TORN AND FRAYED: THE MAKING OF EXILE ON MAIN STREET
05 May 2010





AUGUST, 1980: Keith Richards reclines on a sofa at the Rolling Stones’ Chelsea office, graciously fielding the barrage of Stones-related probing from the lifelong obsessive perched next to him. Doing his first ‘straight’ interview for nearly ten years, ostensibly to promote Emotional Rescue, Keith is amiably forthright about the inner workings of the Stones and the heroin addiction he‘s just beaten to step back up again and take control of the engine room.

When asked the name of his favourite Stones album, his answer is immediate .

‘Ah, Exile. Definitely Exile.’

It wasn’t hard to see why the sprawling masterpiece often called ’Keith’s album’ held such a special place in his heart. Much was recorded in Richards’ French Riviera basement on his own time as he subconsciously realised the kind of album he could have only dreamed of as a spotty adolescent practicing blues licks in the school toilets.

When Keith was talking 30 years ago, Exile had yet to ascend to the mythical status which has often seen it acclaimed as the greatest of all the Stones’ albums, standing as the oblivious peak to which the group had been leading since jerking themselves out of Satanic Majesties’ psychedelic fug in 1968. It’s their ultimate distillation of the American musical heritage which enthralled them since before the forming of the Stones, a gloriously dense melting pot of blues, country, gospel and primitive rock ‘n’ roll, which Jagger now describes as ‘One culture hitting another’.

These styles had been explored on previous albums but reached some kind of timeless zenith woven into Exile’s beautifully-sodden tapestry, designed so each of the four sides traversed its own mood (with no obvious hit single candidates). If ever the Stones took the listener on a journey through their roller coaster world and current obsessions it was on this totemic masterpiece.

As the only album in Universal’s reissue programme blessed with the kind of bonus tracks craved by Stones fans for decades, the reissue and Eagle Rock’s stunning Stones In Exile DVD throw fresh light on an album which carries one of rock ‘n’ roll’s most fascinatingly-debauched legends thanks to the often shocking accounts of its convoluted creation.

Using often hazy or conflicting recollections, many have tried to untangle a story which, if it happened, today, would be frankly unbelievable. But, boiling down all the books, interviews and film footage, a more specific chain of events can be traced, going back to 1969’s Let It Bleed sessions and now culminating over 40 years later with the expanded reissue package.

THE FRENCH CONNECTION

After Brian Jones’ doomed departure in spring 1969, the Stones broke in Mick Taylor with intensive sessions at London’s Olympic Studios, rehearsing their repertoire and new songs, including Dancing In The Light, I Ain’t Signifying and Gimme A Little Drink, the latter played at July’s Hyde Park concert, which was now a tragic memorial to their justdeceased founding member. Throughout 1970, the Stones continued recording Sticky Fingers, and other tracks which would show up on Exile, at Olympic Studios and Stargroves, Jagger’s country pile near Newbury, Berkshire, using the newly customised Rolling Stones Mobile.

So several Exile tracks were already written or even recorded before the Stones relocated to the South of France; they just hadn’t completed the necessary marinating process yet. These included Sweet Virginia, Sweet Black Angel, Stop Breaking Down, Loving Cup, Tumbling Dice and Shine A Light. Ultimately, Exile was one of the Stones’ ragbag loose enders, expanded by the organic flow of raw, new material which started in France, then completed in Los Angeles by early 1972.

“The thing about Exile On Main Street is that there wasn’t a masterplan,” says Mick Jagger now. “We just accumulated material, knowing we would use it one day, so we just came in and recorded.’’

“I just wanted to reduce the Stones’ sound back to basics,” says Keith.

After a crucial meeting in February 1970, the group knew they would be forced to leave the UK as one repercussion of the biggest business upheaval of their career. Their contract with Decca expired in December 1970 and, at the same time, they terminated their relationship with Allen Klein, which had ended in a royal stitch-up where they received little of the money due to them until a later court case and would unwittingly sacrifice their catalogue up until Let It Bleed.

The biggest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world were broke and in a contractual straitjacket. With Prince Rupert Lowenstein now at the financial helm, the Stones were told that, to escape the punishing UK tax laws which took 93 per cent of earnings over £15,000 a year, they would be forced to live abroad for two years, allowed to visit their home country for not more than 90 days a year. As it was too short notice to relocate in April 1970, they decided to go a year later, when they would also launch their own record label.

The Stones undertook their Goodbye Britain tour of March 1971. Sticky Fingers was now finished and a deal clinched with Atlantic Records to distribute their new label, which, after discounting other candidates including Panic, Low Down, Ruby, Snake, Juke and Lick, they had decided to call Rolling Stones Records.

Chip Monck, renowned Stones’ production manager between 1969-73, recalls being at their West End office with lighting man Brian Croft when the tongue design took shape after a backstage pass was urgently needed for a show.

“Brian and I were sitting on the couch in Maddox Street. I said, ‘We’ve got to get some sort of a pass. Your dad’s a printer and he can do it overnight’. It was one of those panic things; what the @#$%& are we gonna do? What do you associate with the Stones? It always seemed to come back to the lips so that seemed like a good idea. What about the tongue just stuck out of the mouth?

“Then we got artist John Pasche to come over, sat down for about 15 minutes and he drew a rough drawing of the tongue which Brian took away for his dad to print off. I took care of it out of my petty cash”.

Soon the tongue was appearing on everything from Stones records to merchandise and is now the most famous rock ‘n’ roll logo in the world (In 2008, Pasche sold his original artwork at auction to the Victoria & Albert Museum for just over £50,000).

The band were all out of the country by April 5, announcing the new label and album from a yacht in Cannes harbour. That same month saw the release of Brown Sugar, the first time the Stones had trailered an album with a single. This was followed by Sticky Fingers, which went on to spend 25 weeks at number one in the US.

Now the Stones were exiles from their home country. This hung heavily for years with Keith, who never returned to full residence in the UK, although he still spends his post-tour winding down periods at Redlands in Sussex.

In the early 80s, he was describing himself as, ‘a no man’s nomad’, voicing his protests during interviews conducted with your correspondent, getting especially rattled when confronted with accusations that the Stones had become tax exiles cut off from reality and their fans.

“Remember who cut us off? It weren’t us. We were kicked out. It was that or they tried to put us in the can. They couldn’t do that so they tried to force us out economically, which they did. They just taxed the arse off us so we couldn’t afford to keep the operation going unless we got out. Nobody’s out through their own choice. It wasn’t a matter of choice, it was a matter of no choice; get out. That was it.

“I mean, it’s understandable; ‘The Stones are rich tax exiles, blah blah blah’, but it’s only alright if you can live like that. If we hadn’t been used to being on the road all the time I don’t suppose any of us would have wanted to go and wouldn’t have gone. But we wouldn’t have been able to keep the Stones together and stay in England. So it was matter of having to get out. No point in moaning.

“The only thing I wouldn’t do is what they’ve tended to do over the last few years; bugger off to Los Angeles and live in that weird, cut-off climate out there. That Rod Stewart syndrome. I probably could have got like that if they hadn’t rubbed my nose in the shit so many times that I never forgot the smell of it!”

Keith’s underlying resentment and screw-youing defiance was a crucial factor in the Exile story, stoking his two fingered psychological motivation and own version of the Dunkirk spirit. He wanted to show the world that the Stones could make a great album anywhere they were forced to hole up, even if it was back in the basement.

DOWN IN THE BASEMENT, MIXING UP THE MEDICINE…

The Stones’ exile began with moving into the respective French abodes which their team found for them. Bill Wyman stayed in Vence, Charlie Watts bought a chateau in Provence (which he still owns) and Mick Taylor and wife Rose were in Grasse. Stones assistant Jo Bergman originally thought that a sprawling, Roman-style mansion called Villa Nellcote would be perfect for Jagger, but his wife-to-be Bianca deemed it too public so they holed up in the Plaza Athenee Hotel in Paris and a villa in Biot.



Villa Nellcote at Villefranche-Sur-Mer provided the backdrop for one of the most infamous episodes in the Stones’ long, eventful story. The Roman-style mansion, entered by 30 foot doors and bedecked with mirrors, was built by one Admiral Alexander Bordes in 1899 (who reportedly committed suicide by jumping off its roof). Surrounded by exotic tropical plants brought back from the Admiral’s travels, including cypress, palms, pine, monkey and banana trees, Nellcote boasted breathtaking views of the Mediterranean and harbour, which was once a pirate’s cove. Keith liked to tell how it was the local Gestapo HQ during the Second World War, as evidenced by swastikas carved into the air vents.



Accompanied by girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and their 18-month-old son Marlon, Keith initially settled well into the Riviera lifestyle, taking his family to the beach, going to the zoo and buying a speedboat he called Mandrax, after the ‘English Quaalude’ popular at the time (“Splash out, I might be in jail next year. Let’s have some fun while I‘m free”, he laughs now).



On May 12, 1971, Mick Jagger married Nicaraguan-born
actress Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías after a whirlwind romance.
The couple wed in the Church of St. Anne in Saint-Tropez, France.
The blushing bride remains an icon in wedding fashion with her
Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit instead of a traditional gown.



The first of several obstacles and diversions loomed when Jagger announced he was getting married in St Tropez on May 12 to Nicaraguan socialite Bianca Perez Morena de Macias, who he had met the previous September at an after-show party. Attended by a plane-load of celeb mates including Ringo, the McCartneys, Eric Clapton, Steve Stills and The Faces minus Rod Stewart, the event descended into media frenzy as best man Keith, who disapproved of Bianca and rared up at paparazzi to ashtray-hurling levels, snoozed through the reception. Bianca despised Nellcote and its endless stream of party-seekers, while the guitarist and Anita couldn’t stand the woman already renamed in suitable rhyming slang. The happy couple then took off on honeymoon for the rest of the month.

This is when incidents began which have been passed down and blown up over the years; like a fracas with the harbour-master after Keith’s red EType Jaguar was involved in a collision with some Italian tourists, resulting in an assault charge. There’s a vivid account of the incident in Up And Down With The Rolling Stones, the book pumped out of Keith’s former drug dealer ‘Spanish’ Tony Sanchez by ghost writer John Blake to paint a depraved, drug-sodden picture of this period.

Keith talked animatedly about the book in 1980: “Grimm’s Fairy Stories! Unbelievable that. When it got to the blood change bit I thought, ‘Oh here we go!’. Marvellous. The incidents all happened, then halfway through each chapter the description takes off into fantasy: ‘Then he sprouted wings’!”



After spending a fruitless month looking for a suitable location to record their new album, the Stones realized that the answer was staring them in the face; for better or worse, they would try to record in Keith’s dingy, clammy basement at Nellcote.



The Mobile arrived on June 7 after a four-day drive. Built at a cost of £65,000, it was equipped with a talk-back system and black-and-white camera for communication between studio and band.

For producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns, this meant a lot of running around between Mobile and cellar, which was on three floors, consisting of a series of partitioned rooms and cubicles. Faithful road manager Ian Stewart acquired several rolls of cheap shag-pile carpet to cover the walls. Not trusting the villa’s powerpoints, they hooked up to the local railway system for electricity.



For Keith, it seemed like paradise, as he would be able to lay down ideas as they struck at any time of night, the perfect location to construct his gigantic ‘@#$%& You’ to those who had forced the Stones out of their home country. Within weeks, the villa resembled one of his hotel rooms, with decorations, debris and constant stream of willing participants for the most happening party on the planet. Weird scenes, untold excess and harsh reality would gradually darken the clouds over Nellcote, but the Tropical Disease sessions, as they called, were under way (another working title was Eat It). Anita says the music could be heard across the harbour.

By the time the newly-weds returned, the Stones were waiting to record. Bianca holed up in Paris, often joined by Mick, who hated the scene and conditions at Nellcote, especially ‘Keith’s disgusting basement’, or ‘Keith’s Coffee House’, as it was called.

There was another hold-up when Keith had a go-karting accident, nastily scraping his back. This required time to recover and hefty opiates to numb the pain, which took a one-way spiral when Corsican drug dealers from nearby smack epicentre Marseilles turned up with pure pink heroin from Thailand, christened ’cotton candy’. Keith and Anita piled in, while engineer Andy Johns, a rampant Bobby Keys, Mick Taylor and Jimmy Miller also developed healthy habits, thus setting the tone for the druggy torpor which would dominate the next few months.

Once the Stones got underway later in June, they worked from early evening to the early hours and sometimes beyond. The basement was a furnace-like nightmare, but with a steamy ambiance that heightened the teeth-pulling tension and defiance which surrounded the album and added to its luminescent swamp-gas crackle.

Wyman’s amp was parked under the stairs, brass section Keys and Jim Price parped at the end of an underground corridor, vocals were often croaked in a disused toilet cubicle with Jack Daniel’s for lubrication, while the 120 degree humidity made guitars go out of tune mid-song as the musicians sweated in their Y-fronts. “It sounded like making a record under bombardment” says Keith. Or as Bobby Keys puts it, “The Stones felt like exiles: us against the world – @#$%& you!”

In theory, the Stones recording for the first time in a Richards-oriented domestic situation removed the recurrent problem of their guitarist’s notorious lateness, as he would already be there, but some nights he would announce, “I’m just going to put Marlon to bed”, then be gone several hours. This became a euphemism for ‘cotton candy’ indulgence, after which he might spend several hours either nodded out or perched on the toilet with his guitar, endlessly honing riffs. All he had to do then was go down to the basement and see who was around to embroider his new licks. This all frustrated Jagger as he waited for music over which to write lyrics. While, in turn, Keith’s most hated phrase became, ‘Mick’s @#$%& off to Paris again.’

Now he says of their differing creative methods, “I never plan anything; Mick’s rock, I’m roll”. Wyman also hated the waiting and spent increasingly more time away from Nellcote producing John Walker, which explains the number of bass credits to Taylor, Richards or even stand-up bass veteran Bill Plummer who played bass on “Rip This Joint,” “Turd on the Run,” “I Just Wanna See His Face,” and “All Down the Line.” Bill Wyman later claimed that he played bass on at least some of the tracks credited to Plummer.

Charlie Watts, who stayed at Nellcote during the week rather than face the six-hour drive back to his chateau, has said he enjoyed the sessions, accepting the waits for the guitarist and epic evolution process of some of the songs. “Keith’s like a jazz player…A lot of Exile was done how Keith works. Time to Keith was a very loose thing, he likes to do a good track, keep it and play it over and over again for a year.”

“It was about as unrehearsed as a hiccough!”laughs Bobby Keys. “Usually you know the name of the song you’re playing”. “It was certainly bizarre at Nellcote: it made Satanic Majesties seem organised,”wrote Wyman in Rolling With The Stones.

Sessions continued, sometimes with just a core nucleus of Keith, Taylor, Watts, Keys, Johns and Miller, especially when Jagger went on holiday to Dublin in August. By then, they had been joined by a visiting Gram Parsons and his girlfriend Gretchen Burrell, the singer hoping a drunken conversation about Keith producing his solo album of ‘cosmic American music’ for Rolling Stones Records would be remembered. Whether he can actually be heard on the album itself, Parsons was a great influence on tracks like Sweet Virginia and Torn And Frayed.

“I used to spend days at the piano with Gram, you know, just singing,” recalled Richards. “I did more singing with Gram than I’ve done with the Stones”. “We did a lot of recording in the kitchen,” adds Andy Johns. “Gram was there nearly all the time. He was a very nice, pleasant, true fellow. Very out of it, though.”

Eventually, Parsons was deemed to be entering into the Nellcote spirit with too much gusto and the Stones were forced to put him on a plane back to London, where he would record his first solo album without Keith. The second, Grievous Angel, would be released after his drug-related death the following year.

During the summer months, the party raged unabated as members of the Stones crew were joined by friends like ‘Stash’ Klossowski and photographer Michael Cooper, drug dealers (including Jean De Breteuil, whose next stop was Paris, where he gave Jim Morrison his fatal shot), sundry jet-setters and visitors including Clapton and John Lennon (who threw up on the stairs after mixing red wine with his methadone).

A Texan fan called Ted Newman Jones III made a pilgrimage to Nellcote to present Keith with a guitar he had built him and was kept on as his guitar tech. There were also assorted kids, dogs and rabbits scampering around. Photographer Dominique Tarle was there for six months, taking many photos which wouldn’t be seen until his Genesis tome The Making of Exile On Main Street and the Stones In Exile DVD. With 30 people often sitting down to dinner, Keith’s weekly outlay on food, alcohol and drugs was in the region of £6,000. “It was like a holiday camp,” reflects Mick Taylor.

By October, a darker mood was creeping in as the junk took further hold and unwanted presences increased, like the ‘cowboys’ – drug dealers blamed for the theft of nine of Keith’s beloved guitars (including the Flying V he played at Hyde Park) and Keys’ saxophones. There was a fire after Keith and Anita nodded out on their bed, discovered unconscious as flames licked their mattress. Fat Jack the junkie cook blew up the kitchen and tried to blackmail Keith and Anita after alleging the latter shot up his teenage daughter with heroin. Jagger moaned when he couldn’t use a microphone because someone was tying off with the lead. Meanwhile, the residents had devised an escape route out of an upstairs window and over the Mobile in case the place got busted. By now, the local police force were keeping a watchful eye on Nellcote.

The Jaggers’ daughter, who they named Jade, was born on October 21 at the Belvedere nursing home in Paris. The proud father would be away for the next three weeks. Although the remaining Stones carried on, “There was a sort of group feeling that was it, we’ve done it,” recalls Keith.

THE GUITAR PLAYER GETS RESTLESS

On November 29, the entire Stones entourage relocated to Los Angeles, in fear of the inevitable bust. Nellcote was finally raided on December 14; The Stones long gone but large quantities of drugs left behind. The court case wouldn’t come up for another year but, in the meantime, Keith had to continue paying rent. Eventually, most charges were dropped. The Stones attended the hearing, except Keith, who was fined 500 francs, given a year’s suspended sentence and banned from France for two years.

The sessions at Sunset Sound, which ran until the following February, became a mission to construct a finished album out of what had been spawned in Keith’s dank basement and tracks in various stages of completion from Stargroves and Olympic. “We didn’t mean to make a double album, it all poured out,” explains Keith.

After Nellcote’s opiated bubble, LA was like reentering civilisation, with a dry, airy studio and normal working facilities. Andy Johns handled much of the mixing as Miller was pretty burnt out from his Nellcote experience. Keith was now firmly in the throes of his own addiction, so Jagger stepped up to take control and bring the album home. He had hated trying to work at Nellcote, while Bianca and Jade had been the priority then anyway, along with supervising the upcoming US tour and Allen Klein situation, which had only just been resolved. Jagger now took the reins with single-minded determination to meet the deadline, starting with overdubbing his vocals.

Asked at the time by journalist Roy Carr if there had been much overdubbing, Keith replied, “No, not very much. Basically, the instrumental work is pretty well the live sound that we got when we recorded the songs in my basement”.Andy Johns says it amounted to “A bunch of overdubs, nothing absolutely vital, just embellishment stuff, background vocals etc…”.

Much of the time was spent on mixing, a bone of contention with Jagger for years, as his voice often merged into the overall wall of sound (to many an unusual effect which is one of the album‘s strengths). Keith wasn’t around for the final days in the studio, electing to fly to a Swiss detox clinic with Marlon and the pregnant Anita in an attempt to get well for the upcoming tour in June.

LET IT STEAL YOUR HEART AWAY

Final mixing was finished as February turned into March. After ruling out Tropical Disease, the Stones decided to call the album Exile On Main Street. The ‘Exile’ is obvious, while Main Street refers to LA’s North-South thoroughfare, constructed as a main artery when it was a western town in the 19th century. By the 1970s, downtown Main Street was a Times Square-style hotbed of pimps, dealers and sleazy movie houses.

After top photographer Man Ray fell through because of money, the job of providing the sleeve’s visuals fell to Charlie’s suggestion of Robert Frank, famous for his epoch-making 1959 movie Pull My Daisy, starring Beat Generation figures including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Jack Kerouac. Frank created a tattered, eye-blasting barrage which perfectly suited the sounds within. Using photos from his book The Americans, including a tattoo parlour wall in New York, he also took stills of the Stones from Super-8 footage he shot in LA, including a gangster dress-up session which was used for the strip of 12 post-cards.

Tumbling Dice was first heard against a specially-created psychedelic montage on BBC2’s Old Grey Whistle Test before being released as the album’s first single on April 21, making number five in the UK and seven in the US. Exile spawned only one other 45: the US-only Happy In June, which made number 27. The album’s May 7 release was trailered by a specially-edited flexi-disc given away with the April 29 issue of NME, featuring Jagger singing the speciallyrecorded Exile On Main Street Blues between All Down The Line, Happy, Shine A Light and Tumbling Dice.

With all the praise heaped on Exile over the years, it might seem hard to believe that, when it appeared on May 22, the album was met with mixed reactions. Melody Maker’s Richard Williams deemed it, ‘the best album they have made’, but future Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, writing in Rolling Stone, balked at the volume of music, calling it, ‘dense and inpenetrable’.

The Beatles and Hendrix had also incurred critical flak for their own double sets, which were later hailed as masterpieces. Exile was a lot to digest, taking several listens to weave its dark magic. It was also presenting American roots music and pure rock ‘n’ roll at a time dominated by exaggerated music, whether self-indulgent prog or boisterous glam rock.

