Old Gods Almost Dead, Page 2

  But the blues needed a drummer and amplifiers to be heard above the din of crowded cities. Muddy built his first Chicago band around Little Walter Jacobs and his brilliant amplified harmonica. Extremely popular on the South Side, they were recording by 1946, and soon started to work for two white Polish immigrants, Leonard and Phil Chess. The Chess brothers, who ran several bars and clubs on the South Side, built a studio in 1947 when they realized that the wildly popular black musicians they employed didn’t have recording contracts.

  Muddy’s first record for Chess was a reworked version of “I Be’s Troubled” called “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” paired with “I Feel Like Going Home.” It was Delta blues greased with electric buzz, and an immediate smash in the summer of 1948. When Muddy added a drummer, the whole Chicago blues thing took off. The new rhythm and blues was dark, sweaty, jumped-up: the dusty mojo of the country hopped up to the violent, frantic pace of the city. The records the Chess brothers made with Muddy and his band sold as fast as they could be pressed. By 1950, Muddy Waters was the undisputed king of the blues, and his band—Muddy on slide guitar, Jimmie Rodgers on second guitar, Otis Spann on piano, Little Walter on wailing, demonic harp, and drummer Elgin Evans—was the most popular group in Chicago.

  In 1950, Muddy reached back into the Delta for an old song called “Catfish Blues.” Played slow and solo on the bottom strings of his guitar, retitled “Rollin’ Stone,” the record eerily prophesied the future and a new blues generation, telling in a possessed, mysterious chant of “a boy child coming, gonna be a rollin’ stone, gonna be a rollin’ stone.”

  The rest is legend, as Muddy gathered the best musicians around him in the early 1950s. Junior Wells replaced Little Walter on harp. The Chess brothers’ bass player and arranger Willie Dixon wrote “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” for Muddy, another smash hit. Chester Burnett, known as Howlin’ Wolf, arrived in Chicago from West Point, Mississippi, in 1953 and lived with Muddy, who showed him around. A huge man famous in the Delta for performing on his hands and knees, baring his teeth and howling out pure murder, Wolf soon began a rivalry with Muddy that lasted as long as both lived.

  By 1955, Muddy was in his prime, full of regal authority, Cadillacs, and women. But in 1956, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Bill Haley took over pop music, speeding up R&B with a faster, rocking backbeat. Rock and roll damaged the market for blues records. Muddy Waters and his band still ruled in the taverns of Chicago and in the urban South, but now the Chess brothers had to find a new sound to stay in business.

  The diddley-bow is an ancient Delta poverty slide guitar, a one-stringed instrument made from a two-by-four, a couple of nails, some broom wire, and a crushed snuff can. You use a nail or a bottle cap for a slide and you get this piercing African tone that can carry for a hundred yards across a cotton field.

  Bo Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel in southwest Mississippi in 1928 and arrived in Chicago at the age of seven to live with his grandmother. When he was twelve, his sister gave him a guitar. “I’m completely self-taught and I don’t play like nobody else,” he says. “I was all rhythm, and I could drive you right out of your tree with chords and that fast wrist work.” He grew up as a ghetto fighter and street musician in the 1940s, playing with little groups called the Hipsters and the Jive Cats. Handy with tools, he was building his own electric guitars and amplifiers as Muddy’s band began taking over the professional blues scene. But “Mac” and his friends were half a generation younger; they began speeding up Muddy’s rhythms, and adapted the post-bop swing of hepcats like bandleader Louis Jordan and Nat Cole. A throbbing tremolo electric guitar gave the music an exotic, primitive edge. Since drums were hard to deploy on street corners, Mac used maracas for percussion, which gave his music an irresistible African sizzle and drive.

  In February 1955, he walked into the Chess studio on South Cottage Grove Avenue and tried to interest the man sitting at the counter in a demo recording of a song called “I’m a Man.” But Little Walter, who was helping around the office for pocket money, told Mac to go away. As he was leaving, Phil Chess came out and said he could play the tape. Within a month, they changed Mac’s name to Bo Diddley and released “I’m a Man” as a single, with “Bo Diddley” on the A side, and a new sound was born: an updated version of the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, a grungy tremolo guitar, and the greasy buzzing of the maracas. This was early black rock and roll, and it was an instant hit on the radio. Soon every young band in America realized that the “Bo Diddley beat” could really jungle up a dance, and the rhythm just exploded. Other masterpieces followed: “Diddley Daddy,” “Pretty Thing,” “Who Do You Love,” “Hey Bo Diddley,” “Cops and Robbers,” and especially “Mona,” a love call to a young stripper Bo liked. Most of these were recorded later by the Rolling Stones, and Bo Diddley probably would have been their biggest influence if the Chess brothers hadn’t released “Maybellene” only two months after they put out “Bo Diddley.”

