Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Brion Gysin: “Around the hotel swimming pool, I saw something I can only call mythological. Mick is screaming about his hotel bill, getting ready for takeoff. The cynics among us are snickering because it looks like love at first sight. At the deep end, Anita is swinging in a canvas seat. Keith is in the pool, dunking up and down in the water, looming up at her. When I go to pass between them, I see that I can’t. I can’t make it. There’s something there, a barrier. I can see it. What I see looks like a glass rod, a twisted glass rod, revolving rapidly. Between Keith’s eyes and Anita’s eyes, it shoots back and forth at the speed of light. Tristan and Isolde stuff, as red as a laser beam. I don’t like the looks of this one bit, so I check out of the hotel immediately and move in with a friend who has a house in the medina, the old Arab quarter.

  “Somehow the sinister chauffeur finds me the next day, tells me the press is looking for them and they need to hide Brian so he won’t say anything stupid. He says, ’Brian thinks the world of you, y’know. You both have the same tape recorder, your Uhers. Why don’t you take him to that place you were talking about so he can tape some music? Bring him back at five or six, there’s a good chap.’

  “So I took Brian Jones over to the Jma al-Fna, the Square of the Dead, the central plaza of Marrakech. Under the winter sun at three in the afternoon, the Jma al-Fna was full of snake charmers, acrobats, medicine men, storytellers, and musicians. We stopped at a flying carpet full of Mejdoubi—holy fools banging away on drums and smoking kif from an outrageous pipe strung with evil amulets, rotten teeth, old trinkets, carcasses of small animals. The Mejdoubi dig Brian for what he is and pass him this pipe, his eyes glistening with pure greed. One hit, and he almost coughs out a lung! Brian wants this pipe badly, but it’s bad medicine and I refuse to translate for him.

  “I drag him to my friend’s house. Brian was sulking, furious. He wants that fucking pipe, told me he’d be willing to pay a fortune for it. On the way back, the Mejdoubi sell it to him for some astronomical price. (Returning through customs at Heathrow, he loses it, since it reeks of dope.)

  “That ain’t all he loses, as he discovered when he got back to the hotel. Half an hour later, he’s on the phone to me, sobbing: ’Come quickly, can you please? They’ve all gone and left me—cleared out! I don’t know where the fucking hell they’ve gone; there’s no message and the hotel won’t tell me anything. I’m here all alone, man. Can’t you come at once?’

  “I go over there. Get him into bed. Call a doctor to give him a shot and stick around long enough to see it take hold on him. I don’t want him jumping down those ten stories into the swimming pool . . . And now, looking back into that time pool, I see how I got set up to help the Stones lose Brian. And I see another ghostly swimming pool somewhere in the future.

  “Those whom the gods love, die young.”

  Five strings, three notes, two fingers, and an asshole, and you’ve got it! You can play the darned thing. That’s all it takes. What you do with it is another thing.

  Keith Richards

  * * *

  The Psychic Debris Field

  March 1967. The Blue Lena made its return voyage north, fleeing the wreckage left behind in Marrakech. Across the Strait of Gibraltar, up through Andalusia, Catalonia, Languedoc, across France and the English Channel, suffering through a massive British customs search, escaping arrest only because Tom Keylock hid the hashish under the gas cap. Anita Pallenberg’s brutal ordeal with Brian Jones was almost over. And yet she was filled with regret, didn’t really want to leave him, wouldn’t have left if she wasn’t afraid for her safety. As Marianne Faithfull later wrote, Keith would never have gotten Anita if Brian hadn’t been such an asshole.

  Thirty years later, recalling feelings from those somber days, there’s still sorrow in her voice as Anita says simply of Brian Jones, “He was, I think, the passion of my life. There’s a difference between love and passion. Brian had that passion, and I think I was passionately in love with him.”

  “Brian really was an easy victim,” Keith told Stanley Booth. “He needed to be in a fucking hospital. But we were all working too hard to expect it [intervention] from the guys you’re working with. Then I get myself right out of the picture. I make friends again with Brian and then steal his old lady. So I really screwed up.”

  When they got to London, Keith cleaned out the Courtfield Road apartment, taking half the records and half the dope. Anita never went back there again. The fugitive couple settled in Redlands.

