Old Gods Almost Dead (35 page)

“The
rhaitas
were incredibly loud—twenty of them lined up in an L-shape with the drummers. The Uher was set to 'minimum' and it was already overloading. I had to point the two mikes at the ground and take the sound reflected off the earth. We went through the batteries, then rigged up the car hookup. I finally got the sound I wanted by having them move around me as they played in a reverse figure eight, with me in the middle holding the two mikes. When the reel started to run out, I'd wave and they'd just stop and smile. In the end, we had about five hours of tape.

“We recorded the flute music at night, and even got some women's music the next day, with the girl singing lead playing a
bendir,
like a snare drum with a wire over it. Brian told me he was looking for a contribution to the next Stones album, that he wanted compressed segments of a seven-day festival. I think we came close to getting what he wanted in the short time we were there.”

Brion Gysin: “Something strange happened that day. I was sitting on the ground with Brian and some of the younger musicians, who were digging on this Rolling Stone cat in his furry Afghan coat. We were under the thatched eaves of a farmhouse where they were going to cook lunch for us. Two musicians came in the courtyard leading a white goat. Brian looked at the goat, watched it disappear into the shadows with the two men. One of them held a knife. Catching the glint from the blade, Brian realized the goat was going to be slaughtered. He staggered to his feet, made a choking sound. He gasped, 'That's me!'

“We all picked up on it, and said, 'Yeah, man, okay. Right! It looks
exactly
like you.' Because it was perfectly true. The goat had a blond fringe hanging over his eyes. 'Yes,' I stammered, 'it
is
you.' Brian turned white, as if he had a premonition of something. Twenty minutes later, we were eating grilled chunks of the goat's liver, and it was never mentioned again.

“We spent the rest of that day recording the music of the
rhaitas
and drums. They put on a little Bou Jeloud performance for Brian so he could get a taste of it on tape. They made him promise to come back for the next Aid el-Kebir, and they would sew him into the goatskins and he could dance as Bou Jeloud. Can you imagine?

“Brian was happy on the way down the mountain. We'd only been there a night and a day, but he had all he needed, I guess. We went back to Tangier, checked into the Minzeh, and Brian began to listen to the tapes.”

George Chkiantz: “Brian in Jajouka was at his most considerate and charming, the perfect guest. Back in Tangier was another story. He beat up Suki right off. He was crazed when we returned from Jajouka. When he couldn't make the Uher work, he freaked out, woke me out of an exhausted sleep, demanded I stagger naked down the hotel corridor to push the right buttons. A few hours later, Suki called me to come quick. Brian was wrecked, standing on the balcony and insulting Arabs on the street below. I went over to calm him down, and he just blacked out, keeled over, and smashed his head on the iron railing. He looked dead to me, and I began to panic. What do we do now? 'Nothing,' said Suki. 'It happens all the time.' She covered him with a bedspread and left him on the balcony.

“I needed to get back to London, but before I left the next day, Brian and Suki took me to the famous beach at Cap Spartel [on Morocco's Atlantic coast]. The guard told us not to swim because the current was too strong. He said, 'If you go in today, next week we find your body ten miles down the beach at Asilah.'

“We put our towels down and I took a nap. I woke up twenty minutes later to see Brian swimming a quarter mile offshore, just his head in the waves. He waved to me! Expertly fighting the current, he eventually regained the beach, his footprints coming out at the exact place they went in. It was the strongest swimming I've ever seen. It made me think, later on.”

                

A few weeks
later, Brian was back in London, playing the Jajouka tapes at Olympic with George Chkiantz, happy with what he'd gotten. He felt the rhythms he'd captured were the antidote to the boredom people felt with R&B. Anticipating the world music movement ten years before it happened, he realized it would be amazing to dub guitar solos over the Jajouka polyrhythms. Brian and Chkiantz experimented with this a bit, but George hated the result.

“It wasn't a good idea,” Chkiantz said later. “After a couple of weeks, I sold him on the idea of making an impression of the trip to Morocco, like seeing a play in a theater through a scrim. I talked him into leaving the flutes alone, except for a bit of echo at the end. For the
rhaitas,
the goat-god dance, we introduced 'phased' procession music that takes you on a little trip through our experience, in and out of consciousness. The whole thing was done in a few days, down to mastering, with Brian present every minute. I sent the tapes to the Stones' office late in the summer.”

