Brian Jones: The Making of the Rolling Stones Page 26
Brian’s barrister, James Comyn QC, stood to present his case for mitigation. Brian was a brilliant man brought low by addiction, he told the bench. His client had ‘never taken hard drugs. As for cannabis, he will cut it out completely. It has never helped him solve any problems. In fact, it has created problems. He says that no one should take an example from him.’ Comyn detailed Brian’s achievements as a musician and composer, adding – abasing his client still further – that Brian hoped his fate would act as a deterrent to his fans. The QC closed his case by arguing against an exemplary sentence: ‘He has never been in prison – and it is my urgent plea that it is not now necessary for him to go to prison. People in the public eye are sometimes inflicted with a higher penalty, which sometimes can be harsh and even cruel.’ This was a high-risk strategy, plainly alluding to the sentences handed down to Mick and Keith, which had been overturned on appeal.
Comyn then called Dr Leonard Henry, one of Brian’s psychiatrists, to testify to his client’s fragile mental state. Henry stated that a prison sentence ‘would completely destroy his mental health. He could go into a psychotic depression as he could not possibly stand the stigma of a prison sentence, and he might well attempt to injure himself.’
Brian then took the stand. Comyn coaxed him through a set of questions designed to show his fragility – and his contrition. Brian agreed he had been lax in allowing others to smoke cannabis in his flat, then agreed to Comyn’s suggestion that he would now forswear use of the drug. ‘This is my precise intention,’ he stated. ‘They have only brought me trouble and disrupted my career and I hope this will be an example for anybody who is tempted to try them.’
After Brian concluded his testimony, there was a ninety-minute recess while Seaton and his panel considered their verdict. When Seaton returned, all the words he had heard were mere tears in the rain. ‘I would be failing in my duty,’ he informed Brian, ‘if I failed to pass a sentence of imprisonment. These offences to which you have pleaded guilty are very serious. You occupy a position by which you have a large following of youth and it therefore behoves you to set an example. You have broken down on that.’ As friends in the gallery gasped in shock, Seaton handed down a term of nine months for allowing premises to be used for the smoking of cannabis and three months for possession, the two to run concurrently. To compound the brutality of the sentence – more than Robert Fraser had received for possessing heroin – Seaton responded to the request for bail with an emphatic ‘No!’
Brian ‘didn’t move very much’ as he heard his sentence, Caroline Coon remembers. ‘But it was obviously a horrible shock. You can see someone physically diminished by the process.’ Stash was ‘appalled by Brian’s contrite look and distraught defeated expression. Poor Brian was in shock – having accepted to plead guilty he was definitely not prepared for what was coming.’
Brian was led down to the cells, ready for his transfer to Wormwood Scrubs. His meek submission to authority had been for nothing. Stash and especially Keith Richards were disappointed, even exasperated, by his guilty plea, the way he’d abased himself. But Coon, who’d witnessed many such fights in the wake of the 1965 Dangerous Drugs Act, points out this acquiescence was exactly what the system was designed to produce: ‘I got a sense of this from all the other young men being arrested. It completely undermines your strength, your sense of yourself when people in uniforms, the state apparatus, can wipe you off the face of the earth. Unless you’ve had it happen to yourself, you can’t imagine how vile it is, or the traumatic stress it’s going to induce.’ As for the criticism that pleading mitigation was an act of weakness, Coon insists, ‘A lot of more powerful men than Brian Jones had to follow advice to put up whatever mitigation he could. These were the judges who used to hang you, or send you to Australia; there was nothing you could do about a hanging judge. I don’t think he lost any dignity whatsoever using whatever means he could to keep himself out of prison.’
Coon had earlier seen Mick Jagger frightened and shaken in the Release office, trying to wrestle with the implications of his case. Now the flank assault on Brian Jones, even after sage voices like William Rees-Mogg’s had exposed the hypocrisy of exemplary sentencing, evoked special outrage, which culminated in a spontaneous demonstration of sympathy with the brutalized dandy. ‘Brian was much more vulnerable,’ says Jeff Dexter, ‘that’s why we demonstrated. It was not right that a boy of that condition should be thrown in jail.’ That evening a group of supporters including Abrams, Coon, Dexter, Chris Jagger, Susan Ziegler (Hoppy Hopkins’ girlfriend) and four others marched down the King’s Road, handing out fake joints and shouting ‘Free Brian Jones!’ It was a rainy, quiet night, and they protested unhindered for some time before the police arrived, insisted they needed a licence for their demonstration, and ultimately arrested the entire group. Dexter was slammed into a Black Maria hard enough to dent it, and was then charged with malicious damage of police property.