The reviews put Keith off press evaluations for life, as he told this writer: “I remember Exile On Main Street being slagged off all over the place when it came out and then the same guys six years later holding it up and saying, ‘Oh, this album’s not as good as Exile On Main Street’. Now I read about two or three reviews when they come out and that’s it…We’ve done what we intended to do: put out the record. After all, it’s popular music. Unpopular music is about the worst thing you can make. I’d rather it be popular. So I’d rather use that criteria than two or three writers slagging it off.”

When called to talk about past albums, Jagger didn’t seemed convinced by Exile’s belated elevation, telling one journalist, “It’s overrated, to be honest. It doesn’t contain so many outstanding songs as the previous two records. I think the playing’s quite good. It’s got a raw quality”. Or simply, “Not one of my favourite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling”. Charlie Watts now explains this as, “Mick doesn’t like anything he did yesterday.”

Now, with Exile back as the extravagantly repackaged big gun in Universal’s Stones reissue programme, Jagger finally gets to boost his vocals on the bonus disc’s re-upholstered out-takes. Above all, the whole beautifully-executed project shows how timeless the Stones’ music can be in any age, as their darkest diamond returns to tower again, shit scraped off its monolithic shoes but about to leave a bigger footprint than ever.

Additional quotes from Stones In Exile [Eagle Rock DVD] and The Mick Taylor Years [Chrome Dreams DVD]

INCOMING!

From riffy gestation to triumphant birth, a guided tour of Exile On Main Street

After the Stones’ post-Satanic Majesties roots rebirth, few of their songs underwent a conventional ‘three Rs’ (wRite, Rehearse, Record) conception, more often emerging from a lengthy marination process as Keith Riffs were hammered and honed by the band, trying out different grooves, tempos and styles while Mick Jagger looked for lyrical inspiration. Although widely assumed to have been cut down in Keith’s basement, each track carries its own tale, sometimes dating back to when Mick Taylor joined the band in 1969.

ROCKS OFF: Andy Johns recalls the night that Keith worked on the riff in the basement for 12 hours straight, before nodding off in the early hours. The engineer called it a night and drove the 30 minutes back to the villa he was sharing with Jim Price. Keith then woke around three, miffed to find the Mobile unattended, so recalled the engineer as he had an idea for guitar parts. Keith has often spoken about his ‘Incoming!’ theory, where inspiration is simply floating in the ether waiting to be intercepted by his creative antenna. On Johns’ return, the guitarist proceeded to build the counter-rhythmic Telecaster riffs which elevated what would become Exile’s opening track. Complete with pumping piano, belting brass and unexpected Satanic Majesties-style psych-drop, it’s the perfect scene-setter. Performed: 1972-73, 75, 94-95, 2002-03, 05-07

RIP THIS JOINT: The fastest Stones song yet at that time, this started life as a Richards-Keys-Taylor basement outing (an early version reportedly features Keith singing), the sax titan blasting off a ripsnorting solo while Bill Plummer adds the roll with upright bass. The lyrics concern life on-the-road from a foreigner’s perspective, while ‘Down to Dallas, Texas with the butter queens’ refers to a bunch of notorious groupies. ‘They did a load of wonderful things with butter, apparently,’ explained Keith. Performed: 1972-73, 75-76, 95, 2002-03

SHAKE YOUR HIPS: James Moore, aka Louisiana bluesman Slim Harpo, jostled with the likes of Howling Wolf in the early Stones’ record collection, his I’m A King Bee covered on their second album, then this hip-shaking boogie recorded in 1969 during the Let It Bleed sessions, revisited the following October and finished in LA. Jagger shows what an under-rated harmonica man he is as Charlie drives the snare-rim against razor-pulse guitars, taking the Stones back to another basement in Ealing, a few years earlier. Never performed live.

CASINO BOOGIE:‘There are a lot of songs on Exile that are really, like, not songs at all, like Casino Boogie,’ said Jagger once. That’s by no means a dismissal; this taut, grainy Nellcote workout is one of the key ingredients to the album’s pungent aroma, Richards supplying guitars, bass and stinging slide; a match made in basement hell when joined by Keys’ deadly sax squalls. Jim Price attributes the album’s claustrophobic ambience to the type of distortion Keith was using on his guitars. Vocals were recorded in LA, with lyrics, boasting lines like, ‘kissing @#$%& in Cannes’, created in the final rush using William Burroughs’ cut-up technique, later also employed by Bowie. Never performed live.

TUMBLING DICE:Of all the convoluted development sagas on Exile, the track selected as first single took longest to bring home, after starting life at Stargroves in 1970 with Richards’ basic riff and completely different lyrics for a song then called Good Time Woman. One of the most fascinating of the extras, it sports cleaner, dual guitar lines and faster tempo yet to decelerate to Tumbling Dice’s inimitable lurching roll.

According to Andy Johns, the final version took nearly three weeks, using over 20 hours of reel-to-reel tape, Keith finally nailing the glorious opening and coda riffs at around six in the morning after the engineer had been recalled with another ‘Incoming’ alarm. ‘That‘s the perfect tempo,’ reckons Keith. ‘Try to hot that one up and you lose the flow.’ While he grasped at elusive riffs, Charlie struggled on the coda to the point where he handed the sticks over to Jimmy Miller. With Mick Taylor on bass, it’s another example of the loose nature of the project.

Jagger came up with the new lyrics at Sunset Sound, inspired by a chat with his housekeeper about gambling. After these were recorded, along with force ten backing vocals from Clydie King, Venetta Fields and Merry Clayton, the track had to be mixed, which turned into another tortuous drama due to the amount of elements on the multi-track. Worth it though; as Keith says: ‘I really loved Tumbling Dice, beautifully played by everybody. When everybody hits it, there’s this moment of triumph.’ Performed: Every tour since!

SWEET VIRGINIA:The shit-kicking country sing-along is another track which sounds like it gestated in the moonshine cellar at Nellcote, but actually dates back to Let It Bleed sessions at Stargroves, then Olympic in October, 1970, before being finished in LA. It’s often believed that Gram Parsons is in the howling chorale but neither Keith or Anita can recall him venturing into the basement, while Mick Taylor has confirmed his raspy vocal presence on the track, which also features rolling piano from Stu and more sublime Jagger harmonica. ‘I wanted to release Sweet Virginia as a kind of an easy listening single,’ recalled Richards. Performed: 72-73, 94-95, 99, 2002-03, 2005-07

TORN AND FRAYED:Even if he isn’t on the track, Gram Parsons’ influence is all over this pure country ode to a vagabond guitar player, which could have come straight off the first Flying Burrito Brothers album, with its ringing old time feel and keening harmonies. ‘One thing is for certain, Gram’s presence at Nellcote impacted on the singing more than anything else,’ says Anita Pallenberg, while Keith has spoken of how Parsons, ‘showed me the mechanics of country music.’ Keith’s harmony vocals – beautifully influenced by endless jamming on old country songs with Parsons – are one of the album’s trademarks. He’d always added a higher counter-point to Jagger but this was now country-style wail action. Parsons himself said, ‘They’ve certainly done some country sounding things since I’ve gotten to know them.’ Torn And Frayed was mainly worked on in LA after GP had been ejected from the Stones camp, featuring Jim Price on organ and Taylor on bass. Performed: 1972, 2002

SWEET BLACK ANGEL: Originally titled Bent Green Needles, this atmospheric beauty dates back to 1970’s Stargroves sessions with Richards on acoustic guitars, Miller on percussion and Jagger‘s harmonica, later enhanced by the marimba of Richard ‘Didymus‘ Washington but credited to Amyl Nitrate. The song was finished in LA in 1971 after Jagger turned it into a tribute to black activist Angela Davis, at the time awaiting trial for murder: a rare political statement for the band. Stones-spotters recognised the snatch of guitar riff dropped into the coda of The Clash’s Stay Free in 1978. Performed: 1972

LOVING CUP:When the Stones played a song they’d been working up for Let It Bleed called Gimme A Little Drink at July 1969’s Hyde Park comeback concert, it was a ragged, slide-drenched shambles, prompting Jagger to moan, ‘all over the place’ when it ground to a halt. The Stones said it didn’t make Let it Bleed (or Sticky Fingers) because it didn’t fit, but it was just the right size to close Exile’s acoustic side. Maybe they just didn’t want to give it to Allen Klein. The bonus version shows it in earlier form: slower paced minus brass but plus Mick’s ’buzzing’ noises. By the final Exile sessions, the track had been renamed Loving Cup and gained the patent Miller percussive shuffle, pumping piano, steel drums and sexy brass coda. Performed: 69, 72, 2002-03, 06

HAPPY:Happy is a prime example of the spontaneous combustion which occasionally sparked during the long hours hanging around in the basement, often waiting for Keith. But the man himself hit the basement bright and relatively early one day, overjoyed at discovering Anita was pregnant, and started jamming with who was already there: Jimmy Miller on drums, Nicky Hopkins and Bobby Keys wielding his baritone sax next to Jim Price. On a roll, Keith overdubbed vocals and bass because Wyman was on holiday. The end result was Keith‘s rollicking theme song. ‘I love it when they drip off the end of your fingers,’ he said. Performed: 72-73, 75-76, 78, 89-90, 94-95, 2002-03, 06-07

TURD ON THE RUN:After kicking off with the whooping defiance of Happy, the original album’s side three continued down the sweaty, rootsy path which marked it as the most obviously ‘basement’ of the four, Turd On The Run even retaining its working title! The wired, open-G thrash tempo meshes North Mississippi train rhythms, as practiced by Fred McDowell, and Appalachian mountain scrubbing, bolstered by Bill Plummer’s upright bass and further dynamic harmonica action from Mr Jagger. Never performed live

VENTILATOR BLUES:The Nellcote basement was stiflingly humid, the complex of rooms and cubicles boasting just one window and solitary electric fan. The lack of air-conditioning inspired a song to suit the claustrophobic atmosphere, constructed around Taylor’s Spoonful-like riff, which earned him his sole Stones writing credit. The Stones never tried it live as Charlie laid down the odd stopstart beat led by a wildly-clapping Bobby Keys standing in front of him, making for a proper one-off. ‘How I ever had the balls to tell Charlie Watts to play drums is beyond me!’ roars Keys now. Throw in Bill Plummer’s upright bass, Keith’s stinging slide and extra ambience from malfunctioning equipment and the result is pure Nellcote grime, although it was considered for a single. Fades into…

JUST WANT TO SEE HIS FACE:Exile’s strangest track fades in as part of the original side three’s dreamy closing sequence, its hazy voodoo shuffle rumbling with thunderous, spooked resonance from Jimmy Miller’s percussion, Plummer’s upright and Taylor’s electric bass, topped with Richards’ shimmering electric piano and Jagger’s doubting Thomas-inspired vocal. Initially a 30 minute jam captured on tape, it was edited in LA after gospel-charged backing vocals were added from Clydie King, Venetta Fields and Jesse Kirkland. Keith liked to say it was cut on a Sunday, while Tom Waits has cited it a big influence. One of the best examples of the ‘magical glow’ which Mick Taylor attributes to the album.

LET IT LOOSEtarted at Olympic in 1970 with backing track finished at Nellcote, the vocals were added in LA, complete with choir organised by Mac ’Dr John’ Rebbenack, which included Tamiya Lynn, Kathi McDonald, Clydie King, Joe Green, Jerry Kirkland, Venetta Fields and Shirley Goodman of Shirley & Company. Jagger thinks Richards wrote this yearning soul ballad, distinguished by the swirling Leslie organ amplifier on a guitar speaker, but supervised its euphoric completion. ‘What he wanted was this funky feeling, this really honest church feel,’ recalled Lynn. Never performed live (but in The Departed movie).

ALL DOWN THE LINE:One of Exile’s straightahead Stones rockers, this originated as an acoustic sketch during Let It Bleed sessions, then carried on in similar form at Olympic in October, 1969 before being further refined at Muscle Shoals. They recorded the first electric version at Olympic in July 1970, and developed it at Stargroves before a fuller version was recorded at Nellcote, vocal overdubs and mixing taking place in LA. Being one of the first tracks finished, it was an obvious candidate for single release, even test-driven on LA radio when the Stones gave it to a local radio station so they could hear it in the car. Performed: 72-73, 75, 77-78, 81, 94-95, 98-99, 2002-03, 05-07

STOP BREAKING DOWN:Enigmatic blues legend Robert Johnson was an early influence on Brian Jones and Keith Richards, the pair spending hours trying to unravel his unearthly intricacies during endless practice sessions at Edith Grove. However, here it’s Jagger supplying the coruscating, sheet metal rhythm guitar on this raw treatment of Johnson’s 1937 composition, joined by a stellar piano performance from Ian Stewart and one of Mick Taylor’s most blistering performances. The track dates back to June, 1969 at Olympic, continued at Stargroves the following October, then mixed in LA. Never performed live SHINE A LIGHT:The oldest track on the album, Jagger’s Shine A Light started life during 1968’s Beggars Banquet sessions as a plea to troubled Brian Jones called Get A Line On You. It was then recorded in 1969 for Let It Bleed with Leon Russell on piano. By July 1970’s Sticky Fingers sessions, Jagger had reworked it into Shine A Light, but it wouldn’t explode in full gospel glory until December, 1971 at Sunset Sound.

Sporting another lineup variation, including Jimmy Miller on drums and Taylor on bass, it’s another strong example of the gospel influence permeating the album, elevated by Billy Preston’s sublime keyboards and heavenly backing vocals from Clydie King, Venetta Fields and Jesse Kirkland. Jagger was inspired to give his most heart-felt vocal performance of the album after Preston took him to see the Reverend James Cleveland in an LA church with Aretha and Erma Franklin in the choir. This long-underrated beauty finally got its due spotlight as the title song of Martin Scorcese’s 2008 movie. Performed: 1995, 97-99, 2006-07

SOUL SURVIVOR:If Shine A Light is Jagger’s track, this ragged-riff behemoth scramble is an unadulterated Keith special, one of the extras featuring his own guide vocal, rhyming ‘fool’ with ‘tool’ in a classic example of what the Stones call ‘vowel movement‘ just to give tracks a vocal topping. He even snarls ‘Etcetera, etcetera‘ in the final coda. In the early Nellcote version, Keith‘s magnificent riff doesn‘t make its entry until the midway point but on Exile it carries the whole track, now sung by Jagger with the chorus repeated ad infinitum with screaming intensity in the coda. Keith liked the riff so much he recycled it in 1983 on Undercover’s It Must Be Hell. Never performed live (unfortunately)

The bonus out-takes

Trying to trace the evolution of any Stones song can be a brain-twisting quagmire, just by the nature of their post- Beggars Banquet recording methods. As seen in the Sympathy For The Devil film, they often started with germs of ideas, often based around Keith riffs, which were then hammered and honed through different tempos and styles until Jagger was inspired to apply lyrics, unless Richards already had a hook. Songs could take years to even get beyond the instrumental stage. Exile is now known to consist of previously-started tracks plus the new ones recorded at Nellcote which were finished in Los Angeles. At the time, Jagger told a journalist, “Virtually everything we recorded is there… There’s about three or four tracks left over.”

By 2003, Keith Richards was predicting, “I’ve no doubt one day we’ll put out an Exile out-takes album.” Casting a little wider to encompass the album’s whole creative time span, the Stones have filled a second CD with a further ten tracks.

These have already aroused some controversy, stoking the traditional forensic analysis on the Stones’ jungle telegraph as diehards celebrated, while the usual more cynical factions rumbled about new songs being constructed in the Exile style from old backing tapes. To which we say, so what? Some tracks have received a wash and brush-up, Jagger recording new vocals on backing tracks only needing the occasional acoustic guitar ‘stroke‘ from Keith and some percussion. Jagger’s vague, “I’m not saying it’s not true” confirmed that this was indeed the case, although Richards has said, “I don’t want to interfere with the Bible.”

In some ways, it’s as exciting as having a new Stones album, if not more, given the gravity of the material finally released to the public after years on bootleg. Early versions of Loving Cup, Soul Survivor and Tumbling Dice (in its earlier Good Time Woman incarnation) rub shoulders with long-bootlegged instrumentals including Aladdin Story and Dancing In The Light, joined by some never-before-encountered outings coming as fully-formed new songs, like chosen single Plundered My Soul, a gloriously-decadent soaring soul romp with brass and girls bolstering a stellar Jagger vocal.

The process began when Stones producer Don Was was presented with a pile of multi-tracks, which he then had to work through, looking for relevant tracks amidst long-forgotten items like a strings-backed Wild Horses (It‘s a hard job but…). After the ‘baking’ process necessary with many old tapes, tracks were given to the band to start the selection process before restoration began. According to Keith’s old friend Alan Clayton, whose Dirty Strangers outfit found themselves joined by a piano-playing Richards on last year’s W12 To Wittering album, the man spent much of last June at Redlands interspersing watching the cricket with wading through tapes sent to him.

“I knew there was loads of stuff lying around, but I wanted to be faithful to the time period,” said Jagger on the Stones Facebook site. “I didn’t want to take things out of context. There’s a couple that are really quite good and would compete with anything on Exile, I think.

Some of them are of interest and fun, but some of them are really good.”

If Jagger’s main disatisfaction about Exile was the low level of his vocals in the mix, he’s made up for it here, ringing through loud and clear on the easy-to-spot, newly-recorded vocals. It is exhilarating to hear Aladdin Story, originally on the short-list for Sticky Fingers, now retitled So Divine, courtesy of its newly-gained sardonic, rasping vocal, which makes a perfect partner to the original instrumental’s slow-burning riff, slinking out of the intro to Paint It Black, wheezing original brass and shimmering vibraphone. The middle eight is quintessential early 70s soaring Stones magic. Whatever the process, the new version is pure Exile in sleazy spirit. One element left untouched on all the tracks is Charlie Watt’s drumming, a gamut of subtle fills and effortless punctuation sparking out of his supernatural beats like controlled dynamite.

Elsewhere, a backing track called Sophia Loren resurfaces as Pass The Wine, originally recorded at Nellcote with piano and brass. I’m Not Signifying is the diamond without which the out-takes might have fallen short with long-time Stones watchers. Originating at Stargroves in 1970, it’s also been titled Ain’t Gonna Lie, I Ain’t Lying, I’ve Been Here Before and I Ain’t Signifying as it was periodically tossed around Olympic and Nellcote. Scattershot blues piano, beautifullywheezing brass and flailing Taylor slide drape the Stones’ in sleaze-blues overdrive, Jagger’s spikey, snarling vocal crowning the whole humping melee.

When Taylor joined the Stones in May, 1969, they broke him in, deep end-style, with a string of sessions around blues standards, jams and works-in-progress. Some showed up on bootlegs, including one purporting to originate from two acetates cut at Trident Studios (but more likely recorded at Olympic), which included Aladdin Story and Dancing In The Light, a chunky shuffle drenched in Jimmy Miller’s piano-pounding, percussive swagger. The song appears in the bonus cuts, lighter in feel as acoustic guitars join Keith’s weighty block-chord riffing. Playing it next to the original recording, it’s apparent that Jagger’s whoops and exhortations have survived under the new vocal; again, true to the unabandoned, rabble-rousing Exile spirit.

Meanwhile, soaring gospel ballad Following The River seems to have dropped fully-formed from the heavens to become one of the set’s most spectacular highlights; all roaring choir, richly melodic strings and rolling blues piano. Jagger owns up to this one, saying, “I started from scratch. I mean, that’s what I do, and I’ve done it many times before.” The Exile spirit seems to pull out both the angel and devil as he turns in another impassioned vocal performances over this prime slice of early 70s gospel rock. Meanwhile, Track 5 is 1.47 of Allmans-style twin guitar motoring, obviously clipped off and titled off an original multi-track.

There are many more unreleased gems in the Stones’ tape dungeons, from deadly-but-unused riff workouts (Rotten Roll) to fully-formed classic ballads (Blood Red Wine). Hopefully, they’ve opened an irresistible new can of worms for themselves…

Reviewed by Kris Needs



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-10-10 14:22 by exilestones.

ROLLING STONES EXILE ON MAIN ST. POSTER
Exile on Main St. is a studio album by the English rock band the Rolling Stones.
It was released on May 12, 1972 by Rolling Stones Records. it was the band's first
double album tenth studio album in the United Kingdom, and twelfth American album.
Recording began in 1969 in England during sessions for Sticky Fingers and continued
in both the South of France and Los Angeles. In a year-end list for critic Robert
Christgau named Exile on Main St. the best album of 1972 and said, "this fagged-out
masterpiece" marks the peak of rock music for the year as it "explored new depths of
record-studio murk, burying Mick's voice under layers of cynicism, angst and ennui".

This poster promotes a remastered version of the album that was released in 2010.

[realcoolvibe.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-10-10 10:46 by exilestones.

