The Night the Rollin' Stones Took the Stage
On July 12, 1962, a little-known blues band filled in at London's Marquee Club — and the Rolling Stones played their very first gig.
The Marquee Club on Oxford Street was one of London's temples of jazz and blues. On the evening of July 12, 1962, the regular Thursday headliners, Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated, couldn't play — Korner had been booked for a BBC radio show. In their place stepped a band almost nobody had heard of, a handful of young men who had been rehearsing in a Soho pub. They billed themselves, on the poster and in the music press, as "the Rollin' Stones."
The lineup that night looked nothing like the Stones the world would come to know. Mick Jagger sang, Keith Richards and Brian Jones — Jones introduced under the stage name Elmo Lewis — played guitar, Ian Stewart was on piano, and Dick Taylor, who would later find fame with the Pretty Things, played bass. Who sat at the drums is one of rock's small unsolved mysteries: both Tony Chapman and Mick Avory, who later joined the Kinks, have been named as the drummer, and the accounts differ to this day.
The name came from their hero, the bluesman Muddy Waters, and his song "Rollin' Stone." Jones, Stewart, Jagger, Richards and Taylor were all in their early twenties, united by an obsession with American rhythm and blues. They were raw, loud, and completely unknown — a band filling in for a band, playing covers of the blues records they loved.
Within months, the pieces fell into place. Bill Wyman joined on bass in December 1962, and Charlie Watts — who had been sitting in with Blues Incorporated at the Marquee — became the band's permanent drummer in early 1963, making his first public appearance with the group that January. In May 1963 they signed manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and Stewart, deemed to not match the band's image, moved to road manager and touring keyboardist. The rest is legend: "Satisfaction," "Sympathy for the Devil," stadium tours, and more than six decades as rock's most durable institution.
On the band's 50th anniversary in 2012, Jagger, Richards, Watts and Ronnie Wood returned to the Marquee to pose for photographs where it all began. The poster for that 1962 gig read "the Rollin' Stones." They added the "g" soon after — and the world added the rest: the Greatest Rock 'n' Roll Band in the World, born on a Thursday night as a favor to a friend.
Photo: Los Angeles Times, CC BY 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).