by Marc Spitz
It would seem at first irresistibly easy. “The police did not have to do any detective work and, encouraged by the tabloid press, the police thought busting pop stars would be very popular and win them promotion,” says Coon.
Mick didn’t seem to have his guard up when he turned up to sing along with the Beatles five days after the publication of the News of the World article, during the live recording of “All You Need Is Love,” part of England’s contribution to a global satellite broadcast. His thoughts were on the imminent release of the Stones’ follow-up to Aftermath, Between the Buttons, on the extensive European tour planned to promote it, and on making a home with Faithfull, and the rugs and tapestries and antiques they would furnish it with. On business affairs, family. On February 13, just over a week after the News of the World article hit the kiosks, Mick and Faithfull took a drive out to Redlands to blow off some steam during a weekend getaway. Accompanied by Chelsea scene-maker Christopher Gibbs, a close friend, as well as Fraser, his employee Mohammed Jujuj, and two hippie hangers-on, Nicky Kramer and David Schneiderman, the latter of whom referred to himself as “The Acid King,” they spent the weekend hiking, eating good food, and tripping on White Lightning acid, while playing Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde. Over the course of the weekend, people came and went, including Tony Sanchez, another London nightlife figure, drug connection, and author of the future classic of Stones literature Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, artist Michael Cooper, Charlie Watts, and George Harrison and Patti Boyd (who left before the cops closed in, fueling the rumor that they were staking the place out and waiting to move in so they wouldn’t have to bust a beloved Beatle).
The party was still going strong when nearly two dozen officers, mostly men, but three women in tow, bundled in dark coats and hats, moved in. Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley produced a search warrant and began rifling through clothes, cushions, and cupboards in search of drugs. The whole event was perversely mannered, with the cops asking politely if they might turn the music off (and Richards, not quite sure who these alike-dressed dwarves were, offering to turn it “down” instead). In Fraser’s possession they found some heroin, and in a coat that Mick claimed belonged to him, but was actually Faithfull’s, they found some pep pills, purchased legally in Italy. Schneiderman refused to allow the police to open the film canisters where he kept his drugs, claiming they contained exposable film. It was all over in about an hour, but not before Marianne Faithfull emerged, clad in a fur rug, having just enjoyed a hot bath, and agitated some of the officers. Zooming on acid, Faithfull saw this as a way to exercise some form of power over them. She found it amusing and was too high to realize that she was planting lurid images in the minds of these agitated cops, ones that would soon be run through the cognitive dissonance of the police-media information pipeline. Faithfull was inadvertently creating a surprisingly durable tabloid invention : Miss X.
As Miss X, Faithfull was stripped of her clothes, her dignity, her name, and her identity as Mick’s partner. Under a cloud of “strong smelling incense,” as it was recounted, this Miss X did things a Miss X would do. The account of her behavior when presented to the public was fair game for further distortion and soon an urban legend was born. According to this legend, when the cops entered, she was naked, covered in fur, with a Mars candy bar inserted in her vagina (implicitly to be eaten by Mick).
Paranoia set in as the high wore off. Lawyers were called and questions asked. Someone set them up, but who? The least-known characters, the two hippie hangers-on, Schneiderman and Kramer, were the obvious suspects. They weren’t part of the scene; they’d merely weeded in. Kramer was allegedly roughed up by nightclub muscle man David Litvinoff, a cohort of the notorious London gangsters, the Kray brothers (and later a consultant on Mick’s film debut Performance). Kramer was deemed clean after allegedly being pummeled to the point where any sane man would spill. Schneiderman vanished into the ether. He must have fingered them to the News. Within a week, it went from all you need is love to all you need is a good lawyer. “When we got busted at Redlands, it suddenly made us realize that this was a whole different ball game and that was when the fun stopped,” Faithfull recalled. “Up until then it had been as though London existed in a beautiful space where you could do anything you wanted.” Exhausted and newly paranoid, the Stones left London that winter while awaiting trial.
Brian Jones correctly assumed he’d be the next to be busted, and Mick and Marianne traveled to Spain and Morocco as their barristers made a case and the tabloids went mad with daily reports of all the lurid Redlands details. These red-top reports also motivated the youth to organize in outrage like they’d never done before and made folk heroes of Mick and Keith. “Clive Goodwin, the editor of the leftist Marxist antigovernment newspaper Black Dwarf, got word that the News of the World was publishing (another) lurid character assassination of Jagger,” Coon recalls. “He rang me—he knew I was involved with a drugs case myself—and he asked me to help him organize a demonstration. We started ringing everyone we knew, telling them to be outside the News of the World the next evening, a Saturday night. Our aim was to stop the News of the World’s Sunday morning paper distribution. About two or three hundred people turned up. We all lay down in Fleet Street blocking the way of the huge distribution lorries. Of course, we were eventually moved on by the police. So we marched past 10 Downing Street and up Whitehall and, at four o’clock in the morning, there we were holding a peaceful vigil on the steps of Eros in Piccadilly Circus. The busting of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was one of the key, politically galvanizing moments for the emerging hippie youth movement in Britain. People rallied around, not only to stars like Mick, Keith, and Robert Fraser, but to all of us, the common people, who suddenly, being easy targets because of the gloriously different way we dressed, were being busted too.”
