Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Read online

  Throughout June, Brian continued to descend into the abyss, and Suki was dragged down along with him, says Stash. ‘Suki started out as well as anybody can be, very fresh and lovely. But Brian was like a kind of disease, he wilted Suki terribly. That’s the sad aspect of this depression, the absolute despondency he sank into.’ Stash managed to leave the country early in July, by which time the fight and optimism Brian had managed to sustain in the wake of his abandonment by Anita had completely vanished. Not only did he feel the Drugs Squad had him licked, he acted as if he was no longer part of the band he’d founded. ‘He would speak to me as if he was not in the band any more,’ Stash recalls. ‘As if the band and he were separate entities. He’d talk about “them”, not “us”. He was the only one who totally caved in, where Mick and Keith toughed it out. Brian very soon after . . . fell apart.’

  If Brian buckled where Mick and Keith merely bent, there was good reason. Stan Blackbourne’s contention that of all the Stones it was Brian who was ‘Public Enemy Number One’ for the police was borne out by renewed harassment that continued even as Mick and Keith were making their appeal. On the run from Courtfield Road, Brian and Suki had temporarily holed up in the Royal Garden Hotel. For two or three nights around 2 July the couple were neighbours with the Monkees, who were in town for three shows at the Empire Pool, and who demonstrated their solidarity with the embattled Stones by wearing black armbands for the occasion.

  Writers have commented on Brian’s ‘paranoia’ over this period, yet even during this brief, secret hideout the police were stalking him. Les Perrin, like his friend Stan Blackbourne, had a background in the forces and had built up contacts within the police, who started to tip him off about upcoming raids. ‘Leslie was a good guy who let me know when a police raid was gonna take place on a flat,’ says Blackbourne. ‘We could never reveal to anyone what was going on.’

  Around 2 July, Perrin’s phone rang with news of an impending bust at the Royal Garden; he and Blackbourne managed to make it to Brian’s room before Pilcher and the Drugs Squad arrived, where they found Brian and Suki semi-comatose, attempting to blot out their troubles with tranquillizers. ‘I put Brian over my shoulder, Leslie put Suki over his, [and] we went down by consent of the nervous manager through the service exit. Hundreds of screaming kids out front shouting out for the Monkees. We threw rugs over the back of the Rolls over Brian and Suki, with me and Leslie sitting on top.’

  In the aftermath of the getaway, Perrin and Blackbourne decided Brian desperately needed professional help, and delivered him to a health farm in Hampshire, where Perrin knew the chief doctor. When Brian regained full consciousness he insisted on leaving immediately, though Blackbourne managed to talk him round. ‘OK, I’ll stay on one condition,’ Brian told the Stones accountant. ‘That you stay with me, and don’t go home for all the time I have to be here. If you won’t stay, I’ll make a nuisance of myself.’

  Later that evening, Blackbourne discovered his role was simply to stay with Brian until the guitarist fell asleep. Brian wouldn’t even contemplate Blackbourne bedding down in the room next door – he begged the accountant to stay with him until he dropped off. This would become a recurring theme over subsequent months: the only way he could sleep was with someone watching at his side.

  Brian’s dire condition was hardly noticed around the Stones’ circle; instead, the focus was on Mick and Keith’s upcoming appeal, scheduled for 31 July. On Saturday, 1 July, The Times’ William Rees-Mogg had penned an editorial based on Alexander Pope’s poem Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot. The piece didn’t mention Keith Richards or Robert Fraser; Rees-Mogg focused solely on the case of Mick Jagger, who had been jailed and photographed in handcuffs for possessing tablets that were completely legal in the country where he had purchased them. Rees-Mogg’s argument was calm, logical and powerful, suggesting that the traditional values which the Stones were thought to challenge necessarily included those of ‘tolerance and equity’. This Times editorial became a landmark, a potent polemic against the lynchmob mentality of many British newspapers, and was widely regarded as a key factor in the success of Mick and Keith’s appeal. Pope’s line ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ was powerful and appropriate and would become forever associated with Mick, who met Rees-Mogg the same day he received his conditional discharge, 31 July. But the image was far more applicable to the Stones’ pioneering creator, still pursued by the police, and Mick’s girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, both of whose troubles were only just beginning.

