I used to believe in law and order and British Empire. I thought Scotland Yard was incorruptible. Wonderful, I fell for the whole shtick.
The coppers I came up against taught me what it was really about. Amazing to think now that I was shocked, but I was. The busts we were subjected to were set against the background of massive corruption in the Metropolitan Police at the time and for the next few years, which culminated in the commissioner publicly firing a great many CID officers and prosecuting others.
It was only by getting busted that we realized how fragile the structure really was. They’re shitting themselves with fear now, because they’ve busted us and they don’t know what to do with us. It was sort of eye-opening. What had they got at Redlands? Some Italian speed that Mick had on script anyway, and they found some smack on Robert Fraser, and that was it. And because they found a few roaches in the ashtray, I got done for allowing people to smoke marijuana on my premises. It was so tenuous. They got nothing out of it. In fact, what they got was a big black eye.
On the day, almost on the hour, that Mick and I were charged, on May 10, 1967, Brian Jones was simultaneously busted in his apartment in London. The stitch-up was orchestrated and synchronized with rare precision. But due to some small glitch of stage management, the press actually arrived, television crews included, a few minutes before the police knocked on Brian’s door with their warrant. The police had to push through the army of hacks that they had summoned to get to the door. But this collusion was barely noticeable in the farce that unfolded.
The Redlands trial, in late June, was in Chichester, which was still in 1930 when it came to the judicials. On the bench was Judge Block, who was probably sixty-odd, about my age now, at the time. This was my first ever show in court, and you don’t know how you’re going to react. In fact I had no choice. He was so offensive, obviously trying to provoke me so that he could do what he wanted. He called me, for having used my premises for the smoking of cannabis resin, “scum” and “filth,” and said, “People like this shouldn’t be allowed to walk free.” So when the prosecutor said to me that surely I must have known what was going on, what with a naked girl wrapped in a rug, which is basically what I was being done for, I did not just say, “Oh, sorry, Your Honor.”
The actual exchange went as follows:
Morris (The Prosecutor): There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant?
Keith: Not at all.
Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal?
Keith: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.
It got me a year in Wormwood Scrubs. I only did a day, as it turned out, but that was what the judge thought of my speech —he gave me the heaviest sentence he thought he could get away with. I found out later that Judge Block was married to the heiress of Shippam’s fish paste. If I’d known about his fishwife, I could have come out with a better one. We’ll leave it at that.
That day, June 29, 1967, I was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison. Robert Fraser was given six months and Mick three months. Mick was in Brixton. Fraser and I went to the Scrubs that night.
What a ludicrous sentence. How much do they hate you? I wonder who was whispering in the judge’s ear. If he had listened to wise information, he would have said, I’ll just treat this as twenty-five quid and out of here; this case is nothing. In retrospect, the judge actually played into our hands. He managed to turn it into a great PR coup for us, even though I must say I didn’t enjoy Wormwood Scrubs, even for twenty-four hours. The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight. I’ve been playing up to it ever since.
But the dark side of this was discovering that we’d become the focal point of a nervous establishment. There’s two ways the authorities can deal with a perceived challenge. One is to absorb and the other is to nail. They had to leave the Beatles alone because they’d already given them medals. We got the nail. It was more serious than I thought. I was in jail because I’d obviously pissed off the authorities. I’m a guitar player in a pop band and I’m being targeted by the British government and its vicious police force, all of which shows me how frightened they are. We won two world wars, and these people are shivering in their goddamn boots. “All of your children will be like this if you don’t stop this right now.” There was such ignorance on both sides. We didn’t know we were doing anything that was going to bring the empire crashing to the floor, and they were searching in the sugar bowls not knowing what they were looking for.
But it didn’t stop them trying again and again and again, for the next eighteen months. It coincided with their learning about drugs. They’d never heard of them before. I used to walk down Oxford Street with a slab of hash as big as a skateboard. I wouldn’t even wrap it up. This was ’65, ’66—there was that brief moment of total freedom. We didn’t even think that it was illegal, what we were doing. And they knew nothing about drugs at all. But once that came on the menu in about ’67, they saw their opportunity. As a source of income or a source of promotion or another avenue to make more arrests. It’s easy to bust a hippie. And it got very easy to plant a couple of joints on people. It was just so common that you expected it.
