Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Jean-Luc Godard arrived in London on May 30, haggard from Les Evénements du Mai, the Paris street riots that he’d shot on the run with 16mm cameras. Godard was distracted and felt he should be in Paris, where the national riot cops in their long black raincoats were still teargassing students and kids; but he was already behind schedule and he needed to shoot right away.

  Mick: “There were lots of meetings in London hotel rooms, trying to get out of Jean-Luc Godard what the film was all about. Never did find out.” Godard tried to explain it in a jumble of disconnected images: an abortion film, Black Panthers lusting after white women, a character named Eve Democracy reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf aloud in a porno bookstore, music and suicide, quasidocumentary comic strips, a political cartoon. Godard told them he wanted to create a new cinema, converting political dialectic into film scripts. The Stones listened politely, nodded wisely, hadn’t a clue. No one did. “I want to make this film as simply as possible,” Godard told a reporter. “What I want, above all, is to destroy the idea of Culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.”

  No one was at their best. Godard seemed under a strain. Mick told friends he was stuffy. Brian Jones’s arrest had left him a zombie. Terence Stamp got busted too and had to drop out of the film. Producer Quarrier ended up reading Hitler’s book himself.

  There was some method to Godard’s madness. He intended to show the Stones building a song as a metaphor of growth, intercut with images of the radical deconstruction of outmoded bourgeois society. As he began to film in the brightly lit Olympic Studio, he caught Mick teaching Brian the guitar chords to “The Devil Is My Name.” As the long session unfolded, the Stones took off their pink jackets, Keith removed his shoes, Charlie loosened his tie. They ran through the song at different tempos with Nicky Hopkins on electric piano as Mick sang guide vocals, lyrics that later evolved into “Sympathy for the Devil.” Keith moved to bass guitar, while Bill played maracas after Keith suggested a rhythmic shift to samba mode. Hours passed as the Stones started, stopped, chatted, and chain-smoked Marlboros. Godard filmed Brian’s utter isolation as he sat by himself in a booth, ignored by everyone, strumming an acoustic guitar that no one had bothered to hook up to the control room. Godard shot long sequences of the back of Brian’s head, allowing the camera to linger on his hair.

  During the day, Godard shot outdoors in Battersea, completing long, excruciating scenes of black radicals reading from LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver in an auto junkyard before executing beautiful white girls with machine guns.

  When Godard resumed filming at Olympic, “The Devil Is My Name” had mutated into a samba nova, with African drummer Rocky Dzidzornu (Keith called him “Rocky Dijon”) pounding out a Niger River counterrhythm. The lyrics asking who killed Kennedy were changed to “the Kennedys” after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 8. Godard’s camera, roving around the studio, caught an interesting visitor to that night’s session. Sitting in a dark corner was “Chas,” glowering in a well-cut dark suit. This was actually the actor James Fox, a friend of Mick’s who’d been cast in the role of the slick gangster in Performance. When the camera got too close, Fox got up and walked out of the frame.

  Godard’s footage of the Stones in the studio is the only coherent portrait of the band working in its prime. The bright movie lights cast an unreal glow because the studio was usually almost dark, but otherwise it was pure documentary. “Godard happened to catch us on two very good nights,” Mick said later that year. “He might have come every night for two weeks and just seen us looking at each other.” The most dramatic footage was shot as Mick overdubbed his vocal, while Keith, Anita, Brian, and Suki sang the famous hoodoo whoops in the background. This was the era when Anita Pallenberg joined the Rolling Stones, became as crucial as anyone in the band, something that Godard managed to capture with a few moments of film.

  On the last night of filming, Godard’s hot lights set the studio ceiling on fire. It burst into flames as the Stones were jamming at four in the morning. The Stones and everyone else ran out of the building as the ceiling began to collapse. (Godard couldn’t believe this, and muttered that he was being sabotaged by the English because it had always rained on his outdoor locations.) Fire crews arrived and drenched their equipment, but the precious tapes were salvaged by Bill Wyman and Jimmy Miller.

  Godard went back to Paris, then returned to London to reshoot the Stones, without Brian, jamming with Nicky Hopkins. Linda Keith listened intently on the other side of the wall. Tom Keylock lit everyone’s cigs as the finished version of “Sympathy for the Devil” finished the sound track.

