Old Gods Almost Dead

by Stephen Davis

  After the restaurant closed following Moroccan independence in 1956, Gysin began taking friends to Jajouka to experience the astounding spectacle of Bou Jeloud dancing. A village boy was sewn into fresh goatskins and a straw bonnet for seven days. Fueled by kif and infused with the spirit of Pan, the goat-god, the boy danced for hours, even for days, in front of a wailing line of drummers and men playing the rhaita, a double-reed wooden trumpet. Thirty of these together sounded like Allah’s bagpipes, and the drums provided a trance-inducing North African backbeat. Bou Jeloud (“Skin Father”) danced until he dropped during the Aid el-Kebir, the “Great Feast” of the Muslim calendar. Sometimes the boy dancing the role of Bou Jeloud died afterward, the ultimate performance.

  July 1, 1968, was a lovely summer morning in London. George Chkiantz had been up all night at Olympic Studio when the studio manager asked him if he had a passport, and could he leave for Morocco that day? Brian Jones would pay him a hundred quid a day to help him make some tapes of tribal music. George went to Brian’s flat in Chelsea and picked up his Uher tape recorder and some microphones. The batteries were dead and would take fourteen hours to recharge, but George had to catch a plane to Gibraltar. From there an old Dakota (“full of gays”) deposited him at Tangier’s half-built airport, with goats grazing on the runways. To George’s amazement, Brian was there to meet him at nine in the morning. No one had ever seen Brian at nine in the morning before. George told him about the battery problems with the Uher but said they could run off the car batteries if he could find some cable. Brian showed him some Indian-owned electronic shops on the Boulevard Pasteur, and soon Chkiantz had what he needed to record tapes in a village with no electricity.

  Brion Gysin: “They came to Tangier that summer. It was Brian, his girlfriend Suki, and a very good soundman. They wanted to record Bou Jeloud’s music during the Aid el-Kebir, but it wasn’t that time of year, so they settled for whatever they could get. I tried to get them to leave the girl in Tangier, told them Jajouka was primitive—no place for a woman—but she absolutely insisted on coming. So I had her cut her hair, and she dressed in jeans and a simple white shirt to try to look more like a man. (Actually she looked a lot like Brian.) Off we went, into the hot Moroccan summer. We met my friend Hamri, whose mother was from the village, in the town of Larache, then hired a taxi and got to the foot of the mountain. We had to walk the rest of the way.”

  The village was on a plateau halfway up the mountain. Flocks of goats wandered among the adobe houses, most of them thatched, others with newer tin roofs. No foreigners found their way up there, and the newcomers were followed by an entourage of curious children. They were greeted with glasses of steaming mint tea and long pipes of locally grown kif and quickly got to work.

  Brion Gysin: “We arrived late in the day and set up the tape machine, and they played until four or five in the morning. It was incredible, with drums and flutes and dancing boys in pink dresses. The musicians wore their turbans and brown mountain djellabas, and you’d think you were in a medieval world. Which, in a sense, you were. The chief drummer, Berdouz, served as emcee, pouring tea, passing pipes of kif, keeping the party going. At midnight, all the dogs in the village started barking, and Jones got upset that this would spoil his tapes. So Hamri had them round up the dogs and move them off somewhere.

  “It was the first time serious recording had been done up there, apart from my own little Uher, and there was some uncertainty among the older musicians. But the younger kids in the tribe were very keen. They loved putting on the headphones to listen to the playback. It was the first time they had ever ’heard’ themselves. They thought Brian Jones was very funny and not really of this world, with his long blond hair and furry hippie clothes. This was 1968, and they’d never seen anybody like this before.

