by Marc Spitz
“There were three things that one would have known about the Rolling Stones at the time (if you were not a fan),” filmmaker Peter Whitehead tells me. Whitehead, who would later film the seminal documentary of the ’60s London scene, Tonight Let’s All Make Love in London (featuring Syd Barrett-era Pink Floyd, John Lennon, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, and the Stones). Whitehead continues, “One, they were a bit like the Beatles. Two, they pissed on a garage, and three, that famous saying which was going around: ‘Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?’ I never listened to the Rolling Stones. I listened to Bartok’s House of the Dead and Beethoven quartets. It was possible to know who they were without knowing who they were.”
And yet “We piss anywhere, man,” a spontaneous outburst, whether subconsciously encouraged by Oldham or not, was more honest and subsequently more perfect agitprop. This was, after all, four young men urinating on perhaps the ultimate symbol of modern, American, imperialist power: the gas station. The very fuel that was helping the war in Vietnam escalate. “It is an act of rebellion,” Whitehead says. “The idea of the thing. The petrol station. It’s about cars. About oil. About big business. It’s about this and that but frankly, everybody’s got the completely wrong take on it. We’re not discussing the Rolling Stones here; we’re discussing the fucking idiocy of the British media. The guys were drunk. A bit stoned. They had a lot to drink; they stopped to get a couple of Kit Kats and a sandwich and wanted to have a pee. There’s no loo in the English garage so they went around the back. We’ve all done it. But they happened to be the Rolling Stones. The establishment wanted anything they could use to develop an anti-PR campaign to this successful youth culture embodied in the Beatles and the Stones, who were effectively changing the consciousness of the British establishment and attacking American imperialism and the dumbing-down process of English culture by kitsch American culture.”
It was uncanny how well the undiluted notion of “We piss anywhere” matched the image of a sneering Mick Jagger. Even the music on their next album, Out of Our Heads, released in July, seemed to play into the “We piss anywhere” ethos. “I’m Free,” one of the album’s singles, contained the chorus “I’m free to do what I want any old time” and demanded “love me,” if only because he was so free, and while Oldham played this up, the media were playing upon him. It was a fragile, combustible symbiosis, one that would nearly ruin the band in the next two years, but not before making them huge. The Stones were now selling millions of records, just like the Beatles, but it would be another year before the Fab Four would have their own potential “We piss anywhere” moment, the following March, when John Lennon was quoted (out of context) telling the Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue with that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now.” From 1965 on, whenever a pop artist, talking politics or philosophy, and in Lennon’s case, the most volatile subject of them all, religion, sparks a furor among the old guard, there’s a little bit of Mick’s original utterance on that cold, dark night. Lennon ultimately apologized. Most do. The Stones never did. “We piss anywhere” helped take them upward, but it would soon blow back in the wind. The mark of Cain was on them now.
6
“Under the Influence of Bail”
It started with a case of mistaken identity in early 1967, the “Winter of Love.” Brian Jones leaned against the bar at Blaise’s, a hip London nightclub. Blaise’s hosted light show–enhanced concerts by Pink Floyd and the Jimi Hendrix Experience and quickly became a hub of the city’s new psychedelic rock scene. Once the band’s handsome and talented leader, Jones was now tottering, full of scotch and downers. His chiseled jaw was distorted with bloat and seemed to melt into his thick neck. His brain was addled with pathological insecurity and jealousy. Brian was furious at Mick and Keith for usurping his position in the Stones. They’d emerged, in the last two years, as a formidable songwriting partnership. This, coupled with the media’s fascination with Mick, the face of not just the Stones but the London scene itself, bruised Jones’ Napoleonic ego. Mick and Keith didn’t take care to assuage him, either, but rather delighted in this new power they wielded over him. Jones turned his anger inward, ingesting heroic quantities of pills, pot, hash, and booze. He was also one of the first pop stars, along with Lennon and Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, to embrace LSD full on. Acid did not have a good effect on Jones’ already fraying psyche. It was, after all, designed to destroy the ego, and Mick and Keith had already done that, so the chemical seemed to burn away everything else, leaving a shell of a pop star. Jones was mistrusting and violently abusive of his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend Anita Pallenberg; convinced that Mick or Keith or both would steal her away, just like they stole his post in the band that he founded with Ian Stewart. Stewart had been demoted. Brian figured that he would be next. By early ’67, he’d changed the world but couldn’t live with himself, or mix with anybody else. He couldn’t enter a place as bustling and happening as Blaise’s without asking for trouble, and it would soon come his way.
