was a pornographic monologue by Phil Spector, dedicated to his British disciple-in-chief, featuring Allan Clarke and Graham Nash on back-up vocals.
When ‘Not Fade Away’ was released on 21 February few among the target audience even recognised it as a Buddy Holly homage. In its raw belligerence it seemed quintessentially Rolling Stones, which by now meant quintessentially Mick. For Jacqui Graham and her ilk, the accompanying vision was not of a bespectacled young Texan, dead too soon, but of ironic eyes and overstuffed, well-moistened lips slurring Holly’s original ‘A love for real will not fade away’ to a barely grammatical ‘Love is love and not fade away’; turning wistful hope into a sexual fait accompli. The single raced up every UK chart, peaking at No. 3, while Mick was still out on the road, upstaging, if not upending, Ronnie of the Ronettes.
With so many readers – or, at least, readers’ offspring – converted to the Stones, Britain’s national press now had to find something positive to say as well as recoiling like a Victorian maiden aunt from their hair and ‘dirtiness’. And the line from Fleet Street could not have been more perfect if Andrew Oldham had dictated it himself. ‘They look,’ said the Daily Express, ‘like boys whom any self-respecting mum would lock in the bathroom . . . five tough young London-based music-makers with doorstep mouths, pallid cheeks and unkempt hair . . . but now that the Beatles have registered with all age-groups, the Rolling Stones have taken over as the voice of the teens.’ Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard – who had been among the first national columnists to interview the Beatles – wrote about the Stones in a tone of repugnance more valuable than five-star adulation: ‘They’ve done terrible things to the music scene, set it back, I would say, about eight years . . . they’re a horrible-looking bunch, and Mick is indescribable.’
The rest of Fleet Street tumbled over itself to follow Oldham’s script, depicting the Beatles – without circulation-damaging lèse-majesté – as just a teensy bit staid and conventional and the Stones as their unchallenged successors at the cutting edge. The two bands’ followings were made to seem as incompatible and mutually hostile as supporters of rival soccer teams (though in truth there was huge overlap), one side of the stadium rooting for the honest, decent, caring North, the other for the cynical, arrogant, couldn’t-give-a-shit South; the family stands applauding tunefulness, charm and good grooming, the hooligan terraces cheering roughness, surliness and tonsorial anarchy. A few months earlier, schoolboys all over the country had been suspended for coming to class with Beatle cuts; now one with a Jagger hairdo was excluded until he had it ‘cut neatly like the Beatles’.
The raison d’être of all male pop stars, back through the Beatles and Elvis to Frank Sinatra and Rudy Vallee, had been sex appeal. Oldham’s greatest image coup for the Stones was to make them sexually menacing. In March, the (predominantly male) readers of Melody Maker were confronted with a banner headline he had skilfully fed the paper: WOULD YOU LET YOUR SISTER GO WITH A ROLLING STONE? The Express helpfully amplified this to WOULD YOU LET YOUR DAUGHTER MARRY A ROLLING STONE?, thereby conjuring up hideous mental pictures in respectable homes throughout Middle England. Nor did it need specifying which Rolling Stone most threatened the virtue of all those sisters and daughters. It was hard to think of a comparable bogeyman-seducer since Giacomo Casanova in eighteenth-century Italy.
On the road – travelling from gig to gig in a manner still totally law-abiding and unobtrusive – the band were publicly insulted and mocked, barred from hotels, refused service in restaurants, pubs and shops, at times even physically attacked. In Manchester, after their first Top of the Pops show, they went to a Chinese restaurant, were served pre-dinner drinks, but then sat for an hour without any food arriving. When they got up to leave, having scrupulously paid for their drinks, the chef burst out of the kitchen and chased them with a meat cleaver. On the Ronettes tour, their show at Slough’s Adelphi Theatre ended so late that the only restaurant still open in the area was the Heathrow Airport cafeteria. As they ate their plastic meals, a big American at the next table began yelling insults. Mick, impressively, went over to remonstrate and received a punch in the face that knocked him backwards. Keith tried to come to his aid, but was also felled. These being days long before airport security, Fleet Street never heard of the incident.
