Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Outside the court, Brian danced a jig with Mick and Suki. It looked like a brand-new day. Holding Suki’s hand afterward, he told the press, “I was sure I was going to jail for at least a year. I never expected that I would be going home. It’s such a wonderful relief.” Asked for a quote, Mick said, “We’re very pleased Brian didn’t have to go to jail. Money doesn’t matter.”

  Brian was staying at Redlands. Tom Keylock drove him there with Cynthia Stewart, Stu’s wife, to look after him. She put her arm around Brian, and he cried most of the way.

  While Mick and Keith were preoccupied with the Performance shoot, Brian worked on his Jajouka project. He wrote notes for the album sleeve that touched on his pride in capturing the wild music of the tribe Ahl Sherif in the field. He carefully noted that the recordings were impressionist rather than ethnographic. “I don’t know if I possess the stamina to endure the incredible, constant strain of the [Bou Jeloud] festival,” he wrote, “such psychic weaklings has Western civilization made of so many of us.”

  In October, the Rolling Stones caved in to Decca’s demand that the toilet sleeve be dropped from Beggar’s Banquet. A plain white sleeve, styled as a banquet invitation, would be substituted for the late November album release. This would draw unfavorable comparisons with the Beatles’ White Album, also released that autumn.

  Around this time, the Labour Party dispatched M.P. Tom Driberg to convince Mick Jagger to become a politician. Harold Wilson’s government had gained forty seats in the 1966 election and was on a roll. Driberg was a longtime ally of the Stones, and he and Mick met to talk politics over lunch at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. (They had first met when Allen Ginsberg had taken the homosexual Driberg to Mick’s flat in Marylebone Road, where Jim Dine’s pink phallus sculpture dominated the room. They were drinking tea when Driberg looked longingly at Mick’s crotch and gushed, “Oh my, Mick, what a big basket you have.” Jagger turned red and smiled, Ginsberg reported.)

  Driberg now told Jagger that there would be 6 million new voters in the next British general election and that Mick would surely win if he stood for Parliament. Mick listened carefully and gave it much thought, since politics had been one of his early career choices. When Marianne returned to London, she could see he was vacillating. Driberg would come to Cheyne Walk for the evening, find Mick and Marianne playing records and cooking dinner, and keep trying to recruit Mick for the Labour Party.

  It almost worked. Marianne recalls that Mick would be convinced at the end of the evening, but would change his mind in the morning when Donald Cammell called screaming for Mick to finish the lyrics to “Memo from Turner.” But in the end, instead of winning Jagger for Labour, Driberg was almost talked out of the party by Mick, who was disgusted by the government’s support for America in Vietnam, its recent, humiliating devaluation of the pound, and for supporting the Nigerian regime during the civil war in Biafra province.

  One night in November, Driberg showed up at 48 Cheyne Walk to have supper with Mick and Marianne. As he arrived, Mick called from Olympic to say he’d be at the studio all night. Marianne burst into tears. Sobbing, she asked the startled politician to please go to the pub next door and buy a few bottles of wine, because she had no money.

  With the filming complete, the Stones were back in the studio with a vengeance, trying to heal themselves, working on the songs for the album that would become their unrivaled masterpiece, Let It Bleed.

  The first number they cut was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” on the weekend of November 16 at Olympic. Mick’s lyric was an explicit plea to Marianne about her drug use, and an essay on how heroin had infiltrated the lives of the Stones and the people around them. Like “Gimme Shelter” and “Monkey Man,” the song described heroin use as a text containing all the bittersweet sadness of the times, in which people felt powerless and turned inward for solace and security. “If God made anything better,” Charles Mingus said of heroin, “he kept it for himself.” Musicians loved the drug because it made them feel secure and focused.

  Al Kooper arrived at Olympic early on the sixteenth, a Saturday night. Then Charlie and Bill, whom Kooper had met in New York, came in. Jimmy Miller was producing, and conga player Rocky Dijon was rolling the massive hash joints required for the sessions. Soon Keith and Mick crashed through the door, Mick in a huge fur coat, Keith in a Tyrolean mountaineer’s hat with a pheasant feather stuck in the band.