The following evening Brian was released from Wormwood Scrubs on bail subject to his appeal. He was a diminished figure – which was presumably the outcome Reginald Ethelbert Seaton had sought. The appeal was scheduled for 12 December, and in the weeks before it was heard, Mick and Keith’s own hanging judge, Leslie Block, happened to be the after-dinner speaker at a gathering of Horsham farmers. Block kept his metaphors nice and simple, to suit agrarian types, for he spoke about farmers’ problems with stones: ‘I may say they are of no use to man or beast unless they are otherwise dealt with – by being ground very small, or to be cut down in size.’ To guffaws from his audience, he went on to say that he and his fellow magistrates had done their best to cut these stones down to size, ‘but alas, the Court of Criminal Appeal let them roll free!’ Block’s words were a blatant reference to an issue that was sub judice, as Brian’s appeal was yet to be heard – but the judge was, of course, never censured.
As Brian waited for his appeal to be heard, the police, according to reports, stopped and searched his car once again as his current chauffeur, Brian Pastalanga, was driving him down London Embankment. Pastalanga stopped Brian as he attempted to jump in the Thames. A few weeks later Brian’s appeal was lodged, based on a series of psychiatric reports that detailed his feelings of inadequacy and the possible imminence of a complete mental breakdown. The dangerous dandy unmasked himself as an inadequate, and in return for this prostration before the authorities was fined £1,000 and given three years’ probation.
*
The light is clear and white and the snow crunches underfoot as Marianne Faithfull walks from the sleek modern restaurant of her concrete-and-glass Austrian hotel to the bar area where she can light up. Last week she went to Vienna, to find out about her family’s wartime history for an upcoming TV documentary. Tonight she will sing in a production of Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, a work Marianne especially identifies with because she reckons she’s committed most of them.
Marianne is a survivor of the onslaught that broke Brian. But this magnificent woman, whose mother and grandfather fought the Nazis and lived to tell the tale, felt herself utterly destroyed by the confrontation which cemented Mick and Keith’s reputation. ‘I felt crushed by the Redlands bust. My self-esteem went down so low, I think I would have killed myself. And I got the feeling people really wanted me to kill myself. Oh it was hard.’ Only in recent years has there come any reconciliation with those dreadful days, aided by the closure of the News of the World, the newspaper that kicked off the whole nasty affair. ‘I did feel good when it shut down. I danced on their grave. I’ve known that evil people come to no good.’
Yet it wasn’t just the media and the establishment that nearly broke Marianne. Like Brian, she is a fascinating person, imperious (‘I can’t share a salad, I was an only child’) yet with a sensitivity no one else within the Stones coterie could even imagine. When Marianne heard that Brian had died, she identified with his plight so much that she swallowed a bottle of barbiturates.
Wh
y did she do it?
‘Because I realized, when I saw all that happening to Brian, what they would do to me. I’d gone through the whole thing, watching it. And it was a terrible experience. The bit where they would pretend to be recording Brian and not have him plugged in. It was really terrible.’
Of all the Stones insiders, it’s the women who stand up for Brian Jones. Her friend Anita Pallenberg has mentioned the feud against Brian, and Marianne uses the same terminology. Brian persuaded Mick and Keith to start up the Stones and in return was the victim of a ‘vendetta’, says Marianne. ‘For being right.’
Marianne is fair, and adds, ‘I did understand why they behaved like that – and Brian was asking for it. I do understand why they loathed him. [But] I saw him as another person with low self-esteem who needed to be helped. Not to be destroyed and humiliated and ground underfoot. Because that’s what was going on.’