+++++++



Used by the Rolling Stones as the recording studio for the recording of Exile on Main Street (1972) Wikipedia - 'Exile on Main Street' (1972) . The sessions used the new mobile recording truck Link - Rolling Stones mobile recording studio which would go on to be used by Deep Purple to record Smoke on the Water (1972) at the Grand Hôtel , Montreux(CH), during 1971-DEC

- Link - Rolling Stones at the Villa Nellcote Link - Rolling Stones at the Villa Nellcote Written accounts of events during the recording of Exile on Main Street (1972) vary but: It appears that on the ration-strength of the villa at this time was the Rolling Stones themselves, their wives and paramours, at least one child, several of the Rolling Stones' staff. Various important visitors whom were friends with the Rolling Stones came to stay: John Lennon, William Burroughs, . Various local bohemian types seemed to come and go, some of whom must have been drug dealers from as far away as Marseilles. There could be up to sixteen people for lunch, which for some must have been breakfast. No-one else seemed to have any idea whom anyone else was. I imagine being a historian of the Rolling Stones is a frustrating process because much like at Mick Jagger's wedding, no one seems to be sure of whom was where, when, or what they were actually doing.

- One of the legends which is oft-repeated is that the electricity to power the amplifiers had to be drawn from the adjacent railway line. However, the power in the catenary is around twenty-five thousand volts Wikipedia - Railway electrification in France and the transformer required would be huge. It is unlikely this happened.

- Another legend is that the band found a case of WWII German morphine in the basement. However, the building was never occupied by the Germans. Supposedly the case was marked with Swastikas but German medical supplies and indeed any Wehrmacht property was marked with the RZM Wikipedia - Reichszeugmeisterei stamp and a manufacturer's number, not a Swastika.

- Author Robert Greenfield, then associate editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone magasine, wrote a book about his experience that summer at the Villa Nellcôte entitled Exile on Main Street: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (2008)

   I'd love this image even more if it was Keith walking in the forefront with Anita and Marlon from a 1971 photo.

[www.thefloodgallery.com]

Quote
Rockman
Heck ... gotta lot of these mags somewhere ....

Yes me too.....my daughters don't want to inherit my massive stones collection of books, magazines, posters, other memoribilia, records and cds. Maybe there should a separate Stones museum devoted to fans to donate stuff.

pool's in but the patio ain't dry

++++++++

Exile on Main Street Juke Box EP


This "Little LP" contains some of the best tracks from the Stones' much-heralded lp "Exile on Main Street". The LP finds the Stones returning to their blues roots. They appear to be having lots of fun with Slim Harpo's "Hip Shake" and a frenetic "Rip This Joint".

"Tumbling Dice" is one of the finest songs the Stones have ever recorded, an appropriately sloppy, slow number that is really more definitive Stones' music than it is blues.

"Rocks Off" opens side two (and the album). It is possibly the most energetic rock tune about impotence ever written! Shades of "Twenty Flight Rock", which the band would cover years later.

"Sweet Virginia" closes side two which finds the Stones in a humorous country/white trash mode.
A fine "little LP".



Although this release has a Rolling Stones Records catalogue number, it was released on a black Atlantic Records label. This was the case for Stones' "Little LPs" (this one has a number of 199) and EPs once the band formed Rolling Stones Records.






[www.discogs.com]

Quote
winos

Quote
Rockman
Heck ... gotta lot of these mags somewhere ....

Yes me too.....my daughters don't want to inherit my massive stones collection of books, magazines, posters, other memoribilia, records and cds. Maybe there should a separate Stones museum devoted to fans to donate stuff.

There is a private Rolling Stones Museum in Bautzen, Germany, that most likely will be happy to inherit your precious collection:

Stones Pavillion Bautzen

Quote
TIRED

Quote
winos

Quote
Rockman
Heck ... gotta lot of these mags somewhere ....

Yes me too.....my daughters don't want to inherit my massive stones collection of books, magazines, posters, other memoribilia, records and cds. Maybe there should a separate Stones museum devoted to fans to donate stuff.

There is a private Rolling Stones Museum in Bautzen, Germany, that most likely will be happy to inherit your precious collection:

Stones Pavillion Bautzen

Thanks Tired it's a long way from Melbourne.....

pool's in but the patio ain't dry

March, ’71, after a legendary set at The Marquee at the end of their 1971 UK tour,
the Rolling Stones stopped by Top of the Pops at BBC Studios to perform songs
from the soon-to-be-released Sticky Fingers.

Alec Byrne was on hand and captured this image of the band performing “Brown Sugar.”
A couple of days later the Stones left the UK for the south of France where they would record Exile on Main Street..

Black & White Blues - The Rolling Stones at the De Lane Lea recording studio





photos by Gus Cora

The Rolling Stones used to live with photographer Gus Coral’s cousin in Chelsea
and the photographer was so blown away after seeing them perform in Richmond,
in October 1963, that he shot the first tour of the then-unknown band,
supporting The Everly Brothers, alongside Bo Diddley.

++++

Rare Photos Of The Rolling Stones, Before They Were Famous




Before the Rolling Stones were the global rock icons they are today, they were just another indie band in London.

Luckily, someone was there to document it. British photographer Gus Coral toured with the band for their first ever tour in 1963. He took over 150 photos of Mick Jagger and the band onstage, behind-the-scenes and in the De Lane Lea recording studios, as their first single Come On reached the charts.

The exhibit features rare, black-and-white photos of the Stones, who were innocent men in suits. Between taxi rides and shows in Holborn, Southend and Cardiff—to the scrum of eight fans waiting for their autograph in the rain—it was a time when this rock band struggled to sell tickets. Here are some rare shots of the band and Coral’s memories of going on tour and hanging out with the band.


What were the Rolling Stones like back then?

Gus Coral: They were a very young band back then, but also very likeable and easy to be around. I enjoyed the music they were making; they had a good understanding of the blues as well as being talented musicians.


How did you get to know them?

I made a conscious effort to do so. I was working with a couple of friends and we were asked to predict who would be the big band of the following year or the next 'big thing' so to speak. We had frequently been taking trips down to Richmond in South West London to see the Stones a handful of times and in my opinion, I thought they were going to succeed. When we went on the tour it was an exciting experience. We drove up to Cardiff in my car. One of the people I was with was working for ABC television at the time and he was hoping to use this trip for research as we were hoping to make a film with The Rolling Stones, which never happened.




What was the state of pop music when you took these in the early 1960s?

Well, it was The Beatles wasn't it, for the most part, at least? It was clean, tidy and quite often uniformed for most of the acts back then. I mean, I liked the Beatles, but then when the Stones came along The Beatles took second place, I'm afraid, at least in my affections. The Beatles were always a little too soft for me, the Stones had a slightly raw edge musically and I think that caught the flavor of the times.


Did you have a feeling they might become a well-known band?

I had a feeling they would be popular yes, but I had absolutely no idea they would become as big as they went on to be. I'm glad now that I was able to have recorded a very important part of history. The Rolling Stones were just a group of young men doing what they did best and hoping to be able to do so continuously.



Since you have lots of photos of the Stones, will you do a book?

I hope so, I'd really like to. The story behind these almost 200 images is so unique and entertaining in its own right; I would like to create a book. I'd like to keep this material together and in a sense hand it down for posterity. Maybe a book is the best way to do so.



Are you still in touch with them today?

Unfortunately, I am not although I do think that it would be a great opportunity to meet up and have a chat about the days that we spent together back in 1963. Maybe we could jog each others’ memories.




What do you see looking back at these?

One of the things I see is that I was probably a better photographer back then than I am today, I had a pure eye and was looking at things for the first time. I have photographed many musicians since, but it's more self-conscious now, back then it was very straightforward: “I'm taking a picture of what’s going on, what’s happening, I'm taking a picture of the reality of their lives.”



The book

Edited 4 time(s). Last edit at 2021-10-17 22:44 by exilestones.

can anyone advise how to upload images please

Ron Wood: Not Just Another Pretty Face


The Faces guitarist steps out solo with the help of some heavy-hitting friends



Ron Wood poses in a hotel Beverly Hills, California in 1974.

Mark Sullivan/Contour by Getty Images

LOS ANGELES — I’ve Got My Own Album To Do is a good title for Ron Wood’s first solo album: It fits his sly, impish look, and besides, it was suggested by no less than Mick Jagger, who had his own album to do.

Ron Wood, of course, is the Faces‘ guitarist, has been for the past five years; before that he played bass behind Jeff Beck. He’s cowritten Faces songs with Ronnie Lane and Rod Stewart, coproduced Faces albums, and worked on Stewart’s solo efforts, but now he’s taking sole musical responsibility. Well, almost.

Wood’s album features Jagger and Keith Richards (with a few songs by them as well), plus Rolling Stone Mick Taylor, Ian MacLagan (keyboard player with the Faces), drummer Andy Newmark (from Sly Stone’s old band) and Willie Weeks, bassist formerly working behind Donny Hathaway and Aretha Franklin. It was recorded in Wood’s eight-track basement studio, under the house once owned by actor John Mills. “Little Hayley grew up there,” Wood said, grinning.

Making the album was “controlled madness,” Wood said, but it doesn’t come through on the vinyl. One or two tracks are pleasant, notably the Jagger/Richard tune, “Sure the One You Need,” which might be the single, and “Crotch Music,” written by Weeks, an unassuming instrumental. But “Far East Man,” by George Harrison and Wood, is a pale reprint of that familiar Harrison Eastern theme, and the real low point is “If You’ve Got To Make a Fool of Somebody,” which doesn’t come within shouting distance of the James Ray original.

Still, the album marks a step forward for Wood, who for several years has been in the near background of the indomitable Rod Stewart. “If the songs aren’t up to scratch, it was only me to blame,” Wood said. He sat hunched forward in a little chair on the hotel patio, wearing white jeans and a colorful shirt tied around his waist calypso fashion. His hair seemed to sprout straight up, and he’s so thin his belt buckle seemed to weigh him down. Earlier, David Bowie had wandered in to say hello, rendering everyone else in the room speechless with awe or fear; Wood was infinitely more comfortable.

“When the Faces were in Australia and Japan,” he said, launching into his story, “we had lots of time to ourselves and began gathering all the ideas that I’d put down over the years as my own songs. At the time I laid them down I didn’t think of anything in particular, whether it was Faces, Rod or the film music I did with Ronnie Lane [for a movie called Mahoney’s Estate, due late this year]. So I itemized all these ideas and found that if I didn’t do something with them they’d never see the light of day.”

Though Wood has often contributed music to Faces songs, this album is his first wholehearted attempt at lyrics. “Writing songs is a definite art. I’d always left the words to Rod,” he said, with a small shrug. “Rod’s words will continue to be the main thing for Faces,” he added, but some of the songs on Wood’s album fit the Faces easily, like “Take a Look at the Guy” and “Am I Grooving You.”

After the album was finished, Wood and Stewart and Keith Richard, plus Weeks, Newmark and MacLagan, did two gigs at Kilburn States Theatre in London which “Knocked me out. We would all have gone off on tour together right then,” including Richard, but there were other commitments – like a Faces tour of England and Europe currently underway. “We only had four day’s rehearsal for the gig. I had no time to learn the words, so I’d make up lines as I felt.

"I hope that by getting my rocks off in this way the change is as good as a rest. It’s all the same pattern – the Clapton Rainbow concert improved me; so did my live concert and the whole making of the album. I learned so much about mastering and mixing, which I’ve never really got that much into; because there were always five of us, you could pass the buck.” Wood coproduced his album with Gary Kellgren, owner of the Record Plant recording studios in Los Angeles and Sausalito. “He came to my basement studio and in return, I went to his really deluxe studio in Sausalito to mix.”

Wood hopes to do his solo tour after the Faces visit the States early in ’75, but it’s still tentative, and he’s not sure who would be playing with him then.

Wood was traveling with his wife, Chris, which may or may not explain his calm, uncrazed demeanor. “There was a time when we were madmen,” he said, smiling. “We’d loot and pillage every time, but now I feel a bit ashamed of some of those things. I’m basically cautious; I only let it rip when I’ve got the other boys behind me.”

This story is from the October 24th, 1974 issue of Rolling Stone.

More:



[www.youtube.com]




[www.youtube.com]


More:
[iorr.org]

More:
[iorr.org]

The First Chess Session


For two years after “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topped the U.S. charts in February 1964, the only sound that mattered had a British accent. The Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, Petula Clark: it was an obsession that went beyond the Beatles—and initially ignored the Rolling Stones.
BY DAVID KAMP

The Stones arrived in the U.S. in June for a disastrous two-week tour that found them, at one juncture, playing four consecutive shows at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Texas . . . [Sighs.] There was a swimming pool in front of us. With seals in it. Performing seals were on in the afternoon, in front of us. And Bobby Vee appearing in tennis shorts—forget the American Dream, now we’ve got the American nightmare. The tour was only 15 dates, but it was a hard slog, a lot of disappointment. You know, if the Beatles’ landing at J.F.K. was like something directed by Cecil B. DeMille, it looked as if Mel Brooks directed our entry.

The indignities piled on. Making their American TV debut on the ABC variety program The Hollywood Palace, the Stones were ritually abused by that week’s host, Dean Martin, who said of them, “Their hair is not long—it’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.”

Oldham did manage one coup on the Stones’ first trip, though, getting the group a recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago, where many of their blues idols had put down their most famous tracks.


The Rolling Stones at Chess in 1964

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__I could not have them going back to England with long faces. So, as a compensation, I organized a recording session at Chess, where they could basically record at the shrine. That got us as far as “It’s All Over Now,” the Bobby Womack song . . .

. . . the Stones’ cover of which squeaked into the American Top 40 in late summer ’64, peaking at No. 26 in mid-September—just as their nemesis, Martin, was enjoying his eighth week in the Top 10 with “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

The early Stones were hardly the only British group whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of covers of American R&B singles. For bands who were not writing their own material, it was crucial to have a good song picker. The Searchers, from Liverpool, had one of the best in drummer Chris Curtis.


+++++++++

The British Invasion




This much is familiar: On January 25, 1964, the Beatles’ single “I Want to Hold Your Hand” entered the American Top 40. On February 1 it reached No. 1. On February 7 the Beatles arrived in New York for their inaugural U.S. visit, and two days later played on The Ed Sullivan Show to hysterical response and record viewership, thereby effecting a cataclysmic cultural shift and triggering a musical movement that would come to be known as the British Invasion. Cue screaming girls, fringe haircuts, Murray the K, etc.

What’s less remembered are the specifics of precisely what and whom this invasion encompassed. Today, the term “the British Invasion” is usually employed to describe (and market) the triumphal epoch of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and the Who, with honorable mentions to the Kinks and the Animals. In hindsight, and on merit, this sounds about right—these are the best and most revered of the English bands who came of age in the 1960s—but the reality of the British Invasion, which was at its most intense in the two years immediately following the Beatles’ landfall, was somewhat different. Far from being solely a beat-group explosion, the Invasion was a rather eclectic phenomenon that took in everything from Petula Clark’s lushly symphonic pop to Chad and Jeremy’s dulcet folk-schlock to the Yardbirds’ blues-rock rave-ups. And while the Beatles were unquestionably the movement’s instigators and dominant force, the Rolling Stones and the Who were, initially, among the least successful of the invaders—the former group struggling throughout ’64 to gain a foothold in America while the Dave Clark Five, Herman’s Hermits, and even Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas vaulted ahead of them, the latter group struggling even to get its terrific run of early singles (“I Can’t Explain,” “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere,” “My Generation,” “Substitute”) released in the United States. (Arguably, given that they didn’t perform in America or chart in its Top 40 until 1967, with “Happy Jack,” the Who don’t even qualify as an Invasion band.)

The British Invasion was, nevertheless, a very real phenomenon. Prior to 1964, only two British singles had ever topped *Billboard’*s Hot 100 chart—Acker Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore” and the Tornadoes’ “Telstar,” both instrumentals—and between them they held the No. 1 spot for a total of four weeks. In the 1964–65 period, by contrast, British acts were at No. 1 for an astounding 56 weeks combined. In 1963 a mere three singles by British artists cracked the American Top 40. In 1964, 65 did, and in 1965, a further 68 did. Beyond all the statistics, the English musicians who came to America between 1964 and 1966 found themselves in the grip of a rampant, utterly unanticipated Anglophilia that made them irresistibly chic and sexy no matter what their background—London or Liverpool, middle class or working class, art school or tradesman’s apprentice, skiffle or trad jazz. Anything English and sufficiently youthful was embraced, exalted, fondled, and fainted over. This applied not only to the important bands whose music would stand the test of time, like the Beatles, the Stones, and the Kinks, but also to such confectioners of engaging period work as the Hollies and Herman’s Hermits, and to such one-hit wonders as Ian Whitcomb (“You Turn Me On”) and the dubiously named Nashville Teens (“Tobacco Road”). America lapped it all up, and the cultural exchange proved beneficial to both sides: the Brits, still very much in the throes of postwar privation, saw their nascent “swinging” youth culture further buttressed, their country abruptly transformed from black-and-white to color; the Americans, still very much in mourning for John F. Kennedy, were administered a needed dose of fun, and, thus re-invigorated, resumed the youthquake that had lapsed into dormancy when Elvis joined the army, Little Richard found God, and Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran met their makers.

Here, a variety of figures who witnessed and participated in the British Invasion in the Beatles’ wake—musicians, managers, industry folk—recount the era as they experienced it, from its arrival in the form of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” to its dénouement in the hairier, heavier year of 1967, by which time American bands had begun to redress the imbalance, and the pheromonal hysteria had worn off.

Britain’s postwar era, the formative period of the future invaders, was marked by an unbridled, condescension-free love of America that hadn’t been witnessed before and hasn’t been witnessed since. To British youth of this time, America was the antithesis of their rain-sodden existence—a promised land of big Cadillacs, rock ’n’ roll, authentic Negro bluesmen, Brando and Dean delinquent pics, and muscular Burt Lancaster movies.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM, MANAGER, THE ROLLING STONES: You sucked up America as energy, to get you out of the cold, gray, drab streets of London. Before global warming, I doubt that England had more than three sunny weeks a year. Which is one of the reasons that England fell in love with the Beach Boys, to a certain degree, more than America did.

IAN WHITCOMB, SINGER: I think history shows that it rained a tremendous amount in Britain in those days, much more than it does now. And there were no sweets; they were rationed. World War II didn’t end in Britain until about 1955, because that’s when rationing stopped. And everybody in Britain looked pale and ugly and flaccid, whereas Americans, at least on the screen and in the pictures in magazines that we got, looked in great shape.

PETER NOONE, HERMAN’S HERMITS: I grew up thinking that all American music was good and all English music was crap. I was a Yankophile. All the TV shows I liked were American—you know, [the sitcom] Sergeant Bilko and so on. You have to imagine that these poor English guys were living in miserable, provincial, rainy, dreary cities, and saw posters with James Dean standing in the boots and the jeans and the T-shirt, with the cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. I mean, if you look at Keith Richards, he still dresses like James Dean in that movie.

__RAY PHILLIPS, NASHVILLE TEENS:__I grew up in Surrey. We used to do a song by the Everly Brothers called “Nashville Blues,” and we were all teenagers, so we called ourselves Nashville Teens.

__ERIC BURDON, THE ANIMALS:__I remember flipping through the pages of this jazz magazine with John Steel, the original drummer with the Animals, in art school. We came across this photograph of a bass player walking past the Flatiron Building after an all-night session in New York City, carrying his bass. We turned around and said, “Yeah! We’re gonna go to New York, and we’re gonna be junkies!”

For all its allure, though, America was, prior to 1964, thought to be impregnable—more a fantastical construct than a practical ambition.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: America was not even a possibility for anybody before the Beatles. As a place to practice your business, it wasn’t even a consideration. Before the Beatles, what were the possibilities? Scandinavia, maybe. The toilets of Belgium—the way the Beatles had done Hamburg. France for holidays. Even the French stars, they used to say, “We’re touring America” . . . really, they were shopping. You know, they might play Canada, but America wasn’t open to them.

PETULA CLARK, SINGER: It was all one-way traffic. For instance, the London Palladium—most of the big stars were American. Danny Kaye and Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine, those sort of people. Everything was coming from America.

PETER ASHER, PETER AND GORDON: The big thing was, Cliff Richard had never made it in America. He’s so huge to us. He was our Elvis, our idol. Him not making it in America made it look impossible.

True enough—America just couldn’t be bothered with English acts, including, as late as the end of 1963, the Beatles, who were already huge stars in the U.K. and on the European mainland. In autumn of that year, the famous disc jockey Bruce Morrow, a.k.a. Cousin Brucie, joined several other D.J.’s and executives at his station, WABC New York, to listen to a test pressing of “I Want to Hold Your Hand.”

BRUCE MORROW: All the geniuses got together, including this one here. The first time we heard the record, all of us gave it the thumbs-down. I think most of us had the feeling of “How dare these Brits, these upstarts, take the American idiom of rock ’n’ roll and do what they did to it?” I think it took over three meetings for us to realize that there was something more to this than protecting the American rock ’n’ roll industry and community. We started reading what was going on all over the Continent and we figured, “Well, we’d better give this a listen again.”

When “I Want to Hold Your Hand” finally made the American playlists, its shocking success abruptly changed the game for everyone in American music. Kim Fowley, a promising young Los Angeles record producer with a No. 1 hit to his credit (the Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley-Oop”), was riding high in January of ’64 with another of his productions, the Murmaids’ “Popsicles and Icicles,” when reality walloped him.

