by Marc Spitz
As the Stones were recording what would become their follow-up to Their Satanic Majesties Request, later titled Beggars Banquet, at Olympic Studios in London, Godard approached them to ask if he might film their progress. The Stones’ new status as outsider folk heroes post-Redlands appealed to the Frenchman, a decade their senior, and fit nicely with a vision he had for a new piece of cinematic agitprop. Godard headed to London in June of ’68 to set up cameras and lights in the sparse studio while the Stones recorded a new song. It was called, originally, “The Devil Is My Name,” written by Jagger after reading Russian novelist Mikhail Bulgakov’s book The Master and Margarita. The book, released in 1967 and considered vogue by the politicized, young intellectuals, chronicles the devil and his entourage spanning time from the days of Christ and Pilate through Soviet Russia of the ’30s. As Godard and his crew observed, the track metamorphosed from a dirge, vaguely Dylanesque, and mostly acoustic guitar driven to the epic with the unique samba beat that we know today. Its title changed as well to the superior “Sympathy for the Devil.” Mick had dabbled in the occult, briefly fraternizing with the author and filmmaker Kenneth Anger and composing, on a new Moog synthesizer, the droning soundtrack to his singularly creepy short film The Invocation of My Demon Brother (homoerotic albinos, soldiers disembarking a helicopter, Charles Manson associate and convicted murderer Bobby Beausoleil, Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey, and lots of fire). While Anger took his fascination with the Stones (whom he considered powerful witches) seriously, Mick’s fascination was fleeting. It wasn’t a song for the devil; it was a song about him. Mick knew what it was like, now, to be demonized.
Godard, with his dark glasses, ever-present cigarette, and imperious, intellectual cool, seemed at first like a perfect collaborator. Like the Stones, the nouvelle vague auteurs took American iconography (gangster pulp, Hitchcock studio films, and cool jazz, rather than the blues) and made something new. Godard envisioned a juxtaposition of the Stones at work on a song that doesn’t quite come together right away with a series of vignettes, both witty and perverse, that would cumulatively address the idea of struggle; creative with regard to the Stones and, as far as the planned vignettes went, the politics of the American minorities and the Vietcong. Footage, mostly silent, of the Stones—Bill, sullen as usual in his bright pink boots, Keith stoned and aloof in shades, Brian bloated with drink and isolated, strumming an acoustic guitar in a cubicle, and Mick impatiently instructing his band mates as they try to get the vibe right (“Three verses, straight through, then a solo . . . it should start off very cool.”)—segues into a contingent of Black Panthers, heavily armed, reciting agitprop like Mein Kampf and Le Roi Jones’ The Dutchman and actually engaging in revolutionary (if highly, even mawkishly, symbolic) acts. A car arrives and virginal, white-clad, barefoot women are led out to be fondled then executed (throwing the white male establishment’s basest fear in their face). When we come back to the Stones, we see progression: “progress” being a key word. Keith is now on bass, searching for some kind of groove, and “Sympathy” is a bit livelier. Mick is still trying to get it, “I been round for many a long—aw shit!”
Watching today, those of us who know the song well will find its rough assemblage compelling. Knowing what the final result will be, there’s a sustained tension as we wait for the Stones to nail it and give us our familiarity. “I shouted out, who killed Kennedy,” Mick sings. This is on June 4, 1968, and we know what’s coming. Mick, of course, does not. It’s a creepy feeling. Four days later, Bobby Kennedy was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and “Who killed Kennedy” becomes “Who killed the Kennedys,” and the Stones, once again sealed in their bunker while blood is shed, use the violence to sharpen their commentary and power. Godard next deconstructs the notion of celebrity leader by pestering an ingénue (Anne Wiazemsky, the costar of his similarly politicized La Chinoise, of the previous year) with highly philosophical questions (“Do you believe drugs are a spiritual form of gambling?”), all of which are responded to with a simple, “Yes.” When we next see the Stones there are congas and “Sympathy” has a groove. As Mick records his vocal, Keith, Brian, Anita, and Marianne gather around doing the famous “woo woos” (supposedly this was staged by Godard, as the backing vocals were already recorded), as if to say, there can be no spontaneous acts. Everything, even rock and roll, even revolution, is contrived. Excited by the prestige of presenting Godard’s first English-language film, and the commercial potential of a Rolling Stones concert film (which is how it was sold and later, how it would be marketed), the studio hated the film (which Godard had entitled One Plus One) and forced an edit in which the Stones played all of “Sympathy for the Devil.” When the Stones saw the final result, they weren’t quite sure what to make of it. Godard and Jagger clashed in the press after the film was screened. As for the meaning of the film, Mick admitted, “I have no idea,” somewhat irritated at having to explain the project to the British and American media. “The lead chick [Anne Wiazemsky] comes to London and gets totally destroyed with some spade cat, gets involved with drugs or something.” When Godard groused that the band had abandoned him once the studio began meddling, Mick responded by dismissing the director as “a twat.”
