From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non- or half-Britishers to whom the Stones – Mick especially – would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.
Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were the, to his mind, far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was £1 each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.
In the event, they astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same ‘abominable’ performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelising for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience – Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.
Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: ‘Rockers’ in black leather and motorcycle boots; ‘Mods’ in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from back streets and council estates; and always girls, girls and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annexe, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.
The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, ‘Do the Crawdaddy’ and ‘Pretty Thing’, spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multi-mirrored walls suffering not even a crack.
Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music programme, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded ‘too coloured’. However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew – still broadcasting in the twenty-first-century – denies ever having been party to such a judgement; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound ‘coloured’.
Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC in Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (‘crawdaddy’ is Deep Southern slang for crayfish or langoustine), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognisable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton – at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down – and a raspy-voiced trainee gravedigger from north London named Rod Stewart.
Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre début single with a smash hit, ‘Please Please Me’, and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When ‘Please Please Me’ became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.
Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off – and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.
Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared with their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll-obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s ‘I’ll Change My Style’. When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored ‘Pop Prom’ at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.
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