Mick Jagger (39 page)

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?”

Mick: “I don’t really want to formulate a new code of living or code of morals or anything like that. I don’t think anyone in this generation wants to.”

Drugs, naturally, were dealt with in the same abstract sociological manner; perish the thought that those courteous, careful lips might ever have dragged at a joint or sucked acid from a sugar cube. Would he not agree, Lord Stow Hill asked, that some drugs—heroin for instance—represented “a crime against society”? “It’s a crime against the law,” he replied. “I can’t see it’s any more a crime against society than jumping out of a window.” But shouldn’t real crimes against society be punished to suit the case? “People should be punished for crimes. Not for the fears of society, which may be groundless.”

As in this case, they seemed to have been.

A FEW WEEKS later, the News of the World published a brief paragraph announcing that Mick Jagger had dropped his libel action against the paper. There would be no apology for the false allegations, no out-of-court damages or reimbursement of legal costs—Mick was simply throwing in the towel. It was a warning to all celebrities not to seek legal redress for lies printed about them in such wealthy, ruthless scandal sheets, however gross and damaging. Pop music figures in particular, with their extra vulnerability to journalistic dirty tricks and often disorganized managerial and legal backup, were best advised to grit their teeth and just take it.

The News of the World not only won a total victory, saving itself hundreds of thousands of pounds; it had the further satisfaction of moral outrage over Keith’s suggestion in court that it had employed Acid King David as an agent provocateur and informer to precipitate the Redlands bust. The Sunday after the trial’s end, a front-page editorial rebutted what the paper called “a monstrous charge … It was a charge made without a shred of evidence to support it … a charge made within the privilege of a court of law … which denied us the chance of answering back at the time … These outrageous allegations are, of course, totally unfounded. We have had no connection whatsoever with Mr. Schneidermann directly or indirectly, before, during or after this case.” The NoW took credit for tipping off West Sussex police but, lapsing into sudden vagueness, said it had received the information from “a reader.”

This claim to have been the mysterious party on the line to Detective Sergeant John Challen at Chichester police headquarters directly contradicted what DS Challen himself had been told when he visited the News of the World’s offices immediately after the raid. Likewise, the paper’s response to the Acid King David allegation had—unusually for it—a ring of truth. It was famous for using undercover reporters and informants to achieve its exposés. If Acid King David really had been such a paid operative, it would have made much of the fact, devoting a multipage spread to “HOW OUR MAN GOT INSIDE STONES SEX ’N’ DRUGS DEN.”

There was never any serious attempt by the British police to locate Acid King David, still less bring him back to Britain to stand his trial and resolve the mystery of who and what he really had been. And, beyond a rumor that he might be in Canada, nothing more was ever heard of him. As time passed, the drug charges fell into abeyance, and as more and more people who had played a role in Mick’s career emerged to give interviews or write books, one might have expected some American publisher’s catalog to announce a forthcoming memoir entitled I Was the Acid King. Yet it never happened.

In 2004, a man named David Jove died in Los Angeles, aged sixty-four. Jove was an eccentric figure on the fringes of West Coast punk culture who produced one of the earliest cable shows with his New Wave Theater Group, directed music videos, and held fancy-dress happenings at his cavelike studio in Fairfax. His real surname, jettisoned during the late sixties, was Snyderman. He left behind numerous images of himself on the Internet, surrounded by his New Wave Theater cronies, camouflaged by face paint—but still unmistakably the weekend guest Michael Cooper had photographed hugging Keith Richard on West Wittering beach a few hours before the bust. Same short curly hair … same sensitive cheekbones, like some actor in art-house movies … David Jove was Acid King David.

One of the few people who ever learned his secret was a British woman named Maggie Abbott who worked as a film agent in L.A.—and, by a strange coincidence, represented Mick in that field for most of the 1970s. She met the eccentric Jove in a professional capacity during the 1980s and the two became friends. Eventually Jove revealed to her that his real surname was Snyderman and, after swearing her to secrecy, told her the whole story.

In January 1967, he had been a failed TV actor, drifting around Europe in the American hippie throng with Swinging London as his final destination. At Heathrow Airport, he had been caught with drugs in his luggage and expected to be thrown into jail and instantly deported. Instead, British Customs had handed him over to some “heavy people” who hinted they belonged to Britain’s internal security service MI5 and told him there was “a way out” of his predicament. This was to infiltrate the Rolling Stones, supply Mick Jagger and Keith Richard with drugs, and then get them busted. In return, the charges against him would be dropped and he’d be allowed to leave Britain without any questions being asked.

To Maggie Abbott he recounted how easy it had been, with his encyclopedic knowledge of LSD, to gain entry into Keith’s circle and get himself invited down to Redlands with the “Sunshine” that was meant to have been the incriminating evidence. Things had gone somewhat awry when, instead, the West Sussex police raiders had found amphetamines in Mick’s jacket pocket, and also Robert Fraser’s heroin. Nonetheless, the desired end result of busting two Stones had been achieved, and Snyderman had been able to leave the country with his remaining acid stash, as promised.

