Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  The irony of a man purchasing boxes full of clothes when he had no fixed abode would only dawn a couple of weeks later, on 2 June, when the pair appeared at West London Magistrates Court and elected for a jury trial. Up to this time, Brian had been upbeat. But when he realized he was being charged with the new, catch-all offence of allowing his house to be used for the smoking of cannabis – an offence that carried a maximum jail term of ten years – his resolution wavered. ‘We were shocked by how these cops would lie – we thought the straight world was essentially straight,’ says Stash, who was charged with possession of cannabis. ‘To see Scotland Yard lying through their teeth was very frightening, I can tell you. It was suddenly a really ice-cold shower.’

  For all his faults, Allen Klein had had good intentions when he advised Brian to keep changing his location and stay away from Stash and the other Stones. He issued the same advice to Mick and Keith – but they simply ignored it. In the wake of 2 June, Klein’s advice and the suggestions of Brian’s own lawyers ensured that Brian became totally isolated. ‘After a few days of being together at the Hilton, this connection I had with Brian just tapered off,’ says Stash. ‘Because he had been told, like a schoolboy, you don’t hang out with him.’ Mick, Marianne, Keith, Anita and Michael Cooper would all cling to each other as threats, both external and internal, escalated. Mick, Keith and Robert Fraser’s case, which had opened on 10 May, was transferred to a bigger court, to be heard by the Chichester Quarter Sessions at the end of June; Brian and Stash’s case, in turn, would be heard at the London Inner Sessions in the autumn. In these ominous circumstances, it wasn’t surprising that the cracks in the organization would open up.

  Andrew Oldham, still convinced he was integral to the band’s future and in constant touch with Klein, followed his mentor’s instructions to lie low. ‘Allen totally played Andrew, played to his weaknesses,’ says Oldham’s business partner Tony Calder. ‘It was horrible.’ Oldham only realized he was history in the course of a conversation in the control booth at Olympic, most likely around 12 June. Oldham had asked his favoured photographer, Gered Mankowitz, along for the discussion; Mick had brought Michael Cooper. ‘Mick told Andrew, in front of me, that Michael Cooper was going to shoot the next sleeve,’ says Mankowitz. ‘And this showed Andrew had been removed, as being the controller of the image. So I knew I was finished – and that Andrew was finished. It was totally cold. I remember feeling for him terribly, it was agony.’

  Although Oldham would later comment on the split with impressive sang-froid, the legal situation plus the schism with the band contributed to a near nervous breakdown. ‘He was absolutely fuckin’ terrified of the police,’ says Calder. ‘Then he was under a Dr Mac at a nursing home in Highgate, where it was all nuns, and they gave him electric shock treatment. He asked me to sign the form, I wouldn’t do it . . . but he went ahead with the electric shock therapy anyway.’

  Once the split was formalized, around August, Klein took over all financial control, while Jo Bergman, who’d previously worked as an assistant to Marianne Faithfull, ran the London office. Yet even by the summer it was obvious the situation was a mess. According to Stan Blackbourne, Klein was largely absent when it came to fighting legal battles; Blackbourne and the Stones’ PR Leslie Perrin ended up doing the work. ‘At the Stones’ trial Klein came in full of bluster but the job had already been done by us over here,’ says Blackbourne. ‘He only came over to get his own publicity.’

  With Mick and Keith grappling with their own troubles, it’s unlikely they gave much thought to Brian. Instead, it was left to the band’s so-called rivals to give the isolated guitarist public support. Paul McCartney called Stash to offer legal help – ‘He was telling me, “It’s ridiculous, absurd, you have to challenge them”’ – and took the estranged rock’n’roll aristo under his wing. He called Brian and asked him down to a Beatles session at Abbey Road on 8 June.

  Paul liked Brian: ‘He had a good old sense of humour; I remember laughing and giggling a lot with him.’ He also noticed that he would ‘shake a little bit’, and with gentle concern speculated that he liked drugs a little more than was good for him. That day the Beatles were working on a bizarre experimental piece with the briefest of lyrics – ‘you know my name – look up the number’ – which John Lennon had, according to legend, lifted from a phone directory. They had been messing with the basic structure for two days when Brian arrived at Abbey Road, and though Paul expected him to play guitar, Brian had brought his old alto saxophone. In a four-hour session, the band recorded piano, drums, guitars, bass and vibraphone, while Brian added a sequence of off-beat ska-parody rhythm fills, played with perfect precision, plus a short, cheesy sax solo which closes the definitive edit of the song, the perfect finishing touch to the Goons-style silly voices and nightclub crooning. It was the only time a Rolling Stone contributed to a Beatles backing track. The song would not be issued until March 1970, by which time both the Beatles and Brian Jones had passed into history.

