Exactly 49 years ago the Rolling Stones, billed as Mick Jagger and the Rollin' Stones, performed for the first time ever, at the Marquee International Jazz Club, London. Keith Richards:
"A gig! Alexis Korner's band was booked to do a BBC live broadcast on July 12, 1962, and he'd asked us if we'd fill in for him at the Marquee. The drummer that night was Mick Avory - not Tony Chapman, as history has mysteriously handed it down - and Dick Taylor on the bass. The core Stones, Mick, Brian and I, played our set list: "Dust My Broom", "Baby What's Wrong?", "Doing The Crawdaddy", "Confessin' The Blues", "Got My Mojo Working".
You're sitting with some guys, and you're playing and you go, "Ooh, yeah!". That feeling is worth more than anything. There's a certain moment when you realize that you've actually just left the planet for a bit and that nobody can touch you. You're elevated because you're with a bunch of guys that want to do the same thing as you. And when it works, baby, you've got wings. You know you've been somewhere most people will never get; you 've been to a special place. And then you want to keep going back and landing again, and when you land you get busted. But you always want to go back there. It's flying without a license".
Source: Keith Richards, Life, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010.
In this little exerpt from his autobio, Keith names all musicians who performed at the Marquee that night, exept for one...Ian Stewart. Keith not even mentions Stu as a core Stone...of course he knows better, which he shows a little bit further on in the book. To be continued.
During their debut gig at the Marquee, the Stones played as supporting act to Long John Baldry's Kansas City Blues Band. Therefore it's very unlikely that the band played the 18 songs as shown in Roy Carr's 1976 book "The Rolling Stones. An Illustrated Record".
ReplyDeleteThe song list, derived from Ian Stewart's 1962 diary, most probably reflects (a part of) the band's early repertoire, rather than the actual set of their first show.
Songlist: Kansas City (Leiber-Stoller)/Baby What's Wrong (Dixon)/Confessin' The Blues (Brown-McShann)/Bright Lights, Big City (Reed-Reed)/Dust My Blues (James)/Down The Road Apiece (Ray)/I'm A Love You (Reed)/Bad Boy (Taylor)/I Ain't Got You (Arnold)/Hush-Hush (Reed)/Ride 'Em On Down (Taylor)/Back In The USA (Berry)/Kind Of Lonesome (Reed)/Blues Before Sunrise (Carr)/Big Boss Man (Smith-Dixon)/Don't Stay Out All Night (Arnold)/Tell Me You Love Me (Smith-Reed)/Happy Home (James).
Adapted from the following (wonderful) sources:
Felix Aeppli, The Ultimate Guide to the Rolling Stones (http://aeppli.ch/tug.htm)
Nico Zentgraf, The Complete Works Website (http://www.nzentgraf.de/).