  “Brian, meanwhile, was in ecstasy, half passed out under the headphones as he listened to the music. The countertones and ’partials’ produced by the dueling flutes could put you into trance by themselves. We finally crashed around dawn. We slept a few hours in the morning until the musicians became impatient. At eleven o’clock, the whole group gathered in front of our house with their rhaitas and blew one tremendous blast—our wake-up call. Then they ran away, falling over each other laughing. We spent the rest of the day on further recording.” George Chkiantz: “We recorded them outdoors underneath a great hedge of blue cactus, the earth very dry and hot. I found it difficult to stand still and wished I’d brought a mike stand. Since their festival wasn’t happening, we tried to arrange for them to play various ’scenes’ from the Bou Jeloud music, so we could get a kind of synopsis of the long ceremony. Gysin had tried to record them before, but he told us he was frustrated by the gender segregation imposed by the village. He was unable to hear the women’s music to get a complete picture of the village, which prevented him from proving his theories about their supposed pagan survivals.

  “The rhaitas were incredibly loud—twenty of them lined up in an L-shape with the drummers. The Uher was set to ’minimum’ and it was already overloading. I had to point the two mikes at the ground and take the sound reflected off the earth. We went through the batteries, then rigged up the car hookup. I finally got the sound I wanted by having them move around me as they played in a reverse figure eight, with me in the middle holding the two mikes. When the reel started to run out, I’d wave and they’d just stop and smile. In the end, we had about five hours of tape.

  “We recorded the flute music at night, and even got some women’s music the next day, with the girl singing lead playing a bendir, like a snare drum with a wire over it. Brian told me he was looking for a contribution to the next Stones album, that he wanted compressed segments of a seven-day festival. I think we came close to getting what he wanted in the short time we were there.”

  Brion Gysin: “Something strange happened that day. I was sitting on the ground with Brian and some of the younger musicians, who were digging on this Rolling Stone cat in his furry Afghan coat. We were under the thatched eaves of a farmhouse where they were going to cook lunch for us. Two musicians came in the courtyard leading a white goat. Brian looked at the goat, watched it disappear into the shadows with the two men. One of them held a knife. Catching the glint from the blade, Brian realized the goat was going to be slaughtered. He staggered to his feet, made a choking sound. He gasped, ’That’s me!’

  “We all picked up on it, and said, ’Yeah, man, okay. Right! It looks exactly like you.’ Because it was perfectly true. The goat had a blond fringe hanging over his eyes. ’Yes,’ I stammered, ’it is you.’ Brian turned white, as if he had a premonition of something. Twenty minutes later, we were eating grilled chunks of the goat’s liver, and it was never mentioned again.

  “We spent the rest of that day recording the music of the rhaitas and drums. They put on a little Bou Jeloud performance for Brian so he could get a taste of it on tape. They made him promise to come back for the next Aid el-Kebir, and they would sew him into the goatskins and he could dance as Bou Jeloud. Can you imagine?

  “Brian was happy on the way down the mountain. We’d only been there a night and a day, but he had all he needed, I guess. We went back to Tangier, checked into the Minzeh, and Brian began to listen to the tapes.”

  George Chkiantz: “Brian in Jajouka was at his most considerate and charming, the perfect guest. Back in Tangier was another story. He beat up Suki right off. He was crazed when we returned from Jajouka. When he couldn’t make the Uher work, he freaked out, woke me out of an exhausted sleep, demanded I stagger naked down the hotel corridor to push the right buttons. A few hours later, Suki called me to come quick. Brian was wrecked, standing on the balcony and insulting Arabs on the street below. I went over to calm him down, and he just blacked out, keeled over, and smashed his head on the iron railing. He looked dead to me, and I began to panic. What do we do now? ’Nothing,’ said Suki. ’It happens all the time.’ She covered him with a bedspread and left him on the balcony.

  “I needed to g
et back to London, but before I left the next day, Brian and Suki took me to the famous beach at Cap Spartel [on Morocco’s Atlantic coast]. 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 ten miles down the beach at Asilah.’

  “We put our towels down and I took a nap. I woke up twenty 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 at the exact place they went in. It was the strongest swimming I’ve ever seen. It made me think, later on.”

  A few weeks later, Brian was back in London, playing the Jajouka tapes at Olympic with George Chkiantz, happy with what he’d gotten. He felt the rhythms he’d captured were the antidote to the boredom people felt with R&B. Anticipating the world music movement ten years before it happened, he realized it would be amazing to dub guitar solos over the Jajouka polyrhythms. Brian and Chkiantz experimented with this a bit, but George hated the result.

