19
THE BUST
One day, Brian Jones went into Blaises Club in Kensington, a bear cave of a rock star haunt. Twenty-four years old and already on the other side of everything, he sat at the bar cadging drinks. The stranger who took the stool beside him was in fact a reporter for News of the World who’d been tipped by a patron: “A Rolling Stone is in here.” The tabloid had been publishing a series on the drug scene, with special emphasis on rock ’n’ roll. The reporter bought Brian a cocktail, then started asking questions. There’s a Sonny Boy Williamson lyric: “Don’t start me talking, I’ll tell everything I know.” Jones went into particulars that night: his first use of narcotics, timid experiment and mean habit, the challenge of finding good stuff, the beauty of the perfect buzz, riding the midnight train. Standing outside, he showed the reporter a block of hashish and asked if he wanted to “come back to my flat for a smoke.”
When the News of the World article ran on February 5, 1967—POP STARS AND DRUGS: THE FACTS WILL SHOCK you—the musician drinking at the bar was identified not as Brian Jones but as Mick Jagger. “During the time we were at the Blaises Club in Kensington, London, Jagger took about six Benzedrine tablets. ‘I just would not keep awake in places like this if I didn’t have them,’ he said.”
Did the reporter simply misidentify his subject, or was he intentionally misled? Your answer depends on your opinion of Brian Jones. Was he a wayward butterfly deserving of pity? Or was he, as Charlie Watts suggested, a little prick?
“I remember the morning Mick read the piece that set the whole thing off,” writes Marianne Faithfull, who’d begun dating Jagger about a year before. “It was Sunday morning in early February of 1967 and we were in bed with coffee and croissants when the papers came. Mick is a newspaper junkie, he reads everything from the Observer to the Sun. We were very happily going through the papers and suddenly Mick came upon the article in the News of the World. He completely flipped out.
“ ‘Fuckin’ ’ell!’ he raved, leaping out of bed.
“ ‘What is it, darling?’
“ ‘Listen to this: “Jagger told us: ‘I don’t go much on it (LSD) now the cats (fans) have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.’ ”
Jagger was depicted as a deviant in the News of the World story, a disturbed youth. Bad luck, and unfair. Not only was this not Mick, it was not anything like Mick. He was not a heavy drug user. Or reckless. He did not confess to strangers. How could it have been an accident? Mick looked nothing like Brian, talked nothing like Brian. He was still angry that night when he appeared on the Eamonn Andrews Show, a popular British talk show. He wanted justice. He said he planned to sue. Because he was young, he did not know what gospel singers take for granted: You can’t wash your hands in muddy water. To win in court, Mick would have to prove not only that he was misidentified, but that the article was untrue. News of the World would have only to verify the essential claim: Mick Jagger takes drugs.
Jagger decided to get away about a week later. He was tired of the scrutiny, the reporters and fans, the jimjams closing in. After an all-night session at Olympic Studios, he drove to Redlands, the estate Keith had purchased in the country. Mick was traveling with Marianne Faithfull, perhaps the most beautiful woman in the world. According to lore, Faithfull had emerged in March 1964 at a launch party for Adrienne Posta. Swinging London at its peak moment. Paul McCartney was at the party, as were John Lennon, Peter Asher, Andrew Oldham, and several of the Stones. Marianne was a twenty-year-old convent boarding-school girl engaged to the artist John Dunbar. Willowy and blond, virginal and buxom, made more beautiful by being seemingly unaware of her beauty. Oldham described her as “an angel with big tits.” “The moment she walked in, we all noticed her,” Linda Keith told me, “and of course we all hated her.”
Faithfull’s father had been a British naval officer, a philologist, and a spy. Her mother was a Hungarian countess. She’d studied existentialism and jazz. Approaching Faithfull, Oldham murmured, “You have something, I want to meet you, and can you sing?”
“In another century you’d have set sail for her,” Oldham explained later; “in 1964 you’d record her.”
A few weeks later, having quit school, Faithfull was in a recording studio in London. “I had been preparing to go to university,” she told me, “but then…well…I was discovered, for God’s sake!” She recorded “As Tears Go By” in 1964, the first Jagger/Richards song to go Top Ten. Mick was crazy about her, but she was interested in Keith. “It was quite clear even then that he was a genius,” she wrote. “He isn’t a bit shy now, but when I first met him he was agonizingly shy and painfully introverted. He didn’t talk at all.”
Faithfull hooked up with Richards at the end of a long party. In her book she describes it as the greatest sex of her life. She was smitten with Keith, but Keith, in love with someone else, urged her on to Mick, saying, “Y’know who has it really bad for you, don’t you?” Jagger followed up with letters, flowers, sweet talk.
According to Chrissie Shrimpton, who spoke about all this much later, Jagger and Faithfull first got together after a Stones concert in Bristol, England. Shrimpton and Jagger had been fighting. Chrissie overdosed on sleeping pills. She woke up in a hospital and later checked in to a mental-health clinic. Meanwhile, Jagger began dating Faithfull. They tried to keep it quiet—Faithfull was married and had a kid—but news leaked. A photo in the paper, gossip splashed across the society pages. By 1966, they’d become London’s It couple. Marianne Faithfull, proto–hippie chick, barefoot, braless, freckled, and blond, clinging to the rock star in velvet and silk. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe. Beautiful people, perfect lives—living the dream for the rest of us. Shrimpton fell apart.
