Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  “And of course he was very rough with the ladies. Once Brian and Anita and I went to Tangier, staying at the Minzeh. On the second day, Brian had a fight with Anita and went to strike her. She managed to duck and he hit his fist on the iron frame of the window. I had to take him to the Clinic California, where they put his arm in a cast.”

  Brian sent a telegram to Andrew Oldham in London on August 31, saying he’d broken two bones in his hand while climbing in the mountains, and would be unable to play guitar for two months. Before he left Tangier, he spent some time with Brion Gysin, an expatriate artist and writer who was a key member of the Tangier Beat-expat scene. Gysin started to tell Brian about a mysterious village of master musicians up in the Moroccan mountains, in a place called Jajouka. Wild music, dancing boys, plenty of kif, stay up and rave all night. Brian Jones, bored to death with the Rolling Stones, was intrigued and made Gysin promise to take him to Jajouka someday.

  * * *

  The Ultimate Freak-Out

  September 1966. Tom Driberg, righteous, somewhat bohemian Labour M.P., spoke on the Stones’ behalf in Parliament after a Scottish judge gratuitously insulted the band while sentencing some poor kid to the workhouse. It was the first inkling that the judiciary class had it in for the Rolling Stones. The judges, the cops, the law: they couldn’t wait to get their hands on the band.

  Mick and Keith were at IBC Studios working on a horn track for “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” Brian and Anita returned from Morocco on September 4 so Brian could begin work on the sound track to Volker Schlöndorff’s new film, Mord und Totschlag, about to begin production and starring Anita in her first feature film.

  Anita: “It was called A Degree of Murder in English. They needed a German-speaking face. I auditioned in Paris and got the part. Then the director asked Brian to do the music, and it became a big thing for us. The Stones movie wasn’t getting made, so Brian got into it on his own.” Brian’s injured hand prevented him from playing. His band included Jimmy Page, Small Faces drummer Kenny Jones, and ace London studio musician Nicky Hopkins on piano. The music was dark and gloomy, to go with a script about a waitress who accidentally kills her ex-boyfriend and goes through changes while disposing of his body.

  After finishing their new single in Los Angeles, the Stones gathered in New York on September 9. Dressed in high-retro World War II women’s clothes and wigs, with heavy makeup supervised by a stunning transvestite Brian, they posed for a series of drag photos on an East Side street on a quiet Saturday afternoon. Brian pushed a distastefully retarded-looking Bill Wyman in a wheelchair for an extra dash of contempt. After the photo shoot, they repaired to a bar, still in drag. Keith: “Hey, let’s go and have a beer. But what voice do you do? We sat there and had a beer and watched TV and no one said anything, it was just so outrageous.” Later, while shooting Peter Whitehead’s drag promo film for “Mother, Baby,” Brian yawned, smirked wickedly, lifted his skirt, and started masturbating. The camera kept rolling. Mick Jagger rescued this bit from the cutting room floor and played the footage for his dinner guests for years.

  The Stones appeared on Ed Sullivan’s show the next day, September 10, doing “Paint It, Black,” “Lady Jane,” and “Mother, Baby.” Mick, in a floral shirt, sang with a live mike to prerecorded backing tracks because of Brian’s injured hand. Brian, in vestal white, sat down and smiled while pretending to play the sitar. Keith stood at the piano during “Mother,” wearing a provocative Wehrmacht field jacket. The Stones had bought loads of Nazi uniforms and memorabilia in L.A. at the end of the U.S. tour. Around this time, Anita dressed Brian in a black SS uniform with a swastika armband and had photos taken of him stomping on a baby doll. In November, another shot from this series, with Anita kneeling submissively in front of Nazi Jones, ran in London papers to universal distaste, since no one “got” this supposed antifascist protest.

  A couple days later, “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?” was released in the U.S. and the U.K. as a horn-driven, wall-of-noise attack on motherhood and apple pie. Keith Richards was unhappy with the record, claiming it was rushed out before it had been finished, and that the wrong mix was released, one that buried the rhythm section. The flip side was a nasty psycho-blues, “Who’s Driving Your Plane?,” recorded over the summer in L.A. with Brian blowing harp over a slow, metal guitar riff.

