Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

  His first trip back to Tangier, with Suki Poitier and Christopher Gibbs, brought on an almost eerie repetition of the last night he and Anita had ever spent together. ‘I suddenly got this call from Brian to go down to their room,’ Gibbs says. ‘Suki was lying on the floor, unconscious. Brian had clearly given her the most terrible beating-up. “Can you call an ambulance, man?” he said. It was entirely in the nature of things to Brian that someone else called the ambulance to take the girl he’d beaten up to hospital. “No, Brian,” I said. “You call an ambulance – and quickly.” It was obvious that simply hadn’t occurred to him.’

  In the spring of 1968, he persuaded Glyn Johns to join him on an expedition to record the G’naou, a troupe who performed on steel drums and outsize metal castanets. Brian’s idea was to show the link between African and American black music by taking the G’naou tapes to New York and overdubbing layers of jazz or soul. In the event, he was too drunk, or stoned, even to hear the G’naou troupe properly. Glyn Johns grew understandably bored, and the taping was a fiasco.

  In October, accompanied by the long-suffering Suki and a sound engineer named George Chkiantz, Brian returned to Tangier, determined to record the Jajouka in their pre-Roman Rites of Pan festival. Brion Gysin met them at Tangier with his Moroccan partner, Hamri, and drove them up to the village that nestles in an eyrie so acoustically perfect, one can hear a dog barking on an adjacent mountain, and the waves breaking on rocks half a dozen miles below.

  For almost two days and nights, Brian squatted there with Suki, smoking kif, apparently entranced by the soft, incessant pipe melody that – owing to the Jajouka’s ability to blow out while inhaling – seems not to pause even for breath. Only a few Europeans had been to the village before; fewer still had seen this private version of the Pan rites, with children dancing, like figures from a cave mural, in brazen, unearthly light. At 4 a.m., the party bedded down in a communal hut: by noon, the festival had begun again.

  Towards evening, Brion Gysin remembers, two of the musicians put down their instruments and rose to begin preparations for the meal the visitors had been asked to share. A moment later, they walked past Brian and Suki, carrying a snow-white goat. As Brian looked at the goat, with its bewildered, pale-fringed eyes, a strangled noise came from him: he said in a whisper, ‘That’s me.’ Suki and Brion Gysin smiled, agreeing there was some resemblance. But Brian did not smile. He continued to watch, fascinated, and to whisper, ‘That’s me,’ as the two men carried the white goat into the shadow of a lean-to, and one of them drew out a long-bladed knife.

  ELEVEN

  ‘THERE’S JUST NO ROOM FOR A STREET-FIGHTING MAN …’

  The few close friends who knew about Marianne’s pregnancy were surprised to see with what unaffected pleasure Mick looked forward to fatherhood. It was one further paradox in a character so narcissistically self-absorbed that he loved small children and enjoyed taking care of them; to a child he always granted an intimacy withheld from his closest adult friends. His happiest hours with Marianne came when he forsook his court to go off for a day in the country with just her and her three-year-old son, Nicholas. With Nicholas, he was less surrogate father than elder brother. He would play with the little boy for hours, pushing him high on swings or whirling him round by the arms in some empty Berkshire meadow.

  Jagger desperately wanted this first child of his own: he also wanted Marianne to become his wife as soon as John Dunbar would divorce her. Marianne had always demurred before, afraid of such a commitment a second time – a little wary, too, of acquiring so voluble a mother-in-law. ‘Somehow,’ she says, ‘I always felt there couldn’t be another Mrs Jagger.’ Even so, she felt her resolve weakening. For, since his discovery that she was carrying his child, he had treated her with almost maternal tenderness.

  Jagger’s support was doubly needful when the story got into the papers, as it soon did. In pre-feminist 1968, there were few social stigmas worse than that of being an unmarried mother even if you were not already notorious as a shameless wearer of fur rugs and abuser of Mars bars. Marianne’s pregnancy, indeed, did far more than pillory her with further lipsmacking banner headlines. It touched off a whole crusade against the Sixties’ ‘Permissive Society’, with its flattened sexual and moral boundaries, by attention-seeking media figures, politicians and clergy. What should have been the most private matter to Jagger and Marianne became the stuff of speeches and parish newsletters throughout the land. The Archbishop of Canterbury himself spared a moment in his pulpit to ask for intercessionary prayers on Marianne’s behalf. Loud criticism also emanated from Mrs Mary Whitehouse, a northern schoolteacher and self-appointed spokeswoman for Britain’s silent moral majority. Once again as chivalrous knight errant, Jagger agreed to defend Marianne and debate morality with Mrs Whitehouse on a special edition of the David Frost television show.