KIM FOWLEY: There were three trade papers in those days, Billboard and Cashbox—we were No. 3 in both—and the Murmaids were No. 1 in the third one, Record World. All of a sudden, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” comes along, and I was No. 1 no more. From, let’s say, February 6, which was when my record ceased to be No. 1, up to May, the only American hits were “Hello, Dolly!,” by Louis Armstrong, “Dawn,” by the Four Seasons, and “Suspicion,” by Terry Stafford. That was it—those were the only three records that got in the first five months of the year. Everything else was British.

FRANKIE VALLI, THE FOUR SEASONS: At the beginning of our career, we had “Sherry,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry,” and “Walk Like a Man”—all No. 1s, one right after the other. And then came “Dawn,” and it was No. 3. It was a big letdown.

BRUCE MORROW: The Four Seasons and the Beach Boys did O.K. and carried the American flag for a few years, but the solo artists had a very rough time. I’m talking, like, Neil Sedaka and Chubby Checker. Because, suddenly, everybody was putting their money and attention and production values behind the British groups. Suddenly there was a flood of British groups—a flood.

KIM FOWLEY: America just laid there, spread its legs, and said, “Come on in, guys. Come over and violate us with your Englishness.” Everybody suddenly wanted an English band, an English song, or something that could be sold or classified or categorized or manipulated into that area.

Indeed, as the winter of ’64 progressed into spring and summer, the American charts were inundated with British product—not just the Beatles’ hastily issued ’62–’63 back catalogue (“She Loves You,” “Love Me Do,” “Twist and Shout,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Please Please Me”), but singles by the Dave Clark Five, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, Dusty Springfield, Cilla Black, the Animals, the Kinks, the Searchers, and Manfred Mann. With all these chart-storming acts came an attendant, and often ridiculous, American Anglophilia.

BRUCE MORROW: Kids would call me for dedications and talk to me with British accents. Some kid from the Bronx would all of a sudden speak the King’s English: “’Ello? Sir Brucie, this is Sir Ivan . . . ” Literally, they gave themselves knight titles.

MARK LINDSAY, PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS: I learned to speak with an English accent, or my best facsimile, as soon as I could. Because I found out that’s what chicks wanted. They didn’t care about the American guys. They were looking for the Brits.

Of all the early Invasion acts, the Dave Clark Five, from the dismal North London neighborhood of Tottenham, were the most serious challengers to the Beatles’ supremacy—far more serious, initially, than the Rolling Stones, who were still playing blues and R&B covers on the U.K. circuit.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: It should be remembered that the Dave Clark Five were the next God for more than a few minutes. In March and April of 1964, with “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces,” they hit the U.S. Top 10 twice. “Glad All Over”? The Stones and I thought it was sad all over. London was as big as the world in those days, very territorial, and Dave Clark came from no-man’s-land, according to our New Wave elitism. But we did not laugh at his business acumen and ability to get it right in America.

SIMON NAPIER-BELL, MANAGER, THE YARDBIRDS: I have more respect for Dave Clark than anyone else in the whole business. If you were hanging around the fringes of show business in those days, you were obviously thinking, Hey, I’d like to be the Beatles’ manager. And since you couldn’t, you had to find another Beatles for yourself. Dave Clark was the best of all—he said, “I’d like to be the Beatles’ manager. I think I’d like to be the Beatles too.”

DAVE CLARK: When people talk about my business acumen, I have to laugh. I left school when I was 15. My dad worked for the post office. Looking back, I think I was just streetwise.

Clark, the band’s drummer and chief songwriter, was a preternaturally driven young jock, aspiring actor, and stuntman who had first organized his band to finance his youth soccer club’s trip to Holland for a tournament (which they won). He also managed the band and produced its records, securing a royalty rate exponentially higher than the Beatles’ and becoming a millionaire at 21. Clark attracted Ed Sullivan’s attention when “Glad All Over,” a No. 1 hit in the U.K., started climbing the U.S. charts, portending another Brit sensation.

DAVE CLARK: When Ed Sullivan first asked us to do his show, we were still semi-professional—the boys still had day jobs—and I said we wouldn’t go professional until we had two records in the top five. This was before “Bits and Pieces.” I turned him down, but then he offered us an incredible amount of money, so we came over. We did the show, and Sullivan liked us so much he said, “I’m holding you over for next week.” But we were already booked in England for a sold-out show. I said we couldn’t do it. So he called me up to his office and said, “I’ll buy the show out.”

For some reason, without thinking, I said, “Well, I don’t think I can stay in New York for the whole week.” And he said, “Where do you want to go?” Well, on the way in from the airport, they had these billboards out, and one of them said, “Montego Bay, Island Paradise.” So I said to him, “Montego Bay”—I’d never heard of it! And so we went to Montego Bay just for the week, all expenses paid. Went on the Monday and came back on the Friday, and there were 30,000 or 35,000 people waiting at the airport.

By that May, we were touring America, every show sold out, in our own private plane, which we leased from the Rockefellers. It had “DC5” painted on the nose. I just said, “If we are going to do it, let’s do it in style.”

The Dave Clark Five’s tour was the first by an Invasion band, pre-dating even the Beatles’ first tour proper. With an innate grasp of the American marketplace and a gift for writing peppy, stadium-friendly stomp-alongs (the propulsive “Bits and Pieces” virtually invented glam rock), Clark scored seven straight Top 20 singles in the U.S. in 1964, and four more in ’65. His band also sold out 12 straight concerts in Carnegie Hall and, over the course of the 1960s, made 18 appearances on Ed Sullivan, more than any other rock group.

DAVE CLARK: We’d get hundreds of girls leaving us hundreds of dolls and gifts in every city. And one of the gifts was a sheep. I didn’t have the heart to send it anywhere, so I took it back to the hotel suite. And we came back after the show, and it had chewed every credit card, every piece of furniture—we didn’t trash hotel suites, but the sheep did.

But whereas Ed Sullivan saw in Clark a nice, wholesome bandleader who appealed to kids and parents alike, some of Clark’s peers back in England saw hauteur and slick opportunism.

DAVE DAVIES, THE KINKS: Dave Clark was a very shrewd guy, but he wasn’t particularly well liked. Because he wasn’t really a musician—he was more of a businessman: “Let’s make a band up like the Beatles and try to make a lot of money.”

GRAHAM NASH, THE HOLLIES: We @#$%&’ hated the Dave Clark Five! They were just awful to us. They were snotty and they couldn’t play for shit. I mean, if you’re great, maybe you have the right to be a little stuck-up, but if you’re not great, @#$%& you and your attitude.

Beyond the Dave Clark Five, the acts that broke early in the Invasion seemed to be those with Beatle associations, whether because they were fellow Liverpudlians, like the Searchers (“Needles and Pins,” “Love Potion No. 9”); fellow clients of manager Brian Epstein, like Gerry and the Pacemakers (“Don’t Let the Sun Catch You Crying,” “Ferry Cross the Mersey”) and exCavern Club coat-check girl Cilla Black (“You’re My World”); recipients of John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s songwriting largesse, like Peter and Gordon (“A World Without Love”); or all of the above, like Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas (“Little Children,” “Bad to Me”).

__BILLY J. KRAMER:__I came with Brian for a week in New York before the Beatles; I think he was negotiating with the Ed Sullivan Show people. I was totally intimidated. Brian said to me when we got off the plane, “What do you think of this place?” And I said, “I think we should get the next plane back to England.”

__GERRY MARSDEN, GERRY AND THE PACEMAKERS:__New York was brilliant! People used to say to me, “Doesn’t it get on your nerves when they try and rip your clothes off?” And I’d say, “No, they paid for it—they can have ’em. Just leave me underpants.”



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-10-26 14:13 by exilestones.

CILLA BLACK: I remember coming down Fifth Avenue, and I was wearing a Mary Quant black plastic mac. Some fans who had caught me on The Ed Sullivan Show wanted a souvenir, so they pulled a button off my mac. And of course it all ripped, and I was really upset. But they were still being friendly—they just wanted a Beatle souvenir.

__PETER ASHER:__Almost all our fans were also Beatle fans. By zeroing in on one of the subgroups of the Beatle phenomenon, the fans had more of a chance to actually get to meet the musicians, or to feel more personally involved. I remember one time, we finished a show and jumped off the stage in San Diego or somewhere. And as we did, the girls broke through some sort of barrier thing, chasing after us. My glasses fell off and fell to the ground. I picked ’em up and put ’em back on, and looked behind me. And a girl, where my glasses had fallen on the lawn, was pulling the grass out and stuffing it in her mouth. Something that had touched me had now touched this grass, and the grass had now become sacred. It was fascinating.

Of these acts, Peter and Gordon were the odd ones out, not rough-hewn northerners but posh kids from London’s prestigious Westminster School who’d formed an Everly Brothers-style harmony duo. Their Beatle connection was that Paul McCartney was dating Peter Asher’s actress older sister, Jane. Lacking a permanent home in London at that time, McCartney had taken to bunking with the Ashers, a bourgeois-bohemian Jewish family, when the Beatles weren’t on tour.

__PETER ASHER:__The top floor of our house had two bedrooms on it, which was him and me. So we were hanging out together a lot. One day—I think Gordon was there, too—Paul was fiddling about, playing a song, and I said, “What’s that?” And he said it was something he’d written for Billy J. Kramer, and that Billy J. didn’t like it, and that John didn’t want to do it with the Beatles. So I said, “Well, could we sing it?”

The song, “A World Without Love,” became Peter and Gordon’s debut single, and it went to No. 1 in America in June 1964, making them the first Englishmen after the Beatles to top the U.S. charts.

But even British acts with no Beatles connection whatsoever discovered, as they made their way to the United States in ’64 and ’65, that they were fab-by-association, no matter what their actual provenance.

PETER ASHER: The funny part was that in America at that time “Beatle” almost became a generic term. People would actually come up to you and say, “Are you a Beatle?” Literally, middle-aged America at that time thought everyone with long hair and English was a Beatle.

JEREMY CLYDE, CHAD AND JEREMY: All the time—“Are you from Liverpool?” And our record company, since they didn’t have a band from Liverpool, dubbed us “the Oxford Sound,” because I had been brought up near Oxford at one point. “You’ve heard the Liverpool Sound. Now—wait for it, kids!—it’s the Oxford Sound!” The Oxford Sound, thank God, didn’t last very long.

__GORDON WALLER, PETER AND GORDON:__Americans just assumed that everyone from England was from Liverpool. But if they referred to us as “the Liverpool Sound,” I just went with the flow. If that made them happy and made the kids buy the records—solid!

One band that did not instantly reap the benefits of hysterical Brit-mania was the Rolling Stones. By 1964 they had already developed a fierce live reputation, had hits in England (including the Lennon-McCartney-written “I Wanna Be Your Man”), and had appeared on the frenetic British teen-pop program Ready Steady Go! But establishing a U.S. foothold proved elusive.

__VICKI WICKHAM, PRODUCER, READY STEADY GO!:__I remember sitting with Brian Jones and Mick Jagger at Wembley Stadium when we were doing Ready Steady Goes Mod, some extravaganza out there. We were sitting over a cup of tea, and I remember them saying, “If only we could get a hit in America—wouldn’t it be great? We’d get a trip, we’d get to shop, we’d get to go there.”

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: All the people that we would laugh at while we were backstage at Ready Steady Go!—Dave Clark, Herman’s Hermits, the Animals—they were having hits in America a long time before the Rolling Stones. Name anybody—even [the unforgivably glutinous Irish vocal trio] the Bachelors got to No. 10.

Oldham, just 20 years old in 1964, had already made a name for himself in England by embarking on a whistle-stop apprenticeship tour of early Swinging London, working brief stints for the designer Mary Quant, the jazz-club impresario Ronnie Scott, and the Beatles’ famous manager, Brian Epstein. The son of an American soldier who had been killed in World War II combat before Andrew was born and an Australian-born Englishwoman who concealed her Russian-Jewish background, Oldham gorged himself on American culture, became obsessed with Alexander Mackendrick’s quintessential New York film, The Sweet Smell of Success, and became one of Swinging London’s greatest self-inventions—an immaculately turned-out press manipulator who loved trouble, wore eyeliner, and, in Marianne Faithfull’s words, “would say things you only hear in movies, like I can make you a star, and that’s just for starters, baby!’”

At 19, Oldham took over the management of the Rollin’ Stones (as they were then known), a nice group of middle-class blues enthusiasts from the suburbs of London, and masterfully recast them as mystique-laden bad boys—scruffing them up, encouraging them to unleash their delinquencies, and stoking the newspapers with his “Would you let your daughter marry a Stone?” campaign.

__SIMON NAPIER-BELL:__What Mick Jagger did onstage subsequently was what Andrew did offstage. Andrew was camp and flamboyant and outrageous, and Mick stole Andrew’s movements and put them into a stage act.

But, for all his bravado in England and his romance with America, Oldham never anticipated that he would actually have to try to crack the States.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: February ’64, when the Beatles came to America, it was a big “Uh-oh”—no, a huge one. I was in a @#$%&’ panic, man. All of my gifts were of absolutely no use to me. This was a country where you killed your president. I mean, c’mon, we’re turning up only six months after you’d popped Kennedy. That did have an effect on one.

The Stones arrived in the U.S. in June for a disastrous two-week tour that found them, at one juncture, playing four consecutive shows at the Texas State Fair in San Antonio.

ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: Texas . . . [Sighs.] There was a swimming pool in front of us. With seals in it. Performing seals were on in the afternoon, in front of us. And Bobby Vee appearing in tennis shorts—forget the American Dream, now we’ve got the American nightmare. The tour was only 15 dates, but it was a hard slog, a lot of disappointment. You know, if the Beatles’ landing at J.F.K. was like something directed by Cecil B. DeMille, it looked as if Mel Brooks directed our entry.

The indignities piled on. Making their American TV debut on the ABC variety program The Hollywood Palace, the Stones were ritually abused by that week’s host, Dean Martin, who said of them, “Their hair is not long—it’s just smaller foreheads and higher eyebrows.”

Oldham did manage one coup on the Stones’ first trip, though, getting the group a recording session at Chess Studios in Chicago, where many of their blues idols had put down their most famous tracks.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__I could not have them going back to England with long faces. So, as a compensation, I organized a recording session at Chess, where they could basically record at the shrine. That got us as far as “It’s All Over Now,” the Bobby Womack song . . .

. . . the Stones’ cover of which squeaked into the American Top 40 in late summer ’64, peaking at No. 26 in mid-September—just as their nemesis, Martin, was enjoying his eighth week in the Top 10 with “Everybody Loves Somebody.”

The early Stones were hardly the only British group whose repertoire consisted almost entirely of covers of American R&B singles. For bands who were not writing their own material, it was crucial to have a good song picker. The Searchers, from Liverpool, had one of the best in drummer Chris Curtis.

CHRIS CURTIS: At Brian Epstein’s family’s store, NEMS, you could ask him, and he’d get you anything you wanted. I listened to Radio Luxembourg virtually every night—they used to do an American slot, and I’d say, “Oh, that’s good,” and order it at NEMS. “Needles and Pins”—I just heard Jackie DeShannon’s version on the radio, so I bought the record. “Love Potion No. 9”—we were in Hamburg, and I used to go out on my own, looking in old shops. I found this old secondhand shop in the next road up from the Grosse Freiheit, which is where the Star Club was. I thought, That’s strange—what’s a 45 doing in the window? And it was the Clovers singing “Love Potion No. 9,” which became our biggest hit in America.

Manfred Mann’s song picker was its singer, the dreamy Paul Jones. The band, named after its bespectacled, Beatnik keyboardist, started out as a jazz combo but had little success. Enlisting Jones, they reconstituted themselves as an R&B outfit but still weren’t having much luck, prompting the singer to take them in a poppier direction.

PAUL JONES: I would avidly listen to the very few programs on British radio where you could hear American popular music. And every time I heard something that I liked, I would go to one of the very few record shops in London you could rely on to stock that stuff. And I heard this “Do Wah Diddy,” by [the black New York vocal group] the Exciters, and I thought, It’s a smash!

“Do Wah Diddy Diddy” had been written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, one of the hit-making teams that worked in Manhattan’s fabled Brill Building. But the Exciters’ version had done surprisingly little business in the U.S. Manfred Mann’s version, however, a future staple of sports-arena playlists, became another No. 1 for the British side in October of ’64.

PAUL JONES: I wanted to get over to America as fast as possible. And when some guy said, “There’s a tour with Peter and Gordon,” I said, “Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go!” And it was dreadfully arranged, in the depths of winter ’64-’65. When we got to New York, we played at the New York Academy of Music, and ticket sales were very poor indeed. So they decided that it would be necessary, at the last minute, to beef up the bill with some local talent. And of all the blind-blank stupidities, the local talent that they booked was the Exciters, who then sang “Do Wah Diddy” before we did.

Manfred Mann’s tour wasn’t a total washout, though. While the band was in Los Angeles, the ubiquitous scenester Kim Fowley witnessed what he deems a seminal event in music history: the first official campaign by a groupie to bed a rock star.

KIM FOWLEY: Her name was Liz, with red hair and green eyes; she looked like a Gidget version of Maureen O’Hara. She was about 18 years old. She was the first girl who I ever saw walk into a hotel room for the express purpose of @#$%& a rock star. I was standing in the driveway, between the Continental Hyatt House and Ciro’s. I had just gotten out of a cab, and I was gonna go over to the hotel and welcome the guys. Then her cab came up. I said, “Hey, Liz, what’s going on?” She said, “Do you know Paul Jones in Manfred Mann?” I said, “Yeah.” And she said, “Well, I want to @#$%& him.” I said, “Really? So what do you want me to do?” She said, “I want you to drag me into their room and introduce me, so I can nail this guy.”

So we knock on the door, and they open the door, and I said, “Paul Jones, here’s your date for the evening.” “Hi, I’m Liz, I’m gonna have sex with you tonight!” And he said, “Great!”

__PAUL JONES:__If I said Kim was lying, I’d be lying, because I don’t know whether it’s true or false. I seem to remember that at the time there were lots of girls that made a beeline for groups—especially the singer. Look: the music was always the main thing for us. If I did get into debauchery, then I have to admit that girls were more likely to be the subject of it than drink. And drugs a poor third.

The greatest of England’s song pickers in the Invasion era was Mickie Most, a former pop singer of middling achievement who’d made himself over as a Svengali-like producer. Unique among London music figures, Most was jetting off to New York even before the Beatles’ breakthrough, trawling the Brill Building music publishers for songs that he could turn into hits with the promising young groups he’d found, the Animals and Herman’s Hermits.

__MICKIE MOST:__The previous generation of British pop artists, like Cliff Richard, Adam Faith, and Marty Wilde, were basically clones of the Americans, except that they didn’t have the ability to write. They used other people’s songs, normally covers of American records that had already been successful. So I designed a shortcut—go to America, to the publishing companies, and get the songs before they were recorded. When I’d find a band like Herman’s Hermits—I liked the band, but they didn’t have any tunes. So off I went to New York, and we found a song called “I’m into Something Good,” written by Gerry Goffin and Carole King. And the Animals, for instance—their first hit was “House of the Rising Sun,” which was an old folk song they were doing in their set; they weren’t writers. So “We Gotta Get out of This Place,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” and “It’s My Life”—those tunes were all American songs which had never been recorded.

The Animals, from Newcastle, were an earthy blues-R&B act fronted by Eric Burdon, a volatile, charismatic belter of small stature and serious intellect. Their slow, portentous version of “House of the Rising Sun” held the No. 1 spot for three weeks in September ’64, establishing them as rootsy heavyweights of the Invasion.

ERIC BURDON: I still resent being lumped in with the British Invasion. That’s just not the way I saw music—to have our management look around for chewing-gum commercials. We weren’t bubblegum. I was @#$%&’ serious about the blues. In one of my first journals, I made an incision into my arm and wrote the word “blues” in blood. It was a crusade.

Herman’s Hermits, on the other hand, were the perfect teen-dream band, acutely polite, unsubversively cheeky, and forever dressed for school-picture day. “Herman” was actually Peter Noone, a relentlessly chipper, well-to-do boy from the suburbs of Manchester who had been a child actor on the English soap opera Coronation Street. He was barely 17 when “I’m into Something Good” became an American hit in the fall of 1964.

__PETER NOONE:__Herman’s Hermits were always very civil. Girls, guys, mums, and dads liked us, ’cause we were not in your face in any kind of way. You know how people say, “I couldn’t let me sister see that”? That’s how we were. We all had a sister who was a little bit older than us or a little bit younger than us, and my sister had, like, a plastic statue of Sister Mary Teresa implanted in her forehead: ALL MEN, LEAVE ME ALONE. We thought all girls were like that. Until we found out that we had a shot at them.

Precocious and possessed of Clintonian energy and political skills, Noone proved adept at ingratiating himself to the appropriate American media figures.

PETER NOONE: I made an alliance with Gloria Stavers, the editor of 16 magazine, because I knew that she was the most important person in rock ’n’ roll in America. She developed acts. If she liked what you represented—she liked Paul McCartney; she liked John Lennon—she made you look better. She would change your answers to make you look better . . .

. . . e.g., Stavers: “What do you think of American girls?” Noone: “They make me wish we still owned the colonies. That’s what America used to be, luv!”