Most of the first day of the prison sentence was induction. You get in with the rest of the inductees and take a shower and they spray you with lice spray. Oh, nice one, son. The whole place is meant to intimidate you to the max. The Scrubs wall is daunting to look at, twenty feet, but someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Blake got over it.” Nine months earlier the spy George Blake’s friends had dropped a ladder over the wall and spirited him away to Moscow—a sensational escape. But having Russian friends to spirit you away is another thing. I walked around in an orderly circle with so much rabbit going on it took me a while to get a touch on the back. “Keef, you got bail, you sod.” I said, “Any messages? Give ’em to me now.” I had to deliver about ten notes to families. Tearful. There were some mean mothers there and most of them were warders. The head bugger said to me as I got in the Bentley, “You’ll be back.” I said to him, “Not on your time, I won’t.”
Our lawyers had filed an appeal and I’d been released on bail. Before the appeal hearing, the Times, great champion of the underdog, came unexpectedly to our assistance. “There must remain a suspicion,” wrote William Rees-Mogg, the Times editor, in his piece “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?,” “that Mr. Jagger received a harsher sentence than would ever have been handed down to an unknown defendant.” I.e., you’ve cocked it up and made British justice look bad. In actual fact we got saved by Rees-Mogg, because, believe me, I felt like a butterfly at the time and I’m going to be broken. When you look back at the brutality of the establishment in the Profumo affair—something as dirty as any John le Carré story, in which inconvenient players were framed and hounded to their death—I’m quite amazed it didn’t get more bloody than it did. In that same month my conviction was overturned and Mick’s was upheld but his sentence quashed. Not so lucky Robert Fraser, who had pleaded guilty to heroin possession. He had to do his porridge. I think that the experience in the King’s African Rifles had more effect on him than Wormwood Scrubs. He’d thrown loads of guys into jankers—army for the glasshouse—which is slopping out the bogs or digging new latrines. It wasn’t as if he had no idea about confinement and punishment. I’m sure Africa was a bit rougher than anywhere else. He went in very bold. Never flinched. I thought he came out very bold too, bow tie, cigarette holder. I said, “Let’s get stoned.”
The same day we were released, the strangest TV discussion ever filmed took place between Mick—flown in by helicopter to some English lawn—and representatives of the ruling establishment. They were like figures from Alice, chessmen: a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney general and Re
es-Mogg. They’d been sent out as a scouting party, waving a white flag, to discover whether the new youth culture was a threat to the established order. Trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the generations. They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous. Their questions amounted to: what do you want? We’re laughing up our sleeves. They were trying to make peace with us, like Chamberlain. Little bit of paper, “peace in our time, peace in our time.” All they’re trying to do is retain their positions. But such beautiful English earnestness, this concern. It was astounding. Yet you know they’re carrying weight, they can bring down some heavy-duty shit, so there was this underlying aggressiveness in the guise of all this amused curiosity. In a way they were begging Mick for answers. I thought Mick came off pretty well. He didn’t attempt to answer them; he just said, you’re living in the past.
Much of that year we struggled haphazardly to make Their Satanic Majesties Request. None of us wanted to make it, but it was time for another Stones album, and Sgt. Pepper’s was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on. We do have the first 3-D record cover of all time. That was acid too. We made that set ourselves. We went to New York, put ourselves in the hands of this Japanese bloke with the only camera in the world that could do the 3-D. Bits of paint and saws, bits of Styrofoam. We need some plants! OK, we’ll go down to the flower district. It coincided with the departure of Andrew Oldham—dropping the pilot, who was now in a bad way, getting shock treatment for some insurmountable mental pain to do with women trouble. He was also spending a lot of time with his own label, Immediate Records. Things might have run their course, but there was something between Mick and him that couldn’t be resolved, that I can only speculate on. They were falling out of sync with each other. Mick was starting to feel his oats and wanted to test it out by getting rid of Oldham. And to be fair to Mick, Andrew was getting big ideas. And why not? A year or two before, he was nobody; now he wanted to be Phil Spector. But all he’s got is this five-piece rock-and-roll band to do it with. He would spend an inordinate amount of time, once a couple of hits had rolled in, trying to make these Spector-type records. Andrew wasn’t concentrating on the Stones anymore. Added to that, we could no longer create coverage in the way Oldham had done; we were no longer writing the headlines, we were ducking them, and that meant another of Oldham’s jobs had gone. His box of tricks was exhausted.
