leader of the group, I’m gonna have an extra five pounds a week.” We used to stay in cheap hotels ’cause we didn’t have any money, but they never stayed in real shit, once they’d got a little bit of money. So we’d stay in a medium-class hotel, but Brian would say, “In a few months’ time, when we’re earning more for a gig, I’m gonna stay in the Hilton because I’m the leader, and everybody else will be staying with you somewhere.” So eventually they got sick to fuckin’ death of him. He would change with the wind as well. Brian was very pretty, but a very silly boy really. Eventually it became obvious that Mick was the leader of the group. In those days Brian was simply a very, very good guitar player, and he was very mercenary too, very keen on money. So when Andrew comes along and says It’s time you started playing numbers like “Poison Ivy” because you’ll sell more records, it was Brian who immediately said Yeah, groovy, great. But having done this, after about the first six months of playing ballrooms in Stoke-on-Trent and Crewe, it was Brian who said, “I think we ought to play at Eel Pie Island twice a week again, and play the blues.” Brian would change from one day to another, and they just got fed up with him.
‘It was a pity. Brian was brought up in the worst possible way. He had a very good education, was very clever at school, but somewhere along the line he decided he was going to be a full-time professional rebel, and it didn’t really suit him. So that when he wanted to be obnoxious, he had to really make an effort, and having made the effort, he would be really obnoxious. But his nature was really quite sweet. Brian was really quite a sweet person, but he took everything to excess. It’s a shame, because he was really a good musician. I don’t want to be too hard on Brian. He was a very difficult person.’
What Keith remembered best about the night the Stones played with the Hollies was the drive back to London, three hundred miles in the back of Stu’s Volkswagen van with Charlie, Mick, Brian, and all their equipment, Bill in the front with Stu because he lied and said he got carsick in the back, where they had to piss out the ventilator because Stu, ‘a sadist,’ Keith said, wouldn’t stop except when he wanted. Thinking about that night and how they all had to sing because that’s what the Hollies did, Keith said, ‘Brian collapsed straightaway to commercialism. He shattered.’
The Stones were playing nearly every day, sometimes twice a day, and when they weren’t playing or recording, they were rehearsing for their first concert tour of England, with the Everly Brothers and Bo Diddley. On July 19 they were booked to play a debutante’s ball, but Brian was sick, the Stones all got drunk, and another band played. The next night the Stones, with Brian, played their first ballroom date, at a place called the Corn Exchange in Wisbech. ‘Come On’ was at number 30 in its struggle upwards in the Top Fifty. The Stones were a gathering sensation and were averaging less than £5 per man for each job. On August 10 they played two shows near Birmingham, and the next day, after playing the Studio 51 Club in the afternoon, the Stones played at the third National Jazz Festival in Richmond. Stu had left his job at the chemical company because there was no time for anything but driving, setting up equipment, taking it down, and driving.
On August 17 the Stones played in Northwich, up near Liverpool, on a bill with Lee Curtis, who according to Keith ‘pulled an incredible scene to steal the show, where he’d do Conway Twitty’s “Only Make Believe,” and he’d faint onstage. Guys came and carried him off, and he’d fight them off and come back, singing “Only Make Believe.” Then they’d carry him off again.’ The craziness was a part of the time, the beat craze that carried thousands of acts along for a while. Coming home on this same night, Bill mentioned in his diary, they met Billy J. Kramer and his band the Dakotas at a café on the M-1. ‘Doesn’t sound very exciting now,’ Bill said. ‘Billy J. Kramer then was as big as the Beatles.’ And the Beatles were on their way to being, as John Lennon later said, more popular than Jesus. That week the Rolling Stones played six dates, not counting rehearsals and photo sessions, and each man got paid £25. The pace was killing, but they all managed to maintain it except Brian. On August 27 the Stones were booked to play at Windsor in a room over the Star and Garter pub. Brian, sick again, was not there, and for the first time the band that had been ‘Brian’s idea in the first place’ played without him.
ELEVEN
Yes, it was some terrible environments that I went through in those days, inhabited by some very tough babies. Of course, wherever there is money, there is a lot of tough people, no getting around that, but a lot of swell people, too.
Speaking of swell people, I might mention Buddy Bolden, the most powerful trumpet player I’ve ever heard of or that was known and the absolute favorite of all the hangarounders in the Garden District.
ALAN LOMAX: Mister Jelly Roll
I stayed in Memphis until the next Friday, October 31. Each day I sat at home waiting for the publishing contract that failed to arrive. It was no fun, but I stayed, maybe because this odyssey could have begun only on Halloween.
I woke up late and rushed to the airport to make the L.A. flight. I kissed Christopher twice, she drove away, going to work, and I ran for the plane.
You can get used to anything, and in the years of magazine writing I had become accustomed to spending time in the pastel plastic innards of giant fire-belching jets, getting drunk. On this plane I threw down my black flight bag and set in to drink champagne, not the best champagne but not bad, and to read about the World Series in The New Yorker, developing a strong attachment to the New York Mets, who this year came from last place to become world champions, and to the stewardess, who kept filling my glass. Yesterday I talked to Jo, who said that someone would meet me at the airport, but when I arrived I looked around, found nobody, and called the Oriole house. Sandison told me that they’d sent a driver named Mimi and that he, Sandison, was going back to England, ‘ignominiously recalled.’ I’d heard Keith and Mick talk about Sandison, and I was not surprised he was leaving. I sat down to wait for Mimi. I had forgotten to ask how I’d recognize her, but I didn’t need to know because she never showed up. After the better part of an hour I took a taxi.
At Oriole the back door was unlocked. The first person I saw was the glamorous Shirley Watts, who was in the kitchen pressing a blouse. ‘Delighted to see you ironing,’ I said, and proceeded to the living room, where on one couch David Sandison and Glyn Johns the sound engineer (dark-haired, bearded, wearing a lime-green fedora) were sitting and on another was a girl reporter from Time magazine, wearing a neat red tweed suit. Glyn was saying, ‘He can be very nice and put you at ease, or he can put you very uptight. He has a remarkable, umm—’
I put my bags in the Oz room. On the way back down the hall I saw Charlie shuffling along in his meditative cuticle-chewing 1950s hipster slump. He went into the living room, stood listening to the lady from Time and then said – closing the terrace door, it was getting dark and the air was cool – that he would find it hard to do her job, that he thought rock and roll had been inflated out of value. ‘A jazz bass player died recently,’ Charlie said, talking about Paul Chambers, ‘and compared to rock players he didn’t make much money, and I can’t justify that.’
The Time lady said that everything is inflated here, it’s a matter of the difference between countries, advertising in America is very exaggerated compared to that in Britain, everything in Britain tends to be understated.
Yeah, Charlie said, but how do you know about all that if you’re a kid, gesturing at Los Angeles outside the window.
If you come from here you know about it, she said, and Charlie said, Yeah, but—
Sandison, peeved at being sent home, warned me that no matter what I wrote, Mick would say that he had never seen me. ‘One of the publicity agents he talked to this week asked Mick about an interview with him in the Playboy that’s out now, and Mick said he’d never even spoken to anyone from Playboy.’
Charlie
