by Marc Spitz
“If William Rees Mogg had not written his ‘Butterfly on the Wheel’ Times editorial, which, I’m sure, was instrumental in getting Mick and Keith released, then the plan would have been to mount an appeal of arrest and sentence in the usual way, just like the legal action that became necessary to help young people who were not famous and who did not have ‘great and the good’ Times editorials protesting on their behalf! Without the Times editorial Mick and Keith would have spent much longer in jail, as long as ‘ordinary’ people who were being busted every day and night,” says Coon.
It was clearly explained to both Mick and Keith upon release that July that although they walked the streets again, they were most certainly not off the hook; in fact, they’d be scrutinized even more closely than before. They were reminded that they had the rare power (or were perceived to have such) to lead others to harm. Abuse of this, they were warned, would figure into any further sentencing. “Whether you like it or not, you are the idol of a large number of the young in this country,” the judge scolded before releasing Mick. “Being in that position, you have very grave responsibilities. If you do come to be punished, it is only natural that those responsibilities should carry higher penalties.” Mick protested weakly, claiming, “This was all pushed on me by the prosecution.” He repeated this same statement to reporters at a brief and tense press conference shortly thereafter. Looking sedated and drawn, Mick spoke slowly and wearily. “People have been talking about responsibility for a long time,” he rambled. “I’m not sure if this responsibility is quite as great as they may count because I believe that individuals make their own minds up more than people think.” Mick never apologized. The seeds of a different Mick, satanic, not messianic, can be detected here, and it would certainly be something he would explore intellectually and express lyrically in the coming year. “Many of us realized we had to roll up our political sleeves for the long haul,” Coon says of the cultural shift in ’68 and ’69 from delighted and hopeful to hard and reactionary. “As with any socio-political movement, we had to learn how to deal with violent people who attach themselves to what was going on. It didn’t help that, very naïvely, the Rolling Stones thought it would be ‘cool’ to get outlaws such as the Hells Angels involved, not to mention their interest in Satanism and the occult, which became the dark, reactionary side of psychedelia.”
Next, the Stones entered the studio to record the follow-up to Between the Buttons: an acid lark called Their Satanic Majesties Request. Although boasting few moments as magnificent as “2,000 Light Years from Home” (easily the highlight), it has its charm now, and is no more or less a hodgepodge mess than more celebrated masterpieces where great songs are outnumbered by bursts of quickly discarded ideas (please see all of Radiohead’s post “Kid A” albums). Blessed with the Wildean ability to reduce complicated matters to their most trenchant points with a perfect quip, Mick later dismissed the album as made “under the influence of bail.” At the time, the band was giving it all they had, trying to make their own Sgt. Pepper. But what they had was severely compromised. Years later, he elaborated to Jann Wenner: “I think we were just taking too much acid. We were just getting carried away, just thinking anything you did was fun and everyone should listen to it. Also we did it to piss Andrew off, because he was such a pain in the neck. Because he didn’t understand it. The more we wanted to unload him, we decided to go on this path to alienate him.” Unsurprisingly, this concoction of discarded blues riff, John Barry Bond theme horns, jug-band blues, Tabla rhythms, snoring sound effects, and Bill Wyman vocals was not a major commercial hit either. Happily things were about to come into fierce focus.
The Stones’ next offering would truly be the first song to snugly fit their new, politicized, rebel folk hero garb. Built around a Bill Wyman bass riff and a turn of phrase inspired by Jack, Keith’s Redland’s groundskeeper, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” marked the Stones’ association with their most important producer and collaborator, Jimmy Miller, and the next, arguably most powerful phase of their career. “It’s about having a hard time and getting out,” Mick has said. “Just a metaphor for getting out of all the acid things.” Richards, as is his wont, puts it much more succinctly: “I’d grown sick to death of the whole Maharishi guru shit and the beads and bells. Who knows where these things come from, but I guess it was a reaction to what we’d done in our time off and also that severe dose of reality. A spell in prison at Wormwood Scrubs would certainly give you room for thought!”
