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The Rolling Stones · S1 E2
Alexis Korner
The godfather of British blues runs a club in Ealing. Mick sings there, Keith plays guitar, and they meet a blond guitarist from Cheltenham who calls himself Elmo Lewis. His real name is Brian Jones
Spring 1962, a basement beneath a bakery in Ealing, West London. A blond kid from Cheltenham plugs in a guitar, introduces himself as Elmo Lewis, and plays slide blues so convincing that everyone in the room assumes he grew up in the American South.
The Rolling Stones, Paint It Black. Brian Jones picks up a sitar in the studio and plays a riff that nobody in rock music has heard before. This is the sound of the kid who walked into the Ealing Club calling himself Elmo Lewis: give him any instrument and he finds a way to make it unforgettable.
The Godfather of British Blues
Alexis Korner is the reason any of this happens. Born in Paris to an Austrian-Turkish father and a Greek mother, he becomes obsessed with American blues and starts the first electric blues band in Britain: Blues Incorporated. He opens the Ealing Jazz Club in March 1962, and within weeks it becomes the only place in London where you can hear Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf played live.
Sources
Brunning, Bob. "Blues: The British Connection." Blandford Press, 1986.
Norman, Philip. "The Stones." Elm Tree Books, 1984.
“He was playing Elmore James. The real thing. I thought, who is this cat?”
— Keith Richards on first hearing Brian Jones, in Richards, Keith. "Life." Little, Brown and Company, 2010
TAP TO REVEAL: Why did Brian Jones call himself Elmo Lewis?
The Ealing Jazz Club
42a The Broadway, Ealing, London W5. The basement beneath an ABC bakery where Alexis Korner opened Britain's first electric blues club on St Patrick's Day, 1962.
No Expectations -- The Rolling Stones
From Beggars Banquet (1968). Brian Jones plays acoustic slide guitar on this track, and it is one of the most beautiful recordings in the Stones' catalogue. The gentle, weeping bottleneck is the same sound that stunned a room full of blues musicians at the Ealing Club six years earlier.
Which future supergroup members played in Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated?
Brian Jones doesn't want to play blues in someone else's club. He wants his own band, he has already picked the name from a Muddy Waters track listing, and the ad he places in Jazz News will change everything.
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