Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The next day, Mick and Marianne flew to Australia to begin work on Ned Kelly. During the long flight to Sydney, Marianne had a chance to think things over. When they arrived at their hotel, she took 150 Tuinal pills and said good night. Mick couldn’t wake her the next day and thought she was dead. They pumped her out, but she was in a coma for six days, during which, she told Mick, a ghostly Brian urged her to join him on the other side.

  Tony Richardson gave her part in the film to a local actress, and production went forward during July.

  Brian was buried in Cheltenham on July 10, the day after a coroner’s inquest concluded he’d drowned accidentally. Charlie and Bill attended with Shirley and Astrid. Suki Potier came, as did Ian Stewart. Linda Lawrence came from America with her five-year-old son, Julian. Mick and Marianne sent a wreath. Due to his local notoriety, Brian’s parents had to beg for the service to be held in the Anglican church in whose choir he’d sung. As a possible suicide (to say nothing of his reported six bastard children), permission was denied for Brian to rest in the churchyard.

  Bill Wyman was astonished to see the crowds lining the streets to witness the funeral cortege. There were hundreds of women, many in tears, throwing roses at the hearse. Canon Hugh Hopkins, who’d known Brian as a boy, gave a diffident eulogy that many found offensive in its faint praise for Cheltenham’s pop outlaw. The scriptural reading was the Prodigal Son.

  On the way out of the church, Brian’s bronze coffin (flown in from New York) was saluted by the police. This gave Charlie Watts his only laugh of the day.

  During the funeral, the workmen who’d been grafting off Brian held a party at Cotchford Farm, even using Brian’s bed for their fun. A truck was backed up to the house and filled with furniture, artwork, and instruments, including an organ and Brian’s Mellotron. These were never seen again. Local people who’d befriended Brian were troubled to see his clothes, papers, and other effects burned in a series of bonfires over the next few days. Suki Potier arrived the following week to find the house looted and almost empty. Luckless, she herself died in a car wreck within a few years.

  Most people were fatalistic in the wake of Brian’s death, especially those who knew him. Anita was angry that no one had been around to take care of him. The office staff took it hard. So did Keith. Others were almost relieved.

  George Chkiantz: “I had my doubts whether he could ever get anything together. I’m sorry to say that it might have been fortunate that Brian died before he found out how few friends he really had. I felt sorry for him, felt that when the Stones’ money ran out, it wasn’t going to be so good for him.”

  “No one wanted to imagine Brian growing old,” Peter Swales adds. “He was one of those types of characters you never wanted to see shuffling down the Kings Road later in life.”

  When asked for a comment on Brian’s death, Peter Townshend said, “Oh, it was a normal day for Brian. Like he died every day, you know?” George Harrison was quoted: “I don’t think he had enough love or understanding.”

  It was the first major death of anyone in the rock movement, foreshadowing many tragedies. In Los Angeles, Jim Morrison wrote a long poem, “Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased”:

  You’ve left your Nothing

  To compete with Silence

  I hope you went out Smiling

  Like a child

  Into the cool remnant

  Of a dream.

  There was an accident on the Ned Kelly set as Tony Richardson shot his movie in the pale light of the Australian winter. An old revolver exploded in Mick’s hand as he was rehearsing for a gunfight scene, and while recuperating the doctors told him to exercise his injured wrist. One day he was alone in the outback with his valet, Alan Dunn, playing electric guitar through a small amp, when the chords to “Brown Sugar” materialized in the air. The lyric came next, “brown sugar” being a play on potent Asian heroin and the charms of black girls like Marsha Hunt. The song was the only positive thing to emerge from Mick’s Australian ordeal. His girlfriend had tried to kill herself, and he wouldn’t make another movie for twenty years. He described the disastrous Ned Kelly as “that load of shit” when it came out the following year.

  That summer, around the time of Hyde Park, Keith got his ear pierced by some Living Theater people one night. He hung from his lobe a heavy bone earring he’d gotten in Peru. It became his trademark over the next few years, along with his no-limits gaze and the endearing gap where his front teeth had rotted out of his head.