“No man dies for what he knows to be true,” Oscar Wilde said. “Men die for what they want to be true, for what some terror in their hearts tells them is not true.” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” is about staring down that terror, seeing it for what it is, and moving on. That’s its power (that and the riff). The band shot a video for it with filmmaker Michael Lindsay Hogg. They seemed like a new machine, like someone gave them a shot of B-12. Even Brian looks reinvigorated. They have never looked cooler before or since: Keith in his fly glasses, Mick smeared with war paint. He knew there was a war going on. And he knew fighting had to be done, but was he willing to die for what he “wanted to be true”? By the middle of 1968, Mick would still be contemplating what to do with the power that he’d finally come to accept as a reality, wanted or not. Would he keep out of trouble or seek it? The world was bending in the Stones’ favor. Young people were rising up all over the world and they were looking to their rock heroes for direction more than ever before.
7
“I Went Down to the Demonstration”
It’s hard to imagine today, but there was a time when a major rock star not only could but was obliged to walk among the people; to pledge his or her power directly to an important cause and not just via a donation or a photo op or a red-carpet crawl. How legitimate they were, and even record sales depended on this level of credibility. Between 1968 and 1979, when the Clash was on the verge of playing large venues and selling millions of records, this was not only obligatory; it was fashionable, part of the package. In the ’70s, certain rockers like David Bowie and Alice Cooper, whose very images were dependent on being different from the people, got a pass, but especially during times of great change, the young uprisers depend on their musical heroes to literally be there for them.
As the Great Society of Lyndon Johnson was tarnished and the Vietnam War escalated, as the fight for civil rights met with violent resistance by those fearful of progress, as the feminist movement grew, and as workers all over the globe went on strike and marched for fair treatment and wages, those rock heroes, considered generals and majors of the mobilized counterculture, were expected to weigh in with support and guidance. Some, like Marlon Brando and Jane Fonda, rose to this with a fervor that bordered on hubris. Singer-songwriters Phil Ochs and Joan Baez were on the ground in a more sober and pragmatic fashion, but they lacked the cultural power of a Dylan or a Brando or a John Lennon or a Mick Jagger. Mick was first approached by the Left when Labour Party and Parliament member Tom Driberg, a gay, progressive politico with ties to the new youth culture (Allen Ginsberg was one of his close friends), suggested that Mick consider running for Parliament to capitalize on the new power of millions of young British baby boomers who’d reached voting age in 1966. Mick was flattered but declined. Still, as the Left gained power, they kept their eye on this new kind of leader.
“We were certainly watching them in the sense that we were dancing to their tunes—the Stones and the Beatles were the most popular groups at the time. We weren’t particularly thinking of the Beatles at that period as radical in any way; they just made pleasing music. But Jagger we felt—there was more of an edge to him and his music at that period and he didn’t like what was going on—sexually and politically—and that became very obvious,” says the writer and activist Tariq Ali today. “If you were even slightly radical you had to be at the demonstration and you had to be prepared to be abused by the government and its supporters.”
The year 1968 marked the apex of problem vs. solution culture. Pe
ople truly wanted to know whether their heroes could walk the walk; were they tourists, visiting the revolution, then retreating to their mansions, or were they going to lead? “There was a real sense of commitment—the feeling that if we all got off our ass we could actually bring about some change—a big sense of ‘We can do it! We can do it.’ People got caught up in that, rightly so,” Ali recalls.
The Stones’ expanding retinue included drug dealers, radical activists like Michael X, and leg-breakers affiliated with London gangsters Reggie and Ronnie Kray, but it somehow didn’t seem out of step with the new thrust. The youth movement of the late ’60s was not entirely pure. It was a social movement as much as a political one, and the war in certain circles was nothing more than a metaphor for a general sense of anger and unrest. “It was about the war but it wasn’t about the war—it was about everything,” writer and activist Mick Farren says. “It had become a much more dangerous brew.”
