Old Gods Almost Dead (27 page)

It was a declaration of war, ill advised as it turned out. Robert Fraser called it “the Oscar Wilde mistake.”

Jewels and Binoculars

Late January 1967.
A weird and sinister campaign of harassment and surveillance targeted the Rolling Stones. If the
News of the World
could prove that Mick had used drugs before his day in court, the paper would avoid an embarrassing and expensive libel verdict. Mick noticed an unmarked van parked in the service road behind his flat at odd hours, and his phone sounded tapped. Someone was watching.

It was also more than just the drug thing. The Stones had been picking at the scab of postwar England for years now and were regarded with unease by the establishment they were mocking. The Stones were the dangerous, shadow side of the Beatles, who had the sense to hide their appetites in vague pop imagery. The Rolling Stones were agents of change, heralds of foreboding and dangerous times, and they were out of their heads. Scores of cops had been injured in riots at Stones shows, and some police officials felt they had a score to settle with these rich, arrogant punks. To them, the Stones were the sound of sedition. The sixties were heating up toward a frenzy of civil unrest, generational revolt, and a brutal war in Vietnam. “Street Fighting Man” was only a year away, and anyone with eyes could see him coming. The cops tried like hell to kill him before he arrived.

Marianne Faithfull went on a chat show on the BBC that month and stuck the dagger in deeper. Some, Mick included, wanted to blame her for what happened afterward.

“Marijuana's perfectly safe, you know,” she said in her sweet, tuneful voice. “It's an old scene, man. And drugs really are the doors of perception. Something like LSD—it's as important as Christianity.
More
important . . . I'd like to see the whole structure of society collapse. Wouldn't it be lovely? We're taking orders from a bunch of dead men. It's insane. I mean, how much longer can it go on?”

The press had a field day with Marianne preaching anarchy on the BBC. The satirical magazine
Private Eye
began to refer to her as Marijuana Faithfull.

Robert Fraser called Mick's libel suit “the Oscar Wilde mistake” because, a hundred years earlier, Wilde had sued after being called a sodomite in public. At the trial, it was established that Wilde
was
homosexual and he was sent to jail for it. Now Mick was suing because he had been called an acidhead in public and he spent the rest of that week organizing an acid trip for himself and his friends at Keith's house in the country. The Acid King was arriving from New York, and this was going to be Mick's first proper trip, and his first with Marianne. His phone was clicking like a telegraph. Marianne answered one day and a young West Indian voice warned her the line was tapped (this turned out to be a phone engineer who was a Stones fan). The warning was ignored.

Brian and Anita were in Munich, and Keith had tagged along. Work started without them on the Stones' new single at Olympic, just Mick and Charlie playing on a demo called “She Comes in Colors,” with Nicky Hopkins on piano. Keith returned the next day and joined Mick and Marianne at Abbey Road Studios, where the Beatles' session for “A Day in the Life,” the climactic song (about Tara Browne's death) on their new album, was being filmed in a party atmosphere of champagne and hash joints. Mick knew the Beatles were preparing a psychedelic masterpiece, and he was concerned how the Stones would look if they followed the Beatles with an acid-drenched record of their own a few months later.

At the session, Mick invited George and Patti Harrison to the weekend house party at Redlands.

The
News of the World
claimed to have received a telephone tip, supposedly from an employee of Keith's, that the Rolling Stones were taking illegal drugs at a weekend house party in West Wittering, Sussex. The managing editor called Scotland Yard and informed the police of the allegations against these common little shits in the band who had snubbed all England.

There had been a lot of tripping at Redlands over the past few months, with Keith and Brian larking and looning around the village and countryside, high as the clouds, laughing and ostentatiously freaking out. A few weeks earlier, Mick left Keith's house after one of these acid festivals, muttering his feelings of foreboding to Donald Cammell. “This is getting out of hand,” Mick told him. “I dunno where it's gonna end.”

