"THEY PUT US ON THE BLACKLIST!"
MICK JAGGER IS IN LOS ANGELES and about to spend the afternoon listening to multitracks for the forthcoming, as yet untitled Rolling Stones LP. “I haven’t heard it for a while,” he says, probably not since the Stones took off on tour earlier this summer. “I’m gonna pick out the ones I really like, and Keith will be listening to it, too. I’m in the process, but I’m not quite there yet.” That phrase also applies to the Stones’ earliest days, an era vividly caught on the new On Air set of recordings made for BBC Radio, 1963-65. They wrote begging letters in the hope that the Beeb might notice them. Eventually they did, and the young R&B covers band were soon sharing airtime with Joe Loss and enduring run-ins that heralded greater establishment-baiting times ahead.
On Air marks a rare venture into your ’60s archive. What took you so long?
It’s something the BBC wanted to do. They probably could have done it anyway but they wanted to do it with everyone’s permission and blessing. I’m perfectly happy with it.
Did you like what you heard? Did anything horrify you?
No! I mean, the sound’s a lot better. Recording at the BBC was a one-take thing. If you didn’t like the vocal or made a few mistakes on the guitar, you couldn’t do it again. It was like playing live to no audience.
Definitely an audience on some tracks…
Sometimes there wasn’t. I remember being there, 11 in the morning, playing the blues to an empty theatre.
The BBC knocked you back to start with. Yeah, they turned us down!
Was there comfort in the glory of being misunderstood?
No, we wanted to get on there. Getting on the radio was important, and this was the only station, really. You had to play the game.
Once you were in, do you remember having to explain yourselves?
We’d say, “We’re an R&B band and this is what we play. We don’t play saccharine pop music like these other bands. We play soulful music.”
Were you mischief-makers? We used to giggle at them. Their attitudes were completely dissimilar to ours. The way they approached recording – getting distortion or a bass drum sound – made us laugh. So old-fashioned! We did a few tracks for Joe Loss, a big bandleader of the ’40s and ’50s and a great fave of my mum’s. Kinda crazy juxtaposition.
But Saturday Club was your most regular date.
Saturday Club was different. Everyone who liked pop listened to that in the mornings while getting ready to go out.
Why not sequence On Air chronologically?
I wasn’t really involved in that. If it was a regular album, I’d be very involved. But who cares about running orders? People push the button and play it in any order they want.
Your BBC sessions began with a lot of Chuck Berry, but by 1964 into ’65, the emphasis was on contemporary US soul. You taped four versions of Solomon Burke’s If You Need Me…
We must’ve liked that one! And Cry To Me. That’s another soul tearjerker thing.
Was there a prime mover in the turn to soul?
I don’t recall anyone in the band particularly championing that. [But] I found as a vocalist it was challenging to me, much more difficult to sing. If you listen to my vocals, you’d go, “Oh, he tried!” Now I’d do it better. But when you’re young you have a go at anything. That’s the whole point.
In the cover of Bo Diddley’s Cops And Robbers, you eat up all that US slang – the Stones’ passion for the US is written all over the set.
Yeah. American music is what we loved. Cops And Robbers, Down The Road Apiece, they were staples of our Richmond club days, blues but sped up. I Just Wanna Make Love To You is five times as fast as Muddy Waters’ version. Do you remember being banned in November 1964 having failed to turn up for a show?
We probably said, ‘Oh, sod it’ after a late night, so they put us on the blacklist for a while. It was a bit like being at school and getting suspended.
Was there a sense every time you walked in of sleeping with the enemy?
Well, in those days, the BBC was super-condescending. [Their attitude was] “Why are we doing this?” Catering to a youth audience but not really wanting to. And, “It’s a fad that’s not going to be around very long.”
By the time you went ‘off air’ after a September 1965 Saturday Club session that featured (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, the Stones were no longer a fad but a way of life. Was this a key moment in the Stones’ career?
Yeah. A lot happened between the first and last BBC sessions. We’d toured America and had hits but none were as big as that.
With Satisfaction, the Stones became flagwavers not just for R&B but for a generation. The authorities soon came down hard. How do you feel about that now?
The period was very ‘us against them’. With organisations like the BBC you did feel that. But by the time we did the last session, it had gone from, “Do we have to play this rubbish?” to, “We’re so happy you’re coming on the show”.
Fans see the recent Sgt. Pepper reissue and wonder why the Stones’ ’60s catalogue hasn’t had the same treatment.
For Exile, we found tracks that hadn’t been released and I wrote lyrics for them and put on new parts. Sticky Fingers was remastered with extra tracks. I was super-involved.
Well, take the recent Satanic Majesties reissue. Couldn’t you sit round a table with ABKCO and find a way to do the Decca-era albums justice?
We don’t control that material as much as we do Exile and so on. It’s a much more difficult process.
Any chance we’ll ever hear that Little Boy Blue And The Blue Boys tape or the Radio Luxembourg sessions?
I don’t know.I think this’ll be good enough for me.
The Stones’ On Air album [see review MOJO 290, p103], and a book – The Rolling Stones: On Air In The ’60s – are out now.