Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The band was eager. They’d sold roughly 10 million singles and 5 million albums by July ’65, and reportedly earned about $5 million on the road. But they were each drawing fifty pounds a week in salary from Impact Sound and were chronically short of cash. Keith in particular was tired of being broke and ripped off. He’d recently punched promoter Robert Stigwood in a London nightclub after Stigwood failed to pay the Stones their percentage from the recent Australian tour.

  Klein would negotiate the Stones’ new record deal and take over as business manager. Eric Easton would be completely forced out. Andrew would be free to manage the Stones and start his own company, Immediate Records, the first independent label in Britain.

  Most people who knew what was going on assumed that Allen Klein would sideline Andrew and take over the Stones within a year. Actually it took two.

  Mick, Keith, and Andrew met with Allen Klein in his suite at the London Hilton on July 24, just after the Stones had been fined and scolded by a judge for the pissing incident at the gas station the previous spring (which was front-page news in London for two weeks).

  “Which one makes the records?” Klein pointedly asked Oldham when they were all sitting down with a drink.

  “That one,” Andrew said, pointing to Keith. At first, Mick and Keith were unsure about the thirty-two-year-old accountant. Klein was short and chubby with greasy hair, a thick New Jersey accent, and wore what Keith described as “diabolical” clothes, usually a turtleneck shirt under a mismatched cardigan. Klein smoked a briar pipe, was rough, brusque, and rude, and there wasn’t much eye contact. But he also was a charmer, a character, and made them laugh with his streetwise act. He told them he’d double their royalties, clean up their taxes, make them millionaires within a year. He’d be their Big Daddy, look after them, take care of things. He’d promised Andrew a Rolls-Royce with tinted windows like John Lennon’s. He promised the Stones the moon if they went with him.

  Two days later, Monday, July 26, there was a band meeting in Andrew’s office in Gloucester Place. Brian, Bill, and Charlie were informed that the others had hired Klein without bothering to check with them first. It was a done deal. Wyman suggested that they get a lawyer to negotiate with Klein. “Don’t be so fucking mercenary,” Keith shouted at him. “We’ve got to trust someone.”

  Keith: “I really pushed them. I said, ’Let’s turn things around. Let’s fucking do something. Let’s go down to Decca with this guy and scare the shit out of them.’ ”

  So the band accompanied Klein to the showdown at Decca House, the company headquarters on the Thames Embankment. Deploying his New Jersey gangster face, flanked by his New York lawyer, who looked like a hungry barracuda, Klein refused to negotiate with anyone but Decca’s chairman, Sir Edward Lewis. In a paneled boardroom overlooking the river, Klein spewed a torrent of profanity, insults, and threatening demands at Lewis and Decca’s senior executives.

  Keith: “He told us each to get a pair of shades and just stand behind him in a row while he talked. ’Whatever you do, don’t say a word. Don’t open your mouth.’ So we stood there, and they just crumbled in front of our eyes, these hard-boiled English lawyers. And we came out of there with the best record contract anyone had. That impresses a guy. He did a good job.”

  The Stones’ new deal with Decca was for $1.25 million for world rights to their recordings, exclusive of North America, to be paid in New York by London Records to Nanker Phelge Music Ltd., the Stones’ publishing entity. Klein also negotiated a 9.25 percent royalty, higher than the Beatles were getting. Their new contract guaranteed annual payments of $35,000 ($7,000 per Stone) for the next ten years.

  On July 29, the band and Andrew signed the Stones’ five-year deal at Decca House. Klein returned to New York, where he got another million from London Records for their American rights. Klein, true to his word, had done what he’d promised.

  When these advances were paid sometime during the autumn of 1965, Klein had the checks made out to “Nanker Phelge Music USA,” a different company, owned and controlled by Allen Klein.

  This turned out badly for the Stones and later became a disaster. For the next five years, Klein kept their money in his pocket. He made them beg for it. According to Bill Wyman, if one of them wanted to buy a car or a house, Klein loaned them their own money and charged them interest. They were completely dependent on him and his New York office, and often desperate for cash. At the end of the deal, the Stones never got their money, and had to pay Klein to go away. They lost control of their publishing rights and their back catalog as well. For the Stones, negative repercussions from their 1965 deal with Allen Klein still echo, many years down the road.

