True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (42 page)

According to a story on the front page, in March 1968 in a village called My Lai in the South Vietnamese province of Song My, a twentysix-year-old First Lieutenant named William Calley killed or caused to be killed one hundred and nine civilians. There were several related headlines: “Laird [Secretary of Defense] Says Top Army Officials Knew about Alleged Massacre . . . Thirteen Villages near Song My Razed in a Week . . . Ford [House Republican Leader] Charges the Previous Administration ‘Covered Up' Vietnam Report . . . Laird ‘Shocked and Sick' Over the Story.” On page two, “A Beatle Returns Award as a Protest. London, Nov. 25. John Lennon, one of the Beatles, has returned his award of Member of the British Empire as a protest against Britain's role in the Nigerian Civil War and British political support of the United States in Vietnam.”

At each Rolling Stones concert there were indications that we were fighting for something tender and lovely and free, but what a hell of a world we had to fight, when the land of the free and the home of the
brave was sending its sons out to slaughter women and children, and the sons, men my age and younger, were doing it. As I sank toward sleep I made my last note of the day: God bless all children & old people everywhere. But as I closed my eyes, my last thought was that Jon Jaymes had handed me that revolver like a promise.

Buddy Bolden . . . had played himself out in a few years. Accustomed to earning only a few cents a day as a barber, he had begun to make real money, which he spent like a drunken sailor. Lack of sleep, liquor, women, hot music, gradually sapped his strength.

Only at certain moments did he still sound like the great King Bolden; at other times his sidemen noticed that he played his cornet as if mad. Possessed themselves, they came to fear this insane music which attacked their minds. Finally, in 1914, it became known that Bolden had to be put into an asylum.

R
OBERT
G
OFFIN:
Jazz

I
N
S
EPTEMBER OF
1968, I went to England to write about the Rolling Stones. I did not know that taking place on my second day in the country would be Brian Jones' second—and, as it turned out, his last—drug trial. During the trial, Brian glanced into the spectators' gallery, and I looked into his eyes. A few days later, Brian and I walked in Kensington Gardens and beside the Serpentine, where Peter Pan landed, and Brian gave me a photocopy of an essay that he intended to use as liner notes for an album of music he had recorded in Joujouka, a village in the Moroccan Rif valley, where the word reefer comes
from. The essay, by Brion Gysin, was titled “The Pipes of Pan.” I knew then what I had seen in Brian's eyes—or whom I had seen looking out of them—but I knew nothing about what had happened the year before in Morocco between Brian and Anita and Keith, how Brian had come to this music. You could have written a book about what I didn't know.

But at the end of 1966, Christopher was working for Omega Airlines, living in an apartment with her mother. Omega's peculiar employee schedules made it possible for her to lie to her mother at times and spend the night with me. I was trying to do the impossible—to start making a living by writing before my savings from eight months with the State ran out. Some people liked my writing, but no one would buy it.
The New Yorker,
on returning “Furry's Blues,” said, “The enclosed has a pleasant tone, we felt, but. . . . ”

Christopher and I wanted to be together, but I wanted to wait until I was making some money. I also thought that if marriage wasn't good enough for James Joyce or Pablo Picasso, it wasn't good enough for me. That is, I shared their disregard for the convention that makes love the business of bureaucrats. Christopher and I compromised. We had our blood tested (“premartial,” the receipt said), bought a marriage license, and on December 20, Charlie Brown married us. He signed the license with the name of a parson I had invented. Before he signed the paper, Charlie asked us if we loved each other. We said yes. “You're married,” he said.

Two days later, Charlie was arrested for selling a small amount of marijuana—an ounce, I believe—to an old high school acquaintance who informed on him. He had been in the county jail for a couple of days before I heard about it. By the time I managed to get him out, it was Christmas Eve night. There was snow on the ground. Charlie and I walked from the jail to the bailbond company—Charlie kept falling on icy places and getting up with a big smile, happy to be free to fall down—and then I drove him to his apartment. The front door was unlocked. Just inside, a search warrant lay on the floor. The air stank with gas. We went through the rooms, opening windows and closing valves. The police had turned all the heating outlets on and left them unlighted in the hope that Charlie would come in and light a cigaret. In their search they had knocked holes in the walls, poured chemicals into all the liquids in the place, broken almost everything that would break. Charlie looked at the wreckage, then walked to an overcoat hanging on the bedroom door, reached into a pocket and took out some grass. We sat on the broken bed and smoked and thought about things.