  “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?” was the last of the Stones’ great pop art singles, ending a five-song mockery of family values marked by ethereal gloom and strident antagonism. Despite great reviews, the record was way over the heads of their mass audience and stalled in the middle of the Top Ten in England and America. The Stones’ old fans found “Mother” off-putting and sleazy. Even Charlie Watts’s parents complained that the Stones had gone too far this time.

  But those speed-spiked negativity records shook people up and made them think. “Jagger’s got this marvelous sense of the day in which a family breaks up,” wrote Norman Mailer years later. “The son throws acid in the mother’s face, the mother stomps the son’s nuts in, and then the fat cousin comes in and says: What is everyone fighting for? Let’s have dinner. And they sit down, the son has no nuts left, the mother’s face is scarred, but they go on, and British family life continues. Jagger’s got that like no one else’s ever had it.”

  Mick: “ ’Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby?’ was like the ultimate freak-out. We came to a full stop after that. I just couldn’t make it with that anymore—what more could we say?”

  On September 23, the Stones began another English tour. Opening were the white-hot Yardbirds, with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the band, and the Ike and Tina Turner Revue. The Stones hadn’t toured England in more than a year, but any doubts about their fans were erased the minute they walked onto the stage at Royal Albert Hall in their velvet jackets and trendy white loafers. The cream of the London pop world was there, as was Brigitte Bardot. As soon as they hit “Paint It, Black,” all five musicians were taken down by a wave of girls, who had to be pulled away so the band could flee. Order was restored, the concert resumed, but the kids rushed the stage again, only to be thrown back into the crowd by the security goons. Six songs into it, some fans got on the stage again. Keith was knocked down, and Mick was strangled. But the Stones played a full set that ended in “Satisfaction” while screaming, hysterical girls were punched and kicked by sadistic security men.

  As the tour progressed through England, the Stones enjoyed watching Tina and the Ikettes, these four wild women—the personification of the sexual yin energy in rock and roll—doing their shag-shag-step-and-a-kick. Mick: “A lot of women performers are quite static, or certainly were in the sixties. They did their best, but they weren’t like Tina. She was like a female version of Little Richard and would respond to the audience—really go out and grab them.” It was a trick Mick Jagger wanted very much to learn.

  Brian and Bill pestered Ike to show them the piano licks he’d played on the old Howlin’ Wolf records, while twenty-six-year-old bombshell Tina was teaching Mick the sideways pony in backstage dressing rooms. She would laugh at Mick’s spasms and show him how to move. Glowering Ike Turner was not too pleased and thrashed his wife in a London hotel room. Mick had a fling with new Ikette Pat Arnold, who later cut a record for Immediate. Bill was driving a couple of the girls from Glasgow to Newcastle in his Mercedes when he smashed it up. They all went on the tour bus after that.

  That autumn, Anita bought an apartment where she and Brian could crash. It was at 1 Courtfield Road in South Kensington, and they moved in that October. Keith virtually lived there as well, all previous hatchets having been buried amid a mellow haze of reefer plumes during the summer’s American tour. The flat was on two levels, with an oak-paneled minstrel gallery, and it quickly became the main hangout of the Stones. Dropping acid and rolling joints of Nepalese “Temple Ball” hashish were the main activities in the candlelit, incense-fogged household draped with geometric Moroccan textiles. Nina Simone and California bands
were on the record player. Brian was reading Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and a textbook called The Psychology of Insanity. He was playing a lot of saxophone, deep into John Coltrane’s new, blowing energy music. Robert Fraser was a regular, along with his protégé Michael Cooper, an intuitively invisible photographer who quickly replaced Gered Mankowitz as the main eye on the Stones. Tara Browne had broken up with his wife and was in residence and miserable. Brian was having daily paranoiac fits on LSD, which flooded into London that fall in solar flares of orange sunshine.

  Keith would taunt him. “Is it the fucking snakes again, Brian?” Mr. Jones spent a lot of time in a fetal position in the corner while the party went on around him.