  But . . . at first they were all happy. They thought they were in Fat City. This crude Yank was Taking Care of Business and making them rich. Charlie Watts bought a Tudor mansion in Sussex. Bill Wyman moved into a house in Kent. They got new cars and spent real money on clothes. The Rolling Stones had turned a giant corner, and over the next few years Klein ratcheted them up many levels, turning the Stones’ “brand” into a global money machine and worldwide legend. The Stones, and later the Beatles, would pay dearly for his services.

  * * *

  Fraser the Razor

  August 1965. Two shows at the London Palladium. Brian, splendiferous in white, his amps turned so loud they drowned out Mick. With their new management in place, the Stones took a break. Keith and Linda vacationed in the south of France, while Brian and Linda Lawrence flew to Tangier to escape a paternity suit over Brian’s other son Julian. They were joined by Mick and Chrissie, who went to Tangier at the urging of their friends Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs.

  Fraser and Gibbs were the two most interesting young men in London: art dealers, Old Etonians, and friends since the age of thirteen. Both were gay, clever, and ultrahip. They set styles and trends in mid-sixties London; the writer/painter Brion Gysin would later claim that Fraser invented Swinging London by himself. Strawberry Bob Fraser (as Keith called him for his preference for pink suits) introduced pop art to London in his Duke Street art gallery, where he represented Andy Warhol and Jim Dine and brought British pop artists like Richard Hamilton into view. Chrissie Gibbs dealt in antique furniture and the exotic orientalism of Moroccan decor, which he popularized when he started bringing things back from his homes in Tangier and Marrakech. Fraser was dark, kinetic, stoned, adept at bringing the right people together. Gibbs was blond, reserved, in control, and his flat in Chelsea was the salon of the so-called Chelsea Set, the demimonde of artists, photographers, musicians, and their women that made London cool and sophisticated. As Gibbs recalled: “My apartment at 100 Cheyne Walk was in a seventeenth-century house with these huge paneled rooms. It was at the bend in the river where the houseboats are, the light bouncing off the water. It was Moorish in mood, quite spare, with straw mats mixed up with Renaissance things. We kept an open house there, nice people coming around, smoking and dropping acid. Brian Jones was about, lots of to-ing and fro-ing. Cecil Beaton photographed the place, and then Antonioni shot the party sequence of Blow Up there. A lot went on. The landlord was not a bit pleased and I almost got thrown out. They shot another film there when I was away one weekend, with three hundred people dropping acid on a Sunday, loud music, gypsy girls breast-feeding their babies . . . All that’s ages ago, but that was the scene.”

  Fraser was drawn to the young, glamorous, reckless pop world, and together, he and Gibbs met the Stones, tried to sell things to John Lennon and Mick Jagger. Fraser and Paul McCartney were good friends. Brian was close to him too, and Fraser and Gibbs were always telling him about Morocco, how he had to go there and see for himself.

  Tangier was to be a perfect creative incubator for the Stones over the next few years, as was the red-walled desert city Marrakech, to the south. Going to Morocco was like time travel to the medieval world, with great music, plentiful dope, superb food, and the kind of privacy the Stones rarely got anywhere else.

  Tangier was a sunny white cit
y that slept during the dry, hot summer days. When the wind was northerly, the call of the muezzins from Tangier’s mosques on the shoulder of Africa could drift five miles across the Strait of Gibraltar and be heard in Andalusia. Since Roman times, Tangier had been the place where Europe and Arab North Africa uneasily intersected. It was an international city for many years, ruled by its European consulates, a haven for shady characters, European exiles, and artists like Delacroix and Matisse. It was a world capital of Anything Goes, with few cops and a relaxed attitude toward anyone with a (false) passport and a few dollars in any currency. The leading literary light in the city was the American writer Paul Bowles, author of The Sheltering Sky and collector of Moroccan tribal music. His salon attracted Beat Generation stars like William Burroughs, who wrote Naked Lunch in Tangier, and his friends Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, and Timothy Leary. There was also a colony of well-off cosmopolitans like Paul Getty Jr., at whose house Mick Jagger and his girlfriends frequently stayed.

