Old Gods Almost Dead (34 page)

Keith had grown up playing in Chuck Berry's blues tunings; the new open G style he learned from Cooder would affect his style from then on. Out of it came “Honky Tonk Women,” “Gimme Shelter,” and the other guitar hooks that would soon earn Keith the soubriquet “the Human Riff.”

Keith: “Five strings, three notes, two fingers, an asshole, and you've got it!”

                

The ruthless
police harassment of Brian Jones continued relentlessly. Crooked cops would knock on his door, ask if he had any drugs, and try to shake him down for money. He came down to Redlands late in June to talk to Mick about the situation, worried that the Stones would dump him if he went to jail. This developed into an argument as Mick tried to placate him. “We've
all
been busted,” Mick shouted at Brian, “and none of us has gone to prison yet. Why should you be any different? Don't be so fucking stupid.”

Brian started to scream that he was going to kill himself. He dashed out of the house, ran across the lawn, and threw himself into the moat. Keith told people the moat was very deep, and Brian appeared to be struggling, so Mick reluctantly waded in to save him after Spanish Tony and Keith refused to do the honors. But the moat was only a few feet deep, and Brian was only pretending to be in distress. When Mick got to him, he was furious. He grabbed Brian's hair and pushed his head under. “You want to drown, you bastard? Well, I'm going to bloody well drown you, then. Look at these velvet trousers—cost me fifty quid!—you've ruined them. You stupid bastard, I hope you
do
go to jail!”

Brian drove back to London that night and seemed to be feeling a little better.

                

By early July,
they had the basic tracks for
Beggar's Banquet
and a new sonic highway to follow. “Sympathy for the Devil” would open the record as a devilish showpiece with intimate voodoo rattles, sinister piano chords, and Keith's spiky guitar playing. It ended in a rave for piano and guitar, with Mick screeching over the music like an Amazon shaman, donning the dangerous mantle of a new plutonian persona—“Call me Lucifer”—to succeed impish Jack Flash.

“Street Fighting Man” had been built with acoustic guitars only, flavored by single drum strokes and maracas that supplied a hypnotic fervor to Mick's lyrics about compromising with bourgeois complacency, about why he was
not
a street fighter and never would be, despite the need for violent revolution to stop a brutal war and retool society. The song ended in a quiescent drone of tambura and an Indian double-reed
shenai,
played by Traffic's Dave Mason, which seemed to point to meditation and inner strength as an antidote to the futility of political struggle. The ringing effect of the guitars came from open tuning. Keith: “What's fascinating about open stringing is that you get these other notes ringing sympathetically, almost like a sitar. Unexpected notes ring out, and you say, 'Ah, there's a constant. That one can go all the way through this thing.' ”

These were the two rock centerpieces at the banquet. The rest of the album evolved from cleverly recycled blues licks and country tunes that Jimmy Miller managed to pull from the chaos around the Stones amid film shoots, drug busts, and tension. “It was on the point of dispersal,” Keith said. Miller's calming approach allowed the Stones to relax and play the roots music they enjoyed, as if they were a bunch of players on the front porch of a house on an old country road, the same one The Band was living on in Woodstock. (The words “Music from Big Brown” were scrawled—by Keith—on the cruddy toilet stall depicted on the album's soon-to-be-rejected cover.)

“No Expectations” evolved out of the pre-owned country blues “Meet Me at the Station” and starred Brian Jones in his last moment of greatness with the Stones, playing shimmering Hawaiian guitar lines over the sober lyrics of blues desolation. Mick: “That's Brian playing. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mikes. That was the last time I remember Brian really being involved in something really worth doing. He was there with everyone else, but he had just lost interest in everything.”

“Dear Doctor” was a parody country song, a send-up of hillbilly traditions complete with a corny harmonica, Band-like mandolin, and a narrative about a shotgun wedding that didn't work out. Country music was still a joke to the Stones. “We're just playing games,” Mick said at the time. “We aren't really into country music enough to know.”