10
Bou Jeloud
BRIAN MAY HAVE been free from the threat of prison, but the escape had come at a heavy cost. The others had drawn together in their troubles; Brian was split apart from them. Hence throughout 1968 Brian and Suki were in retreat, from the police, from their own demons, from the deathly cold within the Stones. Brian could never quite get back in, as if he’d committed some unpardonable sin. As one person in the tangled, dangerous web of relationships put it, ‘Whatever went down, went down heavy.’
By the beginning of 1968, Brian and Suki had found temporary refuge on the fabulous Berkshire estate of Sir William Piggott-Brown, the heir to a banking fortune who also happened to be a champion amateur jockey and owned one of the finest stables of racing horses in the south. Like so many bluebloods, Sir William latched on to the new rock aristocracy, investing in an agency, Scala Brown Associates, acquiring a slice of Island Records and swapping his Mr Vincent suits for kaftans and frilly shirts. Sir William’s estate, at Aston Upthorpe, boasted acres of green fields for his thoroughbreds to gallop across, and dozens of perfectly preserved cottages where hipsters could crash out. Island’s key rock act, Traffic, were residents for much of the year. Jimi Hendrix, Brian, Suki and others were frequent visitors for parties, which normally ended with dozens of beautiful people lying wrecked around the pool while George the butler made his way among them, neatly suited, trundling a wheelbarrow into which he’d load the detritus: empty bottles, crystal glasses, knickers, bras, amyl nitrate poppers. Although Traffic wrote the best part of an album in their little cottage on the estate, that was an exception to the rule. ‘It wasn’t creative, it was decadent,’ says Mim Scala, founder of the agency that bore his name, and who would later initiate the Stones’ contact with the French film director Jean-Luc Godard. ‘It was great for all of us; a little madness took place. There were lots of girls, lots of bits and pieces, then it would be back to work in London on the Monday.’
Scala would become one of Brian’s key companions over the next year, as much as anyone was key. Aside from Suki, he didn’t seem to have any regular friends beyond hangers-on who’d ply him with Quaaludes or scrounge drinks when he was at the Speakeasy, the Revolution or Blaise’s. Tom Keylock returned as his regular driver after Brian Pastalanga was sacked during an argument over a stolen camera; but Stan Blackbourne, the Stones accountant who had become his main supporter in the office, left for a quiet Klein-free life at Kassner, a music publisher. Many of Brian’s confidants simply slipped away; Jimi Hendrix, who’d met up with Brian regularly throughout 1967, was one of the few who remained. The pair relaxed in each other’s company, free from business hassles, talking and playing. ‘It was lovely hearing them,’ says Scala, who hung out with them at Aston Upthorpe and at his own flat. ‘They were two of a kind, and they were happy.’
Although the Stones and the Jimi Hendrix Experience had overlapped during sessions at Olympic, there was surprisingly little interaction between the two. The Stones and their followers, even regular blokey ones like Ian Stewart, were ‘surprisingly aloof’, says Roger Mayer, who worked at Olympic and designed guitar processors for Hendrix. It was only Brian who seemed to get on with Jimi – ‘maybe because they were both quiet types, really’, says Mayer.
It’s not known if they jammed together in 1967, but they hung out together more often over the first half of 1968, playing on acoustic or occasionally electric guitars, with Brian mostly playing slide. Sadly, their one studio session together, on 21 January, is a historic recording that is best left in the vaults according to Eddie Kramer, Jimi’s main studio engineer. Jimi was in the early stages of working out All Along The Watchtower, with Dave Mason guesting on acoustic. Noel Redding had got bored and headed for the pub while the pair of them, plus Mitch Mitchell, persevered. The arrangement of the Dylan song proved tricky. Jimi shouted at Mason a couple of times as they worked it out, and the number of unsuccessful takes mounted. On something like take 21 a new instrument is heard: ‘a piano. It’s out of tune and it’s absolutely horrible,’ says Kramer, ‘and it’s poor old Brian, who had stumbled into the studio, drunk out of his mind.’ Jimi was delighted to have his old friend turn up for the session, whether or not he was compos mentis. But as Brian continued to plonk away, Jimi started to look imploringly at Kramer, wondering how they could get him to stop without hurting his feelings. Finally Brian’s head slumped over, and he fell asleep at the piano. The trio finished the definitive version of All Along The Watchtower, a complete rearrangement which Dylan would later adopt for his own performances, while the founder Stone snoozed away in the corner of the studio.
