Old Gods Almost Dead (30 page)

That night, they met with Allen Klein in his suite at the London Hilton. Klein confiscated a chunk of hash from Marianne as she was rolling a joint, and flushed it down the toilet. Mick and Marianne went off to her father's cottage in the country for a few days, away from London and prying eyes.

Meanwhile, Les Perrin went to work. The veteran press agent got in touch with William Rees-Mogg, the editor of the august
Times
of London. On Saturday, July 1, the
Times
published an editorial that has been credited with saving the Stones from further jail time.

The Real Butterfly

WHO BREAKS A
butterfly on a wheel, thundered the
Times
on the morning of July 1, 1967. The Alexander Pope headline, a reference to the trial of Oscar Wilde, was an indication of the moderate moral dudgeon to come. Noting that “Mr. Jagger” got three months for some pep pills, the paper warned the same thing could happen to the archbishop of Canterbury on his way back from visiting the pope in Rome. “One has to ask, therefore, if this technical offence, divorced as it must be from other people's offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment.” (The editorial never mentioned Keith or Fraser.) Maintaining that it would be wrong to speculate on Judge Block's reasons, the
Times
cut to the chase:

There are many people who take a primitive view on 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 Stones' performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers, and broadly suspect them of decadence  .  .  .

One has to ask: has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism and resentment his celebrity has aroused?  .  .  . 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.

With this, the
Times
killed the case against Mick, and by extension, Keith.

No one took the case seriously after that, except the lawyers who went through the motions in court for another six weeks. The
Times,
it was observed, had acted with some courage, it being technically illegal to write about a criminal case in progress. Old Fleet Street hands realized that Les Perrin had saved the Rolling Stones' arses.

Keith stoically accepted the
Times
's deep condescension. “The
Times
people, they're the ones who can say, 'You're just a butterfly. Let's just keep you a butterfly and leave it at that.' ”

                

Brian Jones
spent the month of July in and out of clinics and nursing homes, under psychiatric care. He was deeply upset because his mother had been insulted in the streets of Cheltenham after his arrest; once again he'd brought disgrace to his family. The Stones were in the studio after July 7, working on new songs with Nicky Hopkins on piano, under the influence of bail. “2000 Light Years from Home” was in production, along with “Citadel” and further work on “We Love You.” Brian would come in from the clinic for the sessions, dabbling on saxophones, tablas, even a harp. Ian Stewart would watch this in distaste. “It was tragic to see, because Brian really was a good player, but all he wanted to do was fiddle with reed instruments and Indian drums. He was too far out of it to play anything. Being a 'star' just got to him—totally.”

At the end of the month, Mick, Keith, and Marianne made a promo film with Peter Whitehead for “We Love You,” based on the Oscar Wilde trial, with Mick as Oscar, Marianne as his boyfriend, and Keith as a hanging judge in a ridiculous wig.

On July 31, Mick and Keith won their appeal in a courtroom filled with kids wearing Stones T-shirts. At the judge's polite request, Mick turned around and asked the fans not to make any noise. Mick's conviction was upheld, but he received a probationary discharge. Keith's conviction was thrown out amid screams of pleasure from fans that disturbed the decorum of the law courts. Keith, suffering from chicken pox, had to wait for the verdict in another room. “When I got up,” Keith recalled, “I was covered in spots. It was the last straw—they couldn't take it. They couldn't even get me into court because I was diseased.” He went right back to Rome to be with Anita.

Mick and Marianne were promptly whisked by helicopter to a country house in Essex, where a TV discussion was filmed with him, William Rees-Mogg, politician Lord Stow-Hill, and the bishop of Woolwich, concerning the problems of youth. Tranquil on Valium, according to Marianne, Mick didn't have much to say, but the broadcast managed to enhance his shaky stature as a spokesman for his generation.

“I hated the bust,” Mick later said, “because it stopped the band and slowed us down . . . It wore me out. It wore my bank balance out. Cost a fortune! And those horrible, gray people that get you off . . . I mean, they put us through a lot of hassle and took a lot of bread off of us. It's just a lot of games they play between different lawyers. We were just there, you know. Nothing
real
happened.” Robert Fraser, his appeal denied, stayed in prison and subsequently lost his art gallery.

                

Keith Richards
was transformed by Anita Pallenberg in Rome that summer. They lived in a suite in the Ritz Hotel atop the Spanish Steps. After working at Cinecitta all day, the Black Queen—totally into her occult role—presided over a salon that included Terry Southern, director Pier Paolo Pasolini, Warholite Gerard Malanga, and Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theater. Mick and Marianne visited as well, and one night they all dropped acid in the haunted, splendiferous Villa Medici with Stash de Rola. The next day, Mick wrote the melody that became “Sister Morphine” on his guitar.

Keith started wearing Anita's jewels, then her clothes and her makeup, and got his unruly hair together in the unkempt shag that became his trademark. Keith had always been somewhat shy, but under Anita's thumb he became flamboyant and cocksure, the very picture of the English rock star, the pretender to the throne being abdicated by Brian Jones in free fall.

                

The Stones spent
much of August 1967 working at Olympic on what would become
Their Satanic Majesties Request.
At the same time, Steve Winwood's new psychedelic soul group, Traffic, was making its first album in Olympic's Studio A. Traffic was being produced by an affable, Brooklyn-born drummer named Jimmy Miller, who had moved to England to work for Chris Blackwell's label, Island Records. Mick Jagger was a Traffic fan, hung out with them, noted Jimmy Miller's laid-back production style, and realized the Rolling Stones would need a new producer when they showed Andrew Oldham the door.

Mick was taking a lot of acid, reflected in songs like “2000 Man” and free-form psychedlic jams like “Gomper.” His spacey lyrics were heavily influenced by his current reading: the Taoist classic
The Secret of the Golden Flower,
the occult anthology
The Morning of the Magicians,
and
A View over Atlantis
by the Stones' friend John Michell. No one was happy with the seemingly directionless music, but Allen Klein and Decca insisted the Stones have a new album ready for Christmas. After a deliberately sloppy blues jam at Olympic one night, Andrew Oldham walked out of the studio and never came back. His era was over.

To celebrate the court verdicts, the Stones released the sensational “We Love You” on August 15, with “Dandelion” on the B side. Mick had finished the lyrics during his night in jail. Prison footsteps and a slamming cell door started “We Love You,” which ended in Brian's martial Mellotron coda. (Both sides of the record concluded with brief snatches of the songs on the flip.) “We Love You” failed to make much impact, with its defiant “we don't care” lyrics buried deep in a drone of white noise, and only reached no. 7 in England. In America, the soaring, nursery-rhymish “Dandelion” was released as the single's A side. It was the Stones' contribution to Flower Power and the Summer of Love, but, Keith pointed out, “We didn't have a chance to go through too much Flower Power because of the bust. We were 'outlaws,' man.”

Mick was helping Marianne with her new album, producing a couple of tracks. Paul McCartney came to the studio to hear her record “When I'm 64.” In late August, Mick and Marianne went to Wales with the Beatles to meet George Harrison's new guru, Maharishi Mehesh Yogi. In London, Brian Epstein, despondent that his contract with the Beatles was about to lapse, took his own life with sleeping pills. It killed the weekend in Wales, and later killed the Beatles as well when Allen Klein tried to take them over.

The Stones finished most of the work on the new album in early September, amid published rumors that Brian Jones was leaving the band and would be replaced by Jimmy Page. Ace session player John Paul Jones, who would join Page in Led Zeppelin the following year, arranged the strings that glistened behind “She's a Rainbow.”

