Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The tour had been planned as the Stones’ farewell to concert performance for the foreseeable future. Like the Beatles, they were weary of incessant touring and the necessity of making records always on the run. Exhaustion had clearly shown in their last album, Between the Buttons, in which lack of ideas combined with over-production to produce a curious, limply echoing effect, like a vaudeville show in an almost empty hall. The album offered such aberrant Stones items as Back Street Girl, a French valse musette complete with accordions, and Something Happened to Me, gasped out by Keith’s nicotine-roughened voice in a ludicrous setting of pithead brass bands. The play-out groove featured Jagger giving facetious road-safety advice. ‘Remember … if you’re going out on your bike tonight … wear white!’

  It was not a good time to be travelling abroad. The summonses against Mick and Keith in Britain put them automatically on the Red List of suspected drug-traffickers, circulated among all European customs authorities. In France, Sweden, West Germany, Austria and Greece, going through customs meant the same ordeal for all five Stones – even drug-free, innocent Charlie Watts – of ransacked cases and, often, rough strip-searches. Brian, before each airport touchdown, would be terrorized by Tom Keylock into flushing his pills and hashish down the aircraft toilet. ‘It was the only way to be safe,’ Keylock says. ‘I used to tell him, if he said he was clean and he wasn’t, I’d chin him.’

  The British press was determined there should be trouble – any kind. On April 8, the Daily Express reported the controversy between Mick Jagger and the Olympic long-jump champion Lynn Davies about the Stones’ alleged bad behaviour at a hotel in Dortmund, West Germany. According to Davies, the hotel’s breakfast room had quailed under the stream of obscenities to be heard from the Stones’ table. ‘I felt sick and ashamed to be British,’ the sensitive athlete declared. ‘… They are tarnishing their country’s name in a foreign land …’ The allegations were put to Jagger in Paris, at a press conference called to complain of his continuing harassment by customs officers. ‘We deny that we were badly behaved,’ he retorted. ‘We hardly ever used the public rooms at that hotel. They were crammed with athletes, behaving very badly.’

  From Paris, the Stones travelled to Poland to make their first, and last, appearance behind the Iron Curtain. The first of two concerts at the Warsaw Palace of Culture took place before 2,000 hand-picked Communist Party officials and their children, while a mass of ordinary teenagers, who had been unable to buy tickets, waited outside, guarded by units of the Polish army. The Stones, to their great bewilderment, could elicit no audience response beyond polite clapping. Halfway through the first show, Mick Jagger had a brilliant idea. Tom Keylock was deputed to drive round the Palace of Culture, scattering Rolling Stones singles just beyond the army cordons. The entire crowd at once broke through to pick up the precious discs, and were driven back by clubs, tear gas and water-cannon fire. It was only by a miracle that troops stationed on the front steps did not actually open fire with their levelled machine guns.

  That night, as the running battles still continued, a Polish photographer handed Tom Keylock several rolls of film, shot as the army prepared to counter-attack. Keylock persuaded Don Short, a Daily Mirror reporter, to smuggle the film out when they left Poland the following day. Short, in consternation, hid the film down his underpants; then, at Warsaw airport, he lost his nerve and passed it back to Keylock, who successfully jettisoned it. The Polish customs’ only victim was Les Perrin, the Stones’ publicist, for neglecting to declare all the currency he was exporting. Perrin could not leave until he had gone into the airport shop and spent his surplus Polish money on a full-length bearskin coat.

  Things were hardly less ugly in Athens, when the Stones gave what would be their final performance for more than two years. Greece’s new regime of Fascist army colonels had not yet got round to banning rock concerts, but they showed their disapproval with hundreds of armed police, pinning the stadium crowd so far back that Jagger could not hope to perform his final, climatic trick of dancing to the stage edge and tossing out roses from a bowl.

  Instead, he handed the basket to Tom Keylock and said, ‘Okay, baby – run!’ As Keylock sprinted towards the police perimeter, several officers at once made ready to receive him. Keylock swung the basket at them, ‘chinning’ two or three, then hurled it into the air and, as the roses cascaded down, ran for his life.