As the Stones planned for their next album, Brian initially seemed present only in name. Mick and Keith recruited new producer Jimmy Miller without consulting him, although the template they mapped out – cranked-up, compressed blues – was ironically close to the sound Brian had championed in the early days. With Brian broken, his self-confidence almost totally eroded, Mick was often quite kind: he arranged a meeting with Miller, who told Brian there was no pressure, he was welcome to contribute whenever he felt like it. Keith, meanwhile, was working on a dramatically new sound, finally abandoning the Chuck Berry riffs that had inspired him since his teens. Keith’s new style was based around the Open D and Open E tunings, a style that had been Brian’s trademark when he advertised for musicians back in 1962, only Keith used them without a slide.
Free from the influence of Andrew Oldham, Keith’s creativity blossomed, as he laid acoustic guitar on top of acoustic guitar, processing the sound through odd objects like a cheap cassette recorder for a monstrous, lo-fi sound. Brian, too, was finally free of Oldham, the man who’d turned his guitar down in the mix ever since I Wanna Be Your Man, and stopped him doing interviews. But in the interim, Keith had learned all Brian’s tricks. Brian had held on, made meaningful contributions to Satanic Majesties; with Mick and Keith back in control, that era was at an end.
Although Mick and Keith felt battered and betrayed by their own drugs bust, they would come to embrace the image that had been thrust on them of being counter-culture heroes. With Brian it was another matter: speak to any of their friends and there’s a general consensus that he ‘brought it on himself’. As Keith Altham, a close friend of Stu’s, puts it, ‘Part of it was his own fault, because he’d given information to the News of the World guys.’ Even incidents outside Brian’s control seemed to conspire against him. On 16 March, after a session in which the band had laid down the beginning of several songs including Jumpin’ Jack Flash, Brian returned home to Chesham Street to find the front door smashed in. In yet another drama, Linda Keith had ended a recently rekindled relationship with Brian with a drug overdose. Somehow the police had received a tip-off, broken in and carried Linda off to hospital. Yet again, Brian hogged newspaper headlines for the wrong reasons.
*
In a generally grim year, there were flashes of the old Brian, the explorer, the one who searched out exotic music. Around 20 March, this search brought him back to a location that embodied his youthful dreams –
but it evoked more recent nightmares, too.
For several months, perhaps since the time Brion Gysin had taken him to the Jemaa el-Fnaa back in that fateful March of 1967, he’d been finding out about the music he’d heard there. The first of the Stones to trace blues back to Robert Johnson and Charley Patton, he’d since delved deeper still, into the African roots of the music, back to one of its likeliest sources: Gnawa music, an ancient form based around the hypnotic, unrelenting beat of the tbel drum, call-and-response chants like the earliest American work songs, and a musical scale that, with its flattened fifths and thirds, echoed that of American blues. The music had become something of an obsession, one he’d enthused about to friends like Mim Scala; so when Paul Getty Jr, who’d recently completed remodelling an ancient house – palace, really – in Marrakesh, invited him to stay, he leapt at the chance.
Brian enlisted Glyn Johns, once again, for the project. The plan was grandiose, brilliant even. His intention was to capture the rhythmic trance music of Gnawa, he told the engineer; then he’d take the tapes to New York and overdub R&B musicians, something taut and funky like the Cold Sweat style of James Brown. It was a visionary concept, anticipating the work of people like Peter Gabriel, even 1990s sampling culture.
Brian and Johns flew directly from London and were soon ensconced in unthinkable luxury in Getty’s palace. The oil heir was at the high point of his drop-out phase, wearing kaftans (a little gawkily), and his wife Talitha was at the peak of her radiance, effortlessly stylish in expensively ethnic costume. The house had been remodelled by Bill Willis but retained its ancient textures, one luxuriously tiled space leading seamlessly on to another, many of them opening up into internal courtyards or arcades, all of them lit by candlelight at night. In the midst of this beauty and privilege, Brian refused to leave the palace. Instead, he proceeded to get absolutely stoned. ‘I tried to get him out of the house,’ says Johns, ‘and I just couldn’t manage it. He got out of it the minute he arrived, and remained that way more or less until we left.’