Rocks Off: 50 Tracks That Tell the Story of the Rolling Stones

Prologue

1961–1963: The Run-up to Recording

It’s an almost apocryphal tale, and there might be as much mythology as sepia-toned documentation to how five pasty middle-class English kids found each other and discovered their lot in life in some obscure, scratchy American blues records. How two of these young men, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, boyhood friends who had lost touch during adolescence, bumped into each other on a Dartford train platform at the age of nineteen. It would have been just a quick, ’ello, how’ve you been? had Mick not been carrying an armful of hard-to-find records he had just ordered through the mail from Chess Records in Chicago. The artists Mick collected were magical names to the pair, who were venturing halfheartedly into university—Mick at the London School of Economics (LSE), and Keith at Sidcup Art College. So instead, we have an origin story.

The fact that the two had independently stumbled across this uncommercial form of music—unknown to but a small portion of fans—signified to each that the other was hip. Their boyhood friendship was rekindled on the spot. Mick had been singing and learning to play blues harp (harmonica), and had played a gig or two sitting in with bands at so-called jazz clubs around London with a friend and other like-minded soul, Dick Taylor, another guitar player who attended Sidcup. Keith had embraced guitar as a boy after his mother bought one for him, teaching himself Chuck Berry numbers from records. The three of them started to jam, with Taylor switching to bass, and named themselves Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys.

Different guys would sit in on drums occasionally, but the three were not yet a complete band. They would venture down to the Ealing Jazz Club, where the godfather of the British blues and R&B scene, Alexis Korner, held court. The Ealing Jazz Club, literally under the Ealing tube stop (one could see commuters walking to the tube through the thick glass above the stage), was hosting weekly R&B club nights hosted by scene father figures Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies. Without them there might have been nothing, Keith points out. The hunger for this music was so strong and it was so hard to come by that people traveled down to these clubs from Manchester and Scotland just to hear a live facsimile played by earnest fans. Drummer Charlie Watts and pianist Ian Stewart, who would both soon join the Rolling Stones, would occasionally sit in with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated.

These weekly sessions are the storied ground zero roots of the London branch of the British Invasion family tree, the blues-fed musicians who would go on to fame with groups like the Yardbirds, the Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and the Kinks. Mick, Keith, and Dick Taylor would frequent these jam sessions. And a young Brian Jones was a star in this setting. He was a very good slide player, Taylor told me, and his general musicianship was very impressive. He was calling himself Elmo Lewis, notes Keith in his autobiography, Life. He wanted to be Elmore James at the time. ‘You’ll have to get a tan and put on a few inches, boy.’ But slide guitar was a real novelty in England, and Brian played it that night. He played ‘Dust My Broom,’ and it was electrifying.

Mick was one of the precious few R&B vocalists who would sit in with Korner’s group at Ealing. But the few times that Keith sat in, the guitarist was already perceived as a lone wolf, playing a more aggressive rock ’n’ roll style of guitar. Korner’s group were all jazz musicians, Ian Stewart explained. They drew the line at Keith’s Chuck Berry–type guitar playing. They didn’t encourage Keith. They’d tolerate him but they certainly wouldn’t encourage him.

We wanted to do something more rock and roll but still with an R&B feel, Taylor recalled. Music seemed very rigidly divided into genres at the time we started, the trad [Dixieland/Preservation Hall–style] jazz scene was really huge in the UK.… We were very much into urban R&B. We loved Chuck, Bo [Diddley], and Jimmy Reed. I remember buying the first available Ike and Tina record. That was what we wanted to play. Monetary success was a complete irrelevance, playing what we liked and getting ‘converts’ was what we were all about.

Brian wanted to form his own band. He put an ad in Jazz News in the spring of 1962 looking for R&B musicians to form a band. Stewart, a lantern-jawed Scotsman who played a mean boogie-woogie in the style of Albert Ammons, answered Brian’s ad and started to arrange auditions. Stu (as he was known) invited Mick, who agreed on the condition that he could bring Keith, whose talents were not yet in demand. The two came down to the seedy Bricklayer’s Arms pub in Soho, where Stu and Brian were holding the try-outs in an upstairs room. Keith plugged in and started jamming along with Stu, hitting it off immediately.

A core band was formed in the spring of 1962 with Brian, Mick, Keith, Stu, and Taylor on bass. They coveted a particular drummer they occasionally saw down at Ealing, Charlie Watts. Charlie, a graphic artist for an advertising agency, was a modern jazz fan who played with a bebop finesse. His image as a cool and elegant hipster was already in place. But it would take a while for the band to secure Charlie as their regular drummer. He was working the steady job and needed to be paid in order for him to lug his drums on the tube to gigs. So in the meantime, the band—still nameless—tried out a series of drummers.

