50 Licks Page 8

  “Let’s Spend the Night Together” was summarily banned on most of American radio, except for the new, more adventurous rock radio stations that had begun popping up on the FM dial in 1966—specifically WOR-FM in New York. But the law of supply and demand came into play, and the Stones were definitely in demand. Solution to the dilemma? “Let’s see what’s on the other side of ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’”

  As it turned out, the flip side—“Ruby Tuesday”—was yet another soon-to-be legendary Rolling Stones ballad in the vein of “As Tears Go By” and “Lady Jane.” No string quartet, but a very engaging recorder solo contributed by Brian Jones AND a very real-life love connection for Keith Richards. The song (mostly written by Keith and Brian, with not much input from Mick) was about a woman described by Andrew Loog Oldham as Keith’s very first serious girlfriend, an English model named Linda Keith. Their relationship was coming to an end.

  KEITH RICHARDS: It was probably written about Linda Keith not being there (laughs). I don’t know, she had pissed off somewhere. It was very mournful, very, VERY Ruby Tuesday and it was a Tuesday.

  That’s one of those things—some chick you’ve broken up with. And all you’ve got left is the piano and the guitar and a pair of panties. And it’s goodbye you know. And so it just comes out of that. And after that you just build on it. It’s one of those songs that are easiest to write because you’re really right there, and you really sort of mean it. And for a songwriter, hey, break his heart and he’ll come up with a good song.

  Good song? How about a GREAT song? And it not only captured the imagination of listeners all over the world, but also became the Stones’ fourth number one single in America. (Without comparable airplay, “Let’s Spend the Night Together” stalled at number fifty-five on the US charts.)

  CHAPTER 15

  2000 LIGHT YEARS FROM HOME

  THE PUSH-PULL relationship between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones continued unabated for the balance of the ’60s.

  KEITH RICHARDS: Everybody was talking about the Beatles versus the Stones and all that crap, and yet between us, it would be, “You come out first and we’ll wait two weeks.” We would try never to clash; there was plenty of room for both of us. There was a time when “Paperback Writer” came out, and one of ours—“Paint It Black” or something like that—came out before or after; we had stitched it up with them. There would be surreptitious phone calls. It was, “OK, ours is ready, yours ain’t” . . . “All right, you go first.”

  PAUL MCCARTNEY: We’d be hanging out with the Stones, working on their sessions, it was a very friendly scene. There must have been a bit of competition because that’s only natural, but it was always friendly. We used to say, “Have you got one coming out?” and if they had, we’d say, “Well, hold it for a couple of weeks, because we’ve got one.” It made sense, really, to avoid each other’s releases. John and I sang on the Stones’ song “We Love You”—Mick had been stuck for an idea and he asked us to come along. So we went down to Olympic Studios and made it up . . .

  When we asked Brian Jones to one of our sessions, to our surprise he brought along a sax. He turned up in a big Afghan coat at Abbey Road. He played sax on a crazy record, “You Know My Name (Look Up the Number).” It’s a funny sax solo—it isn’t amazingly well played but it happened to be exactly what we wanted: a ropey, shaky sax. Brian was very good like that.

  However, for every nice thing you can find a Beatle saying about a Stone, or a Stone saying about a Beatle, there is an equal and opposite devastating slag. Sometimes it got downright nasty. At his rage-venting-primal-scream best in 1971, John Lennon offered the following to Rolling Stone magazine:

  JOHN LENNON: I think it’s a lot of hype. I like “Honky Tonk Women,” but I think Mick’s a joke, with all that fag dancing, I always did. I enjoy it; I’ll probably go and see his films and all, like everybody else, but really, I think it’s a joke . . . I never do see him. I was always very respectful about Mick and the Stones, but he said a lot of sort of tarty things about the Beatles, which I am hurt by, because you know, I can knock the Beatles, but don’t let Mick Jagger knock them. I would like to just list what we did and what the Stones did two months after on every fuckin’ album. Every fuckin’ thing we did, Mick does exactly the same—he imitates us. And I would like one of you fuckin’ underground people to point it out; you know Satanic Majesties is [Sargeant] Pepper; “We Love You,” it’s the most fuckin’ bullshit, that’s “All You Need Is Love.”

  I resent the implication that the Stones are like revolutionaries and that the Beatles weren’t. If the Stones were or are, the Beatles really were, too. But they are not in the same class, musicwise or powerwise, never were. I never said anything. I always admired them because I like their funky music and I like their style. I like rock ’n’ roll and the direction they took after they got over trying to imitate us . . .

  He’s obviously so upset by how big the Beatles are compared with him; he never got over it. Now he’s in his old age, and he is beginning to knock us, you know, and he keeps knocking. I resent it, because even his second fuckin’ record, we wrote it for him. Mick said, “Peace made money.” We didn’t make any money from Peace.

  A quarter of a century later, and fifteen years after John’s death, Mick was still grappling with some of those brickbats hurled in 1971. He told Rolling Stone:

  MICK JAGGER: [John Lennon] said something in your magazine. It wasn’t to do with appearance, more with music. When asked about the Rolling Stones, he said, “I like the butch stuff, and I don’t like the faggy stuff.” But you don’t want to be butch the whole time. It would drive you mad, wouldn’t it?

