The Stones also inadvertently won some radical bona fides in 1967, when Jagger and Keith Richards were busted for drugs at Richards’ country home in Sussex. The raid and its drawn out aftermath put the Stones at the center of a polarizing national debate about drug policy, youth culture, the courts, and the media. Ultimately, however, the Stones’ ordeal only served to strengthen their reputation as antiestablishment icons. According to an acquaintance, “Mick’s case had made him into a martyr, a hero, a spokesman for his generation, and he reveled in this newfound power.”
The problems began when two enterprising reporters from the lowbrow News of the World started looking into some wild LSD parties that the Moody Blues were rumored to be hosting at their communal home. (“Roehampton Raves,” they were called.) Their investigation led them to stake out Blaises, a private basement club in Kensington that sometimes attracted members of the pop aristocracy. One night, Brian Jones walked in. Whether he was just in a voluble mood, or had already lowered his inhibitions with drugs, is impossible to say. But reporters watched him consume about six bennies right on the spot. “I just wouldn’t be able to keep awake in places like this if I didn’t have them,” Jones told them. On the topic of LSD, he said “I don’t go much on it now [that] the cats (fans) have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.” Finally, while still in the presence of the reporters, he pulled out a lump of hashish and invited some friends up to his flat for “a smoke.” All of this soon appeared in the second installment of the Sunday tabloid’s multi-part write up, “Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts That Will Shock You.”
The only problem was, the piece contained a major factual error: the reporters thought they were talking to Mick Jagger. They couldn’t tell the difference between the Rolling Stones’ wispy, wide-mouthed singer and its dissolute, blond-haired guitarist. (Then again, Jones may have sent them down a confused road; he always liked to tell strangers that he was the group’s “leader.”) Jagger was livid, and rightly so. When the News of the World reporters collected their quotes, he had been on vacation in the Italian Riviera. Besides, Mick had always been cautious about his drug use, which anyhow was very moderate compared to Keith’s or Brian’s.
As it happened, on the very day that the story hit newsstands, the Stones taped an appearance on British TV’s Eamonn Andrews Show. After they performed “She Smiled Sweetly” from Between the Buttons, Jagger sat for an interview, and it was there that he made “the Oscar Wilde mistake.” He confidently announced that he would sue News of the World for libel. Just like the flamboyant nineteenth-century writer and poet, Mick was hardly in a position to feign indignation. After all, he did occasionally take drugs, and lots of people knew that to be so. Now News of the World just had to prove it in order to derail his powerful lawsuit against them.
The newspaper must have gotten to someone in the Stones’ camp to act as an informant. (Keith later suspected it was his driver at the time, a Belgian known only as “Patrick.”) Whoever their source was, the News of the World learned that Richards would soon be hosting a weekend party at his new country home, called Redlands, and that Mick and Marianne would be there. Most of the other guests were part of a tightly knit group. They included the Mayfair gallery owner Robert Fraser and his Moroccan “servant” (actually his lover) Mohammed Jajaj; the Chelsea interior designer Christopher Gibbs; and rock photographer Michael Cooper. George Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, dropped by the party, too.
Then there were a couple guests who were not so well known to the others. One was Nicky Kramer, a foppish King’s Road hanger-on. No one could quite remember inviting him in the first place; he just sort of attached himself to the group and Keith kindheartedly let him tag along. The other mysterious character was David Snyderman (sometimes spelled Schneiderman), aka “David Britton,” aka “David Jove,” aka “The Acid King”—a Canadian-born Californian. Keith had met him in New York City about a year earlier. Now he’d recently shown up in London, wanting to be everyone’s drug supplier. He supposedly carried around fake identification and a monogrammed briefcase full of DMT and varieties of acid: White Lightning, Orange Sunshine, and Purple Haze.
On Sunday morning, Acid King Dave went around to everyone’s room, serving them breakfast tea and acid. Some in the group were put off by his loony LSD evangelism: “This is the tao of lysergic diethylamide, man. Let it speak to you, let it tell you how to navigate the cosmos”—but as Marianne put it, “he did have the goods.” A while later they all went out to the West Wittering Beach and larked around the sandy flats, enjoying the winter sunshine and watching the salty waves dissolve into surf on the shore. Then they set out on a Sunday country drive, looking for the groovy mansion belonging to Edward James, a wealthy patron of the surrealist movement whose huge art collection was sometimes open to the public. Unfortunately, they wound up getting lost and by the time they arrived, the estate was closed. Still, they’d had a great day.
After they got back to Redlands, George Harrison and his wife paid a visit. Since they had not taken LSD that day, they might have found it hard to relate to the others. They stayed for only about an hour or two before driving off together in George’s customized Mini Cooper. Shortly after they’d left, the drug squad arrived. Later, it was widely assumed that the raiding party had been staked outside Redlands for some time, waiting for Harrison to leave. According to Richards, the police took malicious, voyeuristic detail in busting the Stones, but at that point they dared not arrest a Beatle. Harrison agreed: “There was the kind of social pecking order . . . in the pop world,” he said. First, they “busted Donovan [in mid-1966] . . . then they busted the Rolling Stones, and then [in 1969] they worked their way up and they busted John and Yoko, and me.”