PETER NOONE: And Ed Sullivan was charmed by Herman’s Hermits because I was a bit brighter than the average musician. He said, “You’re a Catholic, aren’t you? Meet me tomorrow at Delmonico’s”—which I thought was a restaurant; he meant the building—“and come with me and my family to Mass.” It was a big honor. I showed up, suited up and everything, and genuflected in all the wrong places; I hadn’t been for about 10 years.

Noone’s politicking and Most’s production savvy paid off. erman’s Hermits commenced a streak of five straight Top 5 hits, including the No. 1s “Mrs. Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and “I’m Henry VIII, I Am.”

__WAYNE FONTANA, WAYNE FONTANA AND THE MINDBENDERS:__I’d say that at that time in America, in ’65, Peter was bigger than the Beatles.

PETER NOONE: Mick Jagger didn’t like Herman’s Hermits. ’Cause people would ask was he Herman in those days.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__Mick was stopped in Honolulu Airport and asked for his autograph. And they were disappointed that he hadn’t signed “Peter Noone.” The look on his face! But we took Peter Noone and Mickie Most very seriously, and so did other folk. They and the Dave Clark Five, after the Beatles, took the heart of America way before the Stones. They toured on hits, we went looking for them.

__PETER NOONE:__There was a time when we were all staying at the City Squire hotel in New York—us, the Stones, and Tom Jones. Herman’s Hermits had just done “Henry the VIII” on The Ed Sullivan Show, and there were two or three thousand kids standing outside the hotel for us—it had been on the news. We went up on the roof—the Stones and Tom Jones too—and it must have made a big impact on the Stones, because they started to write pop tunes. No more of the blues stuff, “Little Red Rooster”—that was instantly gone. They went to start and write songs, ’cause they said, “Look what happens when you make it in America.”

As ’64 turned into ’65, the Invasion grew ever more literal, with British groups coming over in great numbers for package tours, New York variety showcases hosted by D.J. Murray “the K” Kaufman, and appearances on the various manic television programs that had arisen to cater to the hysterical-teen demographic: NBC’s Hullabaloo, ABC’s Shindig! and Where the Action Is, and the syndicated Hollywood A Go Go. Among the groups to visit were the Kinks, whose Ray Davies-written originals “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night” were all over the radio; the Zombies, whose extraordinary debut single, “She’s Not There,” was the first self-written British No. 1 after the Beatles; the Yardbirds, who came to America with a new featured guitarist, Jeff Beck, because the old one, blues purist Eric Clapton, found the band’s hit “For Your Love” inexcusably poppy; the Hollies, who were having hits in England but who wouldn’t crack the U.S. Top 10 until ’66 and ’67 with “Bus Stop” and “Carrie-Anne”; and lesser acts like Nashville Teens, yet another Mickie Most discovery, who had a hit with a cover of John D. Loudermilk’s “Tobacco Road,” and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, who went to No. 1 with the soulful “The Game of Love.”

For young Brits abroad for the first time, America was at once a wondrous land of untold exotica . . .

__GRAHAM NASH:__Those little white grease pencils, where you don’t sharpen them, but you pull a little string and they sharpen themselves—incredible!

WAYNE FONTANA: American diners were like top restaurants in London. Meat loaf, Boston cream pie, the steaks—incredible!

RAY PHILLIPS, NASHVILLE TEENS: This little Jewish girl, she always used to bring a hot casserole along to the dressing room in the Brooklyn Fox. It was stuffed peppers. Which I guess must be a Jewish thing.

. . . and a place that was, surprisingly, still very much in thrall to 1950s mores and tastes.

DAVE DAVIES: On our first tour, I was surprised how old-fashioned Americans were. Ray and I grew up listening to Big Bill Broonzy and Hank Williams and the Ventures, all these really cool people. So before I went, I was in awe of America, thinking, We’re gonna go places where all these great people are, and we’re gonna listen to the radio and hear all this great music! And they didn’t play anything on the radio that was any good; it was all that poppy, croonery, 50s kind of stuff. I expected to hear Leadbelly on the radio—no one knew who he was!

__ERIC BURDON:__We were put in a Christmas special called The Dangerous Christmas of Red Riding Hood, with Liza Minnelli as Little Red Riding Hood, Vic Damone as the romantic lead, and Cyril Richard as the Big Bad Wolf. We were his Wolfettes. We’d walk around with this bloody makeup on and tails, and we had to sing a song called “We’re Gonna How-How-Howl Tonight.”

ROD ARGENT, THE ZOMBIES: We did the Murray the K Christmas Show at the Brooklyn Fox. It was Ben E. King and the Drifters, the Shangri-Las, Patti LaBelle and the Blue Belles, Dick and Deedee, and another English band, Nashville Teens. Headlining the show was Chuck Jackson. We started at 8 o’clock in the morning and did six or eight shows a day, until about 11 o’clock in the evening. Each act did a couple of songs—our hit and one other song—and then we would have to go to the back of the stage and sort of dance, almost like a very naff chorus line.

But, for all the bands who were chagrined at having to go the cornball route, there were those who embraced the opportunity.

GERRY MARSDEN: On Hullabaloo, I think I was in a hairdresser’s chair, singing “I Like It” while surrounded by a bevy of beauties. I found it great—bloody hell, to be on television in America, I would have shown me bum to get on!

Chad and Jeremy, a harmony duo whose mellow, Kingston Trio-like sound on such hits as “A Summer Song” and “Willow Weep for Me” was as far away as could be from that of the Rolling Stones, were so Old Guard-friendly that they actually lived with Dean Martin for a short time.

JEREMY CLYDE: We were brought over to do the Hollywood Palace show as a sort of antidote to Ed Sullivan—“Well, he’s got the Beatles, so we’ll get Chad and Jeremy!” My parents knew Jeannie Martin, so we stayed with Dean and Jeannie and hung out with Dino, Deana, and Claudia. The house revolved around this great big wet bar.

Clyde was the Invasion’s one authentic English aristocrat, the grandson of the Duke of Wellington. Between his august lineage and his and Chad Stuart’s drama-school backgrounds, Hollywood could not keep its hands off the pair. They could sing; they could act; they had English accents; they had mop-top hair—they were TV-land’s official Invasion mascots.

JEREMY CLYDE: We were on Batman and Patty Duke and The Dick Van Dyke Show. On Dick Van Dyke, we played a British band, and Rob and Laura Petrie kept them in their house for three days—actually, not unlike Dean and Jeannie Martin. On Batman, we did a double episode. We played ourselves, Chad and Jeremy. Catwoman stole our voices—Julie Newmar, who was gorgeous. As I remember, because Catwoman had stolen our voices, the amount of tax that Chad and Jeremy were paying to the British Exchequer would then be lost, and Britain would collapse as a world power. It was a Beatle joke, obviously.

Like Chad and Jeremy, Freddie and the Dreamers were a clean-cut English group who, through the magic of American television and the sheer force of the Invasion, became much bigger in the U.S. than they were in their homeland. Freddie Garrity, a 26-year-old who’d shaved five years off his age to appear more youthquake-friendly, was an impish little fellow in Buddy Holly glasses whose trademark was a spasmodic leg-flailing dance that came to be known as the Freddie.

FREDDIE GARRITY: We were really just a cabaret act. The Freddie dance was just an old routine—it depicted a farmer in a field kicking his feet out in the mud.

Freddie and the Dreamers’ chart placings were already in decline in England when, in 1965, Brian Epstein, moonlighting as the host of Hullabaloo’s London segment, showed a clip of the group performing its 1963 U.K. hit “I’m Telling You Now.” The clip proved so popular that the group was invited to Los Angeles to perform live on Hullabaloo*.*

__FREDDIE GARRITY:__So we went on, did “I’m Telling You Now,” and the phones lit up. Policemen were doing the Freddie in the street. And the song shot to No. 1 in America . . .

. . . which it hadn’t done even in Britain. Freddie-mania took such hold in America that Garrity’s record company hastily put together a follow-up single called “Do the Freddie” for him to sing (it reached No. 18), and on Hullabaloo such luminaries as Chuck Berry, the Four Seasons, Trini Lopez, Frankie Avalon, and Annette Funicello joined Garrity in doing the dance. Freddie and the Dreamers also embarked on a U.S. tour with two fellow Manchester bands, Herman’s Hermits and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders.

__WAYNE FONTANA:__We had No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 on the chart throughout the tour. One week I was No. 1 with “Game of Love,” then Freddie and the Dreamers, then Herman. It was amazing, because we’d all grown up together.

Another young Englishman unwittingly caught up in the slipstream of the Invasion was Ian Whitcomb, a wellborn boy who, while attending Trinity College in Dublin, had started up a band called Bluesville and secured a modest recording contract with Tower, a small subsidiary of Capitol Records. At the end of a Dublin recording session in which he’d committed to tape a protest song called “No Tears for Johnny,” he and his band played a boogie-woogie joke song they’d made up in which Whitcomb panted like a phone pervert and sang, in falsetto, “C’mon now honey, you know you really turn me on.”

IAN WHITCOMB: I was brought across to New York in spring of ’65 by Tower Records. And, to my horror, the promotion man had a copy of the next release of mine, and it was called “Turn On Song.” I said, “You’re not gonna release this! It’s No Tears for Johnny’! I’m gonna be the next Dylan!”

“You Turn Me On (Turn On Song),” as it was officially billed by Tower, somehow made it all the way to No. 8 in the U.S.

IAN WHITCOMB: I was so embarrassed by this damn thing, because I thought I was a singer and rhythm-and-blues man. And here I was with this novelty hit, and I couldn’t stop this damn thing from going up the charts. It’s still an albatross around my neck. When I was on tour with Peter and Gordon in late ’65, Peter said, “You know, you’ve made one of the worst records that’s ever been. Just as pop is progressing, just as we’re getting into serious art with the Beatles and we’re trying to elevate rock into a serious art form, you come along with this rubbish.”

Conveniently, the British Invasion dovetailed with the sexual revolution, which made for plenty of post-show action for visiting English musicians.

__GORDON WALLER:__It was all too easy, frighteningly easy. I bumped into a woman a couple of years ago who still had a youthful figure and a great-looking face, and she said, “Are you Gordon?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “I’m Cathy. You took me to Vegas when I was 15.” I said, “Cathy, I think we’ll rephrase that. We were playing in Vegas, and you happened along.” She said, “Yes, happened along—in your bedroom.” These days, damn, you’d be banged up, wouldn’t you?

PETER NOONE: I thought I was in love with every girl, and I was gonna get married. I never, ever took advantage of anybody. I didn’t know that they were groupies. I thought, What a nice girl! She likes me!

__FREDDIE GARRITY:__It was difficult. I had a wife and a baby daughter. And all of a sudden you’ve got girls coming out of your ears! And, you know, I didn’t want to go deaf.

WAYNE FONTANA: Oh, Freddie was the worst! Even though he was the funny one that jumped around—oh, what a lech! The group joined in—they hired film cameras and everything, so they could set movie scenes up in bedrooms.

Among the most famous of the early rock groupies was Cynthia Albritton, a shy Chicago teen who, for reasons she barely understood, found herself suddenly impelled to storm the hotels where visiting British musicians were staying. In time, she would make a name for herself, literally, as the groupie who made plaster casts of rock stars’ erect penises—she became Cynthia Plaster Caster.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: I’d say the British Invasion made me what I am. It was the hysteria of Meet the Beatles that evolved into plaster-casting. When it happened, a lot of us were virgins. We would climb fire escapes—like 15, 20 stories—to get to the rock ’n’ roll floor, because the hotel security guards just didn’t allow girls in. They didn’t think it was proper.

PETER ASHER: The funny part was, a lot of the girls were really young. They’d be trying to sneak into the hotel room, but they would have no idea what to do if they got there. They would be horrified if you really said, “Well, O.K. now—take ’em off!”

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: I didn’t know what my goal was. I didn’t even know why I was drawn there. The guys were like magnets, and I didn’t know what I wanted at first. ’Cause I’d only made out with a boy or two before that.

In time, though, Cynthia and her friends embraced overt naughtiness.

__CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER:__We discovered along the way this Cockney rhyming slang that only British bands seemed to know. So we learned all the dirty words that we could find out. Such as “Hampton wick,” which rhymes with “dick,” and “charva,” which meant “@#$%&.” I’m guessing it rhymed with “larva.” Maybe larva’s a sexual term, I don’t know—they didn’t go as far as telling me what it rhymes with. But it was a very popular word; we made a lot of contacts from that word. We actually wrote a note to somebody saying that we were the Charva Chapter of the Barclays bankers. And “Barclays Bank” rhymes with “wank”: “Would you like to make a deposit? Would you like to make a nightly deposit? We have nightly banking hours”—that was it. This was for somebody in Gerry and the Pacemakers. And we didn’t even know what a wank was. We were still virgins.

The end result was that two days later I got a long-distance phone call from the guy. And it transpired into him finding out very quickly that I didn’t know what the @#$%& I was talking about.

The plaster-casting idea arose from Cynthia’s and her friends’ desire, having given the matter some consideration, to lose their virginity to British pop stars. Nervous about how to break the ice, Cynthia and company decided that asking musicians to submit to having their members coated in a viscous molding agent was the way to go.

__ERIC BURDON:__I was fascinated by the whole thing. They had a team, and one of them was a real expert at fellatio, and she was beautiful. They came with a wooden box and showed us all the equipment and everything.

The problem was that, initially, Cynthia was not well schooled in the art of molding.

__CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER:__There was, like, a two-year period where we were dragging the [casting-equipment] suitcase around, not really knowing how to do it, just wanting to try it out, using it as shtick to get to the hotel rooms. We’d tell people, “We need someone to experiment on. Would you like to help us experiment?” We’d get the pants down, and then, ultimately, they would put the make on us, and voilà—sex would happen. I think we encountered Eric Burdon during that time period. We were on an airplane with him, and we were gonna try aluminum foil, wrap it around his dick. That proved not to work.

ERIC BURDON: It was on a tour plane, and the engines were already running. And they had me in the bathroom, and everybody was yelling, “C’mon—we gotta leave!” And the plane was rocking backwards and forwards. They got as far as getting the plaster on. It wasn’t very comfortable, you know. I’m a romantic character—I have to have candles, music, and a bottle of wine.

The British Invasion also ushered in a new kind of sex symbol—not the Brylcreemed, conventionally handsome pop idol of yore, but the skinny, spotty, often myopic, often dentally deficient Englishman whose magnetism derived from his Englishness and status as a musician.

CYNTHIA PLASTER CASTER: Peter Asher was so cute. Him and that guy from Herman’s Hermits, Lek? [Derek “Lek” Leckenby, the group’s bassist.] They wore those Peter Sellers glasses. I thought that was really hot.

PETER ASHER: I had pretty substantially crossed teeth. I think the cliché of the glasses and the bad teeth—I know that I contributed something to Austin Powers’s reality. People have said to me, “It must have been you who inspired Mike Myers.” And while he won’t say that, he did say, in the one conversation we had, that he knew all about Peter and Gordon. Unfortunately, I was never that shagadelic.

For all the fun that touring America entailed, there were some rocky moments for the invaders. Some were merely tempests in a teapot . . .

__JEREMY CLYDE:__It was difficult when you were working with American musicians, ’cause they were resentful. Len Barry, who we toured with, had a hit called “1-2-3,” and he had quite a chip on his shoulder—“English musicians don’t have the chops,” all this kind of stuff. And Paul Revere and the Raiders were there to bring American music back to America.

__MARK LINDSAY, PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS:__Actually, Derek Taylor, who was the Beatles’ publicist, split from them kind of early on and came to America, and we were one of his first clients, and he said, “This is a publicist’s dream—the Americans stem the tide for the second time!” There was never any animosity or real competition. As far as the Brits, I was going, “Yeah, more power to ’em!”

. . . while others were more serious.

JIM MCCARTY, THE YARDBIRDS: Giorgio Gomelsky, our first manager, was a big guy with a beard who looked like Fidel Castro. And when we first came to America, there was still a lot of Communist paranoia going on, you know? And, of course, lots of people used to think he was Fidel Castro, and that all of us, with our long hair, were dropouts following him around. So we’d get people threatening to throw us out of town and beat us up.

DAVE DAVIES: I said “@#$%&” on the radio in Boston once. The D.J. was talking like the Beatles, so I called him a @#$%& on the air. They closed the radio station down and dragged me out of the building.

ERIC BURDON: America was hotter than I expected it to be and colder than I ever imagined it would be, weatherwise and culturally. I went to the Stax Studio in Memphis one day and watched Sam and Dave cut “Hold On! I’m a Comin’,” and the next night, in the limousines on the way to the gig, we ran into the Ku Klux Klan on the streets. So one minute you were like, “This is the new South! This is the new dream!,” and then the next minute the old world would just come and slap you upside the head.

Burdon did discover, serendipitously, that his affinity for black America had a secondary benefit.

__ERIC BURDON:__I wanted to hear black music. Anywhere I went, I asked, “How do I get across the tracks? How do I get to Browntown?” And I found out that all you had to do to get away from the screaming girls was drive across the tracks. They would follow us up to Harlem—flying wedges of cars, teenagers hanging out of cars—and as soon as we crossed 110th Street, they would peel off and fall back, and then I’d be alone.

There were fewer high jinks and groupie problems for the women of the British Invasion, a stylistically disparate group—the soulful Dusty Springfield (“Wishin’ and Hopin’”) and Cilla Black; the poppier Petula Clark (“Downtown”) and Lulu (“To Sir with Love”); and the enigmatic Marianne Faithfull (“As Tears Go By”)—whose one common trait was that they were all solo artists who couldn’t seek solace in the camaraderie of a group.

__CILLA BLACK:__It was all right for the guys in any of the bands, because they all had each other. But I’d lost my grandmother while I was over in New York, and it really hit me badly. I was just too homesick, and I wanted to come home. Which I totally regret now.

More sure of herself was Petula Clark, who, at the time of her first U.S. smash, the winter ’65 No. 1 “Downtown,” was a trouper already in her third show-business incarnation—as a child she’d been an actress, England’s answer to Shirley Temple, and as a young woman she’d married a Frenchman, relocated to Paris, and had a second career as a French-singing chanteuse.

PETULA CLARK: The first show I did live was The Ed Sullivan Show. I got there on the day of the show, which was unheard of. But I had a show in Paris on Saturday night, so I got there on Sunday just in time for the dress rehearsal, which was in front of a live audience. I was totally jet-lagged, no makeup, just enough time to throw on my funny little black dress, and they were playing my music—too fast, actually. I walked out onstage, my first time in front of an American audience, and before I’d sung a note, they stood up and cheered. It was extraordinary—that was the moment that I realized what this British Invasion really meant. And then I remember waking up in the hotel and hearing “Downtown,” thinking, Am I dreaming this? It was the St. Patrick’s Day Parade going up Fifth Avenue—the marching band was playing it.

The most beguiling of the Invasion gals was Marianne Faithfull, an aristocratic beauty who was just 17 when Andrew Loog Oldham discovered her at a London party in March of 1964, pronouncing her “an angel with big tits.” By Christmastime of that year, her single “As Tears Go By” had become the first original Mick JaggerKeith Richards composition to crack the American Top 40. Though she was at the epicenter of the Swinging London scene—friends with Paul McCartney and Peter Asher, a visitor to Bob Dylan’s Savoy Hotel suite as chronicled in D. A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary, Don’t Look Back, affianced to bookstore and gallery owner John Dunbar—Faithfull was reluctant to plunge headlong into America to capitalize on her success. She had her reasons.

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: I was pregnant. So I got married to John Dunbar and had my baby. But, also, I was so young, I couldn’t quite get my head ’round going away to America for a long tour. A very sheltered little girl I was—I honestly did think I would be eaten alive in America. I also knew about the Buddy Holly thing and the Big Bopper and all that stuff. So I couldn’t imagine touring America, and maybe I was right. I did do Shindig!, and it was very weird. I was really beautiful, right? And they covered me in makeup, and put false eyelashes on me, and made me look like a tart—a @#$%& dolly bird!

Still, Faithfull’s success augured the beginning of better times for the Rolling Stones. The group had secured its first U.S. Top 10 hit late in ’64 with yet another R&B cover, of Irma Thomas’s “Time Is on My Side,” but Oldham had already realized that for the Stones to compete they would have to start writing their own material. After a tentative start, Jagger and Richards, egged on by their manager, finally hit their stride in 1965.

__ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM:__That was a hell of a process for two people who basically thought I was mad, telling them that they could write. My stance, as I was not a musician, was based on the simplicity of “Hey—if you can @#$%&’ play music, you can write it.” And they did. “The Last Time” was the first time they got into the Top 10 [in May 1965] with a self-written song. And then the record after that was “Satisfaction” . . .

. . . which was a No. 1 in the summer of ’65, to be followed by “Get off of My Cloud,” to be followed by “19th Nervous Breakdown,” to be followed by “Paint It, Black,” and so on. The Rolling Stones were at last the Rolling Stones.

Another significant development of ’65 was the emergence of Invasion-inspired American bands. Back in ’64, the future members of the Byrds, all folkies, had bonded over their mutual love of the Beatles—a bold stance in the severe, smoky environs of hootenanny-land.