  “It wasn’t a good idea,” Chkiantz said later. “After a couple of weeks, I sold him on the idea of making an impression of the trip to Morocco, like seeing a play in a theater through a scrim. I talked him into leaving the flutes alone, except for a bit of echo at the end. For the rhaitas, the goat-god dance, we introduced ’phased’ procession music that takes you on a little trip through our experience, in and out of consciousness. The whole thing was done in a few days, down to mastering, with Brian present every minute. I sent the tapes to the Stones’ office late in the summer.”

  No one had seen Brian this involved in anything since Anita left him. There was a brief flicker of hope that Brian Jones was being recalled to life. Brion Gysin: “It was a big deal in Jajouka for months afterward, this idea of Brian Jones returning to dance as Bou Jeloud. They pestered me about it for months. They even wrote a song for him, a Moroccan jump tune with funny English lyrics in the chorus”:

  Ah Brahim Jones

  Jajouka rolling stone

  Ah Brahim Jones

  Jajouka really stoned!

  * * *

  What Can a Poor Boy Do?

  July 1968. Six thousand miles away, Keith and Mick were mixing Beggar’s Banquet at RCA and Sweetland studios in Los Angeles. Charlie flew in, then Anita. Gram Parsons had a connection for pharmaceutical cocaine from a dentist in Watts, and some grudgingly felt Gram was buying his way into the Rolling Stones. Gram, Keith told friends, got better coke than the Mafia. He and Keith bonded like brothers as Gram took Keith through country music, teaching him songs. One night they drove out into the California desert to watch the sunrise at Joshua Tree National Monument, an out-of-this-world moonscape of cactus and canyons and prehistoric trees. Wrapped in blankets, guitars at hand, Anita as beautiful and gray-eyed as Minerva, they climbed atop the Cap Rock promontory and felt like gods watching Apollo begin his blazing ride across the desert.

  The Stones went to hear Taj Mahal and his band, and really dug the big Harlem-born blues singer, who had the same reverence for country blues they did. Taj’s version of “Corinna” was a big favorite. (He had replaced Ry Cooder with a young Indian guitarist from Oklahoma, Jesse Ed Davis.) Taj played a National steel guitar like Muddy Waters or Robert Johnson, and Keith recognized they shared the same approach to the blues: once removed, from another generation. Mick told Taj about his plans for a circuslike concert he wanted to stage later in the year, and invited Taj to come to London and be part of the show. Marianne decided that if her baby was a girl, she would name her Corinna.

  Marianne’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy was big news in England. It was mentioned from the pulpit of Westminster Abbey, discussed in the papers, and later was the undeclared subject of debate between velvet-booted Mick and Mary Whitehouse, an advocate of sensible shoes and conservative family values, on David Frost’s TV show in London. Mick, while acting as a spokesman for permissiveness, ardently wanted to marry Marianne, but she was still married. Also unknown, except to a few close friends, was that Anita Pallenberg was in the early stages of pregnancy herself.

  The Stones worked hard in the studio. Jack Nitzsche was surprised to see Anita tell Mick that his mix of “Stray Cat Blues” was crap because the vocals were too forward. He was even more surprised when Mick remixed according to Anita’s suggestion. They put the gospel choir on the end of “Salt of the Earth” after Marianne found them.

  She was complaining she had nothing to do, so while they were still mixing Banquet Mick produced two tracks for Marianne at RCA. “Sister Morphine” and “Something Better” both featured Ry Cooder, Charlie on drums, and Jack Nitzsche on keyboards. “Sister Morphine” was five and a half minutes of a dying accident victim’s desperate craving for narcotic relief (the lyrics were addressed to his nurse). Nitzsche scolded Marianne for snorting cocaine in the studio. “Everyone in the band can get wrecked except the drummer and the singer,” he told her. Delivered in a quavering voice (recorded later at Olympic) over languid slide guitar, the song was a desolate cry of pain from a pregnant girl feeling herself coming apart at the seams.