“These radical images married to the Stones didn’t quite have the fucking impact that obviously was the intention,” Farren says. “You had a very interesting film of the Beggars Banquet sessions—intercut with a lot of girls standing on used cars talking about the Vietcong. If it hadn’t been Godard and the Stones, it would have been an amateurish student movie. It meant well but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know.”
“Street Fighting Man” was released as the first single off the Stones’ promised new album, Beggars Banquet, hitting the radio in August just days before the Democratic National Convention was set to kick off in Chicago. There, fifteen thousand antiwar protesters convened in Lincoln Park and clashed with the police after refusing to obey curfew. The single was timed perfectly, and validated Mick’s decision that, ultimately, he had much more power as a singer than he could ever have as another marcher. Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, a drama built around actual footage of the Chicago riots, opens with a similar realization: at a cocktail party where journalists are talking about just how much to get involved when they see people bloodied and injustices. “All good people deplore problems at a distance,” one reporter laments.
“Street Fighting Man” hardly seems hopelessly dated like other songs of the “come on people now, smile on your brother” variety, largely due to the fact that the twenty-four-hour news media has frequently turned to it for soundtrack coverage for every subsequent revolution, most recently those in Tunisia and Egypt. Although it does stand as a reminder to Mick of the moment he truly pondered storming the palace and then came to realize the limits of his power. “Poets don’t sign petitions,” the poet-father of a restless ’68 French radical says during a pivotal dinner scene in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers. “They sign poems.” Jagger the rocker was more valuable to the revolution than Jagger the brick thrower. “You always got to have good tunes if you’re marching,” he later said, “but the tunes don’t make the march.”
In the ensuing decades, Mick would distance himself from political causes to the point of disengagement. There’s a hilarious exchange between Mick and yippie icon Abbie Hoffman in Stanley Booth’s True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. “Why don’t you give us some bread?” Hoffman asks the band. “For what?” Mick inquires. “The trial,” Hoffman answers, “the Chicago Eight.” “I’ve got to pay for my own trials,” he quips.
In his middle age, Mick collected relationships with wealthy and powerful figures like Bill and Hillary Clinton and Tony Blair (neither of which provoked much controversy but certainly left some of the die-hard ’60s radicals a bit crestfallen). There was a time in the mid-’60s when liberal Chelsea dwellers and the hipper echelon of Parliament, smitten by Mick’s surprising intellect, encouraged him to run for office.
Ultimately, he wasn’t willing to bleed for any movement. He’d decided politics was a bit flakey. “They’re the same fucking things,” he observed of the street-warring factions of ’68. “They’ll degenerate to putting helmets on and fighting each other. When they come out they won’t know who the fuck they are.” There were fissures even between the partyloving hippie contingent and the full-stop Trotskyites. “They didn’t trust us dope fiends and we didn’t trust them,” Farren says. “I wasn’t going to be in no fucking Red Guard, thank you. Like Mick and like Lennon, I like good whiskey. I like twelve-year-old scotch. I don’t want to be in 1984 drinking victory gin.” By the time Margaret Thatcher was elected, and England’s Welfare State began to be dismantled, Jagger had fully gravitated to the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum. “It was a decisive time for a lot of people, especially people who’d made a lot of money,” Ali says. “They felt taxes were too high and trade unions were on the verge of taking Britain. They got nervous and I was very surprised to find that Jagger had become a Thatcherite. It’s ironic that in the’60s the Stones and Jagger had been far more radical than the Beatles; once John Lennon broke with the Beatles he became free and Jagger went in the other direction. All that [high society]. I know Marianne Faithfull, I used to see her off and on; she was quite upset he’d gone that way. She didn’t know that he was that political, but she stayed. Mick was an intellectual and like other radical intellectuals during the Reagan-Thatcher years, he said ‘Oh, it’s not going to work. We’ve lost. Better make your peace with the system.’ ”
And yet, at a time when few people were openly critical of the Bush-Blair union, Mick penned the song “Sweet Neo Con,” a scalding attack on the Bush administration, Halliburton and bigoil profiteers, and hypocrite Christians. A genuine protest song, it’s a highlight of the Stones’ creative comeback, A Bigger Bang, and seemed to come out of nowhere, evidence perhaps that Mick has never really stopped thinking about the divide and which side to choose. “He got his conscience working again and I was pleased,” Ali says.
While nothing as jarring as “there should be no such thing as private property” has left his famous lips since the late ’60s, you can’t ever fully count him out—or in. “He was never an anarchist,” Ali says. “If anything he was more socialist. Can you be a multimillionaire and be a socialist?” Ali laughs. “Intellectually you can.”
8
“So, Remember Who You Say You Are . . .”
When did Us vs. Them become Us vs. Us? When did the impenetrable foundation of the Rolling Stones first begin to show signs of fissuring, and who do we blame for the divide that has never been fully repaired (or credit, as it sure made for a more interesting and combustible band)? Anita Pallenberg. This isn’t to say when in doubt, blame (or credit) the woman. Cherchez la femme as Mick himself might say. It’s merely a testament to the power of this particular femme fatale.
Time has not been on Anita’s side. There’s a prescient moment in the fourth season of the great British sitcom Absolutely Fabulous in which Edina Monsoon (Jennifer Saunders) is lost in a dreamy haze following a crash diet. In her head, she is visited by God (as played by Marianne Faithfull) and the Devil (as portrayed by Pallenberg), who discuss the nature of humankind in the modern world. “They won’t have any use for you and me soon,” Faithfull warns. “I’m bored anyway.” Pallenberg shrugs. “What’s the point of me if I’m acceptable?”
Pallenberg has never been acceptable, and likely never will. If there’s anyone who suffers from schadenfreude more than Mick Jagger when it comes to getting old, it’s Anita. She was also such a revolutionary beauty in her time. In January of 2010, the actress, artist, and Stones muse, now in her mid-sixties, was snapped by a Daily Mail photographer while attempting to light a cigarette outside a Waitrose grocery. In the photo, Pallenberg’s blonde hair is stringy, her face wrinkled, and she wears a turtleneck and baggy coat. She’s unrecognizable as the lush-lipped, blonde gamine with the just-been-fucked gaze, lounging naked, wrapped in a sheet in Dillinger Is Dead, Italian director Marco Ferreri’s 1969 art-noir film. As if the “What a Drag” headline (a nod to the Stones’ “Mother’s Little Helper”) weren’t cruel enough, the paper also ran a series of photos of Pallenberg in her youth (as well as Keith and Brian in their youths. Mick, of course, is represented by a recent photo).
And yet there remains a dignity to Pallenberg that can’t be taken away; certainly because, like Keith, given her drug nightmares she should not be alive. But she not only lives on, she’s now a dark rock legend. The few films she made in the ’60s have now become cult classics: Barbarella, the aforementioned Dillinger Is Dead, the madcap adaptation of the erotic novel Candy, and, of course, Performance, perhaps the ultimate ’60s cult film. Writerdirector Harmony Korine, who cast her as Queen Elizabeth in his deeply strange, 2007 satire, Mister Lonely, once called Anita Pallenberg, “The female Chuck Berry,” and she was probably as important to the classic-era Rolling Stones as we understand them as Berry was.