“Parachute Woman” came out of the new Robert Johnson bootleg, reinterpreted by Jagger/Richards (on cassette at Redlands) as a gutbucket country-blues riff. The basic cassette track was used on the record. George Chkiantz: “They fell in love with the sound of this mono cassette recorder. If they got the distortion just about right, it had this curious warble, a remarkably gutsy sound.” “Jigsaw Puzzle” echoed with pedal steel guitar and Keith's bottleneck as Mick spun out Dylanesque chains of imagery—the gangsters, tramps, and a bishop's daughter—that ends in Burroughsian images of the queen killing twenty thousand grandmas, who thank Her Majesty for her trouble. The song built to an orchestral climax of stride piano and winding electric guitars.

“Street Fighting Man” opened side two, followed by a country blues, “Prodigal Son,” stolen from Memphis bluesman Rev. Robert Wilkins's recording “The Prodigal Son.” The Stones cut the song as an intense acoustic jam, Charlie brushing his drums and cymbal, Mick retelling the old Bible story with understated fervor, like a jackleg preacher by a campfire. When the album was released, “Son” was credited to Jagger/Richards. But Rev. Wilkins was still alive, still appearing at blues festivals in America, and the Stones got into trouble for thieving.

“Stray Cat Blues”: shuffle and eighths, down and dirty sex talk, a carnal sketch of what Terry Southern referred to as “groupie-poon,” the (very) young girls who wanted to dally with the Stones. Patterned roughly on the Velvet Underground's buzzing “Heroin” drone, “Stray Cat” was about spreading and biting: bongos, drums, and piano joined the chiming guitars of “Street Fighting Man,” then the whole band with Mellotron in a long jam after Mick's modest proposal of a threesome with the stray cats. It was a brilliant, explicit Hogarth print from the Stones' candlelit underworld, and one of their greatest songs.

The endearing “Factory Girl” was an Indian country jam, with guitar, mandolin, and tabla played expertly by Charlie. The sweet fiddle part was overdubbed by Rik Grech.

Mick's “Salt of the Earth” ended the album with his deep cynicism and anarchic irony. It started quietly with piano and slide guitar, built to anthemic strength, then laid back as Mick contemplated the masses through a lysergic lens. “Salt of the Earth” then went gospel, with piano and a gospel choir added in Los Angeles when Mick and Jimmy Miller flew to California on July 5 to supervise the mixing and overdubbing of
Beggar's Banquet.
The night they landed in L.A., they went out to dinner with the Doors, who were widely viewed as America's version of the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger sat in the front row of the Hollywood Bowl with Marianne and Jimmy Miller as Jim Morrison moaned and writhed in the deepest oedipal throes of “rock theater.” On the way back to their hotel, Mick told Jimmy Miller that he thought the Doors were really boring.

Jajouka Rolling Stone

July 1968.
While Mick and Keith were finishing
Beggar's Banquet
in Los Angeles, Brian was back in Morocco, continuing his quest to expand the Stones' music. His aim this time was to capture the elusive magic of the Master Musicians of Jajouka.

Brian had been trying to get to Jajouka for a couple of years. The village had been discovered by Brion Gysin after he and Paul Bowles had attended a religious festival near the Caves of Hercules, on the coast near Tangier. There Gysin heard the keening wooden oboes of the Jajouka musicians for the first time. He told Bowles, “That's the music I want to hear every day for the rest of my life.” Within a year, he managed to visit Jajouka, a hidden mountain village in the Djebala hills, about seventy miles south of Tangier. One of the first Europeans to witness Jajouka's tribal rites, Gysin recognized carefully preserved rituals that stretched back to the religious ceremonies of Rome and Carthage and even further back to Arcadian Greece. Gysin also found that the village's traditions were in great danger, as its young hereditary musicians left the mountains for city life. Gysin dedicated himself to preserving Jajouka, opening a restaurant, famous in the annals of expatriate Tangier, where groups from Jajouka could play every night for a stable clientele.

After the restaurant closed following Moroccan independence in 1956, Gysin began taking friends to Jajouka to experience the astounding spectacle of Bou Jeloud dancing. A village boy was sewn into fresh goatskins and a straw bonnet for seven days. Fueled by
kif
and infused with the spirit of Pan, the goat-god, the boy danced for hours, even for days, in front of a wailing line of drummers and men playing the
rhaita,
a double-reed wooden trumpet. Thirty of these together sounded like Allah's bagpipes, and the drums provided a trance-inducing North African backbeat. Bou Jeloud (“Skin Father”) danced until he dropped during the Aid el-Kebir, the “Great Feast” of the Muslim calendar. Sometimes the boy dancing the role of Bou Jeloud died afterward, the ultimate performance.

