Old Gods Almost Dead (4 page)

Charlie Watts was bemused by the whole disorganized lot. “When I first played with Cyril Davies, I thought, 'What the fuck is happening here?' ” Watts had never heard an amplified harmonica before. Everyone was coming from their own special interest in the blues. “I didn't know what the hell was going on.” During the winter of 1961, Korner, Davies, and Watts jammed together, joined by other Korner recruits, as they tried to line up club dates for the new group.

But nobody wanted to hear it. The club owners felt threatened because their clientele wanted jazz, and these guys were playing the blues, considered primitive and uncool. Korner tried to book Blues Incorporated on the National Jazz Federation's circuit of clubs and was bluntly told to get lost. The excuse was “acoustic only,” but this was war. If blues got big in England, the jazz clubs would go out of business. Money, jobs, and prestige were at stake, and so the jazzers tried to suppress Korner's new movement. It provoked a lot of bitterness in London over the next two years.

Finally Korner found the dank underground barroom down piss-smelling stairs under a tea shop at the end of a tube line in the western London suburb of Ealing. They set it up as a club, strung a tarp under the skylight to keep the stage from flooding when it rained, and charged five shillings membership admission. The Ealing Club could hold about two hundred.

                

March 17, 1962
. Blues Incorporated made its debut with eight musicians: Korner on guitar, Davies on harp, Watts on drums, jazz guy Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax, plus bass and piano. There were two singers: Long John Baldry, a tall and blustery young blues shouter, and Art Wood, a softer vocalist in the Mose Allison style. Starting at about eight o'clock on Saturday night, they played electric blues for a small group of fans. Attracted by the
Jazz News
ad, Brian Jones showed up with his friend Paul Pond, whose blues group Brian had briefly joined in Oxford.

Brian had his guitar and asked Alexis if he could sit in with the band. “Not tonight, mate,” Korner said. “Come back next week and you're on.”

Brian was back the following Saturday, March 24. There had been a good review about the new blues club in that week's
Melody Maker,
and this time they got a good crowd. “Thank you very much,” Korner said after finishing his version of “Hoochie Coochie Man.” “Now we have a visitor who's come all the way from Cheltenham, and he's going to play some bottleneck guitar with us. Please give a warm welcome to . . .” Korner had forgotten the stage name Brian wanted him to say.

“Elmo Lewis,”
whispered Brian.

“To Elmo Lewis! Take it away, Elmo!”

And Brian ripped into the clarion riff of his hero Elmore James's take on Robert Johnson's old “Dust My Broom,” and the room started rocking as Charlie Watts clicked in, and it was groove city. The humid, beer-soaked old drinking club gave off a solid juke-joint ambience, Brian looked great in his turtleneck sweater under a sports jacket, his short blond hair cut like jazz star Gerry Mulligan's, and the piercing sting of the slide guitar cut through the cigarette smoke like a rusty blade. It was that weird, slithery diddley-bow African delta sound, an echo of hypnotic country blues.

Bill Wyman: “Brian was the first person in England to play bottleneck guitar, when
nobody
knew what it was.”

And watching intently, standing in the back of the crowd, were three young blues fans who had come up from Dartford, Kent, on the bus and the tube. They couldn't take their eyes off Elmo Lewis, this guitar prodigy almost exactly their own age, maybe just a year older. They had their own amateur blues band back in Dartford, these kids: Mike Jagger, Keith Richards, and Dick Taylor. They were all eighteen years old.

Mike

Dartford is
an ancient town southeast of London in Kent, a rest stop on the old pilgrims' road to Canterbury. Suburban now, back then it was a sleepy mix of housing, fields, marshland, and factories.

Michael Philip Jagger, “Mike” to his mates, was born there in July 1943. His father, Basil “Joe” Jagger, was a serious, athletic northerner from a Baptist family in Yorkshire. Mike's mother, Eva Scutts, was born in Australia and came to England as a child. They married in 1940 as the Blitzkrieg was starting. Mike was the first son, joined by brother Chris four years later. Joe Jagger worked as a physical education teacher. Ambitious, he took graduate courses and became a sports professor at a teachers' college. Later Joe Jagger became the foremost British authority on American basketball and the author of a landmark textbook on teaching the sport.