It’s Mick’s romantic pattern—you spot it again and again. The courtship, the honeymoon—a yacht floating in the Mediterranean, a hotel in France—the marriage, sanctioned or not, followed by neglect and dissolution, abandonment, the cutting of ties. None of this much concerned Marianne, who was certain she and Mick would live happily and forever.
Keith Richards purchased Redlands in 1966. Built half a century before John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, it was called a cottage but was in fact a mansion, rich in the sort of features generally associated with storybooks. Dormers and gables, secret gardens and shady nooks, a caretaker, a moat, a gardener named Jack Dyer but called Jumpin’ Jack. Keith refurbished the house until the interior resembled a tale from the Arabian Nights: pillow-covered couches, floor cushions, and muslin curtains that set each encounter in the half light of incense-sweetened air. A reporter who visited soon after Keith moved in itemized the books in the library: The Great War, Dictionary of Slang. Great Sea Battles, Drawings of Rembrandt.
Redlands, an hour south of London in Sussex, became a sanctuary. If Keith were Superman, it would be the Fortress of Solitude. If he were LBJ, it would be White House West, where he could punch ponies, roast weenies, and unwind. Only instead of ponies it was guitars and instead of weenies it was songs. American rock stars aspire to immortality. They want to be James Dean and die beautifully. British rock stars aspire to aristocracy. They want to acquire titles and houses with names. As the stars of the British blues boom became rich, the story shifted from city streets to vast estates, where many set themselves up like the Sun King at Versailles. Jagger bought Stargroves, a sixteenth-century manor in Hampshire. Charlie Watts bought a seventeenth-century horse farm in Devon, in the southwest corner of England. Ron Wood bought Sandymount House, an old Irish mansion where the Stones recorded Voodoo Lounge.
Jagger and Faithfull arrived at Redlands on February 11, 1967. A crowd of pop stars, enablers, and hangers-on had already assembled, including the dandified London art dealer Robert Fraser and the aristocrat Christopher Gibbs. Most of the guests planned to stay for the weekend. Others came and went. Charlie Watts. George Harrison and his girlfriend, Pattie Boyd. Brian Jones did not make it, nor did Bill Wyman, but Michael Cooper, who would replace Mankowitz as the Stones’ photographer, turned up.
David Schneiderman brought the drugs. Mystery surrounds the so-called acid king. He wore dark glasses and a suit. His name is spelled differently in different accounts. He was said to have sold Jimi Hendrix the variety of LSD called Purple Haze, but no one knows who he really was, where he came from, or what he wanted. In some tellings, he’s barely mentioned. In others, he’s the center of everything, a high priest conducting sacred rites. Faithfull says he carried “an aluminum case stuffed with drugs….Inside were the most suspicious-looking contents you have ever seen: incredibly lumpy packages of various sizes all wrapped in tinfoil. Almost the classic dealer’s suitcase.”
The weekend unfolded like a religious retreat. In the pop age, as traditional belief receded, chemical enlightenment flooded in. The friends woke up early Sunday and sat sleepy-eyed on the edge of their beds as the acid king went from room to room, administering his elixir: a variety of acid known as White Lightning served with tea.
If you went back to sleep, as many did, you woke up in a new world. Everything shimmered. Everything glowed. Everything tipped into darkness. The handles on the mugs turned into fingers. The trees whispered your secret name. The day expanded like a bubble. They wandered through it. Old things became new, understood for the first time. You discovered antecedents, returned to childhood, and realized you’d been there a thousand times before. You understood how the universe is ordered, how creation is underlaid by tunnels and connections, how you could fall into one of those tunnels at any moment and lose yourself but still remain the essential blinking thing that abides when the details of biography drain away. For the first time, you knew there was nothing to fear.
They set out in the afternoon, driving the dirt roads, standing on the beach. They headed toward the art collector Edward James’s surrealist home, with its strange garden sculpture. Jagger and Richards clung together like Sancho and Quixote laughing as they crossed the Castilian plain. Faithfull says it was a decisive moment in the friendship. Mick and Keith became brothers that day. They shared a vision, dreamed the same dream. In it, they saw the next turn the band would make, the move from Chicago blues to something looser, jangles and horns. “Brown Sugar.” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” a sound conceived on that strange afternoon.
Michael Cooper photographed Richards on the lawn at Redlands. He wears a puffy Afghan coat and sunglasses, a fur hood enclosing his face, his expression blissful and serene.
Everyone sat around the fireplace at sunset. Aftermath, reentry. Charlie Watts had left, as had George Harrison and Pattie Boyd. It was just the core. The drug had left them diminished, calm and happy. Marianne went to take a bath, then came down in a fur rug worn like a towel.
