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.