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through his harmonica, his hoarse vocal passing through the metal instrument, honing his voice like a razor so it hit the microphone with an extra metallic slash. Brian’s future as a bluesman was settled that night.
    He kept scuffling, working as a bus conductor in Cheltenham and other jobs. He and Hattrell moved in with some art students, and soon Pat Andrews was pregnant. Brian started seeing other girls. Their son was born in October 1961, and Brian named him Julian, after his jazz hero Julian “Cannonball” Adderley. He tried to visit Pat and the baby every day until her furious mother started beating him over the head with her umbrella when he showed up.
    In December 1961, on a long English winter night just before Christmas, Chris Barber’s band was playing Cheltenham Town Hall. For over a year, they’d been playing at the famous Marquee Club in Soho every week, with Alexis Korner and Cyril Davies doing electric blues between Barber’s sets. Brian went with Pat and Dick and was mind-blown by the Korner-Davies blues set. He used his local musician’s street cred to get backstage, and charmed Alexis into a private drink at the Patio Wine Bar across the road after he dumped Pat at home and got his guitar.
    Brian connected with his future mentor in the back room. Korner knew what time it was, saw a glimmer of what was coming, gave Brian Jones his phone number and address, and invited him to London. He and Cyril were leaving Chris Barber to put their own blues band together, and maybe this kid could help.
    Brian and Pat visited London in early January 1962, and Brian spent several days listening to Alexis’s record collection. Rock music’s equivalent of St. Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus occurred when Brian first heard Elmore James’s stunning electric slide guitar version of “Dust My Broom.” It was raw, soulful, and charged like a shot of battery acid. Jesus! Back in Cheltenham, Brian borrowed enough to buy a cheap electric pickup for his guitar. Unable to afford an amp, he converted a German tape recorder and ran the guitar through the speaker. He made a bottleneck slide and spent the next months obsessively listening to blues jams and learning the slide. By March, he could make his guitar whine like a tigress in heat.
    That’s when he saw the little ad in the London music paper
Jazz News
for Alexis Korner’s new band, Blues Incorporated. “The Most Exciting Event of the Year.” And it gave directions: Ealing Broadway Station. Turn left, cross the zebra (pedestrian stripes), and go down the steps between ABC Teashop and the jeweler’s. Saturday at 7:30 P.M.
    That morning, Brian hitched to London. It was March 17, 1962.

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    Charlie Boy
    Alexis Korner needed a drummer to form a Chicago-style R&B group. He found one playing cool jazz in a Knightsbridge coffeehouse, the Troubadour.
    Charlie Watts.
    His family called him Charlie Boy. He was born in 1941 in North London as the bombs were falling, the only child of a lorry driver for the railroad. The family moved to Wembley after the war, when the now-crowded London suburb was still farmland. Charlie grew to be a shy, unassuming teenager: focused, hardworking, short of stature, somewhat pampered by his parents. He lived at home until well into his twenties, and his father bought his clothes for him.
    When he was ten, Charlie heard Earl Bostic’s “Flamingo” on the radio, and it woke him up. The next year, he heard Chico Hamilton playing drums on Gerry Mulligan’s “Walkin’ Shoes” and started beating on pots and pans. His first instrument, a banjo, he bought himself at fourteen. He took it apart, converted the banjo body into a snare drum, and built a stand out of a Meccano kit (called an Erector set in the United States). In 1955, his parents bought him his first drum set for Christmas, and Charlie began playing along to jazz records. He hated rock and roll;