Authors: Philip Norman
As a result, thirty-three-year-old Korner, a genial man with a shock of Afro hair before its time and an uneroded public school accent, now led Britain’s only full-time blues band, Blues Incorporated. The name had no twenty-first-century big-business associations, but had been inspired by Murder Inc., a Humphrey Bogart film about American gangsters—which, indeed, was very much how Korner’s musical contemporaries viewed him.
In 1962, any popular musician who wanted to make it in Britain had first to make it in Soho. The maze of narrow Georgian streets at the heart of London’s West End contained what little music industry the capital could yet boast, harboring song publishers, pluggers, talent scouts, agents, and recording studios—plus almost all the live venues that mattered—among its French restaurants, Italian groceries, cigar stores, and seedy strip clubs. Rock ’n’ roll and skiffle had each been launched in the nation from Soho, and anyone in search of pop stardom, as well as of a flash of naked breasts, an espresso, or coq au vin, instinctively headed there.
Since the Trad jazz boom, however, Soho was no longer a center of musical pioneering but of entrenchment and prejudice. It was now where “pure” jazz enthusiasts gathered—nowhere more fervently than at the National Jazz League’s own Marquee Club, a cellar designed (by the surrealist photographer Angus McBean) to resemble the interior of a tent. In this siege atmosphere, the blues was no longer recognized as a first cousin to jazz, but looked down on as disdainfully as was Trad, or even rock. Alexis Korner had formerly played banjo with the Barber band, which made his decision to put syncopated music behind him, and form a band essentially playing only twelve bars and three chords, all the more reprehensible.
Despite repeated rejections from Soho club managements—the brusquest from the Marquee’s manager, Harold Pendleton—Korner remained convinced there was an audience for blues who were at present totally excluded from London’s live music scene and would beat a path to Blues Incorporated’s door, if he could just provide them with one. Hence his decision to open his own club in the hopefully friendlier environs of the suburb where he’d grown up.
Like Dartford, Ealing had never previously been regarded as a crucible for the blues. It was an affluent, sedate, and almost wholly “white” residential area, best known for its eponymous film studios—maker of British screen classics like Kind Hearts and Coronets and Passport to Pimlico—and for having a “Broadway” rather than just an ordinary High Street. Korner’s Ealing Club (a name more suggestive of golf or bridge than visceral music) was situated almost directly opposite Ealing Broadway tube station, underneath an ABC bakery and tea shop. Local matrons being served afternoon tea by frilly-aproned waitresses little suspected what was brewing beneath their feet.
Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys’ excitement over the new club was somewhat dampened by the inaccessibility of its location, twenty-odd miles to the northwest of Dartford and a tricky journey, whether by road or public transport. Owing to prior commitments, they were not present at Korner’s opening night on March 17. But the following Saturday, the five of them set off for Ealing, packed into Alan Etherington’s father’s car, an appropriately named Riley Pathfinder.
First impressions were hardly promising. The club premises consisted of a shabby staircase and a single room, smelling dankly of the adjacent River Thames, with a central bar and a makeshift stage at one end. The kindred spirits waiting for showtime, no more than a couple of dozen strong, were equally uninspiring. Mick of the future would remember them as “trainspotters who needed somewhere to go … just a bunch of anoraks … and the girls were very thin on the ground.”
Excitement barely quickened when Blues Incorporated took the stage. The three main figures in the lineup, all men in their early thirties (advanced middle age by 1962 standards) were attired as conventionally as bank clerks in white shirts with sober ties, baggy gray flannel trousers, and black lace-up shoes, and had a serious, preoccupied air better suited to some chamber orchestra. But when they started playing, none of that mattered. The music was Chicago-style instrumental blues, a leisurely tag match between guitar, saxophone, and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar—usually seated on a chair—and his longtime playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica, and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semipro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s “Reelin’ and Rockin’” and “Around and Around,” Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City” and “Go on to School,” and Bobby Bland’s “Don’t Want No Woman.” Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt, and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, “Around and Around,” one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (“Well, the joint was rockin’ … goin’ round and round …”). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by “the way he threw his hair around … For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.”
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. “We’d obviously stepped over the limit,” Mick would remember. “You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.” But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present—and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives, and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight lineup of Korner, Cyril Davies, and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. “It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,” he would recall. “For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.” As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. “He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s ‘Poor Boy’—and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.”
Sometime before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica—what musicians call a “harp”—and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril—aka “Squirrel”—Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure, and fiercely anti–rock ’n’ roll Squirrel felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. “He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,” his would-be pupil would recall. “He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, ‘How do you bend a note?’ and Cyril would say, ‘Well, you get a pair of pliers …’ ”
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, on Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen—where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor—drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as “our working-class music” and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his debut there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a gray herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars, and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom” on “bottleneck” or “slide” guitar—not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, “Elmo Lewis,” clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. “It’s Elmore James, man,” he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. “It’s fuckin’ Elmore James …”
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivaling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet, and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalized Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned “Ladies’ College”), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an unforgettable lesson—but not this one. By the age of twenty, he had sired two further children with different young women, each time failing to do the decent thing by marrying the mother and accepting responsibility for the child. Long before there were rock stars as we have come to know them—motivated only by music and self-gratification, oblivious to the trail of ruined lives in their wake—there was Brian Jones.
Leaving school with two more A-levels than Mick, he could easily have gone on to university, but instead drifted from one tedious office job to another while playing alto sax with a rock ’n’ roll group (aptly named the Ramrods). He had met Alexis Korner in Cheltenham while Korner was still in the Chris Barber band; with Korner’s encouragement, he’d migrated to London soon afterward, hotly pursued by the latest young woman he had got “up the duff” with their baby son. In the meantime, he taught himself to play slide guitar well—brilliantly—enough for Korner to put him into the Blues Incorporated lineup at the Ealing Club.
He was only a little older than Mick and Keith, but seemed vastly more mature and sophisticated when they talked to him following his Elmore James imposture. As a guitarist, his rapport was initially with Keith. But Mick was equally impressed by his soft, lisping voice with no trace of West Country bumpkin; his superchic clothes and hair; his knowledge of music across the whole spectrum from pop to jazz; his surprising articulateness and literacy and wicked sense of humor; above all, his determination not to let his chaotic private life hinder him from, somehow or other, becoming a star.