Keith: “Flowers was put together in America by Andrew Oldham because they were begging for product. All that stuff had been cut a year before and rejected by us for not making it. I was really surprised when people dug it, surprised when it even came out!”
Flowers played against the grain of the Summer of Love that year. Its dark themes, impassioned singing, and lovelorn music implied that the halcyon excitement of that summer was but a veneer, and underneath lurked the same old doubts and fears. Many fans loved it anyway. “The Flowers album was for loners and lovers only,” Patti Smith wrote. “It provided a tight backdrop to a lot of decadent fantasy.”
* * *
Iridescent Ghost
Spring 1967. Marianne Faithfull had been playing the role of Irina, the youngest of Anton Chekhov’s three sisters, opposite Glenda Jackson at the Royal Court Theater in Sloane Square since April. She’d gotten good reviews, though she once collapsed onstage while tripping. Mick came every night, at least for the last act. Then he’d go on to the studio, where the Stones continued to work on their album. “She Comes in Colors” was moving along, and Brian Jones kept experimenting with the Mellotron’s eerie artificial sounds. He was often so pilled-up and befuddled they had to prop him up with pillows while he played. Mick bought an early Moog synthesizer, but didn’t know how to play it. Bill Wyman had a track called “Acid in the Grass,” which Mick refused to sing on. “It’s your fucking track,” he haughtily told Bill. “You fucking sing on it.” This became Bill’s trippy “In Another Land” as the sessions went on. Keith’s “Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Blue” demo mutated into “Dandelion.”
On June 13, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix flew to San Francisco, then by smaller plane to Monterey, where the Monterey International Pop Festival was held the following weekend. Brian didn’t play a note at Monterey, but he was a smash anyway. Dressed variously in exquisite Chinese silk robes and a lustrous golden coat, dripping with Berber jewels and a crystal swastika, blasted out of his mind on STP (a newly formulated psychedelic speedball that lasted about three days), Brian floated around the festival’s backstage area with luminescent blond Nico on his arm, the two looking exactly alike. With the aura of an imperious acid czar, Brian was, David Dalton wrote, “like an iridescent ghost on the threshold of the drugs that sustained him.” (The joke among the backstage crew was: Have you seen that chick that looks just like Brian Jones? Hey, man, that was Brian Jones.)
Monterey (organized by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and record executive Lou Adler) was the first major rock festival to feature all of the sixties’ musical currents, and boasted some spectacular events: the Grateful Dead’s all-night set; the Jefferson Airplane’s hallucinogenic nighttime LSD opera in front of the Joshua Light Show; Otis Redding’s soul show for what he affectionately called “the Love Crowd.” On June 18, Ravi Shankar sent the festival off on an extended, blissful Indian reverie as Brian Jones and Nico watched from the front row. The Who came on next, louder than bombs, as Pete Townshend and Keith Moon destroyed their instruments amid smoke bombs and sonic chaos.
Brian’s job was to introduce the American debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. To prepare himself, he dropped some acid with actor Dennis Hopper. Brian came onstage, took the mike, and whispered, to almost dead silence, “I want to introduce you to a very good friend of mine and a countryman of yours—Jimi Hendrix, the most exciting performer I have ever seen.” Hendrix made the audience forget the Who. Playing on two hits of the house acid, Monterey Purple, he played his guitar behind his back and with his tongue. He worked a one-handed version of “Strangers in the Night” into the power chords of “Wild Thing.” Kneeling as if in prayer, he torched his broken instrument in a holocaust of lighter fluid and sacrifice. When the flames died down, he swung it around his head and smashed it to bits. The Monterey Festival was where the guitar players—Hendrix, windmilling Pete Townshend, Mike Bloomfield—became the Voice of God in rock music.
Brian returned to England loaded with the new California chemicals: DMT (a variant of hog tranquilizer) for a heavy downer, STP for psychedelic speed. “That was the worst,” Anita recalled. “Too chemical. No one could handle that stuff.”
London, June 25. On a Sunday afternoon, Brian, Mick, and Marianne joined the Beatles to sing along with “All You Need Is Love” in a pioneering multinational satellite TV broadcast called Our World. Brian had played sax on the Beatles’ obscure “You Know My Name” at Abbey Road studios a few days before.
On Tuesday, June 27, Mick and Robert Fraser were back in court. Presiding was Judge Leslie Block, a vindictive pillar of the Sussex squirarchy. Fraser admitted possession of the heroin pills. His lawyer cited his Eton background and military service in Africa. The prosecutor dredged up his recent obscenity conviction for Jim Dine’s pink penis sculpture, and he was found guilty. Mick’s jury, instructed by Judge Block not to buy the idea that he had a prescription for the speed they found in his pocket, then found Mick guilty. The judge sent Mick and Robert off to Lewes Prison for the night, to be sentenced after Keith’s trial the next day. Mick was prepared for this: he had a bag of clothes, books about Tibet, and a jigsaw puzzle to pass the time.
On Wednesday, it was Keith’s turn to plead not guilty to allowing his house to be used for drugs. The prosecution kept harping on the nude girl the cops had seen at the party. Mick’s lawyer tried to keep Marianne’s name out of it—“she is described as a drug-taking nymphomaniac with no chance to say anything in her defense”—but outside court, smirking cops were feeding the press their obscene Mars bar story. Marianne visited Mick in his cell during the lunch break and found him crying and distraught, facing prison and the end of his career. (The Stones got no support from Decca, ostensibly because they weren’t signed directly to the label. When the Beatles had drug problems later on, EMI helped considerably.) Keith also visited Mick and Robert, who were then taken back to jail to wait for the conclusion of Keith’s trial. Michael Cooper snapped a photo of Mick in his cell, but lost his film to the jailers on his way out.
It was glum at Redlands that night. Keith packed his bag, ready to be jailed. They learned that police had broken into Courtfield Road after a false telephone report that Brian had overdosed. Marianne and Michael Cooper consoled each other in bed. The headline in the Evening Standard blared: NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY.
On Thursday, Keith Richards defiantly took the stand. He told the jury that the Stones had been framed by the News of the World in retaliation for Mick’s libel suit. Dressed in a sharp black suit, he contemptuously told the court, “We’re not old men, and we don’t worry about petty morals.” The jury found Keith guilty after deliberating for five minutes.
Judge Block gave Keith a year in prison. Keith looked at the ceiling, went pale, stayed silent. Robert Fraser got six months and sarcastically clicked his heels. Mick got three months. He reeled back in the dock, stifling a burst of tears, as the judge pronounced sentence and the girls in the gallery yelled out protests. Outside, six hundred fans cried out at the harsh verdicts. Shame! Unfair! Let them go!
Marianne got in to see Mick in his cell afterward, and he was so upset he could hardly speak. Anita was in Rome, working on her film. Allen Klein was called in New York, and he left for London immediately, determined to get the Stones out. Mick was driven to Brixton Prison in South London, while Keith and Robert were delivered to the dungeonlike Wormwood Scrubs to begin their sentences.
There was a small street protest in London that night. Kids demonstrated on the Kings Road and in Piccadilly Circus. Deejay Jeff Dexter led kids out of the underground club UFO and into the streets and was beaten up by the cops for his trouble. Labour M.P. Tom Driberg, who knew Mick socially, said in Parliament that the Stones had been made scapegoats for the drug problem. The Who took out ads in the papers, protesting the “grave sentences imposed upon the Stones at Chichester” and announcing they were releasing a single, “The Last Time”/“Under My Thumb” (quickly recorded the previous day), with proceeds
going to the Stones’ legal costs. Drummer Keith Moon joined two hundred demonstrators outside the Fleet Street offices of the News of the World. His girlfriend carried a sign that read FREE KEITH.
In Wormwood Scrubs, they took Keith’s clothes, gave him a blunt spoon to eat with, told him they were going to cut off all his hair, told him he was going to spend a year sewing mailbags. He wrote to his mother and told her not to worry. As he settled in, the other inmates started shoving bits of tobacco and rolling papers under his cell door. Keith dragged his chair to the cell window and spent his first hours staring at his little square of sky.