In fact, at Redlands just before the raid, he had come close to giving himself away when—his guard possibly lowered by drugs—he’d started talking enigmatically to Michael Cooper about spying and espionage, “the James Bond thing … the whole CIA bit.” Three decades later in L.A., he confessed to Maggie Abbott that he’d been recruited by MI5 on behalf of America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, specifically an offshoot known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) set up by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, in the 1920s, to protect national security and maintain the existing social and political order. For almost forty years, COINTELPRO operated against so-called subversive elements, from Communists and socialists and Soviet spies to the civil rights movement, black radicals, the campaign against the Vietnam War, and femininists, unhindered by any normal restraints of democracy or morality. Its methods, for which it would finally be wound up by a horrified Senate investigation in 1971, included illegal surveillance, black propaganda, burglary, forgery, conspiracy, and harassment.

By 1967, COINTELPRO had switched its focus to the subversive effect of rock music on America’s young, particularly the kind coming from Britain, most particularly the kind played by the Rolling Stones. Getting two Stones busted for drug possession would ensure they were denied visas for any further U.S. tours in the foreseeable future. Britain’s security services had been more than happy to assist in the thwarting of these public menaces. And once they were nailed—so Snyderman had been led to understand—the next ones on the hit list would be the Beatles.

Though Snyderman had done everything asked of him, and afterward been discreet to the point of changing his identity, his reward was what he called “a lifetime of fear.” For the rest of his days, even after COINTELPRO no longer existed, he half expected those heavy people who’d spirited him out of Britain in 1967 to come after him and make sure he never did blow his cover. Maggie Abbott several times tried to persuade him to go public but dared not press the point too far. He always carried a handgun and was suspected of having murdered an actor named Peter Ivers when Ivers defected from one of his TV shows. Not long after turning into David Jove, he had married a comedienne named Lotus Weinstock, whose brother Joel also discovered his real surname. Jove gave Joel Weinstock a few hints about the Redlands story, but threatened to kill him if he ever breathed a word of it.

When Jove died in 2004, he still had not broken his silence, though by that time two of his principal victims in the Redlands bust, Mick and Marianne, both knew his true identity.

ANY MODERN CELEBRITY who had come through such an experience might reasonably be expected to plunge into intensive bouts of therapy or counseling or, at the very least, escape to some remote tropical island for an indefinite period. Yet Mick emerged from it seemingly unscathed in mind as well as body, not needing any rest or recuperation beyond a few days in Ireland with Marianne. As always with him, it was straight on to the next thing: tomorrow, not yesterday. And experiences that might have been expected to sear themselves onto his soul were soon wiped by that famous Jagger amnesia. A few years later, he’d claim to have forgotten even which prison he was in.

No less extraordinary was his seeming lack of any desire to exact vengeance or redress via the many avenues open to him. There was no newspaper interview headed “MY PRISON HELL by Mick Jagger”; no round of condemnatory appearances on TV chat shows; no big-buck deal for a book to be rush-released in Britain, America, and a dozen other territories to recoup some of the fortune in lawyers’ fees he’d had to spend. At the time this was seen as proper acknowledgment of how lucky he’d been; four decades on, with celebrity whinges and sob stories the stuff of everyday life, it looks like quite amazing dignity.

Musically, his lips remained almost as firmly buttoned. The title of Jagger-Richard’s next Stones single, “We Love You,” released in August 1967, seemed as much a satire on hippie values in general as a message of gratitude for their fans’ support and sarcastic turning of the other cheek to their late persecutors. Built around an unhippieishly energetic piano riff, it had been recorded before their appeal hearing with John Lennon and Paul McCartney singing backup vocals anonymously as a gesture of support. Despite the introductory sound of a cell door slamming shut, Mick’s lyrics were muffled in a kind of baby talk: “We don’t care if you hound we, and love is all around we … your uniforms don’t fit we … We forget the place we’re in …”

His self-identification with an earlier martyr to British judicial vindictiveness was underlined by a pop video to promote “We Love You” on television, should he and Keith not be around to do so in person. Shot in color by Peter Whitehead, this was a parody of the trial of Oscar Wilde, with Mick as Wilde, complete with trademark green carnation buttonhole. Keith was the judge, in a bell-bottom wig with curls made of rolled-up legal documents, while a crop-haired, trouser-suited Marianne played Wilde’s nemesis, Lord Alfred Douglas. At one point, a fur pelt was pointedly slapped over the judge’s desk; at another, Marianne waved what looked like an outsize spliff; at another, the camera cut away to Brian Jones, sweaty and vacant-eyed, with no relevance to the action beyond his Victorian-length sidewhiskers.

Released as a single straight after Mick and Keith’s successful gig before the Lord Chief Justice, it should have been an instant No. 1, especially when accompanied by the most hotly topical pop video ever made. Instead, the BBC’s Top of the Pops show banned the video (though it was shown throughout Europe) while the record made only No. 8 in Britain and No. 14 in America as the B-side to “Dandelion.” Even as tongue-in-cheek hippies, they were evidently too much for many of their fans to take. And there was still, alas, plenty more of that to come.

By no means everybody had applauded the appeal court’s decision or been won over by the softly spoken, intelligent butterfly netted on World in Action. A poll conducted by the Daily Mirror showed that 46 percent of its readers felt Mick had deserved his sentence and should have served it in full. Judge Leslie Block remained in no doubt that by banging up a pair of Rolling Stones he had performed a public service which feebleness higher up the legal chain had exasperatingly thwarted. In a speech to his fellow Sussex landowners a few months later, Block made humorous play with his and his putative victims’ names in a famous line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, “You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!” implicitly aimed at his judicial superiors. “We did our best, your countrymen, my fellow magistrates and I, to cut these Stones down to size,” he told the Sussex landowners apologetically. “But it was not to be. The Court of Criminal Appeal let them roll free.”