Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Worst of all, there was Brian’s insecurity. He’d always been like this, oversensitive, but the damage his fellow Stones had inflicted on his ego over the previous few years meant that Brian’s neediness was becoming pathological. ‘He was driven by this narcissistic need, to be recognized, to be loved, for attention. And Anita was stronger than he was at that moment. She could control things, by giving attention, or withholding it, or by treating him in a very condescending way. Then he’d get nasty, in the sense that he’s the one who’s got the money or whatever, so he’d punish her that way. And I’m certain he’d treat her physically badly, too. So he already was, in some ways, an unhappy and pathetic figure.’

  As an experienced director used to working with high-maintenance people, Schlöndorff still had a wonderful time working with Brian. Asked if he could have been a soundtrack composer, he agrees without reservation. Likewise, Kenney Jones is certain that, with a songwriting partner, Brian could have gone on to write pop songs. But to function as a rock star, he needed a certain hardness. Over the years, that essential carapace, such as it was, had become weaker rather than stronger. ‘I tried to help him,’ says Schlöndorff. ‘I understood that doing something on his own was very important for him – more important for him than for me.’

  Inside the safe womb of the recording studio Brian continued more or less to keep things together. In the wider world, though, events were spinning out of control. On 23 January the Stones had their first substantive disagreement with Andrew Oldham over his insistence that they board the revolving stage at the close of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, the old-fashioned variety show on which Oldham had booked them to mime three songs. There’d been differences of opinion before, for instance over the definitive take of their last Oldham mini-epic Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby. This was the first time Mick said no to his mentor. In Oldham’s view, the Stones’ rejection of this little showbiz convention at the Palladium contributed to what happened next. It’s a rather ridiculous notion, given Oldham’s own relish for manufactured outrage. In fact, the wheels were already rolling.

  The News of the World, the now-defunct British tabloid newspaper well known for its disapproval and comprehensive coverage of all kinds of sex and sleaze, fired the opening salvo of the inter-generational war on Sunday, 29 January under the headline ‘Pop Stars: The Truth That Will Shock You’. The story focused on Donovan. In what would become trademark style, the tabloid worked closely with Norman Pilcher. The detective had handed on details of the woman, Suzanne, who had helped them gain entry to Donovan’s flat. Her sensationalized interview formed the core of the story. ‘Again,’ says Donovan, ‘this is how they used people.’

  For several years now the British press and the new generation of British musicians had been engaged in a cosy compact: pop stars helped sell newspapers. Yet by the beginning of 1967, the schism between traditional entertainers and the emerging rock aristocracy had become glaringly obvious. This generation gap, once disparate and diffuse, was now clearly delineated; both the music and the Technicolor clothes distinctly announced a break with the sober Britain of the austerity years, the buttoned-up nation overseen by righteous Victorian statesmen. The News of the World picked up on a growing hostility to these druggy, foppish upstarts and used it to drive news-stand sales, under threat following a string of scoops obtained by their great rival tabloid the People.

  The following Sunday, 5 February, the News of the World followed up their Donovan story with a far more satisfying scalp: Mick Jagger, who in an undercover interview boasted about his history of drug-taking. Except, of course, it wasn’t Mick Jagger. The Rolling Stone the undercover reporter had spoken to was Brian Jones, at one of his regular haunts, Blaise’s, which at 121 Queen’s Gate was only a few blocks away from Courtfield Road. Some sources suggest the ‘interview’ was several months old; more likely it took place in January, when Anita was away filming Mord und Totschlag. The eager reporter had found the perfect dupe. Brian, as ever, was happy to expound on his status as a drugs pioneer. ‘I don’t go much on LSD,’ he informed them, ‘now the cats have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name. I remember the first time I took it – it was on tour with Bo Diddley.’ Brian was actually talking about marijuana. The misquote was almost certainly deliberate, for the mention of LSD, illegal since the Dangerous Drugs Act of June 1965, fitted the newspaper’s agenda much better. The identification of Brian as Mick was possibly accidental, but insiders like Marianne Faithfull believe that too was cynical and deliberate: as the figurehead of the Stones, Mick’s celebrity would help sell more papers.

  The stage was now set for a showdown between the straight world and the alternative world. Mick’s horror at reading the article, on his return from a trip to San Remo and Cannes with Marianne, was intensified by the fact that he had hardly experimented with LSD. In future years his status as a near martyr in the struggle for decriminalization of drugs would be accompanied by the professed belief that drugs were ‘a bad idea’. Similarly, the News of the World would later deny that they in any way represented the forces of the establishment. According to managing editor Robert Warren, the confrontation was ‘never as important as people make out’. Still, with allies of convenience or not, the battle was on.

  Andrew Oldham was as horrified by the News of the World report as Mick: the furore had profound implications for the Stones’ immigration status in America, and after a conference between Klein, Oldham and Jagger, Mick announced, via a TV interview with Eamonn Andrews, that he would be suing the newspaper for libel. He had a clear alibi, and the newspaper soon became aware that its shoddy reporting had opened it up to the potential of heavy damages. That week, the News of the World assigned two of their most aggressive reporters, Trevor Kempson and Mike Gabbert, to the case, hoping for a lead that would incriminate the Stones and ward off the possibility of an expensive libel settlement.

  A familiar pattern began to emerge involving mysterious vans parked outside band members’ houses, and clicking sounds and echoes on phone lines. As Mick, Keith and Brian would soon discover, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Despite Warren’s assertions that the police and the News of the World were not acting in collusion, the press and police remained in close contact until on the evening of Saturday, 11 February the phone rang on the news desk. ‘It was enormously fortunate,’ recalls Warren, ‘that it happened to be an informant.’

  *

  The police raid at Redlands at 8 p.m. on Sunday, 12 February, prompted by a phone call from the News of the World, was a defining event of the decade. Brian and Anita, fatefully, were absent. Brian was planning to come down for what was intended as a blissful, unifying band weekend but was struggling to complete the Mord und Totschlag soundtrack and finished too late for the drive down to West Wittering. The weekend ended up bonding Mick and Keith in a far deeper way than anyone could have comprehended, while Brian’s absence would have consequences that were just as significant.

  The stay had been planned, probably at the suggestion of Robert Fraser, as a kind of cross between a religious festival and a scuzzy party. The central design was for Mick to have his first proper acid trip, helped by Californian ‘acid evangelist’ David Schneiderman, who travelled around with a mysterious suitcase full of drugs and paperwork. Hanger-on Nicky Kramer and Keith’s chauffeur, a Belgian named Patrick, were the only outsiders in a party that also included Fraser and his servant/lover Mohammed Jajaj, Fraser’s friend Michael Cooper (who shot the cover for Sgt Pepper in March and was becoming virtually a house photographer for the Stones), and Christopher Gibbs.

  Schneiderman administered acid to Mick, Keith, Marianne and the others just before noon on the Sunday morning. Mick and Marianne, who had never tried acid before, felt sick at first. Then the drug kicked in. Marianne thought the experience opened Mick up, removed some of his defences, his artifice. Just as profoundly, it bonded Mick and Keith, who’d become estranged over t
he last year. Acid made them see each other in a more sympathetic light. From that point on, says Marianne, ‘they became the Glimmer Twins’.

  The trippers frolicked around West Wittering that Sunday afternoon, wandering around the garden then driving down to the beach, where Cooper’s photos document the disparate little group. They returned as the sun went down and had just settled in the living room when a visitor arrived: Tony Bramwell, soon followed by George Harrison and wife Pattie, who’d driven down in George’s Mini.

  Bramwell didn’t find the gathering that beatific. ‘I’d gone down because I had a girlfriend in Selsey, round the corner. But when I got there, there was just a lot of shit people that I really didn’t like. Robert Fraser always got up my nose. So I wasn’t there for more than ten minutes before I left for Selsey.’ George and Pattie didn’t stay long either. ‘I think George actually sussed the same as me,’ says Bramwell. ‘The Beatles mixed with nice people!’

  As Marianne relaxed in the bath, savouring the acid afterglow, the forces of the opposition waited in the narrow lane leading up to Redlands. Events had moved fast since the News of the World had phoned Scotland Yard late on Saturday evening. According to Steve Abrams of the International Times, the Yard declined to act on the tip, believing that busting Mick Jagger for possession of pot would be the best possible advert for the drug. So the information was passed to Detective Stan Cudmore of the local police in West Sussex. Cudmore, with Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley, assembled a team of eighteen officers, including Rosemary Slade and Evelyn Fuller for the purpose of performing intimate body searches on women – namely Marianne. The informant was apparently well briefed on exactly who was at the cottage.

  When Keith saw a face staring in through the window at Redlands, he assumed it was just a fan getting too close, as they so often did. A few moments later, after loud hammering at the door, he opened up to be faced with a warrant and police officers spilling into the house.

  Detective Evelyn Fuller, the woman Keith had seen at the window, searched through Marianne and Mick’s room, taking careful note of the pink ostrich feathers on their bed, Marianne’s white bra and Edwardian blouse, and also several books on witchcraft, including Games to Play. Fuller was joined by another detective who searched a green velvet jacket and found four pills. They were Stenamina seasickness tablets that Marianne had bought in San Remo. Mick, the gallant, said they were his. Marianne’s presence – she was naked but for a large fur rug with which she’d covered herself after her bath – shocked the assembled detectives, who took her unperturbed grande dame demeanour as conclusive proof of the consumption of evil substances. This shock was not a development they would keep to themselves.

  As the cops continued to search, they finally came to Bob Fraser, who tried to intimidate them with his upper-class haughtiness, then turned over eight tablets. Schneiderman too handed over various substances. Cooper managed to evade a search, but several of Keith’s items were removed, and the guitarist was informed about a key clause of the new Dangerous Drugs Act, passed the previous June: ‘Should the results of our laboratory tests show that dangerous drugs have been used at the premises and are not related to any individual, you will be held responsible.’

  ‘I see,’ Keith replied, perceptively. ‘They pin it all on me.’

  That night, Brian phoned Keith to say he’d finished his work on Mord und Totschlag and was coming down. ‘Don’t bother,’ Keith told him. ‘We’ve been busted.’

  *

  In the first days after the raid, no one within the Stones quite appreciated the magnitude of the drama that was about to unfold. But at least one person was, in addition to problem-solving, thinking about the bigger picture. Where others saw a crisis, Allen Klein saw a perfect opportunity.

  When the main players convened for a meeting later in February, Klein took charge – the tough guy who would see off the villains. Andrew Oldham, in contrast, could hardly conceal his fear. ‘We were told that, after the Stones, the police were gonna go for the suits,’ says his Immediate partner Tony Calder. ‘And I never saw a man pack his bag so quickly. He was terrified.’ Klein seemed to understand Oldham’s paranoia and instructed his young, volatile business partner that the only way to avoid further busts, and press intrusion, was to lie low. Gered Mankowitz was by now Oldham’s main confidant in the organization. They discussed what was going down, and the instructions Klein had given Oldham: ‘Don’t hang out with them. Don’t communicate with them. And whatever you do, don’t talk to the press.’ It seems Klein’s advice made Oldham more paranoid, not less. He felt he was ‘in very dangerous territory’, says Mankowitz. ‘We were told to keep a very low profile and given the impression that we were on very thin ice.’

  Klein’s words of wisdom meant that Oldham would remain largely absent over the following months. The embattled Stones saw this as cowardice, Oldham deserting his post as the battle intensified; his disappearance became a key factor in his estrangement from the band. This left Klein in sole charge and ultimately ensured he took control of the Stones’ Impact Productions catalogue. ‘He was always playing a double game,’ says Mankowitz. ‘Clearly Klein was the most horrible and manipulative person. I can see that now, but could not then.’ Oldham’s position had become all the more vulnerable because in September 1966, after relinquishing business management to Klein, he’d handed over press duties to old-hand PR Les Perrin.

  Oldham was not the only immediate victim of the Redlands bust. From this point, says Marianne, Mick’s irritation with Brian reached a new intensity and transmitted itself to Keith. The pair reckoned the whole business had started with Brian shooting his mouth off in Blaise’s. The fact that Keith had chosen to stage a drugs party, inviting outsiders into the group’s midst when they believed they were under surveillance, didn’t seem to figure in their analysis. Christopher Gibbs comments, ‘You know about the bust. That was to a degree brought upon themselves by themselves. Obnoxious behaviour at one time or another. It was all in the stars. So there’s no point looking for villains.’

  It was cold in England that February. The weekend of the 11th when they’d scampered down to the beach was an aberrant spell of clear blue skies in a cold, grey month. Desperate for an escape from both the clouds and rain, which had rolled in again, and the grim atmosphere, Keith, Brian and Anita were the key enthusiasts for a flit to Morocco. It provided the perfect opportunity to stretch out in the Blue Lena – Keith’s Bentley Continental, a beautiful, sleek, powerful beast kitted out with sumptuous leather seats and a state-of-the-art hi-fi system complete with eight-track cartridge player. Despite owning the car for a year, Keith still hadn’t passed his driving test. In the wake of the bust he’d had suspicions about Patrick, his chauffeur, so for this trip he decided to use the services of Tom Keylock, who’d first driven for the band in late 1965 and proved his worth during the band’s last UK tour at the end of 1966.

  Born in 1926, Keylock was a tough guy – ‘half protecting angel, half Mafioso’, as Volker Schlöndorff describes him. He was ex-military, had served in Palestine, and reputedly fought with the Royal Parachute Regiment at El Alamein. Like Reg, Oldham’s old driver, Keylock satisfied the band’s fascination with hard-man types, with connections to the underworld. As Sam Cutler, later the Stones’ road manager, points out, ‘the Stones have always loved gangsters and had these shitheads working with them’. Keylock was resourceful and calm in a crisis, but over the years many people came to share Cutler’s impression that he was ‘a shifty bastard’. Shifty or not, Keylock would be the most objective observer of what transpired over the next fortnight – two weeks that would finally sunder the trio of individuals who had united just five years before.

  The travellers assembled in Paris, leaving Keylock to bring Blue Lena over on the ferry: Deborah Dixon, Anita’s old friend – for once without her consort Donald Cammell – Brian and Anita, plus Keith. Their intention was to speed through France and Spain, take the ferry out
to Tangier, then follow the trail west to Marrakesh where they’d later meet up with Mick and Marianne.

  The shenanigans started while they were still in Paris. History would have it that the trip was spoiled by Brian’s paranoia and testiness. Doubtless that was a factor, but Anita’s natural tendency to take things to the edge was just as important. In an interview about the trip, Keylock remembered her playing mind-games from the moment they were asked to settle the bill at the Georges V hotel. Keylock handed the receptionist Keith’s Diners Club card, only to be told by the manager, ‘Sorry, monsieur, we don’t accept Diners Club.’ Keylock asked around for money; none of them, Anita included, had any cash. Keylock continued blustering while Brian and Keith, who still seemed thick as thieves, chucked their bags into the Bentley. At one point he handed over a cheque on which he’d forged Keith’s signature, only for the manager to spot the ruse. ‘This is no good! I call the police!’ Finally, Keylock placated the manager with another cheque, signed by Keith under the manager’s nose, before they all jumped in the car, Keylock hit the accelerator, and they sped south. Only later, says Keylock, did he discover Anita had ‘rolls of francs on her that could choke an ox. She didn’t need no bread.’ It was escapades like this that made him conclude, ‘I didn’t get on with Anita too much. She used to do brains in.’

  A few people, friends of Brian’s, hate Anita, blaming her for what would happen over the next eighteen months. Stash, Brian’s closest friend over the period, and the man who’d helped introduce her to Brian, sees it differently. Brian loved Anita because she took things close to the edge. That was her magic. ‘She believed one shouldn’t settle into some mock bourgeois domesticity. Anita was always for keeping things rough. And for them to be ready to answer some difficult questions.’ Brian’s relationship with Anita was volatile and full of confrontations, insecurity and needling because that’s how they both wanted it. Keith kept Anita on a tight leash, a regular rock’n’roll old lady; Brian fought with Anita, and gave her more freedom. As Stash points out, ‘Anita could go further with Brian than she could with Keith.’