Beatles vs. Stones (23 page)

These are the remarks of a young man with an intuitive (you could almost say “childlike”) objection to racism. Seeing as Paul was just twenty-two at the time, with only limited exposure to the United States, we can forgive his wince-worthy turns of phrase. His sentiments were laudable. It would be a mistake, however, to regard these as the remarks of an
activist
. During the civil rights movement, those who were actively committed to toppling segregation almost always used morally charged language to discuss the topic; they would have referred to segregation as grievously wrong, not merely “silly” or “a bit daft.” The Beatles made a principled decision not to accommodate racism when they visited the US, but they did not work to abolish it. (Ultimately, the Gator Bowl concert was not segregated.)

The Beatles also opposed the Vietnam War. For a while, they tried to avoid talking about it. Then in 1966, they started answering questions on the topic, but they never left anyone with the impression that they were poised to join the ranks of the antiwar movement. “We don’t agree with it,” Lennon once told a journalist.
“But there’s not much we can do about it. All we can say is we don’t like it.”
The New York Times
reported that when the Beatles were asked about Vietnam at a press conference, they said,
“We don’t like war, war is wrong”—but
they kept their voices unusually “low,” and were “nearly inaudible.” Another time, in Toronto, a reporter began to ask the Beatles why, if they opposed the war, weren’t they doing anything to try to stop it? But he couldn’t finish his question before Lennon interrupted. “Because someone would shoot us,” he snapped. Tariq Ali, a leader of the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, said,
“We’d heard rumors that some of the Beatles were quite anti-war, but attempts to contact them failed” and they never showed up at any antiwar events.

The following year, the Beatles came out in favor of pot legalization. At Paul’s suggestion, they paid for, and signed their names to, a full-page newspaper advertisement in
The Times
that was headlined “The Law Against Marijuana Is Unworkable in Principle and Unworkable in Practice.” (The ad was spearheaded by the drug organization SOMA. Sixty-one others signed as well, including fifteen doctors and two MPs.) Fearing bad publicity, the Beatles hoped to keep the fact that they financed the advertisement under wraps, but the word got out. And that was the full extent of their involvement in the campaign to legalize marijuana—just their names signed to a petition. Arguably, the only overt protest song the Beatles ever recorded was George Harrison’s “Taxman,” an acid complaint about the huge amount of Beatles’ earnings that were going to the Inland Revenue.

Nevertheless, through the mid-1960s, enthusiasm for the Beatles was all but ubiquitous in the New Left. A new Beatles album
“was an event,” memoirist Geoffrey O’Brien recalls. “Friends gathered to share the freshness of the never-to-be-recaptured first hearing.” The Beatles also provided an alluring soundtrack for many activists. Todd Gitlin, a former president of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the New Left’s premier organization, recalled that once after a long meeting in 1966, a group of Berkeley students joined hands and clumsily attempted to sing the old labor standby, “Solidarity Forever,” but it quickly became clear that hardly anyone knew the words. A moment later, the group erupted with a joyous rendition of “Yellow Submarine”—a new song from their own culture.
“With a bit of effort,”
Gitlin remembered, “the song could be taken as the communion of hippies and activists, students and nonstudents, who at long last felt they could express their beloved single-hearted community.” Another memoirist recalls that when he helped to occupy a Columbia University building during the vertiginous spring of 1968, hundreds of students bonded over the Beatles just before they were arrested. We
“were no longer strangers . . . but brothers and sisters weaving in ritual dance. We sang the words of the Beatles’ songs [and] danced round and round in a circle.”

Beatles albums were frequently scrutinized for profound or hidden meanings, and a few went so far as to imbue the group with superhuman stature and mystical significance. In 1967, a young writer for Milwaukee’s
Kaleidoscope
plausibly claimed that no other artist in history had ever commanded
“the power and audience of the Beatles. The allure, the excitement, the glory of Beatlemania,” he continued, “is the suspicion that the Beatles might succeed just where the magicians of the past have failed.” Even though the Beatles rarely spoke about politics, a
Willamette Bridge
writer observed that youths turned to “the Beatles myth”—the idea that the Beatles possessed some secret insight, shamanic influence or untapped reservoir of power—for solutions to problems as diverse and intractable as the Vietnam War, the atomic bomb, the civil rights struggle, and campus unrest. Writing in the
Berkeley Barb
in early 1967, activist Marvin Garson remarked,
“At idle moments more imaginative men in government must be haunted by a persistent nightmare . . . [that] Lennon and McCartney will go on to lead an antiwar sit-in at the Pentagon.”

