The year-long coolness between Oldham and the Stones had intensified in the era of drug busts which Oldham privately considered merely stupid and time-wasting. His distance from Mick and Keith in their legal ordeal – and the growing resentment all the Stones felt against him – made all the more galling Oldham’s appearance at Olympic Studios, early in 1967, ready to work his Svengali magic on behalf of his boys yet again.
His boys showed their unwillingness to be moulded by keeping him waiting at the studio for hours, sometimes days at a time. ‘They like to make out that they wound me up by going in and playing nothing but the blues, and playing terribly,’ Oldham says now. ‘But I didn’t give a stuff about the blues so how would I know? I put up with being messed around for about seven weeks, then one day I decided I’d had enough and just left. “From here on,” I told them, “you can deal directly with Allen.”’ Thus did Andrew Loog Oldham let go of the greatest money-making machine rock would ever see.
Further time away from the studio was spent in planning an album-sleeve which, Jagger insisted, must be even more elaborate and costly than Sgt. Pepper’s. Michael Cooper – who had photographed the Beatles in Peter Blake’s pop art hall of fame – was commissioned to surpass himself with a portrait showing the Stones as medieval troubadours, kneeling around Jagger dressed in starred robes and a conical wizard’s cap. The Stones helped Cooper build his studio set and carry in the baskets of flowers and fruit he had ordered as props. More time passed while Michael Cooper photographed Jagger in his wizard robes, sitting alone, hugging his knees, on a bed of crushed silver foil.
Cooper’s photograph was then processed into an opaque plastic square which the finished album-sleeve had stuck to it like a table place-mat: the Stones in multi-coloured 3D, against a background of mountains, planets and minaret-spires, banked up with blurry patterns, flowers and fruit.
As autumn wore on, and a December release-date became inevitable, they at last agreed on a title: The Rolling Stones’ Cosmic Christmas. Jagger then found a better idea inside the front cover of the passport he had so recently almost forfeited. Those large, old-fashioned passports used to announce: ‘Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Requests and Requires’ that the bearer be allowed passage without let or hindrance. Jagger’s title – touched by lingering anti-establishment rancour – was Her Satanic Majesty Requests and Requires. When Decca refused to sanction so blatant a slur on the Queen, the line was altered to Their Satanic Majesties Request, giving the far more appropriate sense of being formally invited to some diabolical garden fête.
On October 30, Brian Jones appeared for trial before Inner London Sessions on the drugs charge that had hung over him since the previous June. He arrived in his silver Rolls, dressed with almost excessive formality in a pinstripe suit, white shirt and spotted tie. But the tie was pulled too tight, as if in desperation at his own mirror-image that morning.
Brian’s willingness to plead guilty to cannabis-possession had persuaded the police to offer no evidence concerning the cocaine and methedrine found at his flat. He further admitted responsibility for any cannabis smoked earlier by his party guests, thereby disposing of the flimsy possession charge against his companion in the dock, Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Stash was immediately discharged with a paltry award of 75 guineas towards his legal costs.
In Brian’s case, all his counsel, James Comyn QC, could do was plead for mercy, offering the mitigating circumstances that Brian had never taken hard drugs, apart from LSD, and had vowed he would never touch cannabis again. His psychiatrist, Dr Leonard Henry, was called to testify to Brian’s disturbed mental state at the time of his arrest, and to support Comyn’s plea that he shouldn’t be sent to prison. ‘It would completely destroy his mental health,’ Dr Henry said. ‘He would go into a psychotic depression … he might even attempt to injure himself …’
Brian’s performance in the witness box seemed only to corroborate James Comyn’s description of ‘a young man with a brilliant future … who very much wants to go on with his composing.’
‘Is it your intention to have nothing more to do with drugs?’ Comyn asked him.
‘That is precisely my intention,’ Brian answered, almost in a whisper. ‘They’ve only brought trouble and disrupted my career. I hope this will be an example to anyone who’s tempted to try.’ None of this deterred the court Chairman, Mr R.E. Seaton, from his resolve to combat what he called ‘a growing canker in this country at the moment’. After a ninety-minute adjournment, Brian was sentenced to concurrent prison terms of nine months and three months, and ordered to pay £262 in costs. As a tumult broke out from the girls in the public gallery, James Comyn gave notice of appeal and asked whether, in the meantime, Brian could have bail. ‘No,’ Mr Seaton replied.