  There was a huge row later on because Godard intended to leave the song unfinished, while Quarrier and the film’s financial backers insisted it end with the Rolling Stones performing the complete song. Godard asked for a reason, and was told, “ten million teenyboppers in America alone.”

  “One Plus One does not mean ’one plus one equals two,’ ” Godard complained when they changed the end of the movie. “It means what it says, so we are obliged to take it as it stands: a series of fragmentary fragments.” After its initial release as One Plus One (Godard punched Ian Quarrier at the premiere), the film was retitled Sympathy for the Devil. The following year, Godard said he was disappointed in the Rolling Stones for not supporting him. “The Stones are more political than other bands, but they should be more and more political every day. The new music could be the beginning of a revolution, but it isn’t. It seems more like a palliative to life. The Stones are still working for scientific experiment, but not for class struggle or the struggle for production.”

  * * *

  Music from Big Brown

  Brian Jones’s future in the Rolling Stones became even more doubtful on June 11, 1968, when a judge ordered him to trial on the new drug charges. Already on probation, Brian might go to jail for a second conviction. This killed plans for a Stones tour of America later in the year. Rumors flew around London that Brian was out of the band. The Stones were looking for a new creative force to help Keith Richards. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was still no. 1 in England, and they couldn’t afford to lose any more momentum.

  The new Stones album, due out that summer, was almost finished. Mick decided to reposition the Stones as the heirs and legatees of the courtly troubadours, time-tripping, Grail-seeking jongleurs on a mission to preserve the romantic mysteries for a self-destructive nuclear world. So the band was photographed for their album’s inner sleeve dressed as medieval minstrels attending a dissolute feast in a crumbling manor. Christopher Gibbs, who styled the photo session, came up with the album title: Beggar’s Banquet. Another photo shoot, at an old ruin near Derby, depicted the Stones playing cricket in troubadour costume.

  The Stones scattered around Europe for a week in June: Brian in Spain, Mick in Paris, Keith back to Rome, where he and Anita were living. On June 26, they regrouped at Redlands to rehearse with a twenty-one-year-old slide guitar expert from California who turned the Stones on their ears.

  Jack Nitzsche brought Ry Cooder to London to jam with the Stones. Born in Los Angeles, Ry developed into a slide guitarist after hearing folk legend John Fahey’s bottleneck style. At fifteen, he was playing at the Ash Grove folk club, where in 1965 he was discovered (backing Jackie DeShannon) by Henry Fredericks, a six-foot-four National-steel-guitar-playing blues singer (with an M.A. in agronomy from the University of Massachusetts), who performed as Taj Mahal. They formed an electric blues band called the Rising Sons. The Sons played gigs in L.A. during 1966–67, got a good reputation as an integrated band, but had a run of bad luck. Their album for Columbia (Dylan attended some sessions) was never released. They were blown off Johnny Carson’s Tonight show at the last minute. Cooder’s next gig was with Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band, and he was also working in L.A. as a studio musician.

  Marianne Faithfull was recording a new Jagger—Richards song, “Sister Morphine,�
�� whose lyrics she had written. Nitzsche thought Cooder should play on the track. Nitzsche also had been asked to compose the sound track music for The Performers and had enlisted Cooder to bond with the Stones so that back in L.A. he could reproduce the groove the Stones were mining at the time.

  Instead, Cooder turned the Stones on to his groove. It was an open G tuning, for five strings only. Until 1920 or so, the five-string banjo had been the string instrument favored in bands. In the Roaring Twenties, Sears, Roebuck began selling cheap guitars, and black musicians would remove the bottom string and tune them like banjos. The style had faded a decade later, preserved only in recordings by “country” blues musicians like Fred McDowell and Arthur Phelps—Blind Blake.

  Ry Cooder arrived at Redlands on June 25. Anita: “He came down to visit for the weekend. He was just passed out, I remember, on the couch. Then he’d get up and play—really good. He was a very quiet person, but then I was probably as passed out as he was.”

  The next day, sitting on the floor of the Fifth Dimension, Cooder began to play slide guitar as Charlie Watts tuned his drums and Jimmy Miller rolled tape. Even Brian Jones was impressed as Cooder’s lurid, serpentine playing boomed through the room’s speakers. It was a new way of approaching rock music, and Keith Richards, unable to depend on Brian for any input, paid close attention to Cooder’s style. They jammed on and recorded Muddy Waters’s “Still a Fool” and a lick of Keith’s titled “Highway Child.”

  Keith: “Ry Cooder came to play on ’Sister Morphine.’ I’d been playing with the open G and he was using it too. I picked up a lot of tips on how to handle it. I eliminated the sixth string so it wouldn’t rumble and get in the way . . . I started to get into that, and the high-stringing ’Nashville tuning’ the country boys use [shown to Keith by Gram Parsons: the bottom four strings are restrung and tuned an octave higher than usual].”

  Keith had grown up playing in Chuck Berry’s blues tunings; the new open G style he learned from Cooder would affect his style from then on. Out of it came “Honky Tonk Women,” “Gimme Shelter,” and the other guitar hooks that would soon earn Keith the soubriquet “the Human Riff.”

  Keith: “Five strings, three notes, two fingers, an asshole, and you’ve got it!”

  The ruthless police harassment of Brian Jones continued relentlessly. Crooked cops would knock on his door, ask if he had any drugs, and try to shake him down for money. He came down to Redlands late in June to talk to Mick about the situation, worried that the Stones would dump him if he went to jail. This developed into an argument as Mick tried to placate him. “We’ve all been busted,” Mick shouted at Brian, “and none of us has gone to prison yet. Why should you be any different? Don’t be so fucking stupid.”

  Brian started to scream that he was going to kill himself. He dashed out of the house, ran across the lawn, and threw himself into the moat. Keith told people the moat was very deep, and Brian appeared to be struggling, so Mick reluctantly waded in to save him after Spanish Tony and Keith refused to do the honors. But the moat was only a few feet deep, and Brian was only pretending to be in distress. When Mick got to him, he was furious. He grabbed Brian’s hair and pushed his head under. “You want to drown, you bastard? Well, I’m going to bloody well drown you, then. Look at these velvet trousers—cost me fifty quid!—you’ve ruined them. You stupid bastard, I hope you do go to jail!”

  Brian drove back to London that night and seemed to be feeling a little better.

  By early July, they had the basic tracks for Beggar’s Banquet and a new sonic highway to follow. “Sympathy for the Devil” would open the record as a devilish showpiece with intimate voodoo rattles, sinister piano chords, and Keith’s spiky guitar playing. It ended in a rave for piano and guitar, with Mick screeching over the music like an Amazon shaman, donning the dangerous mantle of a new plutonian persona—“Call me Lucifer”—to succeed impish Jack Flash.

  “Street Fighting Man” had been built with acoustic guitars only, flavored by single drum strokes and maracas that supplied a hypnotic fervor to Mick’s lyrics about compromising with bourgeois complacency, about why he was not a street fighter and never would be, despite the need for violent revolution to stop a brutal war and retool society. The song ended in a quiescent drone of tambura and an Indian double-reed shenai, played by Traffic’s Dave Mason, which seemed to point to meditation and inner strength as an antidote to the futility of political struggle. The ringing effect of the guitars came from open tuning. Keith: “What’s fascinating about open stringing is that you get these other notes ringing sympathetically, almost like a sitar. Unexpected notes ring out, and you say, ’Ah, there’s a constant. That one can go all the way through this thing.’ ”

  These were the two rock centerpieces at the banquet. The rest of the album evolved from cleverly recycled blues licks and country tunes that Jimmy Miller managed to pull from the chaos around the Stones amid film shoots, drug busts, and tension. “It was on the point of dispersal,” Keith said. Miller’s calming approach allowed the Stones to relax and play the roots music they enjoyed, as if they were a bunch of players on the front porch of a house on an old country road, the same one The Band was living on in Woodstock. (The words “Music from Big Brown” were scrawled—by Keith—on the cruddy toilet stall depicted on the album’s soon-to-be-rejected cover.)

  “No Expectations” evolved out of the pre-owned country blues “Meet Me at the Station” and starred Brian Jones in his last moment of greatness with the Stones, playing shimmering Hawaiian guitar lines over the sober lyrics of blues desolation. Mick: “That’s Brian playing. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes. That was the last time I remember Brian really being involved in something really worth doing. He was there with everyone else, but he had just lost interest in everything.”

  “Dear Doctor” was a parody country song, a send-up of hillbilly traditions complete with a corny harmonica, Band-like mandolin, and a narrative about a shotgun wedding that didn’t work out. Country music was still a joke to the Stones. “We’re just playing games,” Mick said at the time. “We aren’t really into country music enough to know.”

  “Parachute Woman” came out of the new Robert Johnson bootleg, reinterpreted by Jagger/Richards (on cassette at Redlands) as a gutbucket country-blues riff. The basic cassette track was used on the record. George Chkiantz: “They fell in love with the sound of this mono cassette recorder. If they got the distortion just about right, it had this curious warble, a remarkably gutsy sound.” “Jigsaw Puzzle” echoed with pedal steel guitar and Keith’s bottleneck as Mick spun out Dylanesque chains of imagery—the gangsters, tramps, and a bishop’s daughter—that ends in Burroughsian images of the queen killing twenty thousand grandmas, who thank Her Majesty for her trouble. The song built to an orchestral climax of stride piano and winding electric guitars.

  “Street Fighting Man” opened side two, followed by a country blues, “Prodigal Son,” stolen from Memphis bluesman Rev. Robert Wilkins’s recording “The Prodigal Son.” The Stones cut the song as an intense acoustic jam, Charlie brushing his drums and cymbal, Mick retelling the old Bible story with understated fervor, like a jackleg preacher by a campfire. When the album was released, “Son” was credited to Jagger/Richards. But Rev. Wilkins was still alive, still appearing at blues festivals in America, and the Stones got into trouble for thieving.

  “Stray Cat Blues”: shuffle and eighths, down and dirty sex talk, a carnal sketch of what Terry Southern referred to as “groupie-poon,” the (very) young girls who wanted to dally with the Stones. Patterned roughly on the Velvet Underground’s buzzing “Heroin” drone, “Stray Cat” was about spreading and biting: bongos, drums, and piano joined the chiming guitars of “Street Fighting Man,” then the whole band with Mellotron in a long jam after Mick’s modest proposal of a threesome with the stray cats. It was a brilliant, explicit Hogarth print from the Stones’ candlelit underworld, and one of their greatest songs.

&n
bsp; The endearing “Factory Girl” was an Indian country jam, with guitar, mandolin, and tabla played expertly by Charlie. The sweet fiddle part was overdubbed by Rik Grech.

  Mick’s “Salt of the Earth” ended the album with his deep cynicism and anarchic irony. It started quietly with piano and slide guitar, built to anthemic strength, then laid back as Mick contemplated the masses through a lysergic lens. “Salt of the Earth” then went gospel, with piano and a gospel choir added in Los Angeles when Mick and Jimmy Miller flew to California on July 5 to supervise the mixing and overdubbing of Beggar’s Banquet. The night they landed in L.A., they went out to dinner with the Doors, who were widely viewed as America’s version of the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger sat in the front row of the Hollywood Bowl with Marianne and Jimmy Miller as Jim Morrison moaned and writhed in the deepest oedipal throes of “rock theater.” On the way back to their hotel, Mick told Jimmy Miller that he thought the Doors were really boring.

  * * *

  Jajouka Rolling Stone

  July 1968. While Mick and Keith were finishing Beggar’s Banquet in Los Angeles, Brian was back in Morocco, continuing his quest to expand the Stones’ music. His aim this time was to capture the elusive magic of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

  Brian had been trying to get to Jajouka for a couple of years. The village had been discovered by Brion Gysin after he and Paul Bowles had attended a religious festival near the Caves of Hercules, on the coast near Tangier. There Gysin heard the keening wooden oboes of the Jajouka musicians for the first time. He told Bowles, “That’s the music I want to hear every day for the rest of my life.” Within a year, he managed to visit Jajouka, a hidden mountain village in the Djebala hills, about seventy miles south of Tangier. One of the first Europeans to witness Jajouka’s tribal rites, Gysin recognized carefully preserved rituals that stretched back to the religious ceremonies of Rome and Carthage and even further back to Arcadian Greece. Gysin also found that the village’s traditions were in great danger, as its young hereditary musicians left the mountains for city life. Gysin dedicated himself to preserving Jajouka, opening a restaurant, famous in the annals of expatriate Tangier, where groups from Jajouka could play every night for a stable clientele.