Old Gods Almost Dead (31 page)

Demand for the album was immense and it “shipped gold,” a commercial success even before its release. (It reached no. 2 in America, no. 3 in the U.K. The American single “She's a Rainbow”/“2000 Light Years from Home” got to no. 10.) As the Stones had expected, the album foundered under
Sgt. Pepper
's overwhelming backwash, but
Majesties
is still a fascinating exemplar of post
-Pepper
psychedelia, and many of its songs retain a certain transportive power for the generation that first heard them under the influence of the bong and the acid-soaked sugar cube.

It began with a blast of discordant horns that introduced the strained bonhomie of “Sing This All Together,” with the Stones inviting their audience to close their eyes, open their heads, and let the pictures come. This melted into the Manhattan dreamscape of “Citadel,” which used fuzzbox guitar and the Mellotron to move through “the woods of steel and glass,” Warholian New York, with a nod to Candy (Darling) and Taffy, two of the drag queens that floated through that world. The song's industrial clanking parodied the Velvet Underground, while Mick's spat-out vocal recalled the angry and vengeful Dylan.

A bizarre harpsichord and the winds of Thor introduced Bill Wyman's “In Another Land,” with Bill's lambent singing (augmented by Steve Marriott from the Small Faces) alternating with Mick's snarled, swaggering chorus: “And I awoke—is this some kind of joke?” This cut to a half minute of Bill Wyman snoring in the studio before continuing with “2000 Man,” an acoustic guitar breakdown backed by drums echoing across the universe, which mutates into a Beatles-like rock jam before returning to acoustic mode. Suddenly we're at a pot party. Marianne coughs, a Mellotron plays, laughing voices. Marianne: “Flower power, eh?” Laughter. Mick: “Where's that joint?” And so into a reprise of “Sing This All Together,” subtitled “See What Happens.” This was a long filler track with noodling guitar, percussive jams, freak-out groans, bad-trip screams, an embarrassing mix of borrowed ideas and uninspired chants. The side ended with a doomy electronic wash of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and a jarring, whispery noise that sounded, to those listening under headphones, as if the Rolling Stones were saying,
we hate you, we hate you, we hate you.

Side two. Sound of cockney voices: we're being sold fish in Billingsgate, vegetables in Soho. A celeste and a violin, and into the great “She's a Rainbow” to Ringo Starr's Beatles beat, with fey backing vocals and Marianne coming in colors, a blithe poem of psychedelic fantasy sex. “Have you,” the song gallantly asks, “seen a lady fairer?” A tolling bell and sepulchral organ in “The Lantern” introduced three verses of phased meditations on communication with transmigrating souls. This was the Stones in a new hermetic mood, in the spirit of Aleister Crowley, the Great Beast 666, late weirdo British magus and newspaper whipping boy. “The Lantern” was about theosophy, narcosis, and the lure of the occult, and it seemed to go on forever.

“Gomper” was sitars, a tambura, tablas, the Stones sitting cross-legged on the floor, the music playing inside the 3-D bubble on the album cover. Birds of love hovered over moaning lovers in a Persian miniature, with Brian playing many of the instruments, jamming along a trippy flyway.

The album's one masterpiece came next. Written in prison, “2000 Light Years from Home” had Kubrickian undertones a year before
2001: A Space Odyssey
appeared. A whooshing Mellotron slipstream soared over fast drumming and percussion, and Mick's singing echoed the exalted isolation of freezing red deserts and the cold light of distant stars. An oscillating theremin sent faint signals from Aldabaran, clearing Mick's ship for a landing. It was high-degree psychedelia to the max, one of the few great artifacts the movement produced. “2000 Light Years” ends in a morbid tag of tolling chords and the eerie subterranean light of Brian's Mellotron.

Suddenly—back in Soho. A smooth-talking tout was murmuring on the wet sidewalk at midnight. “Great live show, they're naked and they dance. It's twelve and six to come in, sir, there's a one o'clock show tonight, sir, nonstop, continuous show, stay as long as you like, there's a bar downstairs  .  .  .”

The finale, “On with the Show,” was an affectionate satire on the
Sgt. Pepper
nostalgia act that sent up the Beatles' “concept” and all of show business as well, ending with a frantic piano straining to be heard at a loud, boring party.

