Old Gods Almost Dead (33 page)

The Stones stole him almost immediately when they went to the Byrds' gig at Middle Earth in Covent Garden. Gram was spirited to Mick's house in Chester Square to help out with songs. At dawn, they all piled into a Rolls and drove down to Stonehenge, then still accessible to anyone. Michael Cooper shot several rolls of Keith and Anita and Mick and Marianne cavorting around the ancient sarsen stones with Gram Parsons and a bottle of Jack Daniel's. They took Gram to Redlands, stoned, wined, and dined him, and he started teaching Keith—on piano—the old country songs he knew.

Keith: “Gram probably did more than anyone to put a new face on country music. He brought it into the mainstream of music again. He said, 'Don't forget about this shit' . . . I think I learned more from Gram than anybody else.” Gram was soon immersed in the Stones' soft machine of druggy glamour and aristocratic fantasy. The Stones in turn were charmed by the naive young star. They were all naturally wary of new hangers-on, but Gram had the means to keep up with their appetites. G.P. could pay his own way.

When the Byrds moved on to South Africa after playing Albert Hall late in the tour, Gram Parsons quit the band to hang with Keith.

“He was a warm, down-to-earth guy,” Keith said later. “He didn't know much about the [apartheid] situation in South Africa, so Anita and I explained it to him in Robert Fraser's apartment. It was quite an intense way to meet a guy. So . . . he stayed in London, and he started to show me the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield. We just used to sit around the piano and sing and get high.” The effects of this new friendship would be heard on the next four Stones albums.

                

Earlier in the year,
Marianne Faithfull had given Mick a copy of
The Master and Margarita,
a newly translated novel by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov. Mick read it in his study in Chester Square, absorbed in the horrific story of the devil's visit to Moscow in the 1930s in the company of a naked female vampire and a cigar-smoking black cat who's a dead shot with a .45 Browning. Omnipotent, well-spoken Lucifer kills people, drives them mad, spirits others to distant places. Women are vulnerable; he gives them magic ointment to rub on their bodies to make them fly through the air, naked, on broomsticks. Only the Master, a writer working on a book about Christ and Pilate, has the moral authority to stop the devil in his tracks.

Out of this came “The Devil Is My Name,” a lyric Mick took into Olympic Studio the week of June 4, when the Rolling Stones were filmed in rehearsal by Jean-Luc Godard for his hotly anticipated new radical propaganda film,
One Plus One.

Mick respected Godard and was flattered he wanted the Stones' energy for his movie. Godard was the shooting star of French cinema, a former critic who'd filmed heroic works of existentialist adventure like
Breathless
and
Contempt.
His recent
Weekend
was an avant-garde reading of Maoism, with cannibal hippie drummers thrown in. It marked the end of the old, romantic Godard. His latest,
Le Gai Savoir,
was an open call to social revolt. He was one of the few New Wave directors to see beneath the conventions of the genre and scrape at the rot in the system. Writing in February 1968, the American critic Susan Sontag called Godard “one of the great culture heroes of our time,” and compared him to Picasso.

The project began as a film about abortion financed by a Greek woman, Eleni Collard, which Godard would direct. Then England's abortion laws loosened up. Godard told the producer he would still make a film in England if they could get him the Beatles or the Stones. Working through actor Ian Quarrier, who knew Mick through Marianne's theater connections, Mme. Collard got Godard the Rolling Stones, hot actor Terence Stamp, and a budget of 180,000 pounds.

Jean-Luc Godard arrived in London on May 30, haggard from
Les Evénements du Mai,
the Paris street riots that he'd shot on the run with 16mm cameras. Godard was distracted and felt he should be in Paris, where the national riot cops in their long black raincoats were still teargassing students and kids; but he was already behind schedule and he needed to shoot right away.

Mick: “There were lots of meetings in London hotel rooms, trying to get out of Jean-Luc Godard what the film was all about. Never did find out.” Godard tried to explain it in a jumble of disconnected images: an abortion film, Black Panthers lusting after white women, a character named Eve Democracy reading Hitler's
Mein Kampf
aloud in a porno bookstore, music and suicide, quasidocumentary comic strips, a political cartoon. Godard told them he wanted to create a new cinema, converting political dialectic into film scripts. The Stones listened politely, nodded wisely, hadn't a clue. No one did. “I want to make this film as simply as possible,” Godard told a reporter. “What I want, above all, is to destroy the idea of Culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war.”

