Old Gods Almost Dead (5 page)

Keith's two passions were animals and singing. By age eight, he was in the school choir, and a teacher picked him out as a natural harmonist, able to descant almost any tune by ear. At age ten, he was one of the best young choristers in London. The choir won several competitions, which is how Keith and three others—“the three biggest hoods in the school”—were picked to sing in the massed choirs at the coronation of the new English queen, Elizabeth II, at Westminster Abbey in 1953. He made several more appearances in the abbey at Christmastime, before his voice finally broke at thirteen.

In 1955, Bert Richards moved the family to the Temple Hill council estate on the other side of Dartford. It was government housing for working families, and for twelve-year-old Keith, it was rough. The older kids were Teds, Teddy boys, tough little thugs in exaggerated Edwardian costume who thought nothing of beating up weaker kids for their pocket money. It was the Teds who rioted when Bill Haley barnstormed the U.K. in '56. It was bicycle chains and razors in the ballrooms, the lead pipe down the trousers. The chicks were as tough as the cats. So Keith learned to keep his head down, watch his mouth, watch his back.

In 1956, Keith's poor grades channeled him into Dartford Technical College, where underachievers learned manual trades. He hated it and ended up having to do a year over again with younger kids, which he hated even more. But that was year one, when rock and roll hit England, and that was it for Keith's formal education. In early 1958, the family got its first record player, and for his birthday that December, Doris bought Keith his first guitar, a seven-quid Rosetti acoustic, and he started to practice almost every minute, sitting in a sonically cool place at the top of the staircase in the little council house. Keith had learned the rudiments from Gus Dupree, who had taught him to play the Spanish guitar classic “Malagueñ
a.” Now Keith hardly moved from the stairs as he laboriously taught himself guitarist Scotty Moore's bouncy riff from Elvis's “That's All Right, Mama” and the rhythmic lick from “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Scotty Moore was Keith's first mentor on the guitar via records, all the way from Sun Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.

Thrown out of school at sixteen for insolence, tight trousers, and cutting class, Keith enrolled at Sidcup Art School, where he took classes in commercial art. England's art colleges in the late 1950s were the real incubators of the rock movement. As David Bowie has said, “In Britain there was always this joke that you went to art school to learn to play blues guitar.” Sidcup was full of talented kids like Keith with guitar cases slung over their shoulders. The smoky lavs were packed with teenage pickers teaching each other Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack Elliott songs, trying to duplicate Leadbelly's ringing twelve-string orchestrations on cheap Spanish guitars with gut strings. The first song Keith learned to play in art school was Jack Elliott's version of “Cocaine Blues” (Keith didn't know what cocaine was). This is where Keith met Dick Taylor, who happened to be in Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys with Mike Jagger.

Dick was another art student, more serious than Keith. They began to practice guitar together at Dick's house. Another schoolmate formed a country and western band, and Keith and Dick joined up. Keith Richards's first gig ever was at a dance in Eltham, south of London near Sidcup. The band didn't get paid, but this is where Keith started to play the easy progression that powers Hank Snow's classic country song “I'm Movin' On.”

Chuck Berry got to England late, because his early records weren't released there and the movies he appeared in weren't distributed. Keith first heard him around 1959, and it was all over. “Chuck Berry was my
man,”
he says. “He was really the one who made me say, as a teenager, 'Jesus Christ! I want to play guitar!' And then suddenly I had a focal point, not that I was naive enough to ever expect it to pan out. But now at least I had something to go for, some way to channel the energies you have at that age. And definitely, with rock and roll, you have to start somewhere around then.”

Keith's discovery of Chuck Berry coincided with the young Richards's dreadful split with his father. Bert Richards worked in a warehouse, left home at five in the morning, and came back exhausted at seven at night to hear his boy making a racket at the top of the stairs with his guitar when he should have been doing his schoolwork. Bert hated his spotty son's art school look, the way he wore his hair long, his sullen, rebellious attitude. Mutual loathing developed, and Keith and his father stopped speaking around 1960. His parents divorced a couple years later. Despite occasional attempts to reach his dad by mail, it would be more than twenty years before Keith and his father were reconciled.

Dartford Station

Early commuter train
from Dartford to Victoria Station in London, October 1960.