  July 26 was Mick’s twenty-fifth birthday. That day, he flew back to London from Los Angeles with the first acetate pressings of Beggar’s Banquet. There was a party that night at Spanish Tony’s new club, Vesuvio, in the Tottenham Court Road, in which both Mick and Keith had a financial interest. Decorated with cushions, water pipes, and Moroccan tapestries, the club was designed to cater to rock stars tired of being ripped off by the expensive clubs they frequented. The opening party featured mescaline punch and hash cake, and was full of Beatles, Stones, and their friends. Mick arrived late from the airport and played the Beggar’s Banquet acetate at top volume. Everyone realized that after the debacle of Satanic Majesties, the new Stones album was make-or-break; there was relief in the room when everyone seemed to enjoy it immensely. Congratulations all around, and many mescalined toasts were offered to its success. Mick played some other records fresh from California: Dr. John the Night Tripper’s Creole murk, and Al Kooper’s new group, Blood, Sweat and Tears. Then Paul McCartney modestly asked Spanish Tony if he’d mind playing the new Beatles single on the house P.A. It was “Hey Jude.” The other side had John Lennon wailing on “Revolution.” It was the first time London’s elite had heard these climactic Beatles songs, and there was huge applause afterward. Mick Jagger, Sanchez recalled, was annoyed at being upstaged at his own birthday party. (The Vesuvio Club was torched a few months later in a fire the authorities termed suspicious.)

  Decca executives could only shake their heads that month when shown the cover the Stones wanted for Beggar’s Banquet. Photographed by Barry Feinstein (husband of Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary) in a toilet at a Mexican car repair shop in Los Angeles, the cover included graffiti insults (by Keith and Mick) aimed at Allen Klein, Lyndon Johnson, the U.S. Marines, Herb Alpert (whose album had prevented Aftermath from reaching no. 1 in the United States), and Bob Dylan (the words “Bob Dylan’s Dream” pointed to the toilet’s flush handle). The album credits were on the other side, along with thanks given to Strawberry Bob (Fraser), St. Christopher (Gibbs), Spanish Tony, John and Michelle Phillips, Lenny Bruce, John and Yoko, Taj Mahal. Other graffiti: “Ronald Reagan is a sissy”; “Lyndon Loves Mao”; “Zappa’s in the cistern”; “Leicester Square [notorious gay cruising spot] at 11 A.M.”; “God rolls his own”; “Music from Big Brown.”

  Both Decca and London Records refused to release the album until another cover design was submitted. The Stones dug in their heels and a stalemate developed. The original July 26 release date came and went with both sides refusing to cave. Keith Richards was especially adamant about the cover. “What the Beatles and ourselves wanted—the most important thing—was to break the record companies’ control. If you’re writing songs and you’re playing ’em, 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 Stones told their labe
l it was merely a distributor of their product with no censorship rights. The company had other ideas and said no. This delayed Beggar’s Banquet for four months and poisoned relations with the Stones, who resolved that their next album for Decca would be their last. Around this time, the band also learned that the corporate parent of Decca was using the record company’s vast profits to underwrite research for its military radar and arms business. Incredibly the Stones realized they’d been contributing to the Vietnam War effort.

  In America, the summer of 1968 was known as the Long Hot Summer. Race riots torched inner cities, and there was civic instability that hadn’t been felt by Americans since the Depression of the 1930s. A cultural chasm divided the generations, and tear gas was in the air of the cities. London Records released “Street Fighting Man”/“No Expectations” as a single in August, just after the Democratic Party’s presidential convention in Chicago, where riot cops brutalized demonstrators and anyone in the streets they could get their hands on. The single’s red sleeve had a photo of L.A. cops clubbing a young demonstrator. When Chicago stations boycotted the record, other radio outlets followed suit, and London hastily withdrew “Street Fighting Man” and recalled all copies in the stores. It was the first banned record of the Stones’ career. Naturally the single didn’t even make the charts. The Stones’ brilliant, timely follow-up to “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” completely bombed.