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| stonedinaustralia |
Following is the chapter on the Stones from the book by Nik Cohn “awopbopaloobop – alopbamboom” – perhaps the first serious book written about post WWII pop and rock and roll.
Cohn also wrote the text for Guy Paellart’s “Rock Dreams” – Paellart (sp?) did the sleeve of IORR (and Bowies Diamond Dogs). Check out “Rock Dreams” if you haven’t already – the picture of mick and keith as pirates predates and anticipates Johnny Depp by about 30 years.
Cohn (born in London and raised in Ireland) wrote the book at aged 23 in 1969 – ‘tho the following was from a revised edition in done in 1971. Legend has it it was essentially written in one marathon sitting fuelled by Guiness and speed. This may account for a couple of factual howlers that most of you will notice. Those small errors aside it is a great piece. Cohn’s prose style is a lesson to us all. Plenty of short and to the point sentences with lots of colourful adjectives coupled with very sharp and often extremely funny perceptions and observations.
Aside from anything else, it is interesting as it takes a retrospective on the Stones of less then ten years which makes it weird to read 30 years later with the band still going.
The book is considered a seminal work ‘tho some of his judgments have been criticized
not least his categorizing Otis Reddings’ act as “sweat and Tom” a description which, history shows, lacked a real understanding of the ethic of professionalism that under-pins black music
Anyway it’s a great book and if you haven’t read it and you are into ‘50’s rock and roll and the music of the sixties it will give you plenty to think about. Those of you who are Dylan fans would like the Dylan chapter notwithstanding the fact that he’s no real fan of Bob’s music.
As you will see, Cohn gives Andrew Loog Oldham a great deal of credit for the Stones success and cultural impact.
A couple of asides – Cohn also wrote the short story upon which the movie “Saturday Night Fever” was based. He was also involved in an amphetamine drug bust in NYC sometime in the ‘80’s which Marianne Faithfull also had some vague connection with.
Anyway, hope you all enjoy it.
CHAPTER 15 – The Rolling Stones
In Liverpool one time, early in 1965, I was sitting in some pub, just next to the Odeon cinema, and I heard a noise like thunder.
I went outside and looked around but I couldn’t see a thing. Just this noise of thunder, slowly getting closer, and also, more faint, another noise like a wailing siren. So I waited but nothing happened. The street stayed empty.
Finally, after maybe five full minutes, a car came round the corner, a big flash limousine, and it was followed by police cars, by police on foot and police on motorbikes, and they were followed by several hundred teenage girls. And these girls made a continuous high-pitched keening sound and their shoes banged down against the stone. They ran like hell, their hair down in their eyes, and they stretched their arms out pleading as they went.
The limousine came up the street towards me and stoped directly outside the Odeon stage door. The police formed cordons. Then the car door opened and the Rolling Stones got out, all five of them and Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager, and they weren’t real. They had hair down past their shoulders and they wore clothes of every colour imaginable and they looked mean, they looked just impossibly evil.
In this grey street they shone like sun gods. They didn’t seem human, they were like creatures off another planet, impossible to reach or understand but most exotic, most beautiful in their ugliness.
They crossed towards the stage door and this was what the girls had been waiting for, this was their chance, so they began to surge and scream and clutch. But then they stopped, they just froze. The Stones stared straight ahead, didn’t twitch once, and the girls only gaped. Almost as if the Stones weren’t touchable, as if they were protected by some invisible metal ring. So they moved on and disappeared. And the girls went limp behind them and were quiet. After a few seconds, some of them began to cry.
In this way, whatever else, the Stones had style and presence and real control. They are my favourite group. They always have been.
To begin with, they used to play the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond and they laid down something very violent in the line of rhythm ‘n’ blues. They were enthusiasts then, they cared a lot about their music. Really, that was the only thing that linked them because they’d come from different backgrounds, very different situations, but they’d all grown up to the blues and, for a time, they got along.
At this point they were only archetypal drop-outs. I mean, they weren’t art students but they should have been, they had all the symptoms, that aggression, that scruffiness and calculated cool, that post-beat bohemianism. And in these very early sixties, before the age of T-shirts and baseball boots, the heavy art-school cults were ray Charles and chuck berry and Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Charlie Mingus and Monk, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, Robert Johnson. If you were pretentious about it, you might stretch to a paperback of Rimbaud or Dostoyevsky, strictly for display. But the Stones weren’t pretentious – they were mean and nasty, full-blooded, very tasty, and they beat out the toughest, crudest, most offensive noise any English band had ever made.