The silver Rolls-Royce remained where he had parked it as Brian was brought out, loaded into a grey van with the day’s other prison fodder and driven away to begin his term at Wormwood Scrubs.
For him, there would be no night vigil by hippies around Eros – no public protest at all, barring the slight scuffle which occurred later that day in the King’s Road between police and a group of impromptu demonstrators, including Mick Jagger’s younger brother, Chris. The prison staff, deprived for their earlier quarry, were jubilant at finding another ‘bloody longhair’ in their midst, and began loudly discussing how Brian’s gold thatch would soon be planed to the scalp. The other prisoners, thinking him homosexual, remained coldly hostile. That night, under his rough prison blanket, he must have known all the horrors of total abandonment.
His psychiatrist contacted the Wormwood Scrubs medical officer and, at least, succeeded in excusing him the regulation prison haircut. Next day, the doctor appeared with James Comyn before a High Court judge in chambers to plead for Brian to receive bail on medical grounds. It was granted, for a surety of £750 and on condition that Brian agreed to undergo the independent examination of a psychiatrist appointed by the court. An hour later, the Wormwood Scrubs screws handed Brian his crumpled pinstripe suit and told him he was free to go.
At this point, six months after his brief celebrity as pop music’s cleansing fire, the magisterial and facetious voice of Judge Leslie Block was heard again in the land. Speaking at the annual dinner of the Horsham Ploughing and Agricultural Society, Judge Block amused his rural audience by a punning reference to Brutus’s outburst against the mob in Julius Caesar, ‘You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things … We did our best, your countrymen, I and my fellow magistrates, to cut these Stones down to size,’ Judge Block continued. ‘But it was not to be. The Court of Criminal Appeal let them roll free …’
Private function as the dinner was, a senior magistrate should have known better than to make jokes about past victims of his judgement, especially now that another Rolling Stone was on bail pending appeal against a prison sentence. A Labour MP, William Wilson, announced he was referring the matter to the Lord Chancellor. Les Perrin, the Stones’ publicist – who had picked up Judge Block’s speech from a Sussex local paper – issued a press release that was more like a protest pamphlet. ‘Is this the kind of justice Britain expects? Is this man typical of those who hold the title, the high and esteemed office to try and sentence people? How can the public believe, in the light of this utterance by Judge Block, that the Rolling Stones can get an unbiased hearing? His statement smacks of pre-judgement – a getting-together to “cut the Stones down to size”. It is a pity he did not observe the ethics of sub judice to Mr Jagger, Mr Richard and Mr Jones by remaining silent.’
On December 12, the finished new album, with its Delft blue and white border and Technicolour plastic griddle, finally went on sale in the British and American shops. The long interval since Between the Buttons, and the garish events of the past summer, had created the largest-ever public for a Rolling Stones LP. Advance orders in the US alone totalled almost $2,000,000. Probably no pop record, before or since, was so eagerly awaited, or so stunning
a disappointment. All but the most besotted Stones fans recognized Their Satanic Majesties for what it was – an attempt to impersonate Sgt. Pepper, lacking all the qualities of the Beatles’ master work and simultaneously reflecting all the delay, conflict and compromise which had bedevilled it.
The Beatles had used their free run of Abbey Road studios to create a song cycle as rounded as a symphony, yet with all the intimacy of a puppet or Punch and Judy show. The best the Stones could do in reply was a rather lame singalong chant (Sing This All Together – See What Happens), opening and closing side one in a cacophony of massed bells, rattles and gongs. Where the Beatles had used comic sound effects to express the joy of playing on top form, the Stones used them merely as infilling for many obvious, yawning gaps. So, interspersed at random, there were excerpts from a street market, a striptease club, some giggling, snoring, a voice saying – rather too audibly – ‘Where’s that joint?’