CHRIS HILLMAN, THE BYRDS: I was a bluegrass mandolin player before I was in the Byrds, and I’d cross paths with David Crosby and Jim McGuinn, as Roger was then known, at this folk club in L.A., the Troubadour. So one night I’m down there with my bluegrass group to play open-mike night, and Jim McGuinn gets up. His hair is a little funnier, it’s starting to grow out, and he’s doing “I Want to Hold Your Hand” on an acoustic 12-string! And I’m going, “What the hell is that?”

__ROGER MCGUINN:__I was working for Bobby Darin in New York, working in the Brill Building as a songwriter, and he was a mentor to me. He said, “You ought to get back into rock ’n’ roll,” because I was influenced by Elvis Presley originally. So I would go down to the Village and play these sort of souped-up folk songs with a Beatle beat. Then I got a gig at the Troubadour in California and did the same thing. Of course, it didn’t go over well—it was like Dylan at Newport. They were antagonistic, and I got the freeze, and they’d talk and talk over my set. Except [future Byrd] Gene Clark was in the audience and was a Beatles fan, and he liked what I was doing. So we decided to form a duo around that, and then Crosby came in a few days later.

__DAVID CROSBY:__Roger and I and Gene Clark all went to see [the Beatles’ 1964 movie] A Hard Day’s Night together. I was, like, spinning around the stop-sign poles, thinking I’d just seen my life’s work. We started growing our hair right away. We learned how to manipulate a dryer and a comb pretty quickly.

On the more plastique end of the Anglophilic spectrum was Gary Lewis, Jerry’s son, who was the drummer, singer, and leader of the beat combo Gary Lewis and the Playboys.

__GARY LEWIS:__Hearing the Beatles inspired me to get the drums out of storage and put a band together from college students. My father was very supportive. He said, “Son, you’re doing great. Just give it a hundred percent and don’t ever grow your hair like those damn Beatles.”

Soon enough, the Byrds were holding their own during the Invasion with their jingle-jangle No. 1s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” and Lewis was at No. 1 with the ersatz Merseybeat of “This Diamond Ring.”

The English bands weren’t offended by their American imitators—far from it. The Beatles and the Stones befriended the Byrds, while Peter Noone befriended Gary Lewis, toured with him, and found his Old Guard connections useful.

PETER NOONE: We were in Kansas City with Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and Gary says, “I’m gonna go up to see my dad’s friend, this guy who used to be president.” He meant Harry Truman, who was one of my heroes, just because he had big American balls. So I said, “Can I come with you?,” and off we went.

Meeting one’s heroes was a big part of the American experience for Invasion acts, and the biggest hero of all was Elvis Presley—who, though he’d been rendered passé by the Beatles and was then trapped in a grim career limbo of overbaked, sideburnless movie features, proved surprisingly sympathetic to English artists.

PETER NOONE: Elvis was absolutely charming. I had to interview him for the BBC or something. It was the most ridiculous interview, because I didn’t prepare: “When are you coming to England? How did you make it without long hair?” The dumbest questions! But he was charmed, because I was so respectful. And he looked @#$%& unbelievable! I mean, if you were a woman, you would come.

__ROD ARGENT, THE ZOMBIES:__When we were on tour, we got up one day and said, “Let’s go to Graceland.” And we just walked through the gate. There was no security. We walked up the drive; we knocked on the door. And the guy that I remember being Elvis’s father, Vernon—but some of the others remember it being his uncle—came to the door. And we said, like little boys, “We’re the Zombies from England! Is Elvis here?” And he said, “Well, no, Elvis isn’t here. But he’ll be really sorry to have missed you guys, because he loves you.” And we thought, He’s probably never heard of us and it’s bullshit, but it’s a very sweet thing for him to say. But I later found it out to be true.

Meeting one’s black heroes, however, was more fraught with difficulties, especially given the British artists’ obvious debt to American R&B. For Dusty Springfield, the prospect was downright nervous-making, as her best friend, Vicki Wickham, remembers.

__VICKI WICKHAM:__When Dusty came over to America, there was a certain sense of “Oh, shit—what if I meet Baby Washington, whose song I’ve covered?” ’Cause she always thought the original was better than hers. She met Maxine Brown, who she’d also covered. She wouldn’t deal with it well, unfortunately. She’d shuffle a bit and then run away instead of having a conversation. And they, obviously, were in awe of her, because as far as they were concerned, she was the best English singer.

ERIC BURDON: The agent would say, “Well, boys, I got you on a Chuck Berry tour in the U.S. And guess what? You’re the @#$%&’ headliners.” What? We were headlining above these guys who I’d worshiped since I was 14. Chuck was really nice to me. I’ve heard a lot about how nasty Chuck can be, and how difficult he can be to work with, but I showed some interest in his feelings, knew all his records, and told him that I thought he was America’s poet laureate. He was embarrassed, I think, but he was kind enough to take me to dinner, sit me down, and say, “Look—stay away from booze and drugs, you know, and keep your money in your sock.”

With Little Richard, though, there was a huge fight backstage at the Paramount Theater in New York between the manager of the Paramount and our publicist. Little Richard’s set kept going overtime, and they were going to slap him with a $10,000 fine, and he was just going off: “I am Little Richard, I am the king!”—emulating Cassius Clay. And there was this little black kid running around, toweling him down and trying to get him to cool down. And that turned out to be Jimi Hendrix.

Resolutely unimpressed by the Brit parade was Bob Dylan, who, though gracious enough a host to introduce both the Beatles and Marianne Faithfull to marijuana when they visited New York, was otherwise disdainful.

__MARIANNE FAITHFULL:__I don’t think Bob’s ever thought much of the British Invasion. What I do know is how he treated people in London, all those who came to worship at the shrine. He felt that he was much, much, much, highly superior. I think he was really irritated that I wouldn’t run away with him to America, or whatever it was he wanted. And then I went off with bloody Mick Jagger! I can see what he means, quite frankly.

By 196667, there was a palpable shift under way in music, from pop to rock. The vestigial flourishes of 50s showbiz began to fall away, endangering the more clean-cut Invasion acts like Freddie and the Dreamers, Gerry and the Pacemakers, and Chad and Jeremy.

JEREMY CLYDE: For us, I think it lasted about two years, ’64 to ’66, and then the girls stopped screaming. And we wanted them to stop screaming, because it was annoying, actually. Chad and I tried all kinds of things. We did a two-man show and took it ’round colleges—bits of drama, mime, and songs, very mixed-media. And then people started to re-invent popular music, and it all became very serious and, in quite a lot of cases, certainly ours, pretentious.

This should have been the moment for the Yardbirds, who, with their instrumental virtuosity and futuristic original compositions such as “Shapes of Things” and “Over Under Sideways Down,” were poised for greatness. But they proved too volatile to last, as Simon Napier-Bell, who took over their management from Giorgio Gomelsky, found out.

__SIMON NAPIER-BELL:__The Yardbirds were a miserable bunch. They were always arguing, bickering, and they weren’t fun.

Before the group’s 1966 U.S. tour, Paul Samwell-Smith, their bassist and driving musical force, quit. Jeff Beck recommended that they draft in his guitarist friend Jimmy Page on bass.

SIMON NAPIER-BELL: After three days, Jimmy said, “I think I should play guitar.” And then [rhythm-guitarist] Chris Dreja had to play bass. It was sensational, but, of course, Jeff no longer was getting 100 percent of the credit for his own solos, ’cause he was playing them with Jimmy, and Jimmy wasn’t getting any credit, ’cause everybody knew they were Jeff’s solos. So both of them were pretty dissatisfied. You could see it was just gonna get sourer and sourer, and on the American tour Jeff just walked out.

JIM MCCARTY: There was a bit of competition going on, ’cause they’d follow each other playing solos, and try and outdo each other, and maybe play at the same time. Sometimes it sounded good, but not very often. But I think Jeff just got stressed out. We were on this dreadful Dick Clark Caravan of Stars tour, and it was the totally wrong sort of thing for us—Gary Lewis and the Playboys, Sam the Sham, Brian Hyland, all these really straight American acts. We’d play in some of these little southern towns, and they’d shout, “Turn the guitars down, you’re too loud!” Jeff just blew his top, smashed his guitar up in the dressing room, and disappeared.

Another band to break on the later end of the Invasion, in 1967, was the Spencer Davis Group, whose Top 10 hits “Gimme Some Lovin’” and “I’m a Man” featured the uncannily blacksounding vocals of Steve Winwood, a white, 17-year-old Birmingham boy. The group, named after its founder-guitarist, had actually been knocking around for a while, with two U.K. No. 1s already to its credit.

__SPENCER DAVIS:__We had a kind of cult status in America, with the young Winwood prodigy, Little Stevie—a name he hated with a passion. In respect to why we were late in having hits, we weren’t really a pop group. A lot of groups—Manfred Mann, Stones, Animals—weren’t pop, but went pop for a minute to have a hit and then went back to what they were doing. For us, the hits came when there was a better climate for rhythm and blues.

The only trouble was that the Spencer Davis Group, like the Yardbirds, couldn’t keep its hit-making lineup together.

__SPENCER DAVIS:__We didn’t quite invade as a complete unit. When we recorded “Gimme Some Lovin’,” the band was already splitting. Steve was going into Traffic with Dave Mason. We ended up going to New York in 1967 with a new singer, Eddie Hardin. Elton John had shown up as Reggie Dwight for the audition, wearing a milkman’s outfit, and we didn’t think that was cool.

A lot of the Invasion groups were beginning to splinter or close up shop, either outpaced by musical currents or eager to try new styles with new colleagues. Eric Burdon organized a new lineup of the Animals. The Jeff Beck less Yardbirds carried on briefly before packing it in, prompting their remaining guitarist to form the New Yardbirds, soon to be known as Led Zeppelin. The increasingly psychedelicized Graham Nash was growing disenchanted with the Hollies and more interested in hanging out with his friends David Crosby from the Byrds and Stephen Stills from Buffalo Springfield.

__GRAHAM NASH:__I realized that I was drifting far away from the Hollies. And then, when they didn’t want to do “Marrakesh Express” or “Teach Your Children,” I said, “I’m done.”

__GORDON WALLER:__The whole thing had been drained dry. The people who were left had run out of things to say musically, except for the Beatles and the Stones. And there were other people coming along, the Elton Johns of the world, the Who.

For London’s the Who, the tail end of the Invasion was just the beginning. In 1965 and ’66, they were already a massive success in England with their mod anthems “I Can’t Explain,” “My Generation,” and “The Kids Are Alright.” Their single “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere” had been adopted as Ready Steady Go!’s theme song, and their volcanic live act was thought to be the U.K.’s greatest. But they didn’t make so much as a dent in the American charts. Part of the reason for this was that their managers, Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp, were film producers making their first foray into the music business.

__CHRIS STAMP:__We signed in America with a company called Decca, which we thought was the same as the English Decca, which was the second-biggest label in England. In fact, American Decca was utterly unrelated, an old-fashioned label that released Bing Crosby, “White Christmas” sort of stuff. They were Sinatra guys—they didn’t know rock ’n’ roll, didn’t even like it. Well, there was a natural outbreak of Who fans somewhere in Michigan with “I Can’t Explain,” and the next record was “Anyway Anyhow Anywhere.” And this company, Decca, sent it back to me, because they thought there was something wrong with the tape, because of the sounds the Who were making. We think of those songs now as pop, but, you know, they weren’t Herman’s Hermits. “My Generation” had stutters in it; it had feedback.

Lambert and Stamp were desperate to break the Who in America, no matter what it took.

VICKI WICKHAM: Kit was a total eccentric, very upperclass, very upper-crust. And we didn’t know till afterwards that he was selling the family silver, pawning the cuff links his dad had given him, to bankroll the Who. ’Cause they had no money.

Stamp, who was in charge of the Who’s American campaign, caught a break when his brother, the quintessential Swinging London actor Terence Stamp, was going off to the U.S. on a promotional junket.

__CHRIS STAMP:__The first time I got over to New York, I got over because my brother had a premiere of a film called The Collector, and he was coming over to do Johnny Carson and promote the film. He exchanged his studio first-class ticket for two economyclass tickets, and I came over with him and stayed in his hotel for three days while he was doing all this stuff.

Stamp managed to make the acquaintance of promoter Frank Barsalona, whose firm, Premier Talent, had developed a reputation as the best of the booking agents for British groups. One of Barsalona’s star clients at the time, Mitch Ryder, was from Detroit, the one place where the Who had an American fan base. Ryder, an early champion of the Who, had gotten his big break in 1965 playing one of Murray the K’s 10-day multi-act shows, and in gratitude had promised to come back whenever Murray Kaufman beckoned.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__Well, of course, a year and a half later, Mitch was really happening, and Murray, of course, wanted him to headline his Easter show. And Mitch called me and said, “Frank, that’s 10 days, five shows a day. I can’t do that.”

Barsalona, in an effort to extricate Ryder from this situation, tried to sour Kaufman on Ryder by making a series of absurd demands, such as having Ryder’s dressing room done up entirely in blue, from the walls to the carpet to the curtains.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__Murray kept saying yes to everything. So then the last thing I said was “Look, Mitch has this thing about this British act called the Who, and he would like them on the show.” Murray said, “They don’t mean anything.” I said, “Murray, that’s what I’m saying. So why don’t we forget about Mitch?” “I’m not going to forget about Mitch!” I said, “Well, then you have to put the Who up in the show.”

In such a fashion did the Who secure its first American engagement, as a support act, along with Eric Clapton’s new group, Cream, in Murray the K’s 1967 Easter show at the RKO 58th Street Theater in New York.

__FRANK BARSALONA:__I had never seen the Who live, and I thought, Oh my God, I’m going to screw myself over! I went to the dress rehearsal with my wife, June, and I said, “You know, June, they’re not bad at all.” And then Pete Townshend starts smashing his guitar to pieces, and Roger Daltrey is destroying the microphone, and Keith Moon is kicking over the drums. I said, “June, do you think this is part of the act?”

__CHRIS STAMP:__Murray the K was still doing these old-fashioned shows in Brooklyn where the act came on, sang their hit, and walked off. So we had to compromise—we stretched it out, I think, to about four songs. The Who would come on; do, like, “I Can’t Explain” and some other song; and finish up with “My Generation” and smash their equipment. Normally, the smashing came about of its own volition—it wasn’t meant to be a showbiz thing. But in the Murray the K thing, it tended to be slightly that. Although Pete was just as angry, I suppose, about having to do only four songs.

Naturally, the Who stole the show, and their reputation grew to the point that by June of ’67 they were one of the major attractions of the Monterey Pop Festival in California, a three-day event that effectively brought down the curtain on chirpy, well-groomed, besuited 60s pop—and, therefore, the phenomenon known as the British Invasion. At Monterey, hair was longer, “Monterey Purple” acid was being taken, and such ascendant, hirsute San Francisco bands as the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company were the stars. Eric Burdon played with his hippiefied new Animals, and Burdon’s friend Jimi Hendrix made his first major U.S. appearance, bringing down the house by setting fire to his guitar during his version of the Troggs’ late-Invasion hit “Wild Thing.”

ERIC BURDON: Monterey was probably the most important three or four days of my life. It was the apex of what was happening. I’d known Jimi from London, and we traveled across together with Brian Jones. And I saw him cut loose in America—it was his first opportunity to be Jimi Hendrix in front of an American audience.

Though many Invasion acts moved in the late 60s and 70s to distance themselves from their scrubbed Shindig! images, most have since come around to accepting their identification with those days.

__GRAHAM NASH:__You can’t change anything that’s already happened. And so you have to embrace it and say, “You know, the Hollies weren’t too bad.” Would I have done it differently, knowing what I know? Possibly. But I choose to look back at it with fondness rather than look back at it and say, “Boy, was I @#$%&.”

PAUL JONES: I find that, as time goes on, I’m just more and more associated with the 60s. I’m not getting further into the future; I’m getting further into the past. And I just think, Oh, man, accept it and just don’t worry. You know, I could have gone on to design motorcars, and I might have had some success; in the end, people would have said, “It’s old Paul Do Wah Diddy’ Jones.” You can’t get away from it.

DAVE DAVIES: On my new album, Bug, there’s a song called “It Ain’t Over, ’Til It’s Done!” which is about the 60s. It’s saying, Maybe it’s not all finished yet. Maybe, rather than it always being a retro thing, all us crazy guys from the 60s are alive and well for a reason, and there’s still something we’ve yet to say.

And while the actual value of the Invasion’s music remains a subject of debate . . .

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: I was a great friend of [the American arranger and producer] Jack Nitzsche, and from Jack I got a different perspective on the British Invasion—that American music was on the verge of changing into something incredible. They were all working away—him, Phil Spector, the Four Seasons, Brian Wilson. And the visions they had, what they were trying to do with American music, were completely @#$%& up by the British Invasion. Jack never really got that vicious about the Beatles and the Stones, but in the wake of those bands that were actually good—real musicians with some kind of vision—came all this other crap like Herman’s Hermits, the Dave Clark Five, et cetera. And I actually agree with him.

. . . its social impact was indubitably huge.

__PETER NOONE:__The bit that people are missing about the British Invasion is that it really was a much bigger deal than people think it was. Even though the newspapers keep going, “Twiggy!,” “Bobbies on Bicycles!,” and all that. Because, before it, England was this quaint little country. It wasn’t considered a haven of brilliant musicians. Can you imagine what it’s done for the British economy? That all these songwriters are bringing all this money back into the economy? Britain is a new place—a new place.

__DAVE CLARK:__When Britain started to do all this stuff, have all these bands, the gap between the countries was so great.In London you’d see these bombed-out blocks of flats, and there were restrictions and rations, and you didn’t always have the luxury of indoor plumbing.In America, we saw the possibilities.I’m still grateful to America—it really is beautiful. “America the Beautiful” is my favorite American song. It really should be your national anthem.

[www.vanityfair.com]

Marianne Faithfull comes across as pretty arrogant and full of herself in this article. Not a surprise though...

Keith Richards from the Unzipped book

Deuce And A Quarter


Scotty and Keith Richards at Levon Helm's studio in NY
Photo© courtesy Jim Herrington

On Tuesday, July 9, 1996 during the recording sessions of "All the King's Men" Scotty and D.J. went to Woodstock, NY to record "Deuce and a Quarter" with Keith Richards and "The Band" at Levon Helm's studio there. The song "Deuce and a Quarter", written by Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon was performed as a duet between Keith Richards and Levon Helm, and is backed up by Rick Danko (harmony, bass), Scotty Moore (guitar), Jim Weider (guitar), D.J. Fontana (drums), Stan Lynch (drums), Richard Bell (keyboards), and Garth Hudson (organ). The evening got hotter an all-night jam session resulted.


Scotty Moore, one of the chief architects of rock n’ roll. I only met him once, after he, Keith Richards, Levon Helm, and others cut a song I wrote with Gwil Owen called Deuce and a Quarter, in the summer of 1996, and released on “All the King’s Men” on Sweetfish Records in 1997.

Also on hand were Graham Parker, Marshall Crenshaw, and Rock 'n' Roll Trio guitarist Paul Burlison. The jam session was still going strong at 4 a.m. They tore through cover after cover, including a hair-raising version of "Willie and the Hand Jive" that found Richards playing a floor tom while Fontana and Helm dueled on their kits.


Scotty, Paul Burlison, Jim Weider and Keith

Keith Richards brought his 82-year-old father Bert to meet Scotty. He wanted to meet the man that made Keith want to play guitar.



In total, Scotty and D.J. spent three days in Woodstock

"It was way out in the woods in a beautiful, huge log studio. Keith Richards came in and did the vocals with Levon. Again, a big party, but we did get a good cut out of it."



Scotty Moore



Keith Richards may have said it best: "Everyone wanted to be Elvis, I wanted to be Scottie Moore". Scottie Moore, the lead guitarist for Elvis Presley on so many of his biggest songs, inspired the next generation of guitarist in the rock & roll world including Keith Richards, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Eric Clapton, Bruce Springsteen, Brian Setzer, Alvin Lee, Jeff Beck, Ron Wood & Mark Knopfler, to name a few.



Scotty Moore was born December 31st, 1931 in Gadsden, Tennessee. Moore began playing guitar as a child, influenced by country music as well as jazz. One of Moore's biggest influences was Chet Atkins. Moore served in the US Navy from 1948 to 1952, came home & began a legendary music career.


Moore & his band the Starlight Wrangler, got to audition for Sam Phillips at Sun Records. It was Phillips who knew that Moore's guitar playing, Bill Blacks double bass-slapping style, was going to be perfect behind a young Elvis Presley. Elvis had recorded a song at the studio a year earlier for his mother & Phillip's secretary Marion Keisker had kept a demo. She asked a young Elvis- What kind of singer are you?" He said, "I sing all kinds." I said, "Who do you sound like?" He said, "I don't sound like nobody." She called him back a year later & Phillips put the band together.

On a classic night in 1954 at Sun Studios, the band had what seemed like an unproductive rehearsal.

Quotes: Moore recalled, "All of a sudden, Elvis just started singing this song, jumping around and acting the fool, and then Bill picked up his bass, and he started acting the fool, too, and I started playing with them. Sam, had the door to the control booth open ... he stuck his head out and said, 'What are you doing?' And we said, 'We don't know.' 'Well, back up,' he said, 'try to find a place to start, and do it again.'"

