Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Side two: “Flight 505,” a rocker about in-flight paranoia. “High and Dry,” the other side of “Thumb,” a corny C&W song about getting dumped by a rich girl. “Out of Time,” a pointed attack on Chrissie Shrimpton—“my poor old-fashioned baby”—with rich marimba and guitar countermelodies and some of Mick Jagger’s best singing on record. “It’s Not Easy” was organ R&B and chugging boogie. “I Am Waiting” was a “Lady Jane” clone with enigmatic lyrics and eccentric phrasing. “Take It or Leave It” had scat lyrics and a sad, lovelorn feel that appealed to young men. “Think” featured fuzz-guitar slabs, great drumming, and loads of romantic recriminations: “Tell me whose fault was that, babe!” “What to Do” ended Aftermath on a note of confusion familiar to all young lovers.

  Aftermath’s audacious and seemingly cruel attitudes antagonized some listeners as an attack on women. Others saw it much differently. In a critique published in New Left Review, Richard Morton described “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” as ironic anthems designed to expose sexual exploitation: “The enormous merit and audacity of the Stones is to have . . . defied a central taboo of the social system: mention of sexual inequality. They have done so in the most radical and unacceptable way possible: by celebrating it. The light this black beam throws on the society is too bright for it. The triumph of these records is their rejection of the spurious world of monadic personal relationships.”

  In the end, Aftermath was a somber, troubled letter from the band to its audience, who made the record no. 1 within days of its release. Even Mick Jagger, rarely given to praising the Stones’ work, was proud of it: “[Aftermath] was a big landmark record for me. It’s the first time we wrote the whole record . . . It had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.”

  Aftermath was an important part of its times, contemporaneous with Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde, Antonioni’s Blow Up, Catherine Deneuve in the film Repulsion, Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood. The Stones were entering their mighty midperiod, and there was nothing now—almost nothing—that could stop them.

  Not that they wouldn’t try . . .

  * * *

  The Sun Blotted Out from the Sky

  April 24, 1966. Tara Browne’s famous twenty-first-birthday party at Luggala, a Guinness family estate near Bray, Ireland. Outlandish period costumes and huge blocks of black hashish. Brian and Anita as Cupid and Psyche in feathers and silk. Mick and Chrissie having a row. She was embarrassed because people generally identified her with the scathing put-downs in Aftermath.

  These were the days of “Paint It, Black,” released in early May 1966. (The comma in the title, inserted by someone at Decca, aroused much curiosity and even charges of racism.) There was nothing else like it on the radio. This lurid tone poem seemed to describe a funeral procession amid haunting, existential self-doubt. Brian’s sitar stated the melody with an otherworldly dolor, and pounding drums launched the song into a high-noir ambience of anxiety and hopelessness, desirous to see the sun blotted out from the sky. Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, called it one of the greatest songs of the century. It seemed to have social echoes as well, reflecting recent waves of immigration to England from India and Pakistan.

  Keith: “We cut it in L.A., as a comedy track. Bill was playing the organ, doing a piss-take on our old manager [Eric Easton], who started as an organist in a cinema pit. We’d been doing it with funky rhythms and it hadn’t worked out and he started playing it like this [a sort of unintentional klezmer parody] and everybody got behind it. It’s a two-beat; very strange. Brian playing the sitar makes the whole thing.”

  “Paint It, Black” was an instant hit record, no. 1 in both England and America. It also marked the Rolling Stones’ commercial apogee as a singles band in the sixties. “Black” was their last no. 1 for more than two years.

  May 1966. Keith moved his record collection and guns down to Redlands; the rooms were still empty of furniture except for Keith’s bed. He bought the cottage across the moat for a music room. His girlfriend Linda Keith moved to New York, leaving Keith high and dry. An old gardener named Jack watched over Redlands while Keith hung with Brian and Anita, who moved in permanently with Brian that month.

  At the end of the month, Bob Dylan and his band, the Hawks, returned to London for climactic performances at Royal Albert Hall. Playing electric rock in the second half of his shows, with a giant American flag as a backdrop, Dylan had been reviled as a sellout and a Judas for almost four months. People threw things at the stage in disgust. His old fans were pleading with him to get rid of the band, but Dylan ignored them. Dylan’s shows invariably ended with searing electric versions of “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like A Rolling Stone” during massive audience walkouts.

