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By Root 7590 0

the hell did you get this?” It was, always, all about records. From when I was eleven or twelve years old, it was who had the records who you hung with. They were precious things. I was lucky to get two or three singles every six months or something. And he said, “Well, I got this address.” He was already writing off to Chicago, and funnily enough to Marshall Chess, who had a summer job with his dad in the mail room there, and who later became the president of Rolling Stones Records. It was a mail-order thing, like Sears, Roebuck. He’d seen this catalogue, which I had never seen. And we just started talking. He was still singing in a little band, doing Buddy Holly stuff, apparently. I’d never heard about any of that. I said, “Well, I play a little.” I said, “Come on round, play some other stuff.” I almost forgot to get off at Sidcup because I was still copying down the matrix numbers of the Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records he happened to have with him. Rockin’ at the Hops: Chess Records CHD-9259.

Mick had seen Buddy Holly play at the Woolwich Granada. It’s one of the reasons I cottoned to him, and because he had far more contacts than me, and because this man’s got some shit! I was well out of the loop then. I was a yokel compared to Mick, in a way. He had the London thing down… studying at the London School of Economics, meeting a wider range of people. I didn’t have the money; I didn’t have the knowledge. I just used to read the magazines, like New Musical Express: “Eddie Cochran appearing with Buddy Holly.” Wow, when I grow up I’ll get a ticket. Of course they all croaked before then.

Almost immediately after we met we’d sit around and he’d start to sing and I’d start to play, and “Hey, that ain’t bad.” And it wasn’t difficult; we had nobody to impress except us and we weren’t looking to impress ourselves. I was learning too. With Mick and me at the beginning, we’d get, say, a new Jimmy Reed record, and I’d learn the moves on guitar and he would learn the lyrics and get it down, and we would just dissect it as much as two people can. “Does it go like that?” “Yeah, it does as a matter of fact!” And we had fun doing it. I think we both knew we were in a process of learning, and it was something that you wanted to learn and it was ten times better than school. I suppose at that time, it was the mystery of how it was done, and how could you sound like that? This incredible desire to sound that hip and cool. And then you bump into a bunch of guys that feel the same way. And via that you meet other players and people and you think it actually can be done.

Mick and I must have spent a year, while the Stones were coming together and before, record hunting. There were others like us, trawling far and wide, and meeting one another in record shops. If you didn’t have money you would just hang and talk. But Mick had these blues contacts. There were a few record collectors, guys that somehow had a channel through to America before anybody else. There was Dave Golding up in Bexleyheath, who had an in with Sue Records, and so we heard artists like Charlie and Inez Foxx, solid-duty soul, who had a big hit with “Mockingbird” a little after this. Golding had the reputation for having the biggest soul and blues collection in southeast London or even beyond, and Mick got to know him and so he would go round. He wouldn’t nick records or steal them, there were no cassettes or taping, but sometimes there would be little deals where somebody would do a Grundig reel-to-reel copy for you of this and that. And such a strange bunch of people. Blues aficionados in the ’60s were a sight to behold. They met in little gatherings like early Christians, but in the front rooms in southeast London. There was nothing else necessarily in common amongst them at all; they were all different ages and occupations. It was funny to walk into a room where nothing else mattered except he’s playing the new Slim Harpo and that was enough to bond you all together.

There was a lot of talk of matrix numbers. There would be these muttered conversations about whether