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

mists and mellow fruitfulness. England was about to suffer its worst winter in years.
    Late 1962 was an uncertain time for the Rollin’ Stones. With few gigs and no permanent rhythm section, Mick Jagger was getting a little vague. He was still doing the occasional gig and society party with Alexis. The new term at LSE had begun, and Mick’s student grant was his only source of income. Brian and Keith had burned their bridges, were committed to the band and frustrated that Mick seemed to be waffling. When Brian got fired from his last job for stealing, he had to talk his way out of being arrested. Now he and Keith began to really bond, spending their days in the freezing Edith Grove flat, learning to weave their guitars in an aggressive blues phalanx. At one point, after Jagger missed some rehearsals to study for exams, Brian and Keith felt abandoned and talked about forming an Everly Brothers—style duo together. While they were plotting, Mick visited Brian’s flat and made love to his girlfriend, Pat.
    It was around this time that Brian really got into the harmonica, with Little Walter and Sonny Boy as his models. Soon Brian even lost interest in playing guitar, his saxophone background providing a good foundation for blowing the harp with his band in rehearsal.
    Keith: “Brian and me would be home in this pad [Edith Grove] all day, trying to make one foray a day either to pick up empty beer bottles from a party or raid the local supermarket because we were so hungry. We’d try and get some eggs or potatoes or something.
    â€œI went out one morning and came back in the evening and Brian was blowing harp! Man! He’s got it
together.
He’s standin’ at the top of the stairs, saying, ’Listen to this:
waaaaaaaah wah, waaaaaaaaaaah wah wah wah wah, waaaaa waaa aaa.’
All these blues notes coming out. He says, ’I’ve learned how to do it! I’ve figured it out.’ And he did it in one fucking day.”
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    There was shock in Edith Grove when they first heard “Love Me Do” on the radio by a new group from Liverpool called the Beatles. “Love Me Do” was a little pop blues with a harmonica solo and a touch of Buddy Holly and the Everlys. It was a bolt from the blue; the Beatles were unknown in London and only a rumor in Soho.
    John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and their new drummer, Ringo Starr, had survived their leather-jacketed years in Hamburg dives and were now fighting their way out of remote Liverpool, which might have been Mars as far as London was concerned. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had cleaned them up, let their hair grow, put them in modernist suits, but had been rebuffed by the big labels in London. Then he sold a demo to Parlophone, which in October 1962 released their first single, “Love Me Do,” chosen (according to their biographer Philip Norman) “with difficulty from an eccentric and uncommercial repertoire.”
    It made Mick Jagger sick. Keith was in shock. “It was an attack from the north,” he said later. “We thought we were the only guys in the world.”
    The Stones wanted to be the Next Big Thing, but the Beatles from uncool Liverpool had beaten them to stardom, launching the “Mersey Sound” of Liverpool groups that dominated white pop for the next two years. It took the Stones that long to catch the Beatles’ wave, after which the two bands would form what Keith has called “a double act” that lasted for the rest of the sixties.
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    Brian Jones, de facto manager of the Rollin’ Stones, realized he had to make something happen, so he deployed his soft-edged charm and impressive faith in his band to massage his contacts to get a record deal, the Holy Grail of bandhood.
    He hustled some studio time at Curly Clayton Sound Studios in North