  Plus, the climate was soft, the beaches were empty, the Moroccans were friendly, and there was plenty of kif, a powerful blend of cannabis and black tobacco that gives the smoker a friendly blast of clarity. Or there was majoun, a candy made of honey and hashish paste. Morphine, speed, and the entire pharmacopoeia were available over the counter. Tangier was as far out as one could get and still be on the fringe of Western civ, a perfect place for angel-headed hipsters like Mick, Brian, and Keith to hide from the cold, commercial world to the north.

  Mick Jagger was pulled out of this idyll halfway through August to fly to New York to meet with Allen Klein about the Stones’ American record deal. While in town, he and Keith went to the Beatles’ immense concert at Shea Stadium. At the time, it was the biggest pop concert in history. The Beatles were almost totally drowned out by screaming girls.

  Back in England, there was a big round of summer parties. The Ormsby-Gore girls came out, and Mick was best man at David Bailey’s wedding to the ravishing French actress Catherine Deneuve (the Shrimp was history). “Satisfaction” was released in England and went to no. 1 like a shot. Brian Jones started seeing Nico, a serenely luscious blond German singer signed to Andrew’s new Immediate Records label.

  Late in August came the initial press reports about the Stones’ new management team and record deals. Eric Easton was fired as the Stones’ booking agent, replaced by the more tuned-in London veteran Tito Burns. Andrew also announced the Stones had a deal to make five movies. The first would be Only Lovers Left Alive, based on a 1964 cult novel by Dave Wallis that posited a Stones-like gang taking over a postapocalyptic world. Over the next year, Andrew generated massive press about this project, which never got made.

  * * *

  Anita

  Under time pressure, the band flew to Los Angeles on September 5 for two days of recording at RCA to finish tracks they’d worked on in July. The city was still tense from the race riots that had torched the Watts section a couple weeks earlier. Out of Our Heads was still at the top of the charts.

  Working with their usual studio team, the Stones finished “Get Off My Cloud,” the first of an astounding five-single sequence of anarchic pop art masterpieces that over the next year attempted to “exorcise the demonic ghosts of the Oedipal family romance and all forms of social hypocrisy” (critic Jonathan Cott). These songs—“Cloud,” “19th Nervous Breakdown,” “Paint It, Black,” “Mother’s Little Helper,” and “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing in the Shadow?”—were a concentrated barrage of the Stones’ trademark cynicism, deeply influenced by Bob Dylan’s flashing-chain imagery that liberated song lyrics into new realms of poetic beatitudes.

  As the follow-up to radio-friendly “Satisfaction,” the Stones could hardly have come up with anything more weird than “Get Off My Cloud.” Keith wrote the melody and Mick wrote the words with their ninety-ninth-floor Manhattan/Metropolis imagery and pop-artsy unfurling of the Union Jack as, in Mick’s words, “a stop-bugging-me, post-teenage-alienation song.” The rushed, offbeat vocals (set to the “Twist and Shout” rhythm) were so buried that the lyrics were muddy and unintelligible. Brian’s sitarlike slide guitar supplied a strange Carnatic ambience as “Cloud” hurtled along to a thunderous drum track.

  Keith hated this new single too.

  “It’s true. I never dug it as a record. The chorus was a nice idea, but we rushed it as the follow-up to ’Satisfaction.’ We were in L.A and it was time for another single. But how do you follow ’Satisfaction’? I wanted to do it slow, like a Lee Dorsey thing. We rocked it up, and I thought it was one of Andrew’s worst productions.”

  After finishing the tracks that would fill out their next album, the Stones rushed back to England, where on September 8 they played their last-ever ballroom show on the Isle of Man. To avoid a violent mob, the group had to squeeze into the hall through the bathroom window, and they swore it would never happen again. It would be many years before the Rolling Stones again played together on a small stage in a sweltering room.

