Mick Jagger (40 page)

For all Mick’s chivalrous self-sacrifice to protect Marianne’s reputation, the trial had turned them into Britain’s most notorious couple since King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson thirty years earlier—though even that Constitution-shaking scandal had not featured “a girl in a fur rug” or a Mars bar. Today, any chocolate manufacturer given such publicity would doubtless rush out a TV commercial slyly hinting at its possibilities beyond mere sustenance between meals (“A Mars bar fills that gap”?). But at the time, Swinging Sixties permissiveness notwithstanding, a deep vein of Puritanism still ran through the British character, and rather than celebrities, Mick and Marianne often found themselves to be pariahs. On August 11, they took the only break Mick seemed to need, flying to Ireland to spend four days with the brewing heir Desmond Guinness. On their return to Heathrow Airport, they had not arranged to be met by Tom Keylock with a limo, so were forced to use a regular black taxi from the rank. The first two drivers they approached refused to take them.

Marianne had undergone perhaps the greatest image change in pop history, from virginal Lady of Shalott to shameless, druggy vamp who, when not lolling around half naked or submitting to chocolate-and-caramel-flavored cunnilingus, thought nothing of taking on eight men at a time. After the trial, she received a flood of hate mail from people who had bought “As Tears Go By” and now felt personally betrayed. Private Eye magazine lampooned her as “Marijuana Faithfull.” Not that she was altogether heartbroken to slough off the goody-goody persona Andrew Oldham had given her. The promising classical actress, so recently a sensitive Irina in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, now agreed to star in an Anglo-French feature film entitled The Girl on a Motorcycle alongside Alain Delon. As every right-thinking Briton knew, only one thing ever happened in French films and only one kind of girl was ever found on a motorcycle.

For Mick, the best therapy was recording with the Stones again after a layoff of almost five months. Back in February they had begun a new album to follow the threadbare Between the Buttons, but the spring and early summer had left Jagger and Richard little time to spare for music, and the project had ground almost to a standstill. With the shadow of penal servitude lifted from them both, work restarted in earnest at Olympic Studios. Far from being exhausted or deflated by his recent traumas, Mick was bursting with energy and determination to make up for all the time that had been lost; moreover, he thought he knew exactly how to do it.

On June 1, the Beatles had released the concept album whose evolution Mick and Keith were watching on the eve of the Redlands bust. Rather than the usual random collection of tracks, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was presented as a continuous, cohesive performance, saturated with the influences of its makers’ Liverpool childhoods along with LSD and psychedelia, and punctuated with canned laughter and applause harking back to the live shows they had lately abandoned. It was hailed as an instant classic, the Summer of Love’s apotheosis, which took Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting to stratospheric new heights and raised the bar dizzyingly for every band setting out to make an album. The cover was a masterpiece in itself, designed by Peter Blake and showing the Beatles as sateen-suited brass bandsmen amid a collage of Pop Art icons from Tom Mix to Marlon Brando. In the lower right-hand corner was a stuffed doll in a sweater inscribed WELCOME THE ROLLING STONES—a sentiment Mick interpreted literally. The way for the Stones to bounce back, he told the others, was to make their very own Sgt. Pepper.

Unfortunately, Andrew Oldham had different ideas. Despite having hived off the Stones’ financial affairs and PR, Oldham was still their record producer, the maestro of mischief who could turn vinyl into dynamite. And after the enforced summer break, he rejoined them at Olympic Studios, ready to pick up where he’d left off. But the old feeling of complicity—the manager who was one of the band and took equal shares of the trouble he stirred up—had vanished long ago. Mick and Keith both felt that in their direst-ever hour of need Oldham had deserted them, floating off to California to have fun at the Monterey Festival. (True enough, but he’d also put in place the support system of Allen Klein and Les Perrin which had served them so well.) Most important, the way that Mick had handled himself through the whole crisis was final proof that he had no further need of a Svengali.

There were a few uncomfortable sessions at Olympic, when Mick outlined the Sgt. Pepper–y direction in which he felt the Stones should now go and Oldham made his opposition forcefully plain. From then on, the Stones resorted to a kind of industrial go-slow, keeping him waiting for hours, sometimes failing to turn up at all, or wasting hours of expensive studio time by busking old blues numbers as badly as possible. Eventually the desired effect was achieved: Oldham lost patience and his temper and walked out. Later that same evening, he phoned Mick, suggesting they “call it a day” and that from here on the band should deal solely “through Allen.”

The split was reported in the following week’s New Musical Express and described, the way such things always are, as mutually amicable. Mick’s accompanying quote paid no tribute to the precocious brilliance that had made the Stones the sullen flip side to the Beatles—not to mention the small matter of inventing him. “I felt we were practically doing everything ourselves [in the recording studio] anyway. And we [i.e., Oldham and I] just didn’t think along the same lines. But I don’t want to have a go at Andrew … Allen Klein is just a financial scene. We’ll really be managing ourselves. We’ll be producing our own records, too.”

Rave magazine, for one, was not deceived by that diplomatic gear change to we. “Mick Jagger is out on his own and he knows it. He has no acknowledged manager, no agent and no record producer … although the other members of the band have the same freedom of decision and action, it is largely his whims and ideas which decide which way the Stones will roll. He is the king Stone, the man in charge, whether he likes it or not.”

While at work on the new album the band was now producing as well as creating, he spent long hours in the Beatles’ company, as if hopeful that some of Sgt. Pepper’s magic might rub off. Wearied by success, adulation, and consumption, each of the band’s three thinking members, John, Paul, and George, had begun to be gnawed by a feeling there must be more to life. In August, they seemed to find it in the Indian holy man Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his philosophy of Transcendental Meditation. Mick and Marianne joined them in becoming disciples of the Maharishi and, on August Bank Holiday weekend, accompanied them to an indoctrination session in Bangor, North Wales. During the session, news came from London that Brian Epstein, who once might have managed the Stones along with the Beatles, had been found dead of an accidental drug and alcohol overdose at his Belgravia home, aged only thirty-two.

But while Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison embraced the Maharishi unreservedly—the more so in their vulnerable state following Epstein’s death—Mick behaved with his usual caution, sidestepping the duty of converts to study for several months at the guru’s mountain ashram in India (as all four Beatles later would) and quietly letting his allegiance lapse soon after. He maintained he still felt “a need for some kind of spirituality that is living” and continued to meditate and read books about Buddhism, sometimes retiring inside a Native American tepee which he had pitched in the Rolling Stones’ office, the better to commune with the spiritual world. However, Hindu nonmaterialism had as little appeal for him as hippiedom’s social anarchy and dropping out. He expounded this have-your-hash-cake-and-eat-it philosophy to one interviewer with an image bordering on the surreal: “You [should] just drop out of those sections of society imposing unfair and restrictive practices on individuals. Someone has to deliver the milk, but it should work on a cooperative basis. I’ll deliver the milk for a week … I don’t mind.” Needless to say, Milkman Mick was a persona that never materialized.

The Beatles and Stones already had a kind of tacit alliance, not only singing on each other’s records but sometimes staggering their releases to allow each other a clear run at the charts. In the aftermath of Brian Epstein’s death, plans were discussed for a Beatles-Stones merger whereby the two bands would share offices and build a recording studio to be used by them both and also run as a commercial enterprise. A suitable site was earmarked in Camden, north London, and Mick got as far as registering the name “Mother Earth” for the record label. The scheme was then firmly squashed by Allen Klein, who now had his own agenda concerning the Beatles and saw how such a workers’ cooperative could threaten both that and his control over the Stones.

Even the band’s staunchest supporters in the music press doubted whether they could survive the double whammy of Mick and Keith’s imprisonment and splitting from Andrew Oldham. They had, after all, had a far longer career than anyone could have expected—more than four years!—and were now well into their twenties, past rock’s traditional age limit (Bill Wyman would soon be thirty-one). Most of the other British bands who’d come up through the R&B circuit had folded or seen their star players defect to form new ones in the psychedelic mode, like Stevie Winwood with Traffic and Eric Clapton with Cream. Dozens of arresting new collective names had sprung up on both sides of the Atlantic—Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, Moby Grape, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, Canned Heat, Jethro Tull, the Incredible String Band, the Electric Prunes—exploring realms very different from the Stones’ simplistic sex-with-a-sneer; all with hair far longer and shaggier than theirs had ever had been; several with the feature which had once made them unique, a charismatic front man who didn’t play an instrument.

Most seriously, it was eight months since the Stones had last showed their faces in America: a lifetime to fickle pop fans with such an array of alternatives to choose from. In press interviews, Mick insisted that they’d soon be back on the road, but gave no details beyond a vague promise to schedule some concerts where no admission would be charged. “The kids,” he said with a twenty-four-year-old’s avuncularity, “ought to be able to groove around and have a nice time for nothing.”

The Stones’ comeback as a live act hinged on one question above all: whether, after a drug scandal of such epic dimensions, they would ever be allowed back into America to tour. In September, they tested the water, flying to New York for the first time in nine months to meet with Allen Klein and (in new self-producing mode) art-direct a cover for the new album. At JFK Airport, they were subjected to stringent baggage and body searches, blameless Bill and Charlie, as always, undifferentiated from the rest. Finally pronounced clean, they were let in, but Mick and Keith were warned that if they applied for U.S. visas in the future, the authorities would look at their British court cases in detail, implicitly to see if the Lord Chief Justice had got it right, before reaching a decision.

Mick and Keith of course were not the only reason for this uncertainty. Brian Jones still had to stand trial for the cannabis, cocaine, and methedrine found at his flat, with such suspiciously perfect timing, on the day of the others’ first court appearance, back in May. For Brian, unlike them, there was no expressway to judge and jury: he had had to wait in suspense through the whole summer, although the media tempests surrounding “the girl in the fur rug,” Acid King David, and the Mars bar had largely kept the spotlight off him. Believing himself vulnerable to further police raids at Courtfield Road, he’d sought refuge in a succession of West End hotels, moving on from each one after a few days when he thought the drugs squad had targeted him again, or when the management discovered who he was and evicted him. Determined to stay clean until his return to court, he employed a succession of doctors to dose him with placebos and, for a time, checked into London’s most famous private rehab clinic, the Priory.

After losing Anita Pallenberg to Keith, he had enjoyed a measure of revenge by going around with Keith’s ex-girlfriend, Linda Keith, although their relationship was purely platonic and “born of mutual dependency,” Linda says now. He had then found a new lover in the model Suki Poitier, former girlfriend of Tara Browne, who had emerged miraculously unscathed from the hara-kiri sports-car crash in which the young Guinness heir died. Suki was loving, soothing, and undemanding, but in all other respects a dead ringer for Anita.

On October 30, Brian’s jury trial finally took place at the Inner London Sessions in Southwark. It happened that right opposite the court building lived the parents of the Stones’ loyal assistant Shirley Arnold. To give Brian sanctuary from the waiting fans, Shirley took him to Mr. and Mrs. Arnold’s flat. As always with older people, his manners were impeccable and he gratefully accepted and demolished a plate of Mrs. Arnold’s homemade beef stew.

In court, he pleaded guilty to possessing cannabis and permitting its use on his premises, but denied ownership of the cocaine and methedrine. It was said that since being busted he had suffered “a virtual breakdown” and was now under strict medical supervision as much to preserve his fragile mental state as to stop him reoffending with drugs. The prosecution accepted his not-guilty pleas regarding the cocaine and methedrine, implying official suspicion that they had been planted by the police. On the cannabis charge he received three months’ imprisonment and for permitting its use, nine months, both to run concurrently. The Daily Sketch criticized the sentences for “turn[ing] this wretched young man into a martyr … as happened in the case of Jagger.” Brian was sent to Wormwood Scrubs—an infinitely more devastating experience for him than prison had been for either Mick or Keith—but then freed on bail pending appeal.

The appeal was heard on December 12, with Mick present in court to lend moral support. After hearing that Brian was “potentially suicidal,” Lord Chief Justice Parker, sitting with two other law lords, set aside both prison sentences and substituted a £1,000 fine and three years’ probation on the condition that he also continued receiving psychiatric treatment. Brian celebrated with an orgy of drink and pills which culminated with him onstage at a club, playing stand-up bass with such violence that eventually it fell to pieces. Two days later, he was back in the hospital.