(Up to this, the British R&B scene had been desperately thin: Chris Barber, the trad trombonist, had started a few sessions in the late fifties but, by 1960, the obvious boss was a harmonica-blower called Cyril Davies, who died just as the blues boom was finally lifting off the ground.
Davies was an earnest man and a good musician but he mostly rehashed the Americans, he made almost no attempt to translate things into English terms and that limited him. Still, he laid foundations.)
At any rate, the stones were at the Crawdaddy, peddling stuff about mid-way between the bedrock Chicago blues of Mussy waters and the pop-blues of Chuck Berry, and they built themselves a following. Naughty but nice, they were liked by Aldermaston marchers and hitch-hikers, beards and freaks and pre-Neanderthal Mods everywhere. Simply, they were turning into the voice of hooliganism.
As groups go, they were definitely motley: Mick Jagger, who sang, came out of a slid middle-class background and had been to the London School of Economics; Keith Richards came from Tottenham (sic.) and was quite tough; Brian Jones wasn’t tough at all – he was from Cheltenham, very safe, but was insecure, neurotic, highly intelligent.
Charlie Watts had worked in an ad agency and, being a drummer, never talked; Bill Wyman was older, was married – he didn’t quite belong.
Anyhow, the thing about them was that, unlike the Beatles, they didn’t balance out but niggled, jarred and hardly ever relaxed. At all time, there was a tension to them – you always felt there was a background chance of public holocaust. That was partly what made them exciting.
In 1963, Andrew Loog Oldham became their manager.
Oldham, without doubt, was the most flash personality that British pop has ever had, the most anarchic and obsessive and imaginative hustler of all. Whenever he was good, he was quite magnificent.
His father having been killed in the war, he’d grown up with his mother, quite rich, and he was sent to public school. By the time he was sixteen, he was doing window displays for Mary Quant, the clothes designer, and then he spent a year bumming around the south of France before he came back to work in the cloak room at the Ronnie Scott Club and be a publicist with Brian Epstein’s NEMS. And that was the whole sum of his achievement at the time he first met the Stones. He was then nineteen years old.
What he had going for him was mostly a frantic yen to get up and get out: he loathed slowness and drabness, age and caution and incompetence, mediocrity of all kinds, and he could not stand to work his way up steadily like anyone else.
Instead, he barnstormed, he came on quite outrageous. He slabbed his face with make-up and wore amazing clothes and hid his eyes behind eternal shades. He was all camp and, when he was batting off nothing at all, he shot big fat lines and always played everything ultimate big time.
The great thing was the way he pushed himself, he could either clean up or bomb completely. He couldn’t possibly get caught by compromise.
Anyhow, the Stones wee obviously just his meat. He caught them at Richmond and got hooked by their truculence, their built in offensiveness. Also, he struck up immediate contact with Mick Jagger, who was greatly impressed by him and became almost his disciple, his dedicated follower in the ways of outrage.
So Oldham bought in Eric Easton, who was his partner and had capital. Easton, a stock businessman who handled such show-biz stuff as Bert Weadon and Julie Grant, wasn’t unimpressed. “But the singer’ll have to go,” he said. “The BBC won’t like him.”
As manager, what Oldham did was to take everything implicit in the stones and blow it up one hundred times. Long-haired and ugly and anarchic as they were, Oldham made them more so and turned them into everything that parents would most hate, be most frightened by. All the time, he goaded them to be wilder, nastier, fouler in every way and they were – they swore, sneered, snarled and, deliberately, they came on cretinous.
It was good basic psychology: kids might see them the first time and not be sure about them, but then they’d hear their parents whining about those animals, those filthy long-haired morons, and suddenly they’d be converted, they’d identify like mad.
This, of course, is bedrock pop formula: find yourself something that truly makes adults squirm and, straightaway, you have a guaranteed smash on your hands. Johnnie Ray, Elvis, P.J.Proby, Jimi Hendrix – it never fails.
So their first single, “Come On”, got to the edge of the twenty, and then “I Wanna Be Your Man” was number ten and, finally, “It’s All Over Now” was number one. Their initial album did a hundred thousand in a week and, by this time, they were running hot second to the Beatles and they kept it like that for two years solid. Later on, in America, they even temporarily went ahead.
All this time, Oldham hustled them strong: he was hectic, inventive and he pulled strokes daily. Less obviously, he was also thorough, he worked everything out to the smallest spontaneous detail. Well, the Stones were really his fantasy, his private dream child and, healthy narcissist as he was, he needed them to be entirely perfect.
The bit I liked best, about both Oldham and the Stones themselves, was the stage act. In every way, both individually and collectively, it expressed them just right.
