Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  Peter Swales: “We all went to see the first version of the Circus in a little preview theater in Soho. Allen Klein sat next to Jagger and—right there—killed the movie.

  “He said, ’I don’t like it. Why? Because the Who blew you off your own stage!’ It was all he had to say.”

  In near-panic mode, the Stones planned to reshoot their own sequence of songs, but it would have cost another 10,000 pounds and never happened. The Circus was obsolete when Brian Jones died the following year, and when the Stones split with Klein in 1970, he took the film with him. It would be another twenty-five years before Klein finally released the film as a videocassette, one that almost everyone agreed was a quite wonderful period piece.

  At the end of 1968, Mick and Marianne and Keith and Anita took ship for Brazil, telling the press they were making a pilgrimage to visit a famous magician. The two couples were trying to patch things up after a difficult year. Anita was pregnant with Keith’s baby, but she liked to tease Mick about it being his. On the crossing, Anita hemorrhaged, inspiring “the clean white sheets stained red” in Marianne’s final version of “Sister Morphine.” New Year’s Eve was spent at a macumba voodoo ceremony on the beach in Rio.

  And on a hot and dusty cattle ranch where they tarried before they continued their adventure in Peru, Keith wrote a honky-tonk cowboy tune on acoustic guitar, a song about the black ranch hands and their ponies that would change and grow over the next few months until it became something else entirely.

  * * *

  Blow with Ry

  January 1969. Brian was in Ceylon over New Year’s. He had problems checking into good hotels that didn’t want a disheveled hippie as a guest. He visited visionary 2001 author Arthur C. Clarke and saw an astrologer who reportedly told him to be careful around water in the coming year. While he was in Ceylon, a London court turned down his appeal of his second drug conviction. Not even Jo Bergman’s friend in Grosvenor Square could get Brian an American work visa now.

  It was almost all over for the Beatles as well. On January 30, they played their final concert on the roof of their office building, filmed by Lindsay-Hogg for the Get Back film. The cameras also caught the discontent and burnout in the studio, as they recorded with Billy Preston on keyboard. Allen Klein took over management of the Beatles after John Lennon was persuaded by Mick that this would be a good idea. Paul McCartney, opposed to Klein but outvoted by his band, was bitterly upset, and the seeds for the end of the Beatles were sown. Conventional wisdom has Mick helping get the Beatles for Klein as a way of getting him off the Stones’ back, but Jagger has denied this.

  The Rolling Stones were back in Olympic Studio in February, working on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Jimmy Miller—“Mr. Jimmy” in the lyric—was producing, with Jack Nitzsche helping out. On March 15, Nitzsche arranged and recorded the song’s soaring chorale, using singers Doris (“Just One Look”) Troy and Madelaine Bell and actress Nanette Newman, as well as thirty-five members of the London Bach Choir in an inspired display of tasteful incongruity. Brian Jones, hopeless psychic cripple, was befuddled. “What can I play?” he asked Jagger one night. “I don’t know,” Mick aridly replied. “What can you play?” After that, Brian missed a lot of these sessions, and people wondered if he was still in the band.

  Peter Swales: “Brian showed up for only a few recording sessions. He put some Moroccan drums on ’Midnight Rambler.’ It was about the limit of his capability. And Jagger would lay it down this way, and not in any mean way: ’We can’t deal with this any more. If he doesn’t fucking show up tonight, he’s out of the band.’ He said this six times.

  “I had to communicate these ultimatums to Brian, not too pleasant a task. He’d become so paranoid about the band that he couldn’t tune his guitar if Keith was around.

  “Some people have since depicted Jagger and Richards as mind-fucking Brian, but I’ve got to say that I never saw anything of the sort. They tried to accommodate him. They extended themselves, indulged him. But . . . this guy! Nobody could save him.”

  Keith was snorting heroin, offered some to Jack Nitzsche in the studio, told people he wasn’t a junkie, had it under control. But anyone who knew Keith and Anita could see how they had changed.

  Meanwhile, the music was running hot. Keith and Mick had written the episodic “Midnight Rambler” and “Monkey Man” during a holiday in the hill town of Positano (near Naples) in 1968. Most of the episodes in “Rambler” were worked out in cafés, with Keith on acoustic guitar and Mick on harmonica. Keith had found “Love in Vain” on the new Robert Johnson bootleg and was determined to record it. “You Got the Silver” was taking shape during late nights at Olympic.

