True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (12 page)

R
OBERT
G
OFFIN:
Jazz

“ B
ECAUSE
the chick has split, and Brian's very upset, and because he gets thrown out of his pad, Mick takes it on himself to find Brian a nice pad where he can live,” Keith said. “Mick finds him a pad in Beckenham, halfway between London and Dartford. Weird little pad in a suburban street full of houses. Brian had one big room built onto this house. It was quite groovy, until he invites some chicks down to cook for him one day, and they burn half of it down, but he's still got to live there, so there's a hole in
the ceiling, piece of canvas above it, tryna hide it from the landlord. When I left home I went to live with Brian in this place. We used to lay around, listen to sounds and play all day and always read
Billboard,
just to see what was goin' on and keep in touch with some kind of reality. Used to read every page, even jukebox profits, used to know everything about what was happening in the charts, absolutely everything.”

“We were still rehearsing,” Stu said. “We didn't have a name or anything. In those days it was the thing to do, to open your own club. You'd find a room that you thought would be a good place and you'd have a club. Korner had started a very successful club up in London—the Marquee Club on Thursday nights—and he was packin' the place. Thursday night was the BBC live jazz broadcast. They said to Alexis, Do you want to do this? which meant that he had to go to BBC studios. So he said to us, Do you want to fill in for me one night? We said Yeah—had to think of a name, so in desperation it became the Rolling Stones. The Marquee was our first job.

“At the start, nobody in England played this kind of music. But nobody. Mick and Keith and Brian were about the only people in the country that knew the music and were trying to play it. Everybody else were jazz musicians trying to play the blues, that hadn't really heard them. And having seen the Stones once at the Marquee, the people who were running the scene in those days were one hundred percent against us, and it was one bloody fight to get anywhere. They thought R&B was a jazz thing and there should be three saxophones. They said, What, two guitars and a bass guitar, that's rock and roll, we don't want to know about it, we'll try and put it down.

“We tried to open in Ealing on a Tuesday night and for two weeks we got not a soul, not one person would come to Ealing to see the Rolling Stones. We tried Tuesday night at the Flamingo, and it was the same thing. That lasted only two or three weeks. I'll never forget the first time we went down to the Flamingo. We did an audition on a Sunday afternoon, and the Flamingo was a pretty smart place. It was
the
modern jazz club in town, and everybody was going down there in their zoot suits, white shirts, and all that. I'll never forget sayin' to Keith, ‘You're not going to the Flamingo lookin' like that, are you?' He said, ‘What ho, Stu, I've only got one pair of fuckin' jeans.' ”

“Winter of '62 was the tough one,” Keith said. “It's down to cello-taping your pants up, Scotch tape across the rips. We're going through the weirdest period, completely broke, and this guy arrives, this strange little guy who lived in the next town to Brian, used to go to school with him. He was about five feet three, very fat, wore thick spectacles. He belonged to the Territorial Army, sort of a civil defense thing. They all live in tents and get soaking wet and get a cold and
learn how to shoot a rifle and at the end they get eighty quid cash. This cat arrives in London fresh from the hills, from his tent. And he wants to have a good time with Brian, and Brian took him for every penny. The guy would do anything for Brian. Brian would say, ‘Give me your overcoat.' Freezing cold, it's the worst winter, and he gave Brian this army overcoat. ‘Give Keith the sweater.' So I put the sweater on. ‘Now, you walk twenty yards behind us.' And off we'd walk to the local hamburger place. ‘Ah, stay there. No, you can't come in. Give us two quid.' This cat would stand outside the hamburger joint, freezing cold, giving Brian the money to pay for our hamburgers.

“Brian gets him to buy a new guitar, a new Harmony electric. He pays for everything, and so in two weeks we've spent all the money and we say, ‘See ya, man,' and put him on a train and send him home. He's incredibly hurt, but all the same, we've taken him around with us to all these clubs, and although he regrets very much being fleeced, he still comes up to London again later with even more bread, and we fleece him again. Terrible sadistic scenes we were pulling on him, Brian and I were really evil to this guy. It ended up with us stripping him off and trying to electrocute him.

