Mick Jagger. Philip NormanЧитать онлайн книгу.
saxophone and harmonica that by rights should only have worked on a Roy Brown or Champion Jack Dupree live album soaked in the rotgut gin and cheap neon of the Windy City’s South Side. Yet astonishingly here it was, conjured up with near-perfect fidelity by a clump of square-looking Englishmen under a cake shop on Ealing Broadway.
The band was jointly fronted by Korner on guitar – usually seated on a chair – and his long-time playing partner, Cyril Davies, a burly metalworker from Harrow (the suburb, not the illustrious school) who had somehow turned himself into a virtuoso on blues piano, harmonica and twelve-string guitar. Their only other regular sideman was the tenor-sax player Dick Heckstall-Smith, a black-bearded agriculture graduate from Cambridge University. Otherwise, Korner used a roster of much younger musicians, mostly not yet even semi-pro, who looked up to him as a teacher and mentor and so required mercifully little payment. Among this floating population were nineteen-year-old classically trained double bassist Jack Bruce, one day to play bass guitar with the supergroup Cream, and a twenty-one-year-old drummer and erstwhile art student from Wembley named Charlie Watts.
It was Korner’s reputation for giving newcomers a break that awoke the first definite glimmer of ambition in Mick. He found out Korner’s address and, a few days later, posted him a tape of Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys performing Chuck Berry’s ‘Reelin’ and Rockin’ ’ and ‘Around and Around’, Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’ and ‘Go on to School’ and Bobby Bland’s ‘Don’t Want No Woman’. Korner heard nothing of compelling interest on the tape (then lost it, to his eventual huge regret) but, as ever, was willing to give a chance on the bandstand to anyone. Without prior audition, Mick was offered a spot the next Saturday, backed by Keith and Korner himself on guitars and Jack Bruce on double bass.
Mick took the stage looking the picture of respectability in his chunky student cardigan, white shirt and Slim Jim tie. As an opener, he and Keith picked what they thought was their best Chuck Berry impersonation, ‘Around and Around’, one of Berry’s several hymns of praise to music itself (‘Well, the joint was rockin’ . . . goin’ round and round . . .’). Even for the broad-minded Korner, it was a bit too perilously close to rock ’n’ roll: after the first jarring chords, he conveniently broke a guitar string and remained preoccupied with changing it until the song was safely over. He later recalled being struck less by Mick’s singing than by ‘the way he threw his hair around . . . For a kid in a cardigan, that was moving quite excessively.’
It was not in any way what the club was supposed to be about, and the performance met with frigid silence from the men of Korner’s age whom he had previously regarded as his target audience. ‘We’d obviously stepped over the limit,’ Mick would remember. ‘You couldn’t include Chuck Berry in the pantheon of traddy-blues-ists.’ But Korner, glancing up at last from that troublesome guitar string, saw a different reaction from the younger men present – and a very different one from their girlfriends, wives and sisters. Until now, women had never been considered a significant factor in blues appreciation. The kid in the cardigan, with his flying hair, had suddenly changed that.
When Mick came offstage, certain he had blown his big chance, Korner was waiting for him. To his astonishment, he was offered another spot next week, this time with Blues Incorporated’s full heavyweight line-up of Korner, Cyril Davies and Dick Heckstall-Smith. Blues Incorporated remained predominantly an instrumental band and to start with Mick was only a brief, walk-on feature, rather like megaphone-toting crooners in 1920s orchestras. ‘It was a bit of a scramble to get onstage with Alexis,’ he would recall. ‘For anyone who fancied themselves as a blues vocalist, that was the only showcase, that one band. I wouldn’t ever get in tune, that was my problem, and I was often very drunk, ’cause I was really nervous.’ As Korner recalled, he seldom sang more than three songs in a night. ‘He learned more, but was only really sure of three, one of which was Billy Boy Arnold’s “Poor Boy” – and he used to sing one of Chuck’s songs and a Muddy Waters.’
