Mick Jagger (15 page)

Despite being an archetypal “Ernie,” according to Mick and Brian’s private argot, Easton realized how the British pop market was exploding and readily agreed to become the Stones’ co-manager and financial backer. However, a potentially serious obstacle existed in Giorgio Gomelsky, who had given the band their Crawdaddy residency, got them eulogized by Record Mirror, and was their manager in every way other than writing. Oldham brought an incognito Easton to the Station Hotel to see the Stones perform and meet their acknowledged leader, Brian Jones. A few days later—during Gomelsky’s absence in Switzerland following the sudden death of his father—Brian and Mick attended a meeting with Oldham and Easton at the latter’s office.

It was a scene that had already been played in hundreds of other pop-managerial sanctums and would be in thousands more—the walls covered with signed celebrity photos, framed Gold Discs, and posters; the balding, overgenial man at a desk cluttered by pictures of wife and children (and, in this case, electronic organs), telling the two youngsters in front of him that, of course, he couldn’t promise anything but, if they followed his guidance, there was every chance of them ending up rich and famous. The only difference was the skeptical look on one youngster’s face and the penetrating questions he put to both his older and younger would-be mentors. “Mick asked me to define this ‘fame’ I kept talking about,” Oldham recalls. “I breathed deeply and said, ‘This is how I see fame. Every time you go through an airport you will get your picture taken and be in the papers. That is fame and you will be that famous.’ ”

True to his altruistic nature, Giorgio Gomelsky made no trouble about having the Stones filched from him in this devious manner, sought no financial compensation for all he had done to advance them, and even continued to offer them bookings at the Crawdaddy. In May 1963, Brian Jones signed a three-year management contract with Oldham and Easton on behalf of the whole band, setting the duo’s commission at 25 percent. During the grooming process, each Stone would receive a weekly cash retainer, modest enough but sufficient to lift the three flat sharers out of their previous abject poverty. Unknown to Mick and Keith, Brian negotiated an extra five pounds per week in his capacity as leader.

Svengali lost no time in setting to work, though his original aim was to package the Stones pretty much like other pop bands, i.e., as Beatle copies. Their piano player, Ian Stewart, was dropped because Oldham thought six too cumbersome a lineup in this age of the Fab Four—and besides, chunky, short-haired Stu looked “too normal.” Good friend as well as fine musician though he was, neither Mick nor Brian protested and there was general relief when he agreed to stay on as roadie and occasional backup player. Keith deeply disapproved of Stu’s treatment—as he had of Giorgio Gomelsky’s—but felt his subordinate position (“a mere hireling”) did not entitle him to take a moral stand. He was equally docile when Svengali gave a moment of attention to him, ordering him to drop the s from “Richards” to give it a more showbizzy sound, as in Cliff Richard.

As an experienced entertainment agent, as well as a substantial investor, Eric Easton had a voice that must also be heeded. And, so far as Easton was concerned, the Stones had one possibly serious weak link. He wondered whether Mick’s voice could stand the strain of nightly, often twice-nightly, appearances in the touring pop package shows that were every band’s most lucrative market. There was also the question of whether the crucially important BBC would still bar him for sounding “too colored.” Group leader Brian Jones was brought into the discussion, and readily agreed with Easton that, if necessary, the Stones’ vocalist would have to go the same way as their pianist.

A couple of days after the contract signing, Oldham telephoned a young photographer friend named Philip Townsend and commissioned the Stones’ first-ever publicity shoot. The only brief Townsend received was to “make them look mean and nasty.” He posed them in various Chelsea locations: on a bench outside a pub, mingling with oblivious King’s Road shoppers, even sitting kindergarten-style on the road outside 102 Edith Grove, ferociously casual and cool with their corduroy jackets, polo necks, and ever-smoldering cigarettes, but, to twenty-first-century eyes, not mustering a shred of meanness or nastiness between them. Mick stands out only for his lighter-colored jacket with raglan lapels; if anyone seems the star of the group, it’s sleek, enigmatic-looking Charlie Watts.