Their Satanic Majesties
received the worst reviews of the Stones' career, but still shifted half a million units by Christmas. Even the band slagged it, Mick describing it on a London TV show as a bunch of “dirgy toe-tappers.” In the press,
Majesties
was routinely attacked as pretentious and a terrible mistake, slavishly imitative of the Beatles.

                

Brian was back
in court on Tuesday, December 12, to appeal his drug conviction. Three psychiatrists testified that he was “an extremely frightened young man” and “a very emotional and unstable person.” A sympathetic judge commuted his jail time to three years' probation and a 1,000-pound fine, provided he continue to seek treatment. Mick and Keith came to court in support of Brian, who left after the judgment to have some rotten teeth pulled. Two days later, stoned on downers, he collapsed in his new flat in Chelsea and wound up in the hospital.

At a press conference around this time, Mick let fly at Brian. “There's a tour coming up, and there's obvious difficulties with Brian, who can't leave the country.” He talked about how the Stones wanted to tour Japan, “except Brian, again, he can't get into Tokyo because he's a druggie.”

Some people around the Stones were appalled by Mick's callousness toward Brian. They wondered why Mick saw him as such a threat. Spanish Tony Sanchez, working now for Keith as a drug courier, thought it was because Brian lived the life that Mick only pretended to live. “Brian was genuinely out of his skull on drugs most of the time, while Mick used only minuscule quantities of dope because he worried that his appearance would be affected. Brian was into orgies, lesbians, and sadomasochism, while Jagger lived his prim, prissy, bourgeois life and worried in case someone spilled coffee on his Persian carpets.”

                

The Stones scattered
for the Christmas holidays. Keith and Anita joined Robert Fraser, just out of prison, and Christopher Gibbs in a rented house in Marrakech. Brian and Linda Keith journeyed with Stash de Rola to Ceylon, where Brian spent time with the astronomer and novelist Arthur C. Clarke. Mick and Marianne and her son, Nicholas, went to the sleepy island of Barbados and then on to Brazil. They were listening to the famous Dylan bootleg
Great White Wonder
(later released as
The Basement Tapes
), and Marianne was reading William Burroughs's
Naked Lunch,
which, she told Mick, made her want to be a junkie. One night, in the city of Bahia, they stumbled into a
candomblé
ceremony, with drumming and dancing in the streets outside the city's rococo old cathedral. Mick was heavily bearded, with long flowing hair, Marianne was carrying Nicholas, and they were the only white people on the scene. Some of the locals made a negative connection with the two English freaks and chased them out of the plaza with curses and stones. This incident was the germ of the voodoo dread that came out later in “Sympathy for the Devil.”

The Fifth Dimension

The Rolling Stones
went back to work in 1968, a frenzied year of great music, intense film work, radical politics, business battles, sensual adventures, and personal tragedies. Keith: “1968—it's got a hole in there somewhere.”

It started in the Fifth Dimension, the name given to Keith's studio in the old cottage on the grounds of Redlands. Redlands was Keith's playground. Activities included shooting the water rats that lived on the banks of the moat, riding motorcycles, archery, throwing knives, rolling joints, playing with the changing cast of dogs that kept disappearing as neighboring farmers poisoned or shot them for bothering their sheep. The entire Living Theater would arrive for a weekend. Legendary Euro hippies like Joe Monk came and went (Monk was shot by a farmer for poaching pheasants). The house was burglarized every few weeks until Keith had a nine-foot wall built around the house and its two-acre garden. Redlands was full of friends and music all the time. For the Fifth Dimension, the cottage's walls were knocked down to create a big central room, which George Chkiantz wired for sound with huge speakers. “Great echo in the long room,” he says. “Great for listening to Wagner records.” Keith was listening to old Blind Blake records for inspiration, fascinated by the “open” guitar tunings this great blues virtuoso of the 1920s deployed on the discs he cut for Paramount. In the Fifth Dimension, primitive Philips and Norelco cassette recorders were used to capture jams and demos.