  Soon everyone was on the floor in a circle, just guitars and percussion, as Mick and Keith taught them the chord changes and rhythms of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Kooper started playing a groove from an Etta James record, and Keith picked it up on guitar. As the session wore on, Jimmy Miller tried to show Charlie a certain drum accent that Charlie failed to master. When Charlie took a break, Miller sat down at the drums and kept playing when they recorded the take (Charlie was unhappy about this but said nothing). Mick and Keith both played acoustic guitars, with Bill on bass. Brian Jones was slumped in a corner, reading Country Life magazine during the entire session.

  Keith overdubbed his part on electric guitar, and Kooper put his signature organ on the track. At two in the morning, folding tables appeared in the studio laden with an enormous banquet of roast lamb, curries, salads, deserts, and an impressive wine selection. The session broke up at dawn. Kooper told Jagger to call him if he wanted to put horns on the track, because Al thought he heard a good horn part for the song.

  Two days later, Marianne lost the baby she’d been carrying for seven months. Both she and Mick were distraught. It was a devastating blow that doomed their long affair. Marianne had been anemic, blamed herself, felt blamed by her doctor and Mick for taking drugs. Now she retreated into barbiturates and drink. “He really wanted that baby,” she said of Mick, “and so the miscarriage did both of us in.”

  Mick commemorated their tragedy, inserting the lines “The baby’s dead / my lady said” into the new version of “Memo from Turner,” and the song was finally complete.

  In late November, while Beggar’s Banquet was released in America and its Luciferian imagery began to seep into youth culture, Brian Jones bought a house in the country. The place was in Hartfield, Sussex, fifty miles southeast of London and not far from Charlie’s house. Cotchford Farm, as it was called, was better known around the world as the House at Pooh Corner, because it had been the home of A. A. Milne, who had written his tales of Winnie the Pooh in the house. There was a statue of Christopher Robin in the garden, which the Milne Society had the right to visit annually. It was an almost ridiculously perfect home for a reclusive, semiretired rock star. Christopher Gibbs set about fixing the place up, and everyone close to him talked about how much Brian, who loved to swim, would enjoy the outdoor pool when summer came around again.

  * * *

  The Rock & Roll Circus

  December 1968. Planning for The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus had been in production for several weeks. Mick Jagger’s strategy was to match the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour TV film and get the Stones in front of an international audience. Mick had a fondness for old-fashioned English traveling circuses. His idea was to combine the Stones and their favorite bands with the clowns, jugglers, and animal acts of one of the small circus companies still touring bucolic English fairgrounds, with Brigitte Bardot as the ringmaster. The Stones put up their own money so they could retain control over the film.

  Peter Swales: “The Stones weren’t a functioning band at that point. Mick, Keith, Charlie, and Bill desperately wanted to get the show back on the road. Mick had told the press the Stones would tour in 1969, and the Rock & Roll Circus was supposed to be the first step. Mick was the ’spiritus rector,’ the guiding spirit behind the Circus, which was done without the input of—indeed was done almost in spite of—Allen Klein.”

  Mick originally wanted the Stones to appear with the Who, Marianne Faithfull, Dr. John, Gram Parsons’s new band, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and a “supergroup” led by Steve Winwood, whose band Traffic was
just breaking up. (As the great sixties bands began to disintegrate, their principal stars began linking up with stars from other bands: “supergroup” was a major buzzword of the era.) Keith wanted Johnny Cash, who declined. The Isley Brothers were too busy.

  Peter Swales: “Allen Klein tried to sabotage the Circus by withholding money and completely failing to book Dr. John and the Burritos. Tom Keylock and I went to Steve Winwood’s flat to beg him to do the Circus (’No shame in trying to blackmail him,’ said Tom), but Winwood said he was physically ill and wouldn’t budge. Then Glyn Johns played me an acetate of Jimmy Page’s new band, still called the New Yardbirds [soon to be Led Zeppelin], and pleaded with me to get them on the Circus. Jagger said no without hearing the record, and I thought there may have been some bad blood there.

