Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  By midnight, all the guests had arrived. There were Mick and Marianne, Keith, the Harrisons, Robert Fraser and his Moroccan servant Mohammed, who did the cooking, Christopher Gibbs, Michael Cooper, a Kings Road hippie named Nicky Kramer (a fringe member of Keith’s entourage), and the American acid dealer David Schneiderman. A fire was going in the great Tudor hearth, the guitars came out, joints were passed. In connection with his own recent obscenity bust, Fraser talked about his friend Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who had killed himself after being framed for pimping in the Profumo Scandal. “I saw what they did to Stephen,” he said darkly. “They can do anyone they want.” Then they all went to bed and slept until noon, when the Acid King started making his rounds.

  David Schneiderman, as he called himself, had an act: LSD was a sacrament, and he was the priest. Marianne: “He was very West Coast, opinionated, pompous. Getting high came with a little moral. He was, ’This is the Tao of lysergic diethylamide, man. Let it speak to you.’ It was all a bit too reverent for our taste, but Robert told us he was the Acid King, and he did have the goods.”

  Late Sunday morning, the Acid King appeared in each of the five bedrooms, bearing a pot of tea and doses of Orange Sunshine. It was a beautiful winter day, and after breakfast most of the guests piled into the cars and embarked on a mystery tour of the countryside while the acid wormed its way into their brains. Michael Cooper’s photographs show the flared trousers, white loafers, bug-eye mirrored shades, floppy hats, and bushy Afghan jackets so in vogue that year. After visiting the cold pebbled beach along the Sussex coast, they tried to find the famous purple country house of the aesthete and surrealist patron Edward James, whose furnishings included several red sofas, designed by Salvador Dalí, shaped like the lips of sex queen Mae West. But the house, in West Dean north of Chichester, remained elusive, and the party returned to Redlands late in the afternoon.

  Keith and Mick both wanted to rest, and Mick enjoyed his quiet acid trip. “He was great to be around,” Marianne wrote. “Very calm and cool, without his usual nervous energy.” As night came on, they all gathered around the fireplace in the long lounge with its fur carpets and Moroccan cushions. Mohammed served a delicious couscous, and after eating, George and Patti Harrison left for their own house in Surrey.

  Marianne went upstairs to have a hot bath.

  Outside, in their hidden positions around Redlands, the waiting force of cops watched George drive off. To this day, Keith thinks nothing would have happened with a Beatle in the house. “They were out there all day, waiting for George to leave. From then on, we were fair game.”

  The most famous drug bust of the sixties began shortly after Marianne returned from her bath, wrapped in a furry bedspread because she hadn’t brought a change of clothes down to the country. The eight men were relaxing, passing a joint to take the edge of the day’s tripping. Christopher Gibbs was resplendent in a silk costume; the scent of Moroccan cooking wafted in from the kitchen, and Blonde on Blonde was on the stereo.

  Someone mentioned there was a face peering in through one of the leaded windows. Probably some fucking fan. Then a furious pounding on the heavy oak door. Reluctantly Keith got up to answer it, and into the room stepped Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely at the head of nineteen cops from the West Sussex constabulary.

  “Mr. Keith Richard, pursuant to the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1964, we have a warrant to search these premises.” Just then, Dylan let go at top volume:

  “The ghost of electricity hooooowls in the bones of her face . . .”

  Squads of cops poured into the room from every entrance as “Visions of Johanna” blared on. The TV flickered with the sound off. The police ogled their pale, costumed victims, sitting amid candlelight and incense like a painting by Burne-Jones. Then they began to search. They were polite to everyone except Mohammed, and they began to hassle Gibbs as another distastefully dressed foreigner until he informed them, in his plummy Old Etonian voice, that he was wearing the national dress of Pakistan.

  Keith was on the phone to his solicitor in London. Marianne looked at Mick. Poor bugger, she thought. His first trip, a lovely day, and now this. When a fumbling cop proposed to search her, she purposefully let slip the fur throw, exposing her ample breasts for a moment, two of the most glorious big tits in Albion, giving the scene the immortality it deserved. As the chief inspector was formally asking if Keith was the owner of the premises, Dylan let go again:

  “Jewels and binocular haaang from the head of the mule, but these visions . . . of Johanna . . . make it all seem so cruuuuuel!”

