Old Gods Almost Dead (26 page)

The new studio scene also gave the Stones new problems. Working with four-track tapes, they took full advantage of new opportunities for overdubbing, sometimes stepping on their tracks so much that the tapes took on a muffled, compressed quality that spoiled the sound of
Between the Buttons
for them in the end.

There was a big social scene going on in the studio during the sessions, reflected in jokey collage-style tracks like “Something Happened to Me Yesterday.” Mick and Marianne would often disappear to a storeroom upstairs to smoke a joint and make love. There were lots of visitors, parties, serious smoke and speed. The scene at Olympic included characters like Jimi Hendrix; Spanish Tony Sanchez, a Soho hustler who scored dope for Keith; “Prince” Stash de Rola; Michael Cooper snapping away, bonding with Keith and Brian; UFO/paranormal researcher John Michell; Tara Browne in and out, floating in his sweet lysergic coma; Robert Fraser, who had just been outrageously busted by the cops and fined for obscenity because his art gallery had exhibited a sculpture of a pink phallus by American pop artist Jim Dine.

As the sessions wound down, the tracks recorded in Los Angeles the previous summer got new vocals relating to Mick's passion for Marianne. Mick toned down the brutal lyrics to “Yesterday's Papers,” whose early versions were bitter and harsh. On a misty December dawn, at the end of an all-night session, Gered Mankowitz took the Stones to Primrose Hill in North London for the new album's jacket photo. With his lens smeared with Vaseline, he shot the Stones bundled against the morning chill, an enervated dead-eyed Brian sunk deep in his muffler, his red eyes averted, a village idiot's grin on his gray face. It seemed to Mankowitz that Brian was deliberately screwing up the shoot.

                

When Jack Nitzsche
returned to Los Angeles, Brian, Anita, and Keith went with him. Mick had planned to take Chrissie for a holiday in Jamaica. The Stones had done good work at Olympic, with a dozen strong tracks in the can and many interesting outtakes like “I Can See It,” a tough rocker with piano and slide guitar; “Looking Tired,” a C&W blues they'd written in Nashville; the great “Ride On Baby” (written in Ireland, the only one to be released); “If You Let Me”; and “Gold Painted Nails.”

But things began to fall part. Tripping Tara Browne was killed in a car crash on December 17, shocking both Beatles and Stones deeply. Browne had been racing his Lotus down busy Redcliffe Gardens in Chelsea when he ran a red light and smashed into a van. His girlfriend, model Suki Potier, was unhurt, but Tara died instantly. “I heard the news today—oh boy,” wrote John Lennon. Brian Jones was devastated at the loss of one of his closest friends. “It affected Brian
very
deeply,” Anita said. “It made it seem like the whole thing was a lie.”

After Tara was killed, Brian didn't want to return to London, and he and Anita and Keith spent Christmas 1966 in a Paris hotel suite. They were all tripping one night when Keith said to Brian,
“You'll
never make thirty, man.”

Brian looked away and said, “I know.”

                

Mick canceled
the Jamaica holiday and went Christmas shopping at Harrods instead with Marianne. They had lunch together in Knightsbridge and talked things over.

Marianne: “If Mick hadn't been hanging around and courting me, I suppose I would have stayed with my husband. But Mick's life was too tempting, this very powerful man with lots of money, promising me the moon with my name on it. I fell for it.” On December 19, Mick and Chrissie both issued statements to the press that they had broken their long unofficial engagement.

Bill Wyman also left his wife around this time and moved into a flat in London.

An era was ending, one that had begun for the Stones four years earlier in Richmond. The long-running
Rolling Stones Monthly
fan magazine folded. Their reign as a teen act was over, as was their role as high priests of R&B. The midnight hour had passed, and the new dawn would bring a much different world for the Rolling Stones, one that would spin way out of their control.

Just before Christmas, depressed by the horrible public humiliation of the forthcoming “Yesterday's Papers” (which asked, “Who needs yesterday's girl?”), Chrissie Shrimpton tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. Her recuperation bills were sent to Mick, who refused to pay them. Instead, he had her things moved out of Harley House. A few weeks later, Marianne Faithfull moved in with Mick. When he confided his anxieties to her, she smiled sweetly and said, “Don't worry.”