•  •  •

Of course, some left-wing youths more closely identified with the Rolling Stones. In 1965, Emmett Grogan, who later helped to form an important Haight-Ashbury hippie collective called the Diggers, distributed mimeographed flyers declaring the Stones to be
“the embodiment of everything we represent, a psychic evolution . . . the
breaking up of old values.” No doubt that was part of the Stones’ appeal. Many rebellious youths looked up to them just because they seemed so dangerously cool. “I went with the Stones once they started writing songs like ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘Satisfaction,’ remembers cultural critic John Strausbaugh.
“I didn’t have the slightest idea what those songs were about. I just knew they were somehow bad, and bad’s what I wanted to be.”

To some radicals, the Stones also seemed more accessible. On May 16, 1965, Ken Kesey’s group, the Merry Pranksters—who were just then emerging as the West Coast’s premier LSD proselytizers—drove from San Francisco to Long Beach, where they partied with the Stones and plied Brian Jones with a fistful of acid.
By contrast, when the Beatles completed a US tour at San Francisco’s Cow Palace in 1965, the Pranksters tried to host a party in their honor, but of course the band didn’t show.

In 1966, when London’s new underground paper
International Times
threw a launch party, Jagger and Marianne Faithfull showed up and celebrated, while McCartney lurked around in a disguise. Actor Peter Coyote recalled that when a group of twenty-odd politically minded
“rockers, bikers, and street people” visited the Beatles at their Apple headquarters in London, the Beatles and their handlers “were kind of afraid of us.”

The Stones also inadvertently won some radical bona fides in 1967, when Jagger and Keith Richards were busted for drugs at Richards’ country home in Sussex. The raid and its drawn out aftermath put the Stones at the center of a polarizing national debate about drug policy, youth culture, the courts, and the media. Ultimately, however, the Stones’ ordeal only served to strengthen their reputation as antiestablishment icons. According to an acquaintance,
“Mick’s case had made him into a martyr, a hero, a spokesman for his generation, and he reveled in this newfound power.”

The problems began when two enterprising reporters from the lowbrow
News of the World
started looking into some wild LSD parties
that the Moody Blues were rumored to be hosting at their communal home. (“Roehampton Raves,” they were called.) Their investigation led them to stake out Blaises, a private basement club in Kensington that sometimes attracted members of the pop aristocracy. One night, Brian Jones walked in. Whether he was just in a voluble mood, or had already lowered his inhibitions with drugs, is impossible to say. But reporters watched him consume about six bennies right on the spot.
“I just wouldn’t be able to keep awake in places like this if I didn’t have them,” Jones told them. On the topic of LSD, he said “I don’t go much on it now [that] the cats (fans) have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name.” Finally, while still in the presence of the reporters, he pulled out a lump of hashish and invited some friends up to his flat for “a smoke.” All of this soon appeared in the second installment of the Sunday tabloid’s multi-part write up,
“Pop Stars and Drugs: Facts That Will Shock You.”

The only problem was, the piece contained a major factual error: the reporters thought they were talking to
Mick Jagger
. They couldn’t tell the difference between the Rolling Stones’ wispy, wide-mouthed singer and its dissolute, blond-haired guitarist. (Then again, Jones may have sent them down a confused road; he always liked to tell strangers that he was the group’s “leader.”) Jagger was livid, and rightly so. When the
News of the World
reporters collected their quotes, he had been on vacation in the Italian Riviera. Besides, Mick had always been cautious about his drug use, which anyhow was very moderate compared to Keith’s or Brian’s.

