Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  The Stones recorded a supercharged early version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in sessions with Jimmy Miller and Glyn Johns at Olympic in mid-March that also produced “No Expectations,” “Parachute Woman,” and “Child of the Moon.” “Everybody Pays Their Dues” was a track that started out as a Redlands demo on Keith’s cassette player. The band tried it in the studio but couldn’t get anything going. Then Charlie Watts produced an antique toy drum and cymbal he’d just bought, and set it up on a carpet on the studio floor. Keith sat cross-legged next to him and they began to play. This sounded great, so Keith recorded it on his cassette. They transferred this crude demo to four-track, and two nights later transferred this to eight-track tape, with myriad overdubs. Now it had dramatic ringing guitars and a buzzing Indian drone and looked like a possible new single.

  March 16. After an all-night session, Brian Jones returned home to his Belgravia flat to find that the police had broken down the door to rescue Linda Keith, who’d taken an overdose of Mandrax. She was rushed to the hospital and recovered, but Brian’s landlord evicted him that afternoon, throwing his clothes and his gear into Chesham Street. Brian moved into a hotel. The headline next day was the predictable NAKED GIRL IN STONES FLAT.

  That day, Sunday, March 17, there was a big peace demonstration in London, part of worldwide protests against the war in Vietnam. Like most artists, Mick Jagger was appalled by the war and had been speaking out in interviews since 1965. Persuaded by London’s leading radical editor, Tariq Ali of the Vietnam Solidarity Committee, to join their march on the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, Jagger put on his street-fighting clothes and sallied forth.

  The march began in Trafalgar Square, with about ten thousand people listening to actress Vanessa Redgrave denounce Harold Wilson’s Labour government for its complicity with the war. Red and blue Vietcong flags fluttered in the cold breeze. The unruly crowd then marched down Oxford Street and swarmed through Mayfair on the way to the “imperialist fortress,” as the embassy was called in march literature. Mick and his companions joined up in South Audley Street, linking arms with demonstrators for photographers, before the crowd massed in Grosvenor Square, where riot cops were waiting. Mounted police charged the crowd, and a hippie who offered flowers to the cops was truncheoned to the ground. Protesters threw marbles under the horses and burned them with cigarettes, and Mick joined in the rock-throwing and running for a few minutes before disappearing into the afternoon. The demonstration petered out after that, with the militant German SDS contingent angry at the English kids for the general lack of action. Later Mick told Tariq Ali that he, too, was disappointed at the peace movement’s lack of battle readiness.

  “What can a poor boy do?” he asked in the new lyrics he wrote to go with the backing track of “Everybody Pays Their Dues.” What good would it do anyone to battle with the cops? How would that stop a war half a planet away? “It was a very rough, very violent era,” Mick said later. “The Vietnam War, violence in the streets, pillaging and burning. And Vietnam was not war as we knew it in the conventional sense . . . It was a real nasty war, and people didn’t like it. People objected and didn’t want to fight it. The people that were there weren’t doing well. It had to influence what we were doing at the time.”

  * * *

  Che Guevara with a Band

  April 1968. Anita was in Rome, where she had a part in Candy, based on Terry Southern’s satiric soft-porn novel. When Keith heard she might be having a scene with costar Marlon Brando, he flew out to be with her. Bongo-playing Brando kept putting down the Stones, but they all got along well enough that Keith and Anita soon named their son after him.

  Mick and Marianne were visiting friends in Ireland, where, in the almost medieval quiet of an Irish Georgian country house, they conceived a child. Mick bought a house for his new family at 48 Cheyne Walk in Chelsea. The house was modest and charming, with a wisteria vine running up the iron balcony along the river-facing front of the house. Legendary Cheyne Walk was the prime artistic neighborhood of London and had been home to Oscar Wilde, George Eliot, Rossetti and a whole flock of Pre-Raphaelites, John Singer Sargent, Ian Fleming. It was entirely apposite that one of England’s brightest young romantic poets should settle there.

  Charlie and Shirley Watts were at home in rural Sussex with a growing herd of Arab horses and their month-old daughter, Seraphina.

