The Rolling Stones: black and white blues, 1963 [antikvár]

^he calendar said September 1963. But calendars don't always tell the whole truth and for the Rolling Stones, five cocky kids who were turning rhythm and blues into rock 'n' roll in a way no one else had done before, September 1963 was the night before Christmas. They just didn't know it yet. What they knew was that they had landed a tour of Northern England with three of their rock 'n' roll idols. Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the Everly Brothers, and that their first single release, a version of Chuck Berry's "Come On" which they despised, had performed well enough for them to be asked, pressured even, to produce a second. Beyond offering a chance for musical atonement, this was obviously a favorable career indicator. Still, what they physically held in hand—the modest payday from a package tour of one-nighters and the chance to throw one more 45-rpm record into the vast cavern of popular music—left them well below any threshold of the success toward which they had been maniacally pushing since the band came together earlier that year. Their greater encouragement at this point had to come from the sheer instinct, the embryonic sense that teenage ears perked up and teenage hormones crashed into overdrive when the Rolling Stones delivered their high-voltage hybrid of blues, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll. Before the Stones had played a note outside the tiny clubs of London, their fan club had three hundred members who would, at the mere mention of the fact a band page 8. Brian Jones burned to sing. Keith Richards, before he was ten, had soloed with a boys choir at Westminster Abbey. But one of the few points on which no one ever argued was who wouid front the Roliing Stones— Micl< Jagger. member favored yellow socks, mail in sackfuls of them. These tours are the kinds of packages an entertainer likes to see under the tree, and looking back, it hardly seems surprising that for the Rolling Stones the bright wrappings soon fell away to reveal glass slippers. But in September 1963, they could just as easily have revealed covered lumps of coal, and that's what these pictiires and this book are about: the Rolling Stones at a time which now may seem either mythic or simply very long ago, in the final hotu-s before they knew whether playing music would ever advance beyond personal pleasure to a means of earning a living. In 1963, when young British and American boys were beginning to form rock bands as casually as they combed their hair, hundreds of tours resembled the one that took the Stones on a 36-night stand through Northern England: a line-up of artists who, though not quite stars, had either enough future or enough past so their arrival in a slightly out-of-the-way town would constitute an event, or at least a night for which the locals would part with a pound or so. The starting date of the tour, September 29,1963, feU one month and one day after Martin Luther King Jr gave his "1 Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C. It's unlikely any of the Stones-Mick Jagger, vocals; Brian Jones, guitar and harmonica; Keith Richards, rhythm guitar; Bill Wyman, bass; and Charlie Watts, drums—paid it much mind, their