Anita and I went back to Morocco for Christmas in 1967, with Robert Fraser, soon after he’d got out of jail. Chrissie Gibbs took a house belonging to an Italian hairdresser in Marrakech. It was a house with a big garden that had run wild, and the garden was full of peacocks and white flowers coming up through weeds and grass. Marrakech gets very dry, and when the rains come all this vegetation comes piercing through. It was cold and wet, so there was a lot of making of fires in the house. And we were also smoking a lot of dope. Gibbs had a big pot of majoun, the Moroccan candy made of grass and spices, that he’d brought from Tangier, and Robert was very keen about this person who Brion Gysin had put us all onto, who was also a maker of majoun, Mr. Verygood, who worked in the “mishmash”—the jam—factory and made us apricot jam in the evening.
We had dropped in on Achmed in Tangier on the way. His shop was now decorated with collages of the Stones. He’d cut up old seed catalogues, and our faces peered out from a forest of sweet peas and hyacinths. This was the period when dope could be mailed in various ways. And the best hash, if you could get any, was Afghani primo, which used to come in two shapes: like flying saucers, with a seal on it, or in the shape of a sandal, or the sole of a sandal. And it used to have white veins in it that were apparently goat shit, part of the cement. And over the next couple of years Achmed would send out large quantities of hashish sealed in the bases of brass candlesticks. Soon he had four shops in a row and big American cars with Norwegian au pair girls falling out the back. All kinds of wonderful things happened to him. And then a couple of years later, I heard he was in the slammer with everything taken from him. Gibbs looked after him and kept in touch with him until he died.
Tangier was a place of fugitives and suspects, marginal characters acting other lives. On the beach in Tangier on that trip we saw these two strange beach boys walking along, dressed in suits, looking like the Blues Brothers. It was the Kray twins. Ronnie liked little Moroccan boys, and Reggie used to indulge him. They’d brought a touch of Southend with them, handkerchief knotted on the corners over the head and trousers rolled up. And those were the days when you were reading about how they’d murdered the axman, and all those people they’d nailed to the floor. The rough mixed with the smooth. Paul Getty and his beautiful and doomed wife, Talitha, had just bought their huge palace at Sidi Mimoun, where we stayed one night. There was a character called Arndt Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, whose name I remember because he was the gaily painted heir to the Krupp millions, and a degenerate even by my standards. I believe he may have been in the car during one of the most terrifying moments I’ve had in a motorcar and one of my closest shaves with mortality.
Certainly Michael Cooper was in the car, and maybe Robert Fraser, and one other, who might have been Krupp. And had it been the heir to the munitions empire, it would have been ironic what nearly befell us. We’d gone on a trip to Fez in a rented Peugeot, and left at night to go back to Marrakech, across the Atlas Mountains. I was driving. Up there among the hairpin bends, halfway down, round the corner right in front of me, without any by-your-leave, coming at us there were these two motorcycles, military I realized by the uniforms, and they were covering all of the road. So he managed to swerve there, I managed to get round here, but down below is half a mile of forget-about-it. So I pull back in and swerve around, and in front of me now is this huge truck, with more motorcycle outriders, and I ain’t going over, so I clipped one of the motorcyclists and I went right by the thing. They went bananas. And as we were passing by it, there’s a huge missile, a rocket on the truck. We’re going round the bend and we’ve just made it—I’ve got one wheel over the abyss; I just managed to save us. What the fuck is this doing in the middle of the road? And seconds later, booom. It went over. We hear this huge crash and explosion. It was so fast I don’t think they knew what happened. This was a long, big motherfucker, an articulated truck. But how we got away with it I don’t really know. Just drove on. Foot down. Deal with the hairpins. My night-driving abilities were famous at that time. We changed cars when we got down to Meknes. I went to the garage and said, “This car isn’t working very well. Can we rent another one?” We just got the hell out of there. I was expecting NATO on my tail or something, at least an immediate military response, helicopters and searchlights. The next day we’re looking in the papers. Not a mention. Falling down a cliff into an abyss astride a third world rocket would have been a sad end, perhaps the only fitting send-off for the heir to the Krupp armaments fortune.
