Free Old Gods Almost Dead by Stephen Davis

Vox AC-30 amp, which is the biggest fuckin’ amp we’ve ever seen in our lives. And that’s
spare
! He says, ’You can put one of your guitars through there.’
Whew.
Put us up quite a few volts goin’ through that thing.
    â€œHe had the bass together already, because he’d been playing in terrible, shitty rock bands for a few years. He’s older than us; he knows how to play.”
    After they jammed for a while, Bill stood them a round of drinks and offered cigarettes. “These were jumped on,” he says, “like I was offering famine relief.” Still, Brian and Keith were cool, distant. Mick asked Bill if he knew any music by the Chicago bluesmen, and Bill replied that all he knew was Chuck Berry and Fats Domino. Bill said he didn’t know Bo Diddley’s stuff, drawing eye-rolling contempt from Brian and Keith.
    But at the end of the day, they invited Bill back to their next rehearsal and somehow manipulated him into leaving his amps and gear in the front room of their lair in Edith Grove. Bill was appalled by the scene he found there—filth, old food and dirty socks strewn about, tubercular damp walls smelling of stale grease and poverty—but despite their misgivings about him, Bill Wyman was about to become a Rollin’ Stone. Ian Stewart recalled, “There’s a certain amount of truth in the old story about Bill being taken on because he had a few amplifiers. But remember, Bill was
very
good.”
    Hard-core Stones fans still call Bill the luckiest man in the world.

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    Swinging London
    If timing is everything, the Rollin’ Stones certainly picked the perfect moment. “It began in 1963,” wrote Philip Larkin, quintessential poet of midcentury British angst, and by “it” Larkin meant the generational shift and daring pop experiments that made the stodgy gray kingdom blossom with art, wit, style, and hype that year. A manic new energy emerged as the generation born during the war remade British culture in its own image, an image broadcast to the wider world via music and design. “Swinging London” was the catchphrase for what happened in the capital in the early sixties. When the Stones burst out of their isolation into a rhythm and blues cult, they became among Swinging London’s most famous avatars.
    The only significant postwar English art movement until then had been the so-called Angry Young Men, the name loosely applied to a number of playwrights and novelists in the mid-1950s whose politically radical or anarchic work depicted existential alienation and malaise. The archetype emerged from director Tony Richardson’s discovery of playwright John Osborne, whose
Look Back in Anger
pulled British theater into the twentieth century. Angry Young Men were portrayed by a new group of actors—Richard Burton, Laurence Harvey, Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde—in a new cycle of movies that dealt with the harsh realities of postwar British life:
Room at the Top, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, A Taste of Honey,
and later
The Servant.
In some ways, with their dark looks, foreign music, and threatening sexuality amid the sunny, unisex pop of early Swinging London, the Rollin’ Stones might have been England’s last Angry Young Men.
    Angry Young heroes included fashion photographers, among the first sixties Englishmen to merge technology with style and get their work published widely. And then there were the Angry Young gangsters, tough East End hoodlums in sharp suits and flattened noses who operated in the underworld of gambling, extortion, leg-breaking and show business, owning and managing nightclubs. The masters of this world were the notorious Kray twins, Reg and Ron, whose sadistic and (closeted) homosexual crew of thugs controlled Plutonian activities in London after dark. The Krays in turn inspired a younger generation of petty criminals, drug dealers, and goons who became known as Chelsea