In her twenties Pallenberg spoke in the broken English of a Federico Fellini starlet or a fey male duke turned vampire. She was fearless in her exploration of drugs, bondage, and the occult. The Stones wore her clothes; not the clothes she designed, mind you. Built like skinny girls themselves, they borrowed her garments and made every other male rock band and rock fan want to dress that way as well; that highly creative, elegant, trashy aesthetic that has also been copied by every female rock and roller for the past forty years. Pallenberg, according to an oft-repeated observation by Keith Richards, “knew everything and she could say it in five languages.” She was one of just a few, alongside Marianne Faithfull and Andrew Oldham, who contributed musically through philosophy, inspiration, and the way they spoke, dressed, and generally comported themselves. “Anita was like a life force, a woman so powerful, so full of strength and determination that men came to lean on her, to become as dangerously dependent on her as a heroin addict is on his drug supplier,” Stones insider and drug connection Tony Sanchez, a.k.a. “Spanish Tony,” writes in his memoir from this period, the notorious Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.
“Anita was a big force in the Stones,” journalist Nick Kent told me in our interview for Vanity Fair’s website. “She didn’t have any skill to bring to the Stones, but what she had was image and attitude. She couldn’t play guitar or drums or bass. It’s questionable whether the Rolling Stones would have had a woman playing in their group, but if they had, then Anita would have been that woman.”
Pallenberg’s conceptual vision for the Stones was nearly as complete as Oldham’s. “I feel as though I’m rather like the sixth Rolling Stone. Mick and Keith and Brian need me to guide them, to criticize them, and to give them ideas,” Pallenberg told Sanchez in Up and Down, adding, “I’m certain that any one of them would break up the band for me. It’s a strange feeling.”
This seemed to be the rule in the Stones during the mid- and late ’60s, the period when the band was at its surging best: Whoever had Anita Pallenberg’s affections somehow had most of the power. Whoever didn’t have her wanted her with a highly distracting fascination at best, a corrosive jealousy at worst. Those who had her and lost her, lost their “demon.” Anita knew all about demons.
Pallenberg was like the conch shell in William Golding’s 1954 allegorical novel, Lord of the Flies. If the Stones were the marooned British schoolboys, trying to establish some kind of order in their strange world of drugs, celebrity, and oppression, she provided some kind of system to combat “the Beast” in the forest. To hold her was to have the floor. If you couldn’t keep the floor, then mutiny was inevitable.
Pallenberg was raised on the kind of old European culture that doesn’t really exist anymore. Born in January of 1944 in Rome, she was shipped off to a prestigious German boarding school after the war by her father, a prosperous travel agent. She was thrown out of school for truancy but remained in Munich and studied art. As a teen, she returned to Rome in the late ’50s at the height of La Dol
ce Vita decadence, and in her early twenties began befriending many in the Federico Fellini circle of actors, models, and artists, and auditioning for parts. Decadent, bisexual, blonde, and intellectually hungry, she was already adept at bewitching both men and women. There are some people who have a preternatural knack for being in the right cultural place at the right time. It may very well be a sixth sense: a gift. Pallenberg next found herself in Greenwich Village modeling and hobnobbing with Allen Ginsberg and the nascent Warhol Factory stars and the radically experimental Living Theatre troupe before returning to Europe. It was there that she attended her first Rolling Stones concert in Munich on September 14, 1965. Backstage she met Brian Jones, who was already beginning to get jittery at the prospect of losing his hand in the Stones. He famously told her, “I don’t know who you are, but I need you,” and from that point on they were inseparable.
They looked perfect together, with their shiny, blond hair cut identically and mingling. In photos, Jones truly seems to meld with her; you can almost see the possession of his soul go down. As the Stones continued their mad tour through Europe, Pallenberg would travel with them or meet them at shows still marked by screaming girls. For a time, she restored his power to the group. She fed him ideas, which would help him distinguish himself as the bolder, more perverse and brave Stone. He donned a Nazi officer’s uniform for a photo shoot. He indulged in orgies, S&M, all of which seemed designed to make Mick and Keith seem provincial. As he had when he first met them, already the father of three children, Brian had once again impressed and worried them with his intense lifestyle, this time one of moneyed and theatrical depravity.