  Brian flew from Marrakech to Casablanca, and then on to Paris, where he threw himself on the mercy of Donald Cammell, who was shocked to find the disoriented Stone on his doorstep, with no luggage, looking like a tramp and smelling of brandy. “They left me,” Brian told Cammell. “They fucked off and left me.” Brian was a wreck, a psychic debris field. Cammell helped him get back to London, where Brian found Anita’s clothes gone from their flat.

  Keith: “Later in London, Brian caught up with us. Anita says, ’No, you’re just too much of an asshole to live with. Keith and I got something going’ . . . That was the final nail in the coffin for me and Brian. He never forgave me for that. I don’t blame him.”

  The Rolling Stones had a European tour coming up, one they couldn’t cancel because the whole band was desperate for cash, especially Mick and Keith, facing astronomical legal fees. On the day that Mick, Marianne, and Christopher Gibbs arrived in London, the Daily Mirror published details of their drug bust, naming names and revealing that the two Stones could expect drug charges to be filed against them. It would cost a fortune to get out of this one—if they even could.

  There was a question whether Brian would do the tour. He told friends he might have to quit, had forgotten how to play guitar, that he was fed up. There was also serious talk of firing him, since no one wanted to see him, much less go on the road and play music. But Mick vetoed this, according to Bill Wyman, because he thought it would do too much damage to the Stones’ image, since Brian was still a crucial visual part of the band. In the end, Brian said, Anita persuaded him to do the “Polish tour” by telling him they’d get back together if things went okay. Brian took some guitar lessons to prepare for the tour.

  On March 24, 1967, the Rolling Stones flew to Malmö, Sweden (body searches at customs), to begin a twenty-eight-show European tour that ran through early April. It was the usual: smoke bombs, baton charges, police dogs, riots inside the halls and out. The youth of Western Europe was getting ready for 1968, with the Stones beating the jungle drums of unrest and revolt. Ironically the Stones were playing well, even though the rest of the band wasn’t speaking to Brian and he wasn’t speaking to them. They didn’t even look at each other.

  During the German leg of the tour, Keith had a torrid affair with a pretty model, but Anita finished filming Mord und Totschlag and joined the tour in Paris on April 3. They moved on to Italy, where Jane Fonda, about to star in her husband Roger Vadim’s seriocomic sci-fi film Barbarella, came to the Stones’ Rome show, invited by Anita, who wanted a part in the movie. Their friend Stash de Rola’s father, the painter Balthus, was director of the French Academy in Rome. With Stash, the Stones spent time smoking hash at the palatial Villa Medici, the academy’s High Renaissance headquarters.

  Every time they crossed a border the Stones were subjected to hostile, provocative drug searches and humiliating immigration delays as nervous officials harassed them. As the Stones were leaving Paris on April 12, there was a stupid hassle about their passports at Le Bourget airport. Keith dissed the inspector, and the enraged fonctionnaire punched him, then Mick. He kept at it until Tom Keylock stepped in.

  The first Rolling Stones show behind the rock-starved Iron Curtain took place in Warsaw, Poland, on April 13 in a 2,500-seat hall in the Palace of Culture. The best seats had been scalped to the children of the nomenklatura.

  Keith: “All very uptight. There’s army at the airport. Get to the hotel, which is very jaillike. We get there to do our gig. ’Honski de boyski boisk! Zee R
ollingstonzki!!!’

  “And who’s got the best seats down front? The sons and daughters of the hierarchy of the Communist Party. They’re sitting down there in their diamonds and pearls, with their fingers in their ears.”

  Three songs into the set, as the dulcet strains of a bored version of “Lady Jane” die away, Keith turned around to face the drums. “Stop fucking playing, Charlie!” He walked to the front of the stage and started to yell at the first five rows. “You fucking lot, you can fucking get out and let the bastards in the back down front!” Keith just stood there until the first four rows emptied out, and then the show went on. The audience kept chanting “I-can’t-get-no!” Outside, the army turned water cannon, dogs, and tear gas on ten thousand kids who couldn’t get in. It was clear to Keith Richards at that moment that the days of the Iron Curtain were numbered.