Drummer D.J. Fontana was added in October of 1954 & would be a part of Elvis's band for the next 16 years. The boys officially formed the group "The Blue Moon Boys". This would be the classic Elvis lineup, who made all the ground breaking television appearances & legendary recordings that put rock & roll on the map.


The group would appear together until Elvis went to the Army in 1958, returned in 1960 & stayed together for the 1968 Elvis Comeback Special, although Bill Black had passed away in 1965. The '68 Comeback Special was a huge success & is looked back at as the first to have that unplugged type of format. This was the last time the band played together & it was the last time Scotty Moore saw Elvis.

Moore can be heard on songs: Jailhouse Rock/ Hound Dog/ All Shook Up/ Blue Suede Shoes/ Heartbreak Hotel/ Dont Be Cruel/ That's All Right/ Are You Lonesome Tonight/ Good Rockin Tonight /Blue Moon of Kentucky/ Milk Cow Blues / Hard Headed Woman/ Baby Lets Play House/ Mystery Train & others. He also appeared in the Elvis Movies: Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole & G.I. Blues from 1957-1960.

Moore was famous for playing a Gibson Super 400, known as "the guitar that changed the world" it is called the largest, fanciest-adorned, highest-priced factory-built archtop / hollow body guitar ever. One of the key pieces of equipment in Moore's sound was the use of the Ray Butts Echo sonic, first used by Chet Atkins.

This is a guitar amplifier with a tape echo built-in, which allowed him to take his trademark slapback echo on the road. Moore said he took his style from every guitar player he ever heard, with Elvis he played around him never trying to top over him. The idea was to play something that wet the other way- a counterpoint.



During those days, Moore & Presley were good friends with Moore feeling like an older brother to the younger Presley. He was the Elvis' first manager before Colonel Tom Parker took over.

For a time Moore supervised operations at Sun Studios as well. Moore would work with his friend Carl Perkins, as well as Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Jeff Beck, Paul McCartney, & Levon Helm.

In 1970 he even engineered the Ringo Starr album Beaucoup of Blues, as well as collaborating with many other artists through the years. He was once ranked the 29th best Guitarist of all time.

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Duce and a Quater
by Kevin Gordon



Duce and a Quater was one of four songs that Gwil and I had written. Dan Griffin called me and asked if we had any new songs; I told him that we had four, but that they were all so weird that I would likely be the only person to record them. He asked for a demo of them anyway, and explained what he was working on, the project that became the “All the King’s Men” record. So, with a beat-to-hell Shure SM-58 (at that time, the only mic I owned), plugged into an old Boss analog delay guitar effects pedal (that I’d bought from Bo Ramsey circa 1989), into a cassette deck, I set about making demos of those songs, just vocal and acoustic guitar. I sent it on, not thinking much of it, since these kinds of possibilities are like lottery tickets with even worse odds.

Much to my surprise (mixed with a little horror, because of the lo-fi quality of the demo I’d sent), about a week later I got another call from Dan, saying he’d been riding around Manhattan in a limo with Keith Richards listening to my demo and that Keith, along with Levon Helm, Scotty and D.J. were going to cut “Deuce”. Having then lived in Music (Business) City for long enough to know not to put much hope into a “gonna-happen” like this until you had the record in your hands and played it and found that your song was indeed on it, Gwil and I were mildly excited, but knew better than to take it as a sure thing. The session itself was still about a month away, and, considering some of the personalities/habits of the folks in question, well . . . anything could happen.

I think it was early July—my wife and I were at the in-laws’ place in Okoboji, Iowa. I can’t remember who called whom, but Gwil told me that he’d gotten a very late night call from a mutual friend, photographer extraordinaire Jim Herrington, who had been hired to shoot photos of a recording session at Levon’s barn near Woodstock, NY, a session in which Keith Richards, Levon, Scotty Moore, D.J. Fontana, and others (mostly members of The Band) were on—they had recorded “Deuce” that day. Jim didn’t know the song was ours until the subject came up that night while a rough mix was being put together. So it was through Jim’s phone call to Gwil that we found out that the session had actually happened.



From my Journal, July 15, 1996 - Went over to Dan Griffin’s yesterday—heard the Deuce & a Quarter cut—great—at first seemed slow, but I think it’s o.k. now—just sounds like a wacked-out Chuck Berry track—Keith’s solo a little buried in the rough mix—clean tone, which I didn’t expect—vocal’s good though—they changed the phrasing on the turnaround, but that’s o.k. Keith sounds like he’s singing ‘green stains’ on the 2nd chorus—but who cares, it’s Keith Richards singing something we wrote!

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Flashback: Keith Richards, Elvis’ Sidemen and the Band Hit the Studio in 1996
“This was serious stuff,” Richards later said of the session that was so important to him, he brought his dad along.

By PATRICK DOYLE



Paul Natkin/Getty Images

One of the coolest gatherings in rock & roll history happened in July 1996. Over three days, Keith Richards, Elvis’ sidemen Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana – plus Levon Helm, Garth Hudson and Rick Danko of the Band – all got together at Helm’s Woodstock, New York barn studio to record a track. The occasion was All the Kings Men, an LP honoring Presley on the 20th anniversary of his death. But it was not a typical tribute album; Elvis’ original band members oversaw and played on it. It also included strong new material; the song Richards played on, “Deuce and a Quarter,” by Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon, was a completely fresh rockabilly classic.



For Richards, the day was forty years in the making. Moore’s playing on “Heartbreak Hotel” is the reason why he picked up the electric guitar in the first place. “Everyone wanted to be Elvis. I wanted to be Scotty,” he famously said. After Moore died in 2016, Richards recalled the magic of his guitar sounds: “There’s a little jazz in his playing, some great country licks and a grounding in the blues as well,” Richards told Rolling Stone. “It’s never been duplicated. I can’t copy it.”

SEE ALSO
That Time Johnny Depp and Keith Richards Went Nuts on Me
Rolling Stones Honor Charlie Watts, Power Through Their Hits at 2021 Tour


The session came together fast. Helm wrote in his book that Richards decided to come at the last minute, once he heard Moore and Fontana were there. “He filled up a car with his dad and some friends, came right over and we all had a hell of a good time,” Helm wrote, “full of spirit and a lot of laughing, playing and partying all night… For me, just having [drummer] D.J. Fontana play in my barn was a privilege. He still played that wide-open barrelhouse, stripper style of drums I saw him play behind Elvis back home in Arkansas more than 40 years earlier. I mean, you almost could see those girls dancing when he played.”


Keith Richards & Levon Helm, Woodstock, NY 1996 by Jim Herrington

In his 2010 memoir Life, Richards said he was nervous. “This was serious stuff. The Rolling Stones are one thing, but to hold your own with guys that turned you on is another. These cats are not necessarily very forgiving of other musicians. They expect the best and they’re going to have to get it – you really can’t go in there and flake.”



No one did. The song is full of swaggering interplay, especially between Helm and Richards, who trade verses. It wasn’t the only song they played. They jammed until 4 a.m., according to Moore’s website, tearing “through cover after cover, including a hair-raising version of ‘Willie and the Hand Jive’ that found Richards playing a floor tom while Fontana and Helm dueled on their kits.” See some incredible photos from that session here.



Guitarist Scotty Moore and drummer DJ Fontana are among the founding fathers of rock and roll. Key players on all the early hits of Elvis Presley, they helped to shape the Sun Records sound. In 1997, Moore and Fontana again teamed up to create the all-star album, “All the King’s Men,” which included collaborations with Cheap Trick, Jeff Beck, the Bodeans, and others.

Track One on the record is this cut, with Moore and Fontana joined by Rolling Stone Keith Richards, along with Rick Danko, Levon Helm, and Garth Hudson of The Band. And on this tune, led by Helm on vocals, the diverse crew sounds like they’ve been playing together their whole lives. Written by Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon, “Deuce and a Quarter,” of course, refers to the street slang for a Buick Electra 225. A car’s a car and that’s a fact; a deuce and a quarter ain’t a Cadillac.




[www.youtube.com]

[www.youtube.com]
"Unsung Heroes"


This is from the final session for the Grammy-nominated CD, "All the King's Men." Ron Wood and his then wife, Jo, hosted us and a film crew for four days of sheer bliss, music and quite a lot of imbibing - some more than others. This song was written on the spot from a lick Scotty was fooling around with that Jeff picked up on. Ronnie wrote the lyrics in 20 minutes and we were on our way to having a great closing track. I have interspersed photos from the Blue Moon Boys archives with session shots. All photographs are used for promotional purposes only! -
dan4456



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-11-02 01:47 by exilestones.

Scotty Moore and D.J.Fontana - All the King's Men
1997 - Sweetfish Records (Released in the UK on CD as Polydor 539 066 2)

Scotty Moore and D.J.Fontana, the original guitarist and drummer from Elvis Presley's Blue Moon Boys, are remembering their former boss on the twentieth anniversary year of his death with the release of All the King's Men. The CD includes appearances by some of the greatest names in Rock n' Roll: Jeff Beck, The Bill Black Combo, The BoDeans, Cheap Trick, Steve Earle, Joe Ely, Levon Helm, The Mavericks, The Jordanaires, Ronnie McDowell, Tracy Nelson, Keith Richards, Joe Louis Walker, Ron Wood.

Parts of this album was recorded with Moore, Fontana, The Band, and Keith Richards, in Levon Helm's Woodstock studio.

The song "Deuce and a Quarter" is performed as a duet between Keith Richards and Levon Helm, backed by The Band. A spirited country rocker that hangs on the coat-tails of rockabilly and contains the Memphis Sun sound. Aside from the great grrove, the most notable thing is how good Richards sounds with The Band.

The lineup for "Deuce and a Quarter" is Levon Helm (vocals), Keith Richards (vocals, guitar), Rick Danko (harmony, bass), Scotty Moore (guitar), Jim Weider (guitar), D.J. Fontana (drums), Stan Lynch (drums), Richard Bell (keyboards), and Garth Hudson (organ).

The album is also available as All The King's Men Chess Set, a box including an enhanced CD, tour shots of both Scotty & D.J., detailed chessmen, game board, and a sheet of Scotty & D.J.'s favorite chess tips.

Sidemen
The Band
Jeff Beck
The BoDeans
Cheap Trick
Steve Earle
Joe Ely
DJ Fontana
The Jordanaires
Stan Lynch
Tracy Nelson
The Mavericks
Ronnie McDowell
Scotty Moore
Keith Richards
Joe Louis Walker
Ron Wood

Unsung Heroes


Ron Wood, Eric Krohel and Scotty - Dec. 1996

In December of 1996 during the recording of the "All The King's Men", Scotty and D.J. went to Dublin to record the last track "Unsung Heroes" with Ron Wood, Jeff Beck and Ian Jennings. The following text is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the July 1997 issue of Guitar Player magazine which describes the session well. The pictures are from Scotty's collection but the article can also be viewed here on the site.


Scotty - Dec. 1996

"In early December, Moore and Fontana traveled to Ron Wood's Sandy Mount Studio outside Dublin, Ireland, to record the album's final track with Wood, Beck and bassist Ian Jennings. 'It feels really good to know these guys remember us,' says Scotty, relaxing on a barstool in Wood's private pub while Ron, Jeff and others watch a tape of Elvis and the boys in action. 'Makes you feel like what we did counts for something after all these years.'"




"Held in Ron Wood's converted sheep barn, the session for 'Unsung Heroes' unfolded like many of the early Elvis dates. Scotty settled into a chair in the center of the main room, plugging his late-80's Gibson Chet Atkins Country Gentleman into Boss delay and chorus pedals and a tweed Fender Twin. Beck, hearing him warming up, dashed from the control room and hurriedly unpacked his guitar while Ron got him a vintage Vox AC30. 'I'd planned to bring a large rig from London,' Beck smiled, 'but decided that ran counter to the spirit of the meeting.' Instead, he showed up with only a Strat Plus and a 10-foot chord. As D.J., Ron and Jennings joined in, Beck picked the melody of 'Blue Moon of Kentucky'. For nearly an hour, politeness prevented everyone from suggesting any specific direction, and, as on the first Elvis session, the players bogged down after jamming on a few standards. A break was called, during which Scotty began to play around with a funky lick that caught Ron's ear. 'What's that?' he asked. 'I dunno,' Scotty replied, 'just something I was fooling with a week or so ago.'



Scotty Moore & D J Fontana




'Well, that's it! Keep that going!' With that Ron grabbed a '54 Strat and started chunking rhythm and ad-libbing lyrics about meeting his two heroes. Beck suggested an occasional line between otherworldly bends and fills. Eventually, 'Unsung Heroes' became a song. 'This is incredible. It's just the way they used to do things-somebody gets an idea and they just go with it. The amazing thing to me-and Jeff was saying this too-is that Scotty and Bill came up with that original stuff completely out of the blue. They didn't have any real precedent to go on, and that's the very last time that happened in rock and roll. Everyone who came along after that had those guys to listen to. You take Jeff Beck-he and the Yardbirds were a big part of the British Invasion, and he'll tell you they were bouncing off what they'd heard from America. Then American bands bounced it back, and so on and so on. And the guy sitting right in there (points through the control room window to Scotty) started it all.'



Later, over pints of Guinness, Scotty and his host listen to a working mix of 'Unsung Heroes.' He and his contemporaries, Scotty says as Ron Wood's eyes begin to mist, have done their part. 'You guys have to carry the torch now-you and the younger guys. We did our thing.'" In the film, Keith Richards answers for his generation: “ Mr. Moore, Mr. Fontana, Mr. Black, the Hillbilly Cats—that’s the world’s greatest rock and roll band. Without them, there wouldn’t be any others. Give thanks, give praises.”





"When we were in Ireland doing the cut with Ron at his house, Mick Jagger called. He talked to Ron and then I got on the line and he said, 'I had a feeling something was going on over there. I didn't even know you guys were in the country. How come you didn't ask me?' And I said, 'Well, we thought we kind of pushed too heavy already by having Keith and Ron,' and Charlie was going to do a drum thing with D.J. but he had the flu. Then Mick said, 'Well if you do another one, I wanna be on it.' And every time we see him, he always asks about it.



We also made a few trips over to Europe and did some touring over there. We hooked up with the Stones in Hamburg in '98. They were playing at a racetrack and 95,000 people were there. Even the Stones were awed by the crowd. Keith said, 'God! At our age! Look at that crowd! What the hell are they here to see?' "


Jeff Beck, Scotty Moore and DJ Fontana from Elvis Presley’s original band and Ronnie Wood at Wood’s house in Ireland.
photos Jim Herrington





+++++++++



Backstage with The Rolling Stones in Memphis

1 Deuce And A Quarter
Featuring, Guest – Keith Richards, The Band

2 I Told You So
Featuring, Guest – The Mavericks

3 Locked Up In The State Of Illinois
Featuring, Guest – The Bodeans*

4 Goin Back To Memphis
Featuring, Guest – Bill Black Combo*

5 I'm Gonna Strangle You Shortly
Featuring, Guest – Joe Ely, Lee Rocker

6 Bad Little Girl
Featuring, Guest – Cheap Trick

7 Soulmates
Featuring, Guest – Ronnie McDowell, The Jordanaires
8 Hot Enough For You

Featuring, Guest – Lee Rocker, Steve Earle
9 Strange Love
Featuring, Guest – Joe Louis Walker

10 Is All Of This For Me?
Featuring, Guest – Tracy Nelson

11 Unsung Heroes
Featuring, Guest – Jeff Beck, Ron Wood










Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana do not appear credited on this edition and are only pictured in the inlay sleeve.


+++++++++

Blue Moonlighting
Making Film and Music History Simultaneously
by Jim Ridley
From Nashville Scene, August 1, 1996.


On Tuesday, July 9, 1996, at a small recording studio in upstate New York, a Nashville film crew was on hand as musical history was made. As video and audio tape rolled into the wee, wee hours, five decades of rock 'n' roll greats, including members of the Band, the Rolling Stones, the Rock 'n' Roll Trio, and Tom Petty's Heartbreakers, gathered at Band drummer Levon Helm's studio in Woodstock, N.Y., for an all-night jam session of epic proportions.

The occasion was the visit of two of rock 'n' roll's most influential players, Scotty Moore and D.J. Fontana, who are recording tracks for an upcoming album and accompanying documentary. As guitarist and drummer for Elvis Presley's 1950s backing band, the Blue Moon Boys, Moore and Fontana helped ignite a revolution in pop music that has never been quelled. Since 1968, when they reunited to back Elvis in his dramatic '68 comeback TV special, they've largely remained outside the spotlight, focusing on session work and side careers.

That will change next year with the release of a feature-length documentary on the Blue Moon Boys, which coincides with Moore and Fontana's new album and the publication of Moore's long-awaited autobiography. (It also coincides with the 20th anniversary of Elvis' death in 1977.) The album is being recorded in sessions around the country with an all-star guest list, which so far includes the Mavericks, Tracy Nelson, the Tractors, Cheap Trick, Joe Ely, the BoDeans, Chet Atkins, and the reformed Bill Black Combo--whose founder, the late bassist Bill Black, rounded out the Blue Moon Boys. The sessions are being filmed by Nashville director Thom Oliphant, who has followed Moore and Fontana on a sentimental journey through the Memphis, Louisiana, and Arkansas of rock 'n' roll's infancy.

"We wanted to tell the story from their point of view," says Dan Griffin, who is coproducing the documentary with Philip Cheney, a member (with Oliphant) of the local film-production group known as the Collective. "They're probably the only people in the Elvis world that haven't cashed in on it." The model for the documentary, he says, is Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's haunting 1989 portrait of the late jazz trumpeter Chet Baker.

Where the musical footage in that film was somber, however, the raucous atmosphere at Helm's Woodstock studio sounds anything but. Keith Richards, who has called Moore "the man who made me want to play," brought his 82-year-old father Bert. Helm brought longtime Bandmates Rick Danko and Garth Hudson, along with relative newcomers Jim Weider, Richard Bell, and Randy Cairlante. Former Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch produced. (Other tracks have been produced by D'Ville Records impresario Garry Tallent.) After laying down a guitar track with Moore, Richards swapped vocals with Helm on a sweltering number called "Deuce and a Quarter," which was penned by Nashvillians Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon.

The evening only got hotter, as Graham Parker, Marshall Crenshaw, and Rock 'n' Roll Trio guitarist Paul Burlison joined the group for a jam session that was still going strong at 4 a.m. The roomful of legends tore through cover after cover, including a hair-raising version of "Willie and the Hand Jive" that found Richards playing a floor tom while Fontana and Helm dueled on their kits. (The gifted Nashville photographer Jim Herrington, who has ably chronicled the Lower Broadway honky-tonk scene, was snapping pictures all the while.) In total, Moore and Fontana spent three days in Woodstock, thus giving the moviemakers 24 solid hours of High-8 studio footage. "It was the most incredible musical moment of my life," Griffin says.

The documentary promises other treats as well. Rare footage taken in 1969, during sessions for the album Mother Earth Country, shows Moore, Fontana, and Tracy Nelson performing in Moore's Nashville studio with the Jordanaires, Charlie McCoy, and Pete Drake. The footage was shot, intriguingly enough, by noted underground filmmaker Robert Frank, director of the often-bootlegged Rolling Stones documentary @#$%& Blues.

Griffin says the film has been in the works for nearly five years, but it gathered steam with the participation of Moore, who in the past had understandably shied away from the deluge of Elvis-related projects. "I've never seen Scotty happier," Griffin said after the Woodstock sessions. As dawn approached after hours of jamming, Moore was seen passing Burlison in the hall on the way to his room. "Paul, don't you steal any of my licks," joked Moore to the man whose fuzzbomb technique on "Train Kept A Rollin' " is considered a milestone in rock 'n' roll guitar. Burlison is said to have laughed. Watch for the documentary early in the fall of 1997 and the LP next spring.

[theband.hiof.no]


+++++++++

The Blue Moon Boys were a band formed by Elvis Presley, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black. The group members were introduced by Sun Studio owner Sam Phillips in 1954, except for D.J. Fontana, who joined the group during a Louisiana Hayride tour in 1955. The Blue Moon Boys were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in 2007. The band was named after Bill Monroe's song Blue Moon of Kentucky.

The Blue Moon Boys continued appearing on Presley's recordings as well as in movies like Loving You. The first live appearance of the band since Presley's army return was in 1960, during The Frank Sinatra Show's special Welcome Home Elvis. The band's last appearance was during the Elvis 1968 Comeback Special[14]—minus Bill Black, who had died in 1965.

Elvis Presley – lead vocals, rhythm guitar, piano, lead guitar, percussion, bass guitar (1954–1968; died 1977)
Scotty Moore – lead guitar, rhythm guitar, backing vocals (1954–1968; died 2016)
Bill Black – double bass, bass guitar, backing vocals (1954–1958; died 1965)
D. J. Fontana – drums, percussion, backing vocals (1955–1968; died 2018)



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-11-02 01:36 by exilestones.

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"Duce & a Quater" was written by Gwil Owen and Kevin Gordon. The urban dictionary says that “deuce and a quarter” refers to the Buick Electra 225, which is 225 inches long.

^^did this device have that 502 engine?

The great Shelley Lazar with fans at Osaka, Japan's Kyocera Dome for Paul McCartney's "Out There" tour in 2013.