In 1950, when he was seven, Mike started at nearby Wentworth Primary School. In his class was a dark, runty little boy called Ricky, who lived on the same street as the Jaggers. This was Keith Richards, a big Roy Rogers fan who knew the names of Roy's horse, dog, Jeep, etc. (Cowboys and Indians was
the
game for English boys in those postwar days when their dreams had a distinct American accent.) Mike and Keith knew each other, but weren't really friends. While Mike was outgoing and popular, Keith kept to himself and went home after school.

In 1954, the Jaggers moved to a bigger house on Denver Road in a better part of Dartford. Mike started at Dartford Grammar, the next rung up the British educational system's ladder of success. He was a good student who fit in well and excelled in sports like cross-country running and basketball. At the same time, he annoyed some of his teachers with his cruelly dead-on impersonations of their foibles.

The Jagger household was prim and very proper, kept orderly by meticulous, somewhat snobby Eva Jagger, who sold cosmetics door-to-door. Mike didn't invite his friends to the house, preferring to spend time at their houses, or to be alone. Some of the local kids thought he was a mama's boy. The focus at home was on school and especially sports. Joe Jagger took his boys “down the Valley” to see the local football team, Charlton Athletic, and its famous keeper, Sam Bartram. In 1957, when Mike was fourteen, he started appearing with his dad in the ATV television series
Seeing Sport,
which promoted activities such as rock climbing. It was the beginning of his career in showbiz, and it set him a little apart from his friends, who were nonplussed when Mike announced he had to rush off to the studio to be on the telly.

“In those slightly post-Edwardian days,” Mick later told an interviewer, “everybody had to do a turn at family gatherings. You might recite poetry, and Uncle Whatever would play the piano and sing, and you all had something to do. And I was just one of those kids. You have to want some sort of approval, but it's also just the love of doing it.”

Mike Jagger was into music early. The Jaggers had a radio but no record player until much later. Mike couldn't hear the American music he liked on the BBC, so like other R&B fans, he tuned in the distant signal of the American AFN (Armed Forces Network) broadcasting from Germany. The AFN played music that nobody else in Europe heard: jazz, country and western, and especially Chicago blues. It was a gold mine for a few English kids in love with American sounds and the faraway dreams they represented. Mike also picked up Americana at a summer job teaching children sports at an American air base, where a black cook was always playing R&B.

He got his first guitar at fourteen, a Spanish acoustic bought while on holiday in Spain. Already adept at singing tunes he heard on the radio, Mike started learning to play Ritchie Valens's big hit “La Bamba.” A gifted mimic since he learned to talk, Mike bawled out a phonetic version of the Spanish lyric with an eye-popping intensity that scared his parents. At fifteen Mike Jagger already knew how to put a song over. Soon he was practicing his guitar in the garden shed in back of the house on Denver Road so his mother couldn't hear him. She didn't really approve.

Buddy Holly came to England that year, 1958, as pivotal a musical event as Muddy Waters's almost concurrent tour.

Holly was a gawky, goofy-looking Texan with Coke-bottle glasses, a neat little band, the Crickets, and a bag of great rock and roll songs: “That'll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” “Oh Boy,” “Rave On.” Holly's stuttering style and geeky demeanor gave immense hope to anyone, especially in England, who felt out of it and yet ready, ready, ready to rock and roll.

Mike and his friend Dick Taylor went to see Holly at a movie theater, the Woolwich Granada. Young Jagger had seen American rockers only on television shows like
Cool for Cats, Oh Boy,
and
Six Five Special,
which had introduced rockabilly stars like Eddie Cochran, Gene Vincent, and Ronnie Hawkins to England. Buddy Holly—twitching, stuttering, really intense Texas music—was Mike Jagger's first experience of living rock on the hoof.

Mike discovered Howlin' Wolf in Dick Taylor's record collection, and the two started to look for imports in the record shops along the Charing Cross Road. Mike began writing to Chess Records in Chicago to order LPs that were impossible to find in England. He got hold of a Blind Willie Johnson EP,
Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground,
and wore it out. Mike and Dick and some chums in Dartford started jamming in the front room of Dick's house in Bexleyheath. Dick's mum would serve tea to the boys and giggle with Dick's sister in the kitchen as Mike Jagger belted out “La Bamba” for the umpteenth time.