There was a knock on the door. No one reacted, or was sure they’d even heard it. Then it came again, louder. Keith got up and looked out. Was he still hallucinating? More than a dozen cops and another one struggling in the distance. He’d fallen into the moat. When Keith cracked open the door, a man introduced himself as Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley of the West Sussex police. He said he had a warrant to search the premises. Keith let him in, then retreated to the couch. He put Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde on the turntable, that thin mercury sound. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”: “They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to go home…” Inspector Dineley asked Keith to turn it off. He refused, but said he would turn it down. (The temperate man always finds a middle way.) The cops went through shelves, jackets, drawers, everything. As they opened the acid king’s metal suitcase, Schneiderman asked them to please be careful, as the packets contained film. Apparently believing this ruse, the officer closed the case and moved on, fueling suspicions—Who did this acid king know? Who was he really working for? A female officer asked Faithfull to accompany her upstairs to be searched. Faithfull stood, walked a few steps, turned, smiled, and dropped the rug—this became the tabloid focus: NUDE GIRL AT STONES PARTY. The police did not find much. Some resin. According to Bill Wyman it was found in a pipe bowl and on a table. Four pep pills in a green velvet coat purchased legally in Italy. Though they were probably Faithfull’s, Jagger claimed them, gallantly taking the rap.
Unluckiest was the art dealer Robert Fraser, found in possession of twenty-four heroin jacks, which he claimed were for his diabetes.
The Redlands bust was one of the great set pieces of the hippie sixties. It had everything the scenario writer wants: drugs, rock stars, nudity. Almost as soon as the police left—Jagger, Richards, and Fraser would later appear in court—people began searching for the rat. It’s a mystery that can occupy a certain kind of fan for hours. The obvious suspects were the bosses at News of the World, motivated by Jagger’s planned lawsuit to prove that he was in fact a drug user. The editors had received a tip about the party, then contacted the police, then sent a reporter to cover the ensuing mayhem. “The paper was embarrassed at not recognizing Jagger from Jones, but they knew they had been right about their report in the first place,” Trevor Kempson, the writer who got the assignment, told author Terry Rawlings. “They in turn had contacted me at the paper and told me what was what, that there was going to be a party some of the Stones were having down in Sussex at Redlands and we were tipped off to that. It was someone who worked closely with the band and he told us there was supposedly drugs being taken down there.”
Someone who worked closely with the band.
For years, everyone assumed it was David Schneiderman. In the most outlandish scenario, the acid king had been working not for News of the World, but for the “establishment”—notice how the cops waited for beloved Beatle George Harrison to leave before closing in?—which had come to regard the Stones as a threat. It’s a somewhat paranoid story line, given heft by the strange case of the acid king who arrived with the metal suitcase, dispensed the medicine, then vanished.
What happened to David Schneiderman?
I’ve searched for him for years, as have others. He played his role, then went away. Faithfull said she crossed paths with him in a restaurant in Beverly Hills. He was old and she was, too, but the fury still burned. But the rat was not Schneiderman after all. Schneiderman was just what he claimed to be: the acid king. Who carries visions in his sack. Whose suitcase is filled with silver foil. He was merely being clever when he directed the cop away from his stash by telling him it was film. Keith later wrote that it was his driver who tipped off News of the World—money beats loyalty—the titan undone by his own bodyguard.
Why does the bust resonate?
Because it was lurid. Because it epitomized sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Because if you could choose one party in history to attend…Because it was the last moment of the old order when rock stars lived among us. The story of the bust entered folklore immediately, where it was larded up with rumor. “The first time I heard about the Mars Bar was from Mick shortly after the trial,” wrote Faithfull. “Mick said, ‘You know what they’re saying about us in Wormwood Scrubs, they’re saying that when the cops arrived they caught me eatin’ a Mars Bar out of your pussy.’ ”
“Redlands was my moment of truth,” Faithfull told me. “That’s when I realized I was in a situation I couldn’t stand. I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t belong. It had been fun, and I guess we all made the same mistake, we believed nothing could touch us, completely forgetting about working-class and middle-class envy, how people would feel. It didn’t even occur to me in my arrogance.”
Me: Is that what drove the bust, you think? Working-class envy?
Her: Yeah. It was us having all that freedom and fun. It was driving them balmy.
The bust had the perverse effect of amplifying the Stones, blowing them up, making them huge. Before Redlands they were a great band. After Redlands, they were the dark lords of rock ’n’ roll. “We scuttered on for quite a long time, trying to pretend it was okay and we could still have fun,” Faithfull continued, “but I was beginning to feel bad about myself. And then, you know, I got the usual sort of problems every woman gets with Mick Jagger. I simply couldn’t stand it any longer, all the different women. And I got terrible hate letters. I’ll never forget it. You have to remember I was only nineteen. I took it all to heart. I believed the horrible things they wrote about me. I got depressed and nobody thought of that, you know, ‘she might need a bit of help here.’ Mick and Keith, God bless ’em, went on to be bigger, better, stronger, brighter, more wicked, more naughty, and more powerful than ever. But the rules were different if you were a woman.”