In January, Christopher and I flew to New York City on an Omega Airlines Honeymoon Pass. Each day I would wake up and leave calls
for editors.
Esquire
had “Furry's Blues,” and I had heard they wanted a story about Elvis Presley. Each night Christopher and I would go out, and the next day we would sleep till noon, missing any phone calls. Finally, on our last day in New York, I conferred with an
Esquire
editor at a Chock Full o' Nuts and came home with the Presley assignment.

The Rolling Stones were in New York for another Ed Sullivan appearance to promote a new single record. (The Stones' new album,
Between the Buttons,
was also a January release.) The problem this time was that Sullivan refused to let Jagger sing the title words to one of the songs on the new single, “Let's Spend the Night Together.” There were news reports that the Stones might refuse to appear on the show. I kept hearing bits of the squabble on taxi radios. Finally the Stones went on and did the song and Jagger didn't sing the title words, just sort of hummed and mumbled.

The Sullivan show was broadcast on Sunday, January 15. The day before, there had taken place, in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the Human Be-In, where the Hell's Angels had been, as Rock Scully would tell us in Oakland, such groovy security.

The Stones flew back to London to prepare for the next Sunday, when they would appear for the first time on
The London Palladium Show,
British television's equivalent of
The Ed Sullivan Show.
That is, the Palladium show presented variety and watered-down nightclub acts, polite and ingratiating, for the Sunday evening of the English masses. The Stones had always stayed away from the Palladium, and when the booking was announced, a newspaper commented that “pop groups can no longer rely on teenaged viewers alone to get TV bookings, but must appeal to a wider audience.” To which Jagger said, “Times are changing, and with the changing times comes a different market—one market. We think the Palladium is ready for the Stones, and the Stones are ready for the Palladium.” He was wrong.

In the last year, as the pop “counterculture” had become more aware of itself—pacifist comrades of illegal sacraments—Mick, Keith, and Brian had grown closer. Oldham used illegal sacraments, too, but he was very fearful of being arrested and would smoke hashish while leaning out of the rear window of his office so he could drop it if the cops came bursting in. He was married, had a two-year-old son, and was quite devoted to making money. He had called the Rolling Stones, in a full-page
Billboard
ad, “the dividing line between art and commerce,” but he told a reporter, “I want to produce good, progressive pop music, but music which is still commercial. I'm not interested in this psychedelic trash, or taking trips.”

After the Stones came to the Palladium, things were never the same between them and Oldham. Keith and Brian arrived for rehearsal two
hours late, both of them crammed with LSD. Brian, wearing a combination of his and Anita's clothing, played piano on one song and insisted on placing a large
hookah
on top where no one could fail to see it. Not trusting the television sound engineers, the Stones brought a tape recording of their instruments, in violation of a musicians' union ban of taped music. But the main issue was the roundabout, the Palladium's revolving stage, where each week's acts gathered at the end of the show to wave and throw kisses at the audience. The roundabout was a great English show-business tradition. Jagger had told the newspapers that the Stones would play the Palladium show, but they wouldn't go on the roundabout. At the end of rehearsal, Jagger and the Stones refused to revolve. Oldham told the show's producer, who said that they had to do it, they had no choice. Oldham agreed with the producer and called the Stones' behavior “atrocious.” Jagger yelled at Oldham, who walked out, saying he didn't need the heartache.