One song only, She’s a Rainbow, found Jagger and Richard on form in the brusquely wistful manner of Ruby Tuesday or Lady Jane. The rest, like the cover, was a blur from which the real Stones emerged in only wavering glimpses – Keith’s throaty guitar, for instance, on Bill Wyman’s nervous debut composition, In Another Land. Here and there, too, were flashes of the virtuosity still able to ignite in Brian Jones. Though Brian, when coherent, had bitterly opposed the psychedelic approach, it was his Moroccan drums and percussion which gave the album whatever mysticism can be felt in it. Brian also played Mellotron on 2,000 Light Years from Home, the song written by Jagger during his night in Brixton Prison – a non-starter, according to Glyn Johns, until Brian sat down and improvised its eerie electronic descant.
The release date of Their Satanic Majesties happened also to be the day Brian’s case came before Lord Chief Justice Parker in the Court of Criminal Appeal. Here, in addition to his two regular psychiatrists’ testimony, the judges considered a file prepared on Brian by the court-appointed psychiatric expert, Dr Walter Neustatter. This referred to Brian’s ‘extremely precarious state of emotional adjustment’ and ‘fragile grasp of reality’, arising from sexual anxieties which, in Dr Neustatter’s opinion, verged on an Oedipus complex. The doctor had been struck, however, by Brian’s considerable personal resources and ‘capacity for insight to contain his anxiety’. Dr Neustratter confirmed Dr Henry’s view, that imprisonment would drive him to a complete mental breakdown, possibly even to suicide.
Once again, the Lord Chief Justice showed a degree of mercy which smaller judges had not. Brian’s nine-month prison sentence was set aside: he was instead fined £1,000 and put on probation for three years. A further proviso was that he should continue receiving psychiatric treatment.
One other Stone, Mick Jagger, was in court to hear Lord Parker’s verdict. Afterwards, Brian paused only long enough to mumble to reporters, ‘I want to be left alone to get on with my life,’ before disappearing into the back of his silver Rolls. The darkened rear window showed a daguerreotype of anguish, its face buried in its frilly-cuffed hands.
Brian celebrated his release with an orgy of drink and pills that, within two days, put him back into hospital again. He had collapsed at Courtfield Road after going out to a club and playing double bass onstage with the resident band. As he slapped at the bass, he also began kicking it, softly at first but with greater and greater ferocity until he’d splintered it to matchwood. Even after the bass was destroyed, Brian continued to play it, his fingers shaping, chords in the air, his face inclined earnestly down towards notes only he could hear.
It was a change as sudden, as chemically mysterious, as sunlight turning rancid. At one moment, it seemed, all the young of America and Europe were holding out flowers and making signs of peace. At the next, they had taken to the streets and were smashing windows and wrenching up paving stones. Instead of beads and kaftans, all at once, there were badges, slogans and military fatigues; instead of gurus, angry-faced student activists; instead of ‘happenings’ and ‘love-ins’, ferocious street battles for which many a one time beautiful person had thoughtfully forearmed himself or herself with a knitting needle to jab police horses in the belly or testicles.
It was a wave seemingly from nowhere that broke, almost completely, on the year 1968: beginning with student riots in Paris that spring, continuing through the summer in Berlin, Amsterdam, London, Washington, Detroit, Los Angeles – riots, burnings, marches and demos, enacted against the shadowy sub-plots of Vietnam and Czechoslovakia, by chanting, angry battalions of the young. It was a revolution whose motives no one fully understood, least of all its participants; whose leaders enjoyed only the briefest heyday; whose armies had no sooner mustered than they dispersed to fresh amusements. It was a cloud of irritant pollen soon blown away, all but for one or two fatal seeds which, planted in certain minds, would become the means of holding the next decade to ransom. The German Baader-Meinhof, the Italian Red Brigades, the Provisional IRA – all terrorism carried on in shoulder-length hair and patched blue denim traces a common lineage back to this splitting open of the Age of Aquarius.
The uprising, like all others, needed anthems. And for once, the chief anthem-givers were found wanting. ‘You say you want a revolution,’ wrote John Lennon. ‘… Well, you can count me out.’ He who was the new, angry order’s chief hope preferred to make his protest by spending a week publicly in bed beside his Japanese consort, Yoko Ono. The rest of pop still sang about San Francisco and flowers. There was only one source where the elixir of anarchy – background battle-music, a soundtrack for eddying tear gas – might conceivably be found.