Over the summer of 1962, Mick, Keith, and Brian moved into an Edith Grove flat together, which became legendary for its abject filth and the misanthropic rudeness of its three new denizens. Brian, who came from an upper-middle-class upbringing in the suburbs of Cheltenham, had no job and had already fathered three of the five children he would eventually father out of wedlock with different women. Keith joined him in the bohemian life by quitting art school, while Mick continued to go to LSE from time to time. Brian and Keith would pore over the trio’s shared record collection with a monkish devotion, listening intently to forensically discern between the instruments, the tones, the dynamics, the lyrics, and the interplay between all the musicians.

Brian had by far the deepest musical knowledge and natural talent and taught Keith much of the foundation of the blues. Brian had formally learned saxophone as a boy and took up guitar at sixteen. He was known for his all-around musicianship. Keith was not interested in being a virtuoso so much as being drawn to an overall band mixture, like those heard on the old Chess Records sides, a wall of sound where the vocalist is simply part of the ensemble. These were the underpinnings for what the trio would eventually alchemize into their early sound, the two-guitar blend that Keith would refer to for decades as the ancient form of weaving.

The band was offered their first gig at the Marquee Club in London in July 1962, filling in for Korner’s band. They had been sitting in during intervals between blues and jazz bands at Ealing and a few other clubs around London, becoming more popular at each appearance. But now, with a real gig, they needed a name. Brian looked down at a Muddy Waters LP and saw the song title, Rollin’ Stone. And so it was.

Mick, Brian, Keith, Stu, and Dick Taylor were all certainly part of the Stones for the gig that night. The question of who played drums has been a bit of a mystery, with Keith maintaining that it was Mick Avory, later of the Kinks, who sat in. Even Taylor is uncertain, telling me, Aargh, I really wish I could get this settled. I always thought that Tony [Chapman]—although our ‘official’ drummer—only managed to come to a couple of rehearsals because his work kept him away. I seem to recall Charlie coming to some of our rehearsals, and actually thought it was him who played at the Marquee.… When later it was said that it was Mick Avory who did the Marquee I presumed it was my memory that was at fault. I wish someone could put me out of my misery about this. The consensus is that it was Chapman.

Taylor, who remained at art college, was not thrilled with converting to the bass guitar to be a part of the band. I was in a real quandary about whether I wanted to play guitar or bass, he explained. I remember Brian being very complimentary about my bass playing, that really touched me as I was a great admirer of his musicianship. In the end, when I decided to leave, it was a combination of wanting to concentrate on my college work and the guitar having won over the bass. Taylor went on to form the Pretty Things, who became rock stars themselves. So dry your eyes; no Pete Best story here.

Chapman brought his mate Bill Wyman in to play bass. They had played together in previous bands. Wyman, born in 1936, had already done a stint in the Royal Air Force, was married, and had a regular job before he bought a guitar and started to learn it at age twenty-four. He was a devoted rock ’n’ roller, not a blues fan. He scrounged up whatever cash he could and bought an electric guitar. He decided to switch to bass one night after seeing a band with a rock solid foundation. The sound of their bass guitar hit me straight in the balls, he recalls. He realized what was missing in his current band. "It suited my personality. At twenty-four, I didn’t see myself as an ‘upfront’ musician … I was always more attuned to the overall sound, the need for internal dynamics, and precision." He would go on to first acquire a Vox Phantom bass, then shortly after, a classic Vox AC30 amp.

These latter assets are what most attracted the Stones to Bill when he brought them down for the audition in December 1962. In fact, in Keith’s diary entry at the time, while the Vox is mentioned by name, Bill is not. He is presumably noted in the phrase, secured bass guitarist. Keith admits, First off, I just wanted to separate Bill from his amplifier.

Still, even though Bill plied them with rounds of beer and smokes, which they jumped on as if I were delivering famine relief, he felt no connection with the band personally. Only Mick had been friendly to him and there was very little overlap with their musical tastes. Bill came from the rock ’n’ roll, rockabilly, and pop worlds of the 1950s, while the Stones were primarily playing minority music with such conviction. Bill could not fathom playing slow 12-bar Jimmy Reed blues all night, so the Chuck Berry numbers were all they really gelled on.

Nevertheless, Bill’s musical prospects were slim and when he got a chance for a second audition with them, he came back. This time, everyone was looser and a bit friendlier. They did not officially hire him per se, but they asked him to show up for their next gig, on December 15, 1962.