Catch Your Dreams Before They Slip Away

The sensational new
Rolling Stones album,
Between the Buttons,
was released in January 1967, a Charlie Watts tour de force, a hard-hitting pastiche of rock styles and erotic fervor. “Let's Spend the Night Together” was a piano-driven oral-sex chant with crashing drums, Keith on bass, Nitzsche's droning organ, and a
Pet Sounds
harmonic bridge. “Yesterday's Papers” glowed in marimba hues and had Hendrix-influenced fuzz guitar; it was the last of the Stones' stupid-girl songs. “Ruby Tuesday” had Brian's owl-hooting flute and Jacobean cello vibe. The raucous “Connection” was Keith Richards's first lead vocal on a Stones record (its images of injections, customs searches, and paranoid longing prefigured the rest of his career). Keith played organ on “She Smiled Sweetly” in a muffled drum duet with Charlie, as Mick unreeled his first unabashed love song, echoing Dylan's “Just Like a Woman.” Nicky Hopkins's piano and some hillbilly dulcimer competed for attention with a kazoo on “Cool Calm Collected,” an arch music hall throwback that speeds up until it screws itself into the studio floor amid laughter as the needle skidded off the album's first side.

“All Sold Out” opened side two with a strange, nasty diatribe against “a girl so strangled” amid two weaving guitars and heavy drums. “My Obsession” was a dark foray into sexual appetites and pussy-eating, full of ominous drums and faraway piano. Bob Dylan's folk rock harmonica songs were evoked on “Who's Been Sleeping Here,” an anguished, explicit complaint to Marianne (“just like Goldilocks”) about her famous love life. The tempo picked up and the theme continued with “Complicated,” another Marianne song: “she's very educated, and she doesn't give a damn.” Round and round she goes, as “Miss Amanda Jones,” the darling of the discotheque crowd, was unleashed in a capacitor burst of pop energy. The jokey acid trip of “Something Happened to Me Yesterday” (Brian on saxophone) was delivered as a comic mocking of squares, the cops, and even the trad jazz musicians in the song's fade. The British
Buttons
also contained the sentimental “Backstreet Girl,” backed by a Parisian accordion line—Mick's favorite song on an album he didn't much like—and the Bo Diddley rave “Please Go Home.”

The last Stones album to be released in two versions (“Ruby” and “Papers” were left off the U.K. disc),
Buttons
was the key transitional work between their early black R&B albums and the apocalyptic masterpieces that came later in the decade. The album title was an accident. Charlie Watts, who drew cartoons for the back of the jacket, asked Andrew what the record was called and was told the title was between the buttons, meaning it hadn't been decided. Charlie's droll six-panel cartoon was titled “Between the Buttons,” and it became the album title as well. The cover shot disturbed Brian's fans, who could see their idol's glazed, shadowy eyes. It made him look, wrote critic David Dalton, “like a doomed albino raccoon.”

The first single was controversial from the minute the song pluggers brought it to the radio stations. “Let's Spend the Night Together” was viewed as sexually explicit and thus taboo. In America, the disc jockeys flipped it over and played safer “Ruby Tuesday” instead, and the record eventually went to no. 1.

The band didn't really like
Between the Buttons.
“We recorded it in London on four-track machine,” Mick later told an interviewer. “We bounced it back to do overdubs so many times we lost the sound of it. [The songs] sounded so great, but later on I was really disappointed with it.”

The Stones bought some new clothes that month: colorful jackets, floral scarves, broad-brimmed hats, costume jewelry, reflecting the peacock revolution in men's fashion in 1967. They did a photo call in London's Green Park, Keith in his woolly white caveman vest, Brian in a flamboyant white hat that became his trademark that year. They all went to see the flaming Jimi Hendrix Experience in various London clubs.

On January 15, they played
The Ed Sullivan Show
in New York. Again the doorman didn't recognize them and wouldn't let them in the theater. There was a melee and Mick's hand was cut by scissors wielded by a girl trying to cut a lock of his hair. Keith punched the doorman hard when they got in. They played “Ruby Tuesday” and, after a big fight and self-loathing when they caved in, a censored version of their new single. Sullivan was adamant: “Either the Stones go, or I go.” Rolling his eyes with sarcasm, Mick had to sing “Let's spend
some time
together” for Sullivan's immense national audience. The band clashed with Andrew Oldham over this, accusing him of giving in too easily to Sullivan's demands. Mick felt intense shame at being censored. “We should have walked off,” he said later.

