Hi everyone

This is a bit of a lengthy post but it's Friday afternoon on a lovely sunny day here in London and if anyone has the time and energy to read this article I would love to get some feedback. I am particularly interested to know if I have made any factual errors. I listed my sources at the end.

Thanks for your help.

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The Stones started off as skinny white boys playing music written mostly by old black men. Forty-seven years later, covers are still essential to the Stones, both live and on record - even on the last few tours covers have been played respectfully, partly as public recognition of the bands roots but also because the Stones still enjoy playing the songs they grew up with. The Stones play classic R’n’B with an authority and rhythmic drive no other band has ever consistently matched - in Keith Richard's words they have both the rock and the roll. In recent years the Stones have even featured guests such as John Lee Hooker and Buddy Guy on high profile live dates. Here is a band that pays its dues.

Even the crucial meeting between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on Dartford station was catalysed by the black American r’n’b artists they revered. As Keith Richards told Robert Greenfield “About 1960... I met Jagger again on the train and under his arm he has 4 or 5 albums Chuck Berry, Little Walter, Muddy Waters. He found out that I could play a little and he could sing a bit.” From this came Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with Mick on vocals, Keith on guitar, Dick Taylor (later to be a Pretty Thing on drums/guitar), Allen Etherington (Maracas) and Bob Beckwith (guitar/bass/drums). In late 1961 or early 1962 a home reel-to-reel recording was made which included many staples of the later Rolling Stones sets such as Wee Baby Blues.

The name The Rollin’ Stones was used for the first time on July 12th 1962 for a performance at the Marquee International Jazz Club in London which included Blues Before Sunrise. By now Richards and Jagger had hooked up with Cheltenham-born Elmore James fanatic Brian Jones so the line up was Jagger (vocals), Richards (guitar), Jones (guitar), Ian Stewart (piano) plus Dick Taylor on bass and Tony Chapman on drums. It wasn’t until a gig at Ealing Jazz Club January 12th 1963 that Charlie Watts (drums) and Bill Wyman (bass) took over as the bands permament rhythm section. A series of one-nighters followed with the Stones honing their repertoire in clubs and pubs strictly in and around London. Glyn Johns then offered to make a tape of the band at IBC Recording Studios so he could start approaching record companies. On 11th With Glyn engineering they managed to record 5 songs in a three-hour session including Bright Lights, Big City Diddley Daddy and I Want To Be Loved . According to Bill Wyman Brian Jones was “really bowled over with these tracks – he was more proud of them than anything else we ever recorded.” Six or seven record companies turned down the tape – ‘the consensus was we were not commercial enough for the pop charts.”

Enter Giorgio Gomelsky. A French-Russian émigré by early 1963 he was running a jazz club in the rear room of the Station Hotel, Richmond. On February 24th the Stones played their first gig their, soon earning a Sunday residency. Talking to Barbara Charone, Giorgio remembers how the Stones were developing their act. "They played their shit. Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley things that weren't too difficult.” The Stones would play at the end of the night a song that would be long enough “to get the pulse going'” such Do the Crawdaddy, Hey Bo Diddley or Pretty Thing. As the band played for about 20 mins the audience began to move about, unusual for English audiences of the time who were usually pretty unresponsive. The Richmond residency was crucial – Wyman later claimed that “our spell there, more than anywhere else, gave us the motivation to take on the world.” Giorgio renamed his club The Crawdaddy and moved it to Eel Pie Island where two crucial contacts were made. The first was the Beatles, who caught the Stones in action on April 14th and then came hung out at the Stones communal flat in Edith Grove, Chelsea out til 4am talking and playing the IBC tapes. The second key contact was arch hustler Andrew Loog Oldham, whose arrival on the scene meant it was all over now for Giorgio Gomelsky’s management ambitions.

