Old Gods Almost Dead (23 page)

Late March. Ten-day Euro tour started with another riot in The Hague. Anita joined up in Paris. The shows began with “The Last Time” and moved through older soul covers and hits like “Time Is on My Side” and “Play with Fire.” Then it built through “Breakdown” and “Cloud” before the “I'm All Right”/“Satisfaction” meltdown. Smoke bombs were thrown at L'Olympia in Paris during the second show: sixty fans were arrested by the gendarmes. The aftershow party at the hotel featured Françoise Hardy and Brigitte Bardot, reigning European movie sex bomb since her 1956 role in
And God Created Woman.
Bardot asked Mick and Keith to write a song for her next film. Marianne Faithfull was at the party too, at the height of her beauty and pop stardom, twenty years old, without her husband, famously promiscuous. (She had a role in Jean-Luc Goddard's new film
Made In U.S.A.
) Brian moved around Paris like a national hero, mobbed for autographs wherever he went.

                

Decca released
the (superior) British version of
Aftermath
in April. It had a rose-tinted cover shot of the band by Guy Webster, with four shots from Jerry Schatzberg's intimate New York photo session on the back. Dave Hassinger's liner notes talked about the Stones' cool professionalism at RCA, taking note of the long hours it took to build a song, from the moment Mick and Keith ran it through for the band to the final track.

After-Math
(spelled this way on the jacket) had fourteen tracks and ran longer than contemporary pop albums usually did. For the first time, all the songs were Jagger/Richards compositions, making this, for serious fans, the first real Rolling Stones album. By turns tender and offensive,
Aftermath
disturbed and delighted everyone who listened to the Stones' blatant attack on motherhood and the common decencies of traditional courtship and other sexual mores. “Mother's Little Helper”—set to the same frantic rockabilly rhythm that Keith used for “Breakdown”—used sci-fi guitars and the sitar, plus the weird “doctor, please” C&W bridge, to talk about tranquilized suburban housewives. “What a draaag it is, gettin' old” seemed like an attack on middle-aged values and echoed Pete Townshend's “Hope I die before I get old” line from the Who's “My Generation.”

“Stupid Girl” was a 4/4 stomp about Mick Jagger's love life. “I wasn't in a good relationship,” he said later. “Or I was in too many bad relationships.” Describing someone as “the sickest thing in the world” can be seen as a stake in the heart of his long affair with Chrissie Shrimpton, but shouldn't be taken so literally. “It's a caricature,” Mick said, “and it's in reply to a girl who was a very pushy woman. I had so many girlfriends at that point, I was obviously in with the wrong group.”

The mood lifted a bit for “Lady Jane,” Mick's “unconscious” pastiche of a Tudor love song. Brian Jones played an amplified dulcimer over Jack Nitzsche's harpsichord, as Mick sang lines supposedly inspired by Henry VIII's love letters to Lady Jane Seymour. (Some related the song to Mick's friend Jane Ormsby-Gore.) Others heard “Lady Jane” as marijuana, “Lady Ann” as amphetamine.

Then back to the dirty business of male chauvinism with “Under My Thumb,” Brian's marimba playing lead to a gentle rocking beat that accelerated into a groove toward the end. “Thumb” had serious, fuzz-tone guitar, a lyric that mixed love and hate—“under my thumb's a squirming dog who's just had her day”—and Otis-type soul riffing at the end. Mick later called this searing song “a jokey number,” but it stirred a sense of outrage in many of the women who heard it as a triumphalist expression of domination. They followed this with “Doncha Bother Me,” a Chicago-style R&B tune with slide guitar and harmonica. Mick's sneering vocal—“Not knowing why / Trying to get high”—was flush with bad attitude.

“Goin' Home” finished the side with a landmark blues jam, mostly Mick riffing over understated layers of harmonica and guitar, building momentum over eleven tense minutes. The song had been recorded at an all-night studio party during the first
Aftermath
sessions the previous December, and carried the crack-of-dawn feeling of the best white blues. “Goin' Home” was an homage to Wilson Pickett and the other soul shouters the Stones loved, a way for the Stones to crack open the short form demanded by the standard song formats of the time. The drums even drop out at one point, when someone threw something at Charlie Watts and the band kept playing.