Some time before the Ealing revelation, he had accepted that an authentic bluesman couldn’t just stand there but had better play some kind of instrument. Feeling it too late to start learning guitar or piano, he had settled for harmonica – what musicians call a ‘harp’ – and had been struggling to teach himself from records by American virtuosi like Jimmy Reed, Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson.
Fortuitously, Blues Incorporated had Britain’s finest blues harp player in Cyril – aka ‘Squirrel’ – Davies, who carried his collection of harmonicas around in a bag like a plumber’s tools. When the band played sans Jagger, Mick would haunt the stage front as avidly as any future Mick worshipper, watching the big, ungainly man coax the most delicate melodies as well as the most wickedly rousing rhythms from his tiny silver mouthpiece. However, the prickly, insecure and fiercely anti-rock ’n’ roll ‘Squirrel’ felt none of Korner’s zeal to help younger musicians. ‘He was very gruff, almost to the point of rudeness,’ his would-be pupil would recall. ‘He told me to fuck off, basically. I’d ask, “How do you bend a note?” and Cyril would say, “Well, you get a pair of pliers . . .”’
Nor was Alexis Korner’s hospitality limited to the Ealing Club stage. At his London flat, in Moscow Road, Bayswater, he and his wife, Bobbie, kept open house for his young protégés as well as for the occasional blues maestro visiting from America. Mick and the other Blue Boys would go back there after closing time to sit in the kitchen – where Big Bill Broonzy had once slept on the floor – drinking instant coffee and talking until dawn came up over the cupolas of nearby Whiteley’s department store. The Korners found Mick always quiet and polite, though by now more than a little influenced by the LSE’s in-house radicalism. On one occasion, he described the blues as ‘our working-class music’ and expressed surprise that a former public schoolboy like Korner should be involved with it. Keith always seemed consumed by shyness, never pushing himself forward as a musician or a person, just happy to be around Mick.
On the club’s second night, yet another Korner find had made his début there. He was a short, stocky twenty-year-old, dressed at the height of fashion in a grey herringbone jacket, a shirt with one of the new faux-Victorian rounded collars and elastic-sided Chelsea boots. He had a mop of fair hair almost as ungovernable as Mick’s, and even more silkily clean, and a smile of shining choirboy innocence. His name was Brian Jones.
Two evenings later, the Dartford boys walked in to find him onstage, playing Robert Johnson’s ‘Dust My Broom’ on ‘bottleneck’ or ‘slide’ guitar – not holding down individual strings but sliding a steel-jacketed finger back and forth along all six at once in extravagant sweeps to produce quivering metallic mayhem. It was a style, and song, identified with one of the Blue Boys’ greatest Chicago idols, Elmore James; the newcomer did not merely sound like James but was billed under a pseudonym, ‘Elmo Lewis’, clearly designed to put him on the same level. This hubris excited Keith, in particular, almost more than the music. ‘It’s Elmore James, man,’ he kept whispering to Mick as they watched. ‘It’s fuckin’ Elmore James . . .’
Brian was a blues pilgrim from even farther afield than Dartford. He had been raised in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, a bastion of stuffy propriety rivalling Kent’s Tunbridge Wells. His background was as solidly middle class as Mick’s and his educational background almost identical. The son of a civil engineer, he had attended Cheltenham Grammar School, distinguishing himself both in class and at games, though hampered in the latter by chronic asthma. Both his parents being Welsh, and his mother a piano teacher to boot, he was instinctively musical, easily mastering the piano, recorder, clarinet and saxophone before he had left short trousers. He could pick up almost any instrument and, in a minute or two, coax some kind of tune from it.
Like Mick, he turned into a rebel against middle-class convention, but in his case the process was considerably more spectacular. At the age of sixteen, while still at Cheltenham Grammar, he fathered a child with a schoolgirl two years his junior. The episode devastated his upright Welsh parents, scandalised Cheltenham (especially sensitive to such issues because of its world-renowned ‘Ladies’ College’), and even reached Britain’s main Sunday scandal sheet, the News of the World. After matters with the girl’s family had been resolved and the baby given up for adoption, most young men would have learned an