  During one of these, while Mick Jagger was working, Stash de Rola climbed the wisteria up the balcony of 48 Cheyne Walk, entered the bedroom, and stayed with Marianne until dawn. It was dangerous, but Stash knew Mick would be at Olympic until six in the morning. Then Marianne began having sex with Spanish Tony in return for drugs, because she had no money of her own to buy cocaine and smack.

  Decca released Marianne’s “Sister Morphine” as a single that February. This wild cri de coeur was an extraordinary artistic statement by a twenty-two-year-old pop singer, but two days later Decca pulled the record off the shelves because it advocated narcotics use. Mick had produced the song, and he visited the company to try to sort it out. But Sir Edward Lewis was adamant, and “Sister Morphine” was suppressed. Marianne was crushed, and Mick disappeared back into the studio. “I began to lose heart,” she later wrote. “ ’Sister Morphine’ was my inner vision and no one would ever know about it. That was the most depressed I ever felt.” Later that spring, she took on the part of the tortured Ophelia in a new London production of Hamlet starring Nicol Williamson. Some nights she played Ophelia on LSD, and some nights she made love with Williamson in the dressing room before they went onstage.

  Mick Jagger wrote to artist M. C. Escher to invite him to design the cover for the new Stones album, Let It Bleed, but Escher bluntly declined. Peter Swales was dispatched to Paris to approach surrealist photographer Man Ray, who also couldn’t be bothered.

  Mick invested in the British edition of Rolling Stone magazine, which had been named for the band, but pulled out the following summer (too busy, no editorial control), and publication stopped.

  More successful was the Rolling Stones’ Mobile, a truck-mounted studio control room that was delivered to the band that winter. Rolling on the back of a British Leyland BMC lorry painted in military camouflage, the Stones’ Mobile would record much of the next two Stones albums and many other landmark sessions and concerts, and would continue operating for the next three decades.

  Ry Cooder arrived at the Let It Bleed sessions in May 1969, brought in by Jack Nitzsche to fill out the Stones’ sound. Cooder was put up in a little apartment near Earls Court. Some felt he might be asked to join the Stones as a perfect foil for Keith and were disappointed when he wasn’t. Playing his fluid slide guitar themes and original interstellar riffs, bursting with new ideas and approaches to the music, Cooder was involved in long taped jams with Mick, Charlie, Bill, and Nicky Hopkins that contained the germs of many Bleed-era arrangements. (Excerpts would be released three years later as Jamming with Edward on the Stones’ own label.) On May 16, Cooder played on a band version of “Sister Morphine” (with different lyrics), as well as adding mandolin to “Love in Vain.” The Stones also worked on “Midnight Rambler” and “Monkey Man,” and Ian Stewart played piano on the fatalistic new “Let It Bleed,” which seemed to sum up the general gloom at the end of the sixties. It was the antithesis to the Beatles’ quiescent song “Let It Be.”

  Cooder didn’t like what was going on. “The Rolling Stones brought me to England under totally false pretenses,” he told Rolling Stone a year later. “They weren’t playing well and were just messing around the studio. There were a lot of very weird people hanging around the place, but the music wasn’t going anywhere. When there’d be a lull in the so-cal
led rehearsals, I’d start to play my guitar. Keith Richard would leave the room immediately and never return. I thought he didn’t like me! But, as I found out later, the tapes would keep rolling. I’d ask when we were going to do some tracks. Mick would say, ’It’s all right, Ry, we’re not ready yet.’

  “In the four or five weeks I was there, I must have played everything I know. They got it all down on these tapes. Everything . . .

  “Brian was still alive then, definitely a phased-out person, a sad character. Sometimes when we’d begin playing, Brian would grab a harp and start blowing into a mike. But most of the time he just sat in a corner, sleeping or crying. Jagger was always very contemptuous of Brian and told him he was washed up. They’re bloodsuckers, man.”

  Brian came to a session to play autoharp on “You Got the Silver.” George Chkiantz was the tape op that night. “You know where we ought to be?” Brian whispered to Chkiantz. “Right now, we should be in Jajouka. The festival’s going on. I should be dancing in a goatskin. I wish I were there. I really wish it.”