As it happened, on the very day that the story hit newsstands, the Stones taped an appearance on British TV’s
Eamonn Andrews Show
. After they performed “She Smiled Sweetly” from
Between the Buttons
, Jagger sat for an interview, and it was there that he made “the Oscar Wilde mistake.”
He confidently announced that he would sue
News of the World
for libel. Just like the flamboyant nineteenth-century writer and poet, Mick was hardly in a position to feign indignation. After all, he
did
occasionally take drugs, and lots of people knew that to be
so. Now
News of the World
just had to prove it in order to derail his powerful lawsuit against them.

The newspaper must have gotten to someone in the Stones’ camp to act as an informant. (Keith later suspected it was his driver at the time, a Belgian known only as “Patrick.”) Whoever their source was, the
News of the World
learned that Richards would soon be hosting a weekend party at his new country home, called Redlands, and that Mick and Marianne would be there. Most of the other guests were part of a tightly knit group. They included the
Mayfair gallery owner Robert Fraser and his Moroccan “servant” (actually his lover) Mohammed Jajaj; the Chelsea interior designer Christopher Gibbs; and rock photographer Michael Cooper. George Harrison and his wife, Pattie Boyd, dropped by the party, too.

Then there were a couple guests who were not so well known to the others. One was Nicky Kramer, a foppish King’s Road hanger-on. No one could quite remember inviting him in the first place; he just sort of attached himself to the group and Keith kindheartedly let him tag along. The other mysterious character was David Snyderman (sometimes spelled Schneiderman), aka “David Britton,” aka “David Jove,” aka “The Acid King”—a Canadian-born Californian. Keith had met him in New York City about a year earlier. Now he’d recently shown up in London, wanting to be everyone’s drug supplier. He supposedly carried around fake identification and a monogrammed briefcase full of DMT and varieties of acid: White Lightning, Orange Sunshine, and Purple Haze.

On Sunday morning, Acid King Dave went around to everyone’s room, serving them breakfast tea and acid. Some in the group were put off by his loony LSD evangelism:
“This is the tao of lysergic diethylamide, man. Let it speak to you, let it tell you how to navigate the cosmos”—but as Marianne put it, “he
did
have the goods.” A while later they all went out to the West Wittering Beach and larked around the sandy flats, enjoying the winter sunshine and watching the salty waves dissolve into surf on the shore. Then they set out on a
Sunday country drive, looking for the groovy mansion belonging to Edward James, a wealthy patron of the surrealist movement whose huge art collection was sometimes open to the public. Unfortunately, they wound up getting lost and by the time they arrived, the estate was closed. Still, they’d had a great day.

After they got back to Redlands, George Harrison and his wife paid a visit. Since they had not taken LSD that day, they might have found it hard to relate to the others. They stayed for only about an hour or two before driving off together in George’s customized Mini Cooper. Shortly after they’d left, the drug squad arrived. Later, it was widely assumed that the raiding party had been staked outside Redlands for some time,
waiting
for Harrison to leave. According to Richards, the police took malicious, voyeuristic detail in busting the Stones, but at that point they dared not arrest
a Beatle.
Harrison agreed:
“There was the kind of social pecking order . . . in the pop world,” he said. First, they “busted Donovan [in mid-1966] . . . then they busted the Rolling Stones, and then [in 1969] they worked their way up and they busted John and Yoko, and me.”

Keith recalled the bust:
“There’s a big knock on the door. Eight o’clock. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everybody has managed to find their way back to the house. TV is on with the sound off and the record player is on. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself in a rug and is watching the box.”

(
That late morsel of a detail—that Marianne was naked beneath a fur rug while in the company of a group of men—would become tantalizing to the prosecutors and the tabloids. There was also a rumor about a Mars Bar.)

Keith continues:
“ ‘Bang, bang, bang,’ this big knock at the door and I go answer it. ‘Oh look, there’s lots of little ladies and gentlemen outside.’ . . . We were just gliding off from a twelve-hour trip.” Later he said that in his acid-infused mind, the invading policemen looked
like a nefarious band of goblins from
The Hobbit
.
“Poor Mick—he could hardly believe his luck,” Marianne added. “The first day he ever dares take an LSD trip, eighteen policemen come pouring in through the door.”