‘Not Fade Away’ ramped up the mayhem at Stones’ concerts – a strange outcome for Buddy Holly’s quiet little prairie hymn. It proved their best live number to date, not so much for Mick’s vocal as Brian’s harmonica playing. The former blond waxwork seemed to gain new energy, hunched over the stand mike with fringed eyes closed and shoulders grooving, as if literally blowing life into the embers of his leadership.
British pop’s notional North–South conflict reached a climax with its very own Battle of Gettysburg, a ‘Mad Mod Ball’, televised live from the Wembley Empire Pool arena and pitting the Rolling Stones against the cream of Merseybeat acts including Cilla Black, the Fourmost, the Searchers and Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas. When the Stones arrived, they found they were expected to perform on a revolving rostrum in the midst of some eight thousand already demented fans. The set-up terrified Mick, who was convinced he would be pulled off the stage before the end of his first song and that someone might actually be killed. To reach the stage, he and the others had to run through an avenue of police and stewards, implausibly miming song words while one of their tracks was played over the loudspeaker system. The cordon immediately gave way against the weight of the crowd, leaving the Stones submerged among mad Mods while their music echoed round a bare rostrum.
After their set, they were marooned onstage for a further half hour, fighting off would-be boarders, while a contingent of Rockers, the Mods’ motorbike-riding arch-foes, staged a counter-riot out in the street that resulted in thirty arrests. Unlike the real Gettysburg, it was a night of unstoppable victory for the South over those and all other rivals but one. ‘In mass popularity,’ wrote Melody Maker’s chief correspondent, Ray Coleman, ‘the Stones are second only to the Beatles.’
THAT POSITION, HOWEVER, could not be maintained simply by doing live shows. To stay ahead of Merseybeat and offer the Beatles any real challenge, the Stones had to come up with a new single as big as ‘Not Fade Away’ and – such was the rate of the pop charts’ metabolism – keep coming up with them at a rate of one roughly every twelve weeks. And the search for songs they could cover without compromising their ideals as a blues band or their carefully cultivated bad-boy image was growing ever more problematic.
Their options had been further reduced by using up four potential singles at once on an EP (extended play) record: Chuck Berry’s ‘Bye Bye Johnny’, the Coasters’ ‘Poison Ivy’, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’ and Arthur Alexander’s ‘You Better Move On’, the latter always introduced by Mick as ‘our slow one’ and sung in atypically soulful, even plaintive mode, though its underlying message was still ‘piss off’. Produced in small 45-RPM format, with a glossy picture sleeve, EPs were as important a UK market as albums, and had their own separate chart. The Stones’ first not only went straight to the top of this but also made No. 15 on the singles charts.
The obvious solution was to give up covering other artists’ songs and write their own, as the two main Beatles did with such spectacular success. Thanks to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, songwriting was no longer the sacred preserve of Moon-and-June-rhyming Tin Pan Alley hacks, but something at which all young British pop musicians, however untrained, were entitled to have a shot. If it worked, it was insurance against that seemingly inevitable day when the pop audience tired of them as performers and they could fall back on writing full-time. Even Lennon and McCartney, at their America-conquering apogee, drew comfort from that safety net.
Until now, Mick had never for one moment visualised himself as a songwriter, let alone as one half of a partnership that would one day rival Lennon– McCartney’s. The idea came from Andrew Oldham and was not motivated by a desire to advance Mick. The fact was that, while Oldham’s management-PR side remained absorbed in the daily challenge of maintaining the Stones’ disreputability, his would-be Phil Spector side was growing bored by working in the recording studio with just a ‘covers band’ – and resentful of having to pay copyright fees and royalties to the composers whose songs were covered.
In February, he had informed Record Mirror