  ‘The fact of the matter …’ Mrs Whitehouse said, looking at Jagger through flyaway-rim spectacles and smiling her bright, metallic smile, ‘… is that if you’re a Christian or a person with faith, and you make that vow, when difficulties come, you have this basic thing you’ve accepted. You find your way through the difficulties.’

  ‘Your Church accepts divorce,’ Jagger replied. ‘It may even accept abortion – am I right or wrong? I don’t see how you can talk about this bond which is inseparable when the Christian Church itself accepts divorce …’ It was, of course, beyond his power to confess that he wanted to marry the girl, but couldn’t.

  Marianne’s son, Nicholas, was playing in the Cheyne Walk music room – a small garden house, smelling strongly of cats – the day Jagger sat down with Keith to try to articulate his thoughts about the revolution he so fervently half wanted to join. ‘Everywhere I hear the sound of marching, charging feet, boy,’ he sang, against Keith’s beating-to-quarters guitar riff. ‘Summer’s here and the time is right for fighting in the street, boy …’

  To his credit, he had tried the real thing, linking arms with the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators outside the American Embassy on the day when Lady Bracknell’s prophecy came true of ‘acts of violence in Grosvenor Square’. The press soon spotted Jagger and chased him from the scene, well before police horses started falling down. Today, looking from his summer house to his Queen Anne mansion, he realized where his true allegiance must lie. The insolent battle cry trailed off into indecision; the passion curdled into even colder feet than Lennon’s. ‘… but what can a poor boy do, ’cept to sing in a rock ’n’ roll band …’

  Chaos was far more effectively present, had he realized it, in another new song, whose recording had been observed in its entirety by Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary film crew. Godard subsequently dropped the title he had meant to give his film, One Plus One, and instead gave it the song’s name, Sympathy for the Devil.

  Even before Jumpin’ Jack Flash, there were those eager to connect the Stones’ music with a darker, more deliberate paganism. They had acquired a fervent fan, and a slightly unsettling friend, in Kenneth Anger, film-maker, connoisseur of the occult and disciple of Britain’s most notorious black magician, Aleister Crowley. To Kenneth Anger, the Stones in their concerts showed the power to invoke forces not invoked since Crowley, ‘The Great Beast,’ had gone to his sacrilegious grave. Mick Jagger, in Anger’s ravished eyes, was no less than a latter-day Lucifer, with Keith as his attendant devil, Beelzebub. So he wanted to cast them in his intended masterpiece, a screen version of the black magic epic Lucifer Rising.

  There was also Anita Pallenberg, whose knowledge of the black arts was rumoured to be extensive, and whose influence over and around the chief Stones had aroused suspicion that she was actually a witch. Spanish Tony Sanchez, Keith’s intermittent chauffeur-bodyguard, claims to have seen the collection of human relics allegedly used in spells against those who had incurred Anita’s displeasure.

  At Anita’s prompting, Keith himself had grown fascinated by black magic and witchcraft and convinced – as many others had been – that Kenneth Anger possessed
the powers of a Magus, or sorcerer. At one point, Keith and Anita even contemplated a pagan marriage ceremony, with Anger officiating: they were deterred – according to Spanish Tony – by an unmistakable warning from ‘the other side’ not to meddle in realms they did not understand.

  Jagger, too, flirted briefly with black magic, as an extension of his interest in mysticism and fairies. Flattered, above all, by his transmogrification to Lucifer, he offered to compose theme music on his new Moog synthesizer for Kenneth Anger’s film Invocation of my Demon Brother. His experiments with the black arts, however, did not proceed one step further than was quite prudent. For something like a year afterwards he, very noticeably, wore a large wooden crucifix.