  Admittedly, Mick has tempered his thoughts about the Beatles since John’s demise in 1980, but there are many recorded instances where he would casually drop a comment such as this in 1977:

  MICK JAGGER: We were not the Beatles . . . the Beatles were a pop band . . . and, though we liked them . . . you know . . . I mean . . . Keith and Brian sort of liked them, but I didn’t really. I mean they were sweet and all that, but we were a blues band. We played blues and we played in clubs and we didn’t play ballrooms and we just played in clubs and we played blues . . . we didn’t play that kind of music, pop music. We didn’t play like . . . what was it? “Please Please Me” . . . we didn’t play adolescent love songs at all . . . we were doing “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”

  So maybe the real questions here are: How do you define a love/hate relationship? Or can you have a sibling rivalry with someone who isn’t actually your brother or your sister? We could ask Don and Phil Everly about this. Or Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Or Ray and Dave Davies. Wouldn’t all of those be interesting conversations to listen in on? You could literally fill volumes about the dynamics and nuances of the personal and professional relationships between John Lennon and Paul McCartney, or Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Here are Mick’s thoughts about this very question:

  MICK JAGGER: You don’t have to have a partner for everything you do. But having partners sometimes helps you and sometimes hinders you. You have good times and bad times with them. It’s just the nature of it . . . People also like partnerships because they can identify with the drama of two people in partnership. They can feed off a partnership, and that keeps people entertained. Besides, if you have a successful partnership, it’s self-sustaining.

  This is certainly true of Mick and Keith. Unfortunately, we’ll never know how things might have turned out for John and Paul had they each been given an equal number of years on the planet.

  Sometimes the rivalry between the bands was light-hearted and playful. For example, the Beatles putting “Welcome the Rolling Stones” on the cover of Sgt. Pepper, or the Stones putting the four tiny, semi-camouflaged faces of the Fab Four on the cover of Satanic Majesties.

  It is difficult, though, not to acknowledge the plausibility of John Lennon’s “imitators” accusation. After all, didn’t “Paint It Black” owe something to “Baby’s in Black�
�? Couldn’t “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” be seen and heard as a close, seven-minute-plus companion of “Hey Jude”? Aren’t there parallels to be drawn between the two made-for-TV specials Magical Mystery Tour and The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus? And, certainly, wasn’t Their Satanic Majesties Request just a blatant, knee-jerk response to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band? Well, not necessarily.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I don’t know. I never listened any more to the Beatles than to anyone else in those days when we were working. It’s probably more down to the fact that we were going through the same things. Maybe we were doing it a little bit after them. Anyway, we were following them through so many scenes. We’re only just mirrors ourselves of that whole thing. It took us much longer to get a record out for us; our stuff was always coming out later anyway.

  MICK JAGGER: I can’t remember anything that happened in 1967 I’m afraid . . . I’m sure there’s lots of other people who can’t remember either . . . everyone was wanting to do something else at that point. Everyone was fed up with just playing straight-ahead rock ’n’ roll, so they just . . . we just went in and just looked around . . . It was a very weird time for us because we were in and out of jail and were on kind of drug charges and we didn’t know what we were doing and . . . It was very peculiar and so we played very peculiar music that year . . . 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. The whole thing [Satanic Majesties], we were on acid. We were on acid doing the cover picture. I always remember doing that. It was like being at school, you know, sticking on the bits of colored paper and things. It was really silly. But we enjoyed it (laughs). 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.

  Mission accomplished! Oldham walked out in the middle of the recording sessions at Olympic Studios never to return.

  There’s no denying that the album had its moments (“She’s a Rainbow,” “2000 Light Years from Home”), but it seldom appears on any lists of favorite, best, or most successful projects by the Rolling Stones. And Pepper eclipsed it by . . . well, about two thousand light years. It is a curio. A timepiece. A graphic reflection of the excesses of the period in which it was recorded.

  BILLY ALTMAN: The Satanic Majesties album had been their first misstep really in their entire career. They’d always been kind of following the Beatles, but kind of doing things their own way. The Beatles would do something and then the Stones would do something in a similar vein, but also different and controversial that set them apart.

  GLYN JOHNS: Recording Satanic was really boring. It really didn’t come off. I’ve never listened to it since its release.

  Once the purple haze began to lift, it actually accelerated and paved the way for a soon-to-be new Stones era: a break with Andrew Oldham; a new producer; the sad departure and death of Brian Jones; and the eventual winding down of the Beatles as a day-to-day functioning reality. In a very real sense, the Stones were poised to finally step out of the shadow of the Fab Four, and make a run for Greatest Rock ’n’ Roll Band in the World status. That journey began in earnest in 1968.

