Episode 108: “I Wanna Be Your Man” by the Rolling Stones

A history of folk music in 500 songs

by Andrew Hickey.

Episode 108.

I Wanna Be Your Man

by the Rolling Stones.

Today, we're going to look at a group who, more than any other band of the 60s, sum up what rock music means to most people.

This is all the more surprising, as when they started out, they were vehemently opposed to being referred to as rock and roll.

We're going to look at the London blues scene of the early 60s and how a music scene that was made up of people who thought of themselves as scholars of obscure music going against commercialism ended up creating some of the most popular and commercial music ever made.

We're going to look at the Rolling Stones and at I Wanna Be Your Man.

Tell me, understand.

I wanna be your man.

I wanna be your man.

I wanna be your man.

The Rolling Stones story doesn't actually start with the Rolling Stones, and they won't be appearing until quite near the end of this episode, because to explain how they formed, I have to explain the British Blues scene that they formed in.

One of the things people asked me when I first started doing the podcast was why I didn't cover people like Muddy Waters and Howling Wolf in the early episodes.

After all, most people now think that rock and roll started with those artists.

It didn't, as I hope the last hundred or so episodes have shown, but those artists did become influential on its development, and that influence happened largely because of one man, Chris Barber.

We've seen Barber before in a couple of episodes, but this, even more than his leading the band that brought Lonnie Donegan to fame, is where his influence on popular music really changes everything.

On the face of it, Chris Barber seems like the last person in the world who one would expect to be responsible, at least indirectly, for some of the most rebellious popular music ever made.

He is a trombone player, from a background that is about as solidly respectable as one can imagine.

His parents were introduced to each other by the economist John Maynard Keynes, and his father, another economist, was not only offered a knighthood for his war work, he turned it down but accepted a CBE, but Clement Attlee later offered him a safe seat in Parliament if he wanted to become Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But when the war started, young Chris Barber started listening to the Armed Forces Network and became hooked on jazz.

By the time the war ended, when he was 15, he owned records by Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Duke Ellington, Jellyroll Morton, and more, records that were almost impossible to find in the Britain of the 1940s.

And along with the jazz records, he was also getting hold of blues records by people like Cow Cow Davenport and Sleepy John Estes.

In his late teens and early twenties, Barber had become Britain's preeminent traditional jazz trombonist, a position he held until he retired last year, aged 89.

But he wasn't just interested in trad jazz, but in all of American roots music, which is why he'd ended up accidentally kick-starting the skiffle craze, when his guitarist recorded an old blood-belly song as a track on a Barber album, as we looked at back in the episode on Rock Island Line.

If that had been Barber's only contribution to British rock and roll, he would still have been important.

After all, without Rock Island Line, it's likely that you could have counted the number of British boys who played guitar in the 50s and 60s on a single hand.

But he did far more than that.

In the mid to late 50s, Barber became one of the biggest stars in British music.

He didn't have a big breakout chart hit until 1959, when he released Petty Fleur, engineered by Joe Meek.

And Barber didn't even play on that.

It was a clarinet solo by his clarinetist Monty Sunshine.

But long before this big chart success, he was a huge live draw and made regular appearances on TV and radio.

And he was hugely appreciated among music lovers.

A parallel for his status in the music world in the more modern era might be someone like, say, Radiohead, a band who aren't releasing number one singles, but who have a devoted fan base and are more famous than many of those acts who do have regular hits.

And that celebrity status put Barber in a position to do something that changed music forever, because he desperately wanted to play with his American musical heroes, and he was one of the few people in Britain with the kind of built-in audience that he could bring over obscure black musicians, some of whom had never even had a record released over here, and get them on stage with him.

And he brought over, in particular, blues musicians.

Now, just as there was a split in the British jazz community between those who liked traditional Dixieland jazz and those who liked modern jazz, there was a similar split in their tastes in blues and R and B.

Those who liked modern jazz, a music that was dominated by saxophones and piano, unsurprisingly liked modern keyboard and saxophone based R and B.

Their R and B idol was Ray Charles, whose music was the closest of the great R and B stars to modern jazz, and one stream of the British R and B movement of the sixties came from this scene.

People like the Spencer Davis Group, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames, and Ranford Mann all come from this modernist scene.