  “By now it was getting close to taping, but we had no acts except the Stones and the Who. So Mick played his trump card and called up his idol—John Lennon. Mick didn’t really want to do it because he didn’t want to be beholden to John, but he did it. Lennon said he would do the supergroup and brought in Eric Clapton. Mitch Mitchell [from the Jimi Hendrix Experience] would play drums, and Keith elbowed Bill Wyman aside and insisted on playing bass.

  “The final show came together only days before the taping. Taj Mahal and his band were recruited too late to get them work visas, so they flew in as tourists and had to work secretly. I found a new band called Jethro Tull after hearing ’Blues for Jeffrey’ at Pie Studios. Then Brian Jones, who’d been given no role in the Circus other than a few lines, insisted that Ivry Gitlis be flown in from Paris to perform. [Gitlis, a Paris acquaintance of Brian’s, was one of the last living inheritors of the great European violin virtuosos. At forty-seven, he was the embodiment of the romantic tradition and a champion of modern composers like Bartók and Stravinsky.] Brian was obviously under a huge emotional strain. He was sozzled on vodka at the meetings, often crying in the office. Brian insisted that Gitlis was a genius, and we accommodated him.” Puzzled by the invitation, Gitlis accepted out of respect for Brian.

  On December 5, the Stones hosted a drunken press party for Beggar’s Banquet at a London hotel that ended in a pie fight. Brian Jones was the favorite target; even Les Perrin mashed a pie in Brian’s face. Lord Harlech, former British ambassador to Washington, took a direct hit. So did Prince Rupert Lowenstein, Mick Jagger’s new financial adviser and éminence grise, a London merchant banker descended from Viennese Jewish aristocracy with a millennium-old Bavarian title. There was a delegation in town from the San Francisco scene—writer Ken Kesey and Rock Scully, who managed the Grateful Dead—hanging out at the Stones’ office. They got pied too.

  As it turned out, the press didn’t need much prodding. Beggar’s Banquet got rave reviews as critics realized the Stones had rediscovered their blues and country roots and were building something admirable out of them. Mick Jagger described the album to International Times as “just a hazy mirror of what we were thinking last summer when we wrote the songs.” The hazy mirror was a Top Ten album in England and America, a sharp reflection of the convulsive psychic currents coursing through the Western world. Nothing else captured the youthful spirit of Europe in 1968 like Beggar’s Banquet.

  On December 6, the Stones and the Who rehearsed at the Marquee to test the new French TV cameras that would be used for the Circus, shooting film and videotape at the same time.

  Peter Swales: “The rehearsals for the Rock & Roll Circus were held at the Londonderry Hotel. Nobody had seen the Stones play in England since 1966 and there was a lot of suspense. Could they still do this? Eventually the gear got set up [with Nicky Hopkins on piano and Rocky Dijon on congas] and the Stones started to play ’Sympathy’ in a rearranged format, and I watched Jagger just whip the Stones back into form. It was incredible!

  “But, no Brian. He was tinkering, fiddling, couldn’t get his guitar in tune. But I had the sense that, even then they were still willing to give Brian the benefit of the doubt.”

  The Rock & Roll Circus was filmed over three days, December 10 to 12, at InterTel studios in Wembley. Beseeching telegrams to Allen Klein to send money for the production went unanswered, so Mick Jagger had to put up 10,000 pounds to secure the studio. On the first day, the cast rehearsed on the set, half a circus tent with a sawdust ring in the center. Ringmaster Jagger presided over an archway, flags, colored lights, and a four-track mobile studio parked outside, in which Glyn Johns recorded the tracks. Sir Robert Fossett’s traveling circus provided trapeze artists, clowns, and even a tiger. John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and Mick jammed on “Peggy Sue.” Lennon insisted his supergroup be called the Dirty Mac, a play on guitarist Peter Green’s hot new blues band, Fleetwood Mac, then taking London by storm with its faithful Elmore James revival.

  The main Circus taping began at noon on Wednesday, December 11, and would last for eighteen hours. The audience, picked from fans who’d sent in coupons from New Musical Express, were given bright ponchos and floppy hats, and sat around the circus ring. Technical problems with the cameras and the lights kept interrupting the flow of the event, with many delays and retakes for each artist. The Kesey/Dead entourage, accustomed to the spontaneity of California happenings, complained about the canned, media-event nature of the show and left early.