“So I get on the train one morning,” says Keith, “and there's Mike Jagger, and under his arm he has four or five albums. I haven't seen him since the time I bought an ice cream off him, and we haven't hung around since we were five, six, ten years. We recognized each other straight off. 'Hi, man,' I say.

“ 'Where ya goin'?' he says. And under his arm he's got Chuck Berry [
Rocking at the Hop
] and Little Walter, Muddy Waters [
The Best of Muddy Waters
]
.
I say, 'You're into Chuck Berry, man, really? That's a coincidence. I can play that shit. I didn't know you were into that.'

“He says, 'Yeah, I've even got a little band. And I got a few more albums. Been writin' away to this, uh, Chess Records in Chicago and got a mailing list thing and got it together, y'know?'

“ 'Wow, man.' So I invited him up to my place for a cup of tea. He started playing me these records and I really turned on to it.”

Keith was impressed. It wasn't just that Mike was carrying these records. It was more that anyone in England had them at all. Expensive imports, they had to be specially ordered. The orders were filled by Leonard Chess's own eighteen-year-old son, Marshall, who worked in the Chess stockroom in Chicago.

Keith: “Back then the long-playing record was a very small market in England. Top-of-the-line stuff . . . Flash son of a bitch, because he comes from a better side of town than me. It's the music I'm trying to listen to. I've got a few singles, but he's got the bloody albums.
One Dozen Berries.
I'm afraid he might reach the [train door] handle before I rob them off him.”

Keith managed to borrow
The Best of Muddy Waters.
He abandoned his post at the top of the stairs and spent days studying the album. It changed his life.

Keith: “Just sitting in that train carriage in Dartford, it was almost like we made a deal without knowing it, like Robert Johnson at the crossroads. There was a
bond
made there that, despite everything else, goes on and on. Like a solid deal.”

So Mike and Keith linked up. They both knew Dick Taylor, and in short order Keith became a Blue Boy. Dick Taylor switched from guitar to bass, and Keith played lead guitar. They spent eighteen months jamming Buddy Holly, “Sweet Little Sixteen,” and “Around and Around” in Dick's front room. Dick's mum liked to watch because Mike was already doing his little moves, tossing his head, dramatizing the tunes. Mike went on summer holiday in Devon with Keith's family and delivered his first public performance during the summer of 1961 at a local pub, doing Everly Brothers songs, with Keith singing harmony and playing guitar.

Then Keith satisfied his Chuck Berry obsession by trading a bunch of records for an electric guitar: a cheap, blond, no-name, f-hole acoustic with a Japanese pickup. The amplifier was an old radio. But it worked—sometimes. The pickup would get loose. “Does anyone have a soldering gun?” Soon Keith was learning “Maybelline” and “Beautiful Delilah,” songs that Berry played so easily with his huge hands.

Keith now got to work, popping speed—purple hearts, French blues, female period pills, anything—to get the stamina to practice these riffs over and over. All this went on until he and Mike heard about the new blues club in Ealing and decided to go to the club's second session on March 24, 1962.

This time, Alexis Korner let Brian Jones get up and play. Brian and Charlie Watts had just spoken to each other for the first time. Mike, Keith, and Dick were gob-smacked by the Elmo Lewis persona, glowing with the groove and blasting loud, firey guitar over Charlie Watts's solid backbeat. Mike went over and spoke with Elmo after the number and got pulled in by the soft patter, the hair, the penetrating eyes, the uncanny bluesman's cool. They talked about him all the way back to Dartford.

On April 7, Mike, Keith, and Dick were back at the Ealing Club. Alexis again brought Elmo Lewis onstage.

Keith: “Suddenly it's
Elmore James,
man, this cat . . . And it's
Brian,
man, and he's sitting on this little [stool], and he's bent over . . . da-da-da, da-da-da on acoustic guitar with a pickup. We thought he was just fucking incredible, so this time we both went up and spoke with him, and he told us he was forming a band. He could have easily joined Blues Incorporated, because Alexis wanted him, but he needed to have his own, and he wanted it to be his own baby.”

The lads from Dartford were also impressed when Brian told them he already had his own baby—in fact, a bunch of babies—with maybe another on the way. This bloke was only twenty, but he seemed so
seasoned.

Keith: “He was a good guitar player then. He had the touch and was just peaking. He was already out of school, he'd been fired from a bunch of jobs. He was already living on his own and told us he was trying to find a pad for his old lady and their kid. Whereas Mick and I were just kicking around in back rooms, still living at home.”