No one had seen Brian this involved in anything since Anita left him. There was a brief flicker of hope that Brian Jones was being recalled to life. Brion Gysin: “It was a big deal in Jajouka for months afterward, this idea of Brian Jones returning to dance as Bou Jeloud. They pestered me about it for months. They even wrote a song for him, a Moroccan jump tune with funny English lyrics in the chorus”:

Ah Brahim Jones

Jajouka rolling stone

Ah Brahim Jones

Jajouka really stoned!

What Can a Poor Boy Do?

July 1968.
Six thousand miles away, Keith and Mick were mixing
Beggar's Banquet
at RCA and Sweetland studios in Los Angeles. Charlie flew in, then Anita. Gram Parsons had a connection for pharmaceutical cocaine from a dentist in Watts, and some grudgingly felt Gram was buying his way into the Rolling Stones. Gram, Keith told friends, got better coke than the Mafia. He and Keith bonded like brothers as Gram took Keith through country music, teaching him songs. One night they drove out into the California desert to watch the sunrise at Joshua Tree National Monument, an out-of-this-world moonscape of cactus and canyons and prehistoric trees. Wrapped in blankets, guitars at hand, Anita as beautiful and gray-eyed as Minerva, they climbed atop the Cap Rock promontory and felt like gods watching Apollo begin his blazing ride across the desert.

The Stones went to hear Taj Mahal and his band, and really dug the big Harlem-born blues singer, who had the same reverence for country blues they did. Taj's version of “Corinna” was a big favorite. (He had replaced Ry Cooder with a young Indian guitarist from Oklahoma, Jesse Ed Davis.) Taj played a National steel guitar like Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, and Keith recognized they shared the same approach to the blues: once removed, from another generation. Mick told Taj about his plans for a circuslike concert he wanted to stage later in the year, and invited Taj to come to London and be part of the show. Marianne decided that if her baby was a girl, she would name her Corinna.

Marianne's out-of-wedlock pregnancy was big news in England. It was mentioned from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, discussed in the papers, and later was the undeclared subject of debate between velvet-booted Mick and Mary Whitehouse, an advocate of sensible shoes and conservative family values, on David Frost's TV show in London. Mick, while acting as a spokesman for permissiveness, ardently wanted to marry Marianne, but she was still married. Also unknown, except to a few close friends, was that Anita Pallenberg was in the early stages of pregnancy herself.

                

The Stones worked
hard in the studio. Jack Nitzsche was surprised to see Anita tell Mick that his mix of “Stray Cat Blues” was crap because the vocals were too forward. He was even more surprised when Mick remixed according to Anita's suggestion. They put the gospel choir on the end of “Salt of the Earth” after Marianne found them.

She was complaining she had nothing to do, so while they were still mixing
Banquet
Mick produced two tracks for Marianne at RCA. “Sister Morphine” and “Something Better” both featured Ry Cooder, Charlie on drums, and Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. “Sister Morphine” was five and a half minutes of a dying accident victim's desperate craving for narcotic relief (the lyrics were addressed to his nurse). Nitzsche scolded Marianne for snorting cocaine in the studio. “Everyone in the band can get wrecked except the drummer and the singer,” he told her. Delivered in a quavering voice (recorded later at Olympic) over languid slide guitar, the song was a desolate cry of pain from a pregnant girl feeling herself coming apart at the seams.

                

July 26
was Mick's twenty-fifth birthday. That day, he flew back to London from Los Angeles with the first acetate pressings of
Beggar's Banquet.
There was a party that night at Spanish Tony's new club, Vesuvio, in the Tottenham Court Road, in which both Mick and Keith had a financial interest. Decorated with cushions, water pipes, and Moroccan tapestries, the club was designed to cater to rock stars tired of being ripped off by the expensive clubs they frequented. The opening party featured mescaline punch and hash cake, and was full of Beatles, Stones, and their friends. Mick arrived late from the airport and played the
Beggar's Banquet
acetate at top volume. Everyone realized that after the debacle of
Satanic Majesties,
the new Stones album was make-or-break; there was relief in the room when everyone seemed to enjoy it immensely. Congratulations all around, and many mescalined toasts were offered to its success. Mick played some other records fresh from California: Dr. John the Night Tripper's Creole murk, and Al Kooper's new group, Blood, Sweat and Tears. Then Paul McCartney modestly asked Spanish Tony if he'd mind playing the new Beatles single on the house P.A. It was “Hey Jude.” The other side had John Lennon wailing on “Revolution.” It was the first time London's elite had heard these climactic Beatles songs, and there was huge applause afterward. Mick Jagger, Sanchez recalled, was annoyed at being upstaged at his own birthday party. (The Vesuvio Club was torched a few months later in a fire the authorities termed suspicious.)