Shelley Lazar, Founder of SLO Ticketing (and a Great Person)
By Michele Amabile Angermiller, Jem Aswad
Variety magazine


photo Kevin Mazur/WireImage


UPDATED: Shelley Lazar, founder of SLO Ticketing and a pioneer of premium ticketing and VIP programs for artists including the Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and The Who, died Sunday morning after a battle with cancer, a rep for her company confirmed. She was 69.


Shelley Lazar and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones at the HBO screening of the movie “Crossfire Hurricane” on Nov. 13, 2012.

Affectionately known as “The Ticket Queen” — or “MFTQ,” as she was dubbed by none other than Keith Richards — Vanity Fair called Lazar “the mastermind behind rock royalty’s all-access passes.” She worked her way through the ranks with New York concert promoter Ron Delsener, Madison Square Garden and Bill Graham Presents before striking out on her own in 2002 with the San-Francisco based SLO VIP Ticket Services. Her company was acquired by Ticketmaster in 2008, with Lazar remaining as chief executive.


Shelley Lazar and Tom Hanks during Barbra Streisand in Concert at the Staples Center
Photo by Kevin Mazur

Social media, particularly her Facebook page, is filled with loving tributes, including ones from Elton John and Paul McCartney. “Shelley Lazar was like no other,” Jimmy Fallon tweeted. “Really gonna miss her.”


Shelley and Paul McCartney

In 2014, at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, McCartney performed “San Francisco Bay Blues,” an early hit for the Weavers, and dedicated it to her. He speaks about her at length in the video included in the tweet below, saying “You want tickets for anything? Shelley’s the go-to,” then apologizes, realizing what he’d set her up for. She can be seen smiling and waving at the end of that video, and this one of McCartney performing the song.





“She was a one of a kind character and a tough as nails businesswoman,” reads a tweet from Ticketmaster parent company Live Nation. “Her passion, tenacity and love of music will be remembered by all of us.”


Shelley Lazar is surrounded by world music band Lakou Mizik in Berkeley, Calif., June 15, 2017


According to her biography, other artists and events for which Lazar managed VIP ticketing include Bob Dylan, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Madonna, Pink, Celine Dion, Paul Simon, the MTV Video Music Awards, the People’s Choice Awards, Barbra Streisand’s 2017 television special and even two Popes. She was also co-executive producer of the award-winning documentary, “Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars.”


Zach Niles, Shelley and Blue Lena
[blue_lena.tripod.com]

Lazar began working part-time in the music industry in the early 1970s, while still a public school teacher in New York City — future comedy and film star Chris Rock was one of her students. Early in her career she worked in several areas of the music business, starting with catering and moving up to booking, marketing and ultimately ticketing, managing the ticket office at Madison Square Garden and earning a reputation as “The Keeper of the List” at the Pier in New York for shows promoted by Ron Delsener.




She was active in several non-profit organizations, including the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, Human Rights Watch and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. She also melded her teaching and music-business backgrounds as a member of the Board of Directors of Little Kids Rock, a charity based in Verona, New Jersey charity encouraging children to play popular music by providing free music instructions and instruments to school districts across the country.



Shelley raised money with her annual Walk for MS with the 109 Bombers.
posted by Posted by Rolling Hansie



[www.loveyouliverollingstones.com]
image posted by Marilou Regan

A recent email exchange with SLO Tix summed up our feelings about Shelley best, "We all miss Shelley every day."

SLO is the pioneer in creating specialized packages that provide unique fan experiences to concerts and events around the world.
Visit [www.slotix.com]



Shelley, Narrie Marshall and Jenny Marshall







"Lazar is recognized for her considerable work and dedication to a number of causes
and non-profit organizations, including the Bill Graham Memorial Foundation, The
Taylor Family Foundation, Tipping Point Community, Human Rights Watch, Elton John
AIDS Foundation and she was the co-executive producer of the award-winning
documentary, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. Lazar is now a member of the Board of
Directors of Little Kids Rock…fulfilling her goal of integrating her education background
and her presence in the music industry by bringing music instruction and performance
to students everywhere."


Shelley, you will always be in our hearts!



A personal card sent to me by Shelley

ExileStones



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2021-11-07 11:08 by exilestones.

Pink Flamingos is the most disgusting movie ever made. Here’s Mick taking a look at the star of Pink Flamingos, Divine.

Divine and Mick Jagger attending Andy Warhol’s pre-opening party at Manhattan’s Copacabana nightclub, New York, October 14, 1976






10/16/1976-New York, NY-Bianca and Mick Jagger reunited at a table at Andy Warhol's pre-opening
party at the Copacabana nightclub here. Bianca got in from movie-making in London to make the party.






Mick Jagger and his wife Bianca arrive at the Andy Warhol-hosted
pre-opening party of the Copacabana nightclub.
Photo by Allan Tannenbaum

In pictures: Remembering when the Rolling Stones visited Sussex
by Olivia Marshall



The Rolling Stones concert at the Big Apple Club in Brighton

rom electric live performances to court appearances, the legendary band have been frequent visitors to Sussex throughout their extraordinary, 60-year career.

The Rolling Stones first performed in Brighton in 1964 when they took to the stage at the Hippodrome, alongside The Echoes and Kevin Scott and The Kinsmen.



In 1971, the Stones performed at the Big Apple Club, which was located above the former Regent Theatre in Queen’s Road.

Despite only being open for four months, the venue hosted artists such as Fleetwood Mac, Donovan and the Rolling Stones.

Photos taken backstage at their performance show Keith Richards tuning up his guitar and Bill Wyman relaxing before taking to the stage.



Charismatic frontman Mick Jagger gripped his microphone tightly in one hand as he delighted the gathered crowds.

Off stage, the band came to be just as well known for their late-night escapades as they were for their music.

One of the most infamous incidents happened in 1967 at Keith's Redlands property in West Wittering.

Mick and Keith were unexpectedly arrested for a minor drug offence when police descended on a party at the house.

Half a century later, Sir Mick told the same newspaper: “The Stones were good targets. We made good copy.

“It was the idea of degenerative moral standards. They (the establishment) were looking for scapegoats for some sort of generational lifestyle thing.”

Keith still lives in West Wittering and in a letter to The Argus, a resident of the village said the rockstar was “quickly taken into the hearts” of the people who lived there.

The guitarist, however, was not the only member of the band to settle in Sussex.



Charlie Watts lived in a picturesque house in Lewes in the early 1960s.

He lived there with his wife Shirley, who he remained married to until his death.

In archival television footage showing an interview with Charlie from the Sixties, the drummer can be seen in his country garden.

Shirley is also seen riding a horse outside the property.




++++1971++++

About Them Shoes

Recording With Hubert Sumlin and Keith Richards


The last cut on Hubert Sumlin’s record, “This Is the End, Little Girl,” was recorded at
Keith’s house in that same place with that same setup. It was only Keith, Hubert, and Paul Nowinski
– the bass player – on that. That was our setup from the previous night.


Paul, Hubert & Keith

Hubert had come over to have a meeting with Keith to discuss business. Afterwards, we went downstairs and the stuff was still set up from the night before. They just picked up instruments and started playing. This song just came out of nowhere. I just pushed the record button on the CD recorder. It never even went to any other medium; it just went straight to CD.

That’s how that song was recorded. There’s your relation with “You Win Again.” That was done in the exact same space in sort of the exact same way. Although with “You Win Again,” there are overdubs. It’s a very good story, the whole “You Win Again” thing.

Hubert was just gleeful. He was not a technical guy and didn’t think about recording. HeRob Fraboni, Hubert Sumlin, Keith Richards wouldn’t have related that back to Chess Records. To him it was like an old, friendly dog had come back to see him. He was feeling this feeling like he felt at Chess Records. He said something like, “Son, we got something here,” just something kind of calm. Keith and I looked at each other. Nobody really quite yet understood what we had.

Hubert’s record had been recorded at another studio in New Jersey. Keith got involved late in the game for whatever reason. I didn’t use a lot of microphones, but I didn’t do this technique because after the Wingless Angels, I had never tried this again.

Now I started to think about the Wingless Angels, of course. Not only Ron Malo, but the Wingless Angels came to mind. I looked at Keith, I said, “Hey, man. We’re actually now picking up where we left off.” He said, “Exactly. We are.” Because he’s so smart and astute about all this stuff and has a great ear.

When we went to cut Keith’s track for Hubert’s record, we went and did it out in New Jersey because we had made the rest of the record out there. The first thing that we did was set up this situation like we did at Keith’s house.

Because of the size of this room, this studio – much bigger than this room at Keith’s house, a much higher ceiling and a much bigger room – it sounded like it was in a damn cathedral or something. That’s what happens when you use very few microphones. It kind of multiplies what you perceive as the size of the space by about three.

I said, “Well, this isn’t going to fit into the rest of the situation.” They had these big baffles, these big portable walls, so to speak. They had big, tall ones at the studio that were 12 feet tall.

We took these things and we built a space in the middle of the room that was about 15 feet by 15 feet. We made these baffles in this pattern and made a room within a room. They set up in that space in a circle and we recorded the same way. I placed the microphones in the same way I would have done it at Keith’s house.

It took a little bit of experimenting, but we got it right. We were just over the moon when we heard it back in the control room. We were like, “Wow. We did it. We did it in a recording studio. Wow.” We were so excited.

That thing on Hubert’s record, that’s exactly as it existed. There are no overdubs. That was done to two-inch tape and it was actually two performances that I cut back and forth between on two-inch tapes. There must have been ten edits. But then, when it was mixed, we got this cool mix up and I ran it off to a CD recorder.

We could never beat that mix. We used that as the mix, what I put on that CD recorder. That was the mix of the song. There were no overdubs at all. On that thing that was done for Hubert’s record, “Still a Fool,” recorded in the same way as the Wingless Angels and “You Win Again.” For all intents and purposes, it was live.


About Them Shoes, the new album from blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin is in stores now on Tonecool/Artemis. Sumlin is joined by special guests Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, David Johansen, harmonica legend James Cotton and The Band’s Levon Helm. Produced by Rob Fraboni, the album is a loving tribute to Muddy Waters and contains seven songs from Waters, four from Willie Dixon (written for Waters), one from Carl C. Wright, and one from Sumlin himself.




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1. I'm Ready

2. Still A Fool

3. She's Into Something

4. Iodine In My Coffee

5. Look What You've Done

6. Come Home Baby

7. Evil

8. Long Distance Call

9. Same Thing, The

10. Don't Go No Farther

11. I Love The Life I Live, I Live The Life I Love

12. Walkin' Thru The Park

13. This Is The End, Little Girl

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTES

Personnel: Hubert Sumlin (guitar); Eric Clapton, Keith Richards (vocals, guitar); Paul Oscher (vocals, harmonica); George Receli (vocals, drums); David Johansen, Nathaniel Peterson (vocals); David Maxwell, Bob Margolin (guitar); James Cotton (harmonica); Michael "Mudcat" Ward (bass guitar); Levon Helm (drums). One of the key architects of the Chicago blues sound, guitar master Hubert Sumlin is probably best known for his wiry, angular phases on Howlin' Wolf classics like "Smokestack Lightnin'" and "I Asked for Water." But Sumlin also worked with Muddy Waters, and ABOUT THEM SHOES pays overt homage to Chicago's favorite blues son with a set list full of Waters's originals and tunes written for Waters by Willie Dixon (the great songwriter, bassist, and Chicago session man). ABOUT THEM SHOES finds Sumlin brings on a distinguished roster of guests, including drummer Levon Helm, harmonica player James Cotton, vocalist David Johansen, and six-string godheads Eric Clapton and Keith Richards. Clapton, Richards, and Johansen lend some fine vocal tracks (Johansen's Wolf-like take on "Walkin' Thru the Park" is especially notable), but Sumlin takes the spotlight here. The veteran still throws out stinging leads, distinctive melody lines, and quick, perfectly crafted embellishments that drip with blues essence. The end result is a fine tribute to Waters, and to Sumlin's own towering contribution to the genre

50 Years Ago Today The Rolling Stones Came to America
TheFutureHeart1 Jun 2014

500 screaming girls and a press conference greeted Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts after they touched down at New York City’s J.F.K. Airport on June 1, 1964. The scenario echoed The Beatles’ famous landing less than four months before, except The Rolling Stones were still largely unknown this side of the pond. To date they had just one charted single in the U.S. – their Bo Diddley-esque cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” which peaked at #48 earlier that year (as opposed to it reaching #3 in the UK) – and England’s Newest Hit Makers, the American version of their debut album, had been released just two days before their arrival. It wasn’t until the fall of 1964 that they had their first U.S. smash with “Time Is on My Side,” but the hysteria that greeted them in New York suggested otherwise.

“Police started pulling us out, saying, ‘Run! It’s every man for himself,” Wyman wrote of arriving at the Astor Hotel in his 1990 auto-bio Stone Alone. “In seconds the hotel reception became an insane asylum. Mick and I made a mad dash into the lobby, and Hilda Skarfe of Song Hits magazine raced after us, followed by about 70 screaming girls, with police close behind…we ran into a laundry closet by mistake and we were trapped. It was like a scene from a movie!”



The Stones’ New York greeting was similar to The Fab Four’s – including questions about their hair at press conferences and radio interviews with self-proclaimed “Fifth Beatle” Murray the K. The DJ also played the Valentinos’ soon-to-be hit “It’s All Over Now” and suggested the Stones cover it. They took his advice and recorded their version nine days later at Chess Studios. Within weeks it was the Stones’ first British chart-topper, and one of two minor hits the group had in America that summer (the other being “Tell Me;” both peaked in the mid-20s).

The Stones’ first television appearance stateside was a June 2nd interview on The Les Crane Show. Crane joked about Brian Jones’ “Prince Valiant” hairdo, and pressed the comparison between them and The Beatles by continuing referring to the Stones’ as “that other British group.” After two days of New York press the band flew to Los Angeles for their notorious American TV debut performance on Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace.

“In America then, if you had long hair, you were a faggot as well as a freak,” Richards wrote in his 2010 memoir Life. “Dean Martin introduced us as something like, ‘these long-haired wonders from England, the Rolling Stones…They’re backstage picking fleas off one another.’ A lot of sarcasm and eye rolling.”

The Hollywood Palace was an hour-long variety show broadcast by ABC on Saturday nights from 1964 through the end of the decade. The Stones taped two performances on June 3rd. The first, their take on Muddy Water’s “I Just Want To Make Love To You” was broadcast on June 6th. The second, “Not Fade Away,” was saved for a second season episode that aired September 26, 1964 (by which time the Stones had legitimately blown up). It’s Martin’s jokes at the Stones’ expense however that are best remembered, and begrudged to this day by Richards. According to some accounts the conflict stemmed from backstage drama that began when the show informed the Stones they needed to buy uniforms to appear and the band angrily refused. Photographer Bob Bonis recalls, “Dean Martin came in and had no idea what he was dealing with. The vibe, as we call it today, was just awful. Dean and I got into an argument at one point and Keith, my newfound friend, was about to pop him one with one of those solid-body guitars.”

“You know these singing groups today?” Martin cracked on the air, “You’re under the impression they have long hair. Not true at all…it’s an optical illusion…they just have low foreheads and high eyebrows.”

Although the Rat Pack star’s insults seem mild by 2014 standards, at the time they signaled the growing divide of the “generation gap.” Stephen King, 16 years old at the time, recalls of watching the TV show: “I thought, ‘@#$%& you, you old lounge lizard. You’re the past, I’ve just seen the future.” Martin in fact was still putting out hit records and starring in feature films. Regardless, Bob Dylan immortalized the beef by writing “an dean martin should apologize t the rolling stones” on the back cover of Another Side of Bob Dylan, released that summer.




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The Stones kicked off a 12-date tour at San Bernardino’s Swing Auditorium on June 5th (pre-dating The Beatles’ first American tour by eleven weeks). Unlike the Fab Four, the Stones still hadn’t had a big hit when they came to America, which translated into poor attendance for their first trek. Worse still, most American audiences at the time weren’t ready for the group’s image – decidedly less-teeny-bopper and more androgynous than the Beatles – and they were ridiculed with insults and homophobic slurs by the audience at their Texas stop. Keep in mind these shows were at a state fair. The band’s opening act was a trampoline performer, rodeo trick riders, chimpanzees and elephants!

The Stones’ first American trip wasn’t about being England’s newest hit-makers so much as it was a pilgrimage of sorts for the group. “Nobody realises how America blew our minds and the Beatles’ too,” Richards recalls. “Can’t even describe what America meant to us. We first started to listen to Otis Redding when we got to the States, and picked up our first Stax singles. And Wilson Pickett.” The undisputed highlight of the trip was recording at Chicago’s Chess Studios (where Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf and numerous blues legends had all made the records that served as the Stones’ blueprint).

“2120 South Michigan Avenue was hallowed ground,” Richards wrote in Life. “We got there on a last-minute arrangement by [manager] Andrew Oldham…There in the perfect sound studio, in the room where everything we listened to was made, perhaps out of relief or just the fact that people like Buddy Guy, Chuck Berry and Willie Dixon were wandering in and out, we recorded 14 tracks in two days.”

Besides recording their next single, “It’s All Over Now,” they commenced sessions for their next EP (“Down the Road Apiece,” “Time Is on My Side,” “Look What You’ve Done”) and met their idols. “Willie Dixon walked in to see us and talked about the scene,” Bill says. “So did Buddy Guy. We felt were were like taking part in a little bit of history – after all, those studios were used by Muddy Waters as well as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. We knew pretty well what numbers we wanted to get in the can… like It’s All Over Now… and the atmosphere was so marvelous that we got through them in double quick time. Then, on the next day, both Chuck and Muddy came in to see us. Fantastic.”

Although disputed by many, Keith insists: “when we first went into Chess Studios in ’64, the first time we came here… There’s Phil Chess and there’s Ron Malo, the engineer, and this guy in white overalls painting the ceiling. As we walked by into the studio, somebody said, Oh, by the way, this is Muddy Waters, and he’s painting the ceiling. He wasn’t selling records at the time, and this is the way he got treated… I’m dying, right? I get to meet The Man – he’s my @#$%& god, right – and he’s painting the ceiling! And I’m gonna work in his studios. Ouch!”

“Before we went to America it was very difficult to record in England,” Keith recalls. “Nobody could record or had recorded the sound we were trying to get. People weren’t used to that kind of roughness. Everyone in England at the time was incapable: engineers, equipment, producers and, to a certain extent, musicians. No one could get a really good funky American sound which is what WE were after. The best move we could possibly do was get to America as quickly as possible and record there.”

“The big trouble with recording in England was that for a rock group the studio acoustics were so bad because you couldn’t play loud,” Bill said in 1972. “When we recorded at the Chess Studios in Chicago, we had Ron (Malo), the guy who engineered all the Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Howlin’ Wolf records. He knew exactly what we wanted and he got it almost instantly.” As for getting turned on to Otis Redding while in America, that would soon-enough inspire them to write “Satisfaction.”

The tour continued through Minnesota, the mid-west, and the northeast, concluding with a two-set concert at New York City’s Carnegie Hall (which had begun booking rock bands after The Beatles played the venue during their first US visit in February ’64).

Keith remembers the Carnegie Hall show as “just screaming with kids. We’d almost forgotten what it was like, ’cause we were used to that every night, every time we played [in England], and suddenly [on our first American tour’) we were brought down, bang, everybody saying, What a fuckup, we’ve blown it. America was still very much into Frankie Avalon. There wasn’t any thought of long-haired kids, we were just entertainment-business freaks, with long hair, just like a circus show. And we get to New York and suddenly we realize that maybe we… that it’s just starting.”

“We really felt like a sore pimple in Omaha. On top of that, the first time we arrived there, the only people to meet us off the plane were 12 motorcycle cops who insisted on doing this motorcade thing right through town. And nobody in Omaha had ever heard of us. We thought, Wow, we’ve made it. We must be heavy. And we get to the auditorium and there’s 600 people there in a 15 000-seat hall. But we had a good time. That’s what stopped us from turning into popstars then… Then we really had to work America and it really got the band together… Some towns you went into on that first tour they’d look at you with a look that could kill. You could just tell they wanted to beat the shit out of you.”

When the tour dates concluded the band continued their pilgrimage by soaking in some more American music before returning to England.

“Mick and I hadn’t come all the way to New York in ’64 not to go the Apollo,” Richards writes in Life. “James Brown had the whole week there at the Apollo. Go to the Apollo and see James Brown, damn @#$%& right. I mean, who would turn that down?”



Timeline
June 1: The Rolling Stones arrive in New York City for their first American tour, holding a press conference at Kennedy Airport.

June 2: The Rolling Stones American TV debut interview on The Les Crane Show.

June 3: The Rolling Stones tape their debut American TV performance for Dean Martin’s Hollywood Palace. Drama ensues.

June 4: The Rolling Stones meet arranger Jack Nitzsche at Los Angeles’ RCA Recording Studios.

June 5: The Rolling Stones’ first United States tour begins in San Bernardino, California.

June 6: The Rolling Stones first Hollywood Palace performance airs.

June 10-11: The Rolling Stones record in the U.S. for the first time at Chicago’s Chess Studios.

June 12-20: The Rolling Stones complete their tour.

June 17-20: The Rolling Stones’ television performances include Clark Race Show, The Mike Douglas Show (Cleveland) and The Clay Cole Saturday Show.





Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-12-04 01:19 by exilestones.