At the same time, when they talked about him, they mocked Brian for his posh accent and his soft manner, which they regarded as provincial. They may have been from the suburbs, but Mike and Keith thought themselves Londoners, disdainful of anyone they considered a hick. This was when Mike (under the influence of the egalitarian, pro-Labour LSE students he admired) was beginning to be downwardly mobile into the newly chic working class, adopting a faux-cockney accent in the tones of the East End, growing his hair, changing his moniker from Mike to the more laddish Mick.

Mick Jagger.

Had a certain edge to it.

Blues Incorporated

Back in Dartford,
the Blue Boys recorded a tape reel of their favorites—“Around and Around,” “Bright Lights, Big City,” and some others—and sent it to Alexis Korner with a worshipful letter written by Mick. Korner liked the energy, and Cyril Davies heard something in Jagger's voice, so Mick and Keith were invited to visit the Korner household. They arrived to find Brian Jones waking up from a night under the Korners' kitchen table. They listened to records—Muddy, Memphis Slim, and Robert Johnson, unknown to the boys from Kent. Next time they visited the Ealing Club, Mick got invited to jump onstage and sing Billy Boy Arnold's “Bad Boy.” But there was a rush to the bar as he started to sing, and no one noticed him.

The second time he sang with Blues Incorporated, Mick brought Keith on, and they did Chuck Berry's “Around and Around” and “Beautiful Delilah” to a smattering of polite applause and then stony silence from the 120 paying members of the Ealing Club. “Good voice you got,” Cyril said to Mick, not deigning to notice shy Keith. Dick Taylor, sitting in the audience, scratched his new goatee and realized
everyone
in the club hated Keith as an unwelcome intrusion of déclassé rock and roll.

And yet, even so, Mick was just . . . glowing. He drank a quick lager to wet his whistle and was so jazzed on the pure heat of it that he couldn't say a word, let alone worry about the negative reaction to Keith's raw chords. On the way home, they agreed to keep going.

By late April '62, Mick had become one of five rotating singers in Blues Incorporated, performing three songs a night in a cardigan sweater and a skinny black tie. He'd sing half-drunk because he was so nervous, shouting “Got My Mojo Working” with Long John Baldry and Paul Pond on either side of him. Other singers included Eric Burdon and Manfred Mann. Eric Clapton, before he owned a guitar, would show up at Ealing on Tuesday nights, ask to sing “Roll Over Beethoven” (the only song he knew), and then disappear. They called Clapton “Plimsolls” because he looked down at his sneakers when he sang.

As he gained confidence, Mick started doing his act: tossing his hair, rolling his eyes, dipping his shoulders, suggestive hand gestures, tight-assed little spins, acting out the risqué lyrics with his eyes and especially his lips. They were full-fledged, pouty,
serious
lips, and he kept licking them between verses, diminutive flicks of the tongue. All this got noticed. Cyril Davies called him “Marilyn Monroe” behind his back, and there was no doubt that at age nineteen Mick was already bringing an ironic, “camp” sensibility to his delivery of the songs.

The Ealing crowd never saw Keith without Mick. Keith was the sidekick, the interior of Mick's outgoing persona. When Mick got onstage to sing, Keith stood in the shadows, waiting for his turn. Then Mick brought Keith on to rock the house with Chuck Berry's “Around and Around,” annoying Cyril Davies, who hated rock and roll. Davies refused to even speak to Keith, who didn't care because he in turn hated Blues Incorporated. To Keith, they were just a dreary bunch of middle-aged men. Keith was into the mating dance of rock and roll, not the weary fatalism of the older blues guys.

Then a serious buzz began about Mick, the new face in town. The weekly music paper
Disc,
May 19, 1962: “A nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer, Mick Jagger, has joined the Alexis Korner group, Blues Incorporated, and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates at Ealing and their Thursday sessions at the Marquee Jazz Club, London.” As the Ealing Club caught on, a few trendy types began to show up, the hipper fringe of Swinging London slumming in Ealing. Alexis saw Mick going down well with the girls, so he started bringing him along to sing at the debutante parties Alexis was hired to entertain. This was Blues Incorporated as a society band, though without Charlie, who couldn't be bothered.