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A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs
Song 176, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, part 3: “Every Cop is a Criminal and All the Sinners Saints”
For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the third part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones.
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- [00:03]
Andrew Hickey
A History of rock Music in 500 Songs by Andrew Hickey Song 176 Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones Part 3 Every Cop is a Criminal and all the sinners saints. This episode has a number of content warnings. There's some brief mention of car accidents, of drug addiction, abortion and miscarriage. There's also more detailed discussion of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, drug overdose, animal slaughter and both suicide and attempted murder. This was not a pleasant one to write, nor will the next few be. Let's talk about poetry for a while. Milton. I think thy spirit hath passed away. From these white cliffs and high embattled towers, this gorgeous fiery coloured world of ours seems fallen into ashes, dull and grey and the age changed unto a mimic play Wherein we waste our else too crowded hours for all our pomp and pageantry and powers we are but fit to delve the common clay Seeing this little isle on which we stand, this England, this sea lion of the sea by ignorant demagogues is held in fee who love her not. Dear God, Is this the land which bare the triple empire in our hand? When Cromwell spake the word democracy, that's to Milton, a poem by Oscar Wilde. Milton is one of the central figures in Wilde's poetry and its understandable why Wilde's politics have largely been overshadowed by his most famous works and by his personal life. But he was a man of radical political beliefs. He was influenced by Kropotkin and developed a libertarian socialist philosophy which he outlined in his book the Soul of Man Under Socialism, in which he emphasized that the socialism he wanted to see wasn't the authoritarian socialism that often gets thought of as the only kind. Rather, what he wanted was not a million miles away from the philosophy of John Stuart Mill, the leading philosopher of British liberalism, who has been described as a liberal, a democrat and a socialist, in that order. Wilde wanted a world of freedom, both personal and economic, a world with no restraints on artists, with individual liberty and with everyone having enough money that they could pursue their own artistic pursuits. And he saw libertarian socialism as a means to that end. The soul of man under socialism is very weak on details of how to get there. Wilde wanted a revolution but couldn't show anyone the plan but is all about, as the title says, how socialism would affect the human soul. So because of that, and because of his personal rebellion more broadly, Wilde was very sympathetic indeed to both the work and the life of John Milton, a poet who is one of the intellectual building blocks both of the liberal traditions of Mill and of the romantic traditions Wilde both built on and was critical of Milton, was one of the greatest polemicists in favour of individual liberty in English history. He was a supporter of Cromwell's revolution and his Iconoclastes was one of the only full throated defences of the execution of Charles I, and he spent some time in prison for his beliefs after the restoration of the monarchy, as Wilde himself would of course later spend time in prison. Though while Milton was a supporter of individual liberty, it only went so far. He was also a government censor for the Republican government, and while he published pamphlets in support of absolute religious liberty, they included the caveat that he didn't include Catholics in that. It's more than a little likely that Milton's own political beliefs and his experiences in the English Civil War and his fear of another civil war after Cromwell's death all played a huge part, consciously or not, in the conception of Milton's greatest work, one of the most important books in the whole of English literature, his long epic poem, Paradise Lost. This poem tells the story of the war in heaven in which the archangel Lucifer rebels against God, leads a band of rebel angels to try to take over heaven, is defeated by the Son of God and banished to hell, where he becomes known as Satan. God then creates the world and Satan tempts Adam and Eve and causes them to fall as he has before them. Now, Paradise Lost is a massive, massive work and it has been discussed incessantly over a period of more than 350 years. But while there is much scholarly discussion about all sorts of things, there is what we might call a pop cultural understanding of what Milton's poem was saying, which can be summed up by the famous quote from William Blake that anyone who's read anything about Milton knew was coming here. The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of angels and God and at liberty when of devils and hell, is because he was a true poet and of the devil's party without knowing it. This argument, later taken up by a lot of the Romantic poets like Byron and Shelley, who were influenced by Blake, is that while Milton believed himself to be writing in the service of God and Christianity, he was too good an artist not to give his central character, Satan, a plausible motivation. And he did a really good job. And because Satan was leading a war against the King of Heaven, Milton couldn't help, whether deliberately or unconsciously, putting his own motivations in the mouth of his main character and thus making him the most sympathetic character and someone who one can't help but admire. Shelley indeed went further still and argued that Milton's Satan had the same morality as Prometheus, who he saw as having the highest morality of all because he was condemned to eternal torture in order to free humanity, to the extent that in Shelley's view, Satan did usurp God as far as morality goes. Indeed, the Catholic Church also seems to have taken this view, placing the poem on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the list of books it was prohibited for Catholics to read in 1758, and apparently not removing it until the 1940s. Other people have disagreed very strongly. C.S. lewis, for example, who is best known these days firstly as a fantasy novelist and secondly as a writer of Christian apologetics, was by his own lights an academic by profession, and in his time he was quite possibly the world's pre eminent expert in late medieval and early modern English literature. In his A Preface to Paradise Lost, he argues fairly convincingly, in my opinion, though I'm hardly an expert on 17th century religious poetry, that readings such as Blake's and the later simplifications of that reading by people like Byrman and Shelley are not so much to do with Milton's own views as down to them reading the work in a totally different intellectual context. The qualities which they saw in a post Enlightenment context as being admirable were in the context of the pre Renaissance European tradition in which Milton was writing, with its rigid Aristotelian adherence to hierarchy, coded instead as disgusting and abhorrent, and would have been recognised as such by anyone at the time. Lewis argues that you can't properly understand a piece of art without understanding the larger cultural context in which it's created, and that when looking at an old piece of art one should look back further to what inspired it and the tradition it came from, not yank it out of context and view it in isolation according to your current standards. As Bohr has pointed out, in a very different context, Don Quixote would be a very different book if written by Pierre menard in the 20th century than it is by Cervantes in the 17th. Even if the words were exactly the same, a work exists in the context of all in which the author lives and what came before them. One gets the very clear feeling, reading between the lines, that the very conservative, very Christian Lewis looked at the Romantics and thought, but was too polite to articulate in so many words, even though they'd been dead more than a century. You are egocentric to the point of narcissism. You're long haired, foppish, overprivileged, layabout, you're drug addled and sexually promiscuous. You use your undoubted talents to seduce teenage girls, impregnate them out of wedlock and abandon them, often even seducing each other's conquests of it. Some sort of competition. You have no beliefs in anything except a desire to outrage polite society which has offended you by demanding you show the slightest consideration to others. Milton put all the qualities he thought most despicable into Satan. Of course you fell in love with him, my dear Byron, my dear Shelley, just as Narcissus fell in love with his own reflection. Of course, one could just as easily argue that Lewis was creating a Milton in his own image just as much as the Romantics were. While we should aim to view things in the context of their times, we are always still actually viewing them from our own perspective. Whatever the academic consensus on this question is though, and as I say, I'm not an expert, but I strongly suspect the answer is actually. Well, it's a lot more complicated than that. Whether the Romantics were right or wrong, they conclusively won the war of ideas among the broader audience. Milton's devil in the popular imaginary is sympathetic. Percy Shelley, incidentally, was tormented all his life by terrible asthma and died by drowning in circumstances that were never fully explained in his late 20s. And since we're talking about poetry, here's another one that's worth talking about. Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis begins sexual intercourse began in 1963, which was rather late for me, between the end of the Chatterley Band and the Beatles first LP.
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Mick Jagger
Well, she was just 17, do you know what I mean? And the way she looked was way beyond compare so how could I dance with another oh when I saw her stand.
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Andrew Hickey
If The American long 1960s can be summed up in a history of attempted and actual assassinations, Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace and their effect on politics. The British long 1960s can similarly be summed up by a list of trials and their effect on Society. Starting in 1960 with the Chatterley trial and going through the Profumo affair and its associated trials, the Last Exit to Brooklyn trial and ending with the Oz obscenity trial in 1971. These trials nearly all had similar basic shapes. Something would outrage, assume public morality and be prosecuted under existing laws, usually related to obscenity. But the trial would end up revealing that what had been believed about public morality was wrong and lead to further changes in attitudes as institutions moved to change in response to the public mood after 1964. These changes went hand in hand with changes to the law brought in by the Wilson government. While there were many other stories in the 60s in Britain, the big one was this liberalisation of society which was an almost constant straight line of progress throughout the decade. I say almost because shamefully, the 60s also saw the first serious attempts to limit immigration to the UK on racial grounds, though it also saw the first anti racial discrimination laws and there was also some tightening of drug laws. But in general, the first and second Wilson ministries were the most socially progressive British government in history. Those changes were largely the result of one man, Roy Jenkins, the home secretary from 1965 through 1967, who famously wanted to create a more civilised, more free and less hidebound society and said that to enlarge the area of individual choice socially, politically and economically, not just for a few, but for the whole community, is very much what democratic socialism is about. Capital punishment was abolished before Jenkins took office, but largely at his instigation. And he famously replaced the board in the Home Secretary's office, in which upcoming executions were listed with a drinks cabinet. Jenkins ended the use of flogging in prison, made prison sentences lighter and increased the use of parole. He introduced suspended sentences so convicted criminals wouldn't have to go to prison if they committed no further crimes, and drafted bills implemented under his successor for no fault divorce and criminalising racial discrimination. He also threw government support behind private members bills partially decriminalising abortion and sex acts between men. And he abolished theatre censorship and the very first of the notable trials of the 1960s. The Chatterley trial was also the result of Jenkins work, though long before he became home secretary in 1955, Jenkins, then still an opposition backed bencher, brought forward a private Member's Bill which after much wrangling on its way through Parliament, eventually became the obscene Publications Act 1959. The act was intended to get rid of a lot of the uncertainty surrounding what did and didn't count as obscene in British law, and allow publishers to have more certainty about what they could and couldn't do. In particular, the act had a section which allowed otherwise obscene publications to come out if they were in the interests of science, literature, art or learning, or of other objects of General concern. Regina vs. Penguin Books Ltd. Later known as the Chatterley Trial, was the first of the big controversial trials of the 1960s and was the big test case for the public interest defence in the new law. Penguin books had published D.H. lawrence's classic 1928 novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover in the UK for the first time a story which is about a repressed aristocratic woman having a sexual relationship with her rough gardener Mellors and gaining an understanding of her own sexuality for the first time, with very explicit descriptions of the sex acts involved. So was it obscene or not? The prosecution got off to a very bad start by asking the would you approve of your young sons, young daughters, because girls can read as well as boys reading this book, Is it a book you would have lying around your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read? That last question was one which for many defined exactly the attitudes of the out of touch establishment as the 60s started. The defence, on the other hand had on their side witnesses like the Bishop of Woolwich, John at Robinson. Robinson would later become a rather controversial figure. A few days before the release of the Beatles first lp he was interviewed by the observer in an article headlined I Our Image of God Must Go in advance of the release of his best selling book on theology, Honest to God. And conservative figures like C.S. lewis made strenuous arguments against both article and book, resulting in Robinson being regarded as a leading figure of the liberal wing of the Anglican Church. But at this time Robinson was regarded as a deeply conservative figure among theologians and his view that every Christian should read Lady Chatterley's Lover held a great deal of weight and a book had to be of general concern if a bishop, an absolute pillar of the establishment, said that all Christians should read it, almost as a moral duty didn't was an improving book. So in late 1960 the British public got both legal and ecclesiastical permission to read about Mellors's John Thomas having its wedding with, as the book put it, Lady Chatterley's Lady Jane.
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Mick Jagger
My sweet Lady Jane when I see you again your servant of I and will humbly remain Just be this plea my love on bended knees, my love, I pledge.
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Andrew Hickey
The Rolling Stones own contribution to the list of important and controversial trials of the 1960s started because of Mick Jagger's Oscar Wilde mistake. As soon as Jagger announced on TV that he was planning on suing the News of the World for calling him a drug user, wheels went into motion within the newspaper. The British tabloids had a vast network of contacts, including people at the phone company. Jagger and Marianne Faithfull got phone calls from a fan saying their line was tapped, though they ignored them. And in both the police and the security services, the News of the World's only possible defence was to prove that Mick Jagger was a drug user. Ideally in court before his libel case came. And they intended to do just that. And Jagger in his hubris played right into their hands. Five days after the Eamonn Andrews interview, Jagger and Richards both attended the orchestral overdub session for the Beatles, A Day in the Life, the song which was in part inspired by the recent death of their friend Tara Brown.
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Mick Jagger
He blew his mind out in a car. He didn't notice that the lights had changed. A crowd of people stood and stared there. They'd seen his face before. Nobody was from the house.
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Andrew Hickey
The day before, the group had started work on their own next album and Jagger in particular was impressed by the new stuff that the Beatles were doing and decided that the Stones should move in the same kind of direction. Psychedelic music with orchestral instruments and Mellotrons, not R and B. Songs about sex would be the Rolling Stones next direction. But the day after that session, Keith Richards hosted a weekend party in his country home. It was a very pleasant party indeed, by all accounts, lots of nice people and nice company. Mick and Marianne came down, as did George and Patty Harrison. Robert Fraser came along, as did the photographer Michael Cooper and a couple of other close friends. Two hangers on. Keith was too soft hearted to disinvite but seemed pleasant enough. And their new friend and acids player David Snyderman, an American known as the Acid King. They had a very nice Saturday night with the only minor darkness coming from Robert Fraser. Fraser talked about a recent trial he had been involved in when his gallery had put on an exhibition of drawings by the American artist Jim Dane, a major figure who had been part of the first comprehensive exhibition of American pop art. Though he always claimed not to be a pop artist. The drawings had been confiscated for obscenity and after a trial which Fraser had jokingly referred to as Regina versus vagina, Fraser had been fined 20 pounds. A slap on the wrist if that, for someone so rich and socially connected, but something he started to ruminate on a little. He talked about the scandal in trials involving his old friend John Forfumo and Stephen Ward a couple of years earlier, and how the legal system could destroy someone's life and reputation. They spent a very pleasant Sunday daytime taking acid. According to some sources, this was Mick Jagger's first ever time taking it and then going for a nice long walk in the country and drive down to a beach around tea time. George and Patty decided to drive home and Keith Richards has remained convinced ever since that what happened next was because they were no longer at the party. The police and the tabloids weren't going to Embarrass a beetle? Not quite yet. But shortly after the couple had left, the police raid started. Snyderman, who later turned out to have been working for the security services, had tipped off the News of the World, who in turn had tipped off the police. He was allowed to leave on a pretext and quickly left the country. But everyone else was searched. Faithfull, the only woman left in the party, was searched in private, but very quickly. She had had a bath after getting her clothes muddy and, rather than putting her dirty clothes on, had just wrapped herself in an enormous fur rug that she'd been using as an extra blanket. Unsurprisingly, there was nothing on her. The only member of the party found in possession of anything given the dealer was allowed to leave was Robert Fraser, who was a heroin addict and unfortunately had some of his supply on him. However, a jacket belonging to Jagger was found, which Faithfull had worn on a recent holiday they'd taken together. And there were some amphetamine tablets, purchasable legally in Europe, but prescription only in the uk, in the pockets, showing a gallantry which Faithfull was grateful for, but which would have surprised Chrissie Shrimpton. Jagger claimed the tablets were his, and so he too was arrested. Richards was arrested as well, for allowing his house to be used for drug use. There was no actual evidence that it had been used for those purposes. With Richards knowledge. It had, of course, but there was no evidence Fraser's heroin had been safely hidden away and it could be presumed he wasn't using it in full view of everyone, while Faithfull's amphetamines had been in her jacket pocket and had clearly been there for a while. But the police claimed that Faithfull's pupils were dilated, and so therefore she must have been smoking cannabis, and therefore Richards premises had been used for those purposes. While all this was going on, Bob Dylan's Blonde On Blonde had been playing in the background. And according to some accounts of the day, as the police left, Richards went to the turntable and started side one, track one again.
