right equipment.
Who drummed for the Stones in the early days?
ALAN CLAYSON: The Stones had a very movable feast of drummers. Tony Chapman was a traveling salesman and often absent. Carlo Little was straight out of the army and playing with Screaming Lord Sutch and the Savages.1 Carlo tended to be a Rollin’ Stone when his commitment to Lord Sutch was not pending. Mick Avory, a rising sap of puberty, came from South London, looking for an opening in a pop group. The drummer the Stones most wanted to recruit was Charlie Watts. He was very reluctant to commit to being anything more than a semi-professional musician. He was a draftsman and he thought the late nights would affect the steadiness of his hand.
As for our mystery man, even though Keith Richards (and an ad from that week’s Jazz News) claim it was Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, in doing our research, we received word from Mick Avory himself that it wasn’t him. Both Dick Taylor and Alan Clayson told us it was possibly Charlie Watts—surmising that he might have been excluded from the Alex Korner BBC session. But Charlie himself has confirmed that he was at the Beeb that night. Here’s how we handicap this particular horse race: 90 percent it was Tony Chapman; 10 percent it was none of the above.
Since earlier in the year, Mick had been a regular vocalist with Korner’s ensemble band. But the BBC budget only allowed for a total of six musicians, and Mick was the odd man out for Jazz Club and didn’t make the trip. Since his name was already known to the Marquee Club regulars, it was slapped onto the blurb about the gig. It signaled some sense of Thursday night continuity: in Korner’s absence, the club would be serving up business as usual. Needless to say, it was anything but “business as usual.”
So how does a band get from one good gig to the biggest stages in the world—for half a century? Well, it’s a process of mix and match, trial and error, charisma and chemistry. Let’s not forget addition and subtraction. For instance, subtract Chapman and Taylor; add Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman.
DICK TAYLOR: There were various little things which nudged me towards not continuing. Basically, the bass thing was one of them, because I felt I always wanted to play guitar. I think if I had been the guitarist in the Stones . . . But I must say, there was no personality clashes or anything like that. We all got on very well. That’s one of the things that I think everybody should know, that while I know that they had their problems later between Brian and Keith, in that time everybody got on very, very well.
The early days were not easy. Keith Richards tells a story about collecting cans for their deposits so he could buy guitar strings.
BILL WYMAN: Those first six or nine months it was really hard to get gigs.
CHARLIE WATTS: Then you joined, then I joined and we had nothing, man.
Brian, Mick, and Keith lived together in a flat in Edith Grove (along with another roommate, James Phelge, who would go on to provide half of the Stones’ nom de plume in the early days, Nanker Phelge). The place was a notorious dump.
DICK TAYLOR: I couldn’t believe it. I’d been to a few places that were a bit squalid. I think Edith Grove really took the biscuit.
BILL WYMAN: Nobody would book us, they were all into traditional jazz. And some blues groups. Brian used to write to the BBC to ask for auditions. And we went down for an audition, to play, and afterwards they rejected us. They said the band is OK, we could use them for American musicians that come over, blues musicians, but the singer’s no good, he sounds too colored. That was the reason they rejected us. And Brian would write to the music papers letters saying what he thought blues was, and he was in a band that played a Chicago form of blues, and he would really get involved in all that when everybody else was almost giving up. And nobody had any money. The band was almost breaking up at different points. There were people coming and going, different musicians.
CHARLIE WATTS: I was out of work at the time. Because me and him are the only two people who actually had jobs. And I was out of work and I used to hang around with Brian and Keith, and their days used to be mad. They’d just sit around all day, actually they’d sleep all day, and sit around all night listening to Jimmy Reed, the same record. I can remember listening to these records. And I’d never heard of Jimmy Reed at that time. Well, I had but it was very new to me. They showed me how good those people were.
A picture of the Stones circa 1963, note Ian Stewart on the upper right.
BILL WYMAN: I used to borrow records, learn them by heart, and sell them for breakfast.
The hard work and blues obsession eventually started to pay off as the new lineup, including Charlie and Bill, started to build a following.
JOHN MAYALL: I heard them first on a Sunday afternoon at a club where they had a residency. It was very professional. They had a really good repertoire. They were a really exciting band and they had it all together. The thing that struck me was the reaction of the audience. They were really getting off on it and everybody knew there was something happening.
Let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves, though. On this first night of going out publicly in front of approximately 150 people, most of whom could be described as middle class bohemian blues purists, stick to the basics. Build on the shoulders of the masters who got you here in the first place. No one expects any original compositions from a fledgling entry on the R&B circuit. No one wants attempts by someone with future songwriting potential to slow down another blues-drenched Thursday. In fact, quite the contrary. They want tried-and-true classics to propel them into the last workday of the week, so they can pick up their paychecks and make their plans to party for the entire weekend ahead. That means selecting a repertoire that leans heavily on those acknowledged masters, and covering the hell out of them for your entire time on stage.
The Stones took the stage, and opened up with an internationally known rock ’n’ roll hit written in 1952 by the seminal songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Originally called “K.C. Loving” by Little Willie Littlefield, the title was changed seven years later to “Kansas City,” and a new version by Wilbert Harrison made it all the way to number one on the popularity charts. The Stones (and for that matter the Beatles) probably became aware of it from a cover version by Little Richard that became a hit in the United Kingdom in 1959. Mr. Penniman performed it in a medley with his own song “Hey, Hey, Hey,” which is exactly how the Fab Four recorded it on their Beatles for Sale album at the end of 1964.
Not surprisingly, the Stones also covered selections from the sacred blues canon, by Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Elmore James, and no fewer than six songs (fully one third of their entire set) by Jimmy Reed: “Honey What’s Wrong,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” “Hush, Hush,” “Ride ’Em on Down,” “Kind of Lonesome,” and “Big Boss Man.” Also not surprisingly, they did the Chuck Berry hit “Back in the USA.” But very surprisingly, Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones covered a song called “Tell Me That You Love Me” that was written by Canadian teen heartthrob Paul Anka. (As he proved once again on a recent PBS tribute to the late Buddy Holly, Anka earned his street cred in the formative days of rock ’n’ roll music. The Stones’ decision to cover him in their debut is a testament to it.)
In summation, a quartet of musicians that music historians regard as four sixths of the original Rolling Stones came together under that name on that sweaty July night in 1962.
We began this chapter with a question, so let’s end it with two more:
Was this the night that changed the music world forever?
No.
Was this the night that would be worth celebrating as the fiftieth anniversary of the Rolling Stones in 2012?
Absolutely.
