Mick Jagger (36 page)

All the time, a stream of negative reports came back to Britain, casting the Stones as agents provocateurs, with no mention of the hassles to which they were subjected, and creating the very worst atmosphere for Mick and Keith’s court appearance on May 10. In Dortmund, West Germany, they happened to share a hotel with the Olympic long-jump champion Lynn Davies, who complained to reporters that a “stream of obscenities” from their table during breakfast had made him feel “sick and ashamed to be British.” Mick’s response, at a Paris press conference, was unusually quotable, albeit hardly calculated to please his gym-teacher father: “The accusations are disgusting and completely untrue. I deny that we were badly behaved. I cannot remember when we have behaved better. We hardly used the public rooms at this hotel. They were crammed with athletes, behaving very badly.”

Ironically, the Stones were also acting as ambassadors for Britain, taking rock to Poland, a Communist-bloc country where even mild popsters like Cliff Richard were regarded as symbols of capitalist decadence. At Warsaw’s forbidding Palace of Culture, the band found themselves playing to two thousand of the party faithful and their children, seated in rows and applauding timorously—rather as speeches by Stalin used to be—while several thousand disappointed fans ran amok outside, and police responded with armored cars, tear gas, and water cannons. Afterward, the musicians tried to make amends by driving through the city, throwing bundles of albums through their car windows. In Athens, their show took place four days before the Greek royal family was overthrown by a cabal of fascist army officers. Such was the anticipatory paranoia at Panathinaikos football stadium that the audience was kept back forty feet from the stage and Mick couldn’t perform his new end-of-set trick, tossing out red roses from a bowl.

On the way back to London, he said he’d had it with live shows and never wanted to tour America again. His wish would very nearly be granted.

IN THE COMING court ordeal, there was an option for Mick that his lawyers were not slow to point out. The four amphetamine uppers he was charged with possessing technically belonged to Marianne; she had bought them at an all-night disco during their romantic escape to San Remo, slipped them into a side pocket of his green velvet jacket without his knowledge, then forgotten about them. She was more than willing to testify as much, but Mick wouldn’t hear of it. Ever the chivalrous knight, and his father’s son, he said his career as a rock star could withstand a drug bust but hers as a serious actress could not, and he wasn’t about to let her be “thrown to the wolves.” A vain hope, as it would prove.

The preliminary hearing took place before Chichester magistrates on May 10. Mick, Keith, and Robert Fraser pleaded not guilty to the charges against them and were bailed in the sum of £100 each to appear at West Sussex Quarter Sessions for trial by jury the following month. Magistrates at this time had no power to impose reporting restrictions if media coverage seemed likely to prejudice the trial in the higher court. So, while Mick and the other two reserved their defense, journalists could report the prosecution’s account of the police raid in full with all its insinuations and innuendos. The sole restriction concerned the fourth defendant—named in the indictment as David Schneidermann [sic]—who had fled Britain with his charmed attaché case of LSD on the night of the bust and afterward seemingly vanished into thin air. Because Acid King David was not in court, the magistrates ruled it would be “unfair” for his name to be made public.

At four o’clock that same day, Scotland Yard’s drugs squad raided Brian Jones’s Chelsea flat. They found Brian, dressed in a Japanese kimono, sitting among the debris of an all-night party. The sole remaining guest was a twenty-four-year-old Swiss nobleman and aspiring pop singer, Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, known for short—rather unfortunately in this instance—as Stash. More focused and knowledgeable searchers than their West Sussex colleagues, the Yard team quickly turned up eleven incriminating items, including a pile of hashish, some methedrine, and a glass phial containing traces of cocaine. When the latter was shown to him, Brian reacted with seemingly genuine horror. “No, man, that’s not mine at all,” he protested. “I’m not a junkie.”

The synchronization of the raid with Mick and Keith’s court appearance in Chichester made clear that Britain’s antidrug agencies, such as they were, had declared open season on the Rolling Stones. And this time there was no doubt about police collusion with the press. A crowd of journalists watched the raiders go in, and Brian and Stash being taken away for questioning at Chelsea Police Station on the otherwise carefree, swinging King’s Road. There Brian was charged with possessing cocaine, hashish, and methedrine and Stash with possessing cannabis—even though none had been found in his pockets or around the divan where he’d been sleeping. Next morning, the pair appeared at Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, around the corner from carefree, swinging Carnaby Street, and were bailed in the sum £250 each until June 2. At that hearing, both elected trial by jury and their case was set down for Inner London Sessions on October 30 with the same bail conditions.