But the Trad people, when they listened to blues, liked music that sounded primitive to them, just as they liked primitive sounding jazz.

Their tastes were very heavily influenced by Alan Lomax, who came to the UK for a crucial period in the 50s to escape McCarthyism, and they paralleled those of the American folk scene that Lomax was also part of, and followed the same narrative that Lomax's friend John Hammond had constructed for his Spirituals to Swing concerts, where the delta country blues of people like Robert Johnson had been the basis for both jazz and boogie piano.

This entirely false narrative became the received wisdom among the trad scene in Britain, to the extent that two of the very few people in the world who had actually heard Robert Johnson records before the release of the King of the Delta Blues singers album were Chris Barber and his sometime guitarist and banjo player, Alexis Corner.

These people liked Robert Johnson, Big Bill Brunsy, Led Belly, and Lonnie Johnson's early recordings before his later pop success.

They liked solo male performers who played guitar.

These two scenes were geographically close.

The Flamingo Club, a modern jazz club that later became the place where Georgie Fame and Chris Farlowe built their audiences, was literally across the road from the Marquis, a trad jazz club that became the centre of guitar-based R and B in the UK.

And there wasn't a perfect hard and fast split, as we'll see, but it's generally true that what is nowadays portrayed as a single British blues scene was, in its early days, two overlapping but distinct scenes based on a pre-existing split in the jazz world.

Barber was, of course, part of the the traditional jazz wing, and indeed he was so influential a part of it that his tastes shaped the tastes of the whole scene to a large extent.

But Barber was not as much of a purist as someone like his former collaborator Ken Collier, who believed that jazz had become corrupted in 1922 by the evil innovations of people like Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, who were too modern for his tastes.

Barber had preferences, but he could appreciate, and more importantly, play, music in a variety of styles.

So, Barber started by bringing over Big Bill Brunsy, who John Hammond had got to perform at the Spirituals to Swing concerts when he'd found out Robert Johnson was dead.

It was because of Barber bringing Brunsy over that Brunsey got to record with Joe Meek.

When I was born into

this world,

this is what happened to me.

I was never

called a man, and now I'm 53.

I wonder when.

Yes, I wonder when.

Yes, I wonder when I get to be called a man.

And it was because of Barber bringing Brunsy over that Brunsy appeared on 6'5 Special, along with Tommy Steele, the Vipers, and Mike and Bernie Winters, Winters, and thus became the first blues musician that an entire generation of British musicians saw, their template for what a blues musician is.

If you watch the Beatles' anthology, for example, in the sections where they talk about the music they were listening to as teenagers, Brunzi is the only blues musician specifically named.

That's because of Chris Barber.

Brunzi toured with Barber several times in the 50s, before his death in 1958, but he wasn't the only one.

Barber brought over many people to perform and record with him, including several we've looked at previously.

Like the rock and roll stars who visited the UK at this time, these were generally people who were past their commercial peak in the US, but who were fantastic live performers.

The Barber band did recording sessions with Louis Jordan.

take all my money.

Taint nobody, I taint nobody, it ain't nobody's

business.

If I do,

if I do, do, do

And we're lucky enough that many of the Barber Band shows at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, a venue that would later host two hugely important shows we'll talk about in later episodes, were recorded and have since been released.

With those recordings, we can hear them backing Sister Rosetta Tharp.

I know

for me.

Oh,

Lord, I'll pray.

Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee.

I'm gonna let it shine.

In the light of mine,

I'm gonna let it shine, baby.

Whoa,

let my little light shine.

And others like Champion Jack Dupree and Sonny Boy Williamson.

But there was one particular blues musician that Barber brought over who changed everything for British music.

Barber was a member of an organisation called the National Jazz Federation, which helped arrange transatlantic musician exchanges.

You might remember that at the time there was a rule imposed by the musicians unions in the UK and the US that the only way for an American musician to play the UK was if a British musician played the US, and vice versa.

And the National Jazz Federation helped set these exchanges up.

Through the NJF, Barber had become friendly with John Lewis, the American pianist who led the modern jazz quartet, and was talking with Lewis about what other musicians he could bring over, and Lewis suggested Muddy Waters.

Barber said that would be great, but he had no idea how he'd reach Muddy Waters.

Did you send a postcard to the plantation he worked on or something?