London nightclubs were no longer places to dance, preen, and drink Cokes. Time was, stars could come with an entourage and relax, their particular excesses so far ahead of the public that the cops and dirt-digging tabloid reporters didn’t even know what to look for. They were now unsafe. Swinging London, as seen by the straight world, was either an abstraction, akin to a rumor of bad behavior one merely shrugs off, or a cheeky, kitschy world of Beatle haircuts and clean fun. Then came pot. As ’66 turned to’67, acid followed, and as it altered the perception of those who took it, it changed the way the public viewed the scene. The world of London youth was now a place where good English girls and boys lost themselves to wild ideas, strange music, and morally vacant sex. And worse, while pot wore off eventually, LSD could destroy your mind forever.
But in the late ’60s LSD had already been used by both the American and British governments as a potential mind-control agent, a weapon in the Cold War. Previously, the powers that be only feared the Russians and the Chinese when they indulged their nightmares about the chemical settling into the wrong hands and polluting the minds of good, God-fearing capitalist men, women, and children. Timothy Leary was already under fire for proselytizing about this new poison. Now parents and politicians had a new bogeyman, and media emperors like Rupert Murdoch (who owned the British tabloid News of the World) had a new haymaker : the intellectual, opinionated post-Dylan rock star, luring the kids toward their doom by example.
“The psychedelic underground and the pop scene were starting to overlap,” Pink Floyd producer Joe Boyd writes in his ’60s memoir, White Bicycles, “and it was getting hard to maintain the original atmosphere. It was also difficult to ignore the increased attention of the police; the longer the queues, the more customers were getting frisked and busted . . . The media stopped winking and grinning about ‘swinging London’ and started wallowing in horror stories about teenagers being led astray.” It felt like the old foundation was slowly being chipped away, and a wave of fear and resentment spread over those in power.
“We were shocked by resistance to our progressive ideas,” recalls writer, artist, and activist Caroline Coon today. “The establishment set itself implacably against us. And arresting us for drug offenses was a lawful way to attack us. New drugs, as they became popular, were made illegal in order to legitimize the harassment of this political and cultural rebellion. It really was acutely Them vs. Us. And once we realized that the police were involved in monitoring and stopping our socio-political movement, we realized that we were under surveillance, that we were not paranoid, that there actually were such things as undercover cops and snitches.” Folk artist turned pop star Donovan’s No. 2 UK hit, “Sunshine Superman,” prompted some to call for a ban simply because they suspected its dippy lyrics may be filled with druggedup slang. The previous year, Donovan became the first major pop star to be arrested on drug charges. The BBC broadcast of a
documentary entitled A Boy Called Donovan that showed him smoking pot at a party might have doomed him.
By 1967, the Rolling Stones were more influential than ever, and it’s easy to see how they might have felt invulnerable and a bit too messianic. After three years of constant touring and recording, they would finally start to see some real money, swapping conceptualist Andrew Loog Oldham for stocky, hard-boiled American business manager Allen Klein. Klein’s upbringing in a New Jersey orphanage almost surely contributed to his notoriously gruff and aggressive manner. In his thirties, he’d guided the financial dealings of superstar soul singer Sam Cooke, one of the first black artists to own his own publishing. After Cooke was murdered in December of 1964, Klein diversified and began “auditing” record companies on behalf of a slew of British Invasion bands like the Animals and Herman’s Hermits in effort to make sure they received every penny of royalties owed. He took 20 percent, but the missing money he found usually more than made it worthwhile (“Remember, no one has to sign with me if they don’t want to,” he’d tell a Playboy interviewer in 1971). Klein (who clearly enjoyed his reputation as “the biggest prick in the music business”) had his sights on both the Beatles and the Stones from the start. Already in the Stones’ camp when he’d heard the news that the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had committed suicide in August, he’d allegedly pulled over to the side of the road and shouted, “I got’em!” Oldham, who was, like Jones, increasingly losing himself to drugs, brought Klein into the fold as a business advisor.
