Old Gods Almost Dead (29 page)

                

During all these
busts and trials, Andrew Oldham made himself scarce. There was a harsh climate of contempt in Soho and London showbiz circles for the Stones' legal troubles, which some thought the band had provoked by their behavior. In America, Phil Spector openly ridiculed the Stones for getting themselves busted, and advised Andrew to lay low. There was a rumor that Andrew had had some kind of nervous breakdown anyway.

“That was the death knell for me,” Oldham has said. “The band thought I should have been standing next to them in court and I wasn't. Basically, I lost my bottle. As far as the police were concerned, I was a notorious figure and they wanted to bust me the same way they busted the Stones and [later] the Beatles. [Unlike Mick Jagger] I would have been classified as a drug-dealing businessman and been stitched up like a kipper. So I kept a low profile for a lot of that period, staying in California when I knew my number was up.”

                

June 1967.
The Beatles' revolutionary
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
was the main pop artifact in Western youth culture. It was a “concept album,” a new thing in rock and roll, a show in itself: the Beatles playing a band giving a concert. The album was the climax of a four-way transatlantic pop olympiad between the Beatles and Stones on one side and Bob Dylan and Brian Wilson on the other.
Blonde on Blonde
and the Beach Boys'
Pet Sounds
had set a new standard in 1966. In 1967, the Beatles answered them with
Sgt. Pepper,
a kaleidoscopic whirligig of music hall pastiche, emotional ballads, and an apocalyptic evocation of the death of Tara Browne.
Pepper
's phantasmagoric album cover, designed and shot by Michael Cooper, featured the Stones' faces hidden among the myriad icons around Sgt. Pepper's men.

But the Stones themselves, crippled by drug busts, were faltering. Their new album, inevitably seen as their response to
Sgt. Pepper,
was made, as Mick said, “under the influence of bail.” The staff at Olympic now watched in horror as the Stones settled into a more relaxed method of recording. Since the
Aftermath
sessions, the Stones had been notoriously slow in building tracks into songs. Now hours and whole days would be wasted in waiting for someone to show up. It looked like the Stones would respond to the Beatles' bright, cohesive variety show with a sullen, contrived record by an almost broken-up group.

In America, London Records needed product for the beach that summer. They released an album titled
Flowers
in June 1967, another grab bag of tracks the Stones had lying around. The Flower Power–era album jacket was unpromising, a crude rendition of the Stones as the heads on weedy-looking stems. Side one featured the album debuts of “Have You Seen Your Mother?” and “Out of Time,” plus tracks from Decca's
Buttons
and a great version of Smokey Robinson's “My Girl,” cut at RCA back in 1965. Side two was assembled as an emotional, regret-filled series of songs left over from recent U.K. albums. “Backstreet Girl” and “Please Go Home” had been left off the American version of
Buttons.
The great “Take It or Leave It” had been left off the U.S.
Aftermath.
Marimbas, harpsichord, drums, and the Mellotron flavored “Ride On Baby,” and “Sitting on a Fence” had some fine guitar picking and harsh lyrics dating from Mick's breakup with his old girlfriend. Individually they were all good songs. Packaged together, they were sort of a downer.

Keith:
“Flowers
was put together in America by Andrew Oldham because they were begging for product. All that stuff had been cut a year before and rejected by us for not making it. I was really surprised when people dug it, surprised when it even came out!”

Flowers
played against the grain of the Summer of Love that year. Its dark themes, impassioned singing, and lovelorn music implied that the halcyon excitement of that summer was but a veneer, and underneath lurked the same old doubts and fears. Many fans loved it anyway. “The
Flowers
album was for loners and lovers only,” Patti Smith wrote. “It provided a tight backdrop to a lot of decadent fantasy.”

Iridescent Ghost

Spring 1967.
Marianne Faithfull had been playing the role of Irina, the youngest of Anton Chekhov's three sisters, opposite Glenda Jackson at the Royal Court Theater in Sloane Square since April. She'd gotten good reviews, though she once collapsed onstage while tripping. Mick came every night, at least for the last act. Then he'd go on to the studio, where the Stones continued to work on their album. “She Comes in Colors” was moving along, and Brian Jones kept experimenting with the Mellotron's eerie artificial sounds. He was often so pilled-up and befuddled they had to prop him up with pillows while he played. Mick bought an early Moog synthesizer, but didn't know how to play it. Bill Wyman had a track called “Acid in the Grass,” which Mick refused to sing on. “It's your fucking track,” he haughtily told Bill.
“You
fucking sing on it.” This became Bill's trippy “In Another Land” as the sessions went on. Keith's “Sometimes Happy, Sometimes Blue” demo mutated into “Dandelion.”