  Brian Jones took Suki and engineer Glyn Johns to Morocco, where Brian wanted to record the rhythms of the Gnawa brotherhood. Brian, fired by boredom and fear of the Stones’ obsolescence, was desperate for a new context to replace R&B as the basis of the Stones’ music. He’d been embarrassed by the insipid psychedelia of Satanic Majesties and wanted the next Stones album to shift toward the earthiest North African rhythms he could find. The Gnawa were the descendants of West African slaves brought north in the same diaspora of the Bambara people that fueled the slave trade to the Americas. Like their musical cousins in the New World, the Gnawa were bluesmen, known for their affinity with the jinn and other dark forces, and for their penetrating trance rhythms. On previous Moroccan voyages, Brian had heard the trademark Gnawa rhythms played on big iron castanets, a sound that sent him into altered states as effective as any drug he’d ever taken.

  Glyn Johns disliked Brian intensely. The engineer was almost one of the Stones and shared the rest of the band’s general contempt for Brian. But Johns respected him as a musician and was persuaded to do the Morocco recordings. He agreed with Brian’s idea of taking the tapes on to New York and dubbing black musicians over the tracks.

  They flew first to Tangier and put up at the Hotel El Minzeh. Christopher Gibbs was also there. “Brian was his usual self, the same old brawl, this time with Suki. She jolly nearly died when I was with them that time at the Minzeh. She had smashed her wrists on a mirror and was bleeding badly. And Brian, instead of calling a doctor or the concierge, rang me. ’Can you come and sort this out for me? Can you ring the doctor? Can you talk to the management? Can you clean up the blood? Do you know how a tourniquet works?’”

  On to Marrakech, where the Gnawa were. The session was arranged by Brion Gysin, but there were serious technical problems with Brian’s Uher recorder, and the sessions were abandoned when Glyn Johns impatiently split for London.

  London. The Stones’ office was abuzz with multiple projects. The new single was “Jumping Jack Flash”/“Child of the Moon,” and word was out that the Rolling Stones were back, better than ever. The Stones began working with movie agent Sandy Lieberson, and film deals were afoot, real ones this time. Jean-Luc Godard wanted them in his new movie. Donald Cammell’s brilliant script The Performers was green-lit by the new Warner Bros.–Seven Arts film company, with Cammell directing, conditional on Mick Jagger taking the part of the rock star Turner. Mick was talking about producing something he was calling a “rock and roll circus.” At the end of April, the Stones made promo films for their new record with Michael Lindsay-Hogg. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was shot in two color versions in a studio, with the band wearing elaborate war paint and bug-eye shades. It was broadcast on TV all over the world the following month, one of the first proto-videos credited with making its song a hit record.

  “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” bore down on the world in May 1968 like an emergency bulletin while Paris burned and America writhed in agony. Acoustic guitars, a zooming bass, and the trademark Jimmy Miller tonal drop in the main riff began the song. Then Mick introduced his new persona, Jack Flash, in the lingo of Delta mysticism and hoodoo. Jack was demonic, born in a cross-fire hurricane, jinnlike, supernatural. He was related to Happy Jack somehow, and to Union Jack, that once-proud banner of a lost empire, now a pop art icon on jackets and tea trays. Halfway through, as the song hurtled even faster, maracas kicked in, Jimmy Miller providing a hint of Gnawa-Diddley sizzle. (The maracas also kicked out for a few bars, the result of a catastrophic split in the tape just prior to mastering.) Jack Flash didn’t really have much to say—“It’s a gas!”—but it was all in t
he way he said it, driven by the best band in the world. Again there was a stone groove of a coda, thirty-five seconds of riffing guitar, droning organ, buzzing Eastern sounds (Brian playing a tambura), and Charlie Watts making great time.

  “Child of the Moon” was something else, a California pastorale with a dramatic chordal riff (related to “Stray Cat Blues”), trumpets that sounded like the Byrds, and sweet lyrics that sketched Marianne Faithfull’s “misty-day, pearly grey, silver silky-faced, wide-awake, crescent shaped smile.”