Oddly enough it was not Keith but Bill Wyman who first picked out the restoring riff on a rehearsal-room piano while waiting for the others to arrive. ‘Brian and Charlie came in next. I played them this riff and we messed around with it for about twenty minutes. When Mick and Keith walked in, they both said “Hey – what’s that? Sounds good.” Mick went away and wrote a great lyric for it and we recorded it straight off.’
The result was Jumpin’ Jack Flash, undisputedly the Stones’ best performance on record, a two-minute masterpiece whose malign energy lives on in it like some sexual poltergeist. If Jagger and Richard ever received divine guidance, it was here in their abandonment of woolly psychedelics to return to unashamed, two-fisted rock. As partners, they had never – have never since – worked better. Jagger, at last, had written the proper litany for Keith’s chord-shapes, a Grimms’ fairy tale (‘I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag …’), each verse a small nightmare, dissolving its bathetically sardonic refrain. The guitar, likewise, matched Jagger’s body almost visibly, its insolent bass his jumps and struts, its tinkling treble the drawn-out lips grimacing ‘It’s a-a-a-aw right …’ He has never come clearer than in the sound of that half-evil, half-playful, spring-heeled silhouette.
On May 12, 1968, the New Musical Express Poll-Winners’ Concert at Wembley Empire Pool featured one unscheduled attraction. The Rolling Stones walked onstage and without preamble launched into their first public performance of Jumpin’ Jack Flash. Even on that audience primed to hysteria, its effect was an instantaneous jolt let in through one collective vein: before the intro chords had finished, thousands were on their feet, stamping and strutting like the voodoo-possessed.
With the single, on May 24, came a promotional film sequence like none seen before in pop or rock. The Stones, in robes that could have belonged equally to hippy mandarins or a wizards’ coven, their eyes elongated by gold warpaint, performed at levitating camera angles, as remote from their own actions as Inca priests brooding over temple rites. Jagger was a wraith conjured up between them, an enormous head and still more enormous mouth, bowing and leering ‘It’s a-a-a-aw right …’ like a pageboy at the very entrance to Purgatory.
The wild response to their NME concert appearance, and the speed with which Jumpin’ Jack Flash flew up the British and American charts, removed any last notion among the Stones that their future lay in elaborately crafted studio albums. After a two-year la
yoff, the concert stage once more exerted its old, irresistible magnetism. Immersed as they were in a new album, with a new producer, the Stones – that is, the four fully functioning Stones – agreed they must go out on tour again.
The road, however, was not as open as it had formerly been – especially not the gold-earning trans-America road. Two years beset by hippies, drop-outs, draft-dodgers and associated un-patriotic evils had reduced the American establishment to the fearful belligerence of an Indian-encircled waggon train. No one with a conviction for possessing drugs – or, as US Immigration phrased it, ‘a crime of moral turpitude’ – was permitted even the shortest sojourn on American soil. The previous September, when Mick and Keith had flown to New York to oversee the Satanic Majesties album sleeve, they had been stopped at Kennedy airport, questioned at length and permitted only temporary entry pending a full official review of their prosecution in England.
On May 21, the still-unscheduled ’68 American tour was wiped out of existence. Les Perrin, the Stones’ publicist, answered his phone at home in Sutton to hear a familiar lisping voice say, ‘Les – they’re coming in through the window.’ Brian Jones was being busted again.
The Gay Hussar, in Greek Street, Soho, is a small, scarlet-painted Hungarian restaurant whose wild cherry soup, cold pike and red cabbage are, for some reason, particularly favoured by politicians, authors and newspaper editors. Among the lunchtime throng in its more fashionable downstairs, several times in 1968, could be espied a pair ill-matched even for those hallucinogenic times. One was Tom Driberg, MP for Barking, Essex, and noted radical journalist. The other – but for his expansive consumption of Gay Hussar dishes, inconspicuous almost to vanishing point – was Mick Jagger.
Since meeting Jagger socially a year or so earlier, Driberg had, twice at least, proved himself a powerful ally. It was he who first raised in Parliament the deplorable handcuffs episode at Jagger’s and Robert Fraser’s trial. He also had signed the famous Times letter, along with Graham Greene and the Beatles, calling for legalization of soft drugs, despite its possible impact on his majority among the Essex voters.