  In the middle of May, Brian’s parents visited him at Cotchford Farm. He’d broken up with Suki Potier and had a new girlfriend, a Swedish girl named Anna Wohlin. There was a crew of boisterous builders working on the place, living on the property, charging their drinks in the village pub to Brian’s account. Brian showed his parents the Christopher Robin garden, the purple velvet walls, the Moroccan hangings. They found him in good spirits, until he came across a picture of himself and Anita Pallenberg in happier times. He stared at the photograph for a long time, absently whispering her name over and over again.

  May 1969. “Harlem Shuffle” was a big hit in England, a cool late-soul dance number by Bob and Earl. Keith and Anita were staying at the Ritz while trying to buy the big brick house at 3 Cheyne Walk, down the street from Mick, but getting money out of Klein’s office in New York was difficult. Anita was seven months pregnant. One night she and Keith were driving down to Redlands at top speed in a huge Mercedes Keith had bought. Supposedly a Nazi staff car earlier in its life, it had already been smashed and repaired once during Keith’s brief ownership, since he liked to drive after a snort of heroin and then would nod off at the wheel. He did it again that night. The speeding car missed the turn at a roundabout, hit the curb, skidded off the road and down an embankment. Covered in blood and glass, Keith hid the dope, dealt with the police, and later got Anita to the hospital, where they found her collarbone broken. Soon Keith was back at the wheel of the Blue Lena.

  Mick got word to Brian Jones that if he didn’t turn up for the photo session for the cover of Through the Past Darkly, the Stones’ new oldies album, he was out of the band for sure. Brian duly arrived at Ethan Russell’s studio, and the band was then photographed lying in a star shape on the deck below St. Catherine’s Dock, near Tower Bridge. The actual cover was shot behind some smashed glass near South Kensington Station. Afterward, the Stones stepped into a workingmen’s pub for a drink. Dead silence for a while, then someone murmured, “Fucking Rolling Stones. ’Oo bloody cares?” His back to the crowd, Keith slammed his glass down on the table, hard. Dead silence after that.

  It was the last time all five Stones were together.

  On Wednesday evening, May 28, the Chelsea cops raided 48 Cheyne Walk. “Marianne, don’t open the door!” Mick yelled. “They’re after the weed!” But the cops got in, busted them, suggested a bribe to a disgusted Mick. “Why don’t you leave us alone?” Mick asked. Mr. Jagger and Mrs. Dunbar, as she was identified, were bailed at fifty pounds apiece.

  Around this time, Ry Cooder walked in, unexpectedly, to Olympic Studio and found Keith working on a new song that had developed from tapes Cooder had played on a few days earlier. Cooder freaked out, complained to Nitzsche that the Stones were doing “a sponge job” on him. “They took a number of my best licks,” he told Rolling Stone, “but more important, they took the basic groove I was playing. He [Keith] had been listening to those tapes. I told Jack Nitzsche we were getting out of there immediately.

  “When Mick heard about it, he called me and said, ’What’s the matter, Ry? Is it money? C’mon, man, don’t leave us now. Let’s have fun.’

  “I told Mick they had all they needed already and that I was leaving. A lot of what I did over there showed up on Let It Bleed, but they only gave me credit for playing mandolin on one cut. ’Honky Tonk Women’ is also taken from one of my licks. They even admitted this to John Phillips. What bothers me most is the theft of songs . . . The Rolling Stones are a reptilian bunch of people.”

  Keith: “I heard those things he said. I was amazed. I learned a lot of things off a lot of people. I learned a lot watching Bukka White play. He [Cooder] taught me the tuning [open G] and I got behind it.

  “Yes, he came by, and we played together a lot. I mean, he’s a gas to play with. He played beautifully, man. But I wasn’t there for a lot of it. Charlie and Bill dug to play with him. I mean, he’s so good.”

  * * *

  The Honky-Tonk Blues

  May 1969. The cowbell, then the snare and the bass. The tone-drop riff that opened like a switchblade. Chords in spine-tingling open G, a sonic slash of electric blue: guitar runs, a pedal steel. Memphis, New York City, the divorcée that got laid. Some piano, horns, more guitar. Big band break, big final chorus—she’s a hooooonky tonk woman!—and that final orgasmic shout, Whooo!

  “Honky Tonk Women” was the joyous, ballsy med-tempo rocker that made its audience believe it was listening to the greatest rock and roll band in the world. It was recorded in five hours, from eleven on Friday night, May 30, to about four the next morning. Jimmy Miller showed Charlie the drum kick, then played the cowbell that rocked out Keith’s cool Brazilian cowboy song. The horn section (much more prominent in the early mixes) was three guys from a recent Fleetwood Mac tour. Nicky Hopkins was on piano. The next morning, Mick Jagger called the office and said, “We done a number one last night.”