Back in London a few days later, Brian, Keith, and Anita went shopping in Chelsea, buying clothes at the boutique Granny Takes a Trip for the band's atypical gig on ITV's
Sunday Night at the London Palladium,
the big variety show. Mick had to deny press stories that the Stones were changing their rough image to pander to the show's family audience. There was another blazing row when the Stones refused to appear with the rest of the cast, waving the traditional good-bye, on a revolving stage at the end of the show while Jack Parnell and His Orchestra played “Startime.” This was everything the Stones had been fighting for four years. The producer told the Stones they would be insulting not just him and the show but the British public as well. Mick told him to fuck off. Andrew sided with the TV producers, and the resulting shouting match and bad feelings—Andrew stormed out of the studio—diminished Andrew's involvement with the Stones. The Stones performed with Keith and Brian tripping on strong acid. The band snuck out a side door after miming to four songs, having managed to avoid the constipated censorship imposed in America, but they caught some negative publicity when they were conspicuously absent from the revolving stage. After this rupture with Andrew Oldham, Mick assumed the role as spokesman for the Stones and hired the veteran London press agent Leslie Perrin to handle the Stones' fractious relationship with the press.

                

Brian and Anita
fought like tigers. She knocked him down with a punch in a crowded Chelsea nightclub. He'd steal her movie scripts and rip them up because he was jealous. Once, after Brian had beaten her up, Spanish Tony asked Anita what had happened and was told it was none of his fucking business. Sanchez arrived at Courtfield Road one day to find Brian freaking because he thought Anita was dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. They got her to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. When she came to, Anita and Brian clutched each other and wept like babies.

Mick and Marianne were also drowning in each other. “They were like a couple of rabbits,” Ian Stewart said. “I'd go over there and she'd be sitting up in bed, radiant and smiling, and he'd be completely wasted and wiped out. They would just fuck all the time.”

In late January, Mick flew to Italy, where Marianne was appearing at the San Remo Song Festival. Marianne had rented a villa in the old fishing village of Positano, and the two lovers spent a week swanning around the Italian and French Riviera. At a nightclub, Marianne bought a bottle of French pep pills from the deejay and fatefully stashed it in the pocket of Mick's handsome green velvet jacket.

On Sunday, February 5, Mick and Marianne were in bed at Harley House, reading the Sunday papers. Suddenly he jumped up, waving the mud-slinging weekly the
News of the World.

Mick Jagger has taken LSD at the Moody Blues' house in Roehampton.

It was the latest report in the paper's ongoing exposé “Pop Stars and Drugs.”

Jagger told us: “I don't go out on it (LSD) now the cats (fans) have taken it up. It'll just get a dirty name. I remember the first time I took it. It was on tour with Bo Diddley and Little Richard.”

During the time we were at the Blaises club in Kensington, Jagger took about six Benzedrine tablets. “I would just not keep awake in places like this if I didn't have them.”

.  .  .  Later at Blaises, Jagger showed a companion and two girls a small piece of hashish (marijuana) and invited them to his flat for “a smoke.”

Marianne laughed. “It's
Brian,”
she said. “They've confused you with Brian. He still goes around telling one and all that he's the leader of the Rolling Stones.”

Mick was livid. The
News of the World
was trying to kill the Stones the way the paper destroyed the lives of the wayward vicars and philandering politicians it usually pursued. But this was absurd. Cautious Mick told friends he'd never taken LSD and was unusually circumspect about doing drugs at all, unlike Brian and Keith, who were flying on acid a lot of the time. Mick prided himself on being discreet and in control of his private life.

Late that afternoon, he called his solicitor. That night, he appeared as scheduled on an ITV talk show hosted by Eamonn Andrews, who cautiously asked him about the drug story. Mick announced that the
News of the World
story was a complete lie and that he would take action to clear his name. Two days later, Mick's solicitor obtained a writ for libel against the paper.