  NINE

  ‘A MARS BAR FILLS THAT GAP’

  On May 10, Mick Jagger and Keith Richard sat with Robert Fraser in the small police court at Chichester, Sussex, waiting for their names to be called among the minor larcenies and traffic peccadilloes that are the normal diet of English provincial magistrates. Both accused Stones wore sober dark suits and the expressions of downcast meekness in which their publicist, Les Perrin, had painstakingly rehearsed them. ‘We were all squeezed up together on these little benches – the lawyers, the national press and us,’ Keith remembers. ‘It was a bit like being back at school. I don’t think even at that point we expected anything much worse then a cuff on the side of the head or a ruler across the knuckles.’

  Jagger had maintained that optimistic view to Marianne each time she begged him to let her confess that the tablets the police found in his jacket at Redlands really belonged to her. ‘Mick kept saying that his career could stand a drug bust but mine couldn’t,’ Marianne says. ‘I could tell it pleased him to think he was playing the English gentleman – that he wouldn’t let me be thrown to the wolves.’

  Robert Fraser, alone of the trio, was prey to deep gloom and pessimism. Fraser had realized at the outset how prejudicial it must be to his own very serious drug offence to appear in harness with two such notorious co-defendants. The court’s refusal to grant him a separate trial had condemned the Old Etonian to forced association with all the Stones accumulated outrage and ill will. It was, moreover, just a few weeks since Fraser had undergone prosecution over the alleged indecency of some Jim Dine paintings exhibited at his Mount Street gallery. Robert Fraser suspected, if Mick and Keith did not, what a wave was preparing to break in that dusty, sunshiny little courtroom.

  The court clerk read out the formal indictments. Michael Philip Jagger – using Les Perrin’s office address of ‘New Oxford Street, London, W1.’ – stood accused of possessing four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methlamphetamine hydrochloride, contrary to the Dangerous Drugs (Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1964. Robert Hugh Fraser of Mount Street, London, W1., was accused of possessing heroin and eight amphetamine capsules similar to those found in Jagger’s possession. Keith Richard – charged in his real surname, ‘Richards’ – of Redlands Lane, West Wittering, was accused of allowing his house to be used for the smoking of cannabis.

  All three pleaded ‘Not Guilty’. Mr Geoffrey Leach, counsel for Jagger and Richard, said he wished ‘to deny most strongly these allegations and to challenge the interpretation thought to be placed by the Prosecution on the evidence in its possession’. Mr William Denny, for Robert Fraser, said his client ‘would welcome the earliest opportunity to make answer to the charges against him’.

  The three, having elected trial by jury in a higher court, claimed the right to reserve their defence until their reappearance at West Sussex Quarter Sessions in June. The committal proceedings, even so, allowed a lengthy précis of the police case to be given by prosecuting solicitor Anthony McCowan. Magistrates in 1967 had no power to impose reporting restrictions if the committal evidence seemed likely to engender prejudice before the main trial. The story of Chief Inspector Dineley’s swoop could therefore run at length in every national newspaper five weeks before any of the accused had uttered a word in his own defence.

  The law, however, went out of its way to protect a fourth, absent member of the Redlands party. Since Acid King David Snyderman had failed to appear to answer charges of possessing cannabis, the bench ruled it would be unfair for his name to appear in the newspaper reports.

  Half an hour later, Mick, Keith and Robert
Fraser left the court on bail of £250 each, emerging into brilliant sunshine and the scrum of Fleet Street photographers, amid screams, cheers and scattered boos, escorted by Les Perrin, who could be observed at ticklish moments actually holding Mick Jagger’s hand. Nearby in the crowd was a familiar and, as of now, deeply anxious, podgy face. Allen Klein had flown in from New York to attend court that day and remain on hand throughout the trial to come.

  At four o’clock that same afternoon, the Scotland Yard Drug Squad raided Brian Jones’s flat in Courtfield Road. They found Brian dressed in a Japanese kimono and bleary-eyed, sitting among the debris of an all-night party. The only remaining guest was twenty-four-year-old Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, a Swiss nobleman and would-be pop singer, known within the Stones’ circle as ‘Stash’.

  This was the easiest Stone of all to put into the bag. The entire flat was littered with evidence of drug-taking revelry which Brian had made no attempt to conceal, even though he had received at least two anonymous phone calls warning him that the police were on their way.