  The tour ended in Athens on April 17. This was the Rolling Stones’ last series of shows for more than two years. Mick told Melody Maker the Rolling Stones were down on touring and would probably never tour in America again. This was also Brian Jones’s last tour with the band he had started five years earlier. Bill Wyman and his stunning new girlfriend, Astrid Lindstrom, stayed in Greece for a vacation. The rest flew back to England without Keith, who went to Rome for Anita’s audition for Barbarella. Screenwriter Terry Southern insisted she would be perfect as the lesbian Black Queen. Anita got the part.

  * * *

  Flower Power

  May 1967. On the cusp of the Summer of Love, the Rolling Stones were looking at jail time.

  Not Brian, though, to his amazement. He kept telling people he’d been warned he was next. The cops were out to get him. He told Linda Keith, who’d hooked up with Brian after Anita left him. He told Tina and Nicky, the lesbian girlfriends who lived with him for a while. He told Anita, whom he saw in Cannes when Mord und Totschlag made its debut (with his music) at the film festival. He and Anita got on okay until he beat her up in his hotel room after the screening, and she fled back to Keith.

  On May 10, Mick, Keith, and Robert Fraser had breakfast with their lawyers, Allen Klein, and Les Perrin at Redlands, then drove to Chichester courthouse. Several hundred people waited outside, not all of them fans. Charged with drug offenses, they opted for a trial by jury and were bailed at 100 pounds apiece. The trial date was June 22, 1967.

  While this was going on, the notorious Scotland Yard detective Norman Pilcher (“Semolina pilchards” in John Lennon’s bitter “I Am the Walrus”) and his drug squad busted Brian and Stash de Rola for a piece of hash and a little cocaine at Courtfield Road. The cops also took a lot of Brian’s stuff, beginning a series of corrupt shakedowns when the drug squad realized they had an easy mark. The newspapers headlined Brian’s arrest the next day. Shaken and upset, he sent his parents a telegram that night: “Don’t jump to hasty conclusions and don’t judge me too harshly. All my love, Brian.”

  Brian’s lawyers told him to stay away from the other Stones while his drug case was pending, and his social separation from Mick and Keith became somewhat official.

  The Stones were making a new record that month, a droning Moroccan anthem of defiance called “We Love You.” The first session at Olympic didn’t start well. Mick, Keith, and Brian arrived at two-thirty, but Charlie Watts didn’t show. They hadn’t seen him since their court dates and knew he wasn’t happy about Brian getting busted. They waited and waited. Charlie finally came down the stairs and glared at his bandmates. Slowly a big grin spread across his face and he said, “So how are our jailbirds, then?”

  “We Love You” was a message from the band to its fans, expressing appreciation for support in the wake of the drug busts. It was a psychedelic collage of jail sounds, Nicky Hopkins’s piano riff, tape-delayed vocal effects (featuring John Lennon and Paul McCartney on high harmonies), angry drums, and Brian Jones’s extraordinary coda on his favorite new instrument, the Mellotron. This icon of “progressive rock” was a tape-driven English keyboard that looked like a small Hammond organ and was actually an early sampling device. Thirty-five keys activated tape-recorded notes; the Mellotron was supplied with sets of tapes for brass, strings, flutes, a choir, and a cheesy-sounding orchestra. The Beatles had famously used it for the beginning of “Strawberry Fields Forever” a few months earlier. It was cutting-edge electronics at the time, and a very hard ax to play.

  “You try playing a Mellotron,” says engineer George Chkiantz, who worked on “We Love You” at Olympic. “Just try. There’s a horrible time lag, depending on how many notes you push down, and most people, even great musicians, screwed it up. A terrible instrument—dreadful, very hard to play, impossible to maintain tempo—unless you were Brian Jones. Nobody else could have gotten anything like that.”

  Allen Ginsberg was in London for a pro-marijuana rally in Hyde Park. He met Mick at Paul McCartney’s house, and Mick invited the Beat poet to that night’s session with Paul and John Lennon to record backing vocals for “We Love You.” Ginsberg, waving his Shiva beads and a Tibetan oracle ring, conducted the singers from the other side of the studio glass to the tempo of the stuttering Mellotron track. “They looked like little angels,” he wrote later of the Stones and the Beatles, “like Botticelli Graces singing together for the first time.”