Lewis laughed and said that no, Muddy Waters had a Cadillac and an agent.

The reason for Barber's confusion was fairly straightforward.

Barber was thinking of Waters' early recordings, which he knew because of the influence of Alan Lomax.

Lomax had discovered Muddy Waters back in 1941.

He'd travelled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record Robert Johnson for the Library of Congress.

Apparently he didn't know, or had forgotten, that Johnson had died a few years earlier.

When he couldn't find Johnson, he'd found another musician who had a similar style, and recorded him instead.

Waters was a working musician who would play whatever people wanted to listen to.

Gene Autry songs, Glenn Miller, whatever, but who was particularly proficient in blues, influenced by Son House, the same person who had been Johnson's biggest influence.

Lomax recorded him playing acoustic blues on a plantation, and those recordings were put out by the Library of Congress.

And I never be satisfied, and I just can't keep up.

Yeah, I know my little old bee.

She gonna jump and shout.

Hello, Trinity, you little girl.

And I'll be.

Those Library of Congress recordings had been hugely influential among the trad and skiffle scenes.

Lonnie Donegan, in particular, had borrowed a copy from the American Embassy's record-lending library.

and then stolen it because he liked it so much.

But after making those recordings, Waters had travelled up to Chicago and gone electric, forming a band with guitarist Jimmy Rogers,

not the same person as the country singer of the same name, or the 50s pop star, harmonica player Little Walter, drummer Elgin Evans, and pianist Otis Spann.

Waters had signed to Chess Records, then still named Aristocrat, in 1947, and had started out by recording electric versions of the same material he'd been performing acoustically.

Well, babe, I just can't be satisfied, and I just can't give a

well.

I feel like snapping

pistol in your face.

I'm gonna let some brave yard lord be forever.

But soon he'd partnered with Chess's great bass player, songwriter, and producer, Willie Dixon, who wrote a string of blues classics both for Waters and for Chess's other big star, Howlin' Wolf.

Throughout the early 50s, Waters had a series of hits on the RB charts with his electric blues records, like the great Hoochie Coochie Man, which introduced one of the most copied blues riffs ever.

hours,

on a seven days,

on the seven months,

the seven doctors say

he was born for good luck,

and that you see,

I got $700.

Don't you mess with me, but you know, yeah.

But by the late 50s, the hits had started to dry up.

Waters was still making great records, but chess were more interested in artists like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Moonglows, who were selling much more and were having big pop hits, not medium-sized RB ones.

So Waters and his pianist Otis Span were eager to come over to the UK, and Barber was eager to perform with them.

Luckily, unlike many of his trad contemporaries, Barber was comfortable with electric music, and his band quickly learned Waters' covenant repertoire.

Waters came over and played one night at a festival with a different band, made up of mudden jazz players who didn't really fit his style, before joining the Barbatore, and so he and Spam were a little worried on their first night with the group, when they heard these Dixieland trombones and clarinets.

But as soon as the group blasted out the riff of Hoochie Coochie Man to introduce their guests, Waters and Spam's faces lit up.

They knew these were musicians they could play with, and they'd fit in with Barbara's band perfectly.

The gypsy woman told my mother

Before I was born,

you got a boy charge

Not everyone watching the talk was as happy as Barber with the electric blues though.

The audiences were often permused by the electric guitars, which they associated with rock and roll rather than the blues.

Walters like many of his contemporaries was perfectly willing to adapt his performance to the audience, and so the next time he came over he brought his acoustic guitar and played more in the country acoustic style they expected.

The time after that he came over though, the audiences were disappointed, because he was playing acoustic, and now they wanted and expected him to be playing electric Chicago blues, because Moody Water's first UK tour had developed a fan base for him, and that fan base had been cultivated and grown by one man, who had started off playing in the same band as Chris Barber.

Alexis Corner had started out in the Ken Collier band, the same band that Chris Barber had started out in, as a replacement for Lonnie Donnegan when Donnegan was conscripted.

After Donnegan had rejoined the band, they'd played together for a while, and the first ever British Skiffle group line-up had been Ken and Bill Collier, Corner, Donnegan, and Barber.

When the Colliers had left the group and Barber had taken it over, Corner had gone with the Colliers, mostly because he didn't like the fact that Donnegan was introducing country and folk elements into Skiffle, while Corner liked the blues.