                

On June 13,
Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix flew to San Francisco, then by smaller plane to Monterey, where the Monterey International Pop Festival was held the following weekend. Brian didn't play a note at Monterey, but he was a smash anyway. Dressed variously in exquisite Chinese silk robes and a lustrous golden coat, dripping with Berber jewels and a crystal swastika, blasted out of his mind on STP (a newly formulated psychedelic speedball that lasted about three days), Brian floated around the festival's backstage area with luminescent blond Nico on his arm, the two looking exactly alike. With the aura of an imperious acid czar, Brian was, David Dalton wrote, “like an iridescent ghost on the threshold of the drugs that sustained him.” (The joke among the backstage crew was: Have you seen that chick that looks just like Brian Jones? Hey, man, that
was
Brian Jones.)

Monterey (organized by John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas and record executive Lou Adler) was the first major rock festival to feature all of the sixties' musical currents, and boasted some spectacular events: the Grateful Dead's all-night set; the Jefferson Airplane's hallucinogenic nighttime LSD opera in front of the Joshua Light Show; Otis Redding's soul show for what he affectionately called “the Love Crowd.” On June 18, Ravi Shankar sent the festival off on an extended, blissful Indian reverie as Brian Jones and Nico watched from the front row. The Who came on next, louder than bombs, as Pete Townshend and Keith Moon destroyed their instruments amid smoke bombs and sonic chaos.

Brian's job was to introduce the American debut of the Jimi Hendrix Experience. To prepare himself, he dropped some acid with actor Dennis Hopper. Brian came onstage, took the mike, and whispered, to almost dead silence, “I want to introduce you to a very good friend of mine and a countryman of yours—Jimi Hendrix, the most exciting performer I have ever seen.” Hendrix made the audience forget the Who. Playing on two hits of the house acid, Monterey Purple, he played his guitar behind his back and with his tongue. He worked a one-handed version of “Strangers in the Night” into the power chords of “Wild Thing.” Kneeling as if in prayer, he torched his broken instrument in a holocaust of lighter fluid and sacrifice. When the flames died down, he swung it around his head and smashed it to bits. The Monterey Festival was where the guitar players—Hendrix, windmilling Pete Townshend, Mike Bloomfield—became the Voice of God in rock music.

Brian returned to England loaded with the new California chemicals: DMT (a variant of hog tranquilizer) for a heavy downer, STP for psychedelic speed. “That was the worst,” Anita recalled. “Too chemical. No one could handle that stuff.”

                

London, June 25.
On a Sunday afternoon, Brian, Mick, and Marianne joined the Beatles to sing along with “All You Need Is Love” in a pioneering multinational satellite TV broadcast called
Our World.
Brian had played sax on the Beatles' obscure “You Know My Name” at Abbey Road studios a few days before.

On Tuesday, June 27, Mick and Robert Fraser were back in court. Presiding was Judge Leslie Block, a vindictive pillar of the Sussex squirarchy. Fraser admitted possession of the heroin pills. His lawyer cited his Eton background and military service in Africa. The prosecutor dredged up his recent obscenity conviction for Jim Dine's pink penis sculpture, and he was found guilty. Mick's jury, instructed by Judge Block not to buy the idea that he had a prescription for the speed they found in his pocket, then found Mick guilty. The judge sent Mick and Robert off to Lewes Prison for the night, to be sentenced after Keith's trial the next day. Mick was prepared for this: he had a bag of clothes, books about Tibet, and a jigsaw puzzle to pass the time.