Demonstrations were theater constructs and media events, drawing horny students and story-hungry journalists as much as true believers on both the Left and the Right. In 1968, there were those cynical or jaded souls who “attended” gatherings, even riots, as if they were social events. In this way, the interest of John Lennon and Mick Jagger, both of whom watched the antiwar and oppression movements closely, could be viewed as even more sincere. These informed “cats” didn’t, after all, need to carry pictures of Chairman Mao to make it with anyone. When Mick spouted Marxist and sometimes anarchist theory in the pages of the recently launched Rolling Stone and N.M.E, it was tantamount to sending up a test balloon, designed to gauge just how much the political discourse of the L.S.E. classrooms was becoming reality. “I see a great deal of danger in the air,” he said at the time. “This is a protest against the system. And I see a lot of trouble coming in the dawn. We have got them on the run now and we have to finish what we started. The way things are run in Britain and the States is rotten and it is up to the young to change everything. The time is right now. Revolution is valid. The kids are ready to burn down the high-rise blocks and those stinking factories where they are forced to sweat their lives away. I’m going to do anything that has to be done to be a part of what is about to go down.”
Unfortunately palace revolution requires lots of planning and one cannot really imagine a Lennon or a Jagger attending regular meetings. Still, both men sensed and publicly acknowledged that there was possibly a role they could play, a pivotal one, that would not only enhance the perception of their bands as not just pop groups but real forces, but might also amount to some good. Lennon had given an interview in Rolling Stone in which he was more outspoken than the Beatles had been (or were ever allowed to be) before “Destruction.” Quoting his own “Revolution,” Lennon said, “Well, you know, you can count me out, and in, like yin and yang. I prefer ‘out.’ But we’ve got the other bit in us.”
The rate at which the world seemed to be changing was dizzying. Every month seemed to bring new reports of student and worker protests all over the world, so much so that it seemed beyond coincidence, but rather some kind of cosmic synergy, an unmistakable signal to all still on the fence that they needed to pledge themselves or get out of the way: hunger strikes among college students in New England, resistance gatherings in Spain, West Berlin, Poland, and Brazil. The rise of the I.R.A. and the P.L.O., the radical feminists and Black Panther Party; the canonization of Che Guevara, and in March, a demonstration in London. On March 17, twenty-five thousand marchers convened in Grosvenor Square to protest the Vietnam War in front of the American embassy, the largest anti–Vietnam War rally in England. Tipped off that this was happening, the police were out in full riot force on horseback and brandishing collapsible truncheons to cow the angry and potentially violent mobs, stop oncoming cars, and search them for weapons or contraband. “It was just building and building,” Farren recalls. “It was very peaceful but then rumors started going around that people had been massacred. There was a rush forward and suddenly the cavalry charged. Mounted policemen. The charge of the light brigade! Guys swinging very long nightsticks and cracking heads.”
Mick was living at Cheyne Walk, walking distance from the square, nesting with Marianne Faithfull, in a beautiful apartment house draped with tapestries and covered with rugs. Their pal Christopher Gibbs designed it, and Faithfull furnished it on various shopping excursions though the city’s boutiques. It was more like a café back room in Morocco or a den in Bombay, and might have been the perfect place to withdraw from chaos, amid antiques and incense smoke. It was clear that he again had a real choice to make too. He could literally watch from his window, or he could put on his boots and hit the street, where kids were carrying signs and chanting “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh,” and others simply screaming “Anarchy!” The protesters enthralled him. Some of this enthusiasm was fostered in the classrooms of the London School of Economics. Surely Faithfull had an influence as well. “I come from a very left wing socialist family,” she told me, adding that as a musician, she’s “always been attracted to revolutionary material.”