For a young man who had been pampered and flattered as Mick had these past five years, it was salutary to realize how urgently he now needed friends and allies—and how thin on the ground they suddenly became. The Stones’ UK record label, Decca, refused to lend the slightest help or support despite the millions of records they had sold. Thanks to Andrew Oldham’s tape-leasing deal, Decca regarded the band as freelancers rather than in-house artists as the Beatles were to EMI; sour memories also still lingered of the $1.25 million advance which Allen Klein had bludgeoned out of them in 1965.

With Oldham still inexplicably absent from the battlefront, it fell to Klein to organize solicitors for Mick and Keith in the lower court and procure a top Queen’s Counsel to represent them at West Sussex Quarter Sessions. This was Michael Havers, a future Conservative attorney general and lord chancellor and father of the actor Nigel Havers. The Stones’ publicist, Les Perrin, also proved invaluable by lobbying his contacts in Parliament about the inequities that the case had already thrown up. And to be sure, Mick and Keith’s treatment was already causing disquiet among those not usually considered their natural allies. On May 19, Home Office minister Dick Taverne opined that unrestricted reporting of magistrates’ court hearings risked creating prejudice against the defendants at their later jury trial, and cited the Jagger-Richard case as a recent glaring example.

Coincidentally, in the run-up to their trial a new kind of pop music experience took place five thousand miles away in Monterey, California. An open-air festival on the lines of the jazz one staged at Newport, Rhode Island, it had one radical innovation: the star-studded bill of Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel, Country Joe and the Fish, Scott McKenzie, the Mamas and the Papas, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Who, Otis Redding, and Janis Joplin that performed for the fifty-five-thousand-strong audience all gave their services for free. Well organized, laid-back, and peaceful—unlike almost all its successors—the Monterey Festival established the idea of American and British rock musicians as a kind of hippie high command, abolishing the music’s exploitativness at a plectrum stroke, promoting hysteria and violence no more, but benign coexistence. Its afterglow seeped across America, then the Atlantic, to become the first, and quintessential, event in what would come to be known as the Summer of Love.

Andrew Oldham was one of the festival’s organizers (it was where he had “gone missing in California”); Mick was a nonexecutive member of its planning board, along with Paul McCartney, and in normal circumstances the Stones might have been expected to join its headliners. However, with Mick and Keith about to go into court on drug charges, there was no hope of either being granted an American visa. With his trial less imminent, Brian did manage to get one, and took the stage at Monterey to introduce a young black singer-guitarist in an orange ruffled shirt named Jimi Hendrix, whose sexual showmanship made Mick seem almost decorous by comparison. Later, with his usual awesome imprudence, Brian joined Hendrix in sampling STP, a hallucinogen whose trips could last up to seventy-two hours.

Britain staked its own claim to the Summer of Love on Sunday, June 25, when the Beatles’ new single, “All You Need Is Love,” was unveiled on a TV program called Our World, broadcast by the BBC from London over the new satellite broadcasting system to a global audience of 400 million. The studio audience included Mick, Keith, and Marianne, seated hippie-style on the floor with Eric Clapton, Jane Asher, and Keith Moon. The sequence was supposed to represent everything Britain could show off most proudly to the world telly-watching community, and at the last minute it was realized this label might not be best applied to two Rolling Stones due in court on drug charges forty-eight hours later. But the Beatles might have refused to do the broadcast if their friends had been excluded, so rather than risk disappointing 400 million viewers, Mick and Keith were left in.

Their trial, like the Monterey Festival, lasted three days, and attracted a global audience like Our World’s, even if its content wasn’t quite so wholesome. With the caprice of a British summer, weather as gloriously sunny as California’s prevailed throughout. The ancient cathedral town of Chichester became almost a festival site on its own, with hysterical fans, jostling journalists, craning TV cameras, sweating police, hot dog wagons, T-shirt and souvenir vendors, and ice cream vans. But spiritually speaking, the Summer of Love was halted at the town limits, frisked, and turned away.

