circa 1962

The embryonic Rolling Stones were formed in June 1962 when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Dick Taylor’s three-piece group Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys joined forces with slide guitarist Brian Jones and keyboardist Ian ‘Stu’ Stewart, brought together by their enthusiasm for the nascent London blues scene that was coalescing around Alexis Korner and his Blues Incorporated. Guitarist Dick Taylor, who had been playing with Mick since grammar school, had encouraged Keith to come along to their rehearsals when the two first met at art college, however it was a fateful reunion between childhood friends Mick and Keith on a train platform in October 1961 that really brought the original trio together. ‘Mick had been singin’ with some rock and roll bands, doin’ Buddy Holly,’ Keith told Rolling Stone magazine in 1971. ‘He found out that I could play a little, and he could sing a bit… and he also knew Dick Taylor from another school they’d gone to, and the thing tied up, so we’d try and do something. We’d all go to Dick Taylor’s house, in his back room, and we’d try to lay some of this Little Walter stuff and Chuck Berry stuff… Just two guitars and a little amplifier.’

The new alliance saw Taylor switch from guitar to bass to accommodate Brian, who would rapidly develop a unique synchronicity with Keith that the pair called ‘guitar weaving’, where they would alternate between lead and rhythm guitar. According to Taylor, this increased ‘firepower’ in the sound meant that the band urgently needed more powerful amplifiers. The band were scraping by with amps the size of transistor radios - Brian and Dick sharing a small green Elpico AC-55, while Keith used a Selmer Little Giant that the group nicknamed the ‘Mighty Midget’. Perhaps inspired by Korner, who was pictured plugging into a Harmony amp during Mick’s short stint as a vocalist for Blues Incorporated in May 1962, the band opted for a pair of new Harmony 300 Series model H306 amplifiers, each with four inputs, six tubes, 12-inch Jensen speakers on large angled baffles, and built-in tremolo circuits. Taylor recalls: ‘One day Brian showed up with a couple of Harmony amplifiers, and that helped us get the right sound. Not long after Brian appeared with the Harmony amps, he got sacked from his job at a London department store for pilfering from the till – I guess that’s how we got the Harmonies.’ Interviewed for Guitar Player magazine in November 1977, Keith gave a different account as to how the amplifiers arrived in the Stones camp: ‘As far as anything recognisable as an amp would go, when we started playing gigs, we managed to talk Mick’s father into forking out some bread for a couple of Harmonys. They were the first amps we had.’

Surviving photographs of the band’s first ever gig at the Marquee Club in London on Thursday 12 July 1962 – billed as ‘the Rollin' Stones’ after a favourite Muddy Waters song – appear to show Keith playing his blonde Gallotone Valencia archtop through one of the band’s new Harmony amps. The newly formed Stones had lucked out when Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated was booked for the BBC radio show Jazz Club, leaving an open slot for their Thursday night residency at the Marquee. Ian Stuart’s diary records that the set for the Stones’ historic debut included Jimmy Reed’s Bright Lights, Big City, Chuck Berry’s Down the Road Apiece and Confessin’ the Blues, and Elmore James’ Dust My Blues. Although Jazz News reported that the line-up included future Kinks member Mick Avory on drums, others recall that the drummer that night was Tony Chapman, who certainly played with the band for a period of time following the Marquee gig. It would be six months before the Stones could persuade Blues Incorporated drummer Charlie Watts to join their ranks.

According to Taylor, the band used the Harmony amps throughout the latter part of 1962 as they began to get regular bookings at both the Marquee and Ealing Jazz Club. Interviewed in 2009 for Andy Babiuk and Greg Prevost’s Rolling Stones Gear, the band’s Edith Grove flatmate James Phelge confirms ‘the guys were using small Harmony amps in late ‘62. Always breaking down.’ As the only professional amplifiers that the band owned at the time, it's almost certain that the two Harmony amps were used for the Rolling Stones’ first recording session at Curly Clayton Sound Studios on 27 October 1962, when the group recorded three demo tracks – Soon Forgotten, Close Together, and You Can't Judge A Book – that would ultimately be rejected by both EMI and Decca. By the end of the year, Taylor would leave the band for art college, to be replaced by bassist Bill Wyman, who by all accounts was initially hired for his Vox AC-30 amplifier. The group began to gather a substantial following after Charlie Watts finally completed the classic Stones’ line-up in mid-January 1963, playing regular slots at Ealing Jazz Club, the Red Lion, the Flamingo, the Ricky Tick Club, the Harringay Jazz Club, Ken Coyler’s Studio 51, Eel Pie Island, and the Station Hotel in Richmond, soon to known as the Crawdaddy Club after the Stones’ set closer – a 20-minute version of Bo Diddley’s Doin’ The Crawdaddy. ‘That was it. When we got Charlie, that really made it for us,’ Keith told the Us magazine Special Report on the Rolling Stones in 1981. ‘We started getting a lot of gigs. Then we got that Richmond gig with Giorgio Gomelsky and that built up to an enormous scene. In London, that was the place to be every Sunday night. At the Richmond Station Hotel.’