“Most of the prisoners were great,” he recalled. “It was, ’What are you doin’ in here? Bastards! They been waiting for you in here for ages.’ ” During the daily walk in the courtyards, Keith was offered hash and even acid. “Wot? Take acid? In here?” That afternoon, “Ruby Tuesday” came on the radio and the whole jail erupted in cheers. “They were banging on the bars. They knew I was in and wanted to let me know.”
At Brixton Prison, Mick Jagger, depressed and lonely, was writing the verses of “2000 Light Years from Home.”
Keith: “That afternoon [Friday, June 30], I’m lying in my cell, wondering what the fuck is going on, and suddenly someone yelled, ’You’re out, man, you’re out. It’s just been on the news.’ So I started kicking the shit out of the door. I yelled, ’You let me out, you bastards! I got bail!’ ”
It was true. Their lawyers had gone to the High Court of Criminal Appeal in London and gotten Keith and Mick bailed at 5,000 pounds apiece, pending their appeals. Robert Fraser, out of funds, stayed in Wormwood Scrubs, eventually serving four months of his sentence. Tom Keylock picked them up from prison, took them to a meeting with Michael Havers, and then to a pub in Fleet Street, where Les Perrin arranged an informal press conference. “It’s great to be out,” a relieved Mick Jagger told the reporters. Keith told them he was so stunned at his sentence he just went limp.
That night, they met with Allen Klein in his suite at the London Hilton. Klein confiscated a chunk of hash from Marianne as she was rolling a joint, and flushed it down the toilet. Mick and Marianne went off to her father’s cottage in the country for a few days, away from London and prying eyes.
Meanwhile, Les Perrin went to work. The veteran press agent got in touch with William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the august Times of London. On Saturday, July 1, the Times published an editorial that has been credited with saving the Stones from further jail time.
* * *
The Real Butterfly
WHO BREAKS A butterfly on a wheel, thundered the Times on the morning of July 1, 1967. The Alexander Pope headline, a reference to the trial of Oscar Wilde, was an indication of the moderate moral dudgeon to come. Noting that “Mr. Jagger” got three months for some pep pills, the paper warned the same thing could happen to the archbishop of Canterbury on his way back from visiting the pope in Rome. “One has to ask, therefore, if this technical offence, divorced as it must be from other people’s offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment.” (The editorial never mentioned Keith or Fraser.) Maintaining that it would be wrong to speculate on Judge Block’s reasons, the Times cut to the chase:
There are many people who take a primitive view on the matter, what one might call a pre-legal view of the matter. They consider that Mr. Jagger has “got what was coming to him.” They resent the anarchic quality of the Stones’ performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers, and broadly suspect them of decadence . . .
One has to ask: has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism and resentment his celebrity has aroused? . . . There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.
With this, the Times killed the case against Mick, and by extension, Keith.
No one took the case seriously after that, except the lawyers who went through the motions in court for another six weeks. The Times, it was observed, had acted with some courage, it being technically illegal to write about a criminal case in progress. Old Fleet Street hands realized that Les Perrin had saved the Rolling Stones’ arses.
Keith stoically accepted the Times’s deep condescension. “The Times people, they’re the ones who can say, ’You’re just a butterfly. Let’s just keep you a butterfly and leave it at that.’ ”
Brian Jones spent the month of July in and out of clinics and nursing homes, under psychiatric care. He was deeply upset because his mother had been insulted in the streets of Cheltenham after his arrest; once again he’d brought disgrace to his family. The Stones were in the studio after July 7, working on new songs with Nicky Hopkins on piano, under the influence of bail. “2000 Light Years from Home” was in production, along with “Citadel” and further work on “We Love You.” Brian would come in from the clinic for the sessions, dabbling on saxophones, tablas, even a harp. Ian Stewart would watch this in distaste. “It was tragic to see, because Brian really was a good player, but all he wanted to do was fiddle with reed instruments and Indian drums. He was too far out of it to play anything. Being a ’star’ just got to him—totally.”
At the end of the month, Mick, Keith, and Marianne made a promo film with Peter Whitehead for “We Love You,” based on the Oscar Wilde trial, with Mick as Oscar, Marianne as his boyfriend, and Keith as a hanging judge in a ridiculous wig.