  A few days after the Abbey Road session, Brian fled London for perhaps the ultimate episode of escapism, flying to San Francisco for the Monterey Festival, an almost unthinkably pioneering musical event. The first modern rock’n’roll festival, it was organized by a committee including Papa John Phillips, Lou Adler and Derek Taylor. Brian flew over to introduce Jimi Hendrix, still an obscure figure in the USA, catching the same flight as Eric Burdon, who unveiled his new, psychedelic Animals at the festival. ‘We both dropped acid, and then went through customs together,’ says Burdon. ‘That was quite exciting.’

  Brian had arranged to meet his old femme fatale Nico, who was herself estranged from the Velvets and looking to attract publicity in her own right. ‘She was a tough piece of work,’ says Guy Webster, who photographed her at Monterey and elsewhere. ‘She walked around with Brian like a celebrated concubine at court – she was difficult, but we got on well. They were both high, and enjoying themselves.’ Ever assertive and confrontational – ‘and a little predatory’, as Stash puts it – Nico spent much of their time together mocking Brian’s clothes, his constant questions about whether a particular scarf went with a particular jacket: ‘I made fun of him, but he said I was quite the same – and why should a girl spend more time than a man? I said I spent some time with simple things . . . [but he] looked like he had thrown it on. This provoked him, which I liked to do, frankly.’ Nico thought Brian looked spotty – he needed a mother. But at the festival, Brian was almost constantly beatific; there were no snakes crawling on the floor there. ‘He was very happy,’ says Keith Altham, who travelled over as Hendrix’s PR, ‘walking around in lace frills and finery, a long flowing robe like he was Queen Boudicca of the pop festival. Considerably out of it, making dreamy little comments . . . he was good at dreamy little comments.’

  Sometimes, the more worldly types like Altham thought this was all trendy druggy nonsense as Brian assured him, ‘It’s all changing, man, tell them about it back home.’ Then Altham mentioned something about free love. With Nico on his arm, Brian looked at him from under his long blond fringe and replied, ‘It’s not free, Keith. And it’s not love.’ Altham took in the sight of Brian, with his Germanic lookalike lover towering over him, and thought to himself, ‘Well, you’ve not lost all your marbles, then!’

  Brian’s speech introducing Jimi Hendrix, who would go on to deliver a jaw-dropping performance, was a big deal. Many British musicians – Eric Clapton, for example – were envious of Hendrix, but not Paul McCartney, who helped get him on the bill, and not Brian. ‘They were kindred spirits,’ says engineer Eddie Kramer. ‘Brian in the studio was a creative genius – he wasn’t afraid of anything. And that’s exactly what Chas Chandler said when we were recording Jimi in the very beginning: “The rules are, there are no rules.” And Jimi was like Brian – he would try anything.’

  Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, Brian’s willingness to try anything also extended to the festival’s newest psychedelics, which
included both STP and DMT – ‘horrible, horrible drugs’ as one connoisseur, Ron Asheton of Detroit’s Stooges, described them. Combined with his new rootless lifestyle, poor diet and constant ill health – Eddie Kramer remembers his problems with asthma becoming more obvious from 1967 onwards – drug abuse and bad advice would soon, in his friends’ view, contribute to the loss of the old Brian. Stash insists the isolation imposed on Brian following the bust forced a profound change: ‘He simply fell into bad company. One guy I would single out, an American, introduced Brian to Mandrax. That was a disaster.’

  Mandrax (known as Quaalude in the USA) was a legal sedative, similar in effect to barbiturates, which blotted out reality and helped Brian sleep. Over this period, sleep was what he craved: there are countless stories of his asking strangers to stay with him, to talk to him until he drifted away. But Mandrax relaxes muscles, hampers coordination, often turned Brian into a mumbling mess, and wouldn’t take long simply to obliterate most of his musical abilities – that insight that had so often enabled him to transform Jagger-Richards songs from good to sensational. The deterioration was frighteningly fast and was already obvious by the end of June.

  ‘It was horrible when Brian started taking downers,’ Stash continues. ‘I was at Robert Fraser’s apartment one day, at 23 Mount Street, we were discussing what was happening, and Brian came to see me there. And he entered through the doorway and, attempting to cross the room, he hit every piece of furniture, bouncing from one to another like a ping-pong ball. It was a dreadful sight. He was a completely changed person.’

  ‘He did have some shite friends, all these arseholes, right after the Monterey period,’ agrees Tony Bramwell. ‘Awful people. I think they fucked him up, more than the Anita thing.’

  Previously, those people in the Stones circle who didn’t like Brian at least had respect for him; he was a pain, attention-seeking and often telling ill-thought-out lies, but they knew, even grudgingly, he was a musical visionary. Now he was becoming a figure of pathos. ‘He was a strange, fucked-up figure who I didn’t get on with,’ says Tony Calder. ‘Yet if you set him a musical challenge, he would do it. But [in late 1967] he was a total victim. He’d put his arm around you, saying, “Would you like my coat?” Trying to buy friends. He was so desperate to find friends. He had nothing.’

  *

  By 27 June, Mick, Keith and Robert Fraser were deeply embroiled in their own troubles as the main trial opened at Chichester Sessions. Mick and Keith’s barrister, Michael Havers, was a legal heavyweight who later rose to become chairman of the Conservative Party; but at Chichester the trio were faced with Judge Leslie Kenneth Block, an ex-military man turned gentleman farmer and member of the Garrick and the MCC known locally as a ‘hanging judge’. Fraser pleaded guilty to possession of heroin tablets, and was remanded in custody. Mick’s defence for possession of Marianne’s seasickness tablets was based on the fact that his doctor knew, and approved of, their use, and of course they were legal in Italy where they’d been purchased. Block minced no words in briefing the jury. ‘You may think I am wasting my time in summing up,’ he intoned, ‘[but] I direct you that there is no defence to this charge.’ Thus instructed, the jury took fewer than six minutes to declare Mick Jagger guilty. As Mick reeled in shock, Block refused to grant bail – meaning both Mick and Fraser would spend that night behind bars. To emphasize the intimidating Victorian brutality underlying the case, the pair were manacled to each other when they were brought back to the Chichester court the next morning to hear Keith’s trial and await sentencing. A photo of the pair in handcuffs, transformed into art by Richard Hamilton and entitled Swingeing London, would become a defining image of the era.

  The case against Keith was based on Schneiderman’s possession of cannabis and relied heavily on innuendo around Marianne’s naked presence – which the British media lapped up eagerly, as newsrooms full of jaded journos drooled over fantasies of drug-fuelled orgies. Fertile imaginations soon concocted their own versions of what had happened at Redlands, which meant that Marianne became another, less celebrated victim of the bust.

  Keith’s trial was a similar ludicrous formality to that of Mick’s, with one saving grace. Faced with a supercilious, sneering barrister who asked if Marianne’s presence, cloaked in a large rug, was ‘normal’, he replied, ‘We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.’ Keith’s defiance marked the point at which a shy, gawky kid with prominent ears became a bona fide rebel. His stance was more than justified, given that the prosecution’s case against him was based on a generalized smear. Marianne’s lack of inhibition, the prosecution suggested, could only be explained by drugs. The group was being prosecuted for a lifestyle choice, not a crime. Meanwhile, the defence for Keith revolved around the allegation that the affair was a set-up, that Schneiderman was a plant.

  Mick, in contrast to the more sanguine Keith, was near breaking point as events unfolded. Judge Block was relishing his task, and as the jury pronounced Keith guilty, he ignored submissions from Havers that the newly created offence of which Keith had been convicted was intended to target organized drug-taking establishments operating for profit. Block handed down sentences of three months for Mick, six months for Fraser, and a year for Keith. That night, Fraser and Keith became prisoners 7854 and 7855 at the notorious Wormwood Scrubs and were issued with the standard prison fatigues and underwear; Mick, more isolated, was confined to Brixton Prison, a near broken man whom Marianne saw whimpering almost at the point of nervous breakdown.

  In later years, the allegation that the police demanded a bribe, which was paid but promptly disappeared, was made repeatedly by Keith Richards and others. It’s impossible to substantiate the claim. Some insiders such as Tom Keylock suggest that the supposed bribe money was actually pocketed by Spanish Tony, one of Keith’s dealers. The News of the World would later admit to paying an informer, who would therefore have had a financial interest in ensuring the Stones were convicted. In today’s legal landscape, this would be regarded as prejudicial. In 1967, the newspaper simply brazened it out.

  The News of the World’s initiative would have grim results. Keith Richards said that Fraser’s imprisonment was ‘probably the same as being inducted in the Army’. It’s hard to conclude this is anything other than the callousness of the survivor: Fraser’s gallery was placed in receivership while he remained in prison and his family would prove far less supportive when he attempted to resuscitate the business four months later. Friends – including Keith and Anita, Richard Hamilton, Paul McCartney and others – rallied round, but Fraser would close his gallery in the summer of 1969.

  There was temporary respite on 30 June, when Havers presented an appeal at the High Court, arguing that the sentences handed down to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were a judgement on their notoriety rather than their crimes. Judge William Kenneth Diplock granted bail, for the mammoth figure of £5,000 for both Mick and Keith; Stan Blackbourne and Les Perrin each provided personal sureties for £1,000. But Mick and Keith’s release on bail was but one bright spot in an otherwise grim atmosphere. The band was short of money, short of a producer, and Brian’s paranoia meter was on overload.

  He had a new companion as his tailspin continued. In the aftermath of Tara Browne’s death he’d been a vital, consoling presence for Tara’s girlfriend, Ossie Clark model Suki Potier, who might have survived the crash but was severely traumatized. The pair had met the day before Brian’s bust (Stash had designs on Suki, but called her over to their Paris hotel, deciding Brian’s need was the greater). With her fine features and long blonde bob, Suki bore a strong resemblance to Brian – which meant she looked like Anita, too. Stash considered her ‘an adequate replacement [for Anita]. But she was a jinxed person.’ Mim Scala, another mutual friend, confirms, ‘She was unlucky. But if you put it another way, she did survive the crash that killed Tara. Suki was a class act, a very beautiful girl who really loved Brian – she used to hang in there, and really cared
about him.’ Anita had been a powerful presence who would slap Brian back – although, of course, friends like Zouzou contend that Anita would initiate many of the dramas and violent spats that characterized their relationship. For all her resemblance to Anita, Suki possessed none of her predecessor’s fieriness or indomitability. ‘She was very much more ladylike than Anita,’ says Scala. ‘I think she was a debutante. She was certainly very well mannered. There was nothing of the street kid about her, she was simply very pretty and very quiet.’

  Friends agreed that Suki was never a strong enough presence to arrest Brian’s decline. But the question has to be asked – who would have been? For the assaults on and intimidation of Brian Jones, the dandy of the Stones, were more sustained and relentless than those that faced Mick and Keith.

  A few days after the bust, Stash had been welcomed by Paul McCartney, who was evangelistic about showing solidarity with the establishment’s intended victims and invited him to stay in his three-storey Regency town house on Cavendish Avenue. Brian visited Stash several times there, from mid May onwards. It was, incredibly, a mere five years since Brian had left Cheltenham as a young man with more focus and dedication than any of his peers, intent on assembling a gang to play his beloved R&B. Now, for the first time, he felt completely alone. The result was a profound despair. Over the course of Brian’s visits to Cavendish Avenue, Stash was staggered by the transformation in his attitude. He’d simply given up. ‘Instead of saying, “Fight the good fight!” which Paul McCartney was advocating, Brian was taking a totally defeatist line: “Oh, they’re too strong for us.” He was in a terrible state, preaching a tale of pessimism and woe. His sensitive nature got the worst of him, because there is that drawback, when extreme sensitivity makes you wimp out instead of toughing it out.’

  Brian’s ever-strengthening conviction that he was simply a victim and that his situation was hopeless was part of a vicious feedback cycle, for that self-pity inspired ever more wilful, childish behaviour, which estranged him further from his friends. McCartney happened to be away during Brian’s final visit to Cavendish Avenue; a large tub of the then legal and extremely fashionable pharmaceutical cocaine had been left on the mantelpiece. ‘It was out in the open, and Brian helped himself to it,’ says Stash. ‘All of it. I’m in charge of Paul’s house, and I’m saying, “Paul will be really upset if it’s gone,” and Brian says, “Don’t worry, I’ll replace it.”’ McCartney heard from friends that there had been some kind of party and called Stash to ask what had been happening. ‘And of course I say, “Don’t worry, there’s been no party, only Brian, and he’s going to replace [the cocaine]. If he doesn’t, I’m responsible.” But of course, Brian never replaced it.’