Old Gods Almost Dead (36 page)

“The only performance that makes it, that
really makes it,
that makes it
all the way,
is the one that achieves madness.”

Now Cammell threw out the script the studio had financed and approved. Dialogue was made up on the spot. Anita wrote most of her own lines. From the beginning, Mick and Anita relentlessly teased James Fox, trying to break him with psychic jujitsu, the same way Turner tries to break Chas.

Anita thought Fox a total square and was openly contemptuous of him. She'd laugh in his face and mock him without mercy. Mick and Marianne had a social friendship with Fox and his girlfriend, Andee Cohen, that involved lots of flirting and sexual tension. Fox had been warned by his father, a prominent talent agent, that the film's advocacy of drugs and bisexuality would hurt his career; his girlfriend was so worried she broke up with him. “Mick's a ruthless tease,” Cammell said later, “and he worked on Jimmy Fox for three days until he had a crack-up.” Spanish Tony found Mick and Fox smoking dusty DMT in the greenroom, to give some extra flash to the drug scenes they were about to do. Halfway through the shoot, Anita slipped some acid into Fox's coffee without telling him, which sent Fox off the deep end. “I was a real brat,” she said.

Things got really complicated when Cammell started to shoot the sex scenes. The bathtub scene alone took two days to film on a closed set. Anita had already seduced Mick three days into filming, according to Tony Sanchez, after secretly wanting him for years. At Cammell's urging, Mick and Anita made love in the set's big bed while he called the action and Roeg shot them with a 16mm Bolex. After the camera stopped rolling, they kept going, kept at it in the greenroom while the crew waited in disbelief. Word got around. Keith heard it from Robert Fraser and was freaked out. He and Anita were living in Fraser's Mount Street flat, rented to Anita for an enormous sum paid by the production. But Fraser had neglected to move out, and he and smoldering Keith were both there when Anita got home from the day's work. Keith, working on the songs for
Let It Bleed,
hated the film that had thrown his woman into bed with his best friend. He ignored Cammell's request to write some music for the film, refused to visit the set, realizing that a confrontation with Mick would harm the Stones. Instead, Keith waited for Anita in his Bentley, parked in front of the house, and worked on the melody to “You Got the Silver.” Anita Pallenberg was a woman with rules of her own, but this was an almost public sexual humiliation. Keith sunk into a depression that he began to treat with heroin and cocaine speedballs, which quickly became his favorite drug for writing songs.

When the horrified studio executives saw the rushes of Cammell's explicit sex scenes, especially the soft porn threesome sequences of Turner, Pherber, and Lucy, they shut down the film. Sandy Lieberson had to beg them to resume production. Then the lab processing the 16mm footage complained that it contravened England's obscenity laws and insisted they were required by law to destroy the film. Cammell and Lieberson managed to get the negative back, but had to watch the lab's director censor the print with a hammer and chisel.

Later, unknown to his stars, Donald Cammell edited his footage of Mick and Anita into a thirty-minute blue movie and submitted it to a porno festival in Amsterdam, where it won the Golden Schwantz.

The pressure only built as the production continued through October. “Memo from Turner,” the Jagger/Richards song that limned the obsessions of
Performance,
providing the artistic high mark of the film (in what could be considered the first modern music video), was unfinished. Keith wouldn't work on it, and Mick's demo lyrics about licking policemen's balls had to be rewritten. Donald Cammell was the only man in England who could pressure Mick Jagger, getting up his nose to finish the lyrics and record a new arrangement so they could finish the film.

Anita: “Donald could reduce Mick to tears over not coming up with the right piece of music, or the feeling that he wanted for a scene—and then to tears of joy when he finally hit it. Mick and I would be terrified by his tirades and rages, but when we got it all right, it was great. And even through all that, Donald and Keith still remained friends.”

When the film ended, everyone went into deep shock. Keith and Anita went back to Italy and it was rocky. Marianne knew everything and was doing so much cocaine Mick feared for the baby, now almost to term.

Marianne Faithfull: “It was soon after
Performance
finished shooting in the fall of 1968 that drug use among our inner circle took a quantum leap. It's when things become completely unacceptable to the human spirit that you turn to alcohol, to drugs, to help you get through. It was right after
Performance
that Anita went off her rocker for years. Into an abyss.”