As a result, Corner had sung and played on the very first ever British Skiffle record, the Ken Collier Group's version of Midnight Special.

Turn a loose mom and let the Midnight Special

Shine a light on me.

Let the Midnight Special

Shine a table of and line on me.

If you ever go to new stuff,

man, you're better than all right.

After that, Corner had also backed Berbel Bryden on some skiffle recordings, which also featured a harmonica player named Sybil Davis.

This train is bound for glory, this train.

This train is bound for glory.

Don't carry nothing but the righteous and the holy.

This train is bound for

But Corner and Davis had soon got sick of Skiffle as it developed.

They liked the blues music that formed its basis, but Corner had never been a fan of Lonnie Donegan's singing.

He'd even said as much in the liner notes to an album by the Barber Band, while both he and Donegan were still in the band.

And what Donnegan saw as eclecticism, including Woody Guthrie songs and old English musical songs, Corner saw as watering down the music.

Corner and Donnegan had a war of words in the pages of Malodymaker, at that time the biggest jazz periodical in Britain.

Corner started with an article headline Skiffle is Piffle, in which he said, in part, It is with shame and considerable regret that I have to admit my part as one of the originators of the movement.

British Skiffle is, most certainly, a commercial success, but musically it rarely exceeds the mediocre, and is, in general, so abysmally low that it defies proper musical judgment.

Donnegan replied, pointing out that Corner was playing in a skiffle group himself, and then Corner replied to that, saying that what he was doing now wasn't skiffle, it was the blues.

You can judge for yourself whether the Blues from the Roundhouse EP, by Alexis Corner's breakdown group, which featured Corner, Davis on guitar and harmonica, plus teachest bass and washboard, was skiffle or blues.

Lost my parlour, skip them a loo, lost my partner, skip them aloud.

Lost my partner, skip them a loo, skip them aloud, my darling.

Hey, hey, skip them a loo, hey, hey, skip them a loo, hey, hey, skip them a little, skip them a

But soon Corner and Davis had changed their group's name to Blues Incorporated and were recording something that was much closer to the Delta and Chicago blues Davis in particular liked.

what you reckon rent.

Say, come home, sweet mama,

you love it, baby, dead.

When to the depot,

but after the initial recordings, Blues Incorporated stopped being a thing for a while, as Corner got more involved with the folk scene.

At a party hosted by Rambling Jack Elliott, he met the folk guitarist Davy Graham, who had previously lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart, Tommy Steele's livicist, if that gives some idea of how small and interlocked the London music scene actually was at this time, for all its fractional differences.

Corner and Graham formed a guitar duo playing jazzy folk music for a while.

But in 1960, after Chris Barber had done a second tour with Muddy Waters, Barber decided that he needed to make Muddy Waters style blues a regular part of his his shows.

Barber had entered into a partnership with an accountant, Harold Pendleton, who was Secretary of the National Jazz Federation.

They co owned a club, the Marquis, which Pendleton managed, and they were about to start up an annual jazz festival, the Richmond Festival, which would eventually grow into the Reading Festival, the second biggest rock festival in Britain.

Barber had a residency at the Marquis, and he wanted to introduce a blues segment into the shows there.

He had a singer, his wife Ottilie Patterson, who was an excellent singer in the Bessie Smith Mould, and he got a couple of members of his band to back her on some Chicago-style blues songs in the intervals of his shows.

He asked Corner to be a part of this interval band, and after a little while it was decided that Corner would form the first ever British electric blues band, which would take over those interval slots.

And so Blues Incorporated was reformed, with Sybil Davis rejoining Corner.

The first time this group played together, in the first week of 1962, it was Corner on Electric Guitar, Davis on Harmonica, and Chris Barber, plus Barber's trumpet player, Pat Halcox, but they soon lost the Barber band members.

The group was called Blues Incorporated because they were meant to be semi-anonymous.

The idea was that people might join just for a show, or just for a few songs, and they never had the same line-up from one show to the next.

For example, their classic album RB from the Marquis, which wasn't actually recorded at the Marquee, and was produced by Jack Goode, features Corner, Davis, sax player Dick Hextall Smith, Keith Scott on piano, Spike Healy on bass, Graeme Burbridge on drums, and long John Baldry on vocals.

But Burbridge wasn't their regular drummer.

