Rave magazine, for one, was not deceived by that diplomatic gear change to we. “Mick Jagger is out on his own and he knows it. He has no acknowledged manager, no agent and no record producer . . . although the other members of the band have the same freedom of decision and action, it is largely his whims and ideas which decide which way the Stones will roll. He is the king Stone, the man in charge, whether he likes it or not.”
While at work on the new album the band was now producing as well as creating, he spent long hours in the Beatles’ company, as if hopeful that some of Sgt. Pepper’s magic might rub off. Wearied by success, adulation, and consumption, each of the band’s three thinking members, John, Paul, and George, had begun to be gnawed by a feeling there must be more to life. In August, they seemed to find it in the Indian holy man Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his philosophy of Transcendental Meditation. Mick and Marianne joined them in becoming disciples of the Maharishi and, on August Bank Holiday weekend, accompanied them to an indoctrination session in Bangor, North Wales. During the session, news came from London that Brian Epstein, who once might have managed the Stones along with the Beatles, had been found dead of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose at his Belgravia home, aged only thirty-two.
But while Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison embraced the Maharishi unreservedly—the more so in their vulnerable state following Epstein’s death—Mick behaved with his usual caution, sidestepping the duty of converts to study for several months at the guru’s mountain ashram in India (as all four Beatles later would) and quietly letting his allegiance lapse soon after. He maintained he still felt “a need for some kind of spirituality that is living” and continued to meditate and read books about Buddhism, sometimes retiring inside a Native American tepee which he had pitched in the Rolling Stones’ office, the better to commune with the spiritual world. However, Hindu nonmaterialism had as little appeal for him as hippiedom’s social anarchy and dropping out. He expounded this have-your-hash-cake-and-eat-it philosophy to one interviewer with an image bordering on the surreal: “You [should] just drop out of those sections of society imposing unfair and restrictive practices on individuals. Someone has to deliver the milk, but it should work on a co-operative basis. I’ll deliver the milk for a week . . . I don’t mind.” Needless to say, Milkman Mick was a persona that never materialized.
The Beatles and Stones already had a kind of tacit alliance, not only singing on each other’s records but sometimes staggering their releases to allow each other a clear run at the charts. In the aftermath of Brian Epstein’s death, plans were discussed for a Beatles-Stones merger whereby the two bands would share offices and build a recording studio to be used by them both and also run as a commercial enterprise. A suitable site was earmarked in Camden, north London, and Mick got as far as registering the name “Mother Earth” for the record label. The scheme was then firmly squashed by Allen Klein, who now had his own agenda concerning the Beatles and saw how such a workers’ cooperative could threaten both that and his control over the Stones.
Even the band’s staunchest supporters in the music press doubted whether they could survive the double whammy of Mick and Keith’s imprisonment and splitting from Andrew Oldham. They had, after all, had a far longer career than anyone could have expected—more than four years!—and were now well into their twenties, past rock’s traditional age limit (Bill Wyman would soon be thirty-one). Most of the other British bands who’d come up through the R&B circuit had folded or seen their star players defect to form new ones in the psychedelic mode, like Stevie Winwood with Traffic and Eric Clapton with Cream. Dozens of arresting new collective names had sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic—Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Moby Grape, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Jethro Tull, the Incredible String Band, the Electric Prunes—exploring realms very different from the Stones’ simplistic sex-with-a-sneer; all with hair far longer and shaggier than theirs had ever had been; several with the feature which had once made them unique, a charismatic front man who didn’t play an instrument.
Most seriously, it was eight months since the Stones had last showed their faces in America: a lifetime to fickle pop fans with such an array of alternatives to choose from. In press interviews, Mick insisted that they’d soon be back on the road, but gave no details beyond a vague promise to schedule some concerts where no admission would be charged. “The kids,” he said with a twenty-four-year-old’s avuncularity, “ought to be able to groove around and have a nice time for nothing.”
The Stones’ comeback as a live act hinged on one question above all: whether, after a drug scandal of such epic dimensions, they would ever be allowed back into America to tour. In September, they tested the water, flying to New York for the first time in nine months to meet with Allen Klein and (in new self-producing mode) art-direct a cover for the new album. At JFK Airport, they were subjected to stringent baggage and body searches, blameless Bill and Charlie, as always, undifferentiated from the rest. Finally pronounced clean, they were let in, but Mick and Keith were warned that if they applied for U.S. visas in the future, the authorities would look at their British court cases in detail, implicitly to see if the Lord Chief Justice had got it right, before reaching a decision.
Mick and Keith of course were not the only reason for this uncertainty. Brian Jones still had to stand trial for the cannabis, cocaine, and methedrine found at his flat, with such suspiciously perfect timing, on the day of the others’ first court appearance, back in May. For Brian, unlike them, there was no expressway to judge and jury: he had had to wait in suspense through the whole summer, although the media tempests surrounding “the girl in the fur rug,” Acid King David, and the Mars bar had largely kept the spotlight off him. Believing himself vulnerable to further police raids at Courtfield Road, he’d sought refuge in a succession of West End hotels, moving on from each one after a few days when he thought the drugs squad had targeted him again, or when the management discovered who he was and evicted him. Determined to stay clean until his return to court, he employed a succession of doctors to dose him with placebos and, for a time, checked into London’s most famous private rehab clinic, the Priory.