By midnight, all the guests had arrived. There were Mick and Marianne, Keith, the Harrisons, Robert Fraser and his Moroccan servant Mohammed, who did the cooking, Christopher Gibbs, Michael Cooper, a Kings Road hippie named Nicky Kramer (a fringe member of Keith's entourage), and the American acid dealer David Schneiderman. A fire was going in the great Tudor hearth, the guitars came out, joints were passed. In connection with his own recent obscenity bust, Fraser talked about his friend Stephen Ward, the society osteopath who had killed himself after being framed for pimping in the Profumo Scandal. “I saw what they did to Stephen,” he said darkly. “They can do anyone they want.” Then they all went to bed and slept until noon, when the Acid King started making his rounds.

David Schneiderman, as he called himself, had an act: LSD was a sacrament, and he was the priest. Marianne: “He was very West Coast, opinionated, pompous. Getting high came with a little moral. He was, 'This is the Tao of lysergic diethylamide, man. Let it
speak
to you.' It was all a bit too reverent for our taste, but Robert told us he was the Acid King, and he did have the goods.”

Late Sunday morning, the Acid King appeared in each of the five bedrooms, bearing a pot of tea and doses of Orange Sunshine. It was a beautiful winter day, and after breakfast most of the guests piled into the cars and embarked on a mystery tour of the countryside while the acid wormed its way into their brains. Michael Cooper's photographs show the flared trousers, white loafers, bug-eye mirrored shades, floppy hats, and bushy Afghan jackets so in vogue that year. After visiting the cold pebbled beach along the Sussex coast, they tried to find the famous purple country house of the aesthete and surrealist patron Edward James, whose furnishings included several red sofas, designed by Salvador Dalí, shaped like the lips of sex queen Mae West. But the house, in West Dean north of Chichester, remained elusive, and the party returned to Redlands late in the afternoon.

Keith and Mick both wanted to rest, and Mick enjoyed his quiet acid trip. “He was great to be around,” Marianne wrote. “Very calm and cool, without his usual nervous energy.” As night came on, they all gathered around the fireplace in the long lounge with its fur carpets and Moroccan cushions. Mohammed served a delicious couscous, and after eating, George and Patti Harrison left for their own house in Surrey.

Marianne went upstairs to have a hot bath.

Outside, in their hidden positions around Redlands, the waiting force of cops watched George drive off. To this day, Keith thinks nothing would have happened with a Beatle in the house. “They were out there all day, waiting for George to leave. From then on, we were fair game.”

                

The most famous
drug bust of the sixties began shortly after Marianne returned from her bath, wrapped in a furry bedspread because she hadn't brought a change of clothes down to the country. The eight men were relaxing, passing a joint to take the edge of the day's tripping. Christopher Gibbs was resplendent in a silk costume; the scent of Moroccan cooking wafted in from the kitchen, and
Blonde on Blonde
was on the stereo.

Someone mentioned there was a face peering in through one of the leaded windows. Probably some fucking fan. Then a furious pounding on the heavy oak door. Reluctantly Keith got up to answer it, and into the room stepped Chief Inspector Gordon Dinely at the head of nineteen cops from the West Sussex constabulary.

“Mr. Keith Richard, pursuant to the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1964, we have a warrant to search these premises.” Just then, Dylan let go at top volume:

“The ghost of electricity hooooowls in the bones of her face  .  .  .”

Squads of cops poured into the room from every entrance as “Visions of Johanna” blared on. The TV flickered with the sound off. The police ogled their pale, costumed victims, sitting amid candlelight and incense like a painting by Burne-Jones. Then they began to search. They were polite to everyone except Mohammed, and they began to hassle Gibbs as another distastefully dressed foreigner until he informed them, in his plummy Old Etonian voice, that he was wearing the national dress of Pakistan.

Keith was on the phone to his solicitor in London. Marianne looked at Mick.
Poor bugger,
she thought.
His first trip, a lovely day, and now this.
When a fumbling cop proposed to search her, she purposefully let slip the fur throw, exposing her ample breasts for a moment, two of the most glorious big tits in Albion, giving the scene the immortality it deserved. As the chief inspector was formally asking if Keith was the owner of the premises, Dylan let go again:

“Jewels and binocular haaang from the head of the mule, but these visions . . . of Johanna . . . make it all seem so cruuuuuel!”

Keith turned on his strobe light. Mick and Robert started to laugh at the lurid absurdity of the scene. A cop turned the record player down. Keith turned it back up again, louder, and asked the cops to keep their muddy boots off the Moroccan cushions that covered the floor. The cops were going through the kitchen, confiscating mustard packets Keith had brought back from American drive-ins. Some female cops asked Marianne to come upstairs to be searched in private. “Darling,” she called to Mick, “this old dyke wants to search me!” They took her upstairs while the men lined up to be searched. They found twenty-four pills in Robert Fraser's pocket. He told them they were insulin tablets, but they were government-issue heroin tablets Spanish Tony had scored for him, good for six months in jail. Mick was searched and nothing was found. Same with Keith and the others. Schneiderman had a small tin of hash and a plastic bag of grass, which were duly impounded. One of the cops reached for the Acid King's LSD-filled briefcase. “Please don't open that case,” Schneiderman begged, explaining it contained valuable exposed film that would be ruined. The chief inspector nodded his assent, and the case was never opened.

One of the policewomen came downstairs with the green velvet jacket Mick had been wearing for about a month. The jacket pocket still contained a glass vial with the speed pills Marianne had bought a few weeks earlier. Mick told the cops what they were and, gallantly, said they were his. He lied and said he'd got them from his doctor. Good for a year in prison, pep pills having been outlawed after the 1965 mod/rocker riots.

After an hour, Chief Inspector Dinely announced the search was over. He warned Keith that he would be liable for prosecution if they had been using drugs. “Yes, I see,” Keith said, dripping with sarcasm. “They pin it all on me.” Schneiderman asked if they were being arrested. Not necessarily, he was told. That'll come later. As the police filed out the door with their booty, Keith went over and dropped the needle onto “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”:

“But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned!”

                

As the police
convoy drove back down Redlands' lane to the Chichester Road, they carried away some old pipes, an ashtray, all the incense, the pills they'd seized, and any chance that Mick could win a libel judgment against the
News of the World.
Christopher Gibbs recalls that the atmosphere was relaxed and philosophical after the police left. A bit of grass and some uppers; what could happen? (Fraser didn't mention the heroin.) No one could believe their good luck that the massive acid stash hadn't been discovered.

The phone rang a few minutes later. Brian was calling from London to say he and Anita would be down to Redlands in a couple of hours.

“Don't bother, man,” Keith told him. “We've all just been busted. Yeah, you heard it right. Busted!”

Blue Lena

News of the raid
on Redlands was a major bummer and scared a lot of people. It was the end of Swinging London, as the smart set retreated into their houses to have their fun in private. The cops put out a scurrilous lie that they'd found Mick lapping a Mars bar protruding from Marianne's bum. The
News of the World
got an exclusive story on the raid, published the following Sunday. Chaos and paranoia in the Stones camp. All work on their next album stopped.

As press scrutiny tightened, bribing the police—standard procedure in these affairs—became more difficult. Mick, Keith, and Fraser raised seven thousand pounds and gave it to Tony Sanchez, who claimed he gave it to a police contact to make the evidence disappear, but nothing ever happened. “David Schneiderman” disappeared immediately after the raid. It could only be determined that someone resembling the American left the country within days. Keith's minders fingered Nicky Kramer as the traitor and had him beaten up, but Kramer denied everything. Many (including Keith) thought the East End villain who did the beating, David Litvinoff, who sometimes drove for Keith, was a more likely suspect.

When the lab reports came back, Mick was charged with possession of speed, Fraser with heroin, Keith with allowing his house to be used for drug taking. Court dates were set for June. Their well-connected lawyer, Michael Haver, a future attorney general, told them that it looked to him like someone was out to get them. Convictions on these charges could mean prison time, the cancellation of their record contract, and the end of the Rolling Stones.

Advised to stop making provocative gestures and disappear for a while, the band had a few weeks off before a Euro tour in late March. They decided to go to Morocco, a place where even pop stars could vanish. Mick and Marianne flew to Tangier. Keith, Brian, and Anita would drive down. In Tangier, Robert Fraser arranged to meet up with Brion Gysin, who could take them up to his village of musicians in the mountains. From there to Marrakech at the edge of the Sahara. They wouldn't be bothered there.