HERBERT ASBURY: The French Quarter
‘Then we got that Richmond gig that built up to an enormous scene,’ Keith said. ‘In London that was the place to be every Saturday night, at the Richmond Station Hotel, on the river, a fairly well-to-do neighborhood, but kids from all over London would come down there.’
‘The Station Hotel was the most important thing,’ Stu said, ‘’cause it was at the Station Hotel that you really started seeing excitement. It was at Richmond that they finally started to get up off their backsides and move, and within two months they were swingin’ off the rafters.
‘The Station Hotel only lasted about ten weeks, because they wanted to pull the place down, and it’s still standing there yet. So they moved us to Richmond Athletic Club, which had a very low ceiling, with girders, so of course they’re leaping about among the girders, they’re going barmy. I’d love to see all that again. Because it was so good. There was never the slightest nastiness about it. Everybody really sort of dug each other, and – we never wanted to stop playing. Half past ten would come, and they’d say Stop, and we’d say Aw fuck, and play another three or four numbers. Some of those numbers used to really, really move. By this time, having lived together and done nothing else but listen to their records and tapes and play together, Brian and Keith had this guitar thing like you wouldn’t believe. There was never any suggestion of a lead and a rhythm guitar player. They were two guitar players that were like somebody’s right and left hand.
‘Still rehearsing three times a week. Nobody had any money. They were spending everything they got on either equipment or records. Those days were hard enough, but there was a thrill about being involved with it all. Even though at this time the Beatles were filling the Albert Hall with screaming kids, they were still over there with Gerry and the Pacemakers and Billy J. Kramer and that lot, there was no guts to it. But you were aware at the time that you were really starting something.’
‘I went to the Station Hotel – how old was I? Fifteen – yeah, fifteen,’ said Shirley Arnold, a pretty auburn-haired English girl. ‘It was fairly cold. It must have been February. I was about to leave school. There were six of us went down to Richmond. We walked around all day there and then went to the Station Hotel. Two of us ended up in the club, but I didn’t actually see the boys, I just heard the music. There were quite a few people there. I was a fan of Tommy Steele and Elvis before that, I think they were the only two. The Beatles did come along just before that, and I was a fan of the Beatles. I don’t think I knew what rhythm & blues and rock and roll were at the time. “Route 66” was the first thing I heard the Stones do. We loved it. Then we came back and I said, “Oh, I must see them again.” Apparently Mick and Keith went down to Ken Colyer’s jazz club one afternoon and said, “Look, can we play when Ken has his break, can we go in and play for nothing?” So they said, “Yeah, you can do it.” No one was really interested, it wasn’t that packed, and I could see them, and I just fell in love with them. The music was so exciting. Then, bang! It happened so quickly, everyone knew who they were.’
Charlie almost hesitantly told me, ‘At Richmond we became sort of a cult, in a way. Not because of us, it just happens. We were there the night that everybody – it sort of works both ways. We followed them and they followed us. There were so many people, and because there was no room to dance they used to invent ridiculous dances. There was no room for Mick to dance onstage and he used to just wiggle his arse, which sort of made . . . I don’t know, but it sort of created – it was a lovely . . . I mean the Crawdaddy was like – it was nice to have a dance. It was nice to be there, and the Crawdaddy was always like that. That was really the best time for response of them all. I mean, it got a bit wearing, if you did the same set, and you knew at a certain time everything would explode. And sure enough it always did, and it always ended up in an absolute . . . gyrating . . . riot. When the last Encore, or More, would die down – when you were nearly dead with sweat, you can’t do more than four hours, and they had to shut the place up. That’s what it was like.’
‘Singlehandedly, we discover,’ Keith said, ‘we’ve stabbed Dixieland jazz to death, it’s really just collapsed, all because of us. Brian was so pleased to see the last jazz band disband and us taking over the clubs, it was his happiest, proudest moment.’
The Crawdaddy Club was operated by Giorgio Gomelsky, the Italian of Russian ancestry who liked to think of himself as the Stones’ manager. ‘We had no such illusions,’ Keith said.
‘There were all sorts of people wanting to manage us,’ Stu said, ‘but they could never get through to us, because there was no phone at Edith Grove. There was no phone ever anywhere near it. The only phone number was in the Jazz News, I.C.I.’ The Stones’ ads carried the telephone number of Imperial Chemical Industries, where Stu worked in the shipping department. ‘So one day this very pushy little guy called Andrew Oldham phoned up and said that he was very interested, and he was in partnership with Eric Easton, rhubarb rhubarb. So I said, The only way you’re gonna get hold of them – I don’t want to get too involved in this ’cause I’ve got enough to think about at the moment, shipping whole shitloads of explosives – I said, Look, why don’t you just get on your bike, or whatever you’ve got, and go round to Edith Grove? And so he went round there and saw Mick, and that was the start of a very close relationship between him and Mick. We used to smuggle Andrew into the Station Hotel without Giorgio knowing, ’cause there were huge queues to get in, they’d start queuing about half-past six at night.’
‘Andrew is very young,’ Keith said, ‘he’s even younger than we are, he’s got nobody on his books, but he’s an incredible bullshitter, fantastic hustler, and he’s also worked on the early Beatles publicity. He got together those very moody pictures that sold them in the first place, so although he hasn’t actually got much he does have people interested in what he’s doing. He comes along with this other cat he’s in partnership with, Eric Easton, who’s much older, used to be an organ player in that dying era of vaudeville after the war in the fifties, when the music hall ground to a halt as a means of popular entertainment. He had one or two people, he wasn’t making a lot of bread, but people in real show biz sort of respected him. He had contacts, one chick singer who’d had a couple of Top Twenty records, he wasn’t completely out of it, and he knew a lot about the rest of England, which we knew nothing about, he knew every hall.’
Oldham and Easton had a Decca recording contract for the Stones, but the Stones had already signed a contract with George Clouston at I.B.C. in lieu of paying for the session they had recorded there. I.B.C. had done nothing with the tapes. ‘They had no outlet,’ Keith said. ‘They didn’t know how to cut them or get them onto discs, and they couldn’t get any record company interested in them. This recording contract, although it’s nothing, is still a binding contract, and Brian pulls another one of his fantastic get-out schemes. Before this cat Clouston can hear that we’re signing with Decca, Brian goes to see him with a hundred quid that Andrew and Eric have given him, and he says, ‘Look, we’re not interested, we’re breaking up as a band, we’re not going to play anymore, we’ve given up, but in case we get something together in the future, we don’t want to be tied down by this contract, so can we buy ourselves out of it for a hundred pounds?’ And after hearing this story, which he obviously believes, this old Scrooge takes the hundred quid. The next day he hears that we’ve got a contract with Decca, we’re gonna be making our first single, London’s answer to the Beatles, folks.’
On April 28, 1963, Oldham brought Eric Easton to Richmond to see the Stones, who came the next day to Easton’s Regent Street offices, where they made a handshake deal that Oldham and Easton should manage them. Within three or four days Brian had bought back their I.B.C. contract, and on May 10 the Stones went to Olympic Studios in London for their first professional recording session. It was also Oldham’s first try at record producing. In about three hours, the Stones recorded two sides for their first single release: ‘Come On,’ a Chuck Berry song, and ‘I Wanna Be Loved,’ by Chicago song-writer Willie Dixon,