  Chuck Berry was born in St. Louis in 1926, a carpenter’s son, and he grew into a tall, handsome young man with a quick wit and huge hands capable of really strangling a guitar. When he was eighteen, a judge gave him ten years for a robbery spree across Missouri. Doing his time, he began to entertain the other prisoners with music, impressed the warden, and eventually got paroled.

  In late 1952, Chuck met piano player Johnnie Johnson and joined his band, Sir John’s Trio. Three years later, in 1955, he visited Chicago for the first time. He went to hear the greats: Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, his hero, Muddy Waters. When Chuck pushed his way through the crowd to ask Muddy whom he should see in Chicago about cutting a record, Muddy told him about Leonard Chess.

  Two weeks later, Chuck Berry walked into the Chess studio, tape reel in hand. “Leonard listened to my tape,” Berry later wrote, “and when he heard one hillbilly selection I’d included called ’Ida Red’ played back on the one-mike, one-track home recorder, it struck him most as being commercial. He couldn’t believe that a ’hillbilly song’ could be written and sung by a black guy. He said he wanted us to record that particular song, and he scheduled a recording session for May 21, 1955, promising me a contract at that time.” They cut “Ida Red,” but Leonard Chess told Chuck to come up with a better title. So Ida Red became a car and got her name changed to Maybelline.

  “Maybelline” was a national hit record, and Chuck Berry never looked back. His humor and wit overlaid a light, swinging kind of rockabilly that teenagers liked to dance to. “Around and Around,” “Reelin’ and Rockin’,” “Carol,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Days,” “Little Queenie”: over the next five years, Chuck Berry wrote thirty-five songs that became the cornerstone of the new pop music, a huge influence on John Lennon and the Beatles, and the main inspiration of Keith Richards’s drive to power up the early Stones.

  * * *

  The Blitzkrieg and the Blues

  And the guns start to roar / From the ship to the shore /

  And the bombs start to fall / As we crouch in the hall . . .

  “War Baby,” Mick Jagger

  Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany declared war on England in 1940 and began bombing English cities and the countryside. English children born during the war spent their earliest years stressed and sleepless because of the banshee air-raid sirens, bursting incendiary and high-explosive bombs, wailing fire engines and ambulances. Charlie Watts (born June 2, 1941), Brian Jones (February 28, 1942), Mick Jagger (July 26, 1943), and Keith Richards (December 18, 1943) heard the fuzz-toned reverb of the Luftwaffe’s buzz bombs and doodlebugs, the chugging AA batteries, the wild feedback of V-1 flying bombs, and the almost silent whoosh of V-2 missiles. Overhead, the insect whines of Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes could be heard as they dueled with Messerschmidts and the German bombers. Bill Wyman, older than the rest (born October 24, 1936), remembers hearing Winston Churchill on the radio: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for
a thousand years, men will still say, ’This was their finest hour.’”

  Keith’s family’s house in Dartford, Kent, was badly bombed. His father was wounded in Normandy later in the war. Food was scarce and heavily rationed. Meat, eggs, sugar, and fruit were rare treats, and the English people were deprived of protein in favor of those fighting in the war. The Stones and their generation were slight of stature, thanks to Hitler and his armies.

  The war ended in 1945, but England was devastated, and rationing continued. Candy—sweets—didn’t reappear until 1953, and children rioted when the shops finally opened. London, Liverpool, Manchester were pocked by gutted buildings and the gaping holes of bomb craters. The urban landscape was one huge building site as the poverty-stricken kingdom tried to rebuild. It’s no accident that for their first promo pictures as a five-piece group, the Stones were photographed on a London bomb site, almost twenty years after the end of the war, as if they identified themselves as a new generation emerging from the rubble of the old.