  A few minutes’ work by the raiders among the divans and outsize cushions were enough to produce eleven different items for chemical analysis. They included a pile of hashish, some methedrine and a glass phial containing traces of cocaine. When asked if the cocaine was his, Brian recoiled in horror. ‘No, man – not cocaine,’ he stammered. ‘That’s not my scene. I smoke hash but I’m not a junkie.’

  In some uncanny way, the whole of London seems to have known in advance that Brian Jones was to be busted. When he and Stash were brought out, to be questioned further at Chelsea Police Station, crowds of reporters and onlookers were already gathered in Courtfield Road. By 5 p.m., Brian had been formally charged with possession of cocaine, methedrine and cannabis resin. Stash was charged with possessing cannabis, even though no trace of the drug had been found either on his person or on the divan where he had been sleeping.

  Next morning, the blond-haired, haggard Stone and the Swiss princeling made a ten-minute appearance before Great Marlborough Street Court’s stipendiary magistrate. Both elected trial by jury at Inner London Sessions and were released on bail of £250 each. Brian’s first act was to send a telegram to his parents in Cheltenham. ‘Please don’t worry, don’t jump to nasty conclusions and don’t judge me too harshly. All my love …’

  The exquisitely neat alignment of Brian’s bust with Mick and Keith’s committal for trial, proved beyond any doubt that the Rolling Stones, through their three most prominent and notorious members, were now under systematic attack by the establishment whose sensibilities they had so long carelessly flouted. Not for their own misdemeanours only, but for all the pampered, nonchalant arrogance of Britain’s pop generation, they had been marked down for a retribution which, in the ensuing weeks, despite all its judicial pomp and deliberateness, bore marked similarities to a medieval hue-and-cry.

  The first hard lesson, for young men cocooned in flattery as much as luxury, was to realize how very few among their immense social circle had the ability, intelligence – or, for that matter, the inclination – to give them the help they now desperately needed.

  There would be little help from Decca Records for musicians who had largely secured the company its current multi-million-pound annual profit. Sir Edward Lewis, though he expressed himself ‘concerned’ at the Stones’ plight, and its possible repercussions on Decca shares, remained carefully dissociated from all strategy being prepared for their defence. ‘The Stones weren’t an in-house Decca act, the way the Beatles were at EMI,’ Andrew Loog Oldham says. ‘That’s why, when the Beatles got into drug busts later, Sir Joseph Lockwood gave them all that support. To Decca, the Stones were just freelances. They had to look after themselves.’

  Oldham himself likewise played a curiously small part in the developing drama, giving the reins of management over largely to Allen Klein. But for Oldham, however, there would have been no Les Perrin to choreograph the manners and subdue the wardrobes of his two charges, and in every way mitigate the unfavourable image they would take with them into court. Perrin also used his extensive contacts in the borderland between Fleet Street and Parliament to enlist the sympathy of liberal-minded MPs like Tom Driberg – already a social conquest of Mick Jagger’s – and the Home Office junior minister, Dick Taverne. On May 19, speaking in Wales, Taverne cited the Jagger-Richard case as one where the reporting of committal proceedings must inevitably create prejudice against accused who had not yet spoken in their own defence.

  Before Mick and Keith even came to trial, most of the papers had agreed this must be the end for the Rolling Stones. So it could easily have been but for Mick, a wholly unexpected tower of strength in this period, both in marshalling his and Keith’s defence and, simultaneously, motivating Bill and Charlie, those deeply bemused, innocent bystanders, to get back into the studio and begin work on an album to redeem the failure of Between the Buttons. An additional spur was provided, in early June, by the Beatles’ psychedelic masterpiece Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, combining drug-sparkled mysticism with matey Toytown humour, and packaged in an historic sleeve showing the four Beatles as sateen hussars, set about by pop-art icons, marijuana plants and a doll wearing a sweatshirt saying WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES.

  The first tentative studio sessions made clear to everyone that Brian Jones was on the edge of complete disintegration. The bust at Courtfield Road had come only days after his return from the Cannes Film Festival and an anguished week with Anita Pallenberg, as musical director and star respectively of the film A Degree of Murder. Brian had stayed in the same hotel as Anita and Keith, and accompanied them on the round of parties and receptions, waiting for a chance to renew his pleas to Anita to return to him. But all that happened when he did get her alone was that old, uncontrollable urge to abuse and hit her.