  There was something epic about Brian’s panoramic Mellotron fanfare at the end of “We Love You.” In forty-two seconds of powerful energy music, it took in the whole sweep of the turbulent year, the travel across continents and oceans, the sheltering sky over the desert in southern Morocco. As brilliant as anything else in the Stones’ career, the solo was perhaps Brian’s last great contribution to his band, recorded in the last days in which he was physically and mentally able to make a contribution.

  After that, Brian Jones was mostly a debauched vision on chemicals, drink, and pills. Ostracized by his band, he attracted a new sleazy entourage of pop-world leeches. An American turned him on to Quaaludes, a hypnotic downer sold as Mandrax in Europe. He took up with Suki Potier, who’d been with Tara Browne when he was killed. Brian and Suki—an Anita look-alike—shared their grief over Tara for the next eighteen months. On June 2, Brian and Stash, immaculately coiffed and dandified in tailored suits, answered drug charges at West London Magistrates Court. Shown a vial of cocaine, Brian blurted, “No, man—I’m not a junkie. That’s not mine at all.” Brian and Stash were bailed at 250 pounds apiece, and trial was set for later that summer.

  During all these busts and trials, Andrew Oldham made himself scarce. There was a harsh climate of contempt in Soho and London showbiz circles for the Stones’ legal troubles, which some thought the band had provoked by their behavior. In America, Phil Spector openly ridiculed the Stones for getting themselves busted, and advised Andrew to lay low. There was a rumor that Andrew had had some kind of nervous breakdown anyway.

  “That was the death knell for me,” Oldham has said. “The band thought I should have been standing next to them in court and I wasn’t. Basically, I lost my bottle. As far as the police were concerned, I was a notorious figure and they wanted to bust me the same way they busted the Stones and [later] the Beatles. [Unlike Mick Jagger] I would have been classified as a drug-dealing businessman and been stitched up like a kipper. So I kept a low profile for a lot of that period, staying in California when I knew my number was up.”

  June 1967. The Beatles’ revolutionary Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was the main pop artifact in Western youth culture. It was a “concept album,” a new thing in rock and roll, a show in itself: the Beatles playing a band giving a concert. The album was the climax of a four-way transatlantic pop olympiad between the Beatles and Stones on one side and Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson on the other. Blonde on Blonde and the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds had set a new standard in 1966. In 1967, the Beatles answered them with Sgt. Pepper, a kaleidoscopic whirligig of music hall pastiche, emotional ballads, and an apocalyptic evocation of the death of Tara Browne. Pepper’s phantasmagoric album cover, designed and shot by Michael Co
oper, featured the Stones’ faces hidden among the myriad icons around Sgt. Pepper’s men.

  But the Stones themselves, crippled by drug busts, were faltering. Their new album, inevitably seen as their response to Sgt. Pepper, was made, as Mick said, “under the influence of bail.” The staff at Olympic now watched in horror as the Stones settled into a more relaxed method of recording. Since the Aftermath sessions, the Stones had been notoriously slow in building tracks into songs. Now hours and whole days would be wasted in waiting for someone to show up. It looked like the Stones would respond to the Beatles’ bright, cohesive variety show with a sullen, contrived record by an almost broken-up group.

  In America, London Records needed product for the beach that summer. They released an album titled Flowers in June 1967, another grab bag of tracks the Stones had lying around. The Flower Power–era album jacket was unpromising, a crude rendition of the Stones as the heads on weedy-looking stems. Side one featured the album debuts of “Have You Seen Your Mother?” and “Out of Time,” plus tracks from Decca’s Buttons and a great version of Smokey Robinson’s “My Girl,” cut at RCA back in 1965. Side two was assembled as an emotional, regret-filled series of songs left over from recent U.K. albums. “Backstreet Girl” and “Please Go Home” had been left off the American version of Buttons. The great “Take It or Leave It” had been left off the U.S. Aftermath. Marimbas, harpsichord, drums, and the Mellotron flavored “Ride On Baby,” and “Sitting on a Fence” had some fine guitar picking and harsh lyrics dating from Mick’s breakup with his old girlfriend. Individually they were all good songs. Packaged together, they were sort of a downer.