Beatles vs. Stones (22 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

POLITICS AND IMAGECRAFT

The last time Mick Jagger
had appeared in court, everyone commented on how dashing he looked in his mod fashion garb. Sporting a King’s Road double-breasted blazer, olive colored trousers, a ruffled shirt, and a striped tie, he seemed like an embodiment of resplendent, insouciant youth. Now, however, as he stood before Lord Chief Justice Hubert Parker, of Waddington, at the Royal Courts of Justice, in London, for his appeal hearing, he wore an ordinary, slim-fitting suit. His conservative attire befitted his somber attitude. If not for his longish hair, he would have looked utterly conventional, like a young businessman or a lawyer. It was July 31, 1967.

Mick had good reason to be nervous. A month earlier, a Chichester judge had sentenced him to three months in prison for possession of just four amphetamine tablets without a prescription. Keith Richards got an even more severe sentence: an entire year in prison simply for allowing some friends to smoke weed on his property. The group’s manager, Andrew Oldham, had always said, “For the Rolling Stones, bad news is good news,” but now this maxim was being severely strained. Jagger had been forced to spend two nights in Lewes Prison and another night in Brixton before he was released on £7,000 bail, and he desperately wanted to avoid being sent back.

Fortunately for the Stones, the hearing went well. Keith’s conviction was overturned on the grounds that the judge had “erred” in his instructions to the jury, and Mick’s sentence was reduced to a one-year conditional discharge.
“That means,” Lord Parker told him, “if you keep out of any trouble for the next twelve months, what has happened will not be on your record as a conviction. If you
do
commit another offense, you will not only be punished for that offense, but brought back and punished for this one.”

The judge also tacked on a stern warning:
“You are, whether you like it or not, the idol of a large number of the youth in this country. Being in that position, you have very grave responsibilities. If you do come to be punished, it is only natural that those responsibilities should carry higher penalties.”

Mick did not actually agree with that last bit of extemporizing from the judge, but no matter; he was thrilled to be unburdened from the prospect of jail. He also had an exciting day ahead. After a brief celebration with his lawyer, and a quick press conference in Soho, he clambered into a small helicopter with Marianne Faithfull and John Birt, a researcher for Granada Television’s
World in Action
, a hard-hitting public affairs program. Later Birt would be named director general of the BBC, but in 1967 he was just twenty-two years old and relatively new to broadcasting. Nevertheless, he had come up with an extraordinary idea:
World in Action
should host a “meeting of the generations” in which Mick Jagger, representing the “new youth,” would engage in a sober exchange of views with representatives from “the Establishment”—a newspaper editor, a lord, a bishop, and a Jesuit. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Mick agreed. And so they were whisked away to a beautiful country estate, which would provide a photogenic backdrop for the summit, all three of them squished together on a small bench behind the pilot.
“We swooped exhilaratingly over a verdant countryside on a glorious, cloudless, summer’s day,” Birt recalled. “Faithfull—relieved her man was not in jail—snogged
him ferociously, unselfconsciously grinding her bum against me as she did. A shy man, I looked the other way.”

Given the widening chasm between England’s youth and their parents, Mick’s television appearance aroused much fanfare. The program’s opening shot shows the chopper landing on a spot of grass and then Mick bounding out. He’d cast off his courtroom attire and, presumably, his gloomy mood as well. Now he was wearing a thigh-length floral shirt with an embroidered collar and striding confidently across the lawn in order to meet his patrician interlocutors, who sat waiting for him in an English garden. The whole setup seemed very odd. One British TV critic said it came off
“like a lost scene from Lewis Carroll.”

William Rees-Mogg, the newly appointed editor of
The Times
, served as the show’s moderator. “You are often taken as a symbol of rebellion, and mothers deplore the influence of the Rolling Stones,” he said to Mick, not unkindly. “Do you think that the society that you live in is one you ought to rebel against, or do you think you’re rebelling against it?”

“Yes, definitely rebelling against it,” Mick answered. Yet he cast himself as a reluctant spokesman. “I haven’t until very recently been into this kind of discussion at all, because I haven’t really felt it has been my place through my knowledge—which I don’t think is enough—to start pontificating on these kinds of subjects,” he said. Now, however, he aimed to rise to the occasion. The dry laconicism with which he sometimes answered provincial journalists was nowhere to be found. He was forthcoming with his answers, and he used his proper London accent, as opposed to his Cockney put-on. Careful viewers might have noticed a slight slurring in his speech, however.

That was because he’d had a good bit of Valium. As a result, he seemed a little loopy. He would get tongue-tied or lose his train of thought, and he never settled comfortably in his chair. When the
Jesuit asked Mick whether he was concerned about “corruption” in contemporary British society, he elicited a stream of gibberish.

Yes, I think it’s always been in need of checking, the corruption, as you—I don’t know what kind of corruption you’re talking about exactly here, but um, but uh, today one’s faced with a very different situation than in past centuries, perhaps because of communication for instance which is, nobody could’ve, none of us could have had the communication this, in any other century, that we have—instant communication—such as we’re doing now. And this er, influences far more people. And with the small, with the small education even that one is allowed today, f-f freely, this also effects this—which makes this, this generation and all these—postwar thing. And the money, and everything else, very different to the others. And also this generation has had no, there was no America to go to, as such in the last century. If you really, you didn’t like it here, you could go to America, start afresh.

Mick was embarrassed by his performance. Probably he did very little to convince
World in Action
’s middle-aged viewers that he was not, in fact, on drugs. Some forty-odd years later, however, Rees-Mogg suggested that Jagger’s remarks might have been more substantial than people first realized. One of Mick’s claims that day was that people ought be permitted the freedom to do whatever they liked so long as they don’t bring harm to others. It might not be wise to use drugs, he conceded, but it was not a crime against
society
, “any more than jumping out of a window is.” However awkwardly it was expressed, Jagger championed a theory of social ethics that he may well have picked up at the London School of Economics. It owed a great deal to John Stuart Mill, and later it became an important characteristic of Thatcherism.
“It was not the soft-liberalism of the Beatles but the libertarian Rolling Stones who best predicted the Anglo-American ideology of the 1980s,” Rees-Mogg argued.

Perhaps Rees-Mogg ascribed too much significance to Jagger’s youthful musings. Nevertheless, he raised an important point. Mothers might have deplored the influence of the Rolling Stones, but Establishmentarians had less cause for worry. Mick said he was dissatisfied with society, but he didn’t bother trying to explain why that was so, and he did not commit himself to pursuing any sorts of reforms. In fact, he said he mostly wanted to be known for having “as good a time as possible . . . without any regard to responsibilities of any sort.” In contrast to the stoicism and restraint of his parents’ generation, Mick championed pure and simple hedonism. He did not declare an affiliation with the cultural radicalism of the hippies, and he did not endorse the strategic politics of the New Left. He was not interested in finding the right formulas for ending racism, halting the Vietnam War, or redistributing wealth.
“I’m not a keen protestor at all,” he told
World in Action
. “I don’t go marching, or anything like that.”

And yet somehow, amid the gauzy idealism and utopian strivings of the late-’60s youthquake, many youths continued to regard the Rolling Stones as radical folk heroes. The same thing happened to the Beatles; young people looked to them for political insight and guidance, even though the group normally tried to shy away from political controversy. Just a short while ago, both bands were known for catering to the fantasies of young fans. Now, millions of politically minded youths believed that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones—the biggest rock stars in the world!—should speak to them clearly and directly, about issues of contemporary significance, in a spirit of mutuality and from a vantage of authenticity. Young fans believed that rock culture was inseparable from the youth culture that they created, shared, and enjoyed. In some fundamental way, they believed themselves to be part of the same community as John and Paul, and Mick and Keith. They believed they were all fighting for the same things.

•  •  •

Although the Beatles are sometimes credited with expanding the expressive possibilities of pop music—thereby helping to turn it into “art”—it bears remembering that when the Fab Four landed in the States in 1964, music critics did not receive them warmly. In fact, establishment writers were so distracted by their shaggy hairdos and the hysterical reactions they elicited from teenage girls, that they barely discussed the Beatles’ music at all. When they did, they frequently regarded it with degrees of condescension, suspicion, and contempt. In 1964, a
Newsweek
reviewer said this about the Beatles:
“Musically, they are a near disaster: guitars slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony, and melody. The lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of ‘yeah, yeah, yeah!’) are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments.”

Even after the Beatles broadened their sonic and emotional palette with
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver,
some mainstream writers still regarded them as a puzzling cultural phenomenon. The first
New York Times
review of any Beatles record did not appear until June 1967, when the band released
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Richard Goldstein, the paper’s young pop critic, gave it a pan.

By contrast, underground press writers always lauded the Beatles, not just for their amazing creative powers, but also for their discernible intelligence, subversive charisma, and drug experimentation. Post–
Rubber Soul
, the Beatles were credited with helping to establish the byways of the emerging youth culture. The Beatles will
“long abide as arbiters of a new aesthetic, missionaries for an emerging lifestyle and resident gurus to a generation,” effused a writer for the
San Diego Door
. Others claimed that underground journalism and rock ’n’ roll both helped to “dissolve many of the tensions” between the political radicalism of the New Left (made up of determined activists) and the aesthetic radicalism of the counterculture (made up of lackadaisical dropouts).
“Even those who did not share the profound cultural alienation of the hippies were likely to share a liking for the Beatles, some
respect for their collective visibility, and a desire to at least experiment with marijuana,” said sociologist Dick Flacks.

Curiously, the Beatles garnered this respect even though they were not very political during most of the ’60s. True, the group sometimes delighted in unmasking snobbery and puncturing class pretensions. But the Beatles never joined the crusade to ban atomic weapons or got involved in the civil rights movement. In fact, their manager, Brian Epstein, was constantly reminding them to avoid making controversial statements of any kind, for fear that they might alienate part of their audience. The Beatles may have been annoyed by this restriction, but for the most part, they acquiesced.

Their approach to American race relations was revealing. The Beatles’ extant performance contracts from 1965 and 1966 all contain a rider stating that the group would not perform in front of racially segregated audiences. That provision probably was not in place during their earlier appearances, but that was just because no one had thought to include it. A September 11, 1964, concert at the Gator Bowl might have alerted the Beatles to the desirability of doing so in the future. A week or so before their performance, the Beatles got word that its Jacksonville-based promoter had planned to order seating according to race. Radio journalist Larry Kane asked McCartney for his thoughts:

KANE:
What about this comment I heard from you Paul, about racial integration at the various concerts?

MCCARTNEY:
We don’t like it if there’s any segregation or anything because we’re not used to it, you know . . . it just seems daft to me. I mean it may seem right to some people, but to us it just seems a bit daft.

KANE:
Well, you’re gonna play Jacksonville, Florida. Do you anticipate any difference of opinion?

MCCARTNEY:
I don’t know really, y’know, because I don’t
know what people in America are like. I think they’d be a bit silly to segregate people . . . cause you know . . . I don’t think colored people are any different, y’know, they’re just the same as anyone else. But, y’know, over here there are some people who think that they’re sorta animals or something, and I just think that’s stupid, y’know.

KANE:
Yeah . . .

MCCARTNEY:
You can’t treat other people like animals. And so, y’know—I wouldn’t mind ’em sitting next to me. Great, y’know, ’cause some of our best friends are colored people.