  * * *

  The Bleeding Man

  The Rolling Stones’ hot new single “Honky Tonk Women” ruled the airwaves in the summer of 1969, a raunchy jam with a stripper beat that made hearts beat harder and sold its way to no. 1 everywhere. A truncated mix of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” appeared on the single’s flip side. Al Kooper had volunteered to arrange horns for the track and received the master tape for this song in the mail one day from Mick. Kooper arranged and recorded a full horn section for the song, but only his French horn introduction was finally used. Kooper was credited on the single’s label with organ and piano as well, an unprecedented gesture by the Stones attesting to Kooper’s exalted stature as a studio wizard.

  Anita and Keith’s son was born on August 10, 1969, and named Marlon Richards, after Marlon Brando. Bill Wyman divorced his wife, and the press delighted in publishing his real age, thirty-two, considered ancient for a pop star. In mid-August, the Woodstock music festival was held in upstate New York. (Mick Jagger had turned down an invitation for the Stones to perform.) Billed as “Three Days of Peace and Love,” Woodstock mingled a half million muddy, tripping rock fans with the star performers of the day (the Band, the Who, Hendrix, et al.) without much trouble. This spawned the communitarian notion of “Woodstock Nation,” an idealized global village of rock music—loving youth supposedly self-sufficient enough to feed, police, and care for itself without the help of the “straight” world. It was a hippie myth that lasted until the Stones toured America four months later.

  In London, Mick was trying to disengage with Allen Klein. Mick told Peter Swales not to give Klein the Stones’ Hyde Park tapes, so Peter hid them in the toilet. When Klein showed up at Maddox Street to collect the tapes, Swales tried, “Sorry, I can’t give them to you.” Klein grabbed Swales by the throat and threw him across the room. He got the tapes. Swales then carried a note from Mick to Paul McCartney that read, “Do what you want about Allen Klein, but I don’t trust this guy.”

  In September, Decca London released Through the Past, Darkly—Big Hits Vol. 2, dedicated to Brian’s memory. The album collected “Honky Tonk Women” and other, more recent singles and album tracks. Issued in a six-sided die-cut sleeve, the album carried an epitaph, as if it were Brian’s tombstone: “With this you see, remember me and bear me in your mind. Let all the world say what they may, speak of me as you find.”

  The music business is like shark life—keep moving or die. The Stones needed money, had to tour America now to support their new album, so the autumn of 1969 was taken up with planning: eighteen shows in fourteen cities during three weeks in November. It would be a new kind of tour, arenas only, ratcheting up the entire game, with the same stage, lights, and sound system every night, all designed by technical director Chip Monck from San Francisco promoter Bill Graham’s organization. Opening acts would include the Ike and Tina Turner Revue, B. B. King, occasionally Chuck Berry, and the young London rock singer Terry Reid, who had turned down Jimmy Page’s offer to join Led Zeppelin.

  The Rolling Stones were basically without management. Allen Klein was preoccupied with the Beatles after his new client John Lennon told the other Beatles in September that he was quitting the band. Working through Klein’s disaffected accountant nephew, Ronnie Schneider, who had carried their bags on the ’65 tour, Mick set up a tour that got the band a 60/40 cut with American promoters. Mick had originally wanted to book the tour himself, bypassing the agencies and earning the band an 80 percent shar
e, but this was too difficult. (Nobody got this kind of deal until Led Zeppelin’s manager, Peter Grant, forced it on the concert business in 1972.)

  Peter Swales: “This is where we all saw Jagger prove himself as a natural leader, where he just took the thing over. He really knew how to consult; he’d listen and consider any opinion, especially Charlie’s. Charlie could kill one of Mick’s pie-in-the-sky plans with a few words. He was a very savvy, very dry and lovely bloke. Mick handled Keith differently. Keith didn’t have much to say—these weren’t his best years—but what he did say had major weight. They’d hammer things out together and could be very ruthless with others. I’d see them break people down, and it was scary. But you never saw them go at each other.”

  The Stones were uneasy. They hadn’t toured America in three years, and now they were returning to a nation that had become a cauldron of weirdness and mayhem. The Vietnam War had poisoned America’s spirit, and race relations were volatile after Martin Luther King’s assassination the year before. In Los Angeles, the Stones’ first stop, Charlie Manson’s hippie “family” had just butchered a houseful of celebrities.