Keith recalled the bust: “There’s a big knock on the door. Eight o’clock. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everybody has managed to find their way back to the house. TV is on with the sound off and the record player is on. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself in a rug and is watching the box.”
(That late morsel of a detail—that Marianne was naked beneath a fur rug while in the company of a group of men—would become tantalizing to the prosecutors and the tabloids. There was also a rumor about a Mars Bar.)
Keith continues: “ ‘Bang, bang, bang,’ this big knock at the door and I go answer it. ‘Oh look, there’s lots of little ladies and gentlemen outside.’ . . . We were just gliding off from a twelve-hour trip.” Later he said that in his acid-infused mind, the invading policemen looked like a nefarious band of goblins from The Hobbit. “Poor Mick—he could hardly believe his luck,” Marianne added. “The first day he ever dares take an LSD trip, eighteen policemen come pouring in through the door.”
For all their trouble, the cops didn’t come away with much on the Stones. In a green velvet jacket belonging to Mick they found four pep pills, which actually belonged to Marianne. She’d recently picked them up in Italy, where they could be easily purchased at any farmacia. Keith wasn’t charged with possessing anything, but rather with allowing people to smoke pot on his property. The police seized a pipe and a bowl from his house that were both found to contain traces of cannabis. They also detected an unusual odor when they arrived, although some of the officers couldn’t agree on what it was—one said it was “sweet” and another called it “acrid.” Finally, the police claimed that Marianne was acting without a normal young lady’s inhibitions—a sure sign, they figured, of cannabis intoxication. The Stones’ friend Robert Fraser, however, had much worse luck. He was found with twenty-four heroin jacks (pills) in his trousers.
Almost every account that has ever been written or spoken about the raid holds that Snyderman somehow got off scot-free. Supposedly, just when an officer was about to rifle through his attaché case, Snyderman piped up and said, “Please don’t open the case! It’s full of exposed film.” And so, improbable as it sounds, the officer
agreed not to open it. When Snyderman skipped the country two days later, never to return, everyone concluded that he was a police plant.
Only that is not what happened. Journalist Simon Wells has recently produced an authoritative examination of the Redlands bust, Butterfly on a Wheel. Surviving police records indicate that one Detective Constable Thomas Davies got all kinds of incriminating stuff off Snyderman. “In his right-hand breast pocket, two pieces of a brown substance weighing 66 grains [4.3 grams] were discovered. In another jacket pocket, an envelope was discovered that contained a powdery substance with one of his pseudonyms, ‘David Britton,’ written on it. Elsewhere, the detective found a cigarette tin that contained three pieces of a brown substance; a decorated wooden pipe with a stem with traces of a substance; a fairly large ball of a brown substance; a blue and white vial containing white pills; an orange colored pill; and numerous other items.” All of this was confiscated and taken back to the police lab for analysis. It is true that Snyderman quickly fled England, but he probably did so in order to save his own skin.
On February 19, a week after the bust, News of the World ran a front-page story headlined “Drug Squad Raids Pop Stars’ Party.” Legally, the paper was prohibited from revealing anyone’s name, but they otherwise provided a detailed and accurate account of what had happened, suggesting a quid pro quo: in return for the tipping off the police, the News of the World got the exclusive, inside scoop. The story’s appearance also indicated that a £7,000 bribe that Jagger, Richard, and Fraser had paid to the police, via Tony Sanchez, had not worked. (That was equivalent to about £100,000 in today’s money, or $155,000.) “That’s what I feel most bitter about,” Keith said years later. “In America, you pay off the cops as a matter of course. It’s business. But in Britain, you pay them off and they still do you.”
Jagger and Richards got Michael Havers to represent them. He was one of London’s finest attorneys (later he became Lord Chancellor). Mick and Keith both remember being surprised when, in a private conversation, Havers told them that it looked as if the prosecutors and the court were seeking to make an example of the two Stones. Some regarded the judge who was assigned to the case, Leslie Block, as an old-style reactionary. Everyone became even more concerned when the police raided Brian Jones’s London apartment on May 10, 1967. He was found to be in possession of pot, cocaine, and speed, and put under arrest.
The Stones thought they understood what was behind the sudden crackdown. “First they don’t like young kids with a lot of money,” Keith surmised. “But as long as you don’t bother them, that’s cool. But we bothered them because of the way we looked, and the way we’d act. Because we never showed any reverence for them whatsoever. Whereas the Beatles had. They’d gone along with it so far, with the MBEs and shaking hands. Whenever we were asked about things like that, we’d say, ‘Fuck it. Don’t want to know about things like that. Bollocks. Don’t need it.’ That riled ’em somewhat.”
Jagger must have figured that he had a strong defense. Although he did not have an official written prescription for the pills, his doctor testified that once he learned that Mick possessed them, he had verbally authorized their use (in order that he could stay up and work). Also, Havers stressed how exceedingly minor Jagger’s offense was. Every year in England, the same types of pills that Jagger was found with were widely prescribed as appetite suppressants, for hay fever, and for motion sickness.