  Marianne Faithfull bonded with Anita and soon joined the Brian/Keith/Anita unit as an intimate member. Married to art gallery owner John Dunbar, the marriage failing, the mother of a year-old son, she plunged into the Stones’ seductive family. Slender, voluptuous, even more beautiful than Anita, she radiated a blue-eyed innocence that belied her fierce intelligence and passionate appetites. She’d had a string of minor hit records after “As Tears Go By,” her singing style a mixture of exceptional maturity and soulful vibrato. She was a pop star in her own right. Allen Klein was besotted with her. Bob Dylan was said to be in love with her, like so many men drawn to her charismatic orbit, but his amorous advances had been rebuffed.

  She had awkward sex with Brian—“leaning over me, like an asthmatic god”—at Courtfield Road during an acid trip, and ended up spending the night with Keith (which, in her memoirs, she called “the best night I’ve ever had in my life”). In the morning, Keith told her that it was Mick Jagger who fancied her the most: “Go on, love, give him a jingle. He’ll fall off his chair. He’s not that bad when you get to know him.”

  Marianne thought this a bit of a stretch. Mick was considered to be unhip and uptight by the Courtfield Road denizens, not part of the in-crowd, an uptight bourgeois cat with a nowhere girlfriend. (Mick occasionally appeared at the flat to smoke a joint, but the unwashed dishes, piles of dirty laundry, and general crash-pad grunge appalled his fastidious sensibilities, and he rarely hung out.) Marianne thought Mick was narcissistic, manipulative, and as tight as two coats of paint.

  As the Stones stormed through England, they were playing some of the best, toughest music of their lives. The audience was younger and crazier than on recent tours, and Brian told interviewers he thought they helped bring some of the Stones’ lost magic back. “It was like it was three years ago when it was all new,” he told the Rolling Stones Monthly. Songs like “Under My Thumb” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” were played with the gritty funk of a Memphis soul band. The funkafied lessons of Otis Redding’s version of “Satisfaction” was now fully integrated into the Stones’ live sound. “Lady Jane” was delicately thrummed by Brian on his dulcimer. “Mother, Baby” and “Satisfaction” went off like grenades. The rhythm section—Wyman and Watts—supplied a powerful, churning bottom over which Jagger, Keith’s guitar, and Brian’s harps and sitar floated like stinging bees. Some fans think these were the best shows of the original Rolling Stones’ career.

  The audiences may have been more excited, but they were also smaller. The Stones couldn’t help notice a lot of empty, unsold seats on the tour.

  After a show in Bristol one night in October, everyone gathered in Mick’s room. Michael Cooper had brought a print of Repulsion, Roman Polanski’s new movie starring Catherine Deneuve. By dawn, Marianne Faithfull, who’d been invited to the gig by Brian and Keith, found herself alone with Mick Jagger and Pat Arnold. Pat finally left. Mick and Marianne went for a walk together just before dawn. A devotee of Holy Grail lore, she quizzed Mick on his knowledge of Arthurian material, a test he passed with gentle humor. The two young stars returned to the hotel and made love for the first time that fateful morning in Bristol.

  * * *

  My Mouth Is Soaking Wet

  In the fall of 1966, the Rolling Stones were not exactly the hottest group in London. Though the Beatles had retired from performing, they were still the kings (John Lennon’s statement that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus set off a press furor on both sides of the Atlantic). The Stones had become passé among the younger mods, who preferred the Small Faces and the Who. Eric Clapton, erstwhile Crawdaddy Club acolyte who’d quit the Yardbirds after their first album, was the guitar star of the time, with the graffito CLAPTON IS GOD scrawled on walls where youth hung out. Clapton’s new band, Cream, a speed-rocking power trio, was the sharpest in the land.

  Then Jimi Hendrix arrived in London. When Hendrix came to a club one night and asked to jam with Cream, he lit into Howlin’ Wolf’s “Killin’ Floor” and ended up playing with his teeth. Clapton had to leave the stage. A new genius had fallen into their midst like a cast-out angel. Jimi shocked all the British pop stars, who suddenly realized that Hendrix, not one of them, would be the true avatar of rock music—as long as he lived.

  The Stones’ English tour ended in Southampton on October 7. They wouldn’t tour again in England for five years.