Bill had been initially shocked by Keith and Brian’s bohemian shaggy-dog appearance. In the pop world where I came from, smartness was automatic. I was neatly dressed, as if for work, with a Tony Curtis hairstyle, he wryly explains. Gradually, Bill got pulled in and came to understand the Stones’ worldview. This older, somewhat wiser bassist could sense that they were onto something larger. They had tapped into the burgeoning youth-fueled counterculture—not so consciously, more intuitively. The long hair and off-putting behavior was a way they—consciously or not—weeded square people out. Pete Townshend said he remembers his impression of seeing the Stones in the streets before ever seeing them play. It’s amazing they didn’t get killed, he said at a reading promoting his memoirs in Boston in 2012. They were distancing themselves from postwar England’s striving and self-satisfied bourgeois comfort in order to get deeper into the art, into something real, not packaged for the masses—in this case, down and dirty blues. They needed to make themselves feel like others, outsiders.

Their ongoing efforts to hire Charlie as their full-time drummer continued and their commitment and confidence convinced him to join their ranks. I had a theory that R&B was going to be a big part of the scene and I wanted to be part of it, he recalled. He was particularly knocked out by a set they played with a great substitute drummer named Carlo Little. Charlie had been playing with another band on the bill. The Stones were great. So I joined, he said. They fired Chapman, who tried to take Bill with him. But Bill was quite happy with his place in the band by then. Charlie played his first gig with them in January 1963 and was their official drummer the next month.

Keith educated Charlie in the chilled-out backbeat style of R&B and blues drummers, specifically Jimmy Reed’s drummer, Earl Phillips, for the right feel, That sparse, minimalized (sic) thing. And [Charlie has] always retained it, Keith points out in Life. It was Charlie’s technical talent and finesse that had attracted him to the band, but felt they had to win him over to R&B, make him a convert to the style, and to get him to play with more emphasis backbeat. He soon became legendary for just this sort of straight-ahead, deceptively simple grooving.

By the time of these first Stones gigs, the Beatles were already breaking across the UK with their first single, Love Me Do. Before the Beatles’ November 1962 debut, rock ’n’ roll had been seen as a 1950s teen fad that had come and gone in the UK. That’s partially why the Stones considered themselves R&B, not rock ’n’ roll. But the Beatles spearheaded a second wave of rock ’n’ roll that had been bubbling under, music that stood in stark contrast to the mass-produced pop stars dominating commercial radio. Many would later describe it as sort of a youth-led awakening along the lines of a Wizard of Oz–like change from a buttoned-down, black-and-white culture to a color-saturated sense of freedom. Here were four musicians who wrote and performed their own songs, which was quite a rarity in the early sixties.

When the Stones were first together we heard there was a group from Liverpool with long hair, scruffy clothes, and a record in the charts with a bluesy harmonica riff, Jagger recalled as he inducted the Beatles into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988. The combination of all this made me sick.

The Beatles saved rock ’n’ roll, or at least made the term itself acceptable for hipsters again. The Stones took notice of the Beatles, especially Brian, who was obsessed with the idea of pop stardom. It was one of his many contradictions, though, that he played this obscure blues music, didn’t write his own songs, and was not a singer. But what he did have was a great look and image, giving the Stones as a whole a leg-up in their visual presentation. In his memoirs, Bill leaves no doubt as to who he felt the leader of the band was, musically as well as in surface image. He explains the live fast die young Brian was one of, if not the earliest, rock ’n’ roller to epitomize the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll ethos well before it became a catchphrase. The group didn’t really settle down until the beginning of 1963, Stewart claimed. "There were two years of pissing around. Brian would suddenly vanish for two months at a time … Brian would hide from his responsibilities. He had two kids by then whose mothers and mothers’ mothers were always chasing him. Brian was totally dishonest." Via his sense of style, his rebelliousness against his stable and comfortable upbringing, and his libertine lifestyle—which was already fairly developed before his forming the Stones—Brian Jones not only gave the Stones their image before the five of them collectively had one, but by extension created an archetype for the sixties.

The band’s musical energy and image had captured the eyes and ears of an enthusiastic promoter named Giorgio Gomelsky, an experimental filmmaker turned impresario, who booked the Crawdaddy Club at the Station Hotel in the well-heeled suburb of Richmond. He had seen the Stones’ set once or twice, and Korner had sung their praises to him. Brian had lobbied Gomelsky relentlessly for a residency at the Crawdaddy. It was this steady gig, commencing in February 1963, that really launched the Stones’ career. The crowds had been building from the sporadic gigs around town and now they started to grow bigger and more enthusiastic at the Crawdaddy. Gomelsky acted as the band’s de facto manager and was their loudest champion at the time.

