Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 22
In different accounts, Keith has suggested various motives for staying so close to Brian and Anita around this time. Some of his motivation was simple friendship, shards of which remained from their early guitar-weaving days. Yet even removing Anita from the equation, Keith’s attitude towards Brian was an unfathomably complex mix of admiration and resentment. Brian was brave yet lazy, inspirational yet soul-sapping. Worst of all, he was simply better at some things – and he still seemed, in a profound way, to be the soul of the band. After all the work Keith had put in, he had not escaped Brian’s shadow. ‘Look how Keith remained squeamish about talking,’ says Stash. ‘Very shy, and all that. So Brian had [become] a kind of front man for the band.’
The atmosphere was heavy, loaded with more than just the smoke from the cigs and the spliffs, as Keylock drove the four of them south, the back of the car festooned with blankets and multicoloured cushions, Keith keeping the eight-track player constantly fed with music. Keith says Brian moaned all the way to Toulouse, that there were bad vibrations; Keylock remembers Brian being in high spirits, looking forward to his birthday on 28 February, ready to celebrate it in style. Brian was also smoking cigarettes like a chimney in the back of the Bentley. It was this, maintains Keylock, that contributed to coughing fits and chest problems that by the time they reached Toulouse left him gasping for air. ‘He never stopped whining about how ill he felt,’ says Keith. ‘He was a hypochondriac.’ Yet when Keylock took Brian to the Centre Hospitalier d’Albi in Tarn he was admitted immediately with suspected pneumonia. Once again, Keith reckons Brian was suspicious and didn’t want the others to leave; Keylock says he was ‘heroic’ and told them to proceed without him, that he’d catch up later. ‘It was Keith who said, “Let’s split,”’ says Keylock. ‘“Are we gonna leave him here?” “Yeah, fuck him.” So I phoned the office to tell them [and] away we went with Keith and Anita [plus Deborah Dixon], over the Pyrenees down to Malaga, where we got on the ferry to the El Minzah.’
When Brian arrived at the hospital, nurse Marie Gillet looked at the pale figure with the blond fringe and silk suit and thought she was dealing with a girl. She gave the patient Cédilanid, a drug normally used to treat an irregular heartbeat, and left him to rest. Over the next week she kept a close eye on the patient in Room 13. Brian spent his time playing guitar, and celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday, one day after his arrival, with a milky coffee. The telegrams he sent to Anita, care of the office or the El Minzah in Tangier, were loving, saying he was looking forward to recuperating in the sun. Over that week, sitting in the hospital office, he wrote countless times to her. ‘There was vast correspondence,’ says Stash, ‘lots of letters. Which are all very mysterious now, never mentioned.’ Nurse Gillet thought him a model patient: ‘Shy, and kind.’
Meanwhile, as the Blue Lena cruised into Barcelona, even Deborah Dixon, a woman who was well used to Donald Cammell’s sexual intrigues, found the atmosphere too heady to bear, and disappeared back to Paris. It was in the back of the Blue Lena, somewhere on a dusty road during the drive through Franco’s backward rural Spain, that Anita and Keith became lovers – Keith says it started with a blow job between Barcelona and Valencia. Shy as ever, he’d waited for Anita to make the first move. Tom Keylock knew that something heavy, irretrievable, was kicking off. ‘Did I know about it? Yeah, but what could I do about it? Nothing to do with me.’
The trip to Malaga was picaresque: Keith and Anita bonding in the back of the car, a romantic dinner in Valencia, followed by hassles with the police after the restaurant refused to accept the Diners Club card. Then when the pair returned to their hotel they found a telegram waiting for them from Brian, asking Anita to come and get him. Anita and Keith took their time: around four days later she returned to collect Brian, flying with him to London where, after a series of medical tests, he was pronounced fit to travel. Marianne Faithfull, on a weekend break from rehearsals for Chekhov’s Three Sisters, was engaged as a travel companion, and the odd trio duly flew to Tangier via Gibraltar on Saturday, 10 March.
Brian was pale, washed out, and for once dressed formally: black and grey suit, white shirt and tie. Marianne thought he was having a mental breakdown and a drugs breakdown all in one – so they decided to drop acid on the flight to Gibraltar. It was there that Marianne noted one of the most beautifully bizarre and unlikely incidents of Brian’s life. Still high on acid, he decided they should get a cab out to the Rock to see the Barbary apes, pampered creatures on a small nature reserve overseen by the British military garrison. His plan was to play them a tape of his Mord und Totschlag soundtrack. The three of them approached the animals with respect, bowing to them before Brian pressed the play button on his portable recorder. The beasts seemed positively alarmed by the impressionistic sounds and scampered away, screaming. Brian, says Marianne, became hysterical and started sobbing. At that point she realized there was some new element to Brian and Anita’s relationship.
‘Don’t you think Brian looks so pale?’ Anita kept asking Marianne. ‘Not very alive?’
*
Brion Gysin, one of Tangier’s most celebrated residents, was the one who announced, ‘The Rolling Stones are here, the Stones are here!’ Hearing that the band was in town, he’d run round to his friend Paul Bowles to spread the news. Bowles had never heard of the band, but not much was happening in the city so he dropped in to see the group, crashed out in Gysin’s apartment, remembering that they were ‘very much rolling (in money) . . . and very stoned’.
It was all a little too much for Bowles, who was there only briefly. The same applied to Christopher Gibbs, who missed out on the drama. Mick and Robert Fraser arrived later, while Marianne returned to London for more rehearsals.
Gysin, himself a visionary who’d spin complex tales and conspiracy theories, make crucial innovations in literature and loved living on the edge, respected Brian as a musician but considered him a ‘selfish child’. When the troupe moved on, out of the crammed streets of Tangier into the wider open spaces of Marrakesh three hundred miles further west, Gysin joined them, disturbed and fascinated by their excesses. He would later initiate Brian into some of the most potent music of his life; and during this trip he would be an unwitting player in his fall.
Brian’s final humiliation would take place in the Es Saadi resort, a luxurious holiday complex comprising a tall modern hotel with huge pool surrounded by half a dozen villas styled in various gothic or fantasy themes. High terracotta walls and black iron railings sheltered occupants from the noise and incessant hassle of the frenetic ancient city. Cacti, fragrant oleander bushes and Grand Jose palm trees clustered around the route to Brian’s villa, a stuccoed, apparently old building a few hundred yards from the hotel. The resort offered a womb-like serenity and security. But there were dead pigeons caught in the palm trees and Arabic metalwork.
A second observer of the ensuing action came from a rather different milieu. Society photographer, set designer and acid-tongued diarist Cecil Beaton – or ‘Fair Cecily’ as his friend Diana Vreeland loved to call him – was a veteran visitor to Es Saadi. Beaton was a close friend of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, a connoisseur of aristocratic glamour with imposingly high standards: he once observed of the Queen that, although possessing nice manners, she would ‘make an extremely good hospital nurse or nanny’. Beaton was drawn to this novel yet strangely decadent aristocracy. His diary provides a beautifully rendered, exquisitely detailed portrait of the exotic party. ‘It was a strange group,’ he wrote, ‘three Stones, Brian Jones and his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, dirty white face, dirty blackened eyes, dirty canary-yellow wisps of hair, barbaric jewellery. The drummer [sic] Keith, an eighteenth-century suit, long black velvet coat and the tightest pants.’ Beaton was fascinated by Mick, analysing his looks as an eminent art historian would appraise a sensational Rubens or Titian canvas. Mick was ‘very gentle, with perfect manners’, Beaton wrote. ‘His small, albino-fringed eyes notice everything. His skin is
chicken-breast white and of a fine quality. He has an inborn elegance.’
Beaton joined the group for a drive into town for an evening meal, taking note of the rugs, pop art cushions and sex magazines in the back of the Blue Lena. They all returned to the hotel around 3 a.m. The following morning, Beaton again calmly appraised Mick as he arrived at the swimming pool, noting that in the strong light his face looked ‘a white, podgy, shapeless mess; eyes very small’.
Then Brian arrived at the pool, ‘in white pants with a huge black square applied at the back. It was very smart in spite of the fact that the seams are giving way. But with such marvellously flat, tight, compact figures as they have, with no buttocks or stomach, almost anything looks good on them.’
By now, Gysin was well aware of the tensions around the band. ‘The action starts almost at once. Brian and I drop acid. Anita sulks and drops sleepers. [She] goes off to sleep in the suite she shared with Brian. Keith has plugged in and sends great throbbing sounds winging after her and on out into the moonlight over the desert. Robert [Fraser] puts on a great old Elmore James record out of his collection. So, as the acid comes up on me, Brian receded into Big Picture. Looks like a tiny celluloid Kewpie doll, banked all around by a choir of identical little girl dolls looking just like him, chanting his hymns. Tom [Keylock] the sinister chauffeur shows up, rolling his eyes, hovering over Brian, whispering in his ear like a procurer.’ Gysin claims to have attempted to walk between Keith and Anita but was prevented from doing so by their locked gaze, which had become so intense it made a physical barrier. Gysin saw an acid vision of a glass link joining the two of them, revolving and throbbing, ‘as bad as a laser beam. I don’t like the look of that so I check out of the hotel immediately.’
Gysin’s part in the story isn’t over, however. The next day everyone went off to explore, heading out for the desert, except Brian, who remained in his villa, depressed and ill. When they returned, Brian had recruited two Berber hookers and tried to entice Anita into a foursome. It was the kind of sex game he and Anita had revelled in many times before. This, however, was one time too many. ‘It wouldn’t have been unlike her to get involved,’ says Stash. ‘If you’re interested in somebody else, things you would have enjoyed together, you’re no longer able to. It’s pain and awkwardness until you split up.’ Sensing that Anita’s defection was imminent, Brian was forcing a confrontation, inviting rejection.
In future years, the story was spread that Brian attacked Anita violently when she refused to participate in the sex game; more recently, Keith revised his claim, saying Brian had attempted to attack Anita but that she had actually broken a couple of Brian’s ribs and a finger, and that they feared his retaliation. In any case, says Stash, ‘Violence of any kind is reprehensible. But you have a man weakened by pneumonia, dazed, the desperation of a man who feels things are slipping out of control.’
Keylock suggests a simpler dynamic: ‘Why did he do it with those whores? He was off ’is ’ead, innee?’
Gysin saw the women, tattooed Berbers with breasts like blue basketwork. ‘Expensive ladies,’ he wrote. ‘Cost Brian a packet – the whole packet. Anita and the Stones. His life as a musician. Eventually, his life.’
Disgusted, frightened, or simply in love with someone else, Anita ran to Keith, who worked out a plan. Mick shouted for the bills while Keylock asked Gysin to distract Brian. The writer took him to the city’s celebrated Jemaa el-Fnaa, an ancient gathering place full of snake-charmers, hucksters, dancing monkeys and musicians beating out hypnotic rhythms. Always a poor negotiator, too keen to show his interest, Brian paid an inordinate amount of money for a hookah which the vendor insisted was a rare antique, adorned with ancient teeth and bones. When he returned to the Es Saadi, his friends were gone.
Gysin described the events he witnessed as ‘mythological’. They were certainly much mythologized. One of the myths, much favoured by Brian’s father – a man who barely knew his son – was that Anita’s disappearance killed him. However painful her abandonment was, this was not the case. Brian knew Anita was a force of nature – her leaving him wasn’t the shock. It was the traitorous actions of Mick and Keith that devastated him. This was a pair of multimillionaires who’d whinge about a fiver for the next fifty years yet barely mention how they’d abandoned their bandmate penniless in an alien country. The loss of Anita was terrible; the betrayal by his fellow Stones was infinitely worse.
‘Brian loved Mick and Keith,’ says Linda Lawrence. ‘He really did. He considered them brothers. This was like having your own family reject you.’
‘He phoned me. He couldn’t believe what had happened,’ says Stash. ‘What had occurred . . . they didn’t confront him, Keith never stood up to Brian and said, “You motherfucker.” He didn’t say a word. He just decided to leave. That was what Brian was the most shocked by – the way he was simply abandoned. No money. Just stuck in a hotel, on his own.’
Brian Jones could be petulant, impulsive, wilful, irresponsible, selfish and indeed sometimes acted like ‘an arsehole’, as road manager Sam Cutler remembers. Keith and Mick’s leaving of him in Morocco was the embodiment of their own, distinctive nastiness. From now on, people like Cutler, Marianne and Nitzsche tend to repeat the same description of how it worked: totally, utterly cold.
Gysin remembered Brian collapsing in shock at the realization that his friends had left him, with no information about where they’d gone. Still, his memory that Brian spent two days sedated in unconsciousness must be an exaggeration: after spending a night with Donald Cammell in Paris, Brian was back in London on the 18th.
*
Today, in a Twitter age when private squabbles quickly become public property, Brian’s silence over being abandoned by his bandmates would be a remarkable example of omertà. In the decades since, we’ve all read thousands of words by the Rolling Stones on Brian’s unreliability, his treatment of Anita, those fateful five pounds, the twelve gigs he missed out of over 930. In the spring of 1967, Brian made no public complaints about his bandmates, nor in private, either.
‘I never heard him slag off the [other] Stones,’ says Mim Scala, who became friends with Brian and his later girlfriend, Suki Potier, in the aftermath of Morocco. ‘He might have gone on to Suki about it, but I never heard him say anything about Mick or Keith. Not once.’
‘It was quite astounding,’ says Stash. ‘Brian would get massive volumes of correspondence sent to him, from fans who complained about Mick. But Brian knew the value of Mick. And he knew the value of Keith.’
‘There was this sort of bravado,’ says Michael Rainey. ‘I’m all right, you know. He never complained to me about anything.’
In fact, while the conventional portrait of Brian in the wake of Anita’s departure was of a broken man, his ego, his conviction that he and Anita were still a golden couple, was still somehow intact, as Stash confirms. ‘He asked me, “What do you think? Do you reckon I have a chance to get Anita back?” I thought he did.’
But as the spring rolled on, the psychodrama within the band became overshadowed by external threats. In the wake of the Redlands raid, the News of the World had announced a major drugs bust but not the identity of the suspects. That all changed on 18 March when the Daily Mirror named Mick and Keith, jumping the gun on formal charges, which reached the Stones’ solicitor, Timothy Hardacre, on the 20th. The news came as a shock because the Stones, according to one of their dealers, Spanish Tony, had dispatched him to bribe the police (although Keylock would later maintain the story was fantasy).
Meanwhile, there was continuing paranoia about the identity of the informant. Hanger-on Nicky Kramer was beaten up by a friend of the Stones in an attempt to make him confess, an incident described by Christopher Gibbs as ‘very unpleasant, awful. I’m sure [Nicky] had nothing to do with spilling any beans.’ David Schneiderman, the most likely suspect, disappeared to California. Keith still suspected Patrick, his chauffeur at the time. More recently,
some have pointed the finger at Tom Keylock, whose brother was a police officer. The News of the World continued to be well informed, revealing that George Harrison had been at Redlands that evening – seemingly incontrovertible evidence supporting the otherwise paranoiac theory that the police wanted to bust the Stones rather than one of the Beatles, who were more beloved by families and the establishment.
Against such a background of backstabbing, suspected duplicity and violence, the Stones’ short European tour, which they’d announced in happier times back in February, should have been a disaster. Brian, still hoping to get Anita back, pulled himself together yet again, telling people he’d been taking guitar lessons to get back his edge – but called Stash, begging him for moral support. In fact, the European shows, chaotic and under-rehearsed as they were, capture the band at a beautiful peak; Keith’s guitar playing is tougher, more muscular – a portent of what he’d be playing in 1969 – while Brian’s instrumental work was ‘beautiful’, says Stash. ‘The press were asking, “What is that instrument?” They meant the dulcimer . . . people were flabbergasted, in great admiration of Brian’s musical abilities.’
Beyond the new toughness and density of the sound, though, one change was inescapable. Right up to 1966, Brian had been the main foil to Mick. Now, further back on the stage, paler, he was overshadowed by Keith, who seemed to have taken on some of Brian’s dark glamour. The Glimmer Twins, bonded by acid visions and betrayal in Morocco, were further forged amid riots in Vienna and Zurich and police intimidation in Warsaw.