She wasn't the only one. The events around
Performance
set off a chain reaction of disasters that kept exploding. James Fox freaked out, underwent a religious awakening, disappeared for years. Michelle Breton became a heroin dealer, disappeared, was soon presumed dead. David Litvinoff killed himself in Christopher Gibbs's house. John Bindon, later convicted of murder, became a junkie and died young.

Only Mick was okay, perhaps even stronger than before. He emerged from the film with a new persona he never let drop, the untouchable rock shaman, the magus of the airwaves, the midnight rambler in love with his own beauty and power.

As for Donald Cammell, he knew he had a masterpiece. Everything in his film had been real but the blood and the bullets. He and Nick Roeg vanished into their editing room, but it would be a year before they showed a working print to Warner's. Their cut was so violent, and violently edited, that an executive's wife vomited at the screening and the whole audience fled in revulsion.

Performance
was shelved until 1970.

The Baby's Dead

At the end
of September 1968, Brian Jones was back in a London court, looking fat and wiped out, pleading not guilty to having a chunk of hash in a ball of wool. Mick and Keith arrived to support Brian, who was duly found guilty. The girls in the gallery cried out at the verdict, and Mr. Jones had to be helped back to his seat. Suki was sobbing, and Keith seemed freaked out. If the judge sent Brian to jail, the Stones would finally have to replace him. But Brian groveled, his psychiatrists testified, and miraculously he was let off with a fifty-pound fine and a scolding.

Outside the court, Brian danced a jig with Mick and Suki. It looked like a brand-new day. Holding Suki's hand afterward, he told the press, “I was sure I was going to jail for at least a year. I never expected that I would be going home. It's such a wonderful relief.” Asked for a quote, Mick said, “We're very pleased Brian didn't have to go to jail. Money doesn't matter.”

Brian was staying at Redlands. Tom Keylock drove him there with Cynthia Stewart, Stu's wife, to look after him. She put her arm around Brian, and he cried most of the way.

While Mick and Keith were preoccupied with the
Performance
shoot, Brian worked on his Jajouka project. He wrote notes for the album sleeve that touched on his pride in capturing the wild music of the tribe Ahl Sherif in the field. He carefully noted that the recordings were impressionist rather than ethnographic. “I don't know if I possess the stamina to endure the incredible, constant strain of the [Bou Jeloud] festival,” he wrote, “such psychic weaklings has Western civilization made of so many of us.”

In October, the Rolling Stones caved in to Decca's demand that the toilet sleeve be dropped from
Beggar's Banquet.
A plain white sleeve, styled as a banquet invitation, would be substituted for the late November album release. This would draw unfavorable comparisons with the Beatles'
White Album,
also released that autumn.

                

Around this time,
the Labour Party dispatched M.P. Tom Driberg to convince Mick Jagger to become a politician. Harold Wilson's government had gained forty seats in the 1966 election and was on a roll. Driberg was a longtime ally of the Stones, and he and Mick met to talk politics over lunch at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street. (They had first met when Allen Ginsberg had taken the homosexual Driberg to Mick's flat in Marylebone Road, where Jim Dine's pink phallus sculpture dominated the room. They were drinking tea when Driberg looked longingly at Mick's crotch and gushed, “Oh my, Mick, what a
big
basket you have.” Jagger turned red and smiled, Ginsberg reported.)

Driberg now told Jagger that there would be 6 million new voters in the next British general election and that Mick would surely win if he stood for Parliament. Mick listened carefully and gave it much thought, since politics had been one of his early career choices. When Marianne returned to London, she could see he was vacillating. Driberg would come to Cheyne Walk for the evening, find Mick and Marianne playing records and cooking dinner, and keep trying to recruit Mick for the Labour Party.

It almost worked. Marianne recalls that Mick would be convinced at the end of the evening, but would change his mind in the morning when Donald Cammell called screaming for Mick to finish the lyrics to “Memo from Turner.” But in the end, instead of winning Jagger for Labour, Driberg was almost talked out of the party by Mick, who was disgusted by the government's support for America in Vietnam, its recent, humiliating devaluation of the pound, and for supporting the Nigerian regime during the civil war in Biafra province.