Charlie Watts played the all-time bombhead drummer, mouth open and jaw sagging, moronic beyond belief, and Bill Wyman stood way out to one side, virtually in the wings, completely isolated, his bass held up vertically in front of him for protection, and he chewed gum endlessly and his eyes were glazed and he looked just impossibly bored.
Keith Richards wore T-shirts and, all the time, he kept winding and unwinding his legs, moving uglily like a crab, and was shut-in, shuffling, the classic fourth-form drop-out. Simply, he spelled Borstal.
Brian Jones had beautiful silky yellow hair to his shoulders, exactly like a Silvrikin ad, and he wasn’t queer, very much the opposite, but he camped it up like mad, he did the whole feminine thing and, for climax, he’d rush the front of the stage and make to jump off, flouncing and flitting like a gymslip schoolgirl.
And then Mick Jagger: he had lips like bumpers, red and fat and shiny, and they covered his face. He looked like an updated Elvis Presley, in fact, skinny legs and all, and he moved like him, so fast and flash he flickered. When he came on out, he went bang. He’d shake his hair all down his eyes and he danced like a whitewash James Brown, he flapped those tarpaulin lips and, grotesque, he was all sex.
He sang but you couldn’t hear him for screams, you only got some background blur, the beat, and all you knew was his lips. His lips and his moving legs, bound up in sausage-skin pants. And he was outrageous: he spun himself blind, he smashed himself and he’d turn his back on the audience, jack-knife from the waist, so that his arse stuck straight up in the air, and then he’d shake himself, he’d vibrate like a motor, and he’d reach the hand mike through his legs at you, he’d push it right in your face. Well, he was obscene, he was excessive. Of course, he was beautiful.
The weird thing was, Jagger on-stage wasn’t like Jagger off-stage but he was very much like Andrew Oldham. Andrew Loog Oldham. I mean, he was more a projection of Oldham than himself. This happens often. For various obvious physical reasons, most managers aren’t capable of getting out and being stars themselves. So they use the singers they handle as transmitters, as dream machines. Possibly, that’s the way it was with Jagger and Oldham.
Anyhow, what I was saying, the stones had a wild stage act and, at that time in Liverpool, the night I mentioned before, they put on maybe the best pop show I ever saw: final bonanza, hysterical and violent and sick but always stylized, always full of hype, and Jagger shaped up genuinely as a second Elvis, as heroic and impossible as that.
After the show I hung around in the dressing-rooms. The Stones were being ritually vicious to everyone, fns and journalists and hangers-on regardless, and I got bored. So I went down into the auditorium and it was empty, quite deserted, but there was this weird smell. Piss: the small girls had screamed too hard and wet themselves. Not just one or two of them but many, so that the floor was sodden and the stench was overwhelming. Well, it was disgusting. No, it wasn’t disgusting but it was strange, the empty cinema (chocolate boxes, cigarette packs, ice-lolly sticks) and this sad sour smell.
Throughout this chapter, I’ve kept on saying how great the Stones were but all I’ve shown is evil and the question finally needs to be asked: what’s so good about bad?
No question, of course, the Stones were more loutish than they had to be but then, after all, each pop generation must go further than the one before, must feel as if it’s doing everything for the first time. Always, it must be arrogant and vain and boorish. Otherwise, it’s not being healthy and the whole essential teen revolt gets dammed up, that whole bit of breaking away and making it by oneself, and then it’s stored up in frustration, it twists itself and, most likely, it comes out ugly later on.
The best thing about the Stones, the MOST IMPORTANT (my emphasis – SIA), was their huge sense of independence, uncompromised.
In the first chapter, I said that pop had originally been just that , a movement towards teen independence, and that Elvis was its first great leader. Well, compared to Elvis, the Stones were entirely different class: they were as far ahead of him as Elvis himself had been ahead of the young Sinatra.
No mashed banana sandwiches, middle-aged managers, G.I. blues, teddy bears, Gods or obediences – the Stones were teenage industry all by themselves, self-contained, and the adult world simply wasn’t relevant. That’s why they were so loathed inside the business, because they threatened the structure, because they threatened the way in which pop was controlled by old men, by men over thirty.
That’s also why they mattered, that’s why Andrew Oldham mattered in particular, because they meant you didn’t need to soften up to make it any more. You didn’t need to be pretty, you didn’t need to simper or drool or suck up – the old men might hate you in every way possible and you could still make yourself a million dollars.
