Mick Jagger

  Melody Maker voiced the outrage of the UK music press with a front-page editorial denouncing the sentences. There was also a surge of sympathy and support from fellow musicians, though hash and hippie woolly-mindedness together produced little practical help. One bright idea that went nowhere was a giant Free the Stones benefit concert whose proceeds would be spent on an “avalanche of flowers” to bury Judge Block. The most eloquent fraternal gesture came from the Who, the Stones’ nearest rivals on the concert circuit since the Beatles’ withdrawal. While the trial was in progress, they recorded cover versions of two Jagger-Richard songs, “The Last Time” and “Under My Thumb,” to be rush-released on their own Track label with all proceeds going to charity. Full-page advertisements in London’s two evening papers, the Standard and the News, explained why: “The Who consider Mick Jagger and Keith Richard have been treated as scapegoats for the drugs problem and as a protest against the grave sentences imposed on them at Chichester, The Who are issuing today the first of a series of Jagger-Richard songs to keep their work before the public until they are free again to record themselves.”

  This was a world where many people over thirty were still indifferent to pop music. Mick’s and Keith’s convictions made it a national topic that the Beatles never quite had, drawing in even upmarket newspapers that previously had managed to ignore the subject. A range of prominent voices from the older, nonrock generation spoke out against Judge Block’s justice, some predictable, like the jazz singer George Melly and the libertarian drama critic Ken Tynan, others unexpected, like the playwright John Osborne and the right-wing journalist Jonathan Aitken. Britain’s so-called traditional sense of fair play can sometimes be exaggerated, but it was now undoubtedly stirred—on Mick’s behalf in particular. Singing a few louche pop songs, neglecting to visit barbers, peeing up garage walls, even enjoying Mars bars from unusual angles, clearly did not merit anything like the retribution that had been dealt out to him. A letter writer to The Times summed it up by quoting from lines written by the poet A. E. Housman after Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895:

  Oh, who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?

  And what has he been after, that they groan and shake their fists?

  And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air?

  Oh, they’re taking him to prison for the color of his hair.

  Once Mick and Keith had been banged up, however, the madness inexplicably began to go into reverse. At the end of the trial, Michael Havers had registered an appeal on their behalf against both conviction and sentence. With unusual speed, a preliminary hearing was scheduled in the High Court on the very next day, June 30, before Lord Justice Diplock. The full appeal could not be prepared before the current legal term went into a two-month recess, which meant the pair must either be given bail or remain behind bars until September. Just before going into court on June 30, Havers was told by the prosecution QC, Malcolm Morris, that Morris had “direct instructions” from the nameless authorities paying his fee not to oppose bail if it were requested. After a twenty-five-minute hearing, this was granted in the sum £7,000 apiece with the proviso that Mick and Keith should not leave the country before their full appeal was heard, and must surrender their passports in the meantime.

  By midafternoon, the “young sinners” had been sprung from their cells and were back in their normal, or abnormal, clothes with wrists free of all metal restraint, giving a press conference in a Fleet Street pub named the Feathers. The location had been chosen by their publicist, Les Perrin, to symbolize good fellowship with the press corps which had covered the trial; at Perrin’s direction, too, their tone was not of Stones-like antiestablishment fury and contempt, but grateful euphoria to be free again. Sipping a vodka and lime (for which the landlord refused to accept payment), Mick said he’d spent some of his time inside “writing poetry” and that everyone at Brixton had been “very kind and helpful.”

  The next day, Saturday, July 1, The Times’s main editorial or first leader was devoted to him. It had been written by the paper’s editor, William Rees-Mogg, an erudite, tweedy man seemingly at the opposite extreme of everything the Stones represented. Rees-Mogg’s headline was borrowed from the great eighteenth-century satirist Alexander Pope in his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot”: “WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?” Subjecting an unimportant or defenseless target to his lethal mockery, Pope meant, was as futile as strapping that most fragile and evanescent of insects to the medieval revolving rack which broke every bone in its victim’s body. Two hundred years later, when young men once again wore shoulder-length hair, frilly cravats, gold-trimmed coats, gaudy waistcoats, and buckled shoes, the observation had never been more apposite.

  Rees-Mogg observed that a butterfly of modern times, whom he referred to with old-fashioned formality as Mr. Jagger, had been pinned to the wheel and ritually dismembered for “about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts”; one for which as a first offender, where no major drugs were involved and there was no question of trafficking, he could normally have expected to get off with probation. “There are many who take a primitive view of the matter,” the editorial continued. “They consider that Mr. Jagger ‘got what was coming to him.’ They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones’ performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence.

  “As a sociological concern, this is reasonable enough, and at an emotional level it is very understandable, but it has nothing whatever to do with the case. One has to ask a different question: has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism and resentment his celebrity has aroused? If a promising undergraduate had come back from a summer visit to Italy with four pep pills in his pocket, would it have been thought right to ruin his career by sending him to prison for three months? Would it also have been thought necessary to display him handcuffed to the public? . . . It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.”

