Charlie Watts had already bought a sixteenth-century house in Sussex, originally designed as a hunting lodge for the first Archbishop of Canterbury, and latterly occupied by a one-time Attorney General, Lord Shawcross. (Establishment figures, though they might officially deplore the Stones, never objected to selling them houses.) It proved the perfect hideaway for Charlie’s deeply private life with his wife, Shirley; for her sculpture studio and horses and his collections of silver, jazz records, model soldiers and American Civil War memorabilia. His father, the former parcel deliveryman, approved of the property, though Mrs Watts wished he could have chosen something ‘a bit more modern’.
Keith decided next, showing what a vein of English romanticism lay under his gipsy exterior by choosing ‘Redlands’, a fifteenth-century moated cottage in the Sussex village of West Wittering. A fan magazine journalist, paying the first of several unexpected visits to the property, found the front door wide open, all five half-timbered bedrooms still unfurnished, the kitchen a sea of dirty dishes and a burnt sausage in the frying pan.
Mick, however, stayed on at the same London mansion flat, half living with the same unsatisfactory girlfriend. Brian Jones’s affair with Anita Pallenberg had increased his discontent with Chrissie. Anita was exactly the kind of ‘classy bird’ he had picked out for himself a hundred times from glossy magazines and films. And Anita, though she affected to despise him, seems to have given him more than one lingering glance, over Brian’s golden head. ‘I always got the feeling with Anita that Mick was the one she really wanted,’ Dave Thomson says. ‘I felt she was working her way through the Stones to get to Mick.’
There was, of course, another girl in the Stones’ circle who more than measured up to Mick’s ideals of beauty and class. She had always seemed out of his reach and, with her marriage, seemed now more so than ever. Just the same, through that hot, hectic summer of 1966, as the rows with Chrissie increased in violence, and as he couldn’t get a date with his first choice, Julie Christie, Mick Jagger began to see more and more of Marianne Faithfull.
Swinging London had reached Cambridge University early in 1965, when assorted Fleet Street journalists laid siege to Churchill College, waiting until its most envied undergraduate, John Dunbar, should attempt to enter or leave the Fine Arts faculty. After several days on the run, Dunbar wearily threw up his hands and gave the story to the Cambridge Daily News’s Paul Buttle. MARIANNE FAITHFULL WEDS CAMBRIDGE STUDENT ran the newsbills posted that night among freewheeling throngs in Petty Cury and Trinity Street.
For Marianne, it was a time of almost schizophrenic contrasts. On the one hand, she was still the seventeen-year-old convent girl, intent on marrying the first boy who had ever made love to her. On the other hand, she was a famous pop star whose virginal beauty made her the target of seduction attempts from almost every man she met. Gene Pitney, the American star, had already made determined attempts to persuade her to run away with him. Then, a week before her wedding, Bob Dylan inveigled Marianne into his suite at the Savoy Hotel and tried to win her in a way that only Bob Dylan would. ‘He sat down in front of me and started to write songs at terrific speed. He asked who John was, and when I said, “He’s a student,” Dylan was terribly contemptuous.
‘All the time, he was writing these songs – covering sheet after sheet with them. Finally, when it was clear I wouldn’t let him come on to me, he picked up every bit of paper and put them all away. I never even saw what he’d written. I only wish I’d had the chance to nick some of it.’
The public approved of Marianne’s wedding and, when a baby son, Nicholas, was born rather soon afterwards, forbore even to count fingers backward through the months of her pregnancy. Her life continued, then, in its continual paradox – on the one hand, the genteel young wife and mother, given increasingly to musicians’ slang; on the other hand, the package-show star, seated at the back of the tour bus with her nose buried in a Jane Austen novel.
For John Dunbar, the future seemed to hold comparable brilliance. In 1966, with two young partners, he founded the Indica Gallery in a mews in the heart of London’s West End. The gallery, small but chastely elegant, was to be devoted to the work of new ‘swinging’ painters and sculptors, while its adjacent bookshop would specialize in off-beat, radical literature from sources already known to some as the Underground.