They called themselves Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. (“Little Boy Blue” was Sonny Boy Williamson's
nom de bleus.
) Mick recalled later, “I used to do Saturday night shows with all these little groups. If I could get a show I would do it. I used to do
mad
things—get on my knees and roll on the floor—when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. And my parents were extremely disapproving of it all, because it was just not
done.
This was for very low-class people, remember. I didn't have any inhibitions. I saw Elvis and Gene Vincent and thought, 'Well, I can do this.' It's a real buzz, even in front of twenty people, to make a complete fool of yourself.

“But people seemed to like it, and it always seemed to be a success, and people were shocked. I could see it in their faces . . . Yeah, I thought it was a bit wild for what was going on at the time, in these little places in the suburbs.”

Mike Jagger finished Dartford Grammar in 1960 and won a grant to attend the prestigious London School of Economics, whose graduates usually went on to run the British Empire. Mike told friends he wanted to be a barrister or a journalist, maybe even a politician. During the summer, to earn money for his record addiction, he sold ice cream outside the Dartford library. Keith bought one once and they chatted briefly.

Mike started classes in September 1960, commuting by train from Dartford to LSE in Aldwych, in central London. He quickly identified the blues cultists among his fellow students and helped organize an informal club. Mike started bringing LPs from his impressive collection to school, and he was carrying a bunch of these when he was approached early one misty, gray October morning on the platform of Dartford Station by a starved-looking art student, who looked like he'd slept in his purple shirt and was carrying a guitar case. Mike knew the face: he'd been at school with him. “I always knew where he lived,” Mick recalled, “because my mother would never lose contact with anybody, and she knew where they'd moved. I used to see him coming home from his school, which was less than a mile away from where we lived.”

It was his new brother from the other side of the tracks, Keith Richards.

The Boy at the Top of the Stairs

Keith's beloved
grandfather, Theodore Augustus “Gus” Dupree, was a musician and bandleader descended from the Huguenots, Protestants who fled Catholic France in Elizabethan times and settled around Canterbury in Kent. Gus played some guitar, had dance bands in the area in the early 1930s, and fathered six pretty daughters. The youngest, Doris, married Bert Richards from northeast London in 1936. When the war came, she got pregnant to avoid factory work, and Keith was born in December 1943 in the same Dartford hospital where Mike Jagger had been born five months earlier.

With the Luftwaffe's bombs falling, the family was evacuated to the country while Bert was in the army. He was wounded in Normandy and after the war took a job in a factory in Hammersmith. Keith didn't see much of him and was raised an only child, doted on and coddled, in the musical world of the Dupree sisters and their dad. The Dupree girls were all talented, could play instruments, wanted to be actresses or movie stars. The family lived on Morland Avenue in Dartford and called their little boy “Ricky.”

Gus Dupree played guitar, fiddle, and piano and breathed music into his grandson, especially the country and western styles of Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, and Jimmie Rodgers. To supplement his income as a baker during the 1950s, he had a C&W group that played at American bases. Doris loved jazzy pop music, and the radio was always playing Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, Billy Eckstine, Django Reinhardt. When Keith visited his granddad's house in London, he would be drawn to Gus's guitar, which lived on top of the piano. Gus would take it out of its case, polish it with a cloth, tune it, play a little for the boy. He never offered the instrument, never pushed it on Keith, just let him be fascinated by it. Sometimes the two would visit Gus's friends in the repair shop under Ivor Marantz's music store in Charing Cross Road. Keith sat in the corner while the men repaired guitars and violins. The cozy room smelled of hot, bubbling glue, steamed wood, and tobacco, and Keith watched as they rebuilt old instruments and hung them from the ceiling to dry.

At age seven, Keith went to school. He hated it with a passion, preferring life in his mother's cheery house. He cried in the mornings, and they almost had to force him out of the house. At school, he met Mike Jagger, who remembered: “I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said he wanted to be a cowboy like Roy Rogers, roping ponies and playing guitar.”