Side two: “Flight 505,” a rocker about in-flight paranoia. “High and Dry,” the other side of “Thumb,” a corny C&W song about getting dumped by a rich girl. “Out of Time,” a pointed attack on Chrissie Shrimpton—“my poor old-fashioned baby”—with rich marimba and guitar countermelodies and some of Mick Jagger's best singing on record. “It's Not Easy” was organ R&B and chugging boogie. “I Am Waiting” was a “Lady Jane” clone with enigmatic lyrics and eccentric phrasing. “Take It or Leave It” had scat lyrics and a sad, lovelorn feel that appealed to young men. “Think” featured fuzz-guitar slabs, great drumming, and loads of romantic recriminations: “Tell me whose fault was that, babe!” “What to Do” ended
Aftermath
on a note of confusion familiar to all young lovers.

Aftermath
's audacious and seemingly cruel attitudes antagonized some listeners as an attack on women. Others saw it much differently. In a critique published in
New Left Review,
Richard Morton described “Stupid Girl” and “Under My Thumb” as ironic anthems designed to expose sexual exploitation: “The enormous merit and audacity of the Stones is to have . . . defied a central taboo of the social system: mention of sexual inequality. They have done so in the most radical and unacceptable way possible: by celebrating it. The light this black beam throws on the society is too bright for it. The triumph of these records is their rejection of the spurious world of monadic personal relationships.”

In the end,
Aftermath
was a somber, troubled letter from the band to its audience, who made the record no. 1 within days of its release. Even Mick Jagger, rarely given to praising the Stones' work, was proud of it: “[
Aftermath
] was a big landmark record for me. It's the first time we wrote the whole record . . . It had a lot of different styles, and it was very well recorded. So it was, to my mind, a real marker.”

Aftermath
was an important part of its times, contemporaneous with Dylan's
Blonde on Blonde,
Antonioni's
Blow Up,
Catherine Deneuve in the film
Repulsion,
Truman Capote's nonfiction novel
In Cold Blood.
The Stones were entering their mighty midperiod, and there was nothing now—almost nothing—that could stop them.

Not that they wouldn't try . . .

The Sun Blotted Out from the Sky

April 24, 1966.
Tara Browne's famous twenty-first-birthday party at Luggala, a Guinness family estate near Bray, Ireland. Outlandish period costumes and huge blocks of black hashish. Brian and Anita as Cupid and Psyche in feathers and silk. Mick and Chrissie having a row. She was embarrassed because people generally identified her with the scathing put-downs in
Aftermath.

                

These were the days
of “Paint It, Black,” released in early May 1966. (The comma in the title, inserted by someone at Decca, aroused much curiosity and even charges of racism.) There was nothing else like it on the radio. This lurid tone poem seemed to describe a funeral procession amid haunting, existential self-doubt. Brian's sitar stated the melody with an otherworldly dolor, and pounding drums launched the song into a high-noir ambience of anxiety and hopelessness, desirous to see the sun blotted out from the sky. Leonard Bernstein, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, called it one of the greatest songs of the century. It seemed to have social echoes as well, reflecting recent waves of immigration to England from India and Pakistan.

Keith: “We cut it in L.A., as a comedy track. Bill was playing the organ, doing a piss-take on our old manager [Eric Easton], who started as an organist in a cinema pit. We'd been doing it with funky rhythms and it hadn't worked out and he started playing it like this [a sort of unintentional klezmer parody] and everybody got behind it. It's a two-beat; very strange. Brian playing the sitar makes the whole thing.”

“Paint It, Black” was an instant hit record, no. 1 in both England and America. It also marked the Rolling Stones' commercial apogee as a singles band in the sixties. “Black” was their last no. 1 for more than two years.

                

May 1966.
Keith moved his record collection and guns down to Redlands; the rooms were still empty of furniture except for Keith's bed. He bought the cottage across the moat for a music room. His girlfriend Linda Keith moved to New York, leaving Keith high and dry. An old gardener named Jack watched over Redlands while Keith hung with Brian and Anita, who moved in permanently with Brian that month.

