Beatles vs. Stones (24 page)

For all their trouble, the cops didn’t come away with much on the Stones. In a green velvet jacket belonging to Mick they found four pep pills, which actually belonged to Marianne. She’d recently picked them up in Italy, where they could be easily purchased at any
farmacia.
Keith wasn’t charged with possessing anything, but rather with allowing people to smoke pot on his property. The police seized a pipe and a bowl from his house that were both found to contain traces of cannabis. They also detected an unusual odor when they arrived, although some of the officers couldn’t agree on what it was—one said it was “sweet” and another called it “acrid.” Finally, the police claimed that Marianne was acting without a normal young lady’s inhibitions—a sure sign, they figured, of cannabis intoxication. The Stones’ friend Robert Fraser, however, had much worse luck. He was found with twenty-four heroin jacks (pills) in his trousers.

Almost every account that has ever been written or spoken about the raid holds that Snyderman somehow got off scot-free. Supposedly, just when an officer was about to rifle through his attaché case, Snyderman piped up and said,
“Please don’t open the case! It’s full of exposed film.” And so, improbable as it sounds, the officer agreed not to open it.
When Snyderman skipped the country two days later, never to return, everyone concluded that he was a police plant.

Only that is not what happened. Journalist Simon Wells has recently produced an authoritative examination of the Redlands bust,
Butterfly on a Wheel
. Surviving police records indicate that one Detective Constable Thomas Davies got all kinds of incriminating stuff off Snyderman.
“In his right-hand breast pocket, two pieces of a brown substance weighing 66 grains [4.3 grams] were discovered. In another jacket pocket, an envelope was discovered that contained a powdery substance with one of his pseudonyms, ‘David Britton,’ written on
it. Elsewhere, the detective found a cigarette tin that contained three pieces of a brown substance; a decorated wooden pipe with a stem with traces of a substance; a fairly large ball of a brown substance; a blue and white vial containing white pills; an orange colored pill; and numerous other items.”
All of this was confiscated and taken back to the police lab for analysis. It is true that Snyderman quickly fled England, but he probably did so in order to save his own skin.

On February 19, a week after the bust,
News of the World
ran a front-page story headlined “Drug Squad Raids Pop Stars’ Party.” Legally, the paper was prohibited from revealing anyone’s name, but they otherwise provided a detailed and accurate account of what had happened, suggesting a quid pro quo: in return for the tipping off the police, the
News of the World
got the exclusive, inside scoop. The story’s appearance also indicated that a £7,000 bribe that Jagger, Richard, and Fraser had paid to the police, via Tony Sanchez, had not worked. (That was equivalent to about £100,000 in today’s money, or $155,000.)
“That’s what I feel most bitter about,” Keith said years later. “In America, you pay off the cops as a matter of course. It’s business. But in Britain, you pay them off and they still do you.”

Jagger and Richards got Michael Havers to represent them. He was one of London’s finest attorneys (later he became Lord Chancellor). Mick and Keith both remember being surprised when, in a private conversation, Havers told them that it looked as if the prosecutors and the court were seeking to make an example of the two Stones. Some regarded the judge who was assigned to the case, Leslie Block, as an old-style reactionary. Everyone became even more concerned when the police raided Brian Jones’s London apartment on May 10, 1967. He was found to be in possession of pot, cocaine, and speed, and put under arrest.

The Stones thought they understood what was behind the sudden crackdown.
“First they don’t like young kids with a lot of money,” Keith surmised. “But as long as you don’t bother them, that’s cool.
But we bothered them because of the way we looked, and the way we’d act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever. Whereas the Beatles had. They’d gone along with it so far, with the MBEs and shaking hands. Whenever we were asked about things like that, we’d say, ‘Fuck it. Don’t want to know about things like that. Bollocks. Don’t need it.’ That riled ’em somewhat.”

Jagger must have figured that he had a strong defense. Although he did not have an official written prescription for the pills, his doctor testified that once he learned that Mick possessed them, he had verbally authorized their use (in order that he could stay up and work). Also, Havers stressed how exceedingly minor Jagger’s offense was. Every year in England, the same types of pills that Jagger was found with were widely prescribed as appetite suppressants, for hay fever, and for motion sickness.

The judge, however, instructed the jury that whatever Jagger’s doctor may have told him, it did not amount to a legal prescription. Six minutes later, Jagger was declared guilty. Hearing the news, he put his head in his hands and struggled to stifle his sobs. He was handcuffed and sent to Lewes Prison to await sentencing.

Richards’s trial, held the next day, was a bit more complicated. He testified that the odor the police detected was incense, and that it wasn’t used to cover-up marijuana smoke, but rather just to perfume the room. The pipes containing cannabis resin, he said, were not originally his; they were a gift from an American road manager. Then he was asked about Marianne Faithfull, who was known in court documents as “Miss X.”

PROSECUTION LAWYER:
There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two
of whom were hangers-on, and the third a Moroccan servant?

KEITH:
Not at all. She doesn’t embarrass easily, nor do I.

PROSECUTION LAWYER:
You regard that, do you, as quite normal?

KEITH:
We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

When Judge Block gave his instructions to the jury some of his remarks seemed gratuitous. He asked them to purge from their minds anything they might have heard about others at Redlands admitting to, or being convicted of, possessing certain drugs. “Finally,” he said, “I would ask you disregard the evidence as to the lady who was alleged by the police to have been in some condition of undress, and not let that prejudice your minds in any way.”

After about an hour of deliberation, the jury found Richards guilty. Next, the judge handed down everyone’s punishment. Keith was sentenced to a year in prison, and Mick got three months. Robert Fraser, who had used a different lawyer than the others, had pled guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. All three were also fined toward the cost of their prosecution.

As Jagger was hauled off to Brixton, and Richards and Fraser were taken to Wormwood Scrubs, fans in the public gallery moaned, yelled, and wept. Later that night, hundreds of supporters thronged into the narrow streets that ran around the
News of the World
headquarters and chanted
“Free the Stones! Free the Stones!” Elsewhere, fans passed out leaflets begging the police, the tabloids, and “outraged magistrates” to demonstrate “sanity.”
Oz
, a countercultural magazine, circulated a broadside denouncing the sentences as
“vicious.” The Stones’ most visible supporters in the pop world were the Who.
They promptly announced they would begin putting out a series of Jagger-Richards cover songs as a form of protest, and their drummer, Keith Moon, showed up on Fleet Street with a sign reading “Stop Pop Persecution!”
Allen Ginsberg, who was visiting London at the time, said,
“The Rolling Stones are one of Britain’s major cultural assets, who should be honored by the kingdom instead of jailed.”

The most significant show of support, however, came from an unlikely source. In 1967, perhaps the most highly respected figure in British journalism was William Rees-Mogg (later Baron Rees-Mogg), the aforementioned
Times
editor. Known for his erudition and upper-crust mannerisms, this former president of the Oxford Union was an absolute pillar of the establishment. Nevertheless, he was disquieted by what had occurred in the Chichester courtroom, and on July 1, he published the most famous editorial of his long career. Its headline (set in capital letters) was borrowed from Alexander Pope: “WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?” Though Mick and Keith had each been granted bail the day before the editorial appeared, the appeals bench had yet to review their cases. As a result, Rees-Mogg assumed a substantial risk when he published his exquisitely worded opinion; if the court had wanted, it could have held him in contempt.

. . . In Britain, it is an offense to possess [amphetamine pills] without a prescription. Mr. Jagger’s doctor says that he knew and had authorized their use, but he did not give a prescription for them as they had already been purchased. His evidence was not challenged. This was, therefore, an offense of a technical character. . . . If after a visit to the pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought proprietary air sickness pills at the Rome Airport and imported the unused tablets into Britain on his return, he would have risked committing precisely the same offense.

. . . Judge Block directed the jury that the approval of a doctor is not a defense in law to the charge of possessing drugs without a prescription, and the jury convicted.

. . . We have therefore, a conviction against Mr. Jagger purely on the grounds that he possessed four Italian pep pills, quite legally bought, but not legally imported without a prescription. Four is not a large number. This is not a quantity which a pusher of drugs would have on him, nor even the quantity one would expect in an addict. . . . It is surprising therefore that Judge Block should have decided to sentence Mr. Jagger to imprisonment, and particularly surprising as Mr. Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts.

It would be wrong to speculate on the judge’s reasons, which we do not know. It is, however, possible to consider the public reaction. There are many people who take a primitive view of the matter, what one might call a pre-legal view of the matter. They consider that Mr. Jagger has “got what was coming to him.” They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence . . .

. . . As a sociological concern, this may be reasonable enough, and at an emotional level, it is very understandable, but it has nothing to do with the case.

. . . If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equality. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.

Following Rees-Mogg’s commentary, much of the country became engulfed in a debate over whether or not the two Stones had been treated unfairly. The
Sunday Express
said that Jagger’s punishment was
“monstrously out of proportion” to his offense, while the
Sunday Times
called the trial a “show trial.”
After the
News of the World
admitted that it had, in fact, tipped off the police about the Redlands
party (claiming it was their “plain duty” to do so, they said), it earned rebukes from two members of parliament, as well as from John Osborne, the iconoclastic playwright.
“Are we expected to accept the principle that newspapers’ editors consider it their ‘plain duty’ to pass random tip-offs from informers about what may or may not be going in someone’s house?” Osborne asked.

The Stones’ appeal was heard on July 31. Keith couldn’t attend because he had come down with chicken pox. When it was over, his conviction was overturned, and Mick was given a one-year conditional discharge. Though all of this court drama unfolded during the summer of 1967—the fabled Summer of Love—the Stones had missed out on the era’s good hippie vibes. They were too busy fighting off their drug convictions and trying to hold their band together. The widespread perception that the establishment had targeted the Stones, however—not for any reasons having to do with maintaining the public order, but rather to make them pay for the insolent attitudes and louche behavior—only managed to enhance their popularity with politically motivated youths.
“We weren’t thinking of the Beatles at that period as radical in any way,” remembered Tariq Ali, the young British activist. “They just made pleasing music. But Jagger we felt—there was more of an edge to him and his music at that period and he didn’t like what was going on—sexually and politically—and that became very obvious.”

•  •  •

Something like the Summer of Love would have happened even without the Beatles. Too many flower-power myth makers had too much to gain. Chet Helms, a Bay Area music promoter, was known to boast that nearly 50 percent of the world’s population would soon be under twenty-five, and
“they got twenty billion irresponsible dollars to spend.” Many thousands of youths flocked to San Francisco, where psychedelic bands like the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and the Jefferson Airplane commanded the
local scene. On a weekend in June, some 50,000 colorfully costumed youths descended on the seaside resort town of Monterey, California, for a three-day hippie music festival.

Some have pedantically argued that in London, there were
two
Summers of Love (in 1967 and 1968). Youths were kept abreast of hip happenings in underground publications such as
International Times
and
Oz
, which hippies peddled on street corners around King’s Road. The Indica bookstore and gallery (named after a species of marijuana) was an important gathering place, as was the UFO Club (pronounced “yoof-oh”), which is where new bands such as Soft Machine and Pink Floyd performed alongside sensory-overloading lightshows and bubbling oil-slide projections.