  It was a witchy time. There was black magic in the air, amateur necromancy that made Stones pal Kenneth Anger’s occult dabbling in London look tame. Astrology was immense. Hippie girls cast the tarot and threw coins to consult the I Ching. Gurus were afoot, and hip youths were “getting back to the land,” with communes sprouting everywhere. The rock music scene was totally wild. Los Angeles groupies began to spread rumors about Led Zeppelin signing a pact with the devil in exchange for their incredible new success. It was a replay of Robert Johnson at the crossroads, a new blues legend for the Atomic Age.

  It had never been easy for the Rolling Stones in America, but now it seemed even more dangerous. Mick Jagger must have had an inkling that any performer playing Lucifer in America was in for trouble. On this tour, there was a new emphasis on muscle, bodyguards, and various layers of security (in part because of union problems with the Stones’ nonunion crew, in part because of “some paranoia among the organizational people about Uncle Allen,” as Keith put it). Hyde Park honcho Sam Cutler, longhaired cockney in fringed buckskins and a cowboy hat, exuding laid-back rock know-how, was hired as road manager.

  Touchdown at LAX. The band scattered. Mick and Keith shared a house owned by Stephen Stills in Laurel Canyon. Bill and Astrid and Mick Taylor and girlfriend Rose Miller checked into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, while Charlie and Shirley and their daughter stayed in a rented house above Sunset Boulevard that became Stones headquarters. The band set up at Elektra Studio in Hollywood for further recording and mixing for Let It Bleed.

  Almost as soon as they arrived, a torrid scene gathered around the Stones. Mick took up with Miss Pamela, teenage shirtmaker to L.A.’s ascendant country rockers and leader of the GTOs, the groupie clique attached to Frank Zappa’s band. She was in the middle of an affair with Jimmy Page, but Page was back in London. Keith hooked up with the black groupie Emeretta Marks, having left Anita and Marlon in London. Gram Parsons was in and out on his big motorcycle with his fabulously plentiful cocaine and his charm, very tight with Keith (to Mick’s annoyance), playing soulful country songs on the piano, shoving coke up every nose in sight. At night, they went to clubs to catch Taj Mahal opening for blues legend Big Boy Crudup, or Gram’s Flying Burrito Brothers at the Corral in Topanga Canyon, or Ike and Tina at PJ’s. Back in Laurel Canyon at dawn, they’d play “Love in Vain” on guitars. They’d replay the stuff they’d done in the studio that day. Miss Mercy of the GTOs would be laying out her tarot deck while Mick tried to persuade Miss Pamela to get into bed with him.

  The autumn evenings in Los Angeles were soft and balmy, there was tons of good dope and pretty girls everywhere—Sam Cutler found he couldn’t keep them away—and soon everyone calmed down. They threw a thirty-third-birthday party for Bill Wyman at the end of October, but the guest of honor suffered an anxiety attack after eating a hash brownie and left early.

  Let It Bleed was finished during the last two weeks in October after almost a year in production. Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns rolled tape at Elektra Studio in Hollywood. “Live with Me” was filled out by local musicians Leon Russell on piano and Bobby Keys on tenor sax. Mick Taylor, warming to his new job, played red-hot lead guitar on “Live with Me” and “Love in Vain.” Merry Clayton, an Afro-headed soul singer who worked in the studios, was chosen for the crucial female vocal part in “Gimme Shelter.” Mick and Keith were also writing, cutting early versions of “Shine a Light” (with Leon Russell) and “All Down the Line.”

  By early November, the album that is arguably the Rolling Stones’ great masterpiece was in the proverbial can. “Gimme Shelter” opened Let It Bleed with its haunting heroin music, the aural equivalent of cooking junk in a tingling fever of anticipation, conflating sex, violence, drugs, and music in a boiling stew of rambling blues harp, guitars, scrapers, and maracas. Merry Clayton’s raving cries of rape gave the song its crazy edge; she was the first woman ever to play a major part on a Rolling Stones record.