  Cold War. The American B-29s landing in the late 1940s were the first occupying force in Britain for a thousand years. The American servicemen brought their music with them: country music and the blues, sounds the English began to love. But the British music union was protectionist, so one didn’t hear much on BBC radio. Country blues came to England in 1951 when Big Bill Broonzy arrived with a touring jazz show. Broonzy played up-tempo city blues when he performed in Chicago and New York, but in England he only did the old Delta songs he thought the British jazz audience wanted to hear.

  In England, jazz still meant New Orleans band music. After the vaudeville-style English music halls faded in the 1930s, they were replaced by dance bands playing a circuit of ballrooms around the country. After the war, the American “progressive jazz” of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis had a cult associated with bohemian intellectuals, but in England, jazz meant the old New Orleans style called Dixieland in America (where it had already died out) and trad in England. Trad jazz was popularized by trumpeter Humphrey Lyttleton, an aristocrat distantly related to the queen, and then taken over by the popular Chris Barber Jazz Band and groups led by trumpeter Ken Colyer and Mr. Acker Bilk.

  Then rock and roll hit England hard, when the Hollywood “juvenile delinquency” exploitation movie Blackboard Jungle opened in 1956 with its theme song, “Rock Around the Clock,” blasted out by Bill Haley and the Comets. It was shake, rattle and roll as Haley’s subsequent English tours sparked riots when teenage audiences trashed the movie theaters where Haley played. There was similar mania for other American rockers like Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Eddie Cochran, and especially the hoodlum-looking Gene Vincent and his blue suede shoes. Suddenly England had its own delinquents, tough “Teddy boys” sporting leopard-skin lapels and armed with bike chains. The Teds and their girls filled the old dance band ballrooms now. Keith Richards: “We were very conscious we were in a totally new era. Rock and roll changed the world. It reshaped the way people think. It was like A.D. and B.C., and 1956 was year one.”

  English rock and roll: Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes, Johnny Kidd and the Pirates. Low-voltage R&R controlled by mobsters from the East End of London, working out of Soho, the dark and shabby (but very alive) strip-club showbiz zone south of Oxford Street in London’s West End. The vivid, hustling ambience of Soho is captured in the 1959 movie Expresso Bongo!, in which sleazo talent agent Laurence Harvey “discovers” raw teenage talent Cliff Richard in a Soho coffee bar and makes him a star.

  Another craze hit England in the mid-fifties when “skiffle” music got big. Played on washboards, banjos, and basses made out of tea chests, skiffle adapted American hillbilly jug band music with a local English spin. Breeding a few stars like Lonnie Donegan and Johnny Duncan, skiffle was easy to play and very catchy. John Lennon’s earliest bands and Ray Davies’s Kinks started as after-school skiffle clubs, and by the time the music faded, skiffle had made its mark as England struggled to find its own voice in the postwar world.

  Bandleader Chris Barber was a jazz fan, and he liked to feature American stars in his popular trad concerts. In 1957, he began bringing over blues musicians to guest with his band: Broonzy, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Sister Rosetta Tharp. Then, in October 1958, Barber changed the history of the blues when he invited Muddy Waters to perform in Britain for the first time.

  Muddy brought his piano player, Otis Spann, and they embarked on a ten-day tour with Barber’s band. After Barber played Dixieland in the first half, Muddy came out with only Spann on piano. English fans came expecting down-home bluesmen in overalls and straw hats. Muddy and Otis were nattily attired in sharp-cut suits, conk hairdos, and pointed black boots. Instead of an acoustic set, they revved up with electric guitar, ferocious singing, and Spann’s driving left-hand rhythms. Audiences loved it, but the critics were stunned. “Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano” read one headline. Muddy was booed in London when he plugged his guitar into a small amp. They did the hits—“Long Distance Call,” “I Can’t Be Satisfied”—and Muddy would perform “Rollin’ Stone” alone as a country blues with its cosmic prophecy of another generation of bluesmen slouching like some rough beast toward London, waiting to be born. He didn’t know it at the time, but Muddy Waters was arming the English for what would come next, as young musicians were infected with the blues. Eric Burdon, who would later star with the Animals, came to the show in Newcastle and left a budding blues singer. Among the fans mobbing the two nervous bluesmen after the concert in London were two English jazz musicians who would provide the linkup to the Stones: Cyril Davies and, more important, Alexis Korner.

