THE GREAT ROLLING STONES REDLANDS BUST By David Bartley ‘Naked Girl at Stone’s Party’ On Sunday the 12th of February 1967 one of the mothers of all battles of that turbulent and sadly maligned decade was set in motion. In one corner the emerging hippy movement; in the other, the forces of conventional middle-class morality. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards (then styled ‘Richard’) of the Rolling Stones were arrested for drug offences. Three months later, Jagger and Richards were tried and sentenced to three months’ and a year’s imprisonment respectively. Mick for possession of amphetamines (sold legally as travel sickness pills in Italy, where they were purchased), Keith for allowing cannabis to be smoked on his premises – Redlands, in West Sussex. They were Quickly released on appeal, but these absurdly vindictive and disproportionate sentences caused an uproar. The new Establishment of the ‘counter-culture’ – including The Beatles and The Who - rallied behind the two Stones and then, remarkably, so did The Establishment. The editor of the Times, William Rees-Mogg, risked a contempt of court charge by publishing an editorial decrying the evident unfairness of the sentences. Common sense ultimately prevailed: matters were Quietly arranged so that the boys quickly won their appeal. The plot to crush the longhairs, with their drugs and their loose sexual attitudes had backfired – spectacularly. Far from penitent pariahs, Mick and Keith were now Promethean heroes, Oscar Wildes for their times. So just how did the NCO class of the old Establishment – the News of The World, the minor judiciary, the police - make such a mess of what was meant to be an exemplary spanking for the Stones and their louche admirers? Here is the countdown to calamity. THE GREAT ROLLING STONES REDLANDS BUST – David Bartley 1 ‘There was a realization that the powers-that-be actually looked upon us as important enough to make a big statement and to wield the hammer. But they’d also made us more important than we ever bloody well were in the first place.’ Keith Richards. Judge Leslie Block 15th January, 1967. Mick Jagger has to sing ‘Let’s spend some time together’ on the Ed Sullivan Show. 22nd January. Back in Blighty, the Rolling Stones refuse to get onto the revolving stage and wave a fond farewell to the audience at the close of ITV’s London Palladium Show. Which is seen as akin to burning the flag. Or failing to be 100% positive about Brexit. The band you wouldn’t want your daughter to marry are marked men. Early February. Two undercover News of The World reporters fall into conversation with a Rolling Stone in a fashionable night club. He talks openly and enthusiastically about his herculean drug use - laying it on thick as he has realised who they are. The NOTW happily run their scoop: Mick Jagger admits to dropping acid. And plenty of it. 5th February. The man himself reads the rag in bed on Sunday morning and hits the ceiling. That night he is a guest on the Eamonn Andrews Show. Not only does he deny taking LSD: he says he is issuing a libel writ. He does so two days later. It seems the NOTW’s reporters couldn’t tell one stoned Stone from another: they’d been talking to Brian Jones. 12th February. Enraged, the NOTW management now tip off Chichester’s finest to raid Keith Richards’ country seat, Redlands. There is, an anonymous caller assures them