“That was the night he disappeared. It was snowing outside. We came back to the pad and he was in Brian's bed. Brian for some reason got very annoyed that he was in his bed asleep. We had all these cables lyin' around and Brian pulled out this wire: ‘This end is plugged in, baby, and I'm comin' after you.' Brian would run after him with this long piece of wire cable that's attached to an amplifier, electric sparks, chasing around the room, and he ran screaming down the stairs out into the street with nothing on, screaming, ‘Don't go up there, they're mad, they're trying to electrocute me.' Somebody brought him in an hour later and he was blue.

“The next day the cat split. Brian had a new guitar, and his amp fixed, a whole new set of harmonicas. This was down at Edith Grove. The second time the guy came we were at Edith Grove in this pad Mick found. I'm not in on it 'cause I haven't got any bread, can't afford rent. Brian can afford it 'cause he's working, Mick can afford it 'cause he's got a scholarship grant from the university. It's Brian, Mick, and these two cats from the LSE. One's a Norwegian and one's a cat that comes from the Midlands. The straightest people you've ever seen in your life. Underneath are three old tarts, and on top are student teachers. It's a three-story house, with the second floor Mick and Brian and those two guys, and immediately I start in with the immortal phrase, Can I crash at your pad? So as not to have to go home. So virtually I leave home. Because I'm staying there all the time these cats are always kicking up a fuss, they won't pay the rent and they'll
kick Brian out for letting me stay there. We're always very brought down when they arrive, and they're sittin' in the corner of the room lookin' very out of it, 'cause there are three or four musicians in another corner trying to get their thing together, and these guys are trying to study.

“Absolutely no bread at this point, Brian's in and out of work more frequently than ever. Got caught stealing again and very luckily was let off. He was always very good, Brian, at getting out of things. He'd always chat up the manager and they'd say, Yeah, we understand, your wife's left you (wasn't his wife but he'd always tell them it was), and your grandmother died and anything else he could think of. Brian was the one who kept us all together then. Mick was still going to school. I was sort of halfway looking for a job. I went out one morning and came back in the evening and Brian was blowing harp. He's standing at the top of the stairs saying, ‘Listen to this: Whoooo. Whooooo.' All these blue notes comin' out. ‘I've learned how to do it. I've figured it out.' One day.

“We were rehearsing two or three times a week, no gigging, we didn't dare. Dick Taylor's still with us, he's on bass by now. We were looking for drums. Charlie was gigging with Alexis Korner. We couldn't afford him. We picked up a drummer called Tony Chapman. Terrible drummer, always comin' in on the onbeat. Then Dick Taylor decided, I think, that he was gonna go on to another art school in London. Stu drifted with us for some reason.

“Brian's just about making enough to keep us from being chucked out of this place, and it's winter, it's like the worst winter ever. Brian and me sitting around this gas fire, wondering where to get the next shilling to put in it to keep the fire going. Collecting beer bottles and selling them back to the pubs, getting like three shillings, and going to pads where we knew there'd been parties on, walkin' in sayin' Hello, how nice, we'll help you clean up, and we'd steal the bottles and whatever food we could find lying around the kitchen and run for it. It's gettin' really sick, down to pickin' people's pockets, in fact that's why these two LSE cats leave. They split, and we get this other cat in who's worth a brief mention 'cause he was as horrifyingly disgusting as Brian and myself at the time and also 'cause he used to call himself Phelge, which was just a nickname, but he insisted on being called Phelge.

“Nanker Phelge”—listed as the writer of the Stones' original songs on their first records—“was a creation of Brian's. This guy who called himself Phelge was going through this incredible scene at the time—everybody went through it in a way, Mick went through his first camp period, he started wandering round in a blue linen housecoat, wavin' his hands everywhere—‘Oh! Don't!' A real King's Road queen for
about six months, and Brian and I used to take the piss out of him. Mick was on that kick, and this guy that we lived with, Phelge, was into being the most disgusting person—he was going through being the most disgusting thing ever. Literally. You would walk into this pad, and he would be standing at the top of the stairs, completely nude except for his underpants, which would be
filthy,
on top of his head, and he'd be spitting at you. It wasn't a thing to get mad about, you'd just collapse laughing. Covered in spit, you'd collapse laughing.