The judge, however, instructed the jury that whatever Jagger’s doctor may have told him, it did not amount to a legal prescription. Six minutes later, Jagger was declared guilty. Hearing the news, he put his head in his hands and struggled to stifle his sobs. He was handcuffed and sent to Lewes Prison to await sentencing.
Richards’s trial, held the next day, was a bit more complicated. He testified that the odor the police detected was incense, and that it wasn’t used to cover-up marijuana smoke, but rather just to perfume the room. The pipes containing cannabis resin, he said, were not originally his; they were a gift from an American road manager. Then he was asked about Marianne Faithfull, who was known in court documents as “Miss X.”
PROSECUTION LAWYER: 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. She doesn’t embarrass easily, nor do I.
PROSECUTION LAWYER: You regard that, do you, as quite normal?
KEITH: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.
When Judge Block gave his instructions to the jury some of his remarks seemed gratuitous. He asked them to purge from their minds anything they might have heard about others at Redlands admitting to, or being convicted of, possessing certain drugs. “Finally,” he said, “I would ask you disregard the evidence as to the lady who was alleged by the police to have been in some condition of undress, and not let that prejudice your minds in any way.”
After about an hour of deliberation, the jury found Richards guilty. Next, the judge handed down everyone’s punishment. Keith was sentenced to a year in prison, and Mick got three months. Robert Fraser, who had used a different lawyer than the others, had pled guilty and was sentenced to six months in prison. All three were also fined toward the cost of their prosecution.
As Jagger was hauled off to Brixton, and Richards and Fraser were taken to Wormwood Scrubs, fans in the public gallery moaned, yelled, and wept. Later that night, hundreds of supporters thronged into the narrow streets that ran around the News of the World headquarters and chanted “Free the Stones! Free the Stones!” Elsewhere, fans passed out leaflets begging the police, the tabloids, and “outraged magistrates” to demonstrate “sanity.” Oz, a countercultural magazine, circulated a broadside denouncing the sentences as “vicious.” The Stones’ most visible supporters in the pop world were the Who. They promptly announced they would begin putting out a series of Jagger-Richards cover songs as a form of protest, and their drummer, Keith Moon, showed up on Fleet Street with a sign reading “Stop Pop Persecution!” Allen Ginsberg, who was visiting London at the time, said, “The Rolling Stones are one of Britain’s major cultural assets, who should be honored by the kingdom instead of jailed.”
The most significant show of support, however, came from an unlikely source. In 1967, perhaps the most highly respected figure in British journalism was William Rees-Mogg (later Baron Rees-Mogg), the aforementioned Times editor. Known for his erudition and upper-crust mannerisms, this former president of the Oxford Union was an absolute pillar of the establishment. Nevertheless, he was disquieted by what had occurred in the Chichester courtroom, and on July 1, he published the most famous editorial of his long career. Its headline (set in capital letters) was borrowed from Alexander Pope: “WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?” Though Mick and Keith had each been granted bail the day before the editorial appeared, the appeals bench had yet to review their cases. As a result, Rees-Mogg assumed a substantial risk when he published his exquisitely worded opinion; if the court had wanted, it could have held him in contempt.
. . . In Britain, it is an offense to possess [amphetamine pills] without a prescription. Mr. Jagger’s doctor says that he knew and had authorized their use, but he did not give a prescription for them as they had already been purchased. His evidence was not challenged. This was, therefore, an offense of a technical character. . . . If after a visit to the pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought proprietary air sickness pills at the Rome Airport and imported the unused tablets into Britain on his return, he would have risked committing precisely the same offense.
. . . Judge Block directed the jury that the approval of a doctor is not a defense in law to the charge of possessing drugs without a prescription, and the jury convicted.
. . . We have therefore, a conviction against Mr. Jagger purely on the grounds that he possessed four It
alian pep pills, quite legally bought, but not legally imported without a prescription. Four is not a large number. This is not a quantity which a pusher of drugs would have on him, nor even the quantity one would expect in an addict. . . . It is surprising therefore that Judge Block should have decided to sentence Mr. Jagger to imprisonment, and particularly surprising as Mr. Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts.
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 . . .
. . . As a sociological concern, this may be reasonable enough, and at an emotional level, it is very understandable, but it has nothing to do with the 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 equality. 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.
Following Rees-Mogg’s commentary, much of the country became engulfed in a debate over whether or not the two Stones had been treated unfairly. The Sunday Express said that Jagger’s punishment was “monstrously out of proportion” to his offense, while the Sunday Times called the trial a “show trial.” After the News of the World admitted that it had, in fact, tipped off the police about the Redlands party (claiming it was their “plain duty” to do so, they said), it earned rebukes from two members of parliament, as well as from John Osborne, the iconoclastic playwright. “Are we expected to accept the principle that newspapers’ editors consider it their ‘plain duty’ to pass random tip-offs from informers about what may or may not be going in someone’s house?” Osborne asked.
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