If the Stones on the Palladium show offended Andrew Oldham, who took dirty pictures of himself at public photo booths, the rest of England was outraged. Last fall, about the time Brian had been breaking his fist on Anita's head, Mick had split up with his girlfriend of three years, Chrissie Shrimpton, the younger sister of Jean Shrimpton, the world's most fashionable fashion model. The week after the Palladium show, the newspapers revealed Jagger's “Secret Romance” with Marianne Faithful, another Oldham client. “I've known Marianne for years now, it wasn't until three months ago that we realised we had strong feelings for each other,” Jagger told reporters at the airport in Nice. “I got Marianne's call in the middle of the night to come—so here I am.” Marianne, twenty years old, mother of a fourteen-month-old son, had left her husband four months before. She had phoned Mick complaining of loneliness when her song, “The One Who Hopes,” failed to reach the finals of the San Remo Song Festival. (“He gets the worst women,” Keith said, “and when it's a black one it's the whitest one he can find.”) “I'm fed up with the fuss and dancing in nightclubs until dawn,” blond, blue-eyed Marianne said. Jagger hired a small boat with three red sails and Saturday evening found them sailing toward Cap d'Antibes “into a red sunset.”

But by the following Sunday, Jagger was back in London and on a radio talk show defending the Stones against the show's two other guests, one of whom had a poodle named “Bobby's Girl” after her hit record, and against the tabloid
News of the World,
which that day had published a story about pop stars and drugs accusing Mick, among others, of taking LSD. Mick said he had never taken LSD and that his lawyers would sue. Two days later, the
News of the World
was served with a writ for libel.

The next Lord's Day the Stones would never forget. It climaxed at
about eight o'clock in the evening, when nineteen policemen and -women descended on Keith's country house, Redlands. Mick, Keith, Marianne, Robert Fraser, and some other people were down from London for the weekend. “Anita and Brian were gonna come but Brian started a fight,” Keith said. “We just left them fighting.” The police took some substances from the premises and left.

After hurried contacts with lawyers, Mick, Keith, Brian, and their companions left England—left Europe—for Africa. Mick, Marianne, Fraser, and a few others flew to Morocco. Brian, Anita, and Keith went to France and headed south in Keith's blue Bentley, driven by Tom Keylock, Brian's chauffeur. At Toulon Brian got sick and checked into a hospital. After a few days, with an actress friend they'd picked up in Paris, Keith and Anita continued south into Spain. At Barcelona, after having a fight with some drunks and being held in a police station till 6:00
A.M.,
they got out to find Brian on the phone demanding that Anita return to Toulon. The actress left, and Keith and Anita, heading for Africa, went to Valencia and spent the night together.

“We took the ferry to Tangier,” Keith said, “arrived at the hotel, and found a stack of telegrams and messages from Brian, ordering Anita to go pick him up.”

Brian and Anita traveled to Tangier together and then—with Keith, Mick, Marianne, some more friends and a lot of LSD—to Marrakech. Brian brought a tattooed Berber whore to the hotel, outraging Anita, then went off to hear some Moroccan music with Brion Gysin. Keith and Anita left, going home together. “Where does that leave me?” Tom Keylock asked, and Keith said, “You can come to work for me.” Brian had lost his band, his girl, and his chauffeur, and his cat would soon be gone.

When Brian came back to the hotel and found himself abandoned, he attempted suicide. Gysin got him a doctor and nursed him back to whatever he had instead of health.

Meanwhile, a London newspaper carried a story about a new modeling agency whose clients included Brian and Anita, available at $250 an hour for “very special jobs,” and ran a photo of Brian in velvet and Anita wearing a miniskirt and a feather boa. She had dyed her hair blond and they could have been twins, beautiful blond twins.

Brian flew back to London and entered another hospital. The Stones' press agent—who had also worked for Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong—announced the release of a new German film, titled in English
A Degree of Murder,
starring Anita, with soundtrack by Brian. The report mentioned that Brian was in hospital, as if to say, Brian's having a bit of a total collapse at the moment, but his career's going great guns.

On March 20 Keith and Mick received court summonses alleging
offenses against the Dangerous Drugs Act. Five days later, the Stones left for three weeks in Europe, their last tour with Brian. He and Keith were not speaking.

“There have been some nice riots,” Mick said, talking to
Disc
magazine from Dortmund. “Here real bodily violence breaks out.”