“And this pad is getting so screwed up, for like six months we used the kitchen to play in, just rehearse in, because it was cold, and slowly the place got filthy and started to smell, so we bolted the doors and locked them all up, and the kitchen was condemned. I was at that time into making tapes, I had a tape recorder, reels and reels of tape in the bedroom. See, it was interesting, the place was built like if that was the bedroom, the stairs would be coming up here, and turn round and then come along here, and the kitchen would be off here, and the bog would be here. I used to have a bed here, and the window there, and the window to the bog would be there. All this was outside a courtyard in the garden. I had the microphone through the window in the cistern of the bog, and the tape recorder at the foot of the bed. And I had reels and reels of tapes of people goin' to the bog. Chains pullin'. On cheap tape recorders, if you record the flushing of a John, it sounds like people applauding, so it would be like some incredible show Brian and I would make up, like with the chick from downstairs: ‘And now, folks, Miss Judy Whatever.' Every time somebody would come into the bog, I'd switch the tape recorder on and go round to the bog door and knock, and they'd say ‘Wait a minute,' and you'd get these conversations going through the door, followed at the end by applause, and then the next person would come in. That's the sort of thing we were into. Real down-home.

“We're trying to get this band off the ground without any real hope. At this time the Beatles' first record comes out and we're really brought down. It's the beginning of Beatlemania. Suddenly everybody's lookin' round for groups, and we see more and more groups being signed. Alexis Korner gets a recording contract, splits from the Marquee Club, and who gets his spot, the Rolling Stones. For just about enough bread to keep alive.

“We really need a bass player now. I'm not sure what happened to Dick Taylor. I think we kicked him out, very ruthless in those days. Nobody could hear him because he had terrible equipment and he seemed to have no way to get anything better. Everybody else had hustled reasonable-size amplifiers. There was the scene of how much bread you were makin' and why split it with a cat who couldn't be heard anyway. Advertised for a bass player. The drummer we've got
says, ‘I know a bass player who's got his own amplifier, huge speaker, plus a spare Vox 130 amp'—which at the time was the biggest amp available, the best. He got one of those to spare, fantastic. So onto the scene comes—” William Perks, a bricklayer's son from Penge, in southeast London “—and we can't believe him. He's a real London Ernie, Brylcreemed hair and eleven-inch cuffs on his pants and huge blue suede shoes with rubber soles.”

Bill met the Stones at a pub called the Weatherby Arms, in King's Road, Chelsea. “Bill came down there,” Stu said, “and they were in one of their funny moods, and they didn't even bother to talk to him, and Bill didn't know what was going on. They were living in Edith Grove together and, um, I used to dread goin' round there because of some of the weird things that used to go on. I used to think they were fuckin' insane at times. When people live together all the bloody time they begin to develop virtually their own language and you're never sure whether you're gettin' through to them, or whether they mean what they say or whether they're laughin' at you all the fuckin' time. So Bill wasn't one bit impressed.”

A few years older than the other Stones, Bill (born October 24, 1935) had received, along with his brothers and sisters (two of each), a sound musical education. By the time he was fourteen he could play clarinet, piano, and organ. “He was very good,” his father said. “In fact, he was in line for the job of organist at our local church.” The elder Mr. Perks, who played accordion “just for fun” at neighborhood pubs, told his children that “if they learned to play an instrument they'd never be short of a pound.” But even though Bill's parents both worked, his mother in a factory, at sixteen he had to leave Beckenham Grammar School to find a job. Drafted into National Service, Bill started playing guitar while stationed in Germany with the Royal Air Force as a file clerk.

After his discharge, Bill found a job with an engineering firm in Lewisham. When he met the Stones he had been married for a year and a half and had a year-old son, Stephen. Bill was working for the engineering firm and playing part-time with a rock and roll band called the Cliftons. “We had a drummer and three guitarists,” Bill said. “One played rhythm, one lead, and I'd tune the top two strings of mine down seven semitones and play bass Chuck Berry-style. We got away with it, but then we'd hear groups with real basses, and we knew there was something wrong. So we bought a bass guitar from a fellow, cut it down, took all the metal off, made it very light and easy to play. I still use it sometimes.” The Cliftons played weddings, youth-club dances, “picked up a fair amount of money, considering we weren't all that good.”