Having been dubbed the next big thing by London’s most influential music trade paper, the Stones were as good as guaranteed a contract with a major record label. Theoretically, of course, they were still bound to IBC studios by the demo tape on which they had given Ian Stewart’s friend Glyn Johns a six-month option. Eric Easton’s advice was that the agreement would have no validity if they could get back the tape’s only copy. Adopting Brian’s habit of bald-faced lying, they therefore told Johns they’d decided to break up the band but would like to keep the tape as a souvenir. An unsuspecting Johns handed it over in exchange for its recording cost: £109.

Among Britain’s few record labels in 1963, the mighty Decca company was the Stones’ almost inevitable destination. Having dominated the UK music market for thirty years, Decca had seen its archrival, EMI, achieve the equivalent of a Klondike gold strike with the Beatles. To compound the agony, Decca’s head of “artists and repertoire,” Dick Rowe, had had first chance to sign the Liverpudlians but had passed on them. So desperate was Rowe to rescue his reputation that the Stones (whose demo tape his department had also rejected a few months earlier because of Mick’s vocals) walked into Decca without the customary studio audition.

A well-worn procedure now lay ahead, which even the otherwise mold-breaking Beatles had followed—and continued to follow. The new signees would go into their record company’s own studios in the charge of a staff producer, who would choose the material they recorded and specify how it should be performed. Though Rowe, in his thankfulness, offered a significantly higher royalty than EMI had given the Beatles (it could hardly have been lower), the Stones would still receive only a tiny fraction of the sale price of each record, and that at a far-distant date, after labyrinthine adjustments and deductions.

Andrew Oldham had other ideas, absorbed from his American entrepreneurial idol, Phil Spector. The artists who helped constitute Spector’s Wall of Sound were recorded privately by the producer at his own expense and free from any interference by third parties. The master tapes were then leased to the record company, which manufactured, distributed, and marketed the product but had no say in its character or creative evolution and, crucially, did not own the copyright. In Britain’s cozily exploitative record business, a tape-lease deal had never before been proposed—let alone in the airily arrogant way Oldham proposed it. Such was Decca’s terror of losing another next big thing that they complied without a murmur.

Again following Spector’s lead, Oldham appointed himself the Stones’ record producer as well as co-manager, undaunted by his indifference to their sacred music—or by never having set foot in a recording studio other than as a PR minder. Decca were already agitating for a debut single to catch the ever-rising tide of hysteria around the Beatles and beat groups generally. With no clue what that debut should be, Oldham simply told his charges to pick out their five best R&B stage numbers and they would make the choice democratically between them. A session was booked at Olympic Sound, one of central London’s only three or four independent studios, on May 10. Mick arrived straight from a London School of Economics lecture with a pile of textbooks under one arm.

The decision about the single’s A-side—the one to be submitted for radio play and review in the trades—proved problematic. The Stones’ best live numbers were uncommercial blues like Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom” or Chuck Berry anthems like “Roll Over Beethoven,” which by now had become the staple of many other bands, not least the Beatles. Finally they chose Berry’s “Come On,” a seriocomic lament about a lost girlfriend, a broken-down car, and being rudely awoken by a wrong number on the telephone. Released two years earlier as the B-side to “Go Go Go,” it had made little impact in Britain and had a slightly more pop feel than Berry’s usual output.

There was little time for any radical reinterpretation of the track at Olympic Sound. Oldham, using Eric Easton’s money, had booked the studio for three hours at a special rate of forty pounds, and was under strict orders from his co-manager not to run over time. That sense of haste and compromise permeated the Stones’ “Come On”; indeed, Berry’s languid vocal was so speeded up by Mick, it sounded more like some tongue-twisting elocution exercise. With an eye to the mass market, he also toned down the lyrics (an act of self-censorship never to be repeated), singing about “some stupid guy tryin’” to reach another number rather than “some stupid jerk.” Brian Jones’s musicianship was limited to a harmonica riff in place of Berry’s lead guitar, and a falsetto harmony in the chorus. Even with a key change to spin it out, the track lasted only one minute and forty-five seconds. For the unimportant B-side, the band could return to their comfort zone with Willie Dixon’s “I Want to Be Loved.”

The session wrapped in just under three hours, so sparing Eric Easton a five-pound surcharge. As the participants left, the single engineer—whose services were included in the price—asked Oldham what he wanted to do about “mixing.” Britain’s answer to Phil Spector did not yet know this to be an essential part of the recording process. Still fearful of being charged overtime, he replied, “You mix it and I’ll pick it up tomorrow.”

