Rhapsody in Black by John Kruth

Author:John Kruth
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: biography, musician
Publisher: Backbeat
Published: 2013-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

7

Rolling with the Stones and Other Punches

Following his 1964 tour of Australia with the Beach Boys, Roy returned Down Under once more in late January 1965, with five young long-haired louts known as the Rolling Stones. Unlike the moody, broody crew of SoCal surfers and the perky Mersey beat bands Roy had previously toured with, the Stones were an altogether different beast. Led in their early days by multi-instrumentalist Brian Jones, they were devotees of the devil’s music who took their name from a Muddy Waters song. Their first hit was an ominous cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s “Little Red Rooster.” And now the lightning crack of Charlie Watts’ snare propelled the onslaught of Jones’ and Keith Richards’ snarling guitars to the top of the charts with a nasty three-chord rocker called “The Last Time.” The Stones, as Roy described them, were “a wild bunch.” Gone were the cheerful demeanor, careful grooming, and nice, neat matching stage outfits of the Beatles and Gerry and the Pacemakers. Coming out of the nitty-gritty London blues scene, the Stones were the antithesis of wholesome bands like the Searchers. They wanted to break Freddie and his Dreamers’ legs, punch the living daylights out of Herman and his Hermits (especially after the latter’s insipid little sing-along “I’m Henery VIII, I Am” ended the Stones’ one-month reign over the charts with “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” in the summer of ’65). Their singer, a grimacing misanthrope named Mick Jagger, didn’t even wear a tie! Even that gnarly Newcastle band the Animals could fashion a Windsor knot!

Jagger prowled the stage in a T-shirt, taunting the crowd with a series of effeminate dance moves he’d copped from Tina Turner, while Jones, a flaxen-haired dandy, dressed like a pimp on the back nine of a golf course in his red velvet pants and white shoes. Keith Richards (who the gravel-throated singer Tom Waits once likened to “a killer at a gas station”) bore a sinister sneer as he wrenched jagged, reverb-drenched riffs from his guitar, while Watts and the zombie-eyed bass player Bill Wyman looked so sullen they might mug you after the show, if you were stupid enough to ask for their autograph.

Splitting the bill with Roy and the Stones for the fifteen-date tour were a clutch of opening bands that included a vocal trio called the Newbeats, whose Sta-Prest suits and searing falsettos still didn’t manage to add up to three-fourths of the Four Seasons. Orbison and company played five shows in two days for crowds of 5,200 at the Agricultural Hall in Sydney. According to Bill Wyman, the shows were “terrific,” with “girls swarming toward the stage.” The next day the Aussie press slagged the Stones for their lurid music and unkempt appearance while Roy was praised for his “family-type image.” As journalist Norman Jopling wrote a couple years earlier in the Record Mirror: “Roy himself is one of the few performers who sells discs purely on the sound and not on the person. For Roy is the complete antithesis of the pop singer, being a bespectacled un-hip-looking gent in his thirties.

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