Brian Jones hated the Stones' psychedelic new album and predicted to one and all that it would bomb. Stu hated it too. On September 13, they all flew to New York with Michael Cooper to build a set and shoot their album cover in lurid and expensive 3-D. For three days, the Stones built the outlandishly exotic set in a Manhattan photo studio, assembling colorful shrubbery out of scraps of paper, painting the red Saturn that hung over the Himalayan backdrop. “The whole thing, we were on acid,” Mick said later. “We were on acid doing the cover picture. It was like being at school, sticking on the bits of colored paper and things. It was really silly, but we enjoyed it. Also, we did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.” Dressed in blatantly Pepperish outfits rented from a costume supplier in Manhattan, the Stones posed for Cooper's shimmering 3-D picture, shot on September 17, and then flew back to London.

On September 27, the Rolling Stones confirmed three months of rumors by announcing they had fired Andrew Oldham as their manager and in the future would produce their records themselves. Andrew, Keith later said, “was no longer into what we were doing, and we weren't sure what we wanted to do, because of the busts. He didn't want to get involved, so it seemed the right time. It just fell apart.”

At this point, Mick Jagger actually took over day-to-day management of the Stones. He hired Marianne's assistant, Jo Bergman (an American who had worked with Brian Epstein on the Beatles' fan club), to run the Stones' new office on Maddox Street in Mayfair. To Bill Wyman's disgust, she took orders only from Mick and seemed interested only in catering to his every whim.

                

Mick's flat
in Marylebone Road had been robbed of clothes and jewelry earlier in the month, so it was time to leave. He rented a posh house in Chester Square for himself and Marianne, had Christopher Gibbs decorate it with period furniture and Moroccan orientalia, and moved into it that October. He liked to stay up all night, reading and smoking, listening to records, seeing visitors in his study on the second floor, where he worked on lyrics in a notebook with the words “Songs for a Cold Winter” hand-lettered on the cover. He also bought a sixteenth-century country house called Stargroves, near Newbury in Berkshire. It was a gloomy old pile with Cromwellian associations on fifty acres, bought with half an idea of turning it into a cool place to make records.

For three months that autumn, Marianne was in France starring in her first feature film, the soft-porn
Girl on a Motorcycle
with Alain Delon. When Mick found out she was having an affair with the production's still photographer, he flew over to keep an eye on her. For her role as a doomed, free-loving bikerette in the erotically charged film, Marianne wore nothing under a skintight black leather suit as she tore through the film on a motorbike, her long blond hair flowing behind her.

The papers were full of stories that October that the Stones and the Beatles would team up on various business ventures: a new studio, perhaps even their own record label. Keith was in Rome with Anita, Brian in Spain with Suki Potier, worried (according to his letters to the band's office) about paying his bills. Mick was talking with Donald Cammell about starring in a film based on a screenplay Cammell was writing titled
The Performers,
about a rock star and a gangster.

On October 30, Brian Jones dressed formally in a gray pinstripe suit and foulard tie. He was still recovering from a night out with Jimi Hendrix at a Moody Blues show. He and Stash de Rola were driven in Brian's silver Rolls-Royce to Inner London Sessions, where they had their day in court.

Stash's case was dismissed. Brian pleaded guilty to allowing drugs to be used at Courtfield Road and to possessing hashish. His lawyers produced several psychiatrists who had treated Brian; they testified that a prison sentence would send Brian into a psychotic depression and that he might kill himself. Then Brian stood in the dock and swore that he'd never smoke dope again. Unmoved, the judge gave Brian a year in prison, and Brian was hauled off to Wormwood Scrubs in a state of shock.

More street protests that night on the Kings Road. The next day, Brian was bailed out of prison, but his spiraling vortex of decline was in whirlpool mode. Now, while no one was looking, the cops decided to break the
real
butterfly on their dirty wheel.

Where's That Joint?

Their Satanic Majesties Request
was a parody of the wording on the British passport: “Her Britannic Majesty requests and requires,” etc. The album was released in mid-November 1967 in a lavish package whose gatefold sleeve included a maze puzzle: its original goal was a nude picture of Mick Jagger, but this had been vetoed by the record company. The maze was surrounded by an incoherent Hieronymous Bosch collage mixing floral designs, Indian imagery, Renaissance painting fragments, and science-fiction motifs superimposed on a map of the world. Cheeky puffs of hash smoke decorated the album cover and inner sleeve.