Everyone involved realized how unsatisfactory the session had been, and there was neither surprise nor protest when Decca’s Dick Rowe judged both the tracks to be unreleasable in their present form and said they must be rerecorded at the company’s West Hampstead studios under the supervision of a staff producer, Michael Barclay. The wisest thing would have been for Mick to start afresh with a new A-side, but instead he continued trying to pummel some life into his hepped-up yet watered-down version of “Come On.” The infusion of technical expertise and extra time made so little audible difference that Decca’s bureaucracy decided to stick with the Olympic Sound version and this was duly released on June 7, 1963.

To drum up advance publicity, Oldham took his new discoveries on an exhaustive tour of the newspaper and magazine offices to which he had easy access thanks to his former connection with the Beatles. As well as the trade press, these included magazines catering to a female teenage audience, like Boyfriend, whose Regent Street offices were just around the corner from Decca. “After Andrew first brought them in, the Stones just used to turn up—usually at lunchtime,” recalls former Boyfriend writer Maureen O’Grady. “I remember Mick and Brian going round the office, trying to cadge a sandwich from our packed lunches. They were obviously ravenous.”

When it came to getting television exposure, the “Ernie” Eric Easton proved to have his uses. Among Easton’s more conventional clients was Brian Matthew, the host of British television’s only significant pop performance show, Thank Your Lucky Stars. Transmitted in black-and-white early each Saturday evening from ABC-TV’s Birmingham studios, it featured all the top British and American chart names lip-synching their latest releases and, in this era of only two UK television channels, pulled in a weekly audience of around 13 million. Six months earlier, while Mick, Brian, and Keith were shivering at Edith Grove, the show had broken the Beatles nationally, sending their second single, “Please Please Me,” straight to No. 1.

Easton spoke to Brian Matthew, and as a result Thank Your Lucky Stars booked the Stones to perform “Come On” on the show to be recorded on Sunday, July 7, and aired nationally the following Saturday. The catch was that they would have to look like a conventional beat group, in matching black-and-white-checked bum-freezer jackets with black velvet collars, black trousers, white shirts, and Slim Jim ties. Mick and Keith protested in outrage to Andrew Oldham, their supposed soul mate, but to Oldham, exposure on this scale far outweighed a little compromising clobber; if they wanted the spot, they must wear the check.

Thus did Britain receive its first sight of Mick Jagger—far down a bill headlined by the teenage songstress Helen Shapiro and introduced by Brian Matthew in the kind of cut-glass BBC tones that traditionally commentated on Royal funerals or Test cricket matches. By today’s standards, it was hardly a provocative debut. The Stones in their little checked jackets appeared on a two-sided set formed of giant playing cards, with Mick standing on a low plinth to the rear of Brian and Bill, and Keith and Charlie shown in profile. Merely lip-synching “Come On” removed any involvement Mick had ever felt with the song, reducing him to the same waxy tailor’s-dummy inanimation as the other four. For nobodies like these, the track was not allowed even its pitifully short ninety-second running time, prematurely fading amid the (artificially induced) screams of the studio audience.

It was long enough to cause horror and revulsion in living rooms the length and breadth of Britain. Earlier that year, a nation that immemorially equated masculinity—and heterosexuality—with the army recruit’s stringent “short back and sides” had been appalled by the sight of four young Liverpudlians with hair slabbed over their foreheads like the twenties Hollywood vamp Louise Brooks. Closer inspection, however, had revealed the Beatles’ mop-tops to be no more than that, leaving their necks and ears as neatly shorn as any regimental sergeant major could wish. But here were pop musicians whose hair burst through those last frontiers of decorum and hygiene, curling over ears and brushing shirt collars; here, in particular, was a vocalist (if one could call him that), the blatant effeminacy of whose coiffure carried on into his marginally twitching torso and unsmiling, obscurely ungracious face.

Out there, of course, nobody knew who he was: almost no band members’ names were yet known but John, Paul, George, and Ringo. The telephone calls that flooded ABC-TV’s switchboard were to protest about the “scruffy” group who had disfigured Thank Your Lucky Stars and to urge the producers never to invite them back.