Dunbar’s partners in the venture were Peter Asher, brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend Jane, and a wispy boy known only as Miles who had grown up with Brian Jones in Cheltenham. The support of pop music’s brahmin class was assured from the start when Paul McCartney helped to paint the gallery white before its official opening. Later that year, at an Indica exhibition entitled Unfinished Paintings and Objects, John Dunbar was to introduce the Japanese performance artist Yoko Ono to the renegade Beatle and painter manqué John Lennon.
At first, Marianne had been shocked by the Stones – by their scruffiness and spottiness and surly indifference to the gifts life was heaping upon them. Marianne remembered only too well what it had been like to ask for credit at the Reading shops. Part of the Stones’ new stardom was unlimited credit, offered by boutiques whose trendiness would increase a hundredfold if a Rolling Stone shopped there. ‘All the Stones had piles of clothes on credit, and never paid for any of them. I used to tell Mick off about that. It was something I’d been taught by Eva from childhood – however hard up you are, your credit must always be good.’
Of all the Stones, she was initially drawn to Brian; not so much for his looks as for the insouciant malice that still sparkled under his platinum fringe. ‘I knew there was a psychic trial of strength going on between Brian and the others, and that Brian was losing it. And there were all these mothers of his illegitimate children in the background. We were all round at Brian and Anita’s place in Courtfield Road one day and suddenly this ex-girlfriend of his, Linda, appeared in the street outside with Julian, their child, in her arms. She was standing right under the window, holding the baby up as if to say “What are you going to do about this?” Brian just looked down at them and laughed.’
The ex-convent girl had by now herself been initiated into all the pleasures of smart young London society. By 1966, she was habituated to marijuana and the varicoloured pills with which her new friends propped their eyes open through each night’s freewheeling pleasure. Then one day at a party, Robert Fraser, the art dealer, beckoned her into another room, pointed to a small white pile of cocaine on the mantelpiece and told her to take a sniff. ‘I didn’t know what you had to do; I just snorted up the whole lot in one go. Robert was very offended.’
The domestic idyll with John Dunbar and baby Nicholas was to be short-lived. Dunbar, though brilliant and imaginative, could not keep up with the affluent pop world Marianne now inhabited, nor maintain herself and Nicholas in the grand style of her hit-parade friends. With a nanny to take care of Nicholas, she began to forsake Dunbar’s art gallery circle for the houses, shut in by Moroccan drapes and heavy with camouflaging incense, where Rolling Stones and their courtiers were to be found.
Marianne claims that, before her affair with Mick Jagger, she had slept with two other Stones – by obvious implication, Keith and Brian. The subject is one upon which Keith chooses to remain gallantly silent. In Brian’s case, his friend Dave Thomson believes, matters went no further than some exploratory groping. ‘Brian told me he’d once been shut in a cupboard with Marianne. But all he did was give her a good feel-up.’
By mid-1966, the pressure of her too-hasty marriage and motherhood was propelling her, almost without her knowledge, into the arms of a person she thought she disliked – a person whose outward crudeness and cockiness, she found, held surprising depths of sensitivity and sympathy. ‘I went to Mick because I needed a friend. Mick was a friend who also happened to be a millionaire.’
Her young assistant, Jo Bergman – a future power in the life of the Stones – puts it rather more simply. ‘Marianne was living in this freezing cold flat. When Mick started to come and s
ee her, suddenly there were electric heaters everywhere.’
Jagger, at the time, was said to be suffering from ‘complete exhaustion’, due mainly to a schedule that had brought the Stones back to Australia and New Zealand in February, and then packed them off again with barely a respite on a new European tour more chaotic and violent than any yet. At their Paris Olympia show, police used batons and tear gas against the 3,000 rioters. Twelve gendarmes were hurt, including one suffering from bites. At the Musicorama in Marseilles, a chair sailed out of the audience, opening a two-inch cut above Jagger’s right eye.
