Fact #90065

Mick Jagger (vocalist, Rolling Stones) : I wasn't totally committed; it was a good, fun thing to do, but Keith and Brian didn't have anything else to do, so they wanted to rehearse all the time. I liked to rehearse once a week and do a show Saturday. The show that we did was three or four numbers, so there wasn't a tremendous amount of rehearsal needed.

Keith Richards (guitarist, Rolling Stones) : We didn't dare (gig yet). We were rehearsing drummers. Mick Avory came by, the drummer of The Kinks. He was terrible, then. Couldn't find that off beat. Couldn't pick up on that Jimmy Reed stuff.... (It was) just Mick and myself and Brian (and Stu). We knew Charlie. He was a friend. He was gigging at the time, playing with Alexis. He was Korner's drummer. We couldn't afford him. One day we picked up a drummer called Tony Chapman who was our first regular drummer. Terrible. One of the worst... cat would start a number and end up either four times as fast as he started it or three times as slow.

Pat Andrews (girlfriend of Brian Jones) : They were rehearsing in the Bricklayers Arms. Mick Avory or Carlo Little was on drums, I can't remember who. Dick Taylor was there and Brian Knight, too. They were doing this song and Mick was playing the harmonica. Brian was never the kind of person who would turn round and say, 'You're rubbish.' He just pulled his harmonica out of his pocket and said, 'Mick, I think you should play it this way.' I'll never forget the look on Mick's face. It was like, 'Oh, shit. What else can this guy do?'

Brian Jones (guitarist, Rolling Stones) : We knew all along, you see. The blues was real. We only had to persuade people to listen to the music, and they couldn't help but be turned on to all those great old blues cats. I'd been through the jazz scene, and I knew that it had to die because it was so full of crap and phony musicians who could hardly play their instruments. And Keith knew a bit about the ordinary pop scene, so he knew what a lot of rubbish that was.

Dick Taylor (guitarist) : Brian at that time had a certain amount of moodiness about him but also a brilliant sense of humour and enthusiasm. He was very encouraging about my bass playing which was nice as I only started to play the bass in order to work with the band and was quite unsure of my own ability on it. Both Keith and myself had a lot of respect for his musical abilities, which were quite a bit ahead of our own. We, and Mick, tried to steer things a bit more into the Chuck and Bo areas than maybe Brian wanted.

Phil May (vocalist, Pretty Things) : Another thing about Brian was he thought everybody had joined "his" band. One thing he always said to me when he really got buried under was The Rolling Stones were actually his band.

Keith Richards (guitarist, Rolling Stones) : Brian was into one kind of blues. Although he'd heard Chuck Berry, he had never heard the kind of stuff WE were into... We laid Slim Harpo on him, and Fred McDowell. Because Brian was from Cheltenham, a very genteel town full of old ladies, where it used to be fashionable to go and take the baths once a year at Cheltenham Spa. The water is very good because it comes out of the hills, it's spring water. It's a Regency thing, you know, Beau Brummell, around that time. Turn of the 19th century. Now it's a seedy sort of place full of aspirations to be an aristocratic town. It rubs off on anyone who comes from there... Brian would never even listen to Jimmy Reed (when we met him), and hardly any of Muddy Waters' electric stuff. We turned him on to Jimmy Reed and Bo Diddley. He was into guys like Sunnyland Slim and Tampa Red. Elmore James was about as far down the road as he'd gone with electric blues.

Paul Jones (singer, Manfred Mann] : He was very diligent. Once he got into something he wanted to do he went for it. I used to play harp in first position all the time. I wasn't any good at bending notes. I could only really do the Jimmy Reed top end stuff. It was Brian who showed me quite early on how to do cross harp and other positions.

Keith Richards : We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters. I mean, we were carrying flags, idealistic teenage sort of shit: No way we think anybody is really going to seriously listen to us. As long as we can get a few people interested in listening to the shit we think they ought to listen to - which is very elitist and arrogant, to think you can tell other people what to listen to, but that was our aim, to turn people onto the blues. If we could turn them on to Muddy and Jimmy Reed and Howlin' Wolf and John Lee Hooker, then our job was done... We thought, sure, we'd love to make records, but we're not in that league. We wanted to sell records for Jimmy Reed, Muddy, John Lee Hooker. We were disciples - if we could turn people on to that, then that was enough. That was the total original aim.