Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis

his lips. They were full-fledged, pouty,
serious
lips, and he kept licking them between verses, diminutive flicks of the tongue. All this got noticed. Cyril Davies called him “Marilyn Monroe” behind his back, and there was no doubt that at age nineteen Mick was already bringing an ironic, “camp” sensibility to his delivery of the songs.
    The Ealing crowd never saw Keith without Mick. Keith was the sidekick, the interior of Mick’s outgoing persona. When Mick got onstage to sing, Keith stood in the shadows, waiting for his turn. Then Mick brought Keith on to rock the house with Chuck Berry’s “Around and Around,” annoying Cyril Davies, who hated rock and roll. Davies refused to even speak to Keith, who didn’t care because he in turn hated Blues Incorporated. To Keith, they were just a dreary bunch of middle-aged men. Keith was into the mating dance of rock and roll, not the weary fatalism of the older blues guys.
    Then a serious buzz began about Mick, the new face in town. The weekly music paper
Disc,
May 19, 1962: “A nineteen-year-old Dartford rhythm and blues singer, Mick Jagger, has joined the Alexis Korner group, Blues Incorporated, and will sing with them regularly on their Saturday dates at Ealing and their Thursday sessions at the Marquee Jazz Club, London.” As the Ealing Club caught on, a few trendy types began to show up, the hipper fringe of Swinging London slumming in Ealing. Alexis saw Mick going down well with the girls, so he started bringing him along to sing at the debutante parties Alexis was hired to entertain. This was Blues Incorporated as a society band, though without Charlie, who couldn’t be bothered.
    This was also Mick’s entrée into posh society; at the deb parties, he met London’s
jeunesse dorée,
young members of the aristocracy and rich families—the Honorable This, Lady Arabella That, the legendary Tara Browne, Guinnesses, Tennants, Ormsby-Gores—with whom he happily hung out (“That’s where we met all our friends,” he claimed years later). It was a giant step up in the stratified English class system from his roots in petit-bourgeois exurbia.
    Brian Jones was also very much part of the scene at Ealing and the increasingly clamorous Thursday nights at the Marquee, where the customers had started dancing on the tables. He turned Charlie Watts on to Robert Johnson’s just-released posthumous compilation album,
King of the Delta Blues Singers.
But soon Pat Andrews arrived with baby Julian in tow and sent Brian into shock by moving in with him. So Brian took a job in a department store while Pat worked in a laundry. Brian was quickly fired for stealing, and the young couple was evicted. Brian found a flat in Notting Hill Gate and another job in another store. He got fired from that, too, for stealing.
    Brain was determined to have his own R&B band and kept hustling. In May 1962, he advertised for R&B musicians in
Jazz News,
rehearsals to begin in the back room of a pub in Leicester Square. One of the first to answer the ad was an older guy: a brawny, unhip, geezer-type Scot named Ian Stewart.
    Stu, as he was known, was born in Scotland in 1938. The family moved to suburban London when he was a baby, and Stu grew up playing the piano in the parlor. Drafted in 1956, he was released for medical reasons and took a clerical job with a chemical company. He’d been to Ealing a couple of times, had seen Brian play, but was a bit chagrined when he showed up at the White Bear pub and found that Brian was into small group Chicago blues. Stu was a committed boogie-woogie piano scholar, who’d started out admiring white swing bands and then discovered old “barrelhouse” players Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson, whose boogie piano duets he found “very moving.” Stu liked the big American R&B ensembles of the early fifties—Louis Jordan and Wynonie Harris—where the piano played eight to