  Most who stayed enjoyed themselves. Jethro Tull did their number between clown acts. Taj Mahal and band played the old Homer Banks song “Ain’t That a Lot of Love.” Keith, outfitted in top hat and black eye patch, introduced a fire-eater, assisted by top model Donyale Luna (who got asked out by Brian backstage). Charlie introduced Marianne’s number, “Something Better,” which she mimed motionlessly seated in a flowing purple dress, looking tragic and sedated.

  Peter Swales: “Marianne was nervous, really very tense. At one point, she was sitting near the entrance when six London cops trotted in. The dressing room area was fragrant with hash smoke; Marianne thought it was a bust and flipped! She went bananas, totally hysteric, until it became clear they only wanted to have their tea in the studio canteen.”

  To introduce the Dirty Mac, Mick dressed up as Allen Klein, in a pastel blue sweater and turtleneck shirt. Mimicking Klein’s accent and delivery, he interviewed Lennon as “Winston Legthigh” backstage, while John ate a plate of rice with chopsticks. The Dirty Mac took the stage just after ten and ran through “Yer Blues,” a track from The White Album that featured the line “I feel so suicidal, just like Dylan’s Mr. Jones.” Yoko Ono reclined in a black bag at John Lennon’s feet and held his hand between takes. Eric Clapton played a couple of fiery guitar solos, earning his place in what became the Plastic Ono Band after the Beatles broke up a year later. After “Yer Blues,” Ivry Gitlis joined the band for an R&B jam, with Yoko adding her piercing banshee cries to the mix (this was later titled “Her Blues”).

  Next came the Who, just off an American tour and impossibly hot. They did several takes of Pete Townshend’s mini-opera “A Quick One (While He’s Away),” each better than the last, ending in a molten climax of windmilling power chords and Keith Moon’s explosive fusillade of drumrolls. The Who were so powerfully on they proved impossible to follow.

  Three hours now went by as the musicians broke for a meal and the Stones’ T-shaped stage was set up by Stu. Some of the audience left to catch the last trains of the night. Finally, at two in the morning, the Rolling Stones with Nicky Hopkins and Rocky Dijon began to warm up. The band looked great: Mick’s hair was longer than ever, still dark brown from his role as Turner. Keith had his trademark shag cut, and even Charlie’s hair was below his shoulders. Brian looked okay, but he strummed his guitar listlessly off to one side (he had tried to introduce one of the circus acts but could hardly manage his lines). Bill Wyman wore pink velvet boots and played great, as usual.

  The lights and cameras were turned on, and the band started running through songs—“Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Parachute Woman,” “No Expectations”—again and again. Long pauses between songs were taken up with discussions with the direc
tor and Glyn Johns about whether another take was required. “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was given its debut performance around 4 A.M., with Mick singing directly to Marianne, who was sitting off to one side. Another take, played to the camera, was lurid and alive as Mick relaxed and began to dance. Brian couldn’t get through the chords, so Keith had to get the song over without the rhythm guitar.

  Exhausted and drained, the Stones did a couple takes of “Sympathy” at 5 A.M., with Rocky Dijon beating his congas and Nicky Hopkins pounding the piano keys as Mick stripped off his shirt, revealing a painted devil covering his chest. Keith tore off a blazing guitar solo as Mick writhed on the stage floor. It was a serious, passionate performance that revealed the darkness lurking in the heart of the song.

  The night ended at six in the morning, with Keith and Mick singing along with the backing track of “Salt of the Earth” while seated in the audience, with the Who and their roadies clowning around them. With everyone dancing and making merry, the remaining audience filed out to waiting buses. Mick and Keith shook their hands and thanked them for staying. Bill Wyman thought the whole thing was “a load of laughs and a great spirit.”

  It was Brian’s last appearance with the Stones.

  Mick Jagger was disgusted when he viewed the taped footage of the Rock & Roll Circus a couple days later. The Rolling Stones had sucked. They were obviously off their form and had been badly upstaged by the rip-roaring Who. With some early interest in the film from London Weekend Television, Michael Lindsay-Hogg edited the footage down to an hour.