                

July 1, 1968,
was a lovely summer morning in London. George Chkiantz had been up all night at Olympic Studio when the studio manager asked him if he had a passport, and could he leave for Morocco that day? Brian Jones would pay him a hundred quid a day to help him make some tapes of tribal music. George went to Brian's flat in Chelsea and picked up his Uher tape recorder and some microphones. The batteries were dead and would take fourteen hours to recharge, but George had to catch a plane to Gibraltar. From there an old Dakota (“full of gays”) deposited him at Tangier's half-built airport, with goats grazing on the runways. To George's amazement, Brian was there to meet him at nine in the morning. No one had ever seen Brian at nine in the morning before. George told him about the battery problems with the Uher but said they could run off the car batteries if he could find some cable. Brian showed him some Indian-owned electronic shops on the Boulevard Pasteur, and soon Chkiantz had what he needed to record tapes in a village with no electricity.

Brion Gysin: “They came to Tangier that summer. It was Brian, his girlfriend Suki, and a very good soundman. They wanted to record Bou Jeloud's music during the Aid el-Kebir, but it wasn't that time of year, so they settled for whatever they could get. I tried to get them to leave the girl in Tangier, told them Jajouka was primitive—no place for a woman—but she absolutely insisted on coming. So I had her cut her hair, and she dressed in jeans and a simple white shirt to try to look more like a man. (Actually she looked a lot like Brian.) Off we went, into the hot Moroccan summer. We met my friend Hamri, whose mother was from the village, in the town of Larache, then hired a taxi and got to the foot of the mountain. We had to walk the rest of the way.”

The village was on a plateau halfway up the mountain. Flocks of goats wandered among the adobe houses, most of them thatched, others with newer tin roofs. No foreigners found their way up there, and the newcomers were followed by an entourage of curious children. They were greeted with glasses of steaming mint tea and long pipes of locally grown
kif
and quickly got to work.

Brion Gysin: “We arrived late in the day and set up the tape machine, and they played until four or five in the morning. It was incredible, with drums and flutes and dancing boys in pink dresses. The musicians wore their turbans and brown mountain djellabas, and you'd think you were in a medieval world. Which, in a sense, you were. The chief drummer, Berdouz, served as emcee, pouring tea, passing pipes of
kif,
keeping the party going. At midnight, all the dogs in the village started barking, and Jones got upset that this would spoil his tapes. So Hamri had them round up the dogs and move them off somewhere.

“It was the first time serious recording had been done up there, apart from my own little Uher, and there was some uncertainty among the older musicians. But the younger kids in the tribe were very keen. They loved putting on the headphones to listen to the playback. It was the first time they had ever 'heard' themselves. They thought Brian Jones was very funny and not really of this world, with his long blond hair and furry hippie clothes. This was 1968, and they'd
never
seen anybody like this before.

“Brian, meanwhile, was in ecstasy, half passed out under the headphones as he listened to the music. The countertones and 'partials' produced by the dueling flutes could put you into trance by themselves. We finally crashed around dawn. We slept a few hours in the morning until the musicians became impatient. At eleven o'clock, the whole group gathered in front of our house with their
rhaitas
and blew one tremendous blast—our wake-up call. Then they ran away, falling over each other laughing. We spent the rest of the day on further recording.” George Chkiantz: “We recorded them outdoors underneath a great hedge of blue cactus, the earth very dry and hot. I found it difficult to stand still and wished I'd brought a mike stand. Since their festival wasn't happening, we tried to arrange for them to play various 'scenes' from the Bou Jeloud music, so we could get a kind of synopsis of the long ceremony. Gysin had tried to record them before, but he told us he was frustrated by the gender segregation imposed by the village. He was unable to hear the women's music to get a complete picture of the village, which prevented him from proving his theories about their supposed pagan survivals.