  This photo from 1965 at RCA Studios in Hollywood presaged the Stones’ psychedelic stage

  CHAPTER 16

  MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER

  YOU CAN’T WRITE about the Rolling Stones without writing about a place called Redlands. Redlands was Keith Richards’s home and the site of one of the most notorious drug busts in all of rock ’n’ roll history. Among the guests at Keith’s that day were Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull, as well as George and Pattie Harrison, and an art dealer named Robert Fraser. There was also a soon-to-leave-England-never-to-return informant named David Schneiderman, aka the Acid King, who it was learned years later had tipped off the police that there were drugs on the premises. Brian Jones was supposed to be there, but was in a fight with his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, and stayed in London. George and Pattie left early, and weren’t there when police arrived at five thirty p.m., search warrant in hand.

  Keith and his friends had spent a long day outdoors before the trouble began.

  KEITH RICHARDS: We were just gliding off from a twelve-hour trip. You know how that freaks people out when they walk in on you. The vibes were so funny for them. I told one of the women with them they’d brought to search the ladies, “Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion? Because you’re ruining the tapestries.” We were playing it like that. They tried to get us to turn the record player off but we said, “No. We won’t turn it off but we’ll turn it down.”

  MARIANNE FAITHFULL: My clothes were all covered with sand, dirt, twigs in my hair, the normal sort of wear and tear of being on a trip outside. It was such an intense trip that I was quite relieved when we started to come down. That’s when I went and took my bath. I was the only one who hadn’t brought a change of clothes and I dealt with it by wearing this beautiful fur rug. It was very large, six by nine feet or something. It would have covered a small room. I remember having this absurd idea of telling everyone to be still. “If we don’t make any noise, if we’re all really quiet, they’ll go away.”

  The cops did not go away; they kept knocking and eventually got inside, where they discovered Faithfull dressed scantily, and oddly. When it came out later, the story of the woman wearing only a rug titillated the English press, and became a focal point of the coverage. (There is a rock ’n’ roll urban legend about Marianne, Mick, and a Mars bar, but it’s been disproved in enough places to dispense with it parenthetically.)

  At some point, with the cops searching the premises, somebody put on Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35,” with its refrain, “Everybody must get stoned.”

  The police found cannabis and amphetamines, and if they’d searched harder they’d have found cocaine and LSD as well. Still, they had enough evidence to eventually sentence Mick and Keith to prison for three and twelve months, respectively. Jagger spent a night in Brixton prison; Richards a night in Wormwood Scrubs. An editorial written by William Rees-Mogg of the Times of London, headlined WHO BREAKS A BUTTERFLY ON A WHEEL?, railed against the severity of Jagger’s sentence and helped turn the tide of public opinion in favor of the band.

  There’s a great story from engineer George Chkiantz about the period when Jagger and Richards were out of jail and waiting for their appeal. Nobody at that day’s recording session wanted to talk about the trial or the fact that this episode could possibly destroy the band. The silence, and simultaneously the tension, was finally broken by a late-arriving Charlie Watts. “So how are the two jailbirds?” he said.

  At last, in July, the guilty verdict was overturned and Mick and Keith were free from the hassles of the law . . . for the moment, at least.

  Brian Jones wasn’t as fortunate. He was first busted for possession in May of ’67, and was fined and given probation. But when he was busted a second time, in May of ’68, he had to plead guilty to avoid jail time. This meant that he’d be unlikely to gain a visa the next time the band wanted to tour the United States, a fact that would soon become significant.

  CHAPTER 17

  JIGSAW PUZZLE

  AT THE START of 1968, the Stones were a group in turmoil, coming off what was mostly a lost year. The rift between Brian and the rest of the band was deepening. Brian had been abusive to his girlfriend of two years, Anita Pallenberg, and she ended up leaving him for Keith. Did Keith feel guilty about this?

  KEITH RICHARDS: Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt. He was a bastard. Up to a point, you could put up with it. In the last year or so, when Brian was almost totally incapacitated all of the time, he became a joke to the band. It was the only way we could deal with it without getting mad at him. So then it became that very cruel, piss-taking thing behind his back all the time . . .

  Things only got worse after Jones’s second bust for ma
rijuana possession in May. Now, not only was Brian in danger of no-showing gigs in the UK, but his legal problems might prevent him from joining the band if and when they decided to return to America.

  KEITH RICHARDS: There was no immediate necessity to go through the drama of replacing Brian because no gigs were lined up. We first had to recognize the fact that we needed to make a really good album. After Satanic Majesties we wanted to make a STONES album.

  And that’s where Jimmy Miller came in.

  GLYN JOHNS: Jagger came to me after Satanic Majesties and said, “We’re going to get a new producer, an American.” I thought, “Oh my God, that’s all I need. I don’t think my ego can stand having some bloody Yankee coming in here and start telling me what sort of sound to get with the Rolling Stones.” So I said, “I know somebody! I know there’s one in England already and he’s fantastic,” and he’d just done the Traffic album: Jimmy Miller. And it was a remarkably good record he made, the first record he made with Traffic. I said, “He’s a really nice guy.” I’d met him, he’d been in the next studio room and I said, “I’m sure he’d be fantastic.” Anything but some strange lunatic drug addict from Los Angeles. So . . . Jagger actually took the bait and off he went, met Jimmy Miller and gave him the job. And the first thing Jimmy Miller did (laughs) was fire ME. ’Cause he’d been using Eddie Kramer as an engineer. And so, naturally, quite obviously, he wanted to use his own engineer, the guy he knew.