Mick Jagger. Philip Norman

its B-side was called ‘Stoned’, which in America meant drunk. It had then been rereleased, coupled with ‘Not Fade Away’, but even in a market supposedly ravenous for all British bands had barely scraped into Billboard magazine’s Top 50.

      Thanks to Andrew Oldham, their transatlantic hosts had been primed to welcome them like a new strain of herpes. ‘Americans, brace yourselves!’ warned the flash circulated to newspapers and broadcast media by the Associated Press. ‘In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting Britons is on the way . . . dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles . . .’ The Fab Four had flown off, carrying the whole nation’s hopes and even prayers like Neville Chamberlain bound for Munich or a Test cricket team for Australasia. Before the Stones left Heathrow Airport on 1 June an MP in the House of Commons expressed fears that they might do real harm to Anglo-American relations.

      Even with this advance word-of-badmouth, it proved impossible for Oldham to whip up any major media coverage on the American side. Turndowns came from the NBC and CBS TV networks and, most slightingly, from The Ed Sullivan Show, which had clinched the Beatles’ conquest by beaming them to a national audience of more than 70 million. Paradoxically, the splashiest print coverage came from a quarter not normally interested in dirtiness and scruffiness – Vogue magazine. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue’s American edition, agreed to publish a David Bailey photograph of Mick that every British magazine had rejected, despite never having heard of him or his band. ‘I don’t care who he is,’ she told Bailey. ‘He looks great, so I’ll run it.’

      While calling the Stones ‘scruffier and seedier than the Beatles’, Vogue summed them up more pithily than any UK publication thus far, and with a hint of ladylike moist gussets that probably did Mick’s image more good in the long run than NBC, CBS and Ed Sullivan put together: ‘To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger, one of the five Rolling Stones, those singers [sic] who will set out to cross America by bandwagon in June. For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his teammates. To women he’s fascinating, to men a scare . . .’

      Since the Beatles’ reception by three thousand banner-waving fans, spilling over observation terraces and buckling plate-glass windows, the arrival of British pop bands at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport had become a routine story to the city’s media. For the Stones, London Records laid on a markedly cut-price version of the now-familiar procedure, enlisting a few dozen teenage girls to scream dutifully as the band descended the aircraft steps after their economy-class flight, hiring a couple of Old English sheepdogs to represent kindred spirits, and providing a cake for Charlie Watts’s twenty-third birthday. At the press conference which followed, there was surprise, even some disappointment, when they proved to be politer and better spoken than most of the invaders who had come before. Who was the leader? one reporter asked. ‘We are . . . all of us,’ Mick lisped in his best LSE accent, without a frisson of Cockney.

      The Beatles had spent their first New York landfall with their manager and considerable retinue in interconnecting luxury suites at the top of Manhattan’s grandest hotel, the Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The Stones spent theirs at the far-from-grand Hotel Astor in Times Square, bunking two to a poky room with their retinue (i.e., roadie Ian Stewart). To save money – an urgent consideration throughout the tour – Oldham slept on the office sofa of his friend and role model, Phil Spector.

      Once his charges had checked into the Astor (which, miraculously, offered no objection), Oldham managed to feed the British press a story that, in true Beatle style, they had caused riots in midtown Manhattan and were imprisoned in their hotel by shrieking mobs. Unfortunately, agency photos which arrived home at the same time showed them exploring the Times Square district without a single hysteric in sight.

      That is not to say that they went unnoticed. They had come to a land where every ‘manly’ man, from President Lyndon Johnson downwards, had hair cropped as close to the scalp as a convict’s but for a little toothbrushlike crest. The Beatles had been let off their hair because of some vague correlation with British classical theatre – Laurence Olivier as Richard III or Hamlet. But Rolling Stone hair meant only homosexuality, which – save in certain enlightened parts of Greenwich Village – was regarded as even more unnatural and detestable than it was in Britain. What should have been a magical first experience of New York for Mick and the others was marred by the typically forthright comments of passing New Yorkers: ‘Ya fuckin’ faggot!’ or ‘Look at that goddamn faggot!’ The fact that to English ears faggot still meant a rissole, or meat patty, did not make the experience any pleasanter.

      The city’s welcome grew several degrees warmer after they met up with Murray ‘the K’ Kaufman, the WINS radio deejay who had generated huge publicity for his show, and himself, by hooking onto the Beatles back in February. Now he adopted the Stones in the same way, escorting them to nightspots like the Peppermint Lounge – where the Twist had been born and was now in its death throes – and introducing them to useful New York music-biz cronies like Bob Crewe, songwriter and producer to the Four Seasons.

      The Stones privately thought Murray the K a ludicrous figure, but he did do them one huge favour. It happened at a party at Crewe’s apartment, in a gloomy Central Parkside pile known as the Dakota where, sixteen years later, the Beatles’ story would come to a horrific full stop. During the evening, Murray gave Andrew Oldham an R&B single, ‘It’s All Over Now’, written by Sam Cooke’s guitarist Bobby Womack and recorded by Womack and his three brothers as the Valentinos. It would be a perfect song for the Stones to cover, the deejay insisted. And the rights could be picked up here in New York from Womack’s manager, an accountant-turned-pop impresario named Allen Klein.

      For Mick and Keith, the main point of being in New York was to visit the Apollo Theater, Harlem’s famous showplace for black music, which had launched the careers of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder among many others. Harlem was still a no-go area for unaccompanied whites, so they had to ask Ronnie Spector of the Ronettes – on whom Keith still had a huge crush – to be their guide. Because of the difficulty of getting cabs back to Midtown late at night, which, anyway, they couldn’t afford, they had to sleep on the floor at Ronnie’s mother’s apartment in Spanish Harlem. In the morning, she would cook them bacon and eggs, and they would thank her with punctilious good manners.

      To add to the thrill, it happened to be James Brown Week at the Apollo. Known as ‘the Godfather of Soul’, Brown had a mesmerising stage act that combined R&B and soul with Barnum-esque showmanship: backed by his vocal group the Famous Flames, he never stopped moving for a second, boogieing as if on an invisible Travelator (two decades before Michael Jackson’s Moonwalk), hurling himself onto his knees or into the splits, finally suffering a make-believe seizure, when two minders would rush from the wings, wrap him in a cloak and half carry him away. Four or five of these operatic cardiac arrests would be simulated before the curtain finally fell.

      Such was Mick’s awe of the Godfather that he never had covered any of Brown’s great showstoppers: not ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag’, or ‘Please Please Please’ or even ‘It’s a Man’s Man’s World’, much as he might applaud the sentiment. Now, in the Apollo’s marijuana-scented dark, he took careful note of every dance move Brown made, to be practised later in front of a full-length mirror. When Ronnie sneaked him and Keith into Brown’s dressing room, he beheld an almost monarchical figure, surrounded by servants and sycophants, who took care of business as assiduously as he did music, watched every penny and imposed strict discipline on his musicians, fining anyone who was late or went onstage with dirty shoes. Here, too, were important lessons for the future.

      From New York, the Stones flew to Los Angeles to make their one nationwide TV appearance. This was not on a prestigious show like Ed Sullivan’s, but Hollywood Palace, a mixed-bag variety programme emceed that week by Dean Martin. When they turned up at the studio, the producer was aghast that they weren’t in matching suits and, unavailingly, offered them money to go out and buy some. They did not meet the great ‘Dino’ himself during rehearsals, when a stand-in was used; only during transmission did they realise they had been set up as stooges to their host’s boozy