After losing Anita Pallenberg to Keith, he had enjoyed a measure of revenge by going around with Keith’s ex-girlfriend, Linda Keith, although their relationship was purely platonic and “born of mutual dependency,” Linda says now. He had then found a new lover in the model Suki Poitier, former girlfriend of Tara Browne, who had emerged miraculously unscathed from the hara-kiri sports-car crash in which the young Guinness heir died. Suki was loving, soothing, and undemanding, but in all other respects a dead ringer for Anita.
On October 30, Brian’s jury trial finally took place at the Inner London Sessions in Southwark. It happened that right opposite the court building lived the parents of the Stones’ loyal assistant Shirley Arnold. To give Brian sanctuary from the waiting fans, Shirley took him to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s flat. As always with older people, his manners were impeccable and he gratefully accepted and demolished a plate of Mrs. Arnold’s homemade beef stew.
In court, he pleaded guilty to possessing cannabis and permitting its use on his premises, but denied ownership of the cocaine and methedrine. It was said that since being busted he had suffered “a virtual breakdown” and was now under strict medical supervision as much to preserve his fragile mental state as to stop him reoffending with drugs. The prosecution accepted his not-guilty pleas regarding the cocaine and methedrine, implying official suspicion that they had been planted by the police. On the cannabis charge he received three months’ imprisonment and for permitting its use, nine months, both to run concurrently. The Daily Sketch criticized the sentences for “turn[ing] this wretched young man into a martyr . . . as happened in the case of Jagger.” Brian was sent to Wormwood Scrubs—an infinitely more devastating experience for him than prison had been for either Mick or Keith—but then freed on bail pending appeal.
The appeal was heard on December 12, with Mick present in
court to lend moral support. After hearing that Brian was “potentially suicidal,” Lord Chief Justice Parker, sitting with two other law lords, set aside both prison sentences and substituted a £1,000 fine and three years’ probation on the condition that he also continued receiving psychiatric treatment. Brian celebrated with an orgy of drink and pills which culminated with him onstage at a club, playing stand-up bass with such violence that eventually it fell to pieces. Two days later, he was back in the hospital.
On December 8, the Stones’ new album was finally released in Britain, appearing in America a day later. It had taken ten months, four more than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and survived pressures the Beatles never had to contend with: not just the trial and imprisonment of its main performers and sole songwriters but also the loss of a manager and producer, equally brilliant and successful as both. The title was Their Satanic Majesties Request, a play on the perception of the band as devils incarnate and also the continuing uncertainty over their international travel. Inside old-style black British passports there used to appear a message in elaborate copperplate script, addressed to foreign frontier officials with the hauteur of empire days: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let [obstruction] or hindrance.”
Their Satanic Majesties’ aspirations were all too obvious. Its cover—photographed by Michael Cooper, who’d also shot Sgt. Pepper’s famous pop art collage—showed the five Stones in mystical robes, seated hippie fashion on the ground with Mick in the middle wearing a conical wizard’s hat. The image had a shimmery lamination which made their faces (all but Mick’s) appear to move when it was tilted. If one peered closer, the four Beatles materialized like ectoplasm, as though in acknowledgment of the wholesale larceny within. For here were all Pepper’s spontaneous-seeming innovations calculatedly trotted out again—the droning Indian ragas, wheedling Mellotrons, tinkling temple bells, and beefy brass bands, the vaudeville sound effects and comic voices (including Mick’s at one point rather unwisely demanding “Where’s that joint?”). The difference was in the music.
Of ten tracks, only “She’s a Rainbow,” an upbeat, multichrome “Ruby Tuesday,” was a song that could be instantly understood and hummed. The rest were little more than extended electronic doodles, with Mick’s voice so distorted and monotonous and strangely muted that often he hardly seemed there at all. “Sing This All Together,” later reprised as “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” was a labored attempt at a hippie campfire chorus featuring more incognito backup vocals by John Lennon and Paul McCartney which the bell jingling and tambourine bashing unfortunately concealed. “On with the Show” began with sound effects from a Soho strip club, then turned to a faux-posh Mick monologue in the style of the Temperance Seven. “2000 Light Years from Home” had been started in his prison cells in Lewes and Brixton and, with his verbal gifts, might have aimed at Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, if not quite De Profundis. Instead, he droned cosmic claptrap about “freezing deserts” and “fiery oceans” as if singing through a megaphone with a clothes peg attached to his nose.
The track list did, however, contain a major surprise. One night, punctual, orderly Bill Wyman had arrived at Olympic at the time arranged for the session to find, as so often, no sign of any of the others. While waiting for them to drift in, he had improvised a song on the piano which he titled “In Another Land.” Steve Marriott of the Small Faces helped him record a tremolo-heavy rough track which, to his surprise, was worked on some more by Mick and Keith, then pronounced good enough to go onto the album. Still more flatteringly, it later became a Stones single in America. But for Bill, triumph was to be outweighed by chagrin. First, Mick took him aside and said that, as a quid pro quo for developing “In Another Land,” Jagger and Richard wanted a share of the publishing. Then the news that someone else in the band wrote songs was kept jealously under wraps. On the album credits, it was attributed to “the Rolling Stones”; only on its American release as a single did Bill get an individual credit.