The Rolling Stones drug trial at the courthouse in Chichester in June of 1967 was one of the first modern legal circuses, a precursor to the court appearances of Charles Manson, O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Phil Spector, and Lindsay Lohan. There were so many news clippings (mostly thanks to Miss X) that pop artist Richard Hamilton, a friend of Fraser’s, would later create a protest piece for a 1968 exhibit entitled Swingeing London. One piece depicted a grimacing Mick, dressed in a pale, velvety green dandy’s coat, handcuffed to a smiling, darkly handsome Fraser. These were nonviolent offenders, handcuffed together like hardened criminals and paraded for the cameras. The establishment’s message was unmistakable: “Toe the line or this will happen to you.” And now, thanks to artists like Hamilton, the Stones and their followers had their response: “This is absurd and unjust.” A Hamilton collage of the tabloid headlines further framed the proceedings as a show trial. And yet it didn’t only profit the tabloids. For all their suffering, the madness turned the two besieged Rolling Stones (and later Brian Jones) into rock and roll’s folk heroes: more polarizing, newsworthy, and intensely interesting than the Beatles could ever hope to be. The atmosphere of Us vs. Them had never been stronger, and the Stones, facing real jail time in the violation of the Dangerous Drugs Act, were now much more than pop stars; they were potential martyrs/heroes.
Mick and Keith rose to the occasion, wearing long hair and a new outfit every day for the bank of photographers. The defendants dressed like the louche, decadent rock stars they were and made no effort to employ a blue pinstriped suit to endear themselves to the judge. “This is who we are,” they seemed to say. They dressed like rich hippies, but hippies nonetheless. “This is us, and you are putting all of us on trial.” Fans carrying signs held vigil outside the courthouse. The event actually consolidated the London club scene, forcing them to mobilize and organize. Release, a group that provided legal relief funds for those railroaded on drug charges, drummed up funds for the Stones and others. The Who, mentioned in the infamous News of the World piece, rush-recorded versions of the Stones’ “The Last Time” and “Under My Thumb” (the former is excellent and the latter, less so). Who drummer Keith Moon
joined the fray, in mod gear and shades, holding up a sign reading STOP POP PERSECUTION. The Stones were privately shaken but publicly they turned Us vs. Them into great courtroom theater.
When the prosecutor asked Richards, “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?” Richards replied, “Not at all,” adding, when pushed, “We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.”
It was obvious to all that they were doomed. The world was watching (the press covered the meals being delivered to the courthouse as if they were arrivals of heads of state: “Mick’s having smoked salmon today”). They were going to be made examples of and they were going to get stiff sentences well beyond what the charges merited. Mick prepared himself for it. He set his business affairs in order; he made peace with Faithfull and with his family, who were supportive through it all. But when he stood up before the judge, on the morning of June 29, 1967, the sentence shocked him to the core. “Michael Philip Jagger, you will go to prison for three months.” He tried not to crumple as it sank in and a cry of disbelief was heard in the pew, but he felt himself go blank. He summoned all the discipline he could to keep standing. Something told him, “Don’t let them break you; stand up.” Richards was sentenced to six months. Fraser, getting a larger sampling of the dark side than he’d bargained for, got a year. That night, the news of the gruesome death of sex bomb Jayne Mansfield on a rainy New Orleans highway provided some distraction from the almost surreal proceedings. Would the Stones really have to spend the next ninety days in prison; dressed in heavy denim and eating and sleeping with murderers and rapists?
Between the bust and the trial, the Stones shot a promotional film for “We Love You,” a rush-recorded single that would function as both a thank-you to supportive fans and a stopgap should incarceration prevent the band from recording and releasing new material. “We Love You,” which sounds as hastily made as it actually was, begins with a jail door slamming. John Lennon and Paul McCartney showed solidarity by adding backing vocals to the track, but neither can be heard distinctly. The lyrics are pretty basic: “We don’t care if you hound we. And love is all around we . . .” The piano hook gets into your head and stays (whether you wish it to or not) but it’s not Mick and Keith’s best moment on record, and coming on the heels of the brilliant Aftermath it’s even more of a shrug. Peter Whitehead, approached to shoot a promotional film, thought about the trial and the verdict and devised a theme. “I saw it as a typical crime of the establishment against artists as was the case with Oscar Wilde.” Whitehead’s take was communicated to Mick, who immediately embraced it.
A church was found to double as a courtroom, Faithfull’s hair was cut short to call to mind “Bosie,” and Keith, as the Marquis, stood before Mick, passing judgment. At one point, a fur rug was introduced into evidence, calling to mind Miss X and the Mars bar. It’s a better promo than it is a song, and Mick (at one point naked and wrapped in the rug) seems to find catharsis acting out the “murder” of Wilde (who never recovered personally or professionally). “I don’t think they were afraid,” Whitehead says. “They were just desperately and profoundly sad, having seen, yet again, just how the British right-wing conservative government could behave. They were absolutely convinced they were going to go to jail. Which means living in a cell.”
After a meal and tearful good-byes, they were separated, Richards sent to Wormwood Scrubs in London and Mick and Robert Fraser to the hospital wing of the Lewes prison, a gothic, Victorian-era prison house, forty miles or so out of the city. While Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would only spend about a day behind bars, when they were first separated from society, there was nothing to indicate that they would not be there for the duration of their respective sentences.
This actually must have been the first moment of true quiet Mick had known in three and a half years. How to pass the time when minutes felt like days? He had access to all the stimulation in the world, and then nothing. He could still recognize himself, his inner thoughts and outer appearance. He wasn’t malnourished ; nobody had beaten him; they didn’t even cut his hair or strip-search him; He was just captive. But what about the acid philosophy ? Isn’t the mind infinite? If he was going to be a martyr for the new consciousness, surely he needed to test its mettle?
Faithfull came to visit, bringing with her cigarettes, paper, and pen. When he saw her he lost his cool and burst into tears. He’d kept a good face; he was a good leader. Not every pop star was cut out for it. Lennon was. McCartney fumbled with it. Bob Dylan fled. The Moody Blues were never candidates anyway. Neither was Donovan. Most of us can’t truly appreciate the rough juxtaposition of being pampered one day and banged up in cement the next; idolized by one half of the nation and fingered as a villain by the other (the half with the power to destroy you). He was only a half decade removed from Dartford. “The point of arresting rock stars like Mick and Keith was basically political intimidation,” Coon says. “And I will guess that Mick and Keith, like anyone else subject to the epitome of state authority, did feel intimidated. Police harassment exerts a very private and personal cost.”
Keith has related tales of the other prisoners, the hard men and outcasts treating him like one of their own, hooting cries of support as he was led down the row. They threw cigarettes into his cell. Mick tells no such tales. What we have from Mick’s experiences is more concrete, and possibly more evidence of the stronger character. While in prison, Mick wrote some lyrics for “2,000 Light Years from Home,” their greatest psychedelic rock song. It’s a song about abject loneliness, reflecting a surreal remove from proper society that was, as per the zeitgeist, equated with deep space travel. Mick’s body was in a small cell, but he was imagining himself a hundred, two hundred, six hundred, then a thousand, and, finally, two thousand light-years away from the gray bars, staring back at earth from the conflagrations of Aldebaran in the Taurus constellation, the muse star that captivated Thomas Hardy and Tolkien. Invoking Aldebaran was utopian, as the distant star is, in many science fiction yarns, habitable. Like De Sade, Wilde and Genet, and Orton, Mick Jagger turned a cell into a study. Others were writing as well, moved to their core by the questionable justice. Some editorials approved of it (this was the same contingent that advocated for the mandatory drug testing of pop stars, after all). It served them right, the arrogance! Most found it to be a travesty, the product of LSD panic, tantamount to a witch trial.
The most famous and influential of these came from an unlikely source in conservative editor William Reece Mogg of the Times of London. In a July 1, 1967, editorial entitled “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel,” Mogg laid the evidence out flatly: “Mr. Jagger was charged with being in possession of four tablets containing amphetamine sulfate and methyl amphetamine hydrochloride; these tablets had been bought perfectly legally in Italy,” before putting the purported crime in context. “If after his visit to the Pope the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought proprietary airsickness pills at Rome airport, and imported the unused tablets into Britain on his return, he would have risked committing precisely the same offence. No one who has ever traveled and bought proprietary drugs abroad can be sure that he has not broken the law.” Mogg singled out Judge Block for inflating the “normal penalty” which is “probation” while taking pains not to “speculate on the judge’s reasons, which we do not know.” He simply asked: “Has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism and resentment his celebrity has aroused?” He also challenged the considerable portion of the populace who were not young and outraged, but older and satisfied. “They consider that Mr. Jagger ‘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 re
asonable enough, and at an emotional level it is very understandable but it has nothing at all to do with this case.” Mogg closed his editorial by drawing comparison to Stephen Ward, who was implicated in the last great British morality play, the Profumo scandal. Ward introduced showgirls Mandy Rice Davies and Christine Keeler to John Profumo, the acting secretary of state for war. It was later discovered that Keeler was also sleeping with a Soviet attaché. After a prolonged attack on his character, Ward took an overdose. “There are cases in which a single figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspect of public morality. That case killed Stephen Ward.” If the Mick Jagger conviction was allowed to stand, the public would essentially have blood on its hands. Richards, by the way, is not mentioned in the editorial; only Mick.
“I was sittin’ in jail and some one threw it [The Times] through the window, which is illegal in jail,” Mick recalled. When he read the editorial, he wondered just how persuasive it would be. By right, it would at least make people realize that he was a human being as well, not just a symbol. “It was against the normal press conduct and shows a strong sense of purpose. That was something I’ll always remember and be grateful for.” Richards, in Wormwood Scrubs, was informed of the Mogg essay as well. Over the course of the day, the outrage grew louder until it was apparent that the court had to backpedal. Mick and Keith were ordered released on bail pending appeal and were immediately granted their freedom, at least temporarily (charges were later overturned on appeal ; Fraser served out his sentence).