One night in November, Driberg showed up at 48 Cheyne Walk to have supper with Mick and Marianne. As he arrived, Mick called from Olympic to say he'd be at the studio all night. Marianne burst into tears. Sobbing, she asked the startled politician to please go to the pub next door and buy a few bottles of wine, because she had no money.

                

With the filming
complete, the Stones were back in the studio with a vengeance, trying to heal themselves, working on the songs for the album that would become their unrivaled masterpiece,
Let It Bleed.

The first number they cut was “You Can't Always Get What You Want,” on the weekend of November 16 at Olympic. Mick's lyric was an explicit plea to Marianne about her drug use, and an essay on how heroin had infiltrated the lives of the Stones and the people around them. Like “Gimme Shelter” and “Monkey Man,” the song described heroin use as a text containing all the bittersweet sadness of the times, in which people felt powerless and turned inward for solace and security. “If God made anything better,” Charles Mingus said of heroin, “he kept it for himself.” Musicians loved the drug because it made them feel secure and focused.

Al Kooper arrived at Olympic early on the sixteenth, a Saturday night. Then Charlie and Bill, whom Kooper had met in New York, came in. Jimmy Miller was producing, and conga player Rocky Dijon was rolling the massive hash joints required for the sessions. Soon Keith and Mick crashed through the door, Mick in a huge fur coat, Keith in a Tyrolean mountaineer's hat with a pheasant feather stuck in the band.

Soon everyone was on the floor in a circle, just guitars and percussion, as Mick and Keith taught them the chord changes and rhythms of “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” Kooper started playing a groove from an Etta James record, and Keith picked it up on guitar. As the session wore on, Jimmy Miller tried to show Charlie a certain drum accent that Charlie failed to master. When Charlie took a break, Miller sat down at the drums and kept playing when they recorded the take (Charlie was unhappy about this but said nothing). Mick and Keith both played acoustic guitars, with Bill on bass. Brian Jones was slumped in a corner, reading
Country Life
magazine during the entire session.

Keith overdubbed his part on electric guitar, and Kooper put his signature organ on the track. At two in the morning, folding tables appeared in the studio laden with an enormous banquet of roast lamb, curries, salads, deserts, and an impressive wine selection. The session broke up at dawn. Kooper told Jagger to call him if he wanted to put horns on the track, because Al thought he heard a good horn part for the song.

                

Two days later,
Marianne lost the baby she'd been carrying for seven months. Both she and Mick were distraught. It was a devastating blow that doomed their long affair. Marianne had been anemic, blamed herself, felt blamed by her doctor and Mick for taking drugs. Now she retreated into barbiturates and drink. “He really wanted that baby,” she said of Mick, “and so the miscarriage did both of us in.”

Mick commemorated their tragedy, inserting the lines “The baby's dead / my lady said” into the new version of “Memo from Turner,” and the song was finally complete.

                

In late November,
while
Beggar's Banquet
was released in America and its Luciferian imagery began to seep into youth culture, Brian Jones bought a house in the country. The place was in Hartfield, Sussex, fifty miles southeast of London and not far from Charlie's house. Cotchford Farm, as it was called, was better known around the world as the House at Pooh Corner, because it had been the home of A. A. Milne, who had written his tales of Winnie the Pooh in the house. There was a statue of Christopher Robin in the garden, which the Milne Society had the right to visit annually. It was an almost ridiculously perfect home for a reclusive, semiretired rock star. Christopher Gibbs set about fixing the place up, and everyone close to him talked about how much Brian, who loved to swim, would enjoy the outdoor pool when summer came around again.

The Rock & Roll Circus

December 1968.
Planning for
The Rolling Stones Rock & Roll Circus
had been in production for several weeks. Mick Jagger's strategy was to match the Beatles'
Magical Mystery Tour
TV film and get the Stones in front of an international audience. Mick had a fondness for old-fashioned English traveling circuses. His idea was to combine the Stones and their favorite bands with the clowns, jugglers, and animal acts of one of the small circus companies still touring bucolic English fairgrounds, with Brigitte Bardot as the ringmaster. The Stones put up their own money so they could retain control over the film.