Within two months of taking up the Sunday night residency at Giorgio Gomelsky’s Station Hotel on 24 February 1963, word had spread about the hot new rhythm and blues group and the place was packed. ‘Crowds of 200 at Richmond were soon the norm,’ Bill remembers in his 2002 book Rolling With The Stones. ‘The excitement in that place was electric… Our spell there, more than anywhere else, gave us the motivation to take on the world.’ Regular bookings allowed the band to begin upgrading their instruments – Keith would play his new Harmony Meteor H70 guitar through this Harmony H306 amplifier, while Brian would play his new Harmony Stratotone Mars through the second Harmony amp or Bill’s Vox AC-30. It’s reasonable to assume that either Keith or Brian used this amp for the Stones’ first professional recording with Bill and Charlie at IBC Studios on 11 March 1963, when the band recorded five tracks from their current stage repertoire with engineer Glyn Johns. The unreleased recording would be shelved when the band signed with Decca eight weeks later.

Presumably photographed during the band’s performance at the Station Hotel on Sunday 7 April 1963, Keith was pictured using this amplifier alongside the first ever newspaper review of the band in the Richmond and Twickenham Times on 13 April 1963 – the specific amp definitively identifiable by the distinctive weave pattern of the grille cloth. The Beatles would famously swing by the Crawdaddy the following night to check out the Stones’ set – the first time the two bands would meet. The following Sunday 21 April 1963, the Stones performed Bo Diddley’s Pretty Thing to an empty club for an unreleased documentary film Gomelsky was shooting about the London R&B scene. Although the film has been lost, a surviving contact sheet from the shoot reveals several shots of Keith plugged into the Harmony amplifier. Wielding his Harmony Meteor, Keith is most clearly seen using this amp - with its distinctive grille – in a superb Dezo Hoffman photograph of the six-piece Stones on stage at the Crawdaddy in late April, around the time that they were spotted and swiftly signed up to a management contract with Andrew Loog Oldham. The photo was published alongside an early review in the 11 May 1963 edition of Record Mirror, in which journalist Norman Jopling predicted that ‘the Rollin’ Stones are destined to be the biggest group in the R & B scene.’ By 4 May 1963, a matter of days before the Stones would sign with Decca, Keith and Brian were seen playing through black Vox AC-30 Twin amps at the News of the World charity gala at Battersea Pleasure Gardens, having outgrown the Harmony H306 amplifiers.

Not long after leaving the Stones, Dick Taylor formed the Pretty Things with Phil May and made a deal to purchase the two retired Harmony amplifiers from his old bandmates. They became the principal amps for the emerging Pretty Things until replaced by Vox AC-30s when the band’s first hit record came out in early 1964. ‘The Harmony amps were still occasionally used for recording and rehearsals,’ recalls Taylor, ‘and even by Brian Jones, who had moved into the basement of the Pretty Things’ crazy Belgravia pad for a stint between 1964-65.’ While the second Harmony H306 was given away to a close friend in the late 1960s, this amplifier remained a favourite for the Pretty Things’ recording sessions over the coming decades and, other than a speaker replacement in 1967, remains original to how the Rolling Stones first used it in 1962.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
R. Greenfield, ‘The Rolling Stone Interview: Keith Richards’, Rolling Stone, 19 August 1971.
M. Jagger, K. Richards, C. Watts and R. Wood, The Rolling Stones 50, London, 2012.
N. Jopling, ‘The Rolling Stones – Genuine R & B!’, Record Mirror, 11 May 1963.
S. Netter, ‘The Stones Chronicles, Special Report on the Rolling Stones: The Last Tour, from the editors of Us magazine, 1981.
B. Wyman with R. Havers, Rolling With The Stones, London, 2002.