No one was at their best. Godard seemed under a strain. Mick told friends he was stuffy. Brian Jones's arrest had left him a zombie. Terence Stamp got busted too and had to drop out of the film. Producer Quarrier ended up reading Hitler's book himself.

There was some method to Godard's madness. He intended to show the Stones building a song as a metaphor of growth, intercut with images of the radical deconstruction of outmoded bourgeois society. As he began to film in the brightly lit Olympic Studio, he caught Mick teaching Brian the guitar chords to “The Devil Is My Name.” As the long session unfolded, the Stones took off their pink jackets, Keith removed his shoes, Charlie loosened his tie. They ran through the song at different tempos with Nicky Hopkins on electric piano as Mick sang guide vocals, lyrics that later evolved into “Sympathy for the Devil.” Keith moved to bass guitar, while Bill played maracas after Keith suggested a rhythmic shift to samba mode. Hours passed as the Stones started, stopped, chatted, and chain-smoked Marlboros. Godard filmed Brian's utter isolation as he sat by himself in a booth, ignored by everyone, strumming an acoustic guitar that no one had bothered to hook up to the control room. Godard shot long sequences of the back of Brian's head, allowing the camera to linger on his hair.

During the day, Godard shot outdoors in Battersea, completing long, excruciating scenes of black radicals reading from LeRoi Jones and Eldridge Cleaver in an auto junkyard before executing beautiful white girls with machine guns.

When Godard resumed filming at Olympic, “The Devil Is My Name” had mutated into a
samba nova,
with African drummer Rocky Dzidzornu (Keith called him “Rocky Dijon”) pounding out a Niger River counterrhythm. The lyrics asking who killed Kennedy were changed to “the Kennedys” after Robert Kennedy was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 8. Godard's camera, roving around the studio, caught an interesting visitor to that night's session. Sitting in a dark corner was “Chas,” glowering in a well-cut dark suit. This was actually the actor James Fox, a friend of Mick's who'd been cast in the role of the slick gangster in
Performance.
When the camera got too close, Fox got up and walked out of the frame.

Godard's footage of the Stones in the studio is the only coherent portrait of the band working in its prime. The bright movie lights cast an unreal glow because the studio was usually almost dark, but otherwise it was pure documentary. “Godard happened to catch us on two very good nights,” Mick said later that year. “He might have come every night for two weeks and just seen us looking at each other.” The most dramatic footage was shot as Mick overdubbed his vocal, while Keith, Anita, Brian, and Suki sang the famous hoodoo whoops in the background. This was the era when Anita Pallenberg joined the Rolling Stones, became as crucial as anyone in the band, something that Godard managed to capture with a few moments of film.

On the last night of filming, Godard's hot lights set the studio ceiling on fire. It burst into flames as the Stones were jamming at four in the morning. The Stones and everyone else ran out of the building as the ceiling began to collapse. (Godard couldn't believe this, and muttered that he was being sabotaged by the English because it had always rained on his outdoor locations.) Fire crews arrived and drenched their equipment, but the precious tapes were salvaged by Bill Wyman and Jimmy Miller.

Godard went back to Paris, then returned to London to reshoot the Stones, without Brian, jamming with Nicky Hopkins. Linda Keith listened intently on the other side of the wall. Tom Keylock lit everyone's cigs as the finished version of “Sympathy for the Devil” finished the sound track.

There was a huge row later on because Godard intended to leave the song unfinished, while Quarrier and the film's financial backers insisted it end with the Rolling Stones performing the complete song. Godard asked for a reason, and was told, “ten million teenyboppers in America alone.”

“One Plus One
does not mean 'one plus one equals two,' ” Godard complained when they changed the end of the movie. “It means what it says, so we are obliged to take it as it stands: a series of fragmentary fragments.” After its initial release as
One Plus One
(Godard punched Ian Quarrier at the premiere), the film was retitled
Sympathy for the Devil.
The following year, Godard said he was disappointed in the Rolling Stones for not supporting him. “The Stones are more political than other bands, but they should be more and more political every day. The new music could be the beginning of a revolution, but it isn't. It seems more like a palliative to life. The Stones are still working for scientific experiment, but not for class struggle or the struggle for production.”