I was suffering from hepatitis on that trip and virtually crawled out of there, but, my luck still holding, into the welcoming arms of one of medicine’s great Dr. Feelgoods, Dr. Bensoussan, in Paris. Anita took me to Catherine Harlé. She was a model agent, a Sufi, an incredible woman who had a great range of contacts. She was like Anita’s spiritual mother, and took her in when she was ill or in trouble. It was she who Brian Jones went to when Anita left, to try and get her back. It was Catherine who put me in touch with Dr. Bensoussan. Already the name, Algerian probably, gave me the hope of something other than conventional medicine. Dr. Bensoussan used to go to Orly Airport and meet sheikhs and kings and princes who were just stopping off on their way to somewhere else, and he would go and fix them up, whatever the time of day or night. In my case it was heavy-duty hepatitis, and it was really sucking me out. I had no strength. I went to visit Dr. Bensoussan, who gave me this shot that took twenty minutes to go in. And it was basically a concoction of vitamins, everything that’s good for you, and then something else very nice. I’d crawl into his store and just manage to get my ass in there, and half an hour later I’d walk bac
k, “Forget the car.” An amazing shot, amazing cocktail concoction. Whatever it was, I’ve got to take my hat off. I mean, in six weeks he had me rockin’. And not only did he deal with the hepatitis, he built me up and made me feel good at the same time. But I also have an incredible immune system. I cured myself of hepatitis C without even bothering to do anything about it. I’m a rare case. I read my body very well.
The only trouble was that with these preoccupations and interruptions, the legal problems, the flights abroad, the wobbling of our relationship with Oldham, we had been temporarily distracted from what was now alarming and evident: the Rolling Stones had run out of gas.
Robert Altman / altmanphoto.com
Chapter Seven
In which, in the late 1960s, I discover open tuning, and heroin. Meet Gram Parsons. Sail to South America. Become a father. Record “Wild Horses” and “Brown Sugar” in Muscle Shoals. Survive Altamont, and re-meet a saxophonist named Bobby Keys.
We’d run out of gas. I don’t think I realized it at the time, but that was a period where we could have foundered—a natural end to a hit-making band. It came soon after Satanic Majesties, which was all a bit of flimflam to me. And this is where Jimmy Miller comes into the picture as our new producer. What a great collaboration. Out of the drift we extracted Beggars Banquet and helped take the Stones to a different level. This is where we had to pull out the good stuff. And we did.
I remember our first meeting with Jimmy. Mick was instrumental in getting him involved. Jimmy came from Brooklyn originally, grew up in the West—his father was entertainment director of the Vegas gambling hotels the Sahara, the Dunes, the Flamingo. We turned up at Olympic Studios and said, we’ll have a run-through and see how things go. We just played—anything. We weren’t trying to make a track that day. We were feeling the room, feeling Jimmy out; and Jimmy was feeling us out. I’d like to go back and be a fly on that wall. All I remember is having a very, very good feeling about him when we left the session, about twelve hours later. I was playing the stuff, going into the control room, the usual old trek, and actually hearing on the playback what was going on in the room. Sometimes what you’re playing in the room is totally different from what you hear in the control room. But Jimmy was hearing the room, hearing the band. So I had a very strong thing with him from that first day. He had a natural feel for the band because of what he’d been doing, working with English guys. He’d produced things like “I’m a Man” and “Gimme Some Lovin’ ” by the Spencer Davis Group; he’d worked with Traffic, Blind Faith. He’d worked a lot with black guys. But most of all it was because Jimmy Miller was a damn good drummer. He understood groove. He’s the drummer on “Happy”; he was the original drummer on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” He made it very easy for me to work, mainly for me to set the groove, set the tempos, and at the same time, Mick and Jimmy were communicating well. It gave Mick confidence to go along with him too.
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