  Mick continued to see Marianne Faithfull in secret. He started spending more time at Courtfield Road, since that’s where she hung out. Her feelings for the ardent Jagger began to change. He was sweet to her, generous, really seemed to want her. Mick and Mrs. Dunbar finally appeared together in public on October 15 at the launch of International Times, London’s new underground newspaper, which generally championed the Stones in its pages.

  Meanwhile, Brian was dropping more and more acid, flying all the time, working on doomy soundscape tapes for his film project. He followed Anita to Munich, where the movie was in production. He and Anita fought tooth and nail, and as his hand healed, he started hitting her again in violent spasms of jealously every time another man even looked at her.

  That November, High Tide and Green Grass was released in the U.K. with an updated track list. In America, London Records’ semifraudulent Got Live If You Want It concert album featured recent live tracks from London, Manchester, and Bristol recorded by Glyn Johns. It was filled out with ancient studio recordings (“Fortune Teller,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”) augmented with screams from the tour. Since the shows were often disrupted, there were major instrumental drop-outs on the tracks, and much overdubbing of the guitars was necessary. Over the years, the U.S. Got Live developed a bad reputation as exploitative and subpar, but it stands as the only surviving example of the Stones’ ferocious attack in its last year as an R&B band.

  Mick and Keith, inspired by the women in their lives and strong drugs, were writing some incredible new music. Keith was playing with hard rhythms and grungy acid guitar. He banged out a new riff on piano that eventually became “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Mick was feverishly moved by his hot liaison with Marianne. His new lyrics—the tongue getting tired, the soaking-wet mouth—were full of images of devouring cunnilingus. “She Smiled Sweetly” was the first real love lyric Mick wrote. If Aftermath had foretold the downfall of Mick’s rhetorical punching bag Christine Shrimpton as ma"tresse-en-titre, the new music for Between the Buttons hailed the rise of Marianne Faithfull as Jagger’s new muse.

  It was recorded in the new Olympic Studio, which had moved from Soho to Barnes, in southwestern London. Built as a film stage, owned by a London advertising mogul, Olympic started out as a jingle factory. The Stones brought in their engineer, Glyn Johns, who in turn brought in other rock and pop clients. Olympic had great engineers, like Eddie Kramer from South Africa, and a young tape operator named George Chkiantz, who would develop key sonic tools such as automatic double tracking and “phasing,” a tricky soundwave distortion technique that would be used to psychedelic effect on recordings by Hendrix, the Small Faces, and many others.

  The Stones loved Olympic. It was the only London studio with technical capabilities that approached their lab at RCA in Los Angeles. Jack Nitzsche flew over for the sessions. Also on keyboards on some tracks was Nicky Hopkins, the young blues piano play
er who’d started with Cyril Davies in the All-Stars. Hopkins had left the Royal Academy of Music at sixteen to play in R&B groups, but a serious digestive illness sent him to the hospital for over a year. Since 1965, he’d been confined to doing sessions, where he’d worked with the Who and the Kinks. Hopkins fit in well with the Stones (except for Stu, who found Nicky’s playing too slick) and played with them in the studio and on the road for years.

  The Buttons sessions ran for three weeks through November and early December 1966, producing some of the Stones’ greatest songs. The Stones needed a new hit single; they came up with “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and what evolved into “Ruby Tuesday,” which was worked out by Brian and Keith as a sketch of Linda Keith. Sensing that power within the band lay in monopolizing Keith, Brian succeeded for a while in freezing Mick out. Brian played the song’s madrigal line on his recorder, while Keith and Bill Wyman managed to coax a countermelody out of a cello: Bill held the instrument and fretted the fingerboard while Keith bowed. The track was long known as “Title 8” until it finally got its lyrics near the end of the sessions.

  Keith’s pounding piano drove the lusty “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” Charlie Watts, still hot from the English tour, was playing with new jazz-inflected polyrhythms, affecting up-tempo jams like “Miss Amanda Jones” and “Connection,” which Charlie cut alone with Keith in the studio. Brian’s luminous marimba and Charlie’s jungle tom-toms powered the brilliant “Yesterday’s Papers,” the first song Mick wrote by himself for a Stones record. A demo titled “Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Blue” evolved over three weeks into the halcyon outtake “Dandelion.”