  In commenting on a case that was still sub judice, Rees-Mogg had deliberately put his paper and himself in contempt of court and liable to draconian penalties. But there was no talk of prosecuting or even reprimanding The Times for having articulated what every rational person in Britain now felt. And as a result, the process of making amends accelerated still further. Michael Havers was notified that Britain’s foremost judge, Lord Chief Justice Parker, had intervened to squeeze Mick and Keith’s appeal hearing into his personal division of the High Court before the end of the law term, on July 31.

  Until then, extreme circumspection was vital. And that didn’t only mean no more weekend parties at Keith’s. The case had become a peg for the growing campaign to have marijuana recognized as less harmful than either nicotine or alcohol and decriminalized. Mick and Keith were naturally in hot demand as figureheads, but—easier for Mick than Keith—could say nothing that might prejudice their appeal. On July 24, The Times published a full-page advertisement headed “The Law Against Marijuana Is Immoral in Principle and Unworkable in Practice, paid for by Paul McCartney.” Its signatories were the four Beatles and Brian Epstein, Jonathan Aitken, George Melly, artist Richard Hamilton, leftist demagogue Tariq Ali, broadcaster David Dimbleby, and more than fifty other names from across the arts and media. Two signatures were notably absent—but might as well have been written in fire.

  A week later, still in Monterey-strength sunshine, came the most extraordinary of all the days later to be so firmly erased from the Jagger memory bank. Mick and Keith began it at the offices of their accountant, Laurence Myers, which had been besieged by anxious fans since before dawn. It happened that the Stones’ fan-club secretary, Shirley Arnold, was to get married a co
uple of weeks later. Shirley had been one of Mick and Keith’s greatest supports through their trial and imprisonment, keeping in constant touch with their distraught mothers and relaying cheerful messages—which no one really believed—not to worry because everything would be fine. In case he should be behind bars again on her wedding day, Mick took the trouble to go to Shirley before leaving for the appeal hearing and wish her happiness. “I remember I was in tears and he was comforting me, but of course I could see he was nervous. Both of them made out it was no big deal, but I knew they were terrified at the thought of going back to prison.”

  Outside the High Court on Fleet Street, crowds were massed as for the start of a Harrods sale. Keith having been smitten by chicken pox, only Mick accompanied their legal team into the tiny courtroom where Lord Chief Justice Parker sat with two fellow appeal judges. Part of the unreality of the experience was that Britain’s most powerful lawmaker should prove as mild-mannered and courteous as the little local beak had been testy and intolerant. Since the Stenamina incontrovertibly counted as unlawful drugs, Mick’s conviction was upheld, but his three-month prison sentence was quashed and a conditional discharge for one year was substituted. This meant that if he committed another offense during the next twelve months, he would be punished for the pills also.

  There followed a mildly spoken homily from the Lord Chief Justice that made Mick hang his shaggy head as no one ever had, or would again. “You are, whether you like it or not, the idol of a large number of the young in this country . . . Being in that position, you have very grave responsibilities. If you do come to be punished, it is only natural that those responsibilities should carry higher penalties.”

  Keith, quarantined in an anteroom, fared even better. The appeal court censured Judge Block for allowing the subpornographic detail about Marianne to be recited in court, and found that police testimony about her “merry mood” and insecure fur rug was insufficient evidence of cannabis smoking. Since Keith could not be convicted of “knowingly permitting” something not proven to have happened, both his conviction and sentence were overturned. However, for the codefendant who had shared Mick’s handcuffs and seen the nadir of his hopes in Lewes Prison, there was no such VIP fast track or happy outcome. Robert Fraser had appealed against his sentence for possessing heroin but, after suffering the handicap of being tried alongside two Rolling Stones, now found himself completely cut loose from them. Fraser had to stay behind bars until a High Court appearance where no kindly Lord Chief Justice presided; because of the serious nature of the drug, his appeal was rejected and he served his full six-month term in Wormwood Scrubs. Oscar Wilde could have warned him, and many to come after him, about the danger of “feasting with panthers.”

  From here, it all became about Mick. After his High Court appearance, he was joined by Marianne and driven straight to the headquarters of Granada Television in Golden Square. As well as their famous northern soap opera Coronation Street, Granada were the makers of British TV’s toughest investigative documentary series, World in Action. Mainly through the persuasiveness of a young researcher named John Birt—in later years, Director General of the BBC—Mick had agreed to star in a special rush edition devoted to his ordeal.

  The opening sequence was a heavily stage-managed press conference, with questioners instructed in advance not to ask if he felt bitter about his treatment. Now dressed in a cream embroidered smock and purple watered-silk trousers, flanked by Allen Klein and Les Perrin, he seemed distinctly woozy—indeed, could hardly pronounce the word responsibility when Lord Parker’s admonition about his power over young people was quoted back at him. “How does one . . . exercise it? Perhaps one doesn’t ask for responsibility . . . perhaps one is given responsibility when one is pushed into the limelight in this particular sphere. My responsibility is only to myself . . . The amount of baths I take and my personal habits are of no consequence to anyone . . .” Marianne would recall that he’d been liberally dosed with Valium beforehand and was still “very scared . . . You got the feeling he only had to say one word out of place and he’d have been taken straight back to Brixton Prison.”