  The record jump-started the Rolling Stones’ career. “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was their first no. 1 in England in more than two years. It wiped the slate clean for the Stones, surpassed all their previous work. Mick: “It’s about having a hard time and getting out, just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.” In America, it got to no. 3 and served as the transistor anthem at the riots during the summer’s political conventions in Chicago and Miami. It was played constantly on the radio in Paris, where in May 1968 a coalition of rebellious students and striking factory workers almost toppled the government of Charles de Gaulle in a monthlong series of violent demonstrations and real street fighting. France was as close as any of the ’68 protests came to an actual revolution, and Jumpin’ Jack Flash seemed to preside over this youthquake like Che Guevara with a band.

  The Stones owed Les Perrin a lot for getting the Times to pry the law off their backs, so as a favor to Les (who had an interest in the New Musical Express) they played a surprise gig at the NME Poll Winners show at Wembley arena. Voted by readers Best R&B Group for five years running, the Stones did a surprise encore to the show, playing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Satisfaction” on a stage in the middle of the hall. Pandemonium in the house as Mick threw his tambourine, then his Capezio dancing shoes, into the pulsing crowd. The band had to walk through the crowd at the end, and it got a little rough on the way to the dressing room. “Just like the old days,” Bill Wyman said, with satisfaction.

  It was Brian Jones’s last performance.

  Next day, it was back into Olympic for a week. The control room was full of girls, friends, and musicians as the Stones cut several albums’ worth of songs and demos with Jimmy Miller. “Street Fighting Man” got its new words. Old blues licks, worked out sitting cross-legged on the floor, produced “No Expectations,” “Stray Cat Blues,” “Love in Vain,” “Prodigal Son.” “Memo from Turner,” based on The Performers screenplay (“You schmucks all work for me”) was demoed with Steve Winwood and Jim Capaldi from Traffic. Jimmy Miller brought in Rik Grech, the bass player from Family, to play a beautiful country fiddle on “Factory Girl.” A demo called “Blood Red Wine” produced enough ideas to later generate three different songs. The earliest guitar versions of “You Got the Silver” dates from this week. Outtakes included “I’m a Country Boy,” “Silver Blanket,” “Hamburger to Go,” “Lady,” “Family,” and Bill Wyman’s sexy “Downtown Susie.”

  The Stones’ sessions that May were, for George Chkiantz, like working in a nightclub, one that opened just as the London clubs closed. Friends and hangers-on would turn up at four in the morning. It was an exclusive after-hours club with the best music on offer, albeit in a workshop state.

  Brian Jones was renting a peer’s flat in Royal Avenue House, just off the Kings Road. It took two hours to walk down the street now because it was so crowded with freaks in costume—uniforms, Indian silks, fringed buckskin, tiny sunglasses, snakeskin boots, floppy hats. The whole street looked like Sgt. Pepper’s band.

  Brian picked up the phone and called the Stones’ office as cops broke into his apartment through the garbage chute on Tuesday, May 21. Brian tried to stay cool. The previous night, the Stones and their ladies, many of them on acid, had seen a screening of Stanley Kubrick’s monumental 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Brian was still flying. When the dope-sniffing cops found a ball of wool with a chunk of hashish in it, Brian lost it. “Oh no, man. No. C’mon—this can’t happen again—just when we’re getting back on our feet.”

  The narcs frog-marched Brian over to Chelsea Station and booked him as Lewis Brian Jones, twenty-six, musician. He told them the stuff wasn’t his, that he never smoked hash because it made him dizzy. They hauled Brian over to court and displayed him, dazed and disheveled, to press photographers. The office sent the Stones’ accountant over with 2,000 pounds, and the real butterfly was bailed into the life of a permanent target for the police.

  * * *

  The Devil Is My Name

  Country music was in the air in 1968, and the Rolling Stones had to breathe it like everyone else. Bob Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, recorded in Nashville, sounding like new acoustic psalms, looked back on frontier America from Dylan’s rural hideway in Woodstock, New York. In California, the Byrds had produced a soulful countrypolitan jam called Sweetheart of the Rodeo, outfitted with neo-Nashville twang and great rediscovered songs. Dylan’s touring band, the Hawks, transformed themselves into The Band, avatars of “country rock.” Their new album, Music from Big Pink, was so influential that Eric Clapton disbanded Cream when he heard The Band’s acetate that spring, and headed to Woodstock to try to join the group.

  The Byrds toured England at the end of May with their newest member, Gram Parsons. Gram was twenty-two, a star-quality Georgia-born musician, tall and handsome, a southern gent and Harvard dropout. He was obsessed with the tender mysteries of modern country music and its acknowledged masters: Hank Williams, Buck Owens, Jimmie Rodgers, the Louvin Brothers. Gram had an encyclopedic knowledge of old songs, a substantial trust fund, and the cavalier charm of a southern troubadour. He’d started the first country rock group, the International Submarine Band, then took over the Byrds with his bell-clear country singing. Gram had sung most of the original Rodeo tracks, but a lawsuit over an old record contract had caused Roger McGuinn to overdub new vocals. Otherwise Rodeo was Gram Parson’s record, widely hailed as a masterpiece and the birth of so-called “country rock.”

  The Stones stole him almost immediately when they went to the Byrds’ gig at Middle Earth in Covent Garden. Gram was spirited to Mick’s house in Chester Square to help out with songs. At dawn, they all piled into a Rolls and drove down to Stonehenge, then still accessible to anyone. Michael Cooper shot several rolls of Keith and Anita and Mick and Marianne cavorting around the ancient sarsen stones with Gram Parsons and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They took Gram to Redlands, stoned, wined, and dined him, and he started teaching Keith—on piano—the old country songs he knew.

  Keith: “Gram probably did more than anyone to put a new face on country music. He brought it into the mainstream of music again. He said, ’Don’t forget about this shit’ . . . I think I learned more from Gram than anybody else.” Gram was soon immersed in the Stones’ soft machine of druggy glamour and aristocratic fantasy. The Stones in turn were charmed by the naive young star. They were all naturally wary of new hangers-on, but Gram had the means to keep up with their appetites. G.P. could pay his own way.

  When the Byrds moved on to South Africa after playing Albert Hall late in the tour, Gram Parsons quit the band to hang with Keith.

  “He was a warm, down-to-earth guy,” Keith said later. “He didn’t know much about the [apartheid] situation in South Africa, so Anita and I explained it to him in Robert Fraser’s apartment. It was quite an intense way to meet a guy. So . . . he stayed in London, and he started to show me the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield. We just used to sit around the piano and sing and get high.” The effects of this new friendship would be heard on the next four Stones albums.

  Earlier in the year, Marianne Faithfull had given Mick a copy of The Master and Margarita, a newly translated novel by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. Mick read it in his study in Chester Square, absorbed in the horrific story of the devil’s visit to Moscow in the 1930s in the company of a naked female vampire and a cigar-smoking black cat who’s a dead shot with a .45 Browning. Omnipotent, well-spoken Lucifer kills people, drives them mad, spi
rits others to distant places. Women are vulnerable; he gives them magic ointment to rub on their bodies to make them fly through the air, naked, on broomsticks. Only the Master, a writer working on a book about Christ and Pilate, has the moral authority to stop the devil in his tracks.

  Out of this came “The Devil Is My Name,” a lyric Mick took into Olympic Studio the week of June 4, when the Rolling Stones were filmed in rehearsal by Jean-Luc Godard for his hotly anticipated new radical propaganda film, One Plus One.

  Mick respected Godard and was flattered he wanted the Stones’ energy for his movie. Godard was the shooting star of French cinema, a former critic who’d filmed heroic works of existentialist adventure like Breathless and Contempt. His recent Weekend was an avant-garde reading of Maoism, with cannibal hippie drummers thrown in. It marked the end of the old, romantic Godard. His latest, Le Gai Savoir, was an open call to social revolt. He was one of the few New Wave directors to see beneath the conventions of the genre and scrape at the rot in the system. Writing in February 1968, the American critic Susan Sontag called Godard “one of the great culture heroes of our time,” and compared him to Picasso.

  The project began as a film about abortion financed by a Greek woman, Eleni Collard, which Godard would direct. Then England’s abortion laws loosened up. Godard told the producer he would still make a film in England if they could get him the Beatles or the Stones. Working through actor Ian Quarrier, who knew Mick through Marianne’s theater connections, Mme. Collard got Godard the Rolling Stones, hot actor Terence Stamp, and a budget of 180,000 pounds.