  Mick and Keith’s case had indeed proved harrowing, but, as Marianne says today, the trial represented a definitive moment ‘for the Stones. But for me, it was a disaster.’ A rumour that Mick had been engaged in cunnilingus with Marianne, eating a Mars bar out of her vagina, when the police raided Redlands had been circulating since the end of June, and was first referenced in print in Private Eye on 7 July. No one knows whether the tale emanated from the police or from Fleet Street, but it would prove as powerful an image as Rees-Mogg’s butterfly, an inspired misogynist confection that would haunt Marianne for the rest of her life. ‘It was awful, and it was a lie,’ she says. ‘I even wonder today, did my mother hear that story? And if she did, did she believe it? If she did it’s terrible, and it’s really frightening.’

  Marianne was in a state of incomprehension and shock as the rumours continued to spread. Meanwhile, Brian checked out of the home in Hampshire only to sign himself into the Priory Hospital in Roehampton a couple of days later. (In this sad respect, as in many happier ones, Brian was again a fashion leader, for many rock stars, including Eric Clapton and Pete Doherty, would stay at the private clinic in his wake.) Although the reports are mainly second-hand, one anonymous doctor later described him as an especially needy patient: ‘I think [Brian] wanted to treat me as one of his fans or his followers or his girlfriend or his chauffeur . . . you cannot ring [your doctor] at three a.m. [on] six, seven or nine mornings and say, “I’ve decided I must go to so and so, get up and come along.” All the money in the world doesn’t pay for this.’

  Subsequent psychological reports focused on many of Brian’s personality traits, notably his anxiety. The intriguing suggestion, one theorized by several of his ex-partners, is that Brian might have been suffering from a bipolar condition, one that was barely understood at the time, namely hypomania. A true diagnosis would rely on a full history of the individual, but many descriptions of Brian suggest a similar condition. Even in his more despondent moments there seem to have been episodes of manic or grandiose behaviour – if ‘grandiose’ is an adequate word to describe an incident Stan Blackbourne remembers from this period: ‘Brian came in one day and he was dressed like the Archbishop of Canterbury. I said, “Good afternoon, Your Grace.” He said, “Oh, you recognize me? How beautiful. Isn’t it marvellous?” He’d been to Bermans, the costume people in Leicester Square. So he says, “Stan, thank you for all you’ve done, I want to take you out for tea, I won’t take no for answer.” I said, “Brian, you can’t walk down the street dressed as the Archbishop of Canterbury.” He said, “Oh, it’s perfectly all right.”’

  Although Brian exhibited classic manic and depressive symptoms, for a meaningful diagnosis to be made the influence of drugs and lifestyle has to be eliminated. Given his heroic drug intake, it’s impossible to arrive at a definitive conclusion. Stash, the man who spent most time with him in the first half of 1967, points out, ‘This bipolar thing is a modern concept. When I first heard the term I thought it must be some extraordinary advantage, not an oddity to be remedied. Surely we all have some bizarre imbalance, otherwise we’d all be accountants.’

  Whether or not there was a medical cause for Brian’s mood swings, we’ll never know. Of all the varying personality traits that Brian possessed, Stash suggests it was his sensitivity that was the most dominant. We hear this in his music. But it was also ‘his undoing’, Stash adds. ‘He was incredibly vulnerable. You can see why he is accused of being cruel: cruelty is
rage, a frustration that comes of deep, deep sadness and despair. It was very hard for Brian; this action of Anita’s was very hard indeed. He was mean to her, but he was only ever mean in frustration at the fact that he was losing.’

