Life [40]
Doris: We had Keith and Mick down in Beesands in Devon for the weekend one summer when they were sixteen, seventeen. They used to run coaches from Dartford. Keith had his guitar with him. And Mick was bored to tears down there. “No women,” he said. “No women.” There was nobody down there. Beautiful place. We rented a cottage on the beach. The old boys used to go out and catch mackerel right outside the front door. They used to sell them for sixpence each. Not much for them to do. Swim… They went to the local pub because Keith brought his guitar down. They were quite amazed how he could play then. We drove them home in the car. It was about eight or ten hours in the Vauxhall normally. Then of course the battery went, didn’t it? We had no lights. I remember pulling up outside Mrs. Jagger’s house at the Close. “Where were you? Why are you so late?!” What a murderous drive home.
Mick was hanging out with Dick Taylor, his mate from grammar school who was at Sidcup too. I joined them in late 1961. There was also Bob Beckwith, the guitar player who had the amplifier, which made him really important. Quite often in the early days, there was one amplifier with three guitars going through it. We called ourselves Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. My guitar, this time an f-hole archtop Höfner steel string, was Blue Boy—the words written on its face—and because of that I was Boy Blue. That was my very first steel-string guitar. You’ll only find pictures of it in the club gigs, before the takeoff. I bought it secondhand in Ivor Mairants, off Oxford Street. You knew it had had one owner because of the patches and sweat marks on the fret board. He’s either playing up the top, the fiddly bits, or he’s a chord man. It’s like a map, a seismograph. And I left it either on the Victoria line or the Bakerloo line on the London Underground. But where better to bury it than the Bakerloo line? It left scars.
We gathered in Bob Beckwith’s front room in Bexleyheath. Once or twice Dick Taylor used his house. At the time Dick was very studious, you’d put him in the purist vein, which didn’t stop him becoming a Pretty Thing in a couple of years. He was the real thing, a good player; he had the feel. But he was very academic about his blues, and actually it was a good thing because we were all a bit off the flight. We’d just as soon break into “Not Fade Away” or “That’ll Be the Day” or “C’mon Everybody,” or straight into “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” We saw it all as the same kind of stuff. Bob Beckwith had a Grundig, and it was on that that we made the first tape of any of us together, our first attempt at recording. Mick gave me a copy of it —he bought it back at auction. A reel-to-reel tape and the sound quality is terrible. Our first repertoire included “Around and Around” and “Reelin’ and Rockin’ ” by Chuck Berry, “Bright Lights, Big City” by Jimmy Reed, and to put the icing on the cake, “La Bamba,” sung by Mick with pseudo-Spanish words.
Rhythm and blues was the gate. Cyril Davies and Alexis Korner got a club going, the weekly spot at the Ealing Jazz Club, where rhythm and blues freaks could conglomerate. Without them there might have been nothing. It was where the whole blues network could go, all the Bexleyheath collectors. People who read the ad came down from Manchester and Scotland just to meet the faithful and hear Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, which also had the young Charlie Watts on drums and sometimes Ian Stewart on piano. That’s where I fell in love with the men! Almost nobody was booking this kind of music in clubs at the time. It’s where we all met to swap ideas and swap records and hang. Rhythm and blues was a very important distinction in the ’60s. Either you were blues and jazz or you were rock and roll, but rock and roll had died and gone pop—nothing left in it. Rhythm and blues was a term we pounced on because it meant really powerful blues