Really, the Stones were major liberators: they stirred up a whole new mood of teen arrogance here and the change was reflected in the rise of Mod, in Carnaby Street and Radio Caroline, in Cathy McGowan and the Who and, later, in Twiggy. These weren’t purely teenage happenings, of course, but most everyone involved in them was under thirty and none of them could possibly have happened in the fifties. For the first time, England had something like a private teen society going and, myself, I think it was the Stones rather than the Beatles who led it.
Certainly, the Beatles were the bigger group but, until they turned to Love in 1967, they never greatly changed the way that anyone thought. They were self assured, cocky, and they took no shit but they were always full of compromise and they appealed as much to adults as to kids. They weren’t committed. The Stones were.
In this way, then, the Stones were the final group of the sixties and their image was the final image, Jagger was the final face and their records were the final records. More than anyone, more even than Bob Dylan, they became their time.
Apart from anything else, they made marvellous music.
In the early R&B phase, they were wildly exciting but also crude, derivative, very limited and they shaped up only as a short-term craze. But then, just as things were wearing thin, Jagger and Keith Richards suddenly upped and exploded as writers. Out of nowhere, they started churning out monsters: “The Last Time”, “Satisfaction”, “Get Off of My Cloud”, “Mother’s Little Helper”, “Under My Thumb”, “Paint It Black”.
They weren’t much on melody, their words were mostly slogans, and a lot of their songs were simply crap. None of that mattered. All that counted was sound – an adapted Spectorsound but less symphonic, less inflated – and the murderous mood it made. All din and mad atmosphere. Really, it was nothing but beat, smashed and crunched and hammered home like some amazing stampede. The words were lost and the song was lost. You were only left with chaos, beautiful anarchy. You drowned in noise.
Their best record was probably “Satisfaction”. Their most archetypal was “Get of Off My Cloud”, which sloganized the sixties just as “Blue Suede Shoes” had the fifties.
According to the story line, Jagger lives in an apartment on the ninety-ninth floor of his block and sits alone by the window, imagining the world has stopped. He plays records incredibly loud, makes holocausts of noise, and nobody can reach him, nobody can turn down his volume down. People from below try to shut him up but he takes no notice. He sits and plays his records and watches and floats. He can’t be touched. He’s on his cloud.
From Autumn 1966, though, the Stones began to slide.
Basically, they’d become too familiar. They’d come to be accepted and new people came along (the Who, Jimi Hendrix,the Mothers of Invention), who went beyond them in outrage and made them look tame. Suddenly, when the Stones came out to do their thing, they looked dated and a bit comic – Jagger’s cavortings even had a certain period charm to them. That’s how fast pop is: the anarchists of one year are the boring old farts of the next.
Beyond that, they’d gone badly stale in themselves, they’d lost pace and direction. Like the Beatles, they’d stopped touring. Unlike the Beatles, they didn’t use the extra time to make better music – their records went flabby and gutless instead.
Finally, they made an album called “Their Satanic Majesties Request”, very experimental, and they commissioned a 3D cover and they pushed the whole operation like mad, they peddled it as a major breakthrough. And it was only boring. It wasn’t freakish or dire or nauseous – it was a drag. It had no rage or arrogance left, no image. In every way, it was toothless.
Also, they weren’t much of a group any more: Watts and Wyman were married and settled, Brian Jones was going through big neurotic problems of his own, only Jagger and Richards were still close.
Fatally, they made no films and, without movies, nobody can really sustain. The Stones had had chances – they’d bought a property, they’d had deals set up but they’d never brought anything through. The right moment went and still they fannied about. When they finally got straight, it was already too late.
In the summer of 1967, Jagger and Richards were given jail sentences on drug charges and later, they got off on appeal. Shortly afterwards, Brian Jones went through roughly the same thing.
That could have saved them: they’d been made martyrs again and they were hounded by authority, by jobsworth, by the uglies in general. They were saints in the true cause of pot, teen symbol of that year, and they were most dignified, and they held their cool. In theory, they should have won everything back.
It didn’t work – they rushed out a new record, “We Love You”, complete with sound effects of prison doors slamming, and it badly failed to make number one. Well, it was a lousy record but that wasn’t the point. In such a situation, it should have scored regardless. Obviously, the time for dramatic savers was gone.
The same winter, Andrew Oldham stopped being their manager.
No question, the second half of his management had been infinitely less impressive then the first. Really, he’d run out of targets – after all, he’d come out of nowhere and found the Stones and made them happen, he’d earned himself a million dollars and started Immediate Records, his own independent label, the first indie in England. He’d cleaned up. He’d entirely made it and he was now twenty-one years old.
Not surprisingly, he turned a bit aimless. He hung out in Hollywood a lot and squandered much money. Whenever I saw him he looked bored, vaguely unhappy.