  It was not Kenneth Anger, but the eclectically read Marianne, who gave Jagger his reference-point for a song in which Satan would make an actual, named appearance. Marianne had just read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, a surrealist Russian novel of the 1930s, in which Satan pays a visit to contemporary Moscow to survey the effects of the Revolution. Bulgakov’s is the smooth-talking Satan later epitomized by George Sanders: a figure in immaculate evening dress, with a long cigarette-holder, bowing low and purring, ‘Permit me to introduce myself …’

  The phrase launched Jagger into a lyric of daring bad taste: a soliloquy by just such an urbane and ingratiating Mephistopheles, looking back over his interventions in human affairs, from Christ’s Crucifixion through the Russian Revolution to Hitler’s blitzkrieg and the Kennedy assassination. A similar irresistible impulse in the studio wrenched the song away from its original, rather folksy arrangement, into a bongo-spattered samba beat that seemed to find a groove more compulsive than any blues. As Jagger moved through his Devil’s apology, overweening politeness rising to the glottal roar of a punk samurai, an impromptu chorus, ‘Woo-woo, woo-woo,’ broke out among Anita Pallenberg and her friends in the control-room. Played back, it seemed indivisible from the song: a soundtrack from a coven of sarcastic witches.

  Christopher Gibbs had suggested naming the new album Beggars Banquet in accord with the prevailing atmosphere of wizards, hobgoblins and devilish paradox. A final mix was ready in time to be played at Mick Jagger’s twenty-sixth birthday party, at Spanish Tony’s Vesuvio Club, on July 26. The guests included John Lennon, Paul McCartney and other pop notables whose opinion Jagger particularly valued. Their acclaim was instant and unanimous. At the first wild bongo beat of Sympathy for the Devil, almost the whole company surged on to the floor to dance the whole album through. For Jagger, it was a night of triumph, marred only slightly when Paul McCartney gave the club disc jockey the Beatles’ new single to play, and everyone went wild a second time, listening to Hey, Jude.

  In Beggars Banquet, the Stones had produced an album whose simplicity and minimal elegance seemed more marvellous, recalling the washy jingle-jangle of Their Satanic Majesties: an album whose daring, often dangerous, themes are hidden within the forthright, artless styles of blues or country music. Exhortations to riot, blaspheme or fornicate are conveyed by no more than the lilt of a hillbilly piano. Complex evils come hidden among plainly strummed acoustic guitars. It is a work which shows the Stones simultaneously pushing into territory never charted by pop, and rediscovering the spirit of Eel Pie Island. The most arresting minor track – more so than the melancholy No Expectations or the semi-pornograpahic Stray Cat Blues – is Jagger’s devout treatment of Prodigal Son, a gospel classic written by the Reverend Robert Wilkins forty years before. Even on unfamiliar and risky ground, everything went right. Salt of the Earth, a song for ‘the hard-working people’, makes a rather better showing nowadays than that deluded anthem, All You Need Is Love.

  The original Beggars Banquet sleeve, art directed jointly by Jagger and Richard, was to have depicted, simply, a lavatory-wall, shot from just above pedestal-height, with song titles and studio credits scrawled as graffiti around its pipes, toilet-roll holder and evil-looking cistern, among examples of invatorial philosophy such as ‘God rolls his own’ and ‘Wot! No paper!’ Not surprisingly, both Decca and the Stones’ American label, London, rejected the design. The Stones refused to consider any alternative. The release-date, August 24, was moved back into September.

  Street Fighting Man had, meanwhile, been launched on an American summer already rent by assassination and race-riots – only days, indeed, after Mayor Daley’s Chicago police had systematically beaten up innocent delegates at the Democratic Party Convention. Street Fighting Man was denounced as plain incitement to further violence and banned by every radio station in the Chicago area, together with dozens more across the country.

  The battle with Decca over the lavatory-wall sleeve deteriorated into a public slanging-match between Jagger and Sir Edward Lewis. Decca’s Chairman was quoted as calling the sleeve ‘silly’ and ‘offensive’. Jagger retorted that Decca had seen nothing offensive in issuing a Tom Jones album (A-Tomic Jones) with a cover showing an A-bomb’s mushroom cloud. Next, he challenged Decca to issue the sleeve in a plain brown paper wrapper marked ‘Unfit for Children’. Sir Edward did not rise to the challenge. The release-date was moved back again, to sometime in October.

  While the Stones battled with Decca, their managers, past and present, battled with each other in a wild fandango of changing partners and rebounding writs.