Andrew had been tipped off by Peter Jones, the editor of the Record Mirror, that something exciting was happening at the Crawdady. Andrew was a 19 year-old hustler working in pop PR and by early May he was managing the Stones. Oldham played a crucial role in moving the Stones way from being a covers-only band. As Keith Richards explained to Stanley Booth “He said ' Look, either we've gotta find somebody to write songs and then lock them up and keep them to ourselves or...whadya gonna do? Just some more cover versions. There's a few out there....write some songs together. So...virtually what he did was lock us up in the kitchen for a night and say 'Don't come out without a song'. So we sat around and came up with As Tears Go By. It took us the rest of that year to dare to write anything for the Stones.” The ballad As Tears Go By was later a huge hit for Marianne Faithful, who was also managed by Oldham. Despite the ferocity of the Stones live act the early Jagger/Richards originals tended to be droopy ballads and it was not until The Last Time, recorded in January 1965, that the band came up with a convincing original.

Key to the success of the early Stones was getting their music on the radio. In the early 1960s the top radio show in Britain was easily BBC’s Saturday Club. The bizarre needletime agreement meant there was consistent demand for pre-recorded sessions, but groups needed to pass an audition before they could be considered for broadcast. In April 1963 The Stones recorded two tracks including skiffle-favourite I’m Moving On but were turned down as being uncommercial. Their second session was submitted to the Auduition Panel where one member thought Mick Jaggers vocals were 'too black' but they squeezed a pass. The session went out on Saturday Club on October 26th 1963 and included ‘ Roll Over Beethoven’ as well as an interview with host Brain Mathews . The Stones went on to record regularly for BBC Radio until August 1965, recording versions of I Can’t Be Satisfied , Cops And Robbers, Ain’t That Loving You Baby, Don’t Lie To Me, I Just Want To Make Love To You and Pretty Thing none of which have ever been released officially.

Having landed a recording contract with Decca the Stones had to decide what to release as debut single. The Stones didn’t want to release a song that someone else had covered, which meant that the more well-known songs in their set were off-limits. Instead they decided on Come On, a relatively obscure Chick Berry song not then released in the UK. The Stones pretty much disowned the single after its release in June 1963 and only rarely played it live. After withdrawing Poison Ivy as a follow-up, the Stones second single was also a cover, albeit one written by their new-found chums Lennon and McCartney. Released in November 1963 ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’ was dominated by Brians extraordinary bottleneck guitar solo. This track did make it into the live set.

In September 1963 the Stones embarked on their first UK tour, supporting Bo Diddley, the Everly Brothers and Little Richard According to Victor Bokris. “for Keith watching Bo Diddley was a nightly education in how to build and hold an audience. Richards and Jones were particularly drawn to Diddley, literally sitting at his feet night after night talking and playing music. Bo Diddley was later to say “Me, Brian and Keith became jug buddies...we drank out of the same jug. They were nice to me, like brothers". Keith wasn’t able to get close to his other seminal influence Chuck Berry until they met in Chicago the following year, although he later admitted to having watched the film ‘Jazz on a Summers Day’ over and over again in order to try and copy Chuck’s licks.

On Friday January 10 1964 the band used Regent Sounds Studio in London’s Denmark Street to supercharge Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away by adding an up-front Bo Diddley influence, prompting the NME’s Derek Johnson to describe the track as “a quivering, pounding, rthythmic opus.” The arrangement of Not Fade Away is so far away from Buddy Holly’s more polite original that veteran-Stones watcher John Perry (The Only Ones) argues the song should be regarded as the first Stones semi-original. The Stones revived Not Fade Away to great effect in July 1995 when the Voodoo Lounge tour played Wembley Stadium and whole new generation responded to Jaggers clarion call of “I’m Gonna Tell You How It’s Going To Be…”

Later in 1964 came the first US tour, opening in San Bernadino on 5th June with the first song a highly-appropriate Route 66. As Keith Richards told Robert Greenfield. “It was a straight gas man. They all knew the songs and they were all bopping...and Route 66 mentioned San Bernadino so everybody was into it.” By June 10 the tour had reached Chicago, where against Oldham’ s wishes the band entered the hallowed Chess Studios for the first time. Over two days house engineer Ron Malo recorded 14 tracks including Tell Me Baby, Around And Around, and Down the Road Apiece. A return visit in November yielded a version of Key To The Highway, a song never officially released by the band, although Keith Richards would later release a great solo version recorded in 1993 with Chuck berry’s pianist Johnnie Johnson.In between visits to Chess the band toured the UK with songs from the debut album such as I’m A King Bee, Mona and Carol forming the core of their set, although You Can Make It If You Try seems not to have been performed live perhaps because of its slower pace. Recorded just too late for inclusion on the LP was Susie Q.