  Since losing Anita, he had had half a dozen girls from the scores who offered themselves. His old Cheltenham schoolfriend Peter Watson remembers meeting him in Tottenham Court Road, bejewelled and bangled, a smut-eyed dolly bird clinging to each arm. At the end of their conversation, Brian proffered the girls to Watson, as one might a packet of cigarettes, and said, ‘Here – do you want one?’

  He had subsequently acquired a steady girlfriend in Suki Poitier, a fashion model whose blonde hair and facial bone structure were the most like Anita’s he could find. Suki had survived the car crash that killed Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune, Brian’s close friend and subject of John Lennon’s finest song, A Day in the Life. She moved in with Brian shortly after the Courtfield Road bust, and for the next eighteen months bravely endured the ordeal of being a living replica.

  Brian was now a haunted and a haunting sight. The face, under its gold fringe, was puffy and sick-pale; the eyes, when not glazed over, wavered back and forth, bleakly reflecting the chaos inside his head. He would sometimes arrive at Olympic Studios so drunk he could do nothing but sit among his guitars and music-stands, and sink into comatose sleep. When he could pick up a guitar, he would sometimes play it without tuning it, or so badly that the whole take was unusable. After a time, the others found it simplest to have his amplifier lead quietly disconnected.

  The bust and his impending trial had stopped him using hashish – and, indeed, made him paranoiacally fearful that someone else might leave some at Courtfield Road where the police could find it. He continued, none the less, to dose himself with barbiturates washed down with brandy or Scotch and, in safe houses, to carry on experimenting with new varieties of LSD. His closest friend in this period was Jimi Hendrix, the young American blues wizard whose stage act was lewder than the Stones had ever dared to be. In June, Brian flew to America to see Hendrix play at the first-ever rock festival, at Monterey, California. Though present only as a spectator, warmly interested in the new generation of American stars like Hendrix and Janis Joplin, he became a festival attraction in his own right, wandering round the hippy bivouacs in his silks and Berber jewellery. ‘Brian and Jimi took STP togeth
er at Monterey,’ Anita Pallenberg says. ‘That’s the acid which can give you a seventy-two hour trip.’

  Barely noticed in the glare surrounding the Jagger–Richard trial, Brian began paying regular visits to a Harley Street psychiatrist, Dr Leonard Henry. Dr Henry considered his condition serious enough to warrant residential treatment, and arranged with a Harley Street colleague, Dr Anthony Flood, for Brian to spend three weeks at Flood’s private clinic at Roehampton. The beginning of this analysis-cum-rest cure was not auspicious. Brian arrived in full regalia, accompanied by Tom Keylock and Suki Poitier, and demanded a double-bedded room for Suki and himself during his treatment. ‘It’s not on,’ Dr Flood said tersely. ‘In any case, the first thing I’m going to do is put you to sleep for two days.’

  The psychiatrist’s initial diagnosis had much to do with this infantile urge to exhibit sexual bravado, even in a state of manifest desperation. Brian, he noted, was ‘anxious, considerably depressed, perhaps even suicidal … He is easily depressed and easily thwarted. He cannot sort out his problems satisfactorily because he becomes so anxious and depressed … He has not a great deal of confidence in himself … He is still trying to grow up in many ways.’

  Dr Flood was struck, at the same time, by the intelligence and perceptiveness that could shine through Brian’s superstar conceits and tantrums. Psychiatrist and patient became something like friends in hours of conversation ranging from Brian’s hypochondriac obsession with all forms of artificial stimulant, through his interest in railway locomotives and London buses, to quite advanced questions of history, philosophy and ethics. At one point, he told Dr Flood he had always regretted not going to university. When told that twenty-five was not too late an age to do so, he seemed to give the matter serious consideration.

  The treatment seemed to be working until a day when Brian begged Dr Flood to let him out for the evening, because, he insisted, the other Stones needed him at Olympic Studios. The doctor agreed, on condition he was back in bed by midnight at the latest. Brian appeared at seven the next morning, so full of alcohol and pills that he could hardly walk. Dr Flood had no alternative but to put him to bed and start again from the beginning.