  Keith turned on his strobe light. Mick and Robert started to laugh at the lurid absurdity of the scene. A cop turned the record player down. Keith turned it back up again, louder, and asked the cops to keep their muddy boots off the Moroccan cushions that covered the floor. The cops were going through the kitchen, confiscating mustard packets Keith had brought back from American drive-ins. Some female cops asked Marianne to come upstairs to be searched in private. “Darling,” she called to Mick, “this old dyke wants to search me!” They took her upstairs while the men lined up to be searched. They found twenty-four pills in Robert Fraser’s pocket. He told them they were insulin tablets, but they were government-issue heroin tablets Spanish Tony had scored for him, good for six months in jail. Mick was searched and nothing was found. Same with Keith and the others. Schneiderman had a small tin of hash and a plastic bag of grass, which were duly impounded. One of the cops reached for the Acid King’s LSD-filled briefcase. “Please don’t open that case,” Schneiderman begged, explaining it contained valuable exposed film that would be ruined. The chief inspector nodded his assent, and the case was never opened.

  One of the policewomen came downstairs with the green velvet jacket Mick had been wearing for about a month. The jacket pocket still contained a glass vial with the speed pills Marianne had bought a few weeks earlier. Mick told the cops what they were and, gallantly, said they were his. He lied and said he’d got them from his doctor. Good for a year in prison, pep pills having been outlawed after the 1965 mod/rocker riots.

  After an hour, Chief Inspector Dinely announced the search was over. He warned Keith that he would be liable for prosecution if they had been using drugs. “Yes, I see,” Keith said, dripping with sarcasm. “They pin it all on me.” Schneiderman asked if they were being arrested. Not necessarily, he was told. That’ll come later. As the police filed out the door with their booty, Keith went over and dropped the needle onto “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”:

  “But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned!”

  As the police convoy drove back down Redlands’ lane to the Chichester Road, they carried away some old pipes, an ashtray, all the incense, the pills they’d seized, and any chance that Mick could win a libel judgment against the News of the World. Christopher Gibbs recalls that the atmosphere was relaxed and philosophical after the police left. A bit of grass and some uppers; what could happen? (Fraser didn’t mention the heroin.) No one could believe their good luck that the massive acid stash hadn’t been discovered.

  The phone rang a few minutes later. Brian was calling from London to say he and Anita would be down to Redlands in a couple of hours.

  “Don’t bother, man,” Keith told him. “We’ve all just been busted. Yeah, you heard it right. Busted!”

  * * *

  Blue Lena

  News of the raid on Redlands was a major bummer and scared a lot of people. It was the end of Swinging London, as the smart set retreated into their houses to have their fun in private. The cops put out a scurrilous lie that they’d found Mick lapping a Mars bar protruding from Marianne’s bum. The News of the World got an exclusive story on the raid, published the following Sunday. Chaos and paranoia in the Stones camp. All work on their next album stopped.

  As press scrutiny tightened, bribing the police—standard procedure in these affairs—became more difficult. Mick, Keith, and Fraser raised seven thousand pounds and gave it to Tony Sanchez, who
claimed he gave it to a police contact to make the evidence disappear, but nothing ever happened. “David Schneiderman” disappeared immediately after the raid. It could only be determined that someone resembling the American left the country within days. Keith’s minders fingered Nicky Kramer as the traitor and had him beaten up, but Kramer denied everything. Many (including Keith) thought the East End villain who did the beating, David Litvinoff, who sometimes drove for Keith, was a more likely suspect.

  When the lab reports came back, Mick was charged with possession of speed, Fraser with heroin, Keith with allowing his house to be used for drug taking. Court dates were set for June. Their well-connected lawyer, Michael Haver, a future attorney general, told them that it looked to him like someone was out to get them. Convictions on these charges could mean prison time, the cancellation of their record contract, and the end of the Rolling Stones.

  Advised to stop making provocative gestures and disappear for a while, the band had a few weeks off before a Euro tour in late March. They decided to go to Morocco, a place where even pop stars could vanish. Mick and Marianne flew to Tangier. Keith, Brian, and Anita would drive down. In Tangier, Robert Fraser arranged to meet up with Brion Gysin, who could take them up to his village of musicians in the mountains. From there to Marrakech at the edge of the Sahara. They wouldn’t be bothered there.

  The voyage of the Blue Lena began in Paris. Tom Keylock had ferried the car over, meeting Keith, Brian, and Anita at the George V. Along for the ride was the beautiful Deborah Dixon, who lived with Donald Cammell. It was a cozy foursome that headed southwest to Aquitaine, Spain and Morocco beyond. Little did Deborah Dixon know that she’d stepped into a complex web of conflicting loyalties, sexual tension, and intrigue that would lead to the dissolution of the original Stones.

  The Blue Lena was furnished with fur rugs, pop art cushions, and outrageous Swedish sex magazines. The car’s cassette player blasted soul music, a live Hendrix tape, the new Beatles single “Penny Lane.” Brian’s birthday was coming up and he was in a good mood, relieved it wasn’t him that got busted. He was drinking brandy, smoking heavily, crumbling chunks of hash into joints and sucking them down, outwardly oblivious to the smoldering looks between his best mate and his girlfriend.

  After they’d been on the road for a day, Brian turned blue, unable to breathe. At the hospital in Toulouse, he was told he had blood in his lungs and would have to stay a few days. Gallant Brian told the others to carry on to Tangier, and he would meet them there. When they checked into a hotel for the night, Keith told Keylock to book only three rooms. He and Anita spent the night together. The next day, Deborah Dixon flew back to Paris. On Brian’s twenty-fifth birthday, they left him in Toulouse and drove to Spain. Tom Keylock could barely keep his eyes on the road because Anita and Keith were making love in the back.

  Keith: “A lot can go on in the backseat of a Bentley. What can anyone say? Shit happens, man.”

  They spent a couple days relaxing in Marbella, on the Costa del Sol. They got hauled down to the comisaría by the tough Spanish cops when Keith’s credit card was rejected at an expensive restaurant. Finally Brian’s frantic telegrams found them. Anita was ordered to return to Toulouse to help him get back to London. Glumly they drove to the airport and put Anita on a plane. Back on the road to Tangier, Keylock asked Keith what the hell was going on. “She’ll be back” was all Keith would say.

  The dusty Blue Lena pulled up to the luxurious Hotel El Minzah in Tangier on March 5, 1967. Mick, Michael Cooper, Robert Fraser, and Brion Gysin were sunning at the oasis-like swimming pool, and Keith went to join them. Keylock went across the street and scored a big block of fresh hash from their friend Achmed the rug dealer.

  A few days later, Brian, Anita, and Marianne flew down from London via Madrid and Gibraltar, where they visited the colony of rare apes that inhabit the Rock. Tripping Brian played the monkeys one of his tapes, and the apes went completely berserk, shrieking in displeasure, running away. Brian began to cry, devastated that the Gibraltar apes hated his music.

  Marianne: “Anita was watching Brian with an aghast expression on her face, and I knew right then and there that this was going to be a fatal week, because all that day Anita had been asking about Keith, how I felt about him, comparing him to Brian.”

  * * *

  Square of the Dead

  Brion Gysin, then in his early fifties, was the hippest man in the world and an old Morocco hand. He was an artist whose work was so avant-garde he’d been expelled from the surrealist movement in Paris by André Breton thirty years earlier. As a writer he had devised the experimental “cutup” method, which his friend William Burroughs adapted for his artfully scrambled narrative technique. Through a Moroccan friend, in 1952 Gysin had discovered the Master Musicians of Jajouka, an old tribe of the hills south of Tangier. The Jajouka musicians played therapeutic trance music and preserved Arcadian rituals that Gysin thought dated to deepest antiquity. Gysin occasionally took selected friends like Bill Burroughs and Paul Bowles up into the hills to hear this music. The previous year, he’d taken Timothy Leary. Now Robert Fraser wanted Gysin to take the Rolling Stones.

  Brion Gysin: “Fraser the Razor, the man who invented Swinging London, brought them to my pad overlooking Tangier Bay. It was Mick and saturnine Keith with his eye on miniskirted Anita Pallenberg, and Brian Jones with a fringe of pink hair over his beady red rabbit eyes. Plus Fraser and Tom, their egregious chauffeur. Is this the whole group? I ask, and they all snicker. ’No, there’s Charlie Wattsisname and the other one and their wives,’ Fraser says. On cue the rest mockingly echo: ’The wives! The wives!’ Michael Cooper is taking pictures of the Stones curled on my bed like writhing iguanas. Paul Bowles stops by to meet the Stones, takes one look at these costumed freaks, and immediately splits in a state of shock. At the end of the evening, I took Fraser aside and told him no way was I taking this circus up the mountain to hear my music, because once the youth of the tribe got a load of these cats and their women, it would be all over up there. They’d already thrown Tim Leary out of the village for giving acid to some of the boys.

  “So we went to Marrakech a few days later, where there was a lot more music on hand and the desert climate was more to their liking.”

  They checked into the Hotel Marrakech in a palm oasis under the city’s red walls. On a clear day, they could see the snowcapped peaks of the Atlas Mountains.

  The loud voice echoing down the hallway belonged to Brian Jones. He was screaming at Anita because he knew something had happened between her and Keith, and so she told him all about it, rubbed his nose in it. So he beat her up with a new ferocity that really frightened her.

  Outside, around the pool, Cecil Beaton, doyen of British celebrity photographers, had hooked up with the Stones and was taking snapshots of a shirtless Keith lounging in his new “antique” coral necklaces and Tuareg wedding baubles. Anita emerged from the hotel with fresh bruises on her face. She sat in a rocking chair and watched her new lover being photographed.

  Cecil Beaton (from his diary): “They were a strange group, the three Stones: Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg—dirty white face, dirty blackened eyes, dirty canary drops of yellow hair, barbaric jewelry—Keith R. in 18th century suit, long black velvet coat and tightest pants, and of course, Mick Jagger . . . He asked, ’Have you ever taken LSD? Oh, you should. It would mean so much to you: you’d never forget the colors. For a painter it’s a great experience’ . . . He is sexy, but completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch. As a model, he is a natural . . . Their wardrobe is extensive. Mick showed me rows of brocade coats. Everything is shoddy, poorly made, the seams bursting. Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender and dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colors . . . None of them is willing to talk, except in spasms. No one could make up their minds what to do, or when.”

  Brion Gysin: “We take over the top floor of this hotel for a playpen hanging over the swimming pool. That night, Bri
an and I dropped some acid. Anita took some sleepers and went off to bed. Keith plugs in his guitar and sends throbbing sounds after her into the moonlight. Robert puts on an old Elmore James record and gets Mick doing little magic dances for him. For the first time, I understand that Mick really is Magic! Tom the chauffeur comes in and whispers in Brian’s ear. They want me to find some Berber girls for Brian, but I tell them I can’t make that scene. Room service arrives with huge trays of food; the food goes over the balcony and the trays are used to toboggan around the floor.”

  Tom Keylock ran into Brian late that night in the lobby of the hotel. “He was completely off his crust, staggering through the lobby, sandwiched between these two dodgy-looking Berber whores, the ones that have peculiar blue tattoos all over them. They were holding Brian up and heading toward Anita’s room. I followed them up the stairs, trying to point out the error of his plan, but he wasn’t having any of it. All hell broke loose when they reached the room. Brian had the idea that he was going to get Anita to perform with these two birds. Anita naturally declined the offer and Brian smashed the room to bits. Anita grabbed her clothes and legged it to Keith’s room, leaving Brian with these women amongst the wreckage. It was very symbolic. Looking at Brian, I thought, ’That’s yer lot, mate. You’ve really blown it this time.’ That moment was the beginning of the end for him and you know what? I think he knew it too.”

  Anita: “When Keith saw what Brian had done to me, he tried to console me. ’I can’t watch Brian do this shit to you any more. I’m going to take you back to London.’

  “ ’What about Brian?’ I asked. ’He won’t let me leave—he’ll kill me first.’ ”

  Keith told her not to worry, he would sort it out and they’d make their escape. Tom Keylock made up a story about a planeload of British reporters landing in Marrakech to bother them, which got Brian properly paranoid. Then Keylock got Gysin to disappear Brian for a few hours, to get him out of the way. No sooner had they gone than Keith and Anita were throwing her bags in the car, lots of luggage filled with feather boas. Keylock asked what would happen when Brian returned. “Fuck ’im,” said Keith. “We’re leaving the bastard here, and you’re driving.”