Within the year Klein would control both bands. With regard to the Stones, this fortuitously dovetailed with the Stones enjoying self-penned (and therefore highly lucrative) hits that topped the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and finally vied with the best of the Beatles’ oeuvre. “Paint It, Black,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” and “Ruby Tuesday” were perfectly constructed sonic art pieces with smart lyrics that frankly observed darkness and nudged hypocrisy, sadness, and decay with precocious humor and existential depth that heretofore seemed impossible for a three-minute pop song. The Stones did so without compromising a shred of toughness. They could be blunt when necessary. Take the “Stupid Girl” (possibly Chrissie Shrimpton) who brags about things that she’s never seen, bitching all the while. Or “Don’tcha Bother Me,” on which Jagger warned all the other Stones-y groups suddenly gone dark, as well as the lounge lizards dropping names and dressing like elegantly wasted hippies, “Don’t’cha copy me no more. The lines on my eyes are protected by copyright law.” Both tracks appear on Aftermath, the Stones’ 1966 release, the first album to avoid reliance on cover tunes. Recorded at RCA Studios in Los Angeles in the year of Revolver , Pet Sounds, and Blonde on Blonde, it showcased the Rolling Stones like nothing before it. One could hardly imagine this band jumping on a bandwagon themselves anytime soon, but like Icarus, or the hero of Aftermath’s “Flight 505,” they went searching for a “new life,” soared too high, and just as they were “feeling like a king” with the “world at their feet,” they crapped out and ended up in the “sea.” What brought the plane down? Ego, bad luck, and lots of good, clean LSD.
Mick later confided to Cecil Beaton (according to his diary) that he took acid about once a month, and only in a “congenial setting.” “They can’t stamp it out,” he confided. “It’s like the atom bomb. Once it’s been discovered it can never be forgotten, and it’s too easy to make LSD.” As ever, it would be the Beatles who broke ground as far as public admission of LSD experimentation was concerned. Paul McCartney, who turned twenty-five at the cusp of the “Summer of Love,” was breaking away from his mop-top image just as much as Lennon, and increasingly they could not be spun. McCartney admitted to a reporter that he himself had taken LSD. In a series of well-meaning if naïve follow-ups, he made matters much worse by stammering, “They’re talking about things that are a bit new they’re talking about things that people don’t really know too much about yet people tend to put them down a bit and say weirdo psychedelic—it’s really just what’s going on around and they’re just trying to look into it a bit so the next time you see the word any new strange word like psychedelic, drugs the whole bit, freak out music don’t immediately take it at that. Your first reactions gonna be one of fear.”
“Do you think it’ll encourage your fans to take drugs,” yet another reporter asks him, barely containing his glee.
“I don’t think it’ll make any difference. I don’t think my fans are gonna take drugs just because I did.” That thousands of his fans dressed and styled their hair like the Beatles, built shrines from merchandise bearing their images, and listened to Lennon sing “Tomorrow Never Knows” in their college dorm rooms as pot smoke filled the air didn’t compute with the Cute Beatle. Or, more likely, he didn’t care anymore. He was bigger than Jesus, too, after all.
The Stones were, like much of their decadent scene, acquainted with acid, but unlike Lennon had, by ’67, only written obliquely about it: on “19th Nervous Breakdown,” Mick recalls, “On our first trip I tried so hard to rearrange your mind.” Aftermath’s “Going Home” is a long, weary, proto-psychedelic account of wanting to return home after a long trip. According to Faithfull, now living with Jagger in a posh town house in Cheyne Walk, his natural leadership qualities emerged while under the influence. He used acid to develop the mind in the same way he used exercise to develop the body. Mick was “calm and cool,” according to Faithfull. Within the Stones and their endlessly shifting power struggles, acid was used as a bonding tool. Initially Keith and Brian took trips together, but Keith’s barely concealed that his feelings for Anita had created a rift. Mick and Keith on acid was a cascade of warm, supportive, brotherly energy that seemed to validate and reward all the amazing work they’d done together. Keith had used the Klein-maneuvered influx of cash to purchase Redlands, a thatched-roofed country mansion in Surrey (Mick would buy his own estate in Newbury a few years later). With its green hills, flower beds, and ancient stones, it was the perfect locale for a psychedelic idyll. Far from the city, under the stars, with a skull full of frizzled matter, it was easy to believe the world was changing for the better, and the Stones, truly pampered now, let their guard down fatally. They behaved like new royalty, not fully realizing the extent to which London law enforcement was gunning for them, along with an even more sinister and effective ally: the panic-fomenting tabloid media.