That was a modern jazz player named Charlie Watts.

And they had a lot of singers.

Baldry was one of their regulars.

as was Art Wood, who had a brother, Ronnie, who wasn't yet involved with these players.

When Charlie quit the band, because it was taking up too much of his time, he was replaced with another drummer, Ginger Baker.

When Spike Heatley left the band, Dick Hextall Smith brought in a new bass player, Jack Bruce.

Sometimes a young man called Eric Clapton would get up on stage for a number or two, though he wouldn't bring his guitar, he'd just sing with them.

So would a singer and harmonica player named Paul Jones, later the singer with Manfred Mann, who first travelled down to see the group with a friend of his, a guitarist named named Brian Jones, no relation, who would also sit in with the band on guitar, playing Elmore James numbers under the name Elmo Lewis.

A young man named Rodney Stewart would sometimes join in for a number or two, and one time Eric Burden hitchhiked down from Newcastle to get a chance to sing with the group.

He jumped onto the stage when it got to the point in the show that Corner asked for singers from the audience, and so did a skinny young man.

Corner diplomatically suggested that they sing a duet, and they agreed on a Billy Boy Arnold number.

At the end of the song, Corner introduced them.

Eric Burden from Newcastle, this is Mick Jagger.

Mick Jagger was a middle-class student, studying at the London School of Economics, one of the most prestigious British universities.

He soon became a regular guest vocalist with Blues Incorporated, appearing at almost every show.

Soon after, Davis left the group.

He wanted to play strictly Chicago-style blues, but Corner wanted to play other types of RB.

The final straw for Davis came when Corner brought in Graham Bond on Hammond organ.

It was bad enough that they had a saxophone player, but Hammond was a step too far.

Sometimes Jagger would bring on a guitar playing friend for a song or two.

They'd play a Chuck Berry song, to Davis's disapproval.

Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had known each other at primary school, but had fallen out of touch for years.

Then one day they'd bumped into each other at a train station, and Richards had noticed two albums under Jagger's arm, one by Muddy Waters and one by Chuck Berry, both of which he'd ordered specially from Chess Records in Chicago, because they weren't out in the UK yet.

They'd bonded over their love for Berry and Bo Diddley, in particular, and had soon formed a band themselves, Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys, with a friend, Dick Taylor, and had made some home recordings of rock and roll and RB music.

Meanwhile, Brian Jones, the slide player with the Elmore James obsession, decided he wanted to create his own band, who were to be called the Rollin' Stones, named after a favourite Muddy Waters track of his.

He got together with Ian Stewart, a piano player who answered an ad in Jazz News magazine.

Stewart had very different musical tastes to Jones.

Jones liked Elmore James and Muddy Waters and Howloom Wolf, and especially Jimmy Reed, and very little else, just electric Chicago blues.

Stewart was older, and liked boogie piano, like Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, and jump band RB, like Winoni Harris and Louis Jordan, but he could see that Jones had potential.

They tried to get Charlie Watts to join the band, but he refused at first, so they played with a succession of other drummers, starting with Mick Avery.

And they needed a singer, and Jones thought that Mick Jagger had genuine star potential.

Jagger agreed to join, but only of his mates Dick and Keith could join the band.

Jones was a little hesitant.

Mick Jagger was a real blues scholar like him, but he did have a tendency to listen to this rock and roll nonsense rather than proper blues, and Keith seemed even less of a blues purist than that.

He probably even listened to Elvis.

Dick, meanwhile, was an unknown quantity, but eventually Jones agreed, though Richards remembers turning up to the first rehearsal and being astonished by Stewart's piano playing, only for Stewart to then turn around to him and say sarcastically, and you must be the Chuck Berry artist.

Their first gig was at the Marquis, in place of Blues Incorporated, who were doing a BBC session and couldn't make their regular gig.

Taylor and Avery soon left, and they went through a succession of bass players and drummers, played several small gigs, and also recorded a demo, which had no success in getting them a deal.

You came to the door by looking at a blue.

You can't judge

By this point, Jones, Richards and Jagger were all living together, in a flat which has become legendary for its squalor.

Jones was managing the group and pocketing some of the money for himself, and Jones and Richards were spending all day every day playing guitar together, developing an interlocking style in which both could switch from rhythm to lead as the song demanded.