  On September 11, the Stones began a short but fateful tour of Germany and Austria. After the show in Munich, there was a bitter argument with Brian, who had again played “Popeye” during “Satisfaction.” They told him to his face he was out of the band if he did it again, and Brian got really upset. Andrew also slagged Brian for abandoning Pat Andrews and their child, an impending bad publicity disaster, as Pat was threatening to go to court.

  Backstage in Munich that night was twenty-three-year-old Anita Pallenberg, already famous as the most beautiful model in Europe. She was blond, beautiful, stacked, trendy in miniskirt, tight sweater, and knee-high white boots. With their usual studied cool, the Stones made a show of ignoring Anita. Only Brian spoke to her, in German, and introduced himself as the leader of the Stones.

  Anita: “I first met Brian at the Oktoberfest Circus. I told a photographer I wanted to meet the Stones and got backstage with him. There were the Troggs, the Spencer Davis Group with Stevie Winwood—they were the opening acts. Backstage, it was where the horses walk, a beerhall atmosphere. I had a piece of hash and some amyl nitrite poppers.

  “I went straight to Brian: he was the one I fancied. I tapped him on the shoulder and had a big smile ready when he turned around. I could hardly believe it, but he was upset, on the verge of tears, and I thought somehow it was my fault. I asked him if he wanted to smoke a joint, and Brian says, ’Yeah, yeah, let’s smoke a joint. Come back to the hotel. I don’t want to be alone tonight.’

  “Brian was tearful that night because Mick and Keith had teamed up on him, and I really felt sorry for him. He was devastated. He cried in my arms all night. It wasn’t a sex thing. He just wanted someone to be with him. We had a little fling together. That was how I met him.”

  The other Stones, Keith in particular, were foaming with envy when they saw drop-dead-lustrous Anita go off with Brian that night. It was the epochal entry of Anita Pallenberg into the Rolling Stones, and over the next five years she would be the only woman who ever became one of them.

  The Stones moved on to West Berlin the next day, and all Brian could think about was Anita, who turned up at the concert again. He asked her to come to London with him, but she said she had a modeling job in Paris. They all visited the Berlin Wall before sneaking into the big outdoor gig in the Waldbuhne (where Hitler Youth rallies used to be held) through bunker tunnels left over from Nazi days. They played before 23,000 kids and sparked one of the worst riots of their career. Any Nazi-era gesture was strictly illegal in Germany, so provocative Andrew suggested to Mick that it would be trippy if Mick did the Nazi goose step during the instrumental break of “Satisfaction”; Mick took it further and started doing the Sieg Heil routine, throwing stiff-armed salutes. The German kids went ape and stormed the stage. Blitzkrieg! Police waded in with truncheons, and one policeman reportedly lost an eye in the ensuing battles. All the seats were destroyed as well as several trains taking the kids home afterward.

  After the final show in Vienna,
the Stones returned to London without Brian, who went to Paris to rendezvous with his ravishing new girlfriend.

  Anita Pallenberg was born in Rome in January 1943. “My family,” Anita says, “followed the Goethe dream of moving south,” settling in Italy to live as artists. Her father, Arnaldo Pallenberg, painted and played piano. Her mother, Paula Wiederhold, was a secretary at the German Embassy in Rome. Their first daughter accidentally put an electric plug in her mouth and was disfigured, so the Pallenbergs had another child, hoping for a son. “I was supposed to be a boy named Martin,” Anita says, “but here I am. I grew up rather poor in a fabulous Roman villa with illusions of being rich, because my grandfather gave most of his estate to the Nazis. We had concerts of chamber music on Fridays, but no money at all really.”

  The Pallenbergs were pan-European, with family and friends everywhere. Anita grew up speaking four languages in an artistic and literary milieu. She was sent to a Swiss school in Rome, which she mostly skipped to wander about the ruins of the classical city. She was then sent to her father’s “decadent” (as she described it) boarding school in Bavaria, 180 boys and 20 girls, mostly the children of ex-Nazis. She excelled at Latin and pottery, went sailing in the summer and skiing in winter. But Anita hated her school and was finally expelled for hitchhiking to Munich for fun. While visiting an aunt in Berlin, she watched the Berlin Wall go up in 1961. (She happened to be there to watch it come down in 1989 as well.)