It was not quite the full majesty of the law ranged against Mick on that Tuesday morning, June 27. Under a court system that had lasted since medieval times, and would not be reformed until the early 1970s, quarter sessions (i.e., convened four times per year) dealt with only middle-rank offenders, leaving the most serious cases to the regional assizes. Although West Sussex’s midsummer quarter sessions were under the charge of a fully qualified judge, sixty-one-year-old Leslie Block, he presided in his capacity of wealthy local squire, chairing a panel of three lay magistrates and exchanging his accustomed shoulder-length wig and red robes for a plain dark suit. Even out of Gilbert and Sullivan costume, however, Justice Block would prove himself at one with the era that had pilloried Oscar Wilde. The judge’s surname, in short, was an all too accurate pointer to the consistency of his head.

Mick was first to be called, wearing a light green jacket, olive-colored trousers, frilled shirt, and multistriped tie—formal attire by his standards, but a string of extra offenses against the worn brown woodwork of the dock. His appearance brought a suppressed shriek from the young women in thigh-high minidresses who filled most of the forty-two public seats, prompting the first of many exasperated calls for order from Judge Block. Not since R&B club days, when Jacqui Graham used to record the minutiae of his cuff links, had fans been allowed this close.

Only here there was to be no vocal. Apart from confirming his full name to be Michael Philip Jagger, his address to be New Oxford Street, London, W.1, and his plea to be “not guilty,” Mick, as was his right, did not utter a word. His counsel, Michael Havers, outlined his defense—that possession of the amphetamines had been legalized by a verbal prescription from his doctor—but did not question him directly, thus sparing him cross-examination by prosecution counsel Malcolm Morris QC. The only oratory required from Havers concerned the triviality of the offense; how, although illegal in Britain, the pills were a proprietary travel-sickness remedy sold in pharmacies throughout Europe, and any respectable person returning from holiday with a toilet bag of foreign medicines could end up in the same predicament.

The entire hearing lasted barely thirty minutes. Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore took the stand to testify that, after Detective Constable (since promoted to sergeant) John Challen had found the tablets in the green velvet jacket, Mick had said they were his and that he needed them “to stay awake and work.” Cross-examined by Michael Havers, Cudmore agreed that Mick’s conduct throughout the raid had been “thoroughly adult and cooperative.” The sole witness for the defense was Dr. Raymond Dixon Firth, who repeated what he had told Challen when the two West Sussex detectives visited him after the raid: that he’d given Mick verbal permission to take the tablets and, in Dixon Firth’s view, this was a legitimate prescription.

Judge Block hardly seemed to be listening. After a whispered exchange with the lay magistrates beside him—two local farmers and a Worthing shopkeeper—he turned to the jury of eleven men and one woman. “These [Dixon Firth’s] remarks cannot be regarded as a prescription,” he said. “I therefore direct you that there is no defense to the charge.” The jury retired for six minutes before returning the prescribed guilty verdict. Rather than sentence Mick there and then, Block deferred the moment until after Keith’s and Robert Fraser’s trials, so keeping him in suspense for at least another twenty-four hours. His counsel’s application for bail was refused, and he was remanded in custody.

Robert Fraser was dealt with just as speedily and inconclusively. Following the analysis of his “insulin” tablet, he’d had no option but to change his plea to guilty of possessing heroin. His counsel could only throw him on the court’s mercy, citing his exemplary service with the British army against Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya, and adding that since being busted, he had fought to wean himself off hard drugs and was now “completely cured.” Again Judge Block deferred sentence until all three defendants had been dealt with, and remanded Fraser in custody also. He and Mick were allowed a brief meeting with their lawyers while Keith, still free on bail, drove at top speed back to Redlands to fetch Mick some clean clothes and creature comforts, including a book on Tibetan philosophy and a jigsaw puzzle. Mick and Fraser were each handcuffed to a police officer, loaded into a white van amid shrieks and camera flashes, and driven off to the grim Victorian prison at Lewes, thirty-eight miles away.