The Stones weren’t much pleased by this and relations got very strained indeed. The clincher came when Oldham didn’t fly back from Hollywood for the Jagger/Richards drug trial. Even Jagger, who’d always been closest to him, was finished by this and, not long afterwards, the split was made official.
Oldham does all right – he still owns Immediate on which he has Amen Corner and Fleetwood Mac, and he has the Beach Boys’ publishing in England. At the worst, he’s suffering from anti-climax. But he is much changed, very deflated.
At the time of his bust up with Stones, he went threough some quite bad times.When he came back on the scene, he was almost unrecognizable. No make-up, no camp, no outrage – he’d turned into a business man.
He wasn’t objectionable. He was quiet and thoughtful, very polite and he wasn’t even rude to waiters. He wanted to get into films, he wanted to be solid inside the pop industry and, on his office wall, he had some photo of himself and his partner Tony Calder, solemnly shaking hands with some middle-aged American record chief.
In every way, he was a more adult, responsible and admirable man but, myself, I’d preferred the ancient monster. He used to be messianic. And now he was a merchant. So Andrew Oldham lived but Loog was very dead.
And the Stones themselves? They revived. Musically, they veered away from the artiness of “Their Satanic Majesties” and went back to the basics, the bedrock aggression that they’ve always been so good at. In fact, they went beyond aggression and plunged themselves into darkness, where they hinted of orgy and satanic atrocity, in songs like “Stray cat Blues”, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Let it Bleed”. Where the evil was expressed directly, the effect grew tedious, as with schoolboys being endlessly naughty; but where it was merely implied, there were moments of high excitement, almost as fine as on “Satisfaction” or “Get Off My Cloud”. In particular, “Beggar’s Banquet” was probably their strongest album and “Street Fighting Man”, “Gimme Shelter” and “honky Tonk Women” among their best-realized songs.
Brian Jones became progressively estranged from the rest of the group and fell ill and, in 1969, died by drowning. He was replaced by a guitarist called Mick Taylor, who looked a bit like him, only cruder, and the group continued very much as before. In 1970 (sic.), they made a barnstorming tour of America, in which they re-established themselves as easily the finest of all rock bands on stage but also introduced some dreary overtones. Jagger took his sexual ambiguity to such lengths as to turn into self-caricature, ogling and pouting and wrist-flapping like some pop Kenneth Williams, and he pantomimed decadence. Where once there had been an assault on despised adult values, a hint of positive break-out, the violence and hysteria had now become targetless. They existed only for themselves: Jagger was bored, one sensed, and raising riots amused him. So he indulged himself in orgies of camp and rabble-rousing, and filled his songs with double-entendre and drug references and hip Californian voodoo. Because he remained a great show-man, the effect on stage was still exciting; but the implications were sour, the gestures third-hand. By 1971, he’d lost himself in amateur-dramatic nastiness, as real and as frightening as Sweeny Todd, and was well on his way to becoming a bore; “Silly boy,” said P.J.Proby.
Meanwhile he settled himself down as an international gossip- column face, to be photographed each time he got on or off a plane. He was seen at the theatre and opera, made friends in the very highest circles ands was responsible for establishing an entirely new vision of male beauty, based no longer on muscle or tan but on skinniness, outrageousness and belle-laide oddity. With the break-up of the Beatles, he became the most superstar superstar of all, after Elvis Presley, and media accepted him unquestioningly as the oracle of all Western youth, to be consulted on whatever new issue might arise. Twelve months in a year, he travelled in search of amusements and got his face on front pages, haunted the smartest restaurants, guest-starred at the choicest parties. Finally, he got married in St. Tropez and held a party for hundreds of beautiful-person guests, the assembled press of the world and the cream of the Rock establishment – a true Hollywood fantasia, at which he threw so many tantrums that his guests, half-admiringly, declared him ‘the new Judy Garland’.
Of course, far away in the background, one occasionally recalled that he’d begun as guerrilla. Once upon a time, he’d seemed dangerous, a threat to all things drab and authoritarian. But such stuff had become very distant. However, much he cavorted and postured, or made his naughty gestures, he had gone soft and safe. There was no chance now that he’d use his money or influence for change. At the time of “We Love You”, the stones had had plans of forming a combine on the lines of Apple, to buck the existing pop structure and, indirectly, to build alternatives to the established order. Now all that was forgotten. Instead, the royalties went on bean-feats in St. Tropez.
[Edited by stonedinaustralia] |
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| LadyJane |
Very interesting. Thanks SIA!! 
LJ. |
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CHAT
ROOM aka THE FUN HOUSE] [
RESTROOMS]