The Stones have returned to this material again and again throughout their lengthy career. Following the death of Brian Jones and his replacement with Mick Taylor in 1969 they returned to live work in the US and Carol was played throughout the ensuing tour (hear it on the Get Yer Ya Yas Out LP, recorded live at Madison Square Gardens in New York). A swinging version of Roll Over Beethoven was played most nights on the 1970 European tour. Don’t Lie To Me was played on the 1972 US tour (see it on the ‘Ladies And Gentlemen” movie, recorded in Fort Worth, Texas). My personal list includes Around and Around and Route 66, both played in the middle of the night at Knebworth Fair in August 1976. Route 66 also featured in their June 1999 gigs at Wembley Stadium and Shepherds Bush Empire. The shows I saw at Wembley Stadium in July 1990 and Twickenham Stadium in August 2003 both included I Just Want To Make Love To You. In every case the song was played with sincerity, enthusiasm and commitment and was warmly received. With so many great Jagger/Richards songs to play, the fact that the band continue to feature Chuck, Bo and Muddy songs from the very start of their career demonstrates the crucial importance of these songs to the Rolling Stones then and now.



References

www.nzentgraf.de
Complete Recording Sessions 1962 – 2003 (Martin Elliott)
Keith Richards (Barbar Charone)
Keith Richards - An Authorised Biography (Victor Bokris)
Keith Richards – Gotta Keep It Growing (Rolling Stone magazine, 1971)
Til I Roll Over Dead (Stanley Booth)
The Rolling Stones – The 1960s (NME)
Rolling With The Stones (Bill Wyman)

You did ask to be picked up on any factual errors: The Crawdaddy was never based on Eel Pie Island - it moved from its original home at the Station Hotel because the building was supposedly due for demolition (it's still standing in 2009....) and relocated to the Richmond Athletic Ground. The gigs at the Eel Pie Hotel were under a different management, nothing to do with Giorgio Gomelsky.

Otherwise a very enjoyable read.

Thanks for sharing. A nice piece to read, and I really enjoyed the way to mark out the continuities with the "cover-only" days and the latter yaers.

I think to really point out the continuity it would sound good if adding to the mentioned Little Boy Blue and The Blues Boys demo two songs not only sound like The Stones in the years to come but to be also recorded by them. First is "Down The Road Apiece" (to be recorded at Chess '64 like you mentioned) and the second one is "Little Queenie (to be heard in GET YER YA-YA'S OUT!).

By the way, a Berry cover in LADIES AND GENTLEMAN American tour 1972 movie is "Bye Bye Johnny", not "Don't You lie To me" (a song they recorded at Chess '64 and was later released in METAMORPHOSIS (1975) album.)

- Doxa

JT, very nice work... clearly written but with some signs of a dedicated fan. A general point would be that sometimes it seems more like a basic history of the early days than a piece particularly about the band's cover versions, which would be more unusual. I would de-emphasize the chronology in favor of your notes on the group's shifting repertoire.

you should also be sure to explain any detail you mention. For example, you note that the Stones went to Chess in 1964 against Andrew's wishes--when I read this, I thought, why was he against it? If you don't know why, it doesn't seem worth mentioning; if you do know, but getting into it would take you off-topic, it's probably not worth mentioning, either.

you should probably talk about the fact that they actually haven't played any Chuck Berry in over 10 years now. There are theories about this here on IORR. While they still regularly play blues numbers, they've also done more r&b (James Brown, O'Jays) and reggae (Wailers).

and what about all the Stax & Motown covers? Those go back to the 60s--and, I should add, were not written by "old black men."

... and really, none of the Chess artists were old when the Stones began. To my knowledge, they didn't do any actual old Delta blues until "Love in Vain" in 1969.

just some thoughts to consider.

My thanks to all for very helpful responses - I will now prepare a second version incorporating the changes you suggest