  For more than two years, Eric Easton had been trying to obtain legal redress for his ousting from the Stones’ co-management by Andrew Loog Oldham in cahoots with Allen Klein. Easton was suing Oldham for breach of contract, and suing Klein for having engineered that breach. Proceedings had been delayed initially by Oldham’s nimbleness in avoiding service of the legal papers, and subsequently by Allen Klein’s will o’ the wisp appearances in London and equally sudden disappearances back to New York.

  In November, 1967, Easton finally succeeded in bringing Oldham before a High Court judge. It was a bizarre occasion, of which the undoubted highlight was an attempt by each ex-partner to have the other jailed for contempt. The result was an order from Mr Justice Buckley, freezing some two million dollars in Rolling Stones royalties until Easton’s claim against Oldham and Klein was resolved.

  By this time, of course, Oldham was no longer acting directly as the Stones’ manager – was, indeed, on hostile terms with them following his walkout during the non-making of Their Satanic Majesties. After the Oldham-Easton High Court battle, the Stones took the opportunity to repudiate the original agreement made with their co-managers. They claimed it had been signed by only one of them – Brian Jones – and was legally invalid, anyway, since Brian had been under the age of twenty-one.

  By this time, too, Oldham and Klein were no longer the cosy, conspiratorial duo which had cut up Eric Easton. The matter at issue was the $1.25 million in advance royalties which Klein had wrung from Decca in 1966 and which – Oldham then assumed – had been paid into his and the Stones’ joint publishing company, Nanker Phelge Music Ltd. Instead, he discovered, the money had been placed with something called Nanker Phelge USA, an entirely separate company formed by Klein a week after the Decca deal, with himself as president and sole shareholder.

  Oldham’s response – though he was still linked to Klein in the Eric Easton case – was to file suit against him in America, claiming that Nanker Phelge USA had been used as ‘a vehicle for the diversion of assets and income’ from Oldham, the Rolling Stones and Nanker Phelge UK Ltd to Allen Klein ‘for his own personal use and benefit’.

  The suit was worth $1.5 million, and it quickly became bogged down in the litigious everglades that were Klein’s natural habitat. Klein’s contention was that, since his company had done the Decca deal, his company would naturally have received the proceeds; and that, since the Stones were guaranteed their royalty payments spread over a twenty-year period, the name he chose to call the handling company was irrelevant. In any case, once filed, the Oldham lawsuit had to take its place in a queue of some fifty other legal disputes involving Klein.

  The Oldham-Klein case dragged on for
most of 1968 – a year in which Klein waxed still greater in New York, first by acquiring the nearly defunct Cameo-Parkway record label, then by raising its shares to many times their value with rumours of acquisitions and takeovers. In the event, Cameo-Parkway’s only acquisition was the firm of Allen Klein and Company (whose listed assets, oddly enough, included General Motors shares to the precise value of $1.25 million).

  In October 1968, Allen Klein approached Andrew Loog Oldham with a deal. He would buy off Oldham’s lawsuit, plus all his residual interests in the Rolling Stones, for one million dollars, to be paid on the instalment-plan. It was, as he well knew, an offer Oldham could not refuse.

  That left only the unfortunate Eric Easton, still trying to obtain satisfaction by conventional legal means from a portly man in New York whose far more important pursuers now included the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and from a blond young man in London whose overwrought emotional state now led him to spend his weekends in the therapeutic care of nuns. On Monday morning, the nuns would unlock the door, and Andrew Loog Oldham would return to his life as a boy tycoon.

  Oldham kept on with his Immediate label, turning his attention to a ‘Mod’ group, the Small Faces, and their gravel-voiced boy lead singer Steve Marriott, whose insecurity and neuroticism made him a worthy successor to Brian Jones. ‘To get Steve to go onstage and entertain, you had to entertain him all the time. So, before we checked out of some grand hotel, we’d saw through the legs of the bed and the chairs in our suite so that the next people to use them would go crashing to the floor.’

  In 1970, Oldham moved to New York, leaving behind a wife, Sheila, and a son, Sean, named after his friend, the theatre designer Sean Kenny. In 1974, he married a Colombian model and film star named Esther Farfan. The couple divided their life between Bogotá and New York, where Oldham teamed up again with Allen Klein, remixing tracks on Klein’s old Cameo-Parkway label. Oldham himself by now owed large sums in back income tax and kept the authorities at bay mainly thanks to generous loans from Klein. No doubt he had ample time to rue his earlier unkind comments about Klein’s taste in knitwear.