  Brian continued to be the most consistent and imaginative contributor to the album the band was attempting to complete, Her Satanic Majesties Request, pulling together songs like 2000 Light Years From Home, but he fled the country for much of the summer, to Marbella, and later to Libya. One of the many times Keith Altham dropped in on Olympic to see what was happening, Brian showed him a string of brochures of far-off places in Africa and the Far East and told Altham of his fantasies of ‘getting away somewhere, where I can get my head together’. Altham wasn’t convinced: he suspected Brian was as likely to ‘go to Tangier or somewhere, where he could get his head untogether’.

  When that summer Mick and Keith oversaw the cover design for Flowers – a messy grab-bag of assorted tracks for American release only – they rejigged it, a paltry effort featuring cut-out shots of each band member’s head atop a flower stem. According to Bill Wyman, the pair decided to remove the leaves from Brian’s stem: ‘[It was] their idea of a joke. Truth is, I never got it.’

  In the years since, others have wondered why the promotional film of We Love You showed a clip of Brian so obviously out of it, at a time when he had a drugs charge hanging over him. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe that, too, was their idea of a joke.

  As Jack Nitzsche points out, ‘They could be real nasty.’

  *

  It would be hard to overstate the hostility and drudgery around the Stones as the rest of the world enjoyed the summer of love. Stan Blackbourne wouldn’t hold out for too much longer. For one thing, he hated Allen Klein, whom he suspected of financial manipulation using Stones money. ‘Klein was a bit of a nasty individual. I was finding out various things – he was using money earned from royalties or tours abroad to buy companies and sell them at a profit. I’m not saying that he never put the money back, but it was quite unethical.’

  Business meetings at the Hilton became increasingly hostile, as the accountant challenged Klein: ‘Why do we always have great difficulty in receiving money from America, when it’s urgently needed? It seems to take ages before it arrives in our account.’ Klein asked Blackbourne to discuss the matter in private, taking him up to his penthouse suite. ‘That suite has quite a big balcony on top, it’s the highest point of the building. He said, “If I have any more trouble, you’ll go over the end.” I kept calm and said, “Do you think that would be a good idea? There are so many witnesses – this isn’t America, this is England.”’

  Blackbourne held out until the end of 1967, but around him he saw the Stones so embattled, with financial hassles adding to other stresses, that he often thought they were all on the point of giving up. All the Stones had money problems but Brian’s seemed to be the worst as his legal fees mounted and he flitted from hotel to hotel; he was forced to borrow while he waited for the payments promised by Klein to materialize. Bill Wyman detailed one period when Brian accepted $300 from a Major Dawson in Marbella, who’d lent him the money to pay his hotel bill; Brian sent Klein telex after telex for money to repay the debt, while Keith received £20,000 to build a brick wall around Redlands. With desperately few allies, Brian was becoming mostly reliant on Blackbourne and Les Perrin, who with his background in the RAF continued to be a cool head in the near constant crises.

  Later in the year it was Blackbourne who heard news of another raid and raced down to the house where Brian was staying. ‘There were several guys, girls, completely naked, laid out all over the place, stoned up to their eyebrows. Brian didn’t know where he was, he hadn’t got a clue what was happening.’ Blackbourne and his driver turfed out the hangers-on, opened the windows, and the driver took Brian to a safe refuge. ‘There were one or two places we could take him. So I was there when the police arrived, looking at some papers nonchalantly, and when they came in they said, “Is Mr Brian Jones here?” “No.” “When was he here?” “I dunno.” Nothing was found. The rest of the boys didn’t know about these things.’ Perhaps in revenge, the police staged a raid on Blackbourne’s office on Regent Street, complete with a search warrant.

  Even with Mick and Keith’s successful appeals, the general intimidation didn’t let up. ‘Groupie Pilcher was more the run-of-the-mill copper,’ says Caroline Coon, co-founder of Release, which assisted the Stones. ‘But some of the others used to go around like something out of the Mafia. One of them had Savile Row tailored suits and dark glasses. They really revelled in their power, would walk in [and] sit down in your office like they owned the world.’ There were allegations that Pilcher engaged in similar intimidation tactics, turning up at Brian’s new semi-permanent abode, a mansion block flat at 17 Chesham Street, claiming he needed to question him about a murder case.