  It was also the advent of Mick Taylor, new guitar player for the Stones.

  Eric Clapton had been approached to join the band to replace Brian several times, always informally, but it never happened. They thought of asking him again when they decided to sack Brian at the end of May so they could tour America in the fall, but Clapton was already committed to Blind Faith, his supergroup with Steve Winwood, Ginger Baker, and Rick Grech. Other names were mooted, including Ronnie Wood, a genial twenty-one-year-old smoker and drinker with a great laugh, pinprick eyes, and the right hair, black and scruffy like crow feathers. Recently fired as Jeff Beck’s bass player, Woody had just hooked up with the rest of the Small Faces after Steve Marriott left the band. Ian Stewart loved the Faces and let them use the Stones’ rehearsal room in Bermondsey, which is where Mick phoned to ask if Ronnie Wood might be interested in joining the Stones. Bassist Ronnie Lane took the call, said no thanks, and only told Woody about it five years later.

  Mick Taylor was a twenty-one-year-old blues guitarist with the liquid style of an Andalusian singer. His playing was incredibly fluid, with an ear to harmonics and arabesque decoration. As a musician he was a romantic melodist. Physically he was a slight, pasty, innocent-looking youth with long wavy hair, and obviously younger than the Stones.

  Born in Hertfordshire on January 17, 1948, Mick Taylor taught himself blues guitar by listening to B. B. King records. He’d first seen the Stones in Soho clubs in 1963, the year he left school. His bands were the Juniors in 1964, then the Gods in 1966–67 before joining John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, replacing Peter Green in 1967. He left the Bluesbreakers in 1969 to go solo.

  Mick Taylor was puzzled to get a call from Mick Jagger. He hadn’t been a real Stones fan until he’d heard Banquet the year before, especially “Street Fighting Man.” He arrived at Olympic the night the Stones recorded “Honky Tonk Women,” on which his guitar was later overdubbed. Mick Jagger was in a room doing an interview with the London underground paper International Times. Jimmy Miller just sat there waiting for Keith, who showed up
three hours later. Taylor played on some tracks they were developing—“Gimme Shelter,” “Live with Me,” an early “Loving Cup”—and thought that was it. “Well, I enjoyed it very much,” young Mick told old Mick, thanking him. A few days later, Jagger rang up and asked Mick if he wanted to join the Stones, and Taylor asked for a week to think about it. “It was a very good period for the group,” he said later. “They’d made a decision to really get back into touring again. There was a very special atmosphere surrounding the whole thing.”

  Taylor called Jagger back. “I said, ’I’d love to be a Stone!’ And that was that.” His initial salary was 150 pounds per week, until he became a made member of the Rolling Stones by proving himself on tour. “We got the right guy now,” Mick told Peter Swales. “He’s really young and cute-looking.”

  Mick Taylor gave the Stones something it never had, a blues guitar virtuoso. For the next five and a half years, Taylor’s charged, cliché-free playing would be the foil for Keith Richards’s spiky style as the Stones kept on rolling.

  June 1969. The Stones were working on the heroin confidential anthem, “Monkey Man.” Brian Jones missed the sessions. He stayed in Sussex, talking to other musicians, especially Alexis Korner, about forming a new band. John Mayall and Mitch Mitchell both visited. Brian consulted Jimi Hendrix who told Brian he needed to write some up-tempo jams. “If you don’t see little kids skippin’ to your music,” Hendrix said, “You got nothin’.” Ian Stewart declined the opportunity, saying, “I started one fucking group with you, and that’s enough.”

  On Saturday, June 8, Mick barked to Peter Swales, “Get me a fucking taxi,” and went off to see Blind Faith play a free concert for 150,000 kids in Hyde Park. Pink Floyd’s free acid rave in the park was even bigger the year before. Promoted by Blackhill Enterprises (who managed Pink Floyd), with the huge crowd expertly controlled by a hip, buckskin-clad emcee named Sam Cutler, the event came off without a hitch. Backstage, Cutler suggested to Mick that the Stones play for free in the park too. A free concert, Jagger realized, would be a trippy way for the Stones to introduce their new guitar player and “Honky Tonk Women” to the world. The date was set for July 5.