Tony Chapman, the drummer they had at the time, brought in a friend of his, Bill Wyman, as bass player.

They didn't like him very much, he was older than the rest of them and seemed to have a bad attitude, and their initial idea was just to get him to leave his equipment with them and then nick it.

He had a really good amplifier that they wanted, but they eventually decided to keep him in the band.

They kept pressuring Charlie Watts to join and replace Chapman, and eventually, after talking it over with Alexis Corner's wife, Bobby, he decided to give it a shot, and joined in early nineteen sixty three.

Watts and Wyman quickly gelled as a rhythm section with a unique style.

Watts would play jazz inspired shuffles, while Wyman would play fast throbbing quavers.

The Rolling Stones were now a six person group, and they were good.

They got a residency at a new club run by Giorgio Gomelski, a trad jazz promoter who was branching out into R and B.

Gomelsky named his club the Crawdaddy Club, after the Bo Diddley song that the Stones ended their sets with.

Soon, as well as playing the Crawdaddy every Sunday night, they were playing Ken Collier's Club, Studio 51, on the other side of London every Sunday evening, so Ian Stewart bought a van to lug all their gear around.

Gamelski thought of himself as the group's manager, though he didn't have a formal contract, but Jones disagreed and considered himself the manager, though he never told Gomelski this.

Jones booked the group in at the IBC Studios, where they cut a professional demo with Glyn Johns Engineering, consisting mostly of Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed's songs.

Gomeelsky started getting the group noticed.

He even got the Beatles to visit the club and see the group, and the two bands hit it off.

Even though John Lennon had no time for Chicago Blues, he liked them as people, and would sometimes pop round to the flat where most of the group lived, once finding Mick and Keith in bed together because they didn't have any money to heat the flat.

The group's live performances were so good that the Record Mirror, which as its name suggested only normally talked about records, did an article on the group, and the magazine's editor, Peter Jones, raved about them to an acquaintance of his, Andrew Lou Goldham.

Oldham was a young man, only nineteen, but he'd already managed to get himself a variety of jobs around and with famous people, mostly by bluffing and conning them into giving him work.

He'd worked for Mary Quant, the designer who'd popularised the mini-skirt, and then had become a freelance publicist, working with Bob Dylan and Phil Spector on their trips to the UK, and with a succession of minor British pop stars.

Most recently, he'd taken a job working with Brian Epstein as the Beatles' London press agent, but he wanted his own Beatles, and when he visited the Crawdaddy Club, he decided he'd found them.

Oldham knew nothing about RB, didn't like it, and didn't care.

He liked pure pop music, and he wanted to be Britain's answer to Phil Spector, but he knew charisma when he saw it, and the group on stage had it.

He immediately decided he was going to sign them as a manager.

However, he needed a partner in order to get them bookings.

At the time, in Britain, you needed an agent's licence to get bookings, and you needed to be 21 to get the licence.

He first offered Brian Epstein the chance to co-manage them, even though he'd not even talked to the group about it.

Epstein said he had enough on his plate already managing the Beatles, Jerry and the Pacemakers and his other Liverpool groups.

At that point, Oldham quit his job with Epstein and looked for another partner.

He found one in Eric Easton, an agent of the old school who had started out as a music hall organ player, before moving over to the management side, and whose big clients were Bert Whedon and Mrs Mills, and who was letting Oldham use a spare room in his office as a bass.

Oldham persuaded Easton to come to the Crawdaddy Club, though Easton was dubious as it meant missing Sunday night at the London Palladium on the T V.

But Easton agreed that the group had promise, though he wanted to get rid of the singer, which Oldham talked him out of.

The two talked with Brian Jones, who agreed, as the group's leader, that they would sign with Oldham and Easton.

Easton brought traditional entertainment industry experience, while Oldham brought an understanding of how to market pop groups.

Jones, as the group's leader, negotiated an extra five pounds a week for himself off the top in the deal.

One piece of advice that Oldham had been given by Full Spectre, and which he'd taken to heart, was that rather than get a band signed to a record label directly, you should set up an independent production company and lease the tapes to the label.

And that's what Oldham and Easton did.