  Brian remained on the run for most of the autumn, from the police and seemingly from his own band. When the Stones flew over to New York on 13 September he smiled happily for the cameras, and although questioned closely by immigration officials, he seemed fairly chipper. But at a business meeting with Allen Klein the next day to discuss a formal announcement of their separation from Andrew Oldham, it was more obvious than ever that this was now Mick and Keith’s show. The band assembled in all their rented finery for the Michael Cooper shoot but the expensive 3D cover didn’t conceal the lack of inspiration for the Satanic Majesties album, which was released on 8 December. Keith Altham was one of many reviewers who liked the Stones but was shocked by the poor quality of the album. He reviewed it for the NME in the only way possible, by stringing together a nonsensical stream of ‘absolute cobblers’ to mock the album’s vacuous hipness. A couple of days after the review appeared, Altham was walking down Wigmore Street at two in the morning when Marianne pulled up in a chauffeur-driven Rolls, jumped out and hugged him enthusiastically. ‘What a wonderful review, darling! The funniest thing I’ve ever read.’ As Marianne got back in the car and sped off down the street, Altham reflected how the fragile, gorgeous woman was the only person around Mick and Keith’s camp to show any genuine sensitivity – or any real sense of humour, for that matter.

  Maybe there was little to laugh about. After managing to persuade the prosecution to release his passport, Stash had spent most of the autumn in Rome. He returned to London at the end of October, ready for his and Brian’s trial at the Inner London Sessions on the 30th. Brian, as for so much of this year, had fled London, in this instance for Spain, and the pair only met up to discuss their case the day before their court appearance.

  Stash was shocked at what he heard: ‘Brian told me he was pleading guilty. I told him it was the wrong thing. I pleaded with him, begged him. I wasn’t concerned it was damaging my case, I was concerned that it wasn’t right he should plead guilty – he simply shouldn’t admit any guilt.’ Brian’s lawyers had advised him that, in a similar manner to Keith’s case, it was likely that he had no real defence against the charge of allowing his house to be used for the purposes of smoking cannabis. There was logic to the argument, for any defence that the substances were planted, or that Brian’s case did not conform to the intention of the law, was hugely risky. But the option Brian and his advisers chose – to plead guilty, and present his damaged mental state as mitigation – represented an act of surrender to the forces of oppression.

  Brian had started out as the bravest Stone, the one who’d staked everything on the band when the others staked so little. This was his most flagrant act of weakness. ‘It poisoned the well with Keith,’ says Stash. ‘The plan, this establishment conspiracy of the mediocrities, was to destroy the [band], to cut off the head in one stroke.’ Brian pleading guilty made the other Stones more vulnerable, it would give Brian and the band serious problems with US immigration, and it also tarnished Stash by association. ‘My lawyers said, “They don’t have a case,” and told me we were going to ask for costs. And t
he whole process of Brian pleading guilty weakened my case, too.’

  It was with these arguments resounding in their heads that Brian and Stash arrived at the Inner London Sessions. Dressed soberly in a pin-striped suit, white silk shirt and blue polka dot tie, Brian possessed a certain swagger, but it was fragile. The forces that faced him were ominously similar to those at the Chichester court. Chairman Reginald Ethelbert Seaton was sixty-eight, claimed membership of the Scottish gentry and numbered archbishops among his nearly noble lineage. He was flanked by three more magistrates. Impassively, they listened as the prosecution announced that they had dropped the charges against Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, that they would not proceed with the charge of possession of cocaine. Brian then entered a plea of guilty to the cannabis possession, as well as allowing his premises to be used for the smoking of cannabis resin.

  Whereas Mick and Keith had had Marianne and others in the dock alongside them, Brian had little support beyond a small gaggle of fans and a group of protesters led by Steve Abrams, a contributor to IT and more recently founder of SOMA, a pressure group to campaign against cannabis laws. Caroline Coon was also there with her boyfriend, DJ and Release activist Jeff Dexter, Chris Jagger (Mick’s younger brother) and some others from the London counter-culture scene.