                

Decca executives
could only shake their heads that month when shown the cover the Stones wanted for
Beggar's Banquet.
Photographed by Barry Feinstein (husband of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary) in a toilet at a Mexican car repair shop in Los Angeles, the cover included graffiti insults (by Keith and Mick) aimed at Allen Klein, Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. Marines, Herb Alpert (whose album had prevented
Aftermath
from reaching no. 1 in the United States), and Bob Dylan (the words “Bob Dylan's Dream” pointed to the toilet's flush handle). The album credits were on the other side, along with thanks given to Strawberry Bob (Fraser), St. Christopher (Gibbs), Spanish Tony, John and Michelle Phillips, Lenny Bruce, John and Yoko, Taj Mahal. Other graffiti: “Ronald Reagan is a sissy”; “Lyndon Loves Mao”; “Zappa's in the cistern”; “Leicester Square [notorious gay cruising spot] at 11
A.M.
”; “God rolls his own”; “Music from Big Brown.”

Both Decca and London Records refused to release the album until another cover design was submitted. The Stones dug in their heels and a stalemate developed. The original July 26 release date came and went with both sides refusing to cave. Keith Richards was especially adamant about the cover. “What the Beatles and ourselves wanted—the most important thing—was to break the record companies' control. If you're writing songs and you're playing 'em, nobody should have the right to tell you how it should be done. You make the record, and you give it to the company.”

The Stones told their label it was merely a distributor of their product with no censorship rights. The company had other ideas and said no. This delayed
Beggar's Banquet
for four months and poisoned relations with the Stones, who resolved that their next album for Decca would be their last. Around this time, the band also learned that the corporate parent of Decca was using the record company's vast profits to underwrite research for its military radar and arms business. Incredibly the Stones realized they'd been contributing to the Vietnam War effort.

                

In America,
the summer of 1968 was known as the Long Hot Summer. Race riots torched inner cities, and there was civic instability that hadn't been felt by Americans since the Depression of the 1930s. A cultural chasm divided the generations, and tear gas was in the air of the cities. London Records released “Street Fighting Man”/“No Expectations” as a single in August, just after the Democratic Party's presidential convention in Chicago, where riot cops brutalized demonstrators and anyone in the streets they could get their hands on. The single's red sleeve had a photo of L.A. cops clubbing a young demonstrator. When Chicago stations boycotted the record, other radio outlets followed suit, and London hastily withdrew “Street Fighting Man” and recalled all copies in the stores. It was the first banned record of the Stones' career. Naturally the single didn't even make the charts. The Stones' brilliant, timely follow-up to “Jumpin' Jack Flash” completely bombed.

Keith: “They told me that 'Street Fighting Man' was subversive. 'Of
course
it's subversive,' we said. It's stupid to think you can start a violent revolution with a record. I wish you could.”

Either you're dead, or you move along.

Mick Jagger

A Different Persona Every Time

The Rolling Stones
were at loose ends in the early fall of 1968. Their new album was delayed, and they were unable to tour because of Brian Jones's drug problems. The Jeff Beck Group was London's hottest band. Ex-Yardbirds guitarist Beck, brilliant but moody, had Rod Stewart on vocals and young Ron Wood on bass. They were about to invade America to great acclaim, paving the way for Led Zeppelin later in the year.

Donald Cammell had been shooting the first half of his film, now called
Performance,
in London since mid-July. Mick Jagger was about to disappear into his movie role as the retired rock star Turner for the month of September. Anita had landed the role of his consort, the script called for sex scenes, Cammell was a student of the polymorphous perverse, and Keith was feeling weird about it.

                

The Stones' organization
in this critical period was headed by Jo Bergman, who had been brought to the U.K. by Brian Epstein and then switched to working for Marianne Faithfull. Mick Jagger was unhappy with Allen Klein's control and decided to set up an independent management operation in late 1967. Marianne gave Jo to the Stones.