They formed a company called Impact and went into the studio with the stones and recorded the song they performed, which they thought had the most commercial potential, a Chuck Berry song called Come On, though they changed Berry's line about a stupid jerk to being about a stupid guy in order to make sure the radio would play it.

like thunder, some stupid guy trying to reach another number.

Come on,

since I've been without you, come on.

Always thinking about you, come on.

Phones sound like thunder, some stupid guy trying to reach another number.

During the recording, Oldham, who was acting as producer, told the engineer not to make up the piano.

His plans didn't include Ian Stewart.

Neither the group nor Oldham were particularly happy with the record, the group because they felt it was too poppy, Oldham because it wasn't poppy enough, but they took the recording to Decca Records, where Dick Rowe, the man who had turned down the Beatles, eagerly signed them.

The conventional story is that Rowe signed them after being told about them by George Harrison, but the other details of the story as it's usually told, that they were judging a talent contest in Liverpool, which is the story in most Stone's biographies, or that they were appearing together on Jukebox Jury, which is what Wikipedia and articles ripped off from Wikipedia say, are false, and so it's likely that the story is made up.

Decker wanted the Stones to re-record the track, but after going to another studio with Easton instead of Oldham producing, the general consensus was that the first version should be released.

The group got new suits for their first TV appearance, and it was when they turned up to collect the suits and found out there were only five of them, not six, that Ian Stewart discovered Oldham had had him kicked out of the group, thinking he was too old and too ugly, and that six people was too many for a pop group.

Stewart was given the news by Brian Jones, and never really forgave either Jones or Oldham, but he remained loyal to the rest of the group.

He became their road manager and would continue to play piano with them on stage and in the studio for the next 22 years until his death.

He just wasn't allowed in the photos or any TV appearances.

That wasn't the only change Oldham made.

He insisted that the group be called the Rolling Stones with a G, not Rollin'.

He also changed Keith Richards' surname, dropping the S to be more like Cliff, though Richards later changed it back again.

Come On made number 21 in the charts, but the band were unsure of what to do as a follow-up single.

Most of their repertoire consisted of hard blues songs, which were unlikely to have any chart success.

Oldham convened the group for a rehearsal and they ran through possible songs.

Nothing seemed right.

Oldham got depressed and went out for a walk, and happened to bump into John Lennon and Paul McCartney.

They asked him what was up, and he explained that the group needed a song.

Lennon and McCartney said they thought they could help, and came back to the rehearsal studio with Oldham.

They played the Stones an idea that McCartney had been working on, which they thought might be okay for the group.

The group said it would work, and Lennon and McCartney retreated to a corner, finished the song, and presented it to them.

The result became the Stones' second single, and another hit for them, this time reaching number 12.

The second single was produced by Easton, as Oldham, who is bipolar, was in a depressive phase and had gone off on holiday to try to get out of it.

I wanna be your man.

The Beatles later recorded their own version of the song as an album track, giving it to Ringo to sing.

As Lennon said of the song, we weren't going to give them anything great, were we?

I wanna be your man.

I wanna be your lover, baby.

I wanna be your man.

Love you like no other baby, like no other can.

Love you like no other baby, like no other can.

I wanna be your man,

I wanna be your man.

I wanna be your man,

I wanna be your man.

For a B-side, the group did a song called Stoned, which was clearly inspired by Green Onions.

Stoned.

That was credited to a group pseudonym, Nanka Felge.

Nanker, after a particular face that Jones and Richards enjoyed pulling, and Felge after a flatmate of several of the band members, James Felge.

As it was an original, by at least some definitions of the term original, it needed publishing, and Easton got the group signed to a publishing company with whom he had a deal, without consulting Oldham about it.

When Oldham got back, he was furious, and that was the beginning of the end of Easton's time with the group.

But it was also the beginning of something else, because Oldham had had a realization.

If you're going to make records, you need songs, and you can't just expect to bump into Lennon and McCartney every time you need a new single.

No, the Rolling Stones were going to have to have some originals, and Andrew Lug Oldham was going to make them into writers.

We'll see how that went in a few weeks' time, when we pick up on their career.

A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon.

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This week's is on The Monkey Time by Major Lance.

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Search Andrew Hickey 500 Songs on your favourite online bookstore or visit the links in the show notes.

This podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser.

Visit 500songs.com.

That's 500 the numbers songs.com

to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of songs excerpted here.

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Thank you very much for listening.