  Dylan had been on the road, around the world, since February, and was said to be running on speed and heroin. In London, he ran into Keith and Brian at Dolly’s, a private club in Mayfair. Dylan had to be carried into the place by Stones chauffeur Tom Keylock, who was minding Dylan while he was in town. Dylan and the two drunken Stones started to get into it. No way, Dylan told Keith, were the Stones the best rock and roll band anymore. Opaque behind his black shades, Dylan told Keith that the Hawks were the best band nowadays.

  Keith, taken aback, asked, “What about us?”

  “You guys may be the best philosophers,” Dylan slurred. “But the Hawks—they’re the best band, man.”

  Keith didn’t need to hear this and began to brood. Dylan began to twist the blade in Keith’s guts. “Y’know, man, I coulda written ’Satisfaction’—easy,” he told Keith. “But there’s no fuckin’ way you guys coulda written ’Mr. Tambourine Man.’ You know that? Think about it.”

  Keith thought about it, and a few drinks later decided that “Like A Rolling Stone” was really kind of taking the piss out of his band. Keith made a lunge for Dylan, expertly parried by Keylock. There was a little scuffle. Dylan got uptight and Keylock hustled him out of the club, into the car, and back to the Mayfair Hotel. As Keylock turned into Park Lane, he noticed Keith and Brian behind them in Brian’s Rolls, and then Brian tried to get past to cut them off. Brian was drunk, swerving in and out of traffic, and they seemed to want another go at Dylan. Keylock pulled into the hotel driveway and got Dylan into the lobby just as Brian’s Rolls jumped the curb and tried in vain to ram through the revolving doors. None of this was mentioned the next night (May 26), when the Stones visited Dylan backstage after his show ended in massive booing, catcalls, and walkouts. The Stones had taped Top of the Pops in the afternoon and shared a box at Royal Albert Hall that night. Afterward, they all went to the Scotch of St. James and got loaded. A few weeks later, Dylan would fall off his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, and effectively retire his electric mod persona for good. The Hawks became The Band.

  By June 1966, the Stones were burned out.

  “We were actually trying to [accomplish] something by taking a few chemicals and making this wrench,” Keith told Stanley Booth. “The ideal behind it was very pure. Everybody at that point was prepared to use himself as a laboratory, to find some way out of this mess. It was very idealistic and very destructive at the same time for a lot of people. But the downside of it now is that people think that drugs are entertainment . . . We weren’t taking drugs just for fun, recreation. Creation, maybe.”

  Brian and Anita went to Spain for a week and stayed in the resort town of Marbella. But their fun was strenuous, and he returned more exhausted than before he left. Mick suffered some kind of physical breakdown and went into seclusion at his flat in Harley House. A couple of TV shows were canceled because Mick’s doctor told him he was suffering from nervous stress and had to rest for a week before going back to America. It was going to be a hard tour. The American version of Aftermath had failed to make no. 1. “Mother’s Little Helper,” with its derisively cruel images of women tranquilized by little yellow pills, was released as a single that month and o
nly made no. 8. A lot of American fans thought “Little Helper” was a real downer. There was a feeling in the band that the Stones had to prove themselves all over again.

  * * *

  Oh Baudelaire!

  The Stones landed in New York on June 23, 1966, to begin their fifth American tour and discovered no hotel would book them. Andrew threatened to sue amid much publicity, and the band made do at the down-market Holiday Inn. That night, Bill played bass on a John Hammond Jr. blues session. Brian and Dylan showed up to hang out, their relationship patched up, and later Dylan played Brian the acetates of Blonde on Blonde. Like everyone else, Brian was floored by the power and humor of the music, particularly the shouted chorus of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”:

  Everybody must get stoned!

  The American version of Aftermath (with “Paint It, Black” as lead track) was climbing the charts but didn’t look to make no. 1. On June 24, the band held a tense, sullen press conference aboard Allen Klein’s motor yacht anchored in the Hudson.

  Reporter: “What’s the difference between you and the Beatles?”

  Mick: “There’s five of us and four of them.”

  Reporter: “I want to do a piece about the reality of being a Rolling Stone.”

  Mick: “The reality of being me? It’s fucking nasty today.”

  Boston was the first stop of the tour. The most Anglophile of American cities, Boston craved English bands and was a main beachhead of the British Invasion. The Stones played the Manning Bowl in Lynn, about twenty miles north of town, in the rain before fifteen thousand zealots. Cops dosed the stampeding crowd with tear gas during “Satisfaction,” and there was panic, trampled kids, plenty of arrests. Drunken fans surrounded the limos and tried to smash the windows. Others chased the band all the way to the airport.

  Back in New York, the Stones’ gear was stolen out of the equipment truck, including custom-built Vox guitars and Brian’s electric dulcimer. Playing their noir rockabilly anthems in a new soul band style, they sold out shows in Washington, Baltimore, Buffalo, Hartford. The McCoys and the Standells were opening shows. Allen Klein added dates to the tour daily, often two shows a day.

  At Marine Ballroom, Atlantic City, a nineteen-year-old poetess from Pitman, New Jersey, named Patti Smith was crammed up against the stage:

  “Mick ripped off his flowered shirt and did a fandango. Satisfaction. Tambourine on head, he strutted like some stud . . . this was no TV, this was real. I could enter the action. I got set to out-stone-face Bill Wyman, the cornerstone of the Stones, relentless as Stonehenge, as a pyramid. Any hard-edged kid took to him. He was onstage right to catch some spit from Mick. Then hell broke. Handkerchiefs folded like flowers, a million girls busting my spleen. Oh Baudelaire! I grabbed Brian’s ankle and held on like a drowning child. It seemed like hours. I was getting bored. I looked up and yawned. Bill Wyman cracked up. Brian grinned. I got scared and squeezed out and ran.”

  On July 2, the Stones played the Forest Hills tennis stadium in Queens. Cops waded into the crowed with nightsticks and deployed tear gas. The band flew back to Manhattan by helicopter, then motorcaded to the Cafe Wha? on MacDougal Street to see a new guitarist that Linda Keith had hooked up with. He was this black hippie from Seattle, an ex-paratrooper, who turned up like a psychedelic Martian in Greenwich Village playing left-handed Fender Stratocaster, upside down, in a group called Jimmy James and the Blue Flames. The Rolling Stones’ collective jaw plunged as they first beheld Jimi Hendrix, a few months before his arrival in London, already controlling an improvised arsenal of blues licks and feedback developed in the road bands of Little Richard and the Isley Brothers. To the Stones’ horror and delight, Hendrix deconstructed some Dylan songs and “Wild Thing” and blasted out an incendiary new music that threatened to make them all obsolete within months.

  Linda, somewhat to Keith’s consternation, was crazy about Hendrix. She even took one of Keith’s new Stratocasters and loaned it to him. But Hendrix was involved with someone else and the vibes were weird. Keith was concerned about Linda, and didn’t like her scene with this flaming black warlock.

  War Memorial Arena, Syracuse, July 6. The Stones flew in on their private turboprop. Radio people came on board for snapshots and interviews with Brian and Mick. Brian was wearing his flamboyant lemon/ pink/blue-striped blazer. As the band entered the hall, Brian saw a big American flag stretched out to dry and grabbed it for a souvenir, inadvertently dragging it on the ground. This sent the stagehands into apoplexy. Their brothers were dying for this flag over in Vietnam! There was a scuffle, some angry curses, and the cops threatened to bust the Stones for insulting the Stars and Stripes. Klein and Andrew forced Brian to apologize. The Stones played a shortened set and left town quick.

  Back in New York City, Keith and Brian met an LSD dealer named David Schneiderman, aka the Acid King. Dude had a briefcase full of Blue Cheer, Windowpane, Purple Haze. Keith invited him to drop by when he was in London.

  Brian and Andrew stayed out all night with three black courtesans who cruised Manhattan in a Rolls-Royce. At 3 A.M. Brian took Andrew to see Max Jacobson, legendary Dr. Feelgood. The doctor treated Andrew’s raging case of herpes, then shot them both up with the powerful amphetamines for which he was notorious.

  On through the American Midwest and out to California. High times as everyone was stoned on good Mexican pot, and a hazy, unfamiliar air of unity took over. Everyone was getting along, and even Brian was doing relatively okay. They were playing like demons every night. “Under My Thumb” raged with an explosive Memphis drive. “Cloud” was taken fast, with Brian’s metallic sitar licks. “Not Fade Away” was a jungle rave, Brian on harp. “19th Nervous Breakdown” was a dual-guitar orgy, with Keith doing great vocal harmony. Deafening screams from the girls during “Time Is on My Side” and “Lady Jane.” The Stones gave “Satisfaction” a fuel-injected trajectory, usually with Stu on piano, and a cool, stop-time ending amid the mayhem.

  The Rolling Stones were now giving the hottest, most exciting shows of their careers. Mick was bumping and grinding, wiggling his can at the fans, stirring them into estrus. Many shows were attended by violence: cops were beat up, dozens of arrests, multiple injuries.

  Los Angeles in the summer heat. The Stones only went out at night. Brian and Anita moved through the clubs and parties like movie stars, only they were the real thing. Brian told friends he was dazzled by the Cadillacs prowling the Strip, and loved the big Hollywood Hills houses, with their pools shimmering in David Hockney blue. He’d like to live there, he said, except for being constantly mobbed on Sunset Boulevard, hassled by both locals and tourists.

  The Hollywood Bowl show on July 25 (opened by Buffalo Springfield) packed 17,500 fans and got rave reviews, no problems, and a great vibe as the band played a perfect set in front of huge photographs of themselves from the Aftermath album. The 1966 American tour ended in Hawaii on July 27, where the (dateless) rest of the band got annoyed with Bill for scoring a pair of pretty sisters. Wyman and Keith both finished their American adventure with a sexually transmitted disease caught from a beautiful flower child in Los Angeles, and both ended up on penicillin. Wyman’s long-suffering wife, Diane, had to have the shots too.

  Brian Jones would never play music for an American audience again. It was his last American tour.

  Keith Richards: “In those days, Mick and I were into a solid word/music bag, unless I thought of something outstanding that could be used in the title. I would spend the first two weeks of the tour [on writing songs], because it was done on the road, all of it was worked out . . . an American tour meant you started writing another album. After three, four weeks, you had enough and then you went to L.A. and recorded it. We worked very fast that way, and when you came off a tour, you were shit-hot playing, as hot as the band is gonna be.”

  Three versions of “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” were recorded between August 3 and August 7 at RCA, involving different instrumental tracks. The Stones’ next single
was pure murder: using electronic feedback, distortion, and battle-hardened fuzz guitar (only weeks after their obviously influential encounter with Jimi Hendrix), “Mother, Baby” was both a demolition of constipated pop song formats and a Rimbaudesque declension of the shadow world of illicit sexuality. The wildly experimental song suggested not only maternal prostitution and incest but fraternal lust as Jagger asks if you’ve seen your brother standing in the shadow too.

  He might well have asked if you’d seen yourself. “You took your choice at this time,” he sings: “The brave old world, or the slide to the depths of decline.” The song ends in an echo of Jimi Hendrix’s slashing “Wild Thing” chords.

  The Stones left L.A. “with pockets full of acid” (Keith) and took the rest of the summer off. Mick and Keith went to Acapulco to write the rest of the new album. When Mick returned to London, he smashed up his new Aston Martin in a car wreck. Both he and Chrissie Shrimpton were uninjured. Keith called Linda’s parents and told them she was in a bad scene in New York. Her father brought her back to London, and friends thought it probably saved her life. Keith went to see her, but came away knowing it was all over between him and the beautiful, adventurous Ruby Tuesday.

  Late in August, Brian and Anita arrived in Tangier and checked into the luxurious Hotel El Minzeh, where they met their friend Christopher Gibbs.

  “Brian was a very difficult person to spend a lot of time with,” Gibbs recalls. “He was a willful, spoiled, demanding, heroically selfish and self-centered being with a lot of sweetness and charm. And part of that charm was this glorious musical gift, of being able to pick up any instrument from any culture in the world and fiddle about with it until he could make it do what it was meant to do.