  “Love in Vain” came next, augmented with extra chords and given a primitive reading by Mick. Ry Cooder played the crying mandolin, and Mick Taylor added atmospheric, trainlike slide guitar. In a publishing scam when Let It Bleed was released, “Love in Vain” was credited to the fictitious “Woody Payne,” prompting more accusations of thievery.

  “Country Honk” was a Gram Parsons remix of “Honky Tonk Women,” closer to Keith’s Brazilian original. Gram brought in young country fiddler Byron Berline, who overdubbed his part outdoors, in the parking lot of the studio, as Jimmy Miller honked a car horn.

  The up-tempo rocker “Live with Me” marked the debut of reedman Bobby Keys into the Stones’ orbit. Keys was a seasoned road musician of twenty-six who’d met the Stones on their first tour, when he was in Bobby Vee’s band. He had a raw, honking tenor sax style and worked regularly in recording sessions when he was in L.A. Leon Russell, who arranged the number, brought Keys to the studio to add some old-school rock and roll ambience to the track. “Live with Me” became a preview of the Stones’ horn-augmented seventies sound. Keys’s tenor solo, fiery with roadhouse grease and Dexedrine energy, would be good for nearly thirty years as an adjunct Rolling Stone.

  “Let It Bleed” ended side one with its ironic look at friendship and Stu’s barrelhouse piano underscoring Mick’s generous offer to come all over him. The Beatles had left themselves open to ridicule with their idealized wish to “Let it be.” In the Stones’ less delusional worldview, it was more realistic to “Let it bleed.” (Keith’s preferred title for this album had been Hard Knox and Durty Sox, which was duly printed above the track list on the record’s inner sleeve.)

  Bleed’s second side was a nearly perfect sequence of rock songs. The dramatized episodes and violent lingo of “Midnight Rambler” so warped against the prevailing cultural grain that the song commanded instant recognition as something special. “Rambler” built climaxes with an almost sexual dynamic before hurtling to a final, orgasmic rush. (The song’s connection to the au courant rock theater concept was Doors engineer Bruce Botnick, who had mixed “Rambler” in Los Angeles.) It also established Mick Jagger as a serious blues harmonica stylist, the possessor of a unique and recognizable sound.

  A startling and surreal love song, Keith Richards’s perilous journey through the diamond mines of romance, “You Got the Silver” was his first solo track, with Nicky Hopkins on organ between the verses. The full band came in halfway, with Keith shouting over his spidery guitars.

  “Monkey Man” and its satanic, apocalyptic imagery nailed the album cold. “All my friends are junkies,” Mick Jagger howled, not far from the truth. The song was a Burroughsian peek into hell, with swooping cones of guitar and an almost savage glee as shrieking apes clawed the back of the song’s riff as it faded into . . .

  The plummy English choir that kicked off “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” Mick Jagger’s sad chronicle
of his circle’s descent into drugdom. With a sob in his voice, he told his story of despair at a fashionable party, of seeing the doomed junkie Mr. Jimmy at the Chelsea Drugstore, of seeing his girlfriend’s beauty and persona begin to slide into narcotic decline. The poignant last verse, with its image “in her glass was a bleeding man,” was a psychic coronary before the organ and choir climbed celestial octaves as Jimmy Miller’s drums beat a tattoo into overdose, death, and transfiguration.

  “It’s a kind of end-of-the-world thing,” Mick later said of Let It Bleed. “It’s Apocalypse; the whole record’s like that.”

  The London Bach Choir, heard on the album’s last song, was offended at Let It Bleed’s relentless drug ambience. Its director denounced Bleed when it was released late in November. No rock record, before or since, has ever so completely captured the sense of palpable dread that hung over its era.

  * * *

  The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World

  On October 27, 1969, the Rolling Stones held a press conference at the Beverly Wilshire to announce their tour schedule and to counter attacks in the press. When it was reported the Stones would take home a million dollars from the tour, the influential San Francisco columnist Ralph J. Gleason scolded the band for high ticket prices ($7.50) and general arrogance. Recalling the good vibes in Hyde Park, Mick Jagger parried by offering to play a free outdoor concert in the Bay Area after the tour. American fans didn’t exactly buy into media criticism of the Stones, and the whole tour sold out within hours. Extra dates in L.A. and New York sold out within minutes.