Keith: “They just had a little microphone, and I'd overload the crap out of it. Just slam the mic right down the acoustic guitar and then play it back on a little extension speaker, put a microphone on that and then put it on tape. That's how 'Street Fighting Man' and 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' were done. Push it through and then double it again. A piano in the background, Nicky Hopkins or Ian Stewart. Maybe a sitar. And it would all become one track creating this sort of eerie space. Fairy dust!”

Early demos like “Stuck Out All Alone” became “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” Ideas born during an endless jam on “Two Trains Running” would turn into “Midnight Rambler.” The driving chords of “Primo Grande” developed into “Everybody Pays Their Dues,” which in turn became “Street Fighting Man.” A new bootleg recording (then available only by mail order from underground blues sources) of unreleased Robert Johnson songs (like “Love in Vain”) inspired new blues forays such as “Meet Me at the Station,” which became “No Expectations” on
Beggar's Banquet,
the first of the four classic midperiod Rolling Stones albums released between 1968 and 1972.

                

In January 1968,
the Beatles'
Magical Mystery Tour
was atop the album charts. Brian was seeing a lot of Hendrix, was in the studio when Jimi recorded Dylan's new “All Along the Watchtower” on January 21 at Olympic, played his sitar with Jimi on recorded jams titled “Little One” a couple days later. Trying to mend fences, Brian was hanging out at Redlands, showing up at Stones rehearsals sometimes. The Stones' new office was up and running, and Stu was scouring South London for a rehearsal studio for the band. Everyone was short of money, and continuous telexes were sent to Allen Klein in New York, imploring him to release money to the band for houses, offices, instruments, dope. Mick finally got 25,000 pounds to pay for semidelapidated Stargroves.

In March, the Stones hired Jimmy Miller as their new producer. He had worked with the band Family and on the Spencer Davis Group's records. The Stones met Miller while he was producing Traffic at Olympic. Keith especially appreciated Miller's approach, what he later called “the chemistry behind the board.” Miller was a drummer himself, heavy into rhythm, skilled in capturing a band's live sound, and his quiet enthusiasm coaxed the Stones through a fresh round of inspired creativity.

Early on, Brian approached Miller and told him he didn't think he had much to contribute. Miller checked with Mick, who told him, “Look, you can't force him, but he'll be okay.” A two-week band rehearsal in a Surrey studio resulted in a clutch of new songs: “Stray Cat Blues,” “No Expectations,” Howlin' Wolf's “Rock Me Baby,” and the earliest versions of “Jumpin' Jack Flash.” The song's great riff began with a bass line Bill Wyman created while warming up in the studio. Later Keith and Mick were jamming at Redlands, trying to work in new guitar tunings like open E and open D, contrified tunings that consciously moved away from the blues tunings they'd always written in.

Keith: “It was about six in the morning and we'd been up all night. The sky was beginning to go gray and it was pissing down rain. 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' comes from this guy, Jack Dyer, who was my gardener, an old English yokel who'd lived in the country all his life . . . So Mick and I were sitting there, and suddenly Mick starts up. He hears these great footsteps, these big rubber boots
—slosh, slosh, slosh—
going by the windows. He said, 'What's that?' And I said, 'Oh, that's Jack. That's Jumpin' Jack.' And we had the open [E] tuning on my guitar. I started to fool around, singing 'Jumpin' Jack,' and Mick says,
'Flash!'
And suddenly we had this wonderful alliterative phrase. So we woke up and knocked it together. It's really 'Satisfaction' in reverse, except it's played on chords instead of a fuzztone.”

The Stones recorded a supercharged early version of “Jumpin' Jack Flash” in sessions with Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns at Olympic in mid-March that also produced “No Expectations,” “Parachute Woman,” and “Child of the Moon.” “Everybody Pays Their Dues” was a track that started out as a Redlands demo on Keith's cassette player. The band tried it in the studio but couldn't get anything going. Then Charlie Watts produced an antique toy drum and cymbal he'd just bought, and set it up on a carpet on the studio floor. Keith sat cross-legged next to him and they began to play. This sounded great, so Keith recorded it on his cassette. They transferred this crude demo to four-track, and two nights later transferred this to eight-track tape, with myriad overdubs. Now it had dramatic ringing guitars and a buzzing Indian drone and looked like a possible new single.