  Alexis Korner was the kind of dark, woolly-headed, Mediterranean exotic for whom there has always been a place on the minstrel fringes of England. Born in 1928 in Paris, mother Greek, father Austrian. The family moved around Europe and North Africa with the Korner family shipping business, arriving in England in 1939. Alexis was thrown out of good schools for being weird and musicianly. Made his own guitar out of plywood and a table leg. Did menial jobs for record companies and worked at the BBC. In 1949, Alexis joined Chris Barber to play banjo and guitar. He was already interested in obscure blues singers like Blind Jimmy Yancey and Scrapper Blackwell. Korner replaced Barber’s washboard-playing singer Tony Donegan (who later changed his name to Lonnie and had a hit skiffle record with “Rock Island Line”). Barber and Korner started a jazz-skiffle group within the Barber band, which lasted until Donegan came out of the army. Alexis left when Donegan returned, resolving to find some other cats with whom to play a more pure type of blues.

  “By ’53 or ’54,” Korner told the BBC, “I’d got passable enough [singing the blues] to go round working solo in clubs. My wife Bobbie tossed a coin and said, ’If it lands heads, you’re freelance’ . . . I met Cyril Davies in the London Skiffle Club above the Roundhouse [in Wardour Street, Soho], and he said, ’Look, man, I’m tired of all this skiffle shit. If I close the place down, will you come in with me and open it up as a blues club?’ ”

  Cyril Davies was a big man, like his heroes Sonny Boy Williamson and Howlin’ Wolf. He worked in a junkyard, had a gruff, no-nonsense demeanor, and blew a pretty fair blues harp for a Welshman. He’d been to Chicago, sat in with Muddy, considered himself a bluesman, the real deal. Like Korner, he was a blues evangelist. They opened the London Blues and Barrelhouse Club in the back room of a pub on Tottenham Court Road in 1957. Three people showed up the first night. It was the height of the skiffle scene—the old club had been packed with students and punters every night—and now two white guys were jamming the blues and nobody cared. But they ran the club for three years of Thursday nights, the only place in England where you could hear blues music, which a tiny community considered a soulful alternative to the bloodless version of jazz that trad represented to them.

  So Korner and Davies began their work as blues catalysts. They imported American blues singers, many of whom lived with Alexis’s family while they were in Londo
n and greatly appreciated the warm hospitality and respect that was on offer. Alexis’s daughter was often sung to sleep by the hellacious Big Bill Broonzy.

  After Muddy blew through town, his mojo working full-bore, Korner and Davies realized they had to plug in and get some serious amplifiers. It was too loud for the landlord, and the pub threw them out in 1960. No other club would even let them bring their amps inside. So they joined up with the Chris Barber Jazz Band as an internal blues duo, performing a miniset in the middle of Barber’s trad/Dixieland act.

  One night in 1961, the Barber band played a date in the old spa town of Cheltenham, in Gloucestershire, about a hundred miles from London. Alexis and “Squirrel” Davies did some Blind Boy Fuller blues during their set, which was well received by the unusually hip crowd. In the bar during the interval, the very approachable Korner was bearded by a short blond teenager who softly burbled away, almost in a whisper, that he, too, was a bluesman, from around here, living on his own now, got a couple kids already and, man, if only they could get together, he could maybe play Alexis some stuff because, actually, he wanted to get out of town and come to London and maybe get something together on his own, and . . .

  Yeah, sure, all right, said Korner. Meet me in the wine bar after the gig. And the kid—Brian Jones—took his girlfriend home and ran off to get his guitar.

  Yes, I will be famous. No, I won’t make thirty.

  Brian Jones

  * * *

  I Will Be Famous

  It would later seem ironic to many that Brian Jones, Wild Man of the Sixties, came from Cheltenham, the old Regency-era spa town in the Cotswolds whose springs had dried up long ago. Cheltenham was known for its bourgeois conformity and legions of the retired. It was a hotbed of rest. Cheltenham Ladies College was the most proper girls’ school in Britain. But there was another side to Cheltenham that owed a lot to the American air bases nearby. The town had five movie theaters, ballrooms where bands played, coffee bars for hanging out. A clever boy like Brian could easily get an idea of the world waiting beyond the provincial beauty of the West Country.