- [21:41]
Mick Jagger
Well, they'll stone you when you're trying to be so good they'll stone you Just like they said they would they'll stone you when you're trying to go home Then they'll stone you when you're there all along why wouldn't I feel so all alone? Everybody must get stoned.
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Andrew Hickey
The News of the World, of course, reported on the raid the next week. There was now essentially no chance of Jagger winning his libel case against them. The case wasn't going to go to court for a few months, but to avoid any further bad publicity, the drug taking members of the group Watts and Wyman were far less interested in that sort of thing, decided to get out of the country as much as possible. Between the arrest and the actual trial, all the major people who'd been at that party in fact decided to decamp to Morocco, where Brian Jones had already been spending a great deal of time. They were going to do it in small groups, so they wouldn't be travelling together. Robert Fraser and Michael Cooper would travel as a group and Jones, Richards and Jones girlfriend Anita Pallenberg were going to travel down together with Tom Keeloch. The Stones show for Cum Bodyguard and Deb for Dixon, the girlfriend of Donald Camel, a friend of the band Mick and Marianne would meet them in Morocco, but remained in London a little longer. During that time they saw a production of Paradise Lost, a one act ballet starring Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fontaine, with music by Marius Constant, a composer best known for writing the Twilight Zone theme. Unfortunately, while the ballet was a hit, the only film footage of it is some brief snatches of nylon, Fontaine rehearsing silently. And while the score was recorded, it seems only ever to have been released on vinyl in 1967 in Italy and the Netherlands, so I can't excerpt any of it. This is a shame, as Dzhego was apparently mesmerised by Nureyev's performance as Satan, informed as it was by Nureyev's own self image as a modern incarnation of the Romantic poets, and told Faithfull he wished he could be like Nureyev. As it happened, Nureyev and Fontaine would end up being a bit like Jagger and Faithful. On a tour of the US a few months later, they visited Haight Ashbury as tourists and were arrested for being on premises where cannabis was in use, though the charges were later dropped. Jagger was also impressed by the staging in which Fontaine and Nureyev came through a gigantic pair of lips that looked like his own. It was like seeing himself there on the stage, Faithfull later said, and it has been suggested that this was the inspiration for what later became the Rolling Stones Records logo. Meanwhile, Jones, Richards and Pallenberg were travelling by car through France and Spain to Morocco. But somewhere in France, one book I'm using says Toulon, others say Toulouse, which again brings up the problem. We hit time and again with the Rolling Stones that all the books are more entertaining than rigorously fact checked. But we'll assume it was Toulouse for now, as that makes more sense geographically. Brian's asthma, which had Always been bad, hospitalised him. He told the others to go on without him. He'd meet them in Tangier. Unfortunately for Brian Jones, though fortunately given Jones treatment of a Veronita Pallenberg, Pallenberg and Richards had been feeling an ever growing sexual attraction for months and had not been acting on it, partly because Richards was too gentlemanly to make a move on a friend's girlfriend, and largely because most of the time they were around each other. Brian was also there, but now they were going to spend days travelling together alone, other than a chauffeur who would be discreet. Dixon soon made her excuses and left through the romantic Mediterranean countryside in the warm spring, so different from the British drizzle they had left behind. You can guess what happened eventually. Jones increasingly frantic telegrams asking Anita to please come back and pick him up and help him get from the hospital to join with the others, couldn't be ignored any longer. And Anita, who still at this stage didn't know if she wanted to leave Brian or not, felt an obligation to do that. Keith and Anita agreed that even though they both disliked Brian by this point, it would be wrong to hurt him. And so they reluctantly parted and Anita went back to get Brian, get him some more medical attention and then bring him back to join the party, who by now had all met up and were hanging out with William Burroughs, Brian Gyson and other countercultural figures. The problem was, as soon as Jones got there, he realised what had happened between Keith and Anita. The accounts of exactly what happened then vary slightly and are impossible to reconcile completely, as is so often the case when talking about the Stones. But the most plausible version, which doesn't seriously contradict any of the others, goes something like Brian couldn't bring himself to actually accuse Keith of anything, so he took it out on Anita, as often happened in the case of Anita, who, unlike Brian's other partner victims, was capable of fighting back. He got the worst of things. According to Keith Richards, Pallenberg worried she'd broken Jones ribs when she fought back, but he wouldn't let it lie. He escalated things the next day by taking two sex workers, usually described in very unflattering and misogynistic terms by other members of the party, back to the room and trying to force Anita to have sex with them and then beating her up so badly when she refused that she thought she was in serious danger for her life. She came running to Richards for help and Richards became determined to rescue this woman, with whom he was now in love, from his former friend. As Richards put It in his autobiography it's said that I stole her, but my take on it is that I rescued her. Actually, in a way I rescued him. Both of them, they were both on a very destructive course. They got Keylock to tell Brian Gysen that there were British reporters sniffing around and they needed Brian out of the way because of his habit of going off message and causing trouble with the press. Keylock suggested that since Jones was such an admirer of Gyson and they both had the same kind of tape recorder, Gysen could suggest that they go and spend a few hours doing field recordings of musicians. As soon as Gysin Keylock and Jones had headed off together to make their recordings, Keith and Anita packed their bags and headed off to Tangier. Mick and Marianne had already left when he got back after a day soaking in the sights and sounds of Marrakesh, Brian discovered he had been abandoned by his friends and dumped by his girlfriend. Brian Gyson later wrote of that night, I go over there, get him into bed, call the doctor to give him a shot and stick around long enough to see it take hold on him. Don't want him jumping down those 10 stories into the swimming pool. And now looking back into the time pool, I see how I got set up to help the Stones lose Brian and I see another swimming pool somewhere in the future. Somewhat amazingly, even though Jones and Richards would no longer be on speaking terms for the next 16 months, they would remain in a band together. They even completed the last of the Stones touring commitments. In another example of the Stones following in the Beatles footsteps, they'd all agreed to get off the road and become a studio band. But they had a European tour to do, including the group's first shows behind the Iron Curtain. And somehow they struggled through it.
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Mick Jagger
All right.
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Andrew Hickey
Brian Jones was hunting, hurting badly Anita was, no matter how awfully he treated her, in his mind, the love of his life. And he made increasingly pathetic attempts to win her back to no avail. While they would both have dalliances with other people, Pallenberg and Richards relationship would be a long term one lasting 13 years as romantic partners and the rest of Pallenberg's life after that as friends. Jones started trying to find replacements for Pallenbergh and they were specifically obviously replacements for Pallenberg. The two main ones were Suki Potier, the former girlfriend of Tara Brown, who had been in the car crash with him when he died, and who bore such a strong facial resemblance to Pallenberg that in some grainy newspaper photos of the era, you can't tell which one is being portrayed. And Linda Keith, who didn't resemble Pallenberg in the slightest, but who was Keith Richards long lost love, the one who had left him for Jimi Hendrix and about whom he had written Ruby Tuesday or stolen it from? Brian Jones, if you believe Marianne Faithfull's account.
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Mick Jagger
If it's gone while the sun is bright or in the Darkest Night, no one knows.
- [30:50]
Andrew Hickey
Brian seems to have thought that by sleeping with Linda Keith he was in some way getting revenge. Instead, it only made things even more awkward between him and Keith. Things got more awkward when, on May 10, the day that Mick and Keith were formally charged, with their court date set for late June, Brian was himself arrested for drug possession. His lawyers advised him that given that Mick and Keith were also being charged with drugs offences, he shouldn't be seen with them in public any more than he had to. This wasn't that difficult. Neither Mick nor Keith wanted anything to do with Brian, and while he was still attending studio sessions, by Richard's account at least, the split from Pallenberg was really the end of Brian Jones as a productive musician, at least in a Rolling Stones context. He would turn up stoned and incoherent and spend sessions refusing to play, just looking at Keith, especially if Anita happened to be around. I say at least in a Rolling Stones context, because the stones in early 1967 were working with a lot of other artists in the first half of the year. Bill Wyman, for example, produced a string of singles for minor artists like the End, the Warren Davis Monday Band and Moon's Train, who featured a young guitarist named Peter Frampton.
- [32:23]
Mick Jagger
You Are Do I Need you.
- [32:34]
Andrew Hickey
Jones, of course, had just completed his film soundtrack, and Jagger produced tracks for Marianne Faithfull, Nikki Scott and Chris Farlow, this one featuring Jagger and Richards on backing vocals and Richards and Jimmy Page on guitar.
- [32:52]
Mick Jagger
The pain and hurt after all this what have I achieved to realize it's time to leave? Who wants Justin's papers? Who wants Justin's girls? Who wants Justin's papers? Nobody.
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Andrew Hickey
There were other collaborations, but the biggest one was a continued collaboration with the Beatles. For all that, the two groups were treated as opposites, with things like Tom Wolfe's famous quote, the Beatles want to hold your hand, but the Rolling Stones want to burn down your town. The fact remained that the two groups were close friends and often collaborators. Mick and Keith had attended the recording of A Day in the Life, and along with Marianne, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, Keith Moon and others were among the crowd of friends gathered, singing along for all youl need is Love. Jagger also sang backing vocals on Baby, you're a Rich Man. Meanwhile, Jones added saxophone to youo Know My Name. Look up the number, which would become the B side to the last new single the Beatles released during John Lennon's lifetime. The influence of the Beatles new orchestral and Mellotron driven material could be heard on the music that the Stones started in earnest in late spring and early summer of 1967. Jagger in particular had been hugely impressed by Sergeant Pepper and the music their rivals were making for what would eventually become magical Mystery Tour. And despite his general apathy towards the sessions, Jones was eager to show off his prowess on the Mellotron. The Mellotron was a difficult instrument to play well because there's a slight lag between when you press the keys and the noise coming out, so it's hard to stay in time. Jones was regarded by many as one of the best Mellotron players around, and he's all over the new tracks like She's A Rainbow, probably the most successful of their attempts to emulate the Beatles.
- [35:15]
Mick Jagger
See the sky in front of you and her face is like a sail and white so fair and pale have you seen a lady fair? She cuts in colors everywhere she combs her hair she she's like a rainbow coming colored in the air everywhere.
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Andrew Hickey
Though even there Jones is outshone, as indeed are the other Stones, by the contributions of Nicky Hopkins on piano and a Bartok influenced string arrangement by John Paul Jones. There's another influence on that track as well as the Beatles, though. The chorus hook line she Comes In Colours comes from a track called Of Course She Comes In Colours by love.
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Mick Jagger
A thought in my head I think of something to do Expressions tell everything I see one on you Whoa, whoa, whoa whoa my love she comes in colors, you can tell her from the clothes she wears.
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Andrew Hickey
Arthur Lee was apparently bothered by what he considered a rip off, but the influences definitely went both ways. Love's Can't Explain was a very mild rewrite of the Stones. What a shame. While there are still arguments to this day about whether Love's revelation was a reworking of the Stones similar jam going home after Love heard Aftermath, or whether Mick and Keith heard Love playing their song first. Either way, the two are nearly identical. And so one way or another, there were tips of the hat on both sides. But of course, all the work on the new album was put on hold for the trail of Mick, Keith and Robert Fraser. They had initially tried to bribe their way out of the problem. A friend of theirs had told them that for £7,000 he could pay someone in the police lab to lose the various confiscated substances and make the charges go away. Unfortunately, the police refused to stay bribed and the charges went ahead. Fraser pled guilty of possession of heroin, a charge that at that time was not considered too serious in Britain at the time, registered addicts were allowed to get heroin on prescription. Fraser wasn't a registered addict, but he was an Old Etonian and had served in the army with distinction, and he hoped that he could get a very lenient sentence. Jagger, having admitted to being in possession of the amphetamines to keep Faithful out of trouble, tried to claim he had a prescription for them which would have made them legal. He got his doctor to testify that the doctor had told him over the phone in February that that kind of pill would be exactly what he needed to get him focused and able to work, and that in the doctor's opinion, that counted as a valid prescription. The judge said that in his opinion, it did not, and directed the jury to ignore that evidence. That left them with no option, given the confession of possession, but to find Jagger guilty too. Both men were remanded in custody until the end of Richards trial, the only one with any serious questions of fact when they would be sentenced along with Richards if he was convicted. It's notable who was and wasn't there for Mick and Keith. Marianne was there, though it had been agreed not to call her as a witness and keep her name out of things. Anita couldn't be there, though. She was in Italy playing the part of the Black Queen, Great Tyrant of Sogo in the science fiction sex comedy.
- [39:20]
Mick Jagger
Barbarella Barbarella Psychedela There's a kind of cockpit shell about you Barbarella Bar Barella Dazzle me with rainbow color Fade away the duller shade of living get me up high Teach me to fly Electrify.
- [39:54]
Andrew Hickey
Brian Jones, rather than supporting his bandmates, decided to take the opportunity of Richards indisposition to slip off to Italy himself to try and fail to win Pallenberg back. Decca Records likewise offered no support, because the Stones weren't actually signed directly to Decca, but through a production company. Decca felt no obligation to help the Stones, even though they were the label's biggest earners, since they weren't actually Decca artists. Helping them should have been Andrew Oldham's role as their manager and record producer. But things had started to get strained between him and the Stones more and more recently. According to Ian Stewart, while Oldham wanted to be a record producer, he didn't have any production ideas and the Stones had been essentially producing themselves for ages and had started to realise that. And Oldham was now terrified that the police were going to bust him next after Mick, Keith and Brian. And so he'd retreated to California to hang out with Phil Spector, thus all but ensuring his connection to the Stones would end forever. Instead, the person who came to the rescue was Alan Klein, who attended a trial every day with Faithful and Les Perrin, the Stones publicist. And given that they couldn't influence the trial, publicity was the best hope for the group not having their lives destroyed. This started with the clothes they wore for the trial. Both Jagger and Richards wore smart suits, but slightly outlandish ones. Jagger wore green velvet with a pink shirt, while Richards wore a black and grey silk suit with a white cravat. They looked like romantic poets, the kind of anti establishment rebel that the establishment knows how to deal with and quite likes, not the kind that is out to smash everything. The case against Richards was the flimsiest of the three. The case amounted to one of the guests, Snyderman, who had been allowed to leave and had since skipped the country, having been found in possession of cannabis, which it was just assumed that Richards must have known about, as that was hardly compelling evidence. The prosecution tried to claim, without naming her, that Faithfull must have been smoking cannabis and also tried to insinuate that she was taking part in an orgy. All she was wearing, said the prosecutor, was a light coloured fur rug which from time to time she allowed to fall, disclosing her nude body. She was unperturbed and apparently enjoying the situation. Although she was taken upstairs where her clothes were to be searched, she returned wearing only the fur rug and in the words of the woman detective looking after her in merry mood, one apparently of vague unconcern, we are not concerned with who that young lady was or may have been. But was she someone who had lost her inhibitions and had she lost them because of smoking Indian hemp? And this was essentially the only evidence that was presented against Richards, that there was a naked young woman in his home where the implication never actually stated that some kind of sex orgy was being held. While Faithful was never mentioned by name in the trial itself, everyone knew who was being talked about. And soon the kind of scurrilous details that make the rounds of playgrounds worldwide had been added. Everybody knew within a couple of weeks that when the police had broken in, they'd found Jagger performing Orville sex on Faithful with a Mars bar placed inside her one shoulders. To imagine all the Yeast infections that have been indirectly caused over the years by that particular playground rumour, inspiring the adventurous. This was apparently enough that Richards was convicted. After less than five minutes deliberation, Richards was sentenced to a year in prison. Jagger to three months, Fraser to six. On his first night in prison, Jagger started working on a song for the next album.
- [43:26]
Mick Jagger
We're setting off with. SOFT explosion Bound for a star Fiery ocean it's so very lonely your hundred light years brightest goes.
- [43:52]
Andrew Hickey
Immediately the protests started. Demonstrators massed outside the offices of the News of the World. Questions were raised in Parliament. Tom Dryburgh, one of Jaggers coterie of aristocratic friends, brought up the matter in the Commons. Dryburgh himself is a fascinating character. He dropped out of university without a degree because he was too busy spending time with Aleister Crowley and learning Crowley's occultism, even though he remained a devout Anglo Catholic throughout his life. He had written for many years for the very right wing Daily Express under the pen name William Hickey, despite being an extremely committed socialist. So committed that it was largely believed after his death that he was a Soviet agent. There were letters in the Times from luminaries such as John Osborne. Christopher Gibbs, one of the other guests, who had a supposedly impeccable background. His grandfather was a baron and his uncle was the last British governor of Southern Rhodesia, was interviewed saying that the party had been thoroughly decorous and the WHO announced that they were only going to record Rolling Stones songs until the two were released, rushing out a single of the Last Time back with Under My Thumb, with proceeds going to Mick and Keith's legal bills.
- [44:57]
Mick Jagger
Well, I told you once and I told you twice but you never listen to my advice. You don't try very hard to please me with what you know. It should come easy. Well, this could be the last time. This could be the last time, baby, the last time I don't know.
- [45:29]
Andrew Hickey
Within a day it was agreed that Mick and Keith would be released on a bail of £5,000 each, pending appeal. Though they had to hand over their passports, Fraser sadly had to remain in jail. Almost immediately, the public mood started to change. In particular, the Times had a Leader written by its editor, William Rees Mogg, father of the current Conservative politician and aristocrat cosplayer Jacob. Entitled, who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? This title is a slight misquote of a line from Alexander Pope, who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? From a satirical poem he wrote about an enemy of his, Brian Hervey, who had challenged a friend of Pope's to a duel for libelling him by questioning his sexuality. The phrase has since entered into semi common use as meaning both taking a great deal of effort to do a simple task and punishing something far more than is deserved. I'm going to read a few paragraphs from Rees Mogg's editorial which was specifically in support of Jagger. In Britain, it is an offence to possess these drugs without a doctor's prescription. Mr. Jaggers doctor says that he knew and had authorised their use, but he did not give a prescription for them, as indeed they had already been purchased. His evidence was not challenged. This was therefore an offence of a technical character, which before this case drew the point to public attention any honest man might have been liable to commit. If, after his visit to the Pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought proprietary air sickness pills in Rome airport and imported the unused tablets into Britain on his return, he would have risked committing precisely the same offence. No one who has ever travelled and bought proprietary drugs abroad can be sure that he has not broken the law. One has to ask, therefore, how it is that this technical offence, divorced as it must be from other people's offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment. In the courts at large it is most uncommon for imprisonment to be imposed on first offenders, where the drugs are not major drugs of addiction and there is no question of drug traffic. The normal penalty is probation and the purpose of probation is to encourage the offender to develop his career and to avoid the drug risks in the future. It is surprising, therefore, that Judge Block should have decided to sentence Mr. Jaggers to imprisonment. And particularly surprising, as Mr. Jaggers is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the court. It would be wrong to speculate on the judge's reasons, which we do not know. It is, however, possible to consider the public reaction. There are many people who take a primitive view of the matter, what one might call a pre legal view of the matter. They consider that Mr. Jagger has got what was coming to him. They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence, a word used by Ms. Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail. There are cases in which a single figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspect of public morality. The Stephen Ward case, with its dubious evidence and questionable verdict, was one of them, and that verdict killed Stephen Ward. There are elements of the same emotions in the reactions to this case. If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new Hedonism then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity. It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr. Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man. This pretty much made it certain that when the appeal went ahead, they would be let off. But there was still the month of July to get through before the case would be heard. During that time, the group continued working on their next album. This was largely without the presence of Brian Jones, who checked himself into the priory for mental health treatment. When he did come in, he wasn't playing much of anything. As Ian Stewart told it later, all he wanted to do was fiddle with reed instruments and Indian drums. He was too far out of it to play anything. Being a star just got to him. That said Jones, mallotron playing at least is all over the record. The music they were making at this point was hugely influenced by the Beatles specifically. And so it made sense that for the non album single, We Love youe, released as a thank you to their fans, and opening with the prison door clanking, a sound effect apparently taken from an episode of the Goon show. Lennon and McCartney came along to add backing vocal.
- [50:02]
Mick Jagger
You Love Me Too.
- [50:19]
Andrew Hickey
That would be the last record the group would ever release, with a production credit for Andrew Oldham, who was becoming increasingly detached from the group and who disliked the new music they were making. Meanwhile, the group were convinced that Oldham was adding nothing to their recordings anyway. They ended up splitting and after the normal court shenanigans, Klein ended up as the group's sole manager. The group made a promotional film for We Love youe, intercutting clips of the band in the recording studio with footage of Mick, Keith and Marianne reenacting a trial. Well, reenacting two trials. The film is usually discussed as featuring a reenactment of the Oscar Wilde trial, and certainly Jagger appears to be dressed as Wilde. Wild Faithfull looks like she's in drag as Lord Alfred Douglas. Richards, meanwhile, is dressed as her judge, but his wig is made up from rolled up sheets of paper. The footage on the copies I have seen is too blurred to be sure, but they look to me like the pages from newspapers. But then, in the middle of the trial, Faithfull introduces into evidence the enormous fur rug which she had been wearing during the arrest, and we later see Jagger lying under it naked. The day after they filmed that footage, Jagger and Richards Appeals were heard. Richards conviction was overturned. He was a free man with no stain on his record. Jagger, on the other hand, was given a conditional discharge. This meant that if he stayed out of trouble for a year, he would then have the conviction quashed altogether and it would be as if he'd never been convicted. If he didn't, he would have to serve the original prison sentence. Robert Fraser had his appeal denied and his life was essentially destroyed immediately. Keith flew off to Italy to see Anita. Mick, meanwhile, had other plans. He had agreed to be interviewed for the Granada TV current affairs programme World In Action. A young researcher named John Burt, later to become Director General of the BBC, but at this time, at the start of his career, had decided that the case was important enough that Jagger should take part in a roundtable discussion with eminent members of the establishment. Talking with Jagger were Rees Mogg, as editor of the Times, Lord Stowe Hill, who had been the Home Secretary in the Wilson government before Roy Jenkins took over, and was one of the most eminent politicians of the day. Representing the government and representing the church was the Bishop of Woolwich, John at Robinson. Also included was a Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Corbishley, included at Rees Mogg's request, as Rees Mogg was a Catholic and didn't want to have an Anglican priest as the only voice for Christianity on the program. According to Faithful, Jagger was on Valium for much of the recording and certainly he doesn't come across as the most incisive voice in the discussion, though one can hardly blame him for not being at his best after just having been through the trauma he'd been through.
- [52:53]
Mick Jagger
Do you think that the society that you live in is one you ought to rebel against, or do you think you're rebelling against it? Yes, definitely rebelling against it. I mean, not in the obvious way that a newspaper or pop headline would do it, but obviously we feel there are things wrong with society. But I haven't, until very recently been into this kind of discussion at all, because I haven't really felt it's been my place or through my knowledge, which I don't think is enough.
- [53:32]
Andrew Hickey
Rees Mogg himself, though, was impressed. Decades later he wrote Jaggers views in a subsequent television interview were perhaps more important than he or we then realised. He took a libertarian view of ethical and social issues, which turned out to be one of the constituents, though only one, of Thatcherism. It was not the soft left Beatles, but the libertarian Rolling Stones who best predicted the Anglo American ideology of the 1980s. Mick Jagger was a Thatcherite before Thatcherism had been invented. Specifically, I remember being struck by the fact that Jagger used the classic John Stuart Mill on liberty argument, that you are entitled to do anything which does not affect somebody else adversely. He argued that that is the test of the permissibility of human action. When Jagger made these remarks in 1967, the young were beginning to revolt against the limits put on liberty by Victorian tradition and wartime necessities and by socialist paternalism. It says a lot about the ideological blurring that was going on in the 1960s and about the way Jagger would, more than most rock stars of his generation, make himself fit what was wanted at the moment. That the right wing Rees Mogg saw Jagger as a proto Thatcherite, while the very same Mill inspired social liberalism was interpreted by Jagger's friend Tom Dreiberg as a sign that Jagger was on the same political side as the socialist Dreiberg. And Dreiberg was spending much of this time attempting to persuade Jagger to become a Labour mp. After the trial, the band continued working on the new album, though as Bill Wyman described it every day at the studio, it was a lottery as to who would turn up and what, if any, positive contribution they would make when they did. Keith would arrive with anywhere up to 10 people, Brian with another half a dozen, and it was the same for Mick. They were assorted girlfriends and friends. I hated it. Then again, so did Andrew and just gave up on it. There were times when I wish I could have done too. On one of those days, the only people to turn up were Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and session keyboard player Nicky Hopkins. So for the first time ever, they worked on a song by Wyman. Wyman was embarrassed by his own vocals, so he had a heavy tremolo added by engineer Glyn Johns and called in Steve Marriott and Ronnie Lane of the Small Faces, who were working in the next door studio to come in and beef up the backing vocals. The other Stones later added Overdubs Jones on Mellotron, Richards on acoustic guitar and backing vocals and Jagger on backing vocals, and it was included on the album they were working on, but it was also released as a Bill Wyman solo single. The album they were working on was originally to be titled Cosmic Christmas, but the title soon changed. The Circle around the Stones was very interested in mysticism and the occult. At this point, Jagger was hanging out with Tom Dreiberg, who had been a close friend of the occultist Aleister Crowley and was basing his decisions on the I Ching. The group's friend Donald Camel was brought up by occultists and sat on Crowley's knee as a small child. His father wrote a biography of Crowley titled Aleister Crowley, the Man, the Mage, the Poet and camel, often called himself Crowley's godson. And Pallenberg was a self styled witch who was also close friends with Kenneth Anger, the filmmaker whose films about occultism and his own gay sexuality had been the subject of numerous obscenity trials in the US and who was an adherent of Crowley's religion Thelema. And so Jagger was inspired by the text in a British passport. Her Britannic Majesty's Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary to suggest the title Her Satanic Majesty Requests and Requires. Decca wouldn't agree to that and instead it was agreed that the album would be titled Their Satanic Majesty's Request. The album cover was photographed by Michael Cooper, the group's friend who had previously shot the COVID of sergeant Pepper. And Jagger's Big Condition was that it should be more extravagant than the Pepper cover. So it was printed as a lenticular picture which moved when you moved your head, and it showed all the group dressed as wizards, looking a mixture of embarrassed in the case of the rhythm section, too stoned to know where they were, or in Jagger's case, very serious about the whole thing. The COVID also included hidden photos of the Beatles, partly in acknowledgement of their support during the trial and partly as a nod to the Beatles welcome the Rolling Stones on the COVID of Sergeant Pepper. On October 30th, Jones own drug case went to trial. Rather than support their bandmate, Mick and Keith took advantage of their returned passports to fly to America to mix the album. Jones was sentenced to a year in prison, but was released on bail pending appeal. On December 8, the album came out and hit number two on pre orders. A US single was released shortly after of She's a Rainbow.
- [58:53]
Mick Jagger
Single Lady Pharaoh she comes in colors everywhere she combs her hair she's like a rainbow coming Colors in the air.
- [59:15]
Andrew Hickey
That made number 10. But soon after the album came out, people started badmouthing the album, calling it a bad imitation of sergeant Pepper. Jones said of it at the time, it's really like sort of got together chaos because we all panicked a little. Even as soon as a month before the release date that we had planned, we really hadn't got anything put together. We had all these great things that we'd done, but we couldn't possibly put it out as an album. And so we just got them together and did a little bit of editing here and there. Richards later said of it, it ended up as a real patchwork. Half of it was, let's give people what we think they want. The other half was, let's get out of here as quickly as possible. Ian Stewart called it awful, and Mick Jagger has often said that he thinks there are only three good songs on it, She's A Rainbow Citadel and 2000 light years from Home. In truth, while it's not a great album, it's an album that's rather better than its reputation. Part of that bad reputation comes, as with many albums from this era, from people spending decades listening only to the stereo mix, which is notably worse than the mono version of the album, which sounds much more coherent. But another part is that it doesn't sound like the Rolling Stones, neither like the tight pop group they had been before, or like the blues rock group they were about to become. It sounds like a dozen albums recorded around the same time from pop groups who had all got the same idea as the Stones that they needed to do our Sgt. Pepper records, like Of Cabbages and Kings by Chad and Jeremy, or Genuine Imitation Life Gazette by the Four Seasons, or Carnival Of Sound by Jan and Dean. And it stacks up perfectly well in that company. Not as good as the Four Seasons attempt, but much better than Jan and Dean's. But better than Jan and Dean, but not as good as the Four Seasons wasn't what the Rolling Stones wanted for themselves, and they quickly decided there needed to be a change in direction. But there were other matters to attend to first. Four days after the album came out, Brian Jones was back in court for his appeal. He had pled guilty and there was no way to get round that, and his offence was more serious than Jaggers had been. But the judge was lenient after psychiatric experts testified that Jones was suicidal. Jones was given three years probation, a fine of £1,000, and was ordered to seek psychiatric treatment. That meant that Jones was free, but unlike Jagger and Richards, he would have trouble gaining entry into many countries because he, unlike them, had a criminal record. Jagger was soon telling interviewers that there's a tour coming up and there's obvious difficulties with Brian, who can't leave the country, and that they wanted to tour Japan, but Brian, again, he can't get into Japan because he's a druggie. The idea that Jones couldn't leave the country was a slight exaggeration. He could go to some countries and spent Christmas in what is now Sri Lanka, but was then known as Ceylon, with the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, but only after he went on a post release bender. He got so stoned and drunk that when he got up on stage at a club to jam with the band he was watching. He started playing the double bass, then started kicking it and carried on kicking until it was in splinters, but kept playing the air even as there was nothing left to play. He then went home, collapsed, and was found unconscious and taken back to the prairie for their Christmas holiday. On the other hand, Mick and Marianne went to the Bahamas and to Brazil, where one night they came across a group of people practicing the syncretic religion Candomble, which, like its sister religions Santeria and Heshin voodoo, is a mixture of African Yoruba religion and folk Catholicism. The group didn't like tourists intruding on their religious observances and pelted Mick and Marianne with Stones until they went away. But before they did, they heard the drumming, which is characteristic of Candombale. 1968 is the year the Rolling Stones finally started becoming the Rolling Stones as we know them today. You can basically break the group's career into three parts of very different lengths. From 1963 through 1966, they were a blues band turned pop group with little to distinguish them from, say, the Animals or Manfred Mann or the Yardbirds. More poppy than John Mayall's Blues breakers, more bluesy than the Kinks or the who, they were more commercially successful than those other bands, thanks largely to Andrew Oldham's skill at marketing them, but not so much that they would on the basis of just that part of their career, but remembered much differently in 1967, they became essentially a Beatles tribute band. Their Satanic Majesty's Request has undergone a certain amount of rehabilitation in recent decades, but it still sounds like a bunch of outtakes from the magical Mystery Tour in Yellow Submarine Sessions, apart from Wyman's song, which sounds like the Small faces. And in 1968, they finally became the Rolling Stones and the band they remain with multiple lineup changes, 56 years later. The big driving force for this change was Keith Richards. Richards had never liked the direction the band had gone in for Their Satanic Majesty's Request and made that very clear. But also the band's time off the road had changed his musical tastes, as he put it, on the road. None of us had had the time to listen to much beyond the top 10. Our stuff, the Beatles and Phil Spector's latest all great records. But when we finally came off the road, I started listening to Blind Blake. A whole lot of blues have become available that we just couldn't get in England. Back in 61 or 62.
- [64:52]
Mick Jagger
There'S a great big mystery and it sure is worrying me this Diddy war did it this Diddy war did it I wish somebody would tell me what Diddy war diddy mean that little girl about 4ft 4 come on, pop in Give me some more of your Diddy boy Diddy boy diddy.
- [65:21]
Andrew Hickey
At the same time, bootlegging was becoming a thing in mock music circles. For the first time on their Christmas holiday, Mick and Marianne had been listening to Dylan's Basement Tapes, which gave Jack a pause and made him reevaluate the trend towards increasing production. And another bootleg had started to circulate. After the success of King of the Delta Blues Singers, collectors had pulled together some other Robert Johnson recordings and put them out as a bootleg album. And Richards was listening to that a lot as well.
- [65:59]
Mick Jagger
To the station with my suitcase in.
- [66:04]
Andrew Hickey
My hand.
- [66:07]
Mick Jagger
And I followed to the station the suitcase in my hand well, it's hard to tell it's hard to tell when all your love's in vain.
- [66:24]
Andrew Hickey
All your love and so Richard started to think about the way that older blues guitarists from the 20s and 30s learned the guitar. The story he told himself, which is probably a mixture of truth and falsehood. And unlike some of the other stories about early blues men, I haven't done the research to check myself, because this episode is already far too long and far too late, was that most black people in the 20s and 30s who bought guitars were people who had previously played the banjo. And so when cheap acoustic guitars became available in the Sears catalogue, they would tune the guitar to five string banjo tunings. And that that was why so many of those players used unusual tunings. Incidentally, the only guitarist I can think of who I know for certain did tune to banjo tunings is that great Mersey Delta blues man, John Lennon. Richards had already been interested in open tunings after he had discovered that Don Everley played in them. As he says in his autobiography, the best rhythm guitar playing I ever heard was from Don Everly. Nobody ever thinks about that. But their rhythm guitar playing is perfect. I don't know that I've explained what an open tuning is in this podcast. I think I probably have. I assume I did when talking about Steve Cropper. But just in case a brief refresher. A normal six string guitar is tuned to the notes from lowest to Highest EAD gbe That's the tuning that almost everyone uses most of the time. But you can tune your guitar in other ways which allow you to do things differently. The simplest type of alternate tuning, and the type that Richards was experimenting with at the time, is called open tuning. And in that you tune the strings to the notes of a chord. For example, the notes in a D major chord are D, F and A. And so you can have an open D tuning, which has the notes tuned to D, A, D, F, A, D, which sounds like this. Doing that allows you to play full chords by just holding one finger down, or a slide, if you have one. And it also allows you to do things like play a lead line on one string whilst strumming the whole guitar, so you're playing a full chord and a melody line at the same time. Richards was initially teaching himself standard open D and A tunings, and he was also playing around with a tape recorder. And the group started work on rehearsals for the next album. Well, most of the group did. By this point, Brian Jones was in the group in name only. He was still making contributions to other people's records. As we heard in the episode on all along the Watchtower, he turned up to the session where Hendrix recorded that and tried to add piano. But as we also heard, he only ended up playing Vibroslap on it because he was incapable of doing much else.
- [69:58]
Mick Jagger
There must be some kind of way out of here say the joker to the thief there's too much confusion I.
- [70:11]
Andrew Hickey
Can'T get no relief so rehearsals went on largely without Brian. As Richards later said, there was no immediate necessity to go through the drama of replacing Brian, because no gigs were lined up. We first had to recognise the fact that we needed to make a really good album. After Satanic Majesties, we wanted to make a Stones album, and to do that, they needed a producer. Once they'd realized that Satanic Majesties wasn't what they wanted, they realised it was because they'd been allowed to indulge themselves in the studio with nobody to tell them that they needed to actually get to work and stop messing about. Jagger also thought that they needed an American producer, because they were trying to get to the American roots of the music they loved, and they'd done so much work in American studios. Jagger told this to Glyn Johns, who was now comfortably ensconced in the role of engineer on the Stones recordings. And as Johns tells the story in his autobiography, when the pain of Satanic Majesty's request had finally subsided, Mick told me that they had decided to go back to using a producer and that they wanted an American. I shuddered at the thought of some Unknown quantity yank coming in with ego and guns blazing, telling me how to do my job. A few weeks earlier I had met Jimmy Miller, who was working with Traffic in the next studio to me at Olympic. He seemed like a really nice guy and was doing a great job. So I told Mick that he did not have to import anyone, as was already an extremely accomplished guy in London. Mick and Keith checked him out and he got the job, never knowing that it was me who recommended him. The first thing he did was replace me with Eddie Kramer to engineer. Fortunately, this only lasted a few days before the band insisted on bringing me back. Miller was an inspired choice. He had only had a fairly recent start in the British music industry. Miller's father Bill was a music promoter and Miller had initially been a singer. He signed to Columbia Records in 1962 and recorded a single, maybe Tomorrow but not Today.
- [72:02]
Mick Jagger
Maybe tomorrow but not today. When I ask for your love, you say maybe tomorrow but not today. You gotta have time to think, you say but only how much time? Music on the table, won't you say you mind or must you always make my heart break?
- [72:31]
Andrew Hickey
He seems to have recorded things for other smaller labels as well. There are a few other singles listed in his name on his Discogs page, but I can't be sure that those are all from the same Jerry Miller, because there are a number of artists of that name. Either way, he soon decided that he worked better behind the scenes than in front of the mic and became a songwriter and producer, co writing a track called Incense for the Anglos. Chris Blackwell of Island Records heard that track when he was in the US and thought it had a sound he needed. Specifically, he wanted that sound for the Spencer Davis Group who were signed to his label. Gimme Some Lovin had been a big hit in the uk, but Blackwell thought that it wasn't quite right for the us. This is the original UK single version.
- [74:00]
Mick Jagger
So glad we made it. So glad we made it. Give me some 11, give me some 11, give me some eleven.
- [74:16]
Andrew Hickey
On the strength of Incense, Blackwell asked Miller to come over to the UK and rework Gimme Some Lovin for the American market. Miller added additional percussion and backing vocals and this was the result.
- [74:32]
Mick Jagger
Nobody just want to talk, let me in baby I don't know what you got but you better take it easy Just spend the time now. So glad we made it, so glad we made it. You got give me some Give me, give me some nothing Give me some Give me, give me some Nothing Give me some.
- [74:58]
Andrew Hickey
That version of the Track made the US top 10, becoming the group's first big hit there and the start of Steve Winwood's successful career in the us. On the basis of that record, Miller became the group's producer and co wrote their next single, I'm a Man with Winwood. That would be Winwood's last record with the group, but when he left he took Miller with him to produce his new band Traffic. And at the point at which Johns introduced Miller to the Stones, he had produced Traffick's first album, the first album he ever produced. And their non album hit singles Paper sun and Hole in My Shoe.
- [76:08]
Mick Jagger
From a Bubble Gum Tree and All the Time you was the hole in my shoe which was letting in.
- [76:32]
Andrew Hickey
Miller was a new producer with something to prove and the Rolling Stones were a band who needed to reinvent themselves. But there were other things going on in the Stones life and in the world. For example, Mick Jagger purchased a home for himself and Marianne on Cheyne Walk in an artistic area of Chelsea, just a short walk from the house Oscar Wilde lived in when he wrote the Importance of Being Earnest.
- [76:53]
Mick Jagger
Fortunately, in England at any rate, education produces no effect whatsoever. If it did, it would prove a serious danger to the upper classes and probably lead to acts of violence in Grosvenor Square. And now to proceed to matters more closely connected with your character.
- [77:10]
Andrew Hickey
1968 was a year which saw more unrest than most, and we've talked about a lot of that in recent episodes. Much of that unrest was in either the USA or in France and Britain, which at that time was both relatively prosperous and under a progressive but unthreatening seeming government saw comparatively little of the violent political radicalism that those other nations saw. But it did happen occasionally, and one such outbreak happened on 17 March 1968, when what started as a peaceful demonstration outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square with the act of Vanessa Redgrave delivering a petition against the Vietnam War, ended with a fight between police and the demonstrators in which 86 people were injured, 25 of them police, and 200 people were arrested. It says something about the attitude of the government of the time that when questions were asked in Parliament by Peter Jackson mp, it was about police violence rather than any kind of condemnation of the young people who were also there. Mick Jagger, despite not being a particularly political person, was at that demonstration and this experience of political street fighting remained in his mind that major event in British counterculture. History came just one day after another major event, and an early tragic one in the Stones life. As I said earlier, Brian Jones was currently in the middle of affairs, both with Suki Potier and with Linda Keith, Keith Richards ex, who was also Jimi Hendrix's example. On March 16, Linda Keith was found unconscious and naked in Jones flat by paramedics who had to break the door down. She had overdosed on sleeping pills. Now, many of the details in this episode come from sources which are contradicting each other, but the details in this bit come from an author who contradicts himself. And they're rather important when it comes to one's assessment of Brian Jones character. Philip Norman is a generally highly regarded rock biographer, but his book on the Stones has a few factual errors that I've noticed. In that book, like every other book on the Stones I've read, he says that Linda Keith attempted suicide. In his book on Hendrix, though, which he wrote many years later, he tells a different story, one that appears to come from an interview with Linda Keith, which he quotes a tiny portion of. In that version of the story, Jones was pathologically jealous of Hendricks, and on the night in question, Keith was going to go to a Hendrix gig on her own. Jones gave her what he told her were uppers so she could stay up all night, but were in fact sleeping pills, then went out and left her there to die. Luckily, either way, she survived. There is one very obvious problem with the details of her story, which is that on the night in question, we know that Hendrix was playing in Lewiston, Maine, while Jones flat was in London. So if it did happen as described, it was not for the reason described. But I have to say it doesn't seem implausible to me that Jones would do that, given everything else we know about him. According to Linda Keith, then the Stones office put it out that I'd tried to kill myself for love of Brian. The newspaper headline, of course, was Naked girl in Stones flat.
- [80:18]
Mick Jagger
Goodbye, Rubens, you say. Who could hang a name on you?
