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Jazz Federation’s circuit of clubs and was bluntly told to get lost. The excuse was “acoustic only,” but this was war. If blues got big in England, the jazz clubs would go out of business. Money, jobs, and prestige were at stake, and so the jazzers tried to suppress Korner’s new movement. It provoked a lot of bitterness in London over the next two years.
    Finally Korner found the dank underground barroom down piss-smelling stairs under a tea shop at the end of a tube line in the western London suburb of Ealing. They set it up as a club, strung a tarp under the skylight to keep the stage from flooding when it rained, and charged five shillings membership admission. The Ealing Club could hold about two hundred.
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â 
    March 17, 1962 . Blues Incorporated made its debut with eight musicians: Korner on guitar, Davies on harp, Watts on drums, jazz guy Dick Heckstall-Smith on sax, plus bass and piano. There were two singers: Long John Baldry, a tall and blustery young blues shouter, and Art Wood, a softer vocalist in the Mose Allison style. Starting at about eight o’clock on Saturday night, they played electric blues for a small group of fans. Attracted by the
Jazz News
ad, Brian Jones showed up with his friend Paul Pond, whose blues group Brian had briefly joined in Oxford.
    Brian had his guitar and asked Alexis if he could sit in with the band. “Not tonight, mate,” Korner said. “Come back next week and you’re on.”
    Brian was back the following Saturday, March 24. There had been a good review about the new blues club in that week’s
Melody Maker,
and this time they got a good crowd. “Thank you very much,” Korner said after finishing his version of “Hoochie Coochie Man.” “Now we have a visitor who’s come all the way from Cheltenham, and he’s going to play some bottleneck guitar with us. Please give a warm welcome to . . .” Korner had forgotten the stage name Brian wanted him to say.
    â€œElmo Lewis,”
whispered Brian.
    â€œTo Elmo Lewis! Take it away, Elmo!”
    And Brian ripped into the clarion riff of his hero Elmore James’s take on Robert Johnson’s old “Dust My Broom,” and the room started rocking as Charlie Watts clicked in, and it was groove city. The humid, beer-soaked old drinking club gave off a solid juke-joint ambience, Brian looked great in his turtleneck sweater under a sports jacket, his short blond hair cut like jazz star Gerry Mulligan’s, and the piercing sting of the slide guitar cut through the cigarette smoke like a rusty blade. It was that weird, slithery diddley-bow African delta sound, an echo of hypnotic country blues.
    Bill Wyman: “Brian was the first person in England to play bottleneck guitar, when
nobody
knew what it was.”
    And watching intently, standing in the back of the crowd, were three young blues fans who had come up from Dartford, Kent, on the bus and the tube. They couldn’t take their eyes off Elmo Lewis, this guitar prodigy almost exactly their own age, maybe just a year older. They had their own amateur blues band back in Dartford, these kids: Mike Jagger, Keith Richards, and Dick Taylor. They were all eighteen years old.

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    Mike
    Dartford is an ancient town southeast of London in Kent, a rest stop on the old pilgrims’ road to Canterbury. Suburban now, back then it was a sleepy mix of housing, fields, marshland, and factories.
    Michael Philip Jagger, “Mike” to his mates, was born there in July 1943. His father, Basil “Joe” Jagger, was a serious, athletic northerner from a Baptist family in Yorkshire. Mike’s mother, Eva Scutts, was born in Australia and came to England as a child. They married in 1940 as the Blitzkrieg was starting. Mike was the first son, joined by brother Chris four years later. Joe Jagger worked as a physical education teacher.