Tariq Ali knew that Mick would be at the demonstration. He’d called and informed Ali that he was going to march. “He said, ‘I’m coming on.’” But he did not want to speak. He was there as an observer, a sort of artist-journalist, traveling on the periphery, although rumors began to spread that he was dancing in front of police horses and chucking bricks at shop windows (most of which were boarded up). In truth, he and Faithfull kept near the bank of cameras and didn’t charge into the fray. It was a personal risk, nonetheless. With the mounted police, caught up in an anarchic clash, however, he certainly ran the risk of being just another long-haired agitator. He certainly wasn’t dressed in stage wear, but rather a simple polo shirt and overcoat—student garb. “They certainly could have smashed his head,” Ali agrees. “They smashed a lot of heads that day. He wanted to be among the crowd. He didn’t care what the consequences of going out would be; that’s absolutely true—obviously had he been beaten up by the cops that day there would have been one hell of a storm in the country as a whole; it was a risk and he took the risk.”
Once people did start recognizing him, Mick felt something strange and unexpected. He witnessed the focus of the movement actually weakening. Those fixated on the embassy and the unjust war were now contemplating “Mick Jagger.” It was a sinking feeling. There was no way, beyond continuing to write and record music, that he could make a difference. An immediate, direct participation, no matter how expected of him, was ultimately impossible. He’d discovered this in an honest and commendable way, by actually trying and failing to fight. After about a half an hour, he fled back to the safety of Cheyne Walk to watch the protest on television like every other outsider.
Lennon was going through the same thing, wondering how much he would add to or distract from the cause. There were rumors going around the crowd that Lennon would pay the legal bills for anyone arrested, but he did not show his face.
Later in the month, Mick convened with Keith, Brian Jones, and the rest of the Stones, who were recording the follow-up to the ill-fated Satanic Majesties with “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” producer Jimmy Miller at Olympic Studios. Mick had a new track with the working title “Has Everybody Paid Their Dues” written. The lyrics reflected images of Grosvenor Square and Paris reset for a hot, volatile June, sensing that the heat of summer would only inflame an already agitated movement and allowing Mick to reference Martha and the Vandellas’ 1964 No. 1 hit “Dancing in the Streets” with typically barbed wit that at once validated and took the piss out of the revolution as social opportunity. Keith strummed, like a folk singer, running his acoustic guitar through an analog tape recorder to create distortion. Brian Jones, in one of his final bursts of creativity, added a tamboura to the acoustic strumming track, and Charlie Watts produced a marching snare drum beat on an old toy kit from the ’30s. With Nicky Hopkins on piano, “Street Fighting Man” is a folk song slightly psychedelized with the Indian drones and run through the
zeitgeist. Miller recorded it on an old-style tape machine that caused the noises to bleed into a drone that approximated the surge and white noise of the crowds at Grosvenor. Mick sang in a slow drawl like a man dizzy with heat and fear and the rush of “we just might succeed,” before ultimately determining, “So what can a poor boy do except to sing for a rock and roll band?” It’s interesting to note that Lennon too sang “Revolution” in a slow, deliberate and pondering fashion with the same sense of curiosity as to what his role should be: “out/in.”
“It was a great song,” Farren says. “But it was kind of like Mick hedging his bets. I didn’t hedge my bets. Jim Morrison didn’t hedge his bets. Mick Jagger and the Beatles did. You can count me out/in.”
The chaos and bloodshed of ’68 didn’t stop just because the Stones decided to seal themselves off in the studio. In April, as the Stones were still working on the track, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis. Later that spring racial tension flared in London when Enoch Powell delivered his “River of Blood” speech, fomenting anti-immigration sentiment. In South Africa, uprisings against the system of apartheid produced casualties, and in May, students in Paris organized a strike to protest the De Gaulle administration.
Director Jean-Luc Godard was in Paris during the riots, monitoring them but, like Jagger, unsure whether he could be of any greater use to the movement. Godard, along with other leaders of the nouvelle vague like Françoise Truffaut, Louis Malle, and Eastern European filmmakers like Milos Forman and Roman Polanski, lobbied to cancel the Cannes Film Festival that spring. He knew that his true power, however, was as a provocateur. In interviews, Godard, a former film critic, ten years into his career as a director, following the groundbreaking Breathless (based on a script he’d written with Truffaut), compared the revolutionary artist, filmmakers in his case, to the Vietcong.