- [80:34]
Andrew Hickey
Jones was of course evicted from his flat. In between all of this, the group, largely without Brian, were trying to work on their next record. The next single is credited to Jagger Richards, like most of their singles, but there's an argument that it should be credited to Jagger and Wyman. According to Wyman and his autobiography, one night during rehearsals at Morden, I was sitting at the piano waiting for Mick and Keith to arrive. Charlie and Brian came in as I began playing the electric keyboard, messing around with a great riff I'd Found Charlie and Brian began jamming with me and it sounded really good and tough. A few weeks later, when we were in the Olympic studio, out came my riff, the backbone for Mick's terrific lyrics. I was born in a crossfire hurricane and we all worked on the music. The part I'd composed worked perfectly, but the credit for this one of our best tracks ever, reads Jagger Richards.
- [81:29]
Mick Jagger
I was born in a class by a hurricane rain but it's all right.
- [82:02]
Andrew Hickey
Richards, though, disputes the claim, saying the riff is basically Satisfaction in Reverse and that he's proud of coming up with it himself. The lyrics had a fairly prosaic inspiration. Jagger and Richards were together in Richards garden and Jagger was dozing when from outside the window came the sound of Richard's gardener, Jack Dyer, stomping on the ground. Jagger was woken up by the noise and asked what it was, and Richard said, it's just jack jumping jack. And Jagger added the word flash. For the recording of that song, as well as many others on the project they were working on, Richards came up with a new technique he hadn't used before. If you place an acoustic guitar right up to the small microphone on a cheap tape recorder, the sound will be too loud for the microphone and it will distort. I don't have a cheap tape recorder, but I can get an approximation of the sound in the digital realm easily enough. You would play a chord like this, but it would come out sounding like this. As Richards put it, you were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. You were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell. Richards loved the sound this gave, and the initial recording for the backing track was done just that way. Jimmy Miller brought his own cheap tape recorder into the studio, and Richards and Charlie Watts recorded an acoustic guitar and drum track into that for the start, with Watts playing a tiny fractis drum kit, both of them playing into one mono channel. People have done digital isolations of the parts of the track and you can hear what Richards and Watts are playing together fairly well. Richards then overdubbed a second guitar and bass. He claims in his autobiography that there's no electric guitar on the record at all, but in fact, if you listen carefully, there is definitely a ringing electric guitar part too. Some sources credit Jones as playing that. Ian Stewart doubled the riff on piano, Wyman added a little organ, and someone, possibly the percussionist Rocky Dijon, who would soon be making big contributions to the group's sound, adds maracas. There was Also a further drum overdub. The main drum part is Watts on his practice kit, but apparently Jagger added some floor tom from Watts regular kit and there may be further overdubs. The track was a new reinvented sound for the Rolling Stones. It returned them to the riff heavy sound of Satisfaction. But rather than that track's clean production sound, it had a dirty sound. What we would today refer to as low fag jumping. Jack Flash was finished in late April 1968 and released in late May. The period of time between the song's recording and release was an eventful one for the group. For a start, Mick and Keith went to see the Birds live and as Richards put it in his autobiography, I went to see them at Blazers Club. I expected to hear Mr. Tambourine man, but this was so different and I went back to see them and met Graham. Richards was hugely impressed by Parsons musicality, he says in his autobiography of the musicians I know personally, although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too. The two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Graham Parsons and John Lennon. And that was whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial. That's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling. But Graham and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music. And then they got thrown into the game in early May as well. Brian Jones went to the launch party for the film Rosemary's Baby. This film was directed by the great filmmaker and awful human being, Roman Polanski, who will also be turning up when we get to the next song in this podcast and largely filmed around the Dakota building in New York where 12 years later John Lennon would be gunned down on his doorstep. The film, which is based on a novel by Ira Levin, is about a woman who is gaslit by her abusive husband and her seemingly friendly neighbours who are in fact part of a satanic cult and who have her raped by a demon in order that she can give birth to the Antichrist. It's the first of a small series of films that would dominate the horror genre in the 70s. Big budget, mainstream looking films about Satanism, the occult and Catholicism, in which the young are portrayed as the vessels of Satan like the Exorcist, the Omen and arguably Carrie, and is the start of a rise to greater prominence in popular culture of the idea of occultism the character of Adrian Marcato is clearly inspired by Aleister Crowley, while Anton Lavey, the head of the Church of Satan, always claimed that he was in costume as Satan for the rape scene in the film, though this was a lie. On 12 May, the Stones gave their only public live performance between April 1967 and July 1969, when they appeared at the NME Pole Winners Party. Sadly, unlike most of these shows, it was never recorded and all that survives are what would turn out to be the last public live performance by Brian Jones. There's a few seconds of silent film footage. They played two songs, Satisfaction and their new single, which ended up going to number one in the UK, their first number one since Paint It Black two years earlier. And on 21 May, just three days before jumping Jack Flash was released, Brian Jones was arrested again for possession of cannabis. Jones had somewhat been improving in the months since his own conviction and had even been taking a small part in the recording sessions for what was to become the group's next album, Beggars Banquet. Indeed, only a few days before his arrest, he had been back to what he had loved at the start of his music career, playing slide guitar on a blues inspired song, no Expectations, which was obviously influenced by Love in V.
- [88:54]
Mick Jagger
Me on a Train I've got no expectations to pass through here again Once I was a rich.
- [89:22]
Andrew Hickey
Jagger later described the session for that we were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mics. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It's funny how you remember, but that was the last moment I remember him doing that because he had just lost interest in everything. After the arrest, Jones was back to being an alcoholic and taking every drug available to him. Jagger later also said Brian wasn't really involved on Beggars Banquet, apart from some slide on no Expectations. He wasn't turning up to the sessions and he wasn't very well. In fact, we didn't want him to turn up, I don't think. The Beggars Banquet sessions are often described as the group going back to their roots or back to basics. But much like the similar recordings around the same time by Dylan and the Band or the Beatles White Album or the Beach Boys Wild Honey, the first of these stripped down albums to be released, predating John WESLEY Harding by 10 days. What we see isn't for the most part, people going back to 50s rock and roll or early blues. None of those albums sound like anything made before the very end of 1967. And what they're all actually doing is following in the lead of the new sounds that had become popular in soul music the year before, and in particular the influence of the country soul triangle of Nashville, Memphis and Muscle Shoals. Beggar's Banquet doesn't sound anything like the stones of 1964, other than having riffs. Nor does it sound like Chuck Berry or Jimmy Reed, except a little on Parachute Woman. In parts, it sounds like people trying to learn the lessons from Sweetheart of the Rodeo. Songs like Dear Doctor are clearly comic pastiche, but are also very clearly from the same realm as a lot of Gran Parson's work. But it also shows the influence of people like Aretha Franklin or Otis Redding's last work before his death, both of whom had come to prominence the previous year, and both of whom were making music that was often based on an acoustic guitar bed with piano, organ and electric league guitar often played in open tunings. Music which was in its turn, far closer to the Nashville sound records of people like Tammy Wynette and Charlie Rich than many fans of either style would perhaps care to admit. We see these albums as returning to simpler forms, in part because the instrumentation is no longer that of 1967's pop music. There are few sitars, mellotrons, harpsichords or piccolo trumpets in evidence on records like these, though few is not the same as no, and because the lyrics usually avoid the baroque excesses of psychedelia, going for simpler vernacular language. But these are all records that are informed by going through psychedelia and coming out the other side. And tricks like Richards use of tape recorded acoustic guitars rather than electric are things that wouldn't have occurred to anyone before the experimentation that characterized the psychedelic era. And that technique was used a lot on Beggars Banquet. It turned up, for example, on Street Fighting Man, a song which, like Satisfaction, was influenced by Martha and the Vandellas, this time riffing off the opening line of Dancing in the street for a song about the changes that were going on in the way the counterculture was reacting to event.
- [92:36]
Mick Jagger
Cuz summer's here and the time is right for rising in the street Bo I know what sleep and D down there Just no place for Jesus Street.
- [93:01]
Andrew Hickey
Fighting man is often portrayed as the opposite to the Beatles revolution, but both songs are deeply ambivalent about the idea of political violence, though Jagger comes down mildly in favour, while Lennon is mostly against that political violence. And also the liberalising changes to the laws we talked about earlier were Also, part of the reason we have such a thorough document of the recording of arguably the most important song on Beggar's Banquet, its opening track, Sympathy for the Devil. Jean Luc Godard, the director who did a lot to define the French new wave of cinema, both as a filmmaker with works like Breathless and in his previous career as a critic in Cahier du Cinema, had moved to London in the hope of making a film about a pressing social abortion. Unfortunately for Godard, what he didn't realise until he got there was that abortion had been legalised in Great Britain, though not in Northern Ireland, by the Abortion Act 1967, and was even provided by the National Health Service. There was no issue anymore for Godard to use in his film. Godard was stuck in London with no film to make and agreed with his financiers that he would make a film anyway if they could get him the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. The actor Ian Quarrier, who was also a co producer on the planned film, was friendly with the Stones and managed to get them to agree to be in Godard's film, not as actors, but in documentary footage of them recording a track for their new album. The film Godard made has been released under two titles in different edits. The version Godard intended is titled 1:1, but Quarrier had the film re edited and retitled Sympathy for the Devil after the track the Stones are seen recording. The principal difference between the two versions is that Godard's edit ends without the Stones having completed the track, while Quarrier's version ends with the finished performance of the song. This so infuriated Godard that when the film premiered at the National Film Theatre, now the BFI South Bank, Godard punched Quarrier in the face. Godard's argument was that one plus one does not mean one, one two, it means what it says. So we are obliged to take it as it stands, a series of fragmentary fragments. As this might suggest, the film is not just about the Stones and they take up roughly a quarter of the film's running time. Rather, as Goddard put it at the what I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War, there is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war. Even for the French New Wave, Godard's film was radical to the point that it almost seems at times like it is a parody of pretentious intellectualism. And it might be, in part, Godard was not completely humorless, though at this point he was very much a Maoist ideologue, and he was at least as influenced by Bertolt Brecht as by his political views. There are roughly four strands to the film, all of which are intertwined in fragmentary narratives with no clear conclusion. One of these strands follows a character named Eve Democracy, who is followed around through a forest by a film crew who ask her questions to which she only gives yes or no answers.
- [96:31]
Mick Jagger
It is urgent to replace the word culture by another one.
- [96:36]
Andrew Hickey
Yes.
- [96:38]
Mick Jagger
And maybe the devil is God in exile. Yes. Do you have a theory about who killed Kennedy?
- [96:49]
Andrew Hickey
No.
- [96:53]
Mick Jagger
It is impossible for America to get out of the atmosphere. Am psychologically impossible. Americans, you think, really want to fight. They really want a war.
- [97:05]
Andrew Hickey
A second involves a group of black actors dressed as revolutionaries in a junkyard, where they recite from texts written by radical black activists like Eldridge Cleaver before assaulting and murdering a group of white women. And a third, which I am not going to excerpt here for reasons that should be obvious, has Quarria in a bookshop selling a mixture of superhero comics and pornography. Quarrier walks up and down reciting from Mein Kampf, distasteful enough in itself, even in the left wing context of this particular film, but all the more so when you take into account the anti Semitic statements Godard made in later years. Customers occasionally walk into the shop, pick up a book or magazine, hand over a sheet of paper, and then slap the people behind the counter who appear to be hostages rather than staff. The film is not, in short, much like A Hard Day's Night or even Magical Mystery Tour. I have to say that even as someone with a higher than usual tolerance for pretentiousness and experimental art, I find it a tough watch. But then I'm watching it in a very different context from the one it was created in, which was a very politically charged time. But most people watching it then or now were watching it for the scenes involving the Rolling Stones. According to Jagger at the time, Godard caught the group at their best. But even so, it's painfully obvious how completely out of things Brian Jones is and how unfocused the band were as a whole. At this point.
- [98:40]
Mick Jagger
I stuck around St. Petersburg when I saw it was the time for change.
- [98:54]
Andrew Hickey
The song that the group were filmed working on, Sympathy for the Devil, was inspired by the Master and Margarita, a book by the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov. Bulgakov actually wrote the book multiple times, burning the first draft because he didn't believe it could be published in the Soviet Union. And a recurring theme in the book as we have it now, is the idea that books don't burn. He then redrafted the book at least four times and hadn't quite finished it by the time of his death in 1940. A version of the book was published in the Soviet Union in 1967, and multiple translations into English followed the same year. Those translations were based on a highly censored version approved for publication, but later editions have incorporated the missing material, which circulated in samizdat versions. As with other writers, notably Kafka, who died with unfinished work, this means that there is no fixed canonical form of the text, even in the original Russian. And when you take into account the existence of multiple translations, even in the first year of publication, it's impossible to know for sure which version Jagger read. He seems to have been particularly impressed by one scene, which in the translations I've been able to get hold of, goes like, forgive me, but in the heat of our debate, I completely forgot to introduce myself. This is my card, my passport, and my invitation to visit Moscow to provide consulting services, the stranger said gravely, and.
- [100:18]
Mick Jagger
Fixed the writers with a piercing look.
- [100:22]
Andrew Hickey
The two became embarrassed. The Devil. He heard everything, thought Berlioz, and gestured politely that there was no need to check papers. The character speaking there, Professor Voland, is heavily implied to be the Devil, though some interpretations of the book have him instead as Saint Peter or Christ himself. And apparently in the translation that Jagger read, which I have not been able to track down, as I say, Volund's line is, permit me to introduce myself. The novel intertwines multiple storylines, one in which Voland, using black magic, exposes the hypocrisies of the Soviet era literary establishment and the way they acquiesced in censorship. And another in which a character in a psychiatric hospital named only the Master, who is based on Bulgakov himself, writes a novel which we read as a book within a book about the trial of Jesus and the life of Pontius Pilate. The Master's mistress is then given magical powers by Volund, becoming a witch, and Volund grants her a wish. She asks that a woman who murdered her own child, a baby she had as the result of a rape, be freed from hell. Volund then grants her a second wish, and she wishes that the Master be freedom. Volun grants this wish by having both the Master and Margarita drink poisoned wine. They are both then sent to a limbo, much like the one in Dante's Divine Comedy, where they are peaceful but cut off from both heaven and hell. The Master finishes his novel there, and in doing so frees Pilate from the same limbo. The novel is a complex one and a funny one, and it seems to argue that the devil has been a force through history, working ostensibly against, but in practice for God, and also that one should always choose freedom from conformity, but that that freedom comes at a cost you must be willing to pay. The book is influenced particularly by the Faust legend in various different versions it quotes Goethe in the epigraph, but there are traces of both Marlowe and Gounod in there too, but also by Paradise Lost and by Dante's Divine Comedy, the two major works which have defined Satan in the Western consciousness far more than anything in the Bible. Jagger took some ideas and images from the novel and from the ideas about black magic that were current in the Stones circle, especially from self styled witch Anita Pallenberg, but also from their friends Kenneth Anger and Donald Camel, and came up with a song, one he wrote alone. Though like all the songs either man wrote, it's credited jointly to Jagger and Richards. Initially titled the Devil Is My Name and inspired by Bob Dylan.
- [103:03]
Mick Jagger
Hope you guess my name oh, what's puzzling you? The nature of my game.
- [103:26]
Andrew Hickey
Initially, the group tried performing it with their standard line up. Jagger on vocals, Jones and Richards on guitars, Wyman on bass and Watts on drums. But over many takes, mostly guided by Richards, who was acting as de facto bandleader in the studio, the song evolved into something quite different. Jones may or may not be on the final instrumental track. He was playing acoustic guitar, and I don't hear one on the track at all, just Richards electric guitar. Indeed, Jones is often not on the album, even when he was playing, Miller later explained. When he would show up at a session, let's say he'd just bought a sitar that day, he'd feel like playing it, so he'd look in his calendar to see if the Stones were in now. He may have missed the previous four sessions. We'd be doing, let's say, a blues thing. He'd walk in with a sitar, which was totally irrelevant to what we were doing and want to play it. I used to try to accommodate him. I would isolate him, put him in a booth and not record him onto any track that we really needed. And the others, particularly Mick and Keith, would often say to me, just tell him to piss off and get the hell out of here. Wyman switched from bass to percussion, Richards played bass and Nicky Hopkins was brought in on piano, and conga player Rocky Dijon was added as the arrangement moved from A Dylan esque acoustic song to something much more rhythmic and powerful. A side note here, Dijon's birth name was Quasi Dzornu and he was also known as Rocky Dzornu. I have seen conflicting reports as to whether Dijon was a preferred stage name or whether it was a nickname given to him by people who couldn't pronounce his surname. I have not been able to determine for sure which it was, but I'll refer to him as Dijon, as that's how he's normally credited in works relating to the Rolling Stones. Of course, this brings up an issue in itself, because that sort of surname tends to be seen as unpronounceable and largely by white Westerners, and Dijon or Dzidzonu was the first black person to play on a Rolling Stones record. Now, the Rolling Stones relationship with race is something I'm planning on dealing with in a future episode, but it is important to acknowledge here that this song explicitly makes the connection between rhythms associated with black people and Satan, a connection, of course, that had often previously been made about rock and roll, usually by those who wanted to condemn it. This association is not an accidental one. Jagger later said. It has a very hypnotic groove, a samba which has a tremendous hypnotic power. It keeps this constant groove. Plus the actual samba rhythm is a great one to sing on, but it also got some other suggestions in it, an undercurrent of being primitive because it is a primitive African, South American, Afro, whatever you call that rhythm. So to white people it has a very sinister thing about it. Of course, Jagger is wrong on a couple of counts here. The rhythm that's being played is not a samba rhythm and is also not primitive. Indeed, while the can dumble drumming we heard earlier has often been cited as a potential influence on the song, though that in itself is also not primitive. The percussion on the track is rooted in the sophisticated jazz of the 1940s, and in particular in the rhythmic sophistication of Dizzy Gillespie's band. Charlie Watts, who was always far more of a jazz musician than a pop or R&B1, often talked about how the principal inspiration for his drumming on the track was one of his jazz idols, Kenny Clark, the drummer for Dizzy Gillespie's band, and particularly the style Clark played in On Night in Tunis. And you can certainly hear some of Clark's drumming style in what Watts plays in Sympathy for the Devil, especially the way that he turns the snares off on his snare drum and barely uses the cymbals at all. But when combined With Dijon's conga playing. Stephen Bauer points out that in fact the rhythm that the two are playing, which is a mambo, not a samba, is very similar to Clarke's playing with Cuban percussionist Chano Pozzo. Un Gillespie's Manteca, one of the first songs to introduce clave rhythms to American jazz. Incidentally, Sympathy for the Devil is not the first song we've talked about in this podcast to have been influenced by Manteca. When Bobby Parker wrote watch your step, he said later he took the riff from Manteca and reworked it in the style of Ray Charles. What did I say? And of course the Beatles in turn later took Parker's song and turned it into I feel fine. And you can still hear the faintest echo of the original Latin groove in Mingo's playing on that track.
- [109:24]
Mick Jagger
Baby's good to me, you know she's happy as can be, you know she said so I'm in love with her and I feel fine.
- [109:40]
Andrew Hickey
But Sympathy for the Devil is the most percussion heavy track the Stones had released to that point. There's almost no audible guitar in the mix other than Keith's brief guitar solo, and while there are multiple piano overdubs from Hopkins, they're mixed fairly low. The track is driven almost entirely by Watts on drums, Dijon on congas, and Wyman on hand percussion, plus Richards busy bass line. Eventually, after several days of work in the studio, the track came together and became one of the most powerful things the Stones would ever record. The song is the utter Quintessence of 1968, a song that could only have been written in that precise moment when the pop culture zeitgeist had moved from the psychedelia and flowers of the year earlier to to violence and darkness and street fighting and assassinations. It was so up to the minute that the lyrics actually had to be changed during the recording, as the murder of Robert F. Kennedy meant that Jagger changed the words from who killed Kennedy? To who killed the Kennedys?
- [111:18]
Mick Jagger
Well, after all it was you and me. Let me please introduce myself I'm a man of whales and taste I lay traps for two.
- [111:37]
Andrew Hickey
Eagle eyed. Viewers can spot someone else in some of the shots, along with the Stones, their various girlfriends, the sesh musicians and Jimmy Miller. James Fox is in the background, acting in character as the part he was going to play in a film with Jagger that would start filming a few months later. The final touch was the overdubbing of the backing vocals suggested by Jimmy Miller. These were sung by Richards, Jones, Wyman, Watts, though Watts can be seen clenching his jaw throughout the session. Pallenberg, faithful Pottier and Glyn Johns.
- [112:12]
Mick Jagger
For change Kildasar and his ministers Anastasia screamed in vain I rode a tank held a generous rank when the Blitz green raged and the bodies saved Pleased to meet you all.
- [112:38]
Andrew Hickey
And all that work was nearly for nothing, as right at the end of the sessions, the hot lights had had been brought into the studio, for Godard's film crew set fire to the studio. The fire and the subsequent drenching of the equipment by the fire brigade wrecked the studio equipment, but the tapes were miraculously rescued. By this time, Brian Jones had actually moved in with Keith Richards. He had been made homeless after Linda Keith's overdose. Richards, despite his increasing disgust at his bandmate, was doing what he could to help Brian. But Richards was still dating Pallenberg and tensions were rising and Jones decided to get away. Back in March, he had flown to Morocco with Glyn Johns in order to record a group of musicians playing a sacred style of music known as Gnawa, with the hopes of then getting black American soul and blues musicians to overdub onto the recordings. According to Johns, though, Jones had spent the entire trip stoned and non functional and Johns had gone out and found the musicians and recorded them himself. But then Jones had done nothing with the tapes. But now Jones was journeying back and he was going to record a different group of Moroccan musicians, the Master Musicians of Jujuka, a group that played traditional Sufi trance music. He was travelling with Suki Potier and Christopher Gibbs, and while he loved Morocco, it also brought back memories of the most traumatic time in his life, when the love of his life had left him for his bandmate and he was travelling with Suki, who looked just like Anita. Things went much the same way as they had previously and Brian ended up beating Sukie up badly. According to Gibbs, I suddenly got this call from Brian to go down to their room. Sukie 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. Brian did end up recording the Master Musicians, with engineer George Ch? Kantz coming along to capture the sound on a portable tape recorder. Glyn Johns having given up on Jones as a bad job, he later edited the tapes into an album that was eventually released in 1971 as Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Jujuka. That album became a touchstone of what is now called world music and made the Master Musicians famous. A couple of years after its release, they recorded with the great free jazz musician Ornette Coleman, and the Master Musicians have continued to this day. They opened the Glastonbury Festival in 2023. Brian Gysen, who had introduced Jones to the music of the Collective, was also present at the recording and would recount how when a goat was brought in to be slaughtered, a snow white goat, in Gysen's telling of the story, Jones became freaked out and said, it's me, it's me. And everyone else picked up on this because the goat with its blonde fringe hanging over its eyes did look very like Jones. Chkiant, unlike Gysen, didn't think that Jones saw this as a portent of his own future, but he did remember that afterwards, when eating the goat meat, Jones talked about it being like communion. Chekyants also remembered two further incidents while they were in Morocco. In one, Jones passed out and hit his head on an iron bar and appeared dead. But Suki Potier explained that this was something that happened regularly. For the other incident, I'll quote Chiantsa's words about a trip they made to the beach. The guard told us not to swim because the current was too strong. He said, if you go in today, next week we find your body 10 miles down the beach at Asila. We put our towels down and I took a nap. I woke up 20 minutes later to see Brian swimming a quarter mile offshore, just his head in the waves. He waved to me, expertly fighting the current. He eventually regained the beach, his footprints coming out the exact place they came in. It was the strongest swimming I've ever seen. It made me think. Later on, while Jones was in Morocco, Jagger, Miller and Faithfull had all travelled to the US to start work on mixing Beggars Banquet. Keith Richards was to follow a few days later, but before he did he met up again with Graham Parsons, who was performing with the Birds at the Albert Hall. It was during this trip that, as we discussed in the episodes on Hickory Wind, Richards explained to Parsons why it was that the Birds trip to South Africa was being treated with such division and anger by people in Britain. Parsons, as we discussed, quit the Birds on being told this and he and Richard spent a lot of the next few months together. Parsons came with Richards to the Beggars Banquet mixing sessions in la. The final complement of people involved in the mixing and final overdub sessions was Miller, Glyn Johns, Nitchche, Jagger, Richards, Faithfull, Pallenberg, Parsons and Charlie Watts. With Jones off in Morocco and barely involved in the recording, and Bill Wyman going through divorce proceedings and needing to be in the uk, these overdubs largely consisted of backing vocals and additional keyboards. And while Faithfull and Pallenberg were both very involved in the creative process, everyone talks about both women as being effectively extra members of the band by this point. Then, for example, it was Faithfull who sought out the gospel choir who sang at the end of Salt of the Earth. Faithfull was getting a bit antsy and so it was decided that while they were over there, Jagger would produce a single for her with Nichi arranging. The A side was a song by Gerry Goffin and Barry Mann titled Something Better, but the B side was a song Faithfull wrote with Jagger and Richards, though it would take until the 1990s for her name to be added to the copyright Sister Morphine. The lineup for that track, other than Faithful on vocals, was Jagavan acoustic guitar, Nitchche on keyboards, Watts on drums, and a session player with whom Nitchche had been working, Rai Kuda on lead guitar and bass. Kuda jammed with the Stones and showed Richards another open tuning, open G, which Kuda used for his slide playing. Richards soon took to that tuning with one crucial alteration. He removed the bottom string, which because it was slack, tuned down to D, had a tendency to go out of tune and create an unnecessary rumble, and started playing with just five strings for the rest of his career. That would be his go to tuning, and he now has guitars custom built for him with only five tuning pegs. Richards style from that point on was very much an imitation of Kuda's, and the influence of Kuda is one of the big differences in the sound of the rolling stones after 1968 compared to before. The other big influence on Richards at this time, of course, was Graham Parsons, who was bringing out Richards love of country music and had already taught Richards another tuning technique, Nashville tuning, where you replaced the low wound strings on your guitar with strings an octave up. Parsons was slowly educating Richards about country music and things like the difference between the Bakersfield and Nashville sounds. But the band were also still rediscovering the blues, and they were also introduced by Kuda to Taj Mahal, Kuda's former bandmate in the Rising Suns, who had just recorded his first album.
- [121:36]
Mick Jagger
Have you got dinner?
- [121:38]
Andrew Hickey
Drop pop from your door Beggars Banquet was completed by Jagger's 25th birthday, and he played it at the Vesuvio Club, a club that had recently been opened by the Stones friend Spanish Tony for his birthday party. The album had been eagerly awaited because Their Satanic Majesty's request was so disappointing. But Jumping Jack Flash had infest people and it went down well with the hip crowd, which included Lennon and McCartney, Yoko Ono, Watts and Faithful. The crowd also liked the new albums that Jagger had brought over from the US by Dr. John, the night Tripper and Blood, Sweat and Tears. But Beggar's Banquet was undoubtedly the highlight of the music played. That was at least until McCartney suggested that the DJ play his new acetate of a new single. The Beatles were about to release.
- [122:29]
Mick Jagger
A J. You don't let me down. You have found her, now go and get her. Remember to let her into your heart. Then you can start to make it better.
- [122:58]
Andrew Hickey
Jagger was apparently furious at being upstaged at his own birthday party, but Faithful remembered it rather more fondly later, saying, the feeling in the room that night was, aren't we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet? And isn't this the most amazing time to be alive? And I don't think it was just the drugs. Not long after, the Vesuvio Club was burned down. Unfortunately, while Beggars Banquet was completed in July, there were problems with the COVID The COVID the group wanted was not acceptable to Decca Records. The original idea apparently came from Keith Richards, who had seen a particularly vile public toilet covered in graffiti and thought that something like that might make a good cover. With the album credits written as graffiti. The idea was given to the publicity team of art director Tom Wilkes, photographer Barry Feinstein, the husband of Mary from Peter, Paul and Mary, and journalist and scenester Michael Vossi. And they found a repellent toilet at a Porsche dealership in Hollywood. According to Vossi, we brought Mick and Keith to the site but did not tell them how vile the bathroom was. There was about an inch and a half of thick dark liquid on the floor and the place stank. The boys arrived in velvet suits and expensive Italian shoes. We'd waded into the muck. Mick looked startled when he peered into the loo. Keith just laughed. Meanwhile, Tom and Barry had scrubbed the lettering off the wall. We gave Mick and Keith crayons and felt pens and they wrote the credits and everything else on the back cover. Their shoes were soaked and covered with God knows what was in that thick liquid. Their beautiful bell bottom velvet pants were soiled from the bottom cuffs up about 4 inches. And they got into it, laughing, hooting, even stomping in the muck to splash more on their clothes. Took them almost an hour. They left, giggly and happy in their limo. This led to a stalemate between the Stones and Decca in the UK and London Records in the us. The Stones were insistent that as Decca were only the distributor of their records, which were supplied to them through a production deal, Decca had no right to turn down whatever they supplied. Richards said later what the Beatles and ourselves wanted, the most important thing was to break the record company's control. If you're writing songs and you're playing them, nobody should have the right to tell you how it should be done. You make the record and you give it to the company. The group were also increasingly concerned about the fact that Decca was part of a conglomerate that also included an arms company, and thus they were indirectly supporting the Vietnam War. They started to make plans to move on from Decca once the contract was up. Meanwhile, Mick Jagger was busy working on what was to be his film debut.
- [125:35]
Mick Jagger
My air giant off his steam and I was grinding at you hard to fast I was burning down the rail to keep the weight Hauling ass and riding up the track and I laughed at the conductor who was telling me my cold would never last when the fire hit My boiled quit before I came There ain't no weapon.
- [126:03]
Andrew Hickey
In this episode, we're discussing in one way or another, several film projects that the Stones or their members were involved in. And one thing they all have in common is that they are not the kind of project that anyone would have expected a pop group to work on. Even a couple of years earlier, when Alan Klein had renegotiated the group's Decca contract, one of the ways he got them extra money was to suggest that they might make films with soundtrack albums. And at the time, the expectation had been that these films would be something along the lines of A Hard Day's Night, those cheeky chappies, the Rolling Stones having a knockabout adventure with some catchy songs. And that was also the expectation that Warner Bros. Had when they greenlit performance, which was to star Mick Jagger as a rock star. But what they got was somewhat different. Performance started out as a script called the Liars, written at the beginning of 1967 by Donald Camel, a friend of the group and a former lover of Anita Pallenberg. The initial script, which was never completed, was about an American hitman on the run in Paris who ends up staying in a flat belonging to a rock star named Haskin, who has recently quit his band, Spinal Cord because they're becoming too commercial. The Liars was actually Camel's third script and second basic attempt at writing the same story. His first two scripts had been written years earlier, but both those films eventually came out in 1968. The first of those, the Touchables, was very much a prototype of the Liars when Camel originally wrote it, though there's also some suggestion that the original draft of the script wasn't by Donald Camel at all, but by his brother David. But it got rewritten by Ian Le Frenay, who had previously co written the sitcom the Likely Lads with Dick Clement, but who was only at the beginning of a 60 year career creating some of British TV's most loved series. The plot of the Touchables involves a group of beautiful young women kidnapping a rock star and gangsters seeking out the kidnapped performer. It was directed by Robert Freeman, the photographer who had taken the photos on all the Beatles album covers from with the Beatles through Revolver, and featured a title song by the band Nirvana, not the later American band of the same name taken from their second album, which was titled the Existence of Chance is Everything and Nothing While the greatest achievement is the living of life and so say all of us.
- [128:16]
Mick Jagger
Makes no conversation we'll be there sometime somewhere all of us take it slow from the back roads to the highway we will go all of us getting here I the.
- [128:49]
Andrew Hickey
Liars was originally intended as a vehicle for Camel's friend Marlon Brando, who was to play the hitman. A groupie character in the script was clearly based on Pallenberg, and while the character of Haskin is only barely sketched in, he's clearly inspired by Brian Jones, who had the same concerns about his own band's commercialism. However, while Brando was close to Camel and would remain so for the remainder of Camel's life, he turned down the opportunity to make the film and the idea was reworked into a script now titled the Performers, with the idea of having James Fox, a friend of Camel's, instead play the role that was originally intended for Brando. The role was shifted to that of a British gangster, Chaz, working for someone closely modelled on Monique Fay, one of the notorious Cray twins who ran London's gangland in the early 1960s. Jagger was pencilled in as a possibility for playing the rock star now named Turner, and at this stage the script, which was more of a series of notes than a full script in the normal sense, was adapted to include some more references to the Rolling Stones life, a drug bust like the one that Jagger and Richards had suffered in the previous year was included to provide some action in the third act. And at one point one of the characters suggested to Chaz that he should visit Marrakesh, which many of their friends had liked when they'd visited the previous summer. Camel had been unhappy with the way the previous screenplays he'd worked on had been turned into films. And so he decided that he was going to direct the film himself, or at least he was going to co direct. Camel had very strong ideas about storytelling, but absolutely no idea about the technical side of filmmaking. And so he decided to get in a collaborator, his friend Nicholas Roeg. Roeg had never yet directed a film by himself, but he had a lot of experience in the British film industry. He had started at the very bottom of the ladder working as a T boy and had worked his way up through clapperloader to camera operator. One of the first films he worked the camera for was the 1960 classic the Trial of Oscar Wilde.
- [130:48]
Mick Jagger
Lord Queensberry is triumphant. Mr. Oscar Wilde is damned and done forever. And about public morality will be vindicated and this evil in our midst will, I hope, be removed forever.
- [130:59]
Andrew Hickey
Damn good thing too.
- [131:00]
Mick Jagger
Never like the fellow from the first. Couldn't stand his plays. Lot of immoral rubbish. Damn it all, Bentley. The fella hasn't been tried yet. Innocent until proved guilty and all that sort of rot. If he had been in my regiment, sir, he'd have been lashed to a gun carriage and flunked. These artistic chaps are all the same. Lot of long haired degenerate. I think you fellas are taking the whole damn thing too seriously. Live and let live, that's what I say anyway. I don't care what they do as long as they don't do it.
- [131:23]
Andrew Hickey
He had then been promoted to cinematographer, working with people like David Lean, Roger Corman, Francois Truffaut and most recently Richard Lester, for whom he had shot Petulia, a film we've talked about earlier because it featured the Grateful Dead and Big Brother and the Holding Company. Roeg would of course go on to become one of the most renowned directors of his generation, but this would be his first time directing a film. Roeg and Camel considered the job of directing a true collaboration and neither ever revealed which aspects of the director's role were taken on by which co director. Roeg later said, the main thing about any collaboration is secrecy. Happily the secrecy has been maintained against all attempts at division. What would it gain people to know who did what? What is on the screen is on the screen. This fit with Camel's ideas too. While he had spent a lot of time in France and was very aware of the French New Wave, he was violently against the auteur theory that directors like Godard had put forward. In Cahier du Cinema, where a film is the singular vision of the director, with everyone else subordinated to it, the script kept changing. Camel did a lot of rewriting along with Pallenberg and his girlfriend Deborah Dixon. It's difficult to figure out exactly who contributed what, as none of the stories quite match up. Some, for example, have Pallenberg being a full co author of the script. But Pallenberg herself has said that she was unaware of the gangster part of the film until she saw the finished work in the cinema. One of the main characters was based on Pallenberg, but Turner, Jagger's character, was a composite. Jagger said at the time, it's very much me. I'm going to make it, if I can. Different to me. I mean, here's me, the me on that album cover. He is supposed to be a great writer like Dylan, but he's completely immersed in himself. He's a horrible person, really. It's not supposed to be a comedy, but James Fox and I are going to make it into a comedy. The cat I play is not really a pop musician, though. He's like me. He's a freak, just forgetting it. Sometimes you go three months and you just can't make it or you don't want to make it, so you just sit down, just like me. But he's much more intelligent. That's the sort of cat he is, a really brilliant cat. That's difficult for me to do. But while he initially intended to play the part as himself, Faithfull in particular thought that Jagger the man was fundamentally too normal a person to be like Turner. Instead, she suggested that he should play the character as if he were Brian Jones, but that he should make himself look more like Keith Richards. What she didn't realise until later was that she was advising Jagger to perform as a combination of two men who were in love in their different ways with Anita Pallenberg and who Pallenberg in turn found extremely attractive. Both the major characters in performance were, in their own way, performers and front men. Turner, of course, was meant to be the frontman of a rock band. But Chaz, James Fox's character, was meant to be the frontman of a gangster firm, the person who acts as the public face of the seemingly legitimate organisation that's a front for organised crime. Fox considers his performance in the film to be the finest of his career, but it took a toll on him. As Faithfull later said, in a sense, most of the people in performance weren't acting at all. They were simply exhibiting themselves. Real gangsters, real rock stars, real drug addicts, real sirens. With a trained actor, there's a separation between what's going on on the set and what you do in your life. But most of the cast of performers were amateurs. This damaged James the most, since he had no support from the other actors. One of the first things you learn in acting is how to share the weight, so negative energy is distributed equally. This protects an actor playing a very dark role from being pulled under. Otherwise, people would be cracking up all the time. It's called generous acting. James, as a professional, knew all about this, but no one else on the project had a clue, so he got really screwed. Possibly the problem was more to do with things like Anita Pallenberg slipping LSD into Fox's coffee without telling him. In order for him to act more realistically in scenes where Chaz is taking psychedelic drugs after making performance, Fox actually gave up acting for over a decade to become an evangelical Christian. Pallenberg was on the set because she ended up starring in the film as Ferber, the character based on herself. Originally, the part was going to go to Faithful, but she was pregnant and it was thought she'd be showing by the time of filming. As it turned out, tragically, she miscarried by the end of the year. Tuesday World was then brought in for the role, but she broke her ankle almost immediately and the obvious choice became Pallenberg. Pallenbergh was also pregnant, but she had an abortion in order to take the role, something she felt very conflicted about at the time. Oddly, the other major female role in the film, Lucy, was also recast because of her broken ankle. Mia Farrow, the star of Rosemary's Baby, had originally been cast in the role at the request of the studio, but she broke her ankle in New York and the role was instead given to Michelle Breton. Performance is a collage of a film. The story is a very simple one. Chaz is a gangster with a sexual interest in BDSM who has killed a business associate of his boss, gangster Harry Flowers. He goes on the run and manages to find a hideaway in the spare room of Turner, a retired rock star who has given up on performing, where he pretends to be a juggler who heard about Turner's Spare Room for rent through the showbiz grapevine. Turner and the two women with whom he lives in a menage, a Trois become interested in Chaz and have him start questioning his own sexuality and his very identity with him starting to take on aspects of Turner and to become more effeminate. Harry Flowers eventually finds Chaz and when Chaz discovers this he kills Turner. He's led off in Flowers car, but we see at the end that Chaz actually now has Turner's face. The film is as far from being a by the numbers pop vehicle as it gets and it's a richly intertextual film, particularly referencing the works of Borges and Kafka. It's also built on the cut up techniques of Brian Gyson and William Burroughs. And the whole film is influenced as well by the idea of the blues as the devil's music, with Turner at one point playing Robert Johnson songs.
- [138:33]
Mick Jagger
Woke up this morning I said hello Stephen, I believe it's time to go.
- [138:59]
Andrew Hickey
After the first half of the film, which is very much in the realist style of other contemporary gangster films like Get Carter or the Small World of Sammy Lee, and takes place in a wide variety of locations all over London, including a trial involving a Mr. Fraser, and focuses solely on Chaz. In the second half, almost everything takes place inside Turner's house and in the heads of the four main characters. The whole film is a dense network of references to Hassan y Sabah and the Hashishim and through them to the story of Satan in the Garden of Eden, to Kafka and Borges, and to itself. And in a film about identity in which Mick Jagger was playing a composite of her current and former lovers, it is perhaps unsurprising that things got complicated between Jagger and Pallenberg. Famously, there is an extended sex scene in the film which is made up of footage of the two actually having sex. Campbell supposedly cut together a longer, more explicit version of the scene, which won awards in an adult film industry event when he put that out. As one might imagine, this did not sit well with Richards, who had a major falling out with Jagger, although the two patched things up soon enough. But as the film was a sore point with Richards, the major selling point of the film to the studio, the promise of new Rolling Stones soundtrack material didn't happen. Only one Jagger Richards song, Memo from Turner, was used in the film and Richards refused to work on it, sabotaging attempts to record it at Stone sessions. By all accounts, while it's credited as Jagger Richards, it was actually written by Jagger Camel. The track was instead recorded as a Mick Jagger solo track produced by Jack Nitsche with instruments provided by Ry Kuda and Russ Titleman on guitars, Randy Newman on piano, Jerry Sheff, who was soon to become Elvis's bass player, on bass, and Gene Parsons of the Birds on drums.
- [140:53]
Mick Jagger
Come now, gentlemen, your love is all I crave. You'll still be in the circus when I'm laughing, laughing in my grave.
- [141:17]
Andrew Hickey
Instead of the Stones, the soundtrack was put together by Jack Nitsche and featured two songs other than Memo from Turner. One of them is the first time that hip hop will enter our story, a track by the proto hip hop group the Last Poet, which unfortunately I can neither name nor excerpt here as it uses the N word in the title and as a constant chant in the background. The other is a blues song written in much the same style as a lot of the Stones, then contemporary music by Nietzsche and Titleman, and sung by Newman. This song, which is played over the very start and ending of the film, says a lot about the film's themes and perhaps also about Nitchi's attitudes towards the R and B the Stones were playing because it sounds at first like a thrusting phallic blues rock song, until you realise that the lyrics are actually about erectile dysfunction.
- [142:06]
Mick Jagger
People lies down ship waiting at the station with the heavy loaded sack Saving up and holding just a spill. Shooting a supply for my demon's eye Instead of waiting for time to hold my whip when the fire in my boiler quit before I came There ain't no empty cell I need a gone dead train.