A buzz spread through Blaise’s that January night. “There’s a Rolling Stone here.” The clueless News of the World reporter was convinced that he had cornered Mick Jagger himself at the bar. Jones, mistaken for Mick, saw this as a real opportunity to exact revenge on his former ally by confessing that he enjoyed hash to calm down and speed when he needed an energy boost, and that he felt no guilt whatsoever about utilizing these chemicals. When asked whether he, like McCartney, was given to acid trips, Jones, as “Mick,” hinted that he was already beyond acid and on the prowl for the next super-high: “I don’t go much on LSD now that the cats have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.” He downed his drink, looked around, and declared that the party had become boring. He invited the reporter to accompany him elsewhere to partake in smoking a lump of Moroccan hash. The reporter left the club convinced he’d been invited by Mick Jagger to go get very stoned. He had a hot story.
When the second of a planned multipart article entitled “Pop Stars and Drugs: The Facts Will Shock You” was published in News of the World on February 5, 1967, private, middle-class Mick was aghast to read quotes attributed him, openly confessing to drug use, along with lurid tales about the exploits of peers like the Who, the Moody Blues, Cream, and the already persecuted Donovan. He vowed to sue. With social ties to both the Beatles and the Stones, Robert Fraser, a well-connected gallery owner warned Mick that if he did he would be making “the Oscar Wilde mistake.” As any fan of Stephen Fry knows, Wilde, at the height of his own popularity with the production of The Importance of Being Earnest, was accused by the Marquis of Queensb
ury of being a sodomite after his relationship with the Marquis’ son, Lord Alfred Douglas (known affectionately as Bosie), was discovered. Wilde sued for libel, thereby exposing himself to a slew of personal attacks and countercharges that later found him incarcerated in Reading Gaol; his plays closed, his books were banned, and he became estranged from his family. Paul McCartney, for one, revered Fraser as “one of the most influential people on the London’60s scene.” His old-style salons fostered a really intellectual bond between the smart, young pop stars and the slightly older Pop artists and designers of the day like Peter Blake, the photographer Michael Cooper, and film director Christian Marquand. Socialites, those who purchased rather than produced art, were a glamorous component as well. Guinness heir Tara Browne and John Paul Getty Jr. gave the Stones even more of a powerful and decadent air as they all passed through Fraser’s apartment and gallery, smoking, blasting R&B records, and discussing matters both lofty and trashy.
Fraser was gay and on his way to developing a serious drug problem, but like Mick, he came from an upstanding family and could thrive in both the straight and the hip worlds. He felt himself strongly drawn to the latter, whether it was showcasing pop artists like Warhol and Jim Dine or mixing with the increasingly hard and occasionally seedy retinue around the Stones. “He wants to be on the outside edge where there’s criminal activity,” Mick noted in the foreword to the Fraser biography, Groovy Bob. The cautious Fraser kept his head while Mick just burned.
Mick, in a rare moment of naïveté and lack of foresight, surely brought on by an inflated sense of power and his new wealth, did not learn from Wilde’s mistakes. He wouldn’t back off, and filed suit, forcing the News of the World to essentially find a way, any way, to prove that he was indeed a drug user. He was now a target for amoral police sergeants like the infamous Sgt. Pilcher, looking to drum up publicity and appease outraged taxpayers by knocking these pious, candy-colored pop stars down a peg, and a sitting duck when it came to frame jobs and setups, the truth easily reached retroactively. He placed himself unwittingly in the position of not being able to sin at all, in any way. Every aspirin tablet had to be accounted for, an impossibility given the Stones travel schedule, business pressures, and the increasingly shady retinue that surrounded their larger and larger estates. Those close to them were not safe either. “If [LSD] wasn’t meant to happen, it wouldn’t have been invented,” Faithfull blithely observed, not realizing she was sealing her fate. “I think I’m really powerful . . . they’ll smash me,” she prophesized.