On July 31, Mick and Keith won their appeal in a courtroom filled with kids wearing Stones T-shirts. At the judge’s polite request, Mick turned around and asked the fans not to make any noise. Mick’s conviction was upheld, but he received a probationary discharge. Keith’s conviction was thrown out amid screams of pleasure from fans that disturbed the decorum of the law courts. Keith, suffering from chicken pox, had to wait for the verdict in another room. “When I got up,” Keith recalled, “I was covered in spots. It was the last straw—they couldn’t take it. They couldn’t even get me into court because I was diseased.” He went right back to Rome to be with Anita.
Mick and Marianne were promptly whisked by helicopter to a country house in Essex, where a TV discussion was filmed with him, William Rees-Mogg, politician Lord Stow-Hill, and the bishop of Woolwich, concerning the problems of youth. Tranquil on Valium, according to Marianne, Mick didn’t have much to say, but the broadcast managed to enhance his shaky stature as a spokesman for his generation.
“I hated the bust,” Mick later said, “because it stopped the band and slowed us down . . . It wore me out. It wore my bank balance out. Cost a fortune! And those horrible, gray people that get you off . . . I mean, they put us through a lot of hassle and took a lot of bread off of us. It’s just a lot of games they play between different lawyers. We were just there, you know. Nothing real happened.” Robert Fraser, his appeal denied, stayed in prison and subsequently lost his art gallery.
Keith Richards was transformed by Anita Pallenberg in Rome that summer. They lived in a suite in the Ritz Hotel atop the Spanish Steps. After working at Cinecitta all day, the Black Queen—totally into her occult role—presided over a salon that included Terry Southern, director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Warholite Gerard Malanga, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater. Mick and Marianne visited as well, and one night they all dropped acid in the haunted, splendiferous Villa Medici with Stash de Rola. The next day, Mick wrote the melody that became “Sister Morphine” on his guitar.
Keith started wearing Anita’s jewels, then her clothes and her makeup, and got his unruly hair together in the unkempt shag that became his trademark. Keith had always been somewhat shy, but under Anita’s thumb he became flamboyant and cocksure, the very picture of the English rock star, the pretender to the throne being abdicated by Brian Jones in free fall.
The Stones spent much of August 1967 working at Olympic on what would become Their Satanic Majesties Request. At the same time, Steve Winwood’s ne
w psychedelic soul group, Traffic, was making its first album in Olympic’s Studio A. Traffic was being produced by an affable, Brooklyn-born drummer named Jimmy Miller, who had moved to England to work for Chris Blackwell’s label, Island Records. Mick Jagger was a Traffic fan, hung out with them, noted Jimmy Miller’s laid-back production style, and realized the Rolling Stones would need a new producer when they showed Andrew Oldham the door.
Mick was taking a lot of acid, reflected in songs like “2000 Man” and free-form psychedlic jams like “Gomper.” His spacey lyrics were heavily influenced by his current reading: the Taoist classic The Secret of the Golden Flower, the occult anthology The Morning of the Magicians, and A View over Atlantis by the Stones’ friend John Michell. No one was happy with the seemingly directionless music, but Allen Klein and Decca insisted the Stones have a new album ready for Christmas. After a deliberately sloppy blues jam at Olympic one night, Andrew Oldham walked out of the studio and never came back. His era was over.
To celebrate the court verdicts, the Stones released the sensational “We Love You” on August 15, with “Dandelion” on the B side. Mick had finished the lyrics during his night in jail. Prison footsteps and a slamming cell door started “We Love You,” which ended in Brian’s martial Mellotron coda. (Both sides of the record concluded with brief snatches of the songs on the flip.) “We Love You” failed to make much impact, with its defiant “we don’t care” lyrics buried deep in a drone of white noise, and only reached no. 7 in England. In America, the soaring, nursery-rhymish “Dandelion” was released as the single’s A side. It was the Stones’ contribution to Flower Power and the Summer of Love, but, Keith pointed out, “We didn’t have a chance to go through too much Flower Power because of the bust. We were ’outlaws,’ man.”
Old Gods Almost Dead Page 24
