In March 1963 the Stones recorded five songs – Bo Diddley\u2019s \u2018Diddley Daddy\u2019 and \u2018Road Runner\u2019, Jimmy Reed\u2019s \u2018Bright Lights, Big City\u2019 and \u2018Honey What\u2019s Wrong?\u2019, and Muddy Waters\u2019 \u2018I Want To Be Loved\u2019 – at the instigation of Glyn Johns, a friend of Ian Stewart\u2019s, lead singer of south London R&B group the Presidents, and a sound engineer at IBC Studios in Portland Place, north of Oxford Circus. The band were delighted with the finished tracks, not least Brian Jones, whose unwavering aim was to replicate the authenticity of the original records. The session tape would be spooled and re-spooled for every visitor to the group\u2019s Fulham flat, but attracted no meaningful record company interest.<\/p>\n
Two months later, with Andrew Oldham installed as their manager, the Stones tried another studio, Olympic, in south west London, where the novice Oldham doubled as producer to supervise the recording of the A- and B-sides of the band\u2019s debut single, \u2018Come On\u2019 and \u2018I Want To Be Loved\u2019. The second was one of the tracks they\u2019d recorded at IBC, but, although \u2018Come On\u2019 was a Chuck Berry song, it was not in the band\u2019s repertoire. Oldham\u2019s influence was already evident: he had insisted that they should consider covering only the most commercial-sounding records in their collection.<\/p>\n
In the same week that the Stones recorded that first single, the Record Mirror<\/em>\u2019s Norman Jopling, having seen the band at the Station Hotel, reported, \u201c(The Stones) are probably destined to be the biggest group in the R&B scene. Unlike all other R&B groups the Stones have a definite visual appeal. They play and sing in a way one would expect more from a coloured US R&B team\u2026 They have achieved the American sound better than any other group over here.\u201d Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames\u2019 fans at the Flamingo All-Nighter would have taken issue with that last assertion, but Jopling had accurately foreseen the Rolling Stones\u2019 destiny.<\/p>\n It was a destiny not mirrored throughout R&B. Even from the dulling distance of the next decade, Alexis Korner\u2019s frustration at the record industry\u2019s reluctance to back Blues Incorporated animated him. \u201cThey didn\u2019t want to know,\u201d he fulminated. \u201cWe had a single-length version of \u2018(I\u2019ve Got My) Mojo Working\u2019 on that first session in 1962. It was the<\/em> tune of that period. It would\u2019ve caught on, it would\u2019ve sold, but they wouldn\u2019t release it. In January 1963, we put down a version of \u2018(Night Time Is) The Right Time\u2019, which Decca completely messed up by dubbing choirs and I don\u2019t know what else on and finally issued about a year later on one of those (various artists) albums. It was the time of the first Ray Charles tour here, and \u2018The Right Time\u2019 was his big number. They didn\u2019t want to know. They couldn\u2019t get used to the idea that a wailing band could possibly sell any records.\u201d No doubt there was an element of ageism at play too, because, although Blues Inc\u2019s then frontman Ronnie Jones was young and handsome, the majority of the band\u2019s personnel were unmistakably, as Charlie Watts observed, \u201ceccentric old men\u201d, unmarketable in a teen-oriented music industry.<\/p>\n Released at the end of June and promoted on Thank Your Lucky Stars<\/em>, \u2018Come On\u2019 peaked at No 21 in September. By then the band had cancelled upcoming club dates to join their first nationwide package tour, opening for John Leyton, Bo Diddley, Little Richard, and the headlining Everly Brothers. They had also recorded \u2018Fortune Teller\u2019 and \u2018Poison Ivy\u2019, both familiar to anyone who had seen them live, as a second single, but, following an eleventh hour change of heart, this pairing was shelved. If their first hit\u2019s sole connection with the Stones\u2019 core repertoire had been its originator, Chuck Berry, the replacement follow-up came from an entirely unaccredited source: John Lennon and Paul McCartney.<\/p>\n In April the four Beatles had checked out the Stones at the Station Hotel. Then, in August, following a chance encounter in the West End with Andrew Oldham, briefly a Beatles publicist, Lennon and McCartney showed up at a Stones rehearsal and ran through a new song of theirs, which they felt would suit the band. With the Beatles at No 1 for the third time since January, what group with ambition would turn down a Lennon-McCartney composition? Not the Rolling Stones.<\/p>\n In truth, \u2018I Wanna Be Your Man\u2019 was not out of Lennon and McCartney\u2019s top drawer. Had it been, then surely either John or Paul would have sung lead on the Beatles\u2019 own version? As it was, when it appeared on their second album, With The Beatles<\/em>, the vocal was Ringo\u2019s. But it was an adept pastiche of British R&B and, reinforced by Brian Jones\u2019 trademark slide guitar, made it to No 12. Of the Stones\u2019 next eight singles, only two would fail to top the charts. Even \u2018Little Red Rooster\u2019, a valedictory version of what might be termed a post-modern blues by Sam Cooke, reached No 1. The Rolling Stones had turned rhythm and blues into pop hits. For themselves, at least.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In March 1963 the Stones recorded five songs – Bo Diddley\u2019s \u2018Diddley Daddy\u2019 and \u2018Road Runner\u2019, Jimmy Reed\u2019s \u2018Bright Lights, Big City\u2019 and \u2018Honey What\u2019s Wrong?\u2019, and Muddy Waters\u2019 \u2018I Want To Be Loved\u2019 – at the instigation of Glyn Johns, a friend of Ian Stewart\u2019s, lead singer of south London R&B group the Presidents, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-rb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions\/24"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johnpidgeon.com\/words\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}