- [142:36]
Andrew Hickey
Much of the rest of the soundtrack is made up of atmospheric pieces dominated by Bernie Krause on Moog, Rai Kudron slide guitar and session singer Mary Clayton, who would soon make her own major contribution to the Stones discography. The film wouldn't, though, get released for nearly two years because Camel's initial cut was so violent and so unlike what the executives at Warners were expecting that the wife of one of the studio executives apparently vomited during a test screening. When it did finally come out, it initially had a poor reception, but it's now regarded as one of the great masterpieces of 60s cinema. Short term, though, the major effect it seems to have had was to put so much stress on the interpersonal relationships around the group. The both Richards and Pallenberg became heavy users of heroin, while Faithfull started using a lot of cocaine. In the middle of the filming, Jones latest trial for cannabis possession happened. He was found guilty, but luckily for him, the judge was lenient and sentenced him only to a pound 50 fine rather than to the imprisonment everyone was expecting for him. But Jones was now a multiply convicted criminal, and the chances of him ever being able to get a visa for foreign tours were fading fast. Meanwhile, Jagger went straight from his second film project of the year to the third. Kenneth Anger was, as we previously mentioned, someone who was a major member of the Stoners circle at this time and a follower of Aleister Crowley's ideas of sex magic. Anger is now best known for writing Hollywood Babylon, a book compiled from a series of articles he wrote for Cahieru Cinema, which told various scurrilous, scandalous, and often flat out libelous stories about film stars. But at this point he was best known as an underground filmmaker and was generally regarded, along with Andy Warhol, as the most important American underground director. Many of Anger's films had got him into legal trouble because his major subjects were gay sex and the occult. But for example, his Scorpio Rising, a film about Hell's Angels soundtracked with pop songs like Blue Velvet, was popular enough that Anger could claim with some justification, that many of the biker exploitation films from American International Pictures and the major hit Easy Rider were ripping off his work. The previous year, Anger had started to make a film based around Crowley's idea of the Aeon of Horus, the era which was supposedly inaugurated in 1904 by Crowley's dictation of the Book of the Law, the holy book of his religion, Thelema. The Aeon of Horus is the age of what Crowley referred to as the crowned and conquering child, when the child God Horus rules an age of youth and of individualism and somewhat equivalent to the age of Aquarius, which New Age people talk about. This film was to be called Luciferizing and was about the Egyptian gods raising the angel Lucifer in Anger's cosmology, somewhat equivalent to Shelley's idea of Lucifer being equivalent to Prometheus. Andanga had started filming it in LA with Bobby Beausoleil, the musician we talked about in the episode of Love, who was briefly a member of that group and who was nicknamed Bummer Bob playing Lucifer. The film had also featured another musician, Anton lavey, best known as the founder of the Church of Satan, a right wing political religious organisation which combined devil worship, atheism and the values of both Ayn Rand and Nietzsche, and which had a lot of affinity with Crowley's ideology, but who had also been a professional organist and would later release recordings of jaunty tunes like Satan Takes a Holiday. According to lavey's Bandcamp page, lavey was an accomplished organist thanks to a Robert Johnson like Deal with the Devil, in which Lavey exchanged his soul for a shot at being a pipe organ superstar. Anger and Beausoleil had had a falling out. They would later repair their friendship and Beausoleil would end up recording the soundtrack to the finished Lucifer Rising from prison. After Anger also had a falling out with the original soundtrack composer Jimmy Page, Anger decided to restart the whole filming process and tried to get Jagger to play Lucifer. Jagger wasn't interested in being in the film, but the eventual finished film, when Anger remounted it a couple of years later, would feature Jagger's younger brother Chris Faithful and Donald Camel. But Anger wasn't the kind of man to leave footage unused and out of the scraps of the failed initial attempt at Lucifer Rising, he created an 11 minute short invocation of My Demon Brother and added some new footage of Jagger. Jagger also composed and played the soundtrack on his Moog.
- [148:37]
Mick Jagger
Sa.
- [149:04]
Andrew Hickey
And as the year came to a close, there were two new projects on the horizon. The first was that they were starting work on their new album, starting with a track titled you'd Can't Always get what yout Want, which Jagger had written. Discussion of that track and the album it's part of will wait until the next episode where we will look at the stones in 1969. But before the end of the year there was one more film project in a year that had been full of them. This time the group were going to host a rock and roll circus.
- [149:31]
Mick Jagger
You've heard of Oxford Circus, you've heard of Piccadilly Circus, and this is the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. And we've got sights and sounds and marbles to delight your eyes and ears. And you'll be able to see the very first one of those in a few moments.
- [149:45]
Andrew Hickey
The plan for the film was to be a Christmasy answer to the Beatles Magical Mystery Tour from the previous year and a way to get back into live performance after two years off the road. It would be a stage show featuring all the Stones favourite band intermingled with circus act. And the original plan was to have the Stones themselves, the Flying Burrito Brothers, the who, Marianne Faithfull, Dr. John and the new band that Steve Winwood and Eric Clapton were forming, Blind Faith. That plan itself came from an earlier plan for a circus themed tour with the Stones, the who and the Small Faces, which had been talked about but not really seriously planned. Unfortunately, according to many people involved, Alan Klein didn't like the idea and effectively sabotaged it by simply not getting round to booking Dr. John and the Burritos. Steve Winwood was unwell and didn't want to commit to the show. This left just the Stones, the who and Faithfull lined up for the performance. Not exactly the masked line up of stars they wanted. Glyn Johns, of course, was going to record the music and he was involved in the planning of the show. He brought in an acetate of a band whose first album he had just worked on and suggested that to Jagger.
- [150:58]
Mick Jagger
Yeah, now I've reach that age I've tried to do all those things the best I can no matter how I try Find my way to the same old jam. Good times, bad times, you know I.
- [151:30]
Andrew Hickey
Unfortunately, it was to be bad times for Led Zeppelin, as Jagger simply didn't get the music that Johns played for him. Eventually, to fill out the line up, they got their friend Taj Mahal, who didn't have a visa or time to get one, so came over as a tourist and performed secretly.
- [151:53]
Mick Jagger
You got to dig it, baby yes, yes, yes. You know I never could not hope all the love that I fell in my heart for you if I could spread it up across the sea I know my love would cover it all up Baby, ain't that a lot of love but you are.
- [152:17]
Andrew Hickey
And a new band named Jethro Tull, who had already lost their lead guitarist and so ended up having only their vocals and flute played live, while the rest of the band, including temporary substitute guitarist Tony Iommi, mimed to a pre recorded backing track. There was one other guest, though someone else who hadn't performed live in even long longer than the Stones. Once again, when Beggars Banquet finally came out, it was greeted as the Stones best album yet. But it also looked like it was following a trend from the Beatles. Not only was it a return to roots rock, just like some of the Beatles recent material, but because of the dispute with the record label, the original sleeve for the album was not used and instead it was put out in a plain white sleeve with just Rolling Stones Beggar's Banquet RSVP written on it to look like an invitation. Which of course drew comparisons to the Beatles white album, which had recently been released and which contained the track yeah, Blues, which was very much the kind of thing the Stones were also doing.
- [153:57]
Mick Jagger
Wanna die if I ain't get away girl, you know the reason why.
- [154:13]
Andrew Hickey
In the absence of any of the major acts they had wanted to book other than the who, and indeed the absence of money, because Klein refused to put up the funds needed to film the show and Jagger had to pay for it out of his own pocket, Jagger turned to John Lennon in desperation and Lennon agreed to turn up with Yoko and do a song as everyone else was putting together supergroups at the time. Lennon decided to have his own blues supergroup and named it the Dirty Mac, a pun on Peter Green's new supergroup, Fleetwood Mac. This one off grouping consisted of Lennon on lead vocals and rhythm guitar, Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richards on bass, and Mitch Mitchell of the Jimi Hendrix Experience on drums. To introduce the Dirty Mac, Lennon and Jagger did a brief comic dialogue in which they both imitated Alan Klein and his sycophantic attitude towards the artists he wanted to represent.
- [155:02]
Mick Jagger
Winston welcome to the show, Michael. It's a pleasure to be here. It's really nice to have you, John, as you know, I've admired your work for so long and haven't been able to get together with you so much as I want. It's not been my fault. Michael, do you remember that? That old place off Broadway? Oh, those are the days I want to hold your man. Remember that. John, I want to talk to you about your new group. The Dirty Mac that you've got together for tonight's show comprises of yourself, myself, that's Winston Legthy, you know, nobody who.
- [155:34]
Andrew Hickey
Saw that savage mockery would have believed that one of those people was trying to persuade the other that he should sign a management contract with the man they were both mimicking. The Dirty Mac performed two songs, a live version of Ye Blues.
- [155:52]
Mick Jagger
Feel so suicidal, Just like killers with the young and lonely Wanna die if I am dead already get girl, you know the reason why.
- [156:22]
Andrew Hickey
And then joined by Ivory Getlis, a violinist friend of Brian Jones's, a blues jam with a Yoko vocal variously titled as Her Blues or Whole Lotta Yoko. The other performances were pretty much what one would expect. Faithfull sang her forthcoming single, A Goffin and man song, in odd time signatures titled something better to a backing track.
- [157:27]
Mick Jagger
Your way Dreaming good fortune on everyone's.
- [157:31]
Andrew Hickey
Street.
- [157:36]
Mick Jagger
Say hey, have you heard the whiskey is the rage I'll send you a jug in the morning it is absurd to live in a cage. You know there's got to be something.
- [157:53]
Andrew Hickey
And the who gave what was generally considered the best performance of the two days of filming, with a seven and a half minute long run through of their mini opera, A Quick One While He's Away, which started with some fairly rough attempts at harmonies, with the group finding it difficult to keep straight faces.
- [158:18]
Mick Jagger
Man's been gone for night on a year he was due home yesterday but he ain't here.
- [158:29]
Andrew Hickey
But ended with the sort of ecstatic climax for which the group were rapidly becoming known as one of the best LS in the business. And then finally, the Stones came on for their first live performance of more than a couple of songs in nearly two years. The finished version of the performance we have is the result of a number of retakes, but even so, a few things are obvious. First, by coming on last, the Stones themselves were very tired, and doing multiple retakes didn't make it easier. The version of Jumping Jack Flash is sluggish and exhausted rather than wired and energetic.
- [159:48]
Mick Jagger
I was born in a cross by Hurricane and I how old I'm mar driving rain but inside.
- [160:08]
Andrew Hickey
There'S another thing to notice about that as well. Despite Keith Richards and Brian Jones both being in the footage holding guitars, you can only clearly hear one guitar in the mix for much of the track. I'm not convinced Jones is in the mix at all, though there are points where I can hear what might be a second guitar, and that's true throughout most of the set. Jones is physically present, but doesn't look like he's mentally there at all. Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull later. Brian Jones was well past his sell by date by then. We spoke to Brian and he didn't really know what was going on. He was rather cut off from the others. There was a lot of embarrassed silence, but a delightful chap and we felt rather sorry for him. I was approached for an interview by a chap from Record Mirror. I inadvertently remarked that the Stones were a bit under rehearsed and that Brian couldn't even tune his guitar, which was literally the truth, but a bit tactless and inappropriate for me to say. According to Glenn Cornick of Jethro Tull, a roadie had to physically put Jones hand on the fretboard at the start of the song. He was in such a state. Pete Townes then said of that day, Brian was defeated. I took Mick and Keith aside and they were quite frank about it all. They said Brian had ceased to function, they were afraid he would slip away. They certainly were not hard nosed about him, but they were determined not to let him drag them down. That was clear. And this was the state that Jones was in throughout the performance. He makes one actual notable contribution, reprising his slide guitar part from no Expectations and does a perfectly decent job of it.
- [161:51]
Mick Jagger
To pass through here again.
- [162:08]
Andrew Hickey
And I can hear two guitars in the mix on the 12 bar blues Parachute Woman, but that's about it. The set also featured the live debut of the unfinished new song They've been working on youn Can't Always get what yout Want. And while Jones had been present for the initial sessions, he'd apparently just lain down on the floor and not contributed. And so when it came to performing the song, he had no idea what the chords were. And so, again, while he's visible in the footage and in the quiet part of the intro, it sounds like he's very faintly in the mix in the left channel. He makes no audible contribution to most of the track, with Nicky Hopkins piano taking the role that a rhythm guitar normally would.
- [162:45]
Mick Jagger
What you want, honey and you cannot always get the man that you want and you cannot always get the man that you want but if you try sometime I just might find yeah, oh, baby, I.
- [163:16]
Andrew Hickey
And by the climax of the set, an incendiary version of Sympathy for the Devil, Jones was relegated to shaking maracas at the side of the stage, the former leader of the band, now the third most important percussion player on the stage, after Charlie Watts on drums and Rocky Dijon on congas.
- [163:36]
Mick Jagger
I may well chase I've been around for a long, long year so many men sold the faith I was round When Jesus Christ had his moment of doubt Pain made damn sure the fighter washed his hand.
- [164:04]
Andrew Hickey
While the Stones performances other than Jones'had been competent, this first ever live performance of Sympathy for the Devil took off in a way the others hadn't, with Jagger crouching on the floor in a semi fetal position and beating the floor in time to the music, before tearing off his jumper to reveal drawings of Satan on his chest and arms and dancing topless through the rest of the song.
- [164:50]
Mick Jagger
All right.
- [165:01]
Andrew Hickey
Shortly after the filming, Michael Lindsay Hogg, the director of the film, put together an hour long edit of the footage, but it was blocked from release by Klein, who told the group bluntly that they were playing badly and that they'd been upstaged by the who. It eventually got a release in 1996, by which time 1968 was far enough in the rear view mirror that it worked well as a nostalgia piece for people who wanted to remember the Stones, the who and Lennon as they had been. As 1968 drew to a close, it seemed like nothing much had changed and they'd spent a year in stasis. Mick and Marianne once again went on holiday to South America over Christmas, this time taking Keith and Anita with them and saying they were off to visit a magician. While they were travelling, Mick and Keith met people who knew they were famous but didn't know why, and who kept saying to them, give us a clue, just give us a glimmer and started nicknaming themselves the Glimmer Twins. They spent New Year's Eve at a voodoo ceremony, and while they were away, they were trying not to think about what to do about Brian Jones, the man who had founded the band but who was now a complete embarrassment, who couldn't come with them on tour and couldn't have played his part if he had. Despite everything, they didn't want to get rid of him, but it was becoming increasingly clear there was no other option, and for Jones himself, he was starting to finally realise that he was no longer a Rolling Stone in anything other than name. He went back to Sri Lanka for another visit, to Arthur C. Clarke, and while he was there, according to some sources, he saw an astrologer. The astrologer told him that whatever he did, he should avoid the water in the next year, but Brian Jones did so love to go swimming.
- [166:45]
Mick Jagger
Rhythm of the.
- [166:53]
Andrew Hickey
A History of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Each week Patreon backers will get a 10 minute bonus podcast. This week's is on I Think It's Going to Rain Today by Randy Newman. Visit patreon.com andrewhickey to sign up. For as little as a dollar a month, a book based on the first 50 episodes of the podcast, From Savoy Swingers to Clock Rockers, is now available. Search Andrew Hickey 500 songs on your favorite online bookstore or visit the links in the the Show Notes this podcast is written and narrated by me, Andrew Hickey, and produced by me and Tilt Ariser. Visit 500-undredsongs.com that's 500-the-nuts songs.com to read transcripts and liner notes and get links to hear the full versions of of songs accepted here. If you've enjoyed the show and feel it's worth reviewing, please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts. But more importantly, tell just one person that you liked this podcast. Word of mouth, more than any other form of promotion, is how creative works, get noticed, and sustain themselves. Thank you very much for listening.