At the end of the month, Bob Dylan and his band, the Hawks, returned to London for climactic performances at Royal Albert Hall. Playing electric rock in the second half of his shows, with a giant American flag as a backdrop, Dylan had been reviled as a sellout and a Judas for almost four months. People threw things at the stage in disgust. His old fans were pleading with him to get rid of the band, but Dylan ignored them. Dylan's shows invariably ended with searing electric versions of “Ballad of a Thin Man” and “Like A Rolling Stone” during massive audience walkouts.

Dylan had been on the road, around the world, since February, and was said to be running on speed and heroin. In London, he ran into Keith and Brian at Dolly's, a private club in Mayfair. Dylan had to be carried into the place by Stones chauffeur Tom Keylock, who was minding Dylan while he was in town. Dylan and the two drunken Stones started to get into it. No way, Dylan told Keith, were the Stones the best rock and roll band anymore. Opaque behind his black shades, Dylan told Keith that the Hawks were the best band nowadays.

Keith, taken aback, asked, “What about us?”

“You guys may be the best
philosophers,”
Dylan slurred. “But the Hawks—they're the best band, man.”

Keith didn't need to hear this and began to brood. Dylan began to twist the blade in Keith's guts. “Y'know, man, I coulda written 'Satisfaction'—easy,” he told Keith. “But there's
no fuckin' way
you guys coulda written 'Mr. Tambourine Man.' You know that?
Think
about it.”

Keith thought about it, and a few drinks later decided that “Like A Rolling Stone” was really kind of taking the piss out of his band. Keith made a lunge for Dylan, expertly parried by Keylock. There was a little scuffle. Dylan got uptight and Keylock hustled him out of the club, into the car, and back to the Mayfair Hotel. As Keylock turned into Park Lane, he noticed Keith and Brian behind them in Brian's Rolls, and then Brian tried to get past to cut them off. Brian was drunk, swerving in and out of traffic, and they seemed to want another go at Dylan. Keylock pulled into the hotel driveway and got Dylan into the lobby just as Brian's Rolls jumped the curb and tried in vain to ram through the revolving doors. None of this was mentioned the next night (May 26), when the Stones visited Dylan backstage after his show ended in massive booing, catcalls, and walkouts. The Stones had taped
Top of the Pops
in the afternoon and shared a box at Royal Albert Hall that night. Afterward, they all went to the Scotch of St. James and got loaded. A few weeks later, Dylan would fall off his motorcycle near his home in Woodstock, New York, and effectively retire his electric mod persona for good. The Hawks became The Band.

                

By June 1966,
the Stones were burned out.

“We were actually trying to [accomplish] something by taking a few chemicals and making this wrench,” Keith told Stanley Booth. “The ideal behind it was very pure. Everybody at that point was prepared to use himself as a laboratory, to find some way out of this mess. It was very idealistic and very destructive at the same time for a lot of people. But the downside of it now is that people think that drugs are entertainment . . . We weren't taking drugs just for fun, recreation.
Creation,
maybe.”

Brian and Anita went to Spain for a week and stayed in the resort town of Marbella. But their fun was strenuous, and he returned more exhausted than before he left. Mick suffered some kind of physical breakdown and went into seclusion at his flat in Harley House. A couple of TV shows were canceled because Mick's doctor told him he was suffering from nervous stress and had to rest for a week before going back to America. It was going to be a hard tour. The American version of
Aftermath
had failed to make no. 1. “Mother's Little Helper,” with its derisively cruel images of women tranquilized by little yellow pills, was released as a single that month and only made no. 8. A lot of American fans thought “Little Helper” was a real downer. There was a feeling in the band that the Stones had to prove themselves all over again.

Oh Baudelaire!

The Stones landed
in New York on June 23, 1966, to begin their fifth American tour and discovered no hotel would book them. Andrew threatened to sue amid much publicity, and the band made do at the down-market Holiday Inn. That night, Bill played bass on a John Hammond Jr. blues session. Brian and Dylan showed up to hang out, their relationship patched up, and later Dylan played Brian the acetates of
Blonde on Blonde.
Like everyone else, Brian was floored by the power and humor of the music, particularly the shouted chorus of “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”: