True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (47 page)

At the hotel we gathered in Keith's suite. Wyman went away with Astrid, and Mick went to a party at Jimi Hendrix's, where he would make off with the lady of the house and bring her to the Plaza for a few days to console him in his woman troubles. (Her name was Devon Wilson; Hendrix's closest female companion, she was reputed to have an appetite for all kinds of drugs and sex. She would die a few years later of an unexplained fall from a window of the Chelsea Hotel.) At the Plaza I had a stack of messages from Cynthia, but Keith, Charlie, little Mick, Sam, and I went to Slug's, a jazz club in the East Village that
The New Yorker
called “a frabjous sort of place, in a somewhat vorpal neighborhood.”

On the way downtown I mentioned that Michael Lydon had told me about B. B. King going off by himself and getting drunk in Philadelphia because he thought he'd done a bad show.

“It's good that he still gets so upset,” Keith said. “You got to be
able to do it every night, and it ain't easy. Especially if you ain't done it in three years.”

After driving around several wrong blocks we found Slug's. The neighborhood was dark, but inside the place was crowded and noisy with the sounds of the Tony Williams Lifetime—Williams on drums, John McLaughlin on guitar, and a white organ player. “Is there somebody who can get us a table?” Keith asked. I shoved up to the bar and said to the light-skinned, leading-man-style black bartender, “The Rolling Stones are here, could you have somebody get them a table—”

“Man,” he said, drawing a beer, “we don't—”

“Cater to Rolling Stones?”

“That's right,” he said—so hip and aloof that I was delighted—saying with a shrug that it may count for something uptown, all that popularity and screaming and money, but down here the only thing that counts is musicianship, mother.

“If you stay as straight as you are, you'll go to heaven,” I said, and not looking up, still drawing beer, he smiled.

“Do you sell them drinks?” I asked.

“Sure, man,” he said. I gave him an order and he said he'd send them to our table, there ought to be some space down front, and sure enough there were a couple of small tables. The Lifetime were starting another song, or whatever it was they played for half an hour at a time: sometimes melodies, sometimes noises, Williams sweating, doing things for sound effects—putting a mike inside his hi-hat cymbal and pulling it out as he closed it with an odd swipp! Lost chords strayed up from the organ, McLaughlin played weird noises on guitar. The music had little emotional appeal but they played with energy and enthusiasm, and it held your attention if only because it changed completely every couple of minutes. At one point Williams played a bopshoo
bop
! bopshoo
bop
! boogaloo pattern and Charlie said, “That's the only thing he's played all night that I play myself, actually.”

Finally it was getting on toward dawn and the driver, who'd come in to listen with us, went out and brought the car around, and we went back to the hotel. “I'd never play anything like that,” Keith said as we were driving along, “but it's good to go hear it.”

At the Plaza Keith and I told Charlie, little Mick, and Sam good night and went to Jon Jaymes' room because Keith didn't have his key in his no-pockets pants. Jon came to the door in his white boxer shorts, hair rumpled, face rumpled. Keith told him to call a bellman while I went in and pissed in his—not his hat—his toilet, swaying a little, drunk and so tired, hadn't slept right since I didn't know when. We left Jon's and went down to sit on the rug in the corridor outside Keith's room. In a minute or two here came a little worried-looking Italian bellman. He let us in and I bribed him, because Keith had no
cash, to go somewhere in the New York night—no room service at this hour—and fetch us back one cheeseburger, one hamburger, two Cokes, and one pot of tea.

“I've got something in here that might interest you,” Keith said when the bellman left. Going into the bedroom, sitting down on the bed, he opened a drawer of the bedside table and took out a couple of capsules filled with white powder.

“No, not me,” I said.

“Huh?” Keith said, looking up. “I've seen you do coke.” Then he saw I was joking and opened the caps into two piles on a small tray.

“This is heroin,” Keith said. “I don't do it very often, just take it when you get it—keep it around, you get hung up on it.” He split each pile in two and sniffed two up, using the gold bamboo he wore on a gold chain around his neck, then handed me the tray and bamboo and headed for the living room. I inhaled the other two mounds of bitter powder and followed. Keith was in a corner threading a tape into his recorder, which was old and grey and looked like something John Garfield would use to call Dane Clark in a World War II jungle picture.

“Got something I want you to hear,” he said. “Memphis Minnie—and some other things.” The tape started, indecipherable. “Ah, it's not wound properly.” Keith shook the recorder and it rattled as if it were about to fall apart. After a couple of shakes it was working fine, playing a tape of blues from the twenties and thirties—Minnie Douglas, Curley Weaver, Butterbeans and Susie. I went into my much-rehearsed speech about how the old bluesmen had been ripped off.

“This is a great song,” Keith said.

“You can go to college, you can go to school,” Washington Phillips sang, “but if you ain't got Jesus you's an educated fool—”

The bellman arrived with our food and I was so relaxed and vaguely nauseated from the heroin that I took one bite of my hamburger and put it down. Keith didn't eat either. Lucille Bogan sang “Shave 'Em Dry,” which begins, “I got nipples on my titties big as the end of yo' thumb, I got somethin' 'tween my legs can make a dead man come—” and goes on from there to get dirty. We talked about the kids who came to the shows night after night, wondering how they really felt, a mystery to all of us. I thought of Mick onstage waving to the crowd with one hand in a V-sign, the other making a clenched fist. “I don't think they understand what we're trying to do,” Keith said, “or what Mick's talking about, like on ‘Street Fighting Man.' We're not saying we want to be in the streets, but we're a rock and roll band, just the reverse. Those kids at the press conferences want us to do their thing, not ours. Politics is what we were trying to get away from in the first place.”

The tape ended and whipped around in the machine till the spinning
ran down. Outside it was dawn, rose-gold light filtering through the long Plaza windows. We were both exhausted, eyes closing. “I think I'm gonna zonk, man,” Keith said.

“Me too, if I can just make it to bed.” I thanked Keith, went up to my room, undressed looking out at Central Park in the morning mist, lay down on the bed, manfully intending to make some notes, and fell asleep with my notebook on my chest, good night.

And when the curtains part, and you see a flailing mass of waving arms, it just does something to you. Right inside. There's a swaying and a roaring. Screams? I've heard some groups say they don't like them. Well, okay for them. But we like the screams. It's all part of it, the whole proceedings, do you see? That two-way thing all over again. Sometimes that atmosphere gets real tight. It feels as if it could snap.

B
RIAN
J
ONES

I
N THE MIDDLE
of June 1967 Brian Jones and Andrew Oldham —both of them drifting and being pushed out of the Stones' circle—were in California at the Monterey Pop Festival, hearing music by Otis Redding and Jimi Hendrix that was far better than any the Stones were then able to produce. Brian, dressed in layers of velvet and lace from the Chelsea Antique Market, stupefied with drugs, in films of the festival looks blurred, almost transparent. “Dying all the time/Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind,” Mick had sung on the B side of the last single, “Ruby Tuesday,” on which Brian had played ethereal, not to say haunting, flute. The last thing, Stu said, Brian ever did for the Stones.

In Chichester, on June 27, Keith and Mick appeared before Judge Leslie Block at the West Sussex Quarter Sessions, Mick in an apple­
green jacket and olive trousers, Keith wearing a navy frock coat and a lace-collared shirt. Mick's case was considered first, with Malcolm Morris, Queen's Counsel, leading for the prosecution and Michael Havers, Q.C., for the defense. Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely, the first witness, testified that on February 12, at about eight o'clock in the evening, he and eighteen other police officers, three of them women, went to Redlands and found there one woman and eight men, among them Michael Philip Jagger.

Sergeant John Challen of the police party testified that in searching the premises, “I first went into the drawing-room and then went upstairs to a bedroom. There I found a green jacket, in the left-hand pocket of which I found a small phial containing four tablets. I took the jacket downstairs and Jagger admitted the jacket belonged to him and that his doctor prescribed them.” Challen asked Mick who his doctor was, and Mick said, “Dr. Dixon Firth, but I can't remember if it was him.” Asked what the tablets were for, Mick said, “To stay awake and work.”

Called by the defense, Dr. Firth testified that the tablets, which were amphetamine, had not been prescribed by him, but that Mick had told him he had them and asked if they were all right to use. The doctor remembered this conversation as having taken place sometime before February and his having advised Mick that they were to be taken in an emergency but not regularly.

The doctor and the prosecutor exchanged opinions as to the propriety of telling Mick he could have the drugs and whether Mick's conversation with the doctor amounted to a prescription. Judge Block said he had no hesitation in saying that it did not, and that the only legitimate defense, a written prescription, was therefore not open to Michael Jagger. “I therefore direct you,” he told the jury, “that there is no defense to this charge.”

Within five minutes the jury came back with a guilty verdict. Judge Block granted Mick an appeal certificate and remanded him in custody at Lewes Prison. The London
Times
reported: “Mr. Jagger was driven from the building in a grey van with others prisoners on remand. Just before the van was driven out, about a dozen schoolgirls banged their fists on the closed yard gates, tried to scramble over them, and screamed, ‘We want Mick.' ”

On the second day of the trial, Keith, in a braid-trimmed black suit, met with the same judge and counsels before a new jury and pled not guilty to letting Redlands be used for smoking cannabis. The proceedings began with submissions concerning the relevance of certain evidence. Judge Block ruled that, within limits set by Mr. Morris, certain parties should not be named but the evidence should be submitted. Mr. Morris explained to the jury that it was necessary for him to prove
that Keith had willfully and knowingly allowed cannabis to be smoked. The evidence would show, he said, that incense was being burned at Redlands to cover up the odor of cannabis. “That there was a strong, sweet smell of incense in these premises will be clear from the evidence,” Morris said, “and you may well come to the conclusion that that smell could not fail to have been noticed by Keith Richards. There was ash—resulting from cannabis resin and smoking Indian hemp—actually found on the table in front of the fireplace in the drawing room where Keith Richards and his friends were. The behavior of one of the guests may suggest that she was under the influence of smoking cannabis resin in a way which Richards could not fail to notice.”

The English newspapers, including
The Times,
ran photographs of Marianne Faithfull near the unnamed female guest part of the story. Years later she would confirm that the green velvet jacket and the amphetamines Mick was jailed for having were hers. The trial ruined whatever shred of good repute she might have had.

Keith testified that he had driven down from London with Mick and Marianne for a weekend party attended by Michael Cooper, Christopher Gibbs, Robert Fraser, and Fraser's Moroccan servant, Mohamed. (Fraser, in possession of heroin during the raid, had been found guilty and jailed along with Mick.) George Harrison of the Beatles and his wife Patti came late and left before the police arrived. Two other guests, not friends of Mick or Keith, also came—David Schneidermann, a Canadian familiarly known as “Acid-King David,” and a person described in
The Times
as “an exotic” from Chelsea, customarily seen in the King's Road in red silk trousers and shirt, bells around his neck, and flowers behind his ears. His only known occupation at the time of the party was “forever blowing bubbles through one of those wire wands.” The group drove down more or less in convoy to Redlands, arriving there late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The party finally broke up about five o'clock in the morning. The four bedrooms upstairs in the house were occupied, so Keith slept in a chair down-stairs.

About eleven o'clock Keith awoke to find Schneidermann already up and Mohamed in the kitchen. Keith had a cup of tea and went into the garden for an hour or so. When he went back into the house he heard people discussing a trip to the beach. All but two guests, neither of them Schneidermann, went to the beach and were there between twenty minutes and half an hour. Keith walked the mile and a half back to the house; most of the others went by car, including Schneidermann, who had a minivan. Sometime during the morning the Harrisons left.

In the afternoon Mohamed drove the others in a minibus down to
the house of Edward James, the father of English surrealist art, at West-dean, on the Downs, a house reputed to contain a sofa shaped like Mae West's lips. But they were unable to get in and returned to Keith's about five-thirty. Keith went upstairs, had a bath, changed his shirt and got back downstairs between six-fifteen and six-thirty. Mohamed was preparing a Moroccan meal. By seven-thirty the meal was finished and the guests had collected in the living room. The television was turned to a film called
Pete Kelly's Blues,
but the sound was off and records were playing. Incense was burning.