Read Online Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis - Free Book Online

Love Me” and Elmore James’s “Happy Home.”
    They had a drink in a pub afterward and split the twenty-pound fee among them.
    Charlie Watts went to see them that night. “There were a lot of people dancing,” he recalled, “but the usual Marquee jazz crowd was saying, ’This is
really
terrible.’ But really, they were very popular even then. The thing was, the bands that were doing that stuff—me included—were eccentric old men. Now the Stones, the front line at any rate, were young, so there was obvious appeal for the kids that wanted to dance. Alexis’s band was a joke to look at, but this lot crossed the barrier. They actually looked like rock stars, I suppose, but
they could play.”
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    They rehearsed for the rest of the summer, finding occasional substitute gigs at the Marquee. Mick Avory left and was replaced by Tony Chapman, who played in a South London rock and roll band, the Cliftons. (Some believe it was Chapman, not Avory, who played the first Stones gig at the Marquee.) The other Stones didn’t like Chapman, but he kept showing up. Brian asked Charlie Watts to join, but he again declined. Satisfied with his job and his amateur Blues by Six gig, Charlie Watts was out of Brian’s reach, at least financially.
    In August, Mick found a cheap flat at 102 Edith Grove in the unfashionable part of Chelsea called World’s End. It was a two-room dump with bare lightbulbs and a shilling-fed gas fire for heat, and for the next eight months it was Stones world headquarters. Mick and Keith both left Dartford and moved in, along with a young printer named Jimmy Phelge, who kept everyone laughing with his disgusting personal hygiene and sick, gross-out humor. Brian lived at Edith Grove but had Pat and their baby in another flat. Food and money were in extremely short supply, and that fall the little group was saved from starvation by Doris Richards, who turned up occasionally with groceries and clean laundry.
    As the autumn of 1962 wore on, the Rollin’ Stones picked up occasional jobs, at a parish hall in Richmond, arranged by Brian, and at the Red Lion pub in Stu’s hometown, Cheam, in Surrey. Dick Taylor left the band in September to attend the Royal College of Art. For a couple of months, the bass chores were handled by various people, most often Colin Golding, who probably played around eight gigs, even more than Dick Taylor (who went on to start the legendary R&B band Pretty Things, with fellow Sidcup student Phil May).
    Gigs were hard to come by because the old jazz promoters who controlled the clubs were against playing blues. “We were a blues band that played in clubs,” Mick said,
“not
a rock band that played in ballrooms. We didn’t play any Eddie Cochran numbers.” Brian Jones was moved to write a detailed letter to
Jazz News,
explaining that R&B was a fresh wind blowing in from Chicago that deserved a proper hearing. The jazzers thought that Alexis and the Stones were trying to kill trad, and they were right. They tried to starve the Rollin’ Stones out and almost succeeded. Even Cyril Davies fired the Stones as a support band for his powerful R&B All-Stars after a bitter argument with Mick about blues singing. Sarcastic Harold Pendleton needled them constantly about their act and beatnik appearance until one night Keith grabbed his guitar by the neck and tried to smash Pendleton in the head. After that, the Stones were banned from the Marquee. Occasional gigs at Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 and Giorgio Gomelsky’s Piccadilly Club didn’t make up for the loss of the West End’s premier venue.
    It was the Rollin’ Stones against the music business. No young band had ever taken on the big boys before and come out with all their fingers intact.

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    The Luckiest Man in the World
    Now it was late autumn in England, John Keats’s season of