According to Peter Swales, a young promo man who worked with the band at the time, “Jo Bergman ran the office with a lot of strength. She had serious entrée and ability to fix things, like a friend in the consular section of the American Embassy who could facilitate Keith's visa problems. Jo was abrasive, manipulative, devious, and there was always some question among the staff about her loyalty because she was close to Allen Klein. But Jo was the boss because she controlled the lines of communication, especially with Mick, who made himself available by phone twice a day. Ian Stewart ran the Stones' rehearsal studio and storage space in a basement in Bermondsea, South London. I loved seeing Stu because he was so honest about things. You hear that he wasn't embittered about the Stones, but I beg to differ. He
always
spoke about them sarcastically, didn't take their music seriously, regarded Mick as a bit of a ponce. Stu loathed Brian, yet always claimed he was the greatest guitarist in England—at least in his prime.

“Before I was formally hired, they sent me to Cheyne Walk to talk to Mick. I was shown upstairs to the lounge, and there was Mick, dancing in front of a full-length mirror with music blasting. I was amazed, and unnerved too. The room was done in Moroccan textiles, with a Buddhist altar overlooking the river. We sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire and Mick handed me a joint, which I reluctantly smoked with him despite these lurking feelings of intimidation. Mick was full of unrealistic marketing schemes in the wake of their troubles with Decca. He wanted to know if I thought
Beggar's Banquet
could be distributed from the backs of lorries, and I had to say no, I didn't think that was feasible.

“By the time I came along, Brian Jones was just a wreck. I mean, I was shocked. He was on the borderline of obesity, in his body and his face, although his hair hid that a bit. He perspired all the time and smelled of brandy. He seemed like both a sweet, gentle man who spoke beautiful, pristine English and an utterly pathetic creature who was seeing a psychiatrist for severe paranoia. My experience, contrary to what else one hears, was that Mick Jagger bent over backwards to try to accommodate Brian. They didn't really want to dump him—that wasn't on their agenda at all. It was just that he'd become completely unreliable. He was a passenger in the band, but he couldn't even remember to get on the bus.

“We never saw much of Keith, who hardly ever came to the office. Mick was always in and out, a different persona every time. He'd show up in a proper brown pinstriped suit for business meetings with Sandy Lieberson, who was producing
Performance.
Sometimes he came in jeans, looking disheveled, stealing my Rothmans and smoking them like a woman,
very
camp. He was so totally secure in his masculinity that he could really camp it up with the best of them.”

The Only Performance That Makes It

Mick and Anita
began working on
Performance
early in September 1968. Filming continued for seven weeks, following the improvised mind fuck of the second half of Donald Cammell's script—an occult stew of hallucinogenic sexual confusion. The collateral damage from the filming had fatal consequences for the Stones, their women, and almost everyone connected to the movie.
Performance
would be delayed for years, was then heavily censored, would get bad reviews when finally released.

But thirty years later,
Performance
would be called the best film ever made in England. Some believe that when advanced technology renders Rolling Stones CDs as obsolete as Edison cylinders, say in a hundred years,
Performance
will stand as
the
glittering Stones-related document of London in the late 1960s.

Cammell wrote
Performance
to test the affinities between the sadistic violence of London's criminal gangs (the Krays, the Richardsons) and the sadomasochism Cammell saw in Brian Jones and others in the London pop world. The Chelsea Set, of which Cammell was a member, mingled art dealers, actors, musicians, aristocrats, and villains, providing the back-story of the film.

Performance
tells the story of Chas, a psychopathic enforcer for Harry Flowers, a homosexual mobster loosely patterned on Ron Kray, half of the notorious Kray twins who had ruled London gangland. The first half of the film, lurid with homoerotic innuendo and tortuous imagery from Francis Bacon's paintings of naked male torsos, places Chas in his milieu of extortion, beatings, and revenge. (Production of
Performance
happened only because both Krays were in prison for murder.)

When Chas kills a former friend, he's marked for death by his own gang and forced underground. Through a ruse, he becomes a lodger in the Notting Hill house of Turner, a retired rock star, and his weird girlfriends. Reclusive Turner, out of boredom, decides to mess with Chas: turn him on, break up his macho pose, and see what's underneath. He manipulates Chas with his seductive world of smoke and mirrors, sex and drugs, music and the occult.

Performance
is an extended tribute to the avant-garde masters of the sixties. Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Georges Bataille, and James Brown are constantly referenced. The script—an explicit homage to Borges—calls for hundreds of jump cuts and flashbacks derived from the cutup method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Burroughs's obsession with the legendary dope-crazed Assassins of Hassan Sabbah is a leitmotif of the film. Satan is openly evoked as Jagger/Turner sings Robert Johnson's “Come On in My Kitchen.”

