Chuck Berry's "Come On," right in the R&B zone (with a rock and roll lean), came out in June, backed by Willie Dixon's "I Want to Be Loved." Success came so easily! The Berry tune spent three months boppin' around the lower end of Britain's top 50 in the summer of '63. Stewart was actually fine with it and stayed with the band as what you might call a "Silent Stone" until his death in December 1985.Īfter signing with Decca Records, the session for the first single took place. Well, now, Stu (as they called him) was tight with the other five he instead was relegated to the position of road manager, session musician, buddy, pal, unofficial Stone, every bit as important as any of them, only with a smaller salary. Right off the bat Oldham demanded Stewart be thrown into the street, something about his image being all wrong. Muddy Waters didn't realize it at the time, but his song "Rollin' Stone" supplied the group with its name.Īndrew Loog Oldham became the group's manager and producer a few months later (taking over for Giorgio Gomelsky, who had plenty of other irons in the fire) with the idea to position them as the antithesis of artists like the Beatles, Gerry and the Pacemakers and Frank Ifield, all red hot, reasonably clean-cut stars topping the charts at the time. South Londoner Bill Wyman signed on as bassist near the end of the year and the band was complete in early '63 when jovial Charlie Watts of Kingsbury in North London became the drummer and, according to Mick, the key member of the band throughout the years. Ian Stewart (from further up a different road in Surrey) clicked as keyboard player. Several potential bandmates came and went. They later went to different schools but met up again by chance in 1960, both in their later teens and obsessed with stateside rhythm and blues.įrom way up the road in Cheltenham, Brian Jones came along and the band started to take shape in 1962 with Keith playing lead guitar and cowriting the occasional song, Brian playing guitar (when he wasn't goofing around with any other instrument that might be laying around) and Mick taking on the unlikely role of lead singer. In a nutshell, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards met in the early '50s during grammar school in Dartford, Kent, east end of London. album, I had learned much about the band's beginnings in the faraway land of England. By the time I crossed paths with this debut U.S. England's Newest Hit Makers wasn't the first of their collections I discovered, as several had been released before my archival digging began. The flip sides of the early Stones 45s fascinated me, then came the inevitable album addiction, something rarely experienced by a "singles guy" like myself. But before that Mick, Keith, Charlie, Brian and Bill supplied the recipe for my poison of choice.
Later my fondness for the music of the Fab Four increased as I went through a phase, post-breakup, of digging beneath the obvious hit singles. The "bad boy" image, a sharp contrast to my own sense of self, was something I found forbidden yet appealing, an emotion others have taken further through emulation. As the decade progressed and I grew up, it was the Stones' blues-based sound I was drawn to. I was a fan of the Beatles back then (as now), but was perhaps a bit too young to understand any great significance in their work. You can like both, but each individual has a preference for one or the other (the question has also been applied pitting Elvis against the Beatles).
It's a dilemma dating back to the '60s itself: you were either a Beatles person or a Rolling Stones person.
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