On Wednesday, it was Keith's turn to plead not guilty to allowing his house to be used for drugs. The prosecution kept harping on the nude girl the cops had seen at the party. Mick's lawyer tried to keep Marianne's name out of it—“she is described as a drug-taking nymphomaniac with no chance to say anything in her defense”—but outside court, smirking cops were feeding the press their obscene Mars bar story. Marianne visited Mick in his cell during the lunch break and found him crying and distraught, facing prison and the end of his career. (The Stones got no support from Decca, ostensibly because they weren't signed directly to the label. When the Beatles had drug problems later on, EMI helped considerably.) Keith also visited Mick and Robert, who were then taken back to jail to wait for the conclusion of Keith's trial. Michael Cooper snapped a photo of Mick in his cell, but lost his film to the jailers on his way out.

It was glum at Redlands that night. Keith packed his bag, ready to be jailed. They learned that police had broken into Courtfield Road after a false telephone report that Brian had overdosed. Marianne and Michael Cooper consoled each other in bed. The headline in the
Evening Standard
blared:
NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY.

On Thursday, Keith Richards defiantly took the stand. He told the jury that the Stones had been framed by the
News of the World
in retaliation for Mick's libel suit. Dressed in a sharp black suit, he contemptuously told the court, “We're not old men, and we don't worry about petty morals.” The jury found Keith guilty after deliberating for five minutes.

Judge Block gave Keith a year in prison. Keith looked at the ceiling, went pale, stayed silent. Robert Fraser got six months and sarcastically clicked his heels. Mick got three months. He reeled back in the dock, stifling a burst of tears, as the judge pronounced sentence and the girls in the gallery yelled out protests. Outside, six hundred fans cried out at the harsh verdicts. Shame! Unfair! Let them go!

Marianne got in to see Mick in his cell afterward, and he was so upset he could hardly speak. Anita was in Rome, working on her film. Allen Klein was called in New York, and he left for London immediately, determined to get the Stones out. Mick was driven to Brixton Prison in South London, while Keith and Robert were delivered to the dungeonlike Wormwood Scrubs to begin their sentences.

There was a small street protest in London that night. Kids demonstrated on the Kings Road and in Piccadilly Circus. Deejay Jeff Dexter led kids out of the underground club UFO and into the streets and was beaten up by the cops for his trouble. Labour M.P. Tom Driberg, who knew Mick socially, said in Parliament that the Stones had been made scapegoats for the drug problem. The Who took out ads in the papers, protesting the “grave sentences imposed upon the Stones at Chichester” and announcing they were releasing a single, “The Last Time”/“Under My Thumb” (quickly recorded the previous day), with proceeds going to the Stones' legal costs. Drummer Keith Moon joined two hundred demonstrators outside the Fleet Street offices of the
News of the World.
His girlfriend carried a sign that read
FREE KEITH.

In Wormwood Scrubs, they took Keith's clothes, gave him a blunt spoon to eat with, told him they were going to cut off all his hair, told him he was going to spend a year sewing mailbags. He wrote to his mother and told her not to worry. As he settled in, the other inmates started shoving bits of tobacco and rolling papers under his cell door. Keith dragged his chair to the cell window and spent his first hours staring at his little square of sky.

“Most of the prisoners were great,” he recalled. “It was, 'What are you doin' in here? Bastards! They been waiting for you in here for ages.' ” During the daily walk in the courtyards, Keith was offered hash and even acid. “Wot? Take acid? In here?” That afternoon, “Ruby Tuesday” came on the radio and the whole jail erupted in cheers. “They were banging on the bars. They knew I was in and wanted to let me know.”

At Brixton Prison, Mick Jagger, depressed and lonely, was writing the verses of “2000 Light Years from Home.”

                

Keith:
“That afternoon [Friday, June 30], I'm lying in my cell, wondering what the fuck is going on, and suddenly someone yelled, 'You're out, man, you're out. It's just been on the news.' So I started kicking the shit out of the door. I yelled, 'You let me out, you bastards! I got bail!' ”

It was true. Their lawyers had gone to the High Court of Criminal Appeal in London and gotten Keith and Mick bailed at 5,000 pounds apiece, pending their appeals. Robert Fraser, out of funds, stayed in Wormwood Scrubs, eventually serving four months of his sentence. Tom Keylock picked them up from prison, took them to a meeting with Michael Havers, and then to a pub in Fleet Street, where Les Perrin arranged an informal press conference. “It's great to be out,” a relieved Mick Jagger told the reporters. Keith told them he was so stunned at his sentence he just went limp.