Performance
is about the madness that occurs when personal boundaries dissolve and people merge into each other. As they trip on magic mushrooms, the
chi
of the two men transmigrates. Cammell shows a mystical confluence as rock star
/hashishin
and gangster/assassin interfuse. As Chas's gang closes in on him, he shoots Turner as the ultimate madness. The camera follows the trajectory of the bullet as it burrows through Turner's brain, evoking a flash image of Borges, whose stories celebrated outlaws, their knives and killings. Chas is led to his fate in a white Rolls-Royce, but it's Turner's face that looks out the car window as it drives off.

Performance
had been written the year before in St. Tropez by Cammell, with the help of Deborah Dixon. Anita remembers working on her dialogue while they were at the beach, loose pages blowing away and landing in the water. As the son of Aleister Crowley's biographer, Cammell was interested in magic, not politics, but his screenplay makes many subtle points about the class system. In London, Cammell recruited David Litvinoff to help with the cockney gang-speak that gives the script its immediacy. Litvinoff was the link between the Chelsea Set and the (gay) underworld, and he used his own beatings at the hands of the Kray gang as material for the script.

Cammell had worked on a couple of mid-sixties movies but was frustrated at the utter failure of the film world to capture the visceral excitement of the times or anything even remotely hip. He'd been talking to Mick about doing a film for two years, and in the end it didn't take much convincing. Cammell's magnetic personality encompassed interests in literature, cinema, art, metaphysics, philosophy. “If he said, 'Come with me to hell,' ” one friend said of Cammell, “you'd say, 'Okay—how bad can it be?' ” When Mick signed on to play Turner (for $100,000 and 7H percent of the net), Cammell and Sandy Lieberson, acting as producer, persuaded the new management of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts to finance the project. They were given a large budget and an extraordinary amount of freedom to create what the studio hoped would be a mystery film about a pop star played by Mick Jagger. It was an extraordinary leap of faith by Warners. Donald Cammell had never directed a film, Sandy Lieberson had never produced a movie, and Mick Jagger had never starred in one, yet the studio agreed to an unsupervised shoot.
Performance
was made by a group of amateurs with no one looking over their shoulders, probably the main reason for its authenticity and greatness.

The first half of the film had been shot around London that summer after Cammell brought in cinematographer Nicholas Roeg to codirect. While Cammell rehearsed the actors and dictated the action, Roeg blocked the cameras and actually shot the film. James Fox, who played Chas, was given an education in thuggery at the Thomas a Becket pub in South London, headquarters of the British boxing world. The old Harrow boy, who normally played posh types, emerged as one of the chaps, with a body taut as cable. His character was modeled on an East End tough named Jimmy Evans. Real Chelsea villains like John Bindon—famous for biting a man's ear off in a fight—were recruited to play members of Harry Flowers's gang.

Cammell and Roeg shot in sequence, and the first half was finished by mid-August 1968. The exterior shots of Turner's house were filmed in Powis Square, Notting Hill Gate. The interiors, decorated by Christopher Gibbs with his Delacroix mélange of antiques and orientalia, were shot in an elegant house in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge, that had previously housed a crooked gambling club. The doors and windows were sealed shut for the production, and Cammell conjured a hermetic, occult environment for his actors to play their fateful parts.

Mick and Cammell had talked endlessly about the characters in the film, especially Turner. “Turner was an amalgam,” Mick said, “with more than a bit of Brian Jones.” Turner (played by Mick with his hair dyed almost black) whispered in Brian's semiprecious lisp and moved through the darkened rooms of his house with Brian's devious detachment. His “secretary,” Pherber, was completely patterned on Anita Pallenberg, who won the role of herself after the American stars Warner's wanted became unavailable. Mia Farrow, their first choice, broke her ankle as she was about to come to London. Tuesday Weld actually arrived in London, but her shoulder was accidentally broken by Deborah Dixon during some New Age “therapy” for Weld's chronic backache.

Anita got the part. Pregnant when she signed the contract for
Performance,
she had an abortion a few days later and went on with the film.

The role of Lucy, the young girl in Turner's ménage à trois, was played by Michelle Breton, a boyish, twenty-year-old waif who Cammell and Dixon had met in St. Tropez and taken into their ménage, Cammell being big on threesomes. Breton was the free-spirited paradigm of the hippie kid that Cammell needed to balance his two jaded rock stars.

Where the first half of
Performance
closely follows Cammell's script, the second half was mostly improvised on the set, depending on how the players interacted. It was pure Theater of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud made flesh in the film's most famous line, spoken by Turner to mind-blown, disoriented Chas: