| August 28th, 2005 05:31 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Moss: Footnotes on the Passing of Time and the Rolling of Stones
Tony Atherton
The Ottawa Citizen
August 28, 2005
In the beginning, there was Mick and Keith and Brian. And the beginning was a long, long time ago.
In an effort to more vividly trace the seams etched in the craggy mugs of the band whose longevity fascinates and appalls us, we offer an evocation of that night 43 years ago when a coterie of callow, awkward R&B fanatics calling itself The Rolling Stones first performed in public. Though largely an act of imagination, this vignette is inspired by details gleaned from dozens of sources, including official and unofficial biographies of the group and its members.
The story is copiously foot-noted. It is in these annotations one might begin to see how much water has flowed under the Bridges to Babylon since that night.
July 12, 1962. A self-consciously bohemian crowd -- beatniks and embryonic Mods -- gathers near the corner of Oxford and Poland streets on the edge of London's Soho district.
The hipsters are queuing for tickets to the Academy Cinema1, London's original art-house theatre, which occupies the street level at 165 Oxford Street2. Maybe there's a flick by that new French bloke, Jean-Luc Godard3, or maybe they're screening Victim, the recent Dirk Bogarde film banned in the U.S. for uttering the word "homosexuality"4.
Usually by this time on a Thursday, the throng would be snaking down the stairs below the theatre to the Marquee Club5, a venue devoted to traditional jazz and blues. But tonight, no one is waiting to get in the club and precious few loll at tables around the small stage with its striped awning, the "marquee" of the club's name.
The few patrons who have shown up forgot that Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, the hard-driving band that has been filling the house on Thursdays since the spring, has the night off for a BBC Radio gig. Their only consolation is that Korner's usual vocalist, an absurdly tall, gangly kid who looks like Derbyshire, sounds like West Chicago, and goes by the name of Long John Baldry6, will be filling in.
But before Baldry comes on, these fans of hardcore blues will have to endure a set by a bunch of over-eager yobs with a name -- the Rolling Stones -- that fairly reeks of that modern musical anathema, rock 'n' roll.
The fact that this band's front man is the liver-lipped7 punk who occasionally sits in for Baldry with Blues Incorporated isn't much of a recommendation. The punk (Mitch, is it? Mikey?8) is stiff on stage, has a weird voice and twitches his head incessantly.
He is twitching even now, sitting at the table near the door in a bulky cardigan9 he's convinced himself is radical attire. His generous lips are wrapped around a Benson & Hedges Silk Cut10.
Mick Jagger, a diligent 19-year-old schoolboy from the London School of Economics, is getting antsy. The sixth man in the combo is late. Ian Stewart11 is a stocky, lantern-jawed bloke, old at 24, who looks -- and acts -- like a suburban insurance salesman. But he plays a thumping boogie-woogie piano and the band needs him, not the least because he's holding the night's set list.
Sitting at the same table, squinting over the cigarette that dangles from his lips, a kid with the face of a choir boy labours to master a B7 chord on the unamplified, semi-solid Hofner electric guitar12 he balances on one knee. If he can get B7 down pat, along with Chuck Berry's duck-walk, he figures his life will be complete.
Eighteen-year-old Keith Richards is never far from Mick Jagger. And vice-versa. They're both from Dartford, a small, dull, middle-class city in Kent13 whose saving grace is that it is only a short train ride to London.
Keith and Mick have known one other since they were toddlers, though it hadn't been until the previous fall that they'd bumped into each other on a train -- Mick headed for the LSE, Keith headed for another day of skipping classes at the Sidcup Art College -- and discovered a mutual interest in American blues and R&B.
Across the room, a boy with a shock of blond hair and the insouciant look of a classroom cutup brushes the lapels of his velvet jacket and returns to fiddling with the dial of a Bush transistor radio14.
The Rolling Stones barely exists, but it is definitely 20-year-old Brian Jones's band15. It was he who recruited Mick, Keith and Ian, and he who had plucked its name from the lyric sheet of a Muddy Waters' album.
Dick Taylor, the Dartford boy who first turned Mick on to the blues, is already on stage, tuning his bass.
Also on stage is Tony Chapman, a semi-pro drummer engaged at the last minute for this gig16.
There's a commotion at the door and Ian comes bustling in, apologizing for being late and blaming the telly.
"Gee, that Ena Sharples17 is a gas," he says to no one in particular as the band heads for the stage.
They plug in and switch on their 15-amp Vox amplifiers and, as a couple of stage lights heat up18, Ian sits at the piano and takes out a folded page ripped from his pocket diary19. "Kansas City, then Baby, What's Wrong? and Confessin' the Blues he says in a stage whisper.
A club employee climbs languidly to the stage, leans into a mike and says, without much enthusiasm, "Ladies and gentlemen, the, uh, Rolling Stones ..."
- - -
Worth Noting
1. The Academy was one of more that 3000 cinema screens in Britain at the beginning of the 1960s, accommodating half a billion movie-goers a year. By the Stones' 40th anniversary, after VHS, DVD and a multiplexing, there were 3150 screens for 185 million admissions.
2. The address is now home to an ATM machine, a technology that would revolutionize banking beginning in the mid-80s, about the time when it looked like the Stones were breaking up.
3. Jean-Luc Godard had just broken into the mainstream the previous year with the debut of Breathless (A bout de souffle). In 1962, the Stones' might have seen Lawrence of Arabia, and cheered some guy named Sean Connery as James Bond in a movie called Dr. No.
4. Homosexuality was still a crime in Britain in 1962 and would be for another five years. Today, Soho is home to London's gay village, and the city's hugely popular Pride Day parade.
5. Founded by the preservationist National Jazz League, the club that accommodated blues and barely tolerated R&B would become the temple of British rock after moving around the corner to Wardour Street in 1964.
6. The legendary British blues singer died at 64 last month in Vancouver.
7. Large lips were considered ugly in the 1960s, likely for reasons that were unconsciously racist. In 2005, men and women pay up to $5,000 to have a gob like Mick had in '62.
8. Born Michael Philip Jagger, middle-class Mick didn't adopt his working-class nickname until the year before the band was formed. Until then he was Mike.
9. British-made, naturally. In 1960, only seven per cent of clothing sold in Britain was imported. By the late '90s, imports accounted for almost 60 per cent of sales.
10. More than half of Britain's adult population smoked in the early 1960s. Today the figure is little more than a quarter.
11. Ian Stewart would be kicked out of the band less than a year later by the Stones' new manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, because he didn't look like a rebel. "Stu" stayed on as the Stone's road manager until his death in 1985.
12. Electric guitars had been mass-marketed for less than a decade before Keith bought his Hofner, which he would soon trade for a Fender Telecaster.
13. Sleepy Dartford, its population doubled to 85,000, is now home to Bluewater, Europe's largest and most extravagant retail mall, and the Mick Jagger Centre, which boasts two performance spaces, a recording studio, computer music suites, an art gallery and rehearsal studios.
14. One of the first British radios to take advantage of transistors, the 1958 Bush "portable" weighed more than two kilograms. But its technology led to microchips and an electronics revolution Brian couldn't have imagined.
15. Brian Jones' lifestyle would become more dissolute in the next few years, and by 1969, after two drug convictions, he would be tactfully sacked by the band. Shortly after, he would die in a tawdry drowning incident. Last month, his hometown of Cheltenham, which practically ran him out on a rail when he impregnated a 14-year-old schoolgirl in 1958, unveiled a tacky gilt bust of the musician at a local shopping mall.
16. Taylor quit in December and was replaced by Bill Wyman, chosen largely on the strength of his massive Vox 850 amplifier. Chapman played on and off with the Stones until the band convinced jazz drummer Charlie Watts to give them a chance in 1963. Ronnie Wood wouldn't be folded into the mix until 1976.
17. The appeal of Ena Sharples, hair-netted harpie of the Rover's Return snug, was part of what made Coronation Street the top-rated TV program of 1962, when TV's longest running serial was just a-year-and-a-half old, and Brits only had two channels. Two days before the Stone's first gig, the Cape Canaveral launch of Telstar, the first communications satellite, foreshadowed an age when Britain would have access to hundreds of TV services.
18. The set up for Stones 1998 Bridges to Babylon Tour included two stages, a cantilevered bridge, several giant inflatables, 346 spots, arcs, strobes, and theatre projectors, 10 smoke machines and two fog generators.
19. If Ian had waited 35 years or so, he could have e-mailed the set list to his colleagues from his BlackBerry.
Ran with fact box "Worth Noting", which has been appended to the story.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2005
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| August 28th, 2005 07:11 AM |
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| corgi37 |
What an awesome post. Some one, some where, has simply got to make a movie about the band. How cool will it be to see 1/2 a dozen dissinterested people watching rock history.
"Ladies and Gentlemen, the, uh, Rolling Stones"
Thats fried gold! |
| August 28th, 2005 07:39 AM |
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| Hannalee |
There's a commotion at the door and Ian comes bustling in, apologizing for being late and blaming the telly.
"Gee, that Ena Sharples17 is a gas," he says to no one in particular as the band heads for the stage.
Give me strength....
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