  Rather than probe into the background of the case (much as that cried out to be done), World in Action opted for an uncharacteristically soft format—a discussion between Mick and four representatives of the establishment he had managed to put so hysterically on the defensive. These were the editor of The Times, his new champion William Rees-Mogg; the Bishop of Woolwich, Dr. John Robinson; a former Labour home secretary and Attorney General, Lord Stow Hill; and a leading Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Corbishley. The encounter took place in the Essex garden of the county’s Lord Lieutenant, Sir John Ruggles-Brise, surrounded by the kind of security nowadays associated with G8 summits.

  Even though it had been set up for a television program, the scene that would be transmitted to the nation in old-fashioned grainy black-and-white had a surreal quality the most Technicolor acid trip could scarcely have bettered. A month earlier, Mick had been prisoner number 7856, facing the bleakest vista of barred windows, naked lights, and “slopping out” urine pails. Now four distinguished emissaries from the system that had so recently tried to break him were doing obeisance before him, like magi at the feet of some Mod messiah; tacitly apologizing on the nation’s behalf, acknowledging that his power to communicate with people was infinitely greater than all of theirs put together, and asking in all humility what they might learn from him.

  Here in starkest relief was the generation gap which had been endlessly talked and written about since the mid-fifties and which the sixties, for all their revolutionizing, had essentially done nothing to change. On the one hand, lounging on a garden chair, looking cool and collected once again, the twenty-four-year-old in his butterfly-wing silks who’d flown into rural Essex by helicopter; on the other, ranged along a bench, four middle-aged men who’d had to slog all the way out through east London by car, thick-suited, five-o’clock-shadowed, and palpably embarrassed and apprehensive.

  From all they had read of Mick, World in Action’s production team expected him to take ruthless advantage of having the establishment thus at his mercy—possibly to deliver some ringing manifesto to rally the flower children as Wat Tyler had rallied the peasants in Dartford in 1381—at the very least, to express outrage over what he had endured and the stress it had caused his family. But they had not reckoned with the Jagger facility to adapt to whatever company he was in and take on the accents of those around him. What they got, instead, was the coziest of chats in which the butterfly, astonishingly, turned out to speak the same language as the lepidopterists. And proved to have no sting whatsoever.

  “Mick,” said William Rees-Mogg, sounding more like a bishop than a newspaper editor, “you are often taken as a symbol of rebellion, and mothers deplore the influence of the Rolling Stones because they think the Rolling Stones are rebellious. Do you think the society you live in is one that you ought to be rebelling against [and] that you are rebelling against it?”

  Could this really be what had so terrified everyone—this pleasantly spoken young man with his obvious articulacy and intelligence, yet respectful and unassuming manner? “Well, obviously we feel that there are things wrong with society. But until recently I haven’t been into this kind of discussion because I didn’t feel it was my place or think my knowledge was enough to start pontificating on these kinds of subjects . . . I try to keep out of discussions of things like religion or drugs . . . I didn’t ever set myself up as a leader in society. But society, really, has pushed one into that position.”

  Lord Stow Hill: “Mr. Jagger . . . you appeal to millions of young people. [Cut away to a big, charming smile from lips that surely could never have subjected a wholesome and much-loved chocolate bar to such gross misapplication.] What I would like to ask is how you conceive yourself as an influence with them? In your personality, your approach to music and rhythm, and so on, what is the way in which you would like yourself to be understood, by young people espec
ially?”

  Mick: “Just in the very way I started when I was quite young, which was to have as good a time as possible—which most young people do try to do without regard to responsibilities of any sort, social, family or otherwise.”

  Before long he was not just taking questions but, to use his own impressive word, pontificating on a variety of sociological issues, rather as he would once have done in a London School of Economics debate . . . the changes in young people’s lives brought by the mid-twentieth century . . . their vastly increased affluence and access to communication . . . the recent race riots in America, which were also helping stir privileged white American teenagers into anarchy . . . Timothy Leary’s doctrine of “turn on, tune in, and drop out” (which, no, he didn’t happen to subscribe to) . . . the erosion of individual freedom in America and Western Europe . . . state infiltration of the press and broadcasting media . . . the change in the law’s role from the protector of liberty to its enemy . . . He seemed to have taken over the chair from William Rees-Mogg, yet without raising his voice or delivering a single put-down. Far from laughing at their heavy-handed efforts to comprehend him and his kind, he saw things from their side . . . gave them credit where it was due . . . offered criticism only in the kindliest manner. “Our parents went through two world wars and a depression. We’ve had none of that . . . I’m sure you do your best . . . it may be, for your generation.”

  Rees-Mogg: “What are the qualities you think your generation are going to bring forward because quite soon, after all, you are going to be the dominant generation?”