Hardly a month elapsed before yet another US and Canadian tour. Jagger began it still in a state of exhaustion, descending the aircraft steps as one reporter noted, ‘smiling lamely, supported by the brassbound epaulets on his shoulders’. He seemed to be living out the neurosis of the Stones’ current single, Paint It Black, in which the singer was portrayed as a palpitant wreck, turning his head away from pretty girls, like Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus, ‘until my darkness goes …’
The tour began on a note of high fashion with the Stones featured among back-combed American debutantes on the cover of Town and Country magazine, and a press reception thrown by Allen Klein on a yacht in New York harbour, when fan magazines were excluded in favour of journalistic gentry (like Town and Country’s own Linda Eastman). The Stones were noticeably more stand-offish, as one disgruntled guest wrote. ‘There’s a feeling of “Don’t touch me, I’m a Rolling Stone.” Even that manager of theirs is so hung up on himself, it’s unbelievable … Mick is a hippie in the true sense of the word. When someone says something honest, he goes blank …’
Klein’s litigation-loving style was detectable in the stunt with which Andrew Loog Oldham launched the Stones on this fifth transcontinental journey. Oldham announced he had filed a five million dollar lawsuit against fourteen New York hotels for turning away the Stones and so casting aspersions on their good name. It was all pure fiction and, as events proved, rather unnecessary. Headlines after Oldham’s heart were already burning the Stones’ progress across the American map like one of those old movie sequences symbolizing a country given over to fire and plunder.
The opening concert, in Lynn, Massachusetts, was stopped by the police after only minutes, and the audience dispersed with a ferocity that turned mere high spirits into mob rage. As the Stones drove away afterwards, their car windows were belaboured with wooden planks torn up from the walkways. In Montreal, the Stones stopped playing to boo the stage-front bouncers for punching and judo-chopping at girls who tried to grab at Jagger. In Syracuse, they were said to have insulted an American flag by dragging it along the floor of the War Memorial Hall. (Brian Jones had merely been trying to take the flag as a souvenir.) In Vancouver, the thirty-six concert casualties included ushers kicked in the groin, women policeman suffering from exhaustion, bouncers with alleged concussion and fans nursing assorted broken bones. In Montreal, where the police had subdued fans by ramming them head first into a wood fence, the Stones came offstage through an aisle of fifty prostrate bodies.
The last American concert – for longer than anyone imagined – was in Hawaii on July 25. The Stones then dispersed for brief holidays before starting a new British tour late in September. Brian Jones, in Morocco with Anita Pallenberg, was reported to have broken his right hand in a climbing accident.
The British tour coincided with yet another single, Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow? whose convoluted title reflected the pressure on Jagger and Richard to dash off another three-minute smash while simultaneously ducking chairs and being attacked by wooden planks. On this song, tour chaos followed them even into the studio, upsetting the malign tautness they had achieved on Satisfaction, causing Jagger to gabble the obscure lyric breathlessly as if eyeing up exits, and everyone else to pound and scrub their instruments towards the same quick getaway. Brass and cathedral-like echo were added in a too hurried mix, to get it all finished for unveiling on the next Ed Sullivan TV show.
In America, the single was issued inside a picture sleeve that struck new horror into conservative hearts. The Stones were photographed as a group of ageing transvestites, each one adopting a ‘drag’ role to which his character seemed only too well suited. Brian Jones (‘Flossie’) pouted smoke rings in a WAAF uniform and peroxide wig. Keith (‘Molly’) in befrogged costume and cameo brooch, looked like an archdeacon’s wife turned to drink. Jagger, his lips reddened to the size of chipolata sausages, wore a bedraggled cloche hat and Charlie (alias ‘Millicent’) a ratty-looking fur cape. The centrepiece was a wheelchair in which Bill Wyman (‘Sarah’) sat, a sullen WAC, with skinny spinster legs almost tied in a knot.
The British tour began on September 29, amid lengthy music press post-mortems as to why Have You See Your Mother, Baby? had not reached number one in America or Britain. If it was ‘over the kids’ heads’, as luminaries like Eric Clapton and Mike D’Abo agreed, no more perfect theme song could have been found for concerts which eclipsed even Vancouver and Montreal in uproar and violence. British fans, deprived of the Stones for almost a year, were intent on making up for lost time. The final show, at the Royal Albert Hall, was halted after three minutes when Jagger was attacked by three girls simultaneously, and the arbitrary collaring, punching and tossing back of half a dozen more still could not stem the screaming tidal wave.
A film sequence shot that night shows the Stones at their most goadingly indifferent – Mick Jagger in Mod crop and flowered shirt; Keith in sunglasses, collar and tie, like a blinded mafioso; Brian Jones, in velvet frock coat and heavy sideburns, laughing hysterically as the power fails, the house lights rise, loose drums roll underfoot, Charlie hastily exits to the rear, and Brian himself is turned around and shepherded away by large official hands.
* * *
Swinging London sung to its zenith through that summer season when girls went bare-thighed in wasp-striped mini-dresses and boys, buttoned up in Beau Brummell coats, swaggered down King’s Road closely followed by camera crews from Life magazine, recording anthropomorphic data for what its sister publication Time had momentously – and a year late – dubbed the Style Capital of Europe. The effect of Time and Life between them had been an American tourist boom not seen since London’s last royal coronation. The subculture was now a sub-continent, of boutiques, bistros, bric-a-brac markets, purveying solid versions of the parody Britishness which pop music had made the rage across America. It was a time when fortunes could be made from naming a shop I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet; when the British saw their national colours profitably transferred from imperial flagstaff to Carnaby Street plastic bag. Mass-produced jingoism led inevitably to a resurgence of the genuine article, blossoming still further in weeks of unaccustomed summer sun. When, in August, England beat West Germany to win the 1966 World Cup, it truly did seem as if Britannia was back in business.
The Beatles continued to be Swinging London’s foremost citizens. They had ceased live performances in August, withdrawing, shell-shocked, into lives of individual plutocracy, reuniting only to make albums that would chart their ascent into the same iconographic firmament as Portobello Road market and I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet. The Beatles’ Revolver is held to be the first thematic pop LP, capturing as it does, by random images, the sun-soaked euphoria of London in 1966. The Stones’ Aftermath can make an equal claim – a better one, even, in its blend of metropolitan arrogance with strange, Eastern-sounding noise.
The era which the Beatles officially announced – and which Brian Jones had subtly prophesied four months earlier – took shape in the odour of joss sticks, smouldering among twilit tumbles of embroidered caftans, tapestried slippers, prayer beads, leather footstools and beaten-brass trays. The Beatles’ (and Stones’) experiments with sitars set off a fascination with all things Eastern, passed from Britain to America via the mutually reacting pop industry. In Britain, the effect was merely commercial; in America, it was profoundly cerebral. Rumours began to reach London of young peop
le in California who had thrown off all convention to practise Hinduism, in precept or in spirit, with shoulder-length hair and flowing beards and robes and sandals and flower garlands, barring all activity but Buddha-like goodwill and consumption of those substances with which Eastern sages were said to have attained their wisdom and maintained their repose.
It was, ironically, the Tory London Evening Standard which published earliest details of the new ‘hippie’ communities in San Francisco and on the North California coast, and transmitted their apostate slogan: ‘Turn on, tune in, drop out.’ The Sunday Times soon afterwards introduced Britain to the hippie movement’s first leader – or guru – one Timothy Leary, a Harvard academic who had sacrificed his career to explore the ‘psychedelic’ (literally, mind-expanding) properties of the man-made drug lysergic acid diethylamide. Even the Sunday Times did not know, however, that in Pont Street, Knightsbridge, there was already an establishment called the World Psychedelic Centre where liquid LSD was available free to anyone who wanted it, sprinkled on little fingers of bread.
Andrew Loog Oldham was also swinging to a zenith as the youth-obsessed capital’s latest big businessman under twenty-four. Oldham, in mid 1966, joined forces with his old PR confederate Tony Calder to form an independent record label, Immediate. The idea had come, inevitably, from Phil Spector’s Philles label, with additional inspiration from Berry Gordy’s Motown corporation. Like Motown, Immediate was conceived as a team of songwriters, arrangers and producers, kept in harness to service artists selected by the power of one Diaghilev eye. Like Motown, Immediate would have its own distinctive style, an aura of success that headed its product to the charts before the customers had heard a word. Its hippy winsome slogan was ‘Proud To Be Part Of The Industry Of Human Happiness’.