A few weeks earlier, a new and avowedly serious music paper had started in San Francisco, with a name making no bones about its founder-editor Jann Wenner’s favorite band. Nonetheless, the fifth issue of Rolling Stone was brutally frank about Their Satanic Majesties Request. “Despite moments of unquestionable brilliance,” wrote reviewer Jon Landau, it put “the status of the Stones in jeopardy . . . With it, [they] abandon their capacity to lead in order to impress the impressionable. They have been far too influenced by their musical inferiors [sic] and the result is an insecure album in which they try too hard to prove they can say something new . . . It is an identity crisis of the first order and one that will have to be resolved . . . if their music is to continue to grow.”
Mainly on the strength of advance orders, the album grossed $2 million in the United States within ten days, outselling the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and reaching No. 2 there and No. 3 in the UK. But reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic voiced the same disappointment, bafflement, and fears that for whatever reason—prison, drugs, hippie virus, Beatle-fixatedness, the nonparticipation of Andrew Oldham—the Stones had lost it.
Mick professed himself unbothered by the storm of ridicule and reproach. “It’s just an album, not a landmark or a milestone or anything pretentious like that,” he told the NME. “All we have tried to do is make an album we like with some sounds that haven’t been done before. It doesn’t mean we’ll never release any more rock ’n’ roll.” He added that the album should be treated as “a sound experience rather than a song experience”—which was a bit like calling a play a scenery experience rather than a dramatic one—and insisted he was as proud of it as of anything the Stones had ever done.
Not for many decades would he concede that they had been “out to lunch.” And in any case, the lunch break was soon over.
MICK AND MARIANNE were never comfortable at his Harley House flat with its too-palpable echoes of a previous relationship. After a year, Mick decided to move back to Chelsea, renting a house in Chester Square while he looked around for somewhere to buy. As much as a home for Marianne and himself, he wanted a symbol of just how far he’d come since squalid flat-sharing days in Edith Grove, and by March 1968, he’d found it.
Back then, just £50,000 secured the freehold of 48 Cheyne Walk, an eighteenth-century town house in the exclusive row whose white walls and ornate black wrought-iron balconies front the Thames Embankment between Chelsea and Albert Bridges. By a long way Chelsea’s most prestigious address, “the Walk” had at one time or another been home to writers Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painters J. M. W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, actor Laurence Olivier, and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Piquantly for its first resident rock star, Oscar Wilde had lived at number 34 at the time of his arrest and trial in 1895.
Number 48 dated from 1711 and was a particularly beautiful and unspoiled example of the Queen Anne period, wood-paneled throughout and with many original features like fireplaces and balustrades, though, as customary with even wealthy abodes built at that time, the rooms were rather small and narrow. Part of the attraction for Mick was a substantial summerhouse in the back garden which he could convert into a music and rehearsal room.
The house was redecorated (by society interior designer David Mlinaric) and furnished with an extravagance mostly dictated by Marianne—for these were still days when Mick found it hard to refuse her anything. If he balked at the Regency double bed or the “Louis XV” bath, allegedly dating from 1770, she would remind him he now resided at one of London’s best addresses and had a duty to live up to his position. Hence the chandelier in the front hall for which she persuaded him to pay £6,000. “Look a’ that!” he’d marvel as he opened the door to visitors. “Six grand for a fuckin’ light!”
Occasi
onally, he’d dig in his heels, making Marianne realize that “he thought more about money than anyone I ever knew.” Once in Morocco, he doggedly refused to buy a white fur rug she’d set her heart on, even though it didn’t cost that much. And the concept of investing in artworks was still alien to him. Through his connection with the Robert Fraser Gallery, he heard that a Balthus painting was to be offered for sale at a bargain price by the artist’s son. Marianne urged him to make it the basis for an art collection like his canny friend Paul McCartney’s, but he refused.
In these first days in their wood-paneled Thames-side retreat, he seemed utterly besotted with Marianne. Friends like the director Donald Cammell later recalled “the sense of sheer possession” when he looked at this “bird” who was not only stunningly beautiful but classy and intellectual beyond his dreams. They had rows almost from the beginning, usually stemming from Mick’s belief—inculcated first by his mother, and hardly challenged by the dominant element of his audience—that all females were put on earth to be his slaves. However, the rows were never as bitter as those with Chrissie Shrimpton used to be, and he usually knew how to defuse them. Even at Harley House, Marianne remembers, his male chauvinism would sometimes make her bolt out of the flat and down the stairs, grabbing up “a £5 note and a lump of hash” as she went. Mick would run after her and cajole her back by making her laugh.
Marianne continued to expand his mind more than any hallucinogen ever had, taking him to the theater, ballet, and foreign-language films; above all, telling him about books. A typical buying spree under her tutelage piled his bedside table with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the collected sayings of Confucius, a guide to Jungian philosophy, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and poetry by Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and e.e. cummings.
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