Music from Big Brown

Brian Jones's future
in the Rolling Stones became even more doubtful on June 11, 1968, when a judge ordered him to trial on the new drug charges. Already on probation, Brian might go to jail for a second conviction. This killed plans for a Stones tour of America later in the year. Rumors flew around London that Brian was out of the band. The Stones were looking for a new creative force to help Keith Richards. “Jumpin' Jack Flash” was still no. 1 in England, and they couldn't afford to lose any more momentum.

The new Stones album, due out that summer, was almost finished. Mick decided to reposition the Stones as the heirs and legatees of the courtly troubadours, time-tripping, Grail-seeking jongleurs on a mission to preserve the romantic mysteries for a self-destructive nuclear world. So the band was photographed for their album's inner sleeve dressed as medieval minstrels attending a dissolute feast in a crumbling manor. Christopher Gibbs, who styled the photo session, came up with the album title:
Beggar's Banquet.
Another photo shoot, at an old ruin near Derby, depicted the Stones playing cricket in troubadour costume.

The Stones scattered around Europe for a week in June: Brian in Spain, Mick in Paris, Keith back to Rome, where he and Anita were living. On June 26, they regrouped at Redlands to rehearse with a twenty-one-year-old slide guitar expert from California who turned the Stones on their ears.

Jack Nitzsche brought Ry Cooder to London to jam with the Stones. Born in Los Angeles, Ry developed into a slide guitarist after hearing folk legend John Fahey's bottleneck style. At fifteen, he was playing at the Ash Grove folk club, where in 1965 he was discovered (backing Jackie DeShannon) by Henry Fredericks, a six-foot-four National-steel-guitar-playing blues singer (with an M.A. in agronomy from the University of Massachusetts), who performed as Taj Mahal. They formed an electric blues band called the Rising Sons. The Sons played gigs in L.A. during 1966–67, got a good reputation as an integrated band, but had a run of bad luck. Their album for Columbia (Dylan attended some sessions) was never released. They were blown off Johnny Carson's
Tonight
show at the last minute. Cooder's next gig was with Captain Beefheart's Magic Band, and he was also working in L.A. as a studio musician.

Marianne Faithfull was recording a new Jagger—Richards song, “Sister Morphine,” whose lyrics she had written. Nitzsche thought Cooder should play on the track. Nitzsche also had been asked to compose the sound track music for
The Performers
and had enlisted Cooder to bond with the Stones so that back in L.A. he could reproduce the groove the Stones were mining at the time.

Instead, Cooder turned the Stones on to
his
groove. It was an open G tuning, for five strings only. Until 1920 or so, the five-string banjo had been the string instrument favored in bands. In the Roaring Twenties, Sears, Roebuck began selling cheap guitars, and black musicians would remove the bottom string and tune them like banjos. The style had faded a decade later, preserved only in recordings by “country” blues musicians like Fred McDowell and Arthur Phelps—Blind Blake.

Ry Cooder arrived at Redlands on June 25. Anita: “He came down to visit for the weekend. He was just passed out, I remember, on the couch. Then he'd get up and play—really good. He was a very quiet person, but then I was probably as passed out as he was.”

The next day, sitting on the floor of the Fifth Dimension, Cooder began to play slide guitar as Charlie Watts tuned his drums and Jimmy Miller rolled tape. Even Brian Jones was impressed as Cooder's lurid, serpentine playing boomed through the room's speakers. It was a new way of approaching rock music, and Keith Richards, unable to depend on Brian for any input, paid close attention to Cooder's style. They jammed on and recorded Muddy Waters's “Still a Fool” and a lick of Keith's titled “Highway Child.”

Keith: “Ry Cooder came to play on 'Sister Morphine.' I'd been playing with the open G and he was using it too. I picked up a lot of tips on how to handle it. I eliminated the sixth string so it wouldn't rumble and get in the way . . . I started to get into that, and the high-stringing 'Nashville tuning' the country boys use [shown to Keith by Gram Parsons: the bottom four strings are restrung and tuned an octave higher than usual].”