The Stones played their shit. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, things that weren’t too difficult, said Gomelsky in Keith Richards: The Biography. But they were playing with guts and conviction. They were playing the blues, but they weren’t an academic blues band. The Rolling Stones were more like a rebellion … a ritual thing.… In the end … people [at the Crawdaddy] just went berserk.

Their evangelic devotion to blues and R&B was soon gaining a cultish following from kids yearning for something other than the conformist, adult-approved pop culture dominating the mainstream outlets. Giorgio, whose talents as a promoter extended beyond his hysterically hyperbolic advertisements, openly encouraged the audience, keeping the energy level maxed up, providing one of the few no-holds-barred outlets for the pent-up, pre-Pill, sexually frustrated kids. Gomelsky would whip the club into a lather and audience members reached fevered heights, with beer-sodden, sexually charged young men and women dancing on tables in the overpacked sweltering room. It was bigger than individual groups of people, says Bill. I can’t tell you the excitement at that place in those months. It was like, all of a sudden, you hit civilization right on the head. The energy was incredible and it gave everybody courage for years and years.

The buzz spread around London, bringing in people who would figure prominently in the Stones’ future: engineer/producer, Glyn Johns; manager/PR man, Andrew Loog Oldham; and the Beatles themselves. All of them would come to bear witness to the frothy scene at the Crawdaddy. Johns, who had met various Stones members the previous year, brought them to the studio where he was working, IBC Studios, on March 11, 1963, to record some demos. He was thrilled to meet some long-haired idiots who were into the same music as he was, specifically, they were the only other people he knew who were aware of Jimmy Reed.

I was afraid to introduce them to George Clewson, the guy who owned the studio, said Johns. The effect they had on people, with their appearance, their clothes, their hair—their whole attitude—was immediate. As soon as you saw them, they showed complete opposition to society, everybody, anything.

But Clewson nevertheless signed them to a deal for free recording time with Johns in return for an exclusive six-month option to shop the resulting tapes to record companies. The tracks they covered were representative of the sets that they had been playing—all covers, of course. Clewson, however, could not drum up any interest. Though the Stones had attained a devoted cult audience around London, their hard R&B stylings were far from what was selling in the squeaky pop world of early-1960s radio. It would take a long leap of faith to find something commercially viable in that raw blues.

On April 14, 1963, Gomelsky had invited the Beatles to come see the Stones down at the Crawdaddy. At the time, the Beatles had their second single, Please Please Me, at the top of the charts. In his book Stone Alone; Bill described it this way:

The room was packed and we were in good form, driven on by the Crawdaddy regulars that now formed our core audience. Soon after we began our first set, we were staggered to see the four Beatles standing and watching us. They were dressed identically in long leather overcoats. I became very nervous and said to myself: "Shit, that’s the Beatles!"

Between sets, the two bands chatted, and the Beatles stayed for the second set and then came back to the Edith Grove flat, where the musicians sat talking about music into the wee hours. In awe, Brian received an autographed photo of the pop stars.

Journalist Peter Jones tipped off one particularly energetic and sharp nineteen-year-old PR man, Andrew Loog Oldham, to the scene at the Crawdaddy. Oldham had been working as the Beatles’ London publicist. Oldham was the highly ambitious son of a single, striving mother in postwar London. He was an inveterate hustler who lived by a fake it ‘til you make it credo, literally knocking on doors and gaining work as a jack-of-all-trades for film stars and fashion designers.

Oldham had a similar evangelical fervor, energized by the conviction that he was tapping into the slipstream of rapidly changing cultural forces. He had keen and well-developed interests in not only fashion, but in the fresh, independent, and individual expression of the French New Wave’s film auteurs, the aesthetics of which he adapted for use in publicizing and art directing the fashion scene, and eventually in stylizing, grooming, and presenting the image of the Stones—the shadowy, gloomy noirish shots of the early Stones records like Out of Our Heads, for example.

Branching out from fashion into music, Oldham did some early work as a publicist for Phil Spector in England, and a week of handling Bob Dylan for Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. The little bit of work he tasted in the music business pointed the way for the rest of his career. However, it was when he happened to be present, coincidentally, at the first national television appearance by the Beatles that he became spellbound. As he watched them rehearse live, with a palpable buzz in the air, he noted their fearlessness and supreme confidence, as early as this, their first television appearance.

When he finally met the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, Oldham could see his path forward. Oldham convinced Epstein to hire him as the Beatles’ publicist in London. He started renting office space from a prematurely gray-haired, old-school showbiz agent then in his mid-thirties, Eric Easton. To Oldham, Easton was old and out of touch, but in the days when a nineteen-year-old could not yet obtain the necessary agent’s license, this office rental would lead to a partnership between the two men.

While Easton literally represented the old guard, Oldham began having great success in helping take the Beatles national. He was a proselytizer for how revolutionary and genuine the group was, no comparison to the pop hits being pumped out by the grown-ups of postwar British showbiz. Looking again at rock ’n’ roll via his fashion sensibilities, Oldham makes the analogy that the Beatles and Dylan were organic, authentic, costly, custom-made, real, and durable, as opposed to the cheap, off the rack, and disposable world of the adult-approved pop acts of the 1950s and early ’60s.

Oldham was looking for his first act to sign as a manager when he took Jones’s tip and went down to see the Stones in May 1963. When the music started, he finally got a glimpse of what was causing the word-of-mouth hype. He saw hundreds of kids getting swept up in the Stones brand of R&B, music that spoke of sex. To Oldham, Bill looked gaunt, pale, almost medieval. Charlie looked to be kinda blue, like he’d been transported for the evening from Ronnie Scott’s or Birdland. Stu was the odd man out. Keith, effected an alchemic exchange in cool-hand heat with himself. Brian, an incredible blond hulking hunk … ugly pretty. Finally, Jagger, was rock ’n’ roll in 3-D and Cinerama, moving like an adolescent Tarzan. Oldham recognized that the Stones’ animalistic, loud, sweaty R&B was raw, but he knew they could be polished enough for wider acceptance.

Oldham, though, was so overwhelmed that first night that he had not introduced himself. A few days later, taking his partner Easton to see the band, Oldham made his move to sign his first act. Whether or not he actually mentioned that he had worked with the Beatles, they knew. The word had gotten to the Stones. When they met, Oldham impressed upon them that there was a commercial market ready for what they were doing. If the Beatles could to it, he explained, so could the Stones.

Oldham had learned an essential lesson about the music business from his mentor, Phil Spector: stay independent. Spector had told Oldham that if and once he discovered a band to manage or produce, he should retain control, remain independent, and produce the act himself, rather than take advances from a label for recordings. Oldham, heeding the advice, convinced Easton that it was necessary to form an independent recording and management deal, which they did, naming it Impact Sound. It was set up primarily to keep Oldham in as much control as possible, including the record production, about which he knew next to nothing.

The Beatles had adapted to the white-lab-coat environment in early-1960s UK recording studios, with the invaluable midwifery of George Martin. But the visceral, unpolished live energy of the Stones would be difficult, if not impossible, to capture in that stale atmosphere of clinical early-1960s English record company studios, accustomed to pumping out whatever pop dreck was handed to them that day. It would be a challenge Oldham would take on himself, not just managing the band, but producing them as well. He extricated them from the contract with IBC with a bit of smoke and mirrors, alienating their early supporter, Glyn Johns, who had brought them to IBC.

Notably, Johns did not engineer any more sessions for the Stones until 1966. With this transaction a pattern was forming—the band cut out anyone who got in the way of their success. This had left Chapman by the side of the road. And getting out from under the contract with Clewson meant losing Johns.

But then the band itself became a target for the Machiavellian Oldham, who felt Ian Stewart did not fit in with the image that the new manager wanted to present. Oldham also claimed that record companies and press would not get behind a band with more than five members without losing focus. Either way, it was clearly no longer just about a group of R&B musicians. Oldham’s fashion sense attracted him to the pretty, thin, long-haired boys, in the words of Cynthia Stewart, Stu’s widow. Stu, with too-short hair, plain clothes, and a protruding jaw (due to a calcium deficiency in his youth) just looked too straight for Oldham, whose main focus was making Mick Jagger a star. So, graciously, Stu agreed to step out of the photo shoots and live shows, and became relegated to road manager for the band that he had formed with Brian Jones.

With IBC out of the way, the Stones signed with Impact Sound, and Oldham booked a session. On May 10, 1963, the same month that Mick started a sabbatical from the London School of Economics—where he had still not completed his degree—Oldham and the band recorded the little-known Chuck Berry song, Come On, which was brought to Decca Records, and only Decca, for their consideration. The record company had already been tipped off to the Stones’ phenomenal residency at the Crawdaddy by George Harrison. Of all the Beatles, Harrison had taken the greatest early interest in the Stones and advised Decca Records executive Dick Rowe that he should go see the band at the Crawdaddy. Rowe was in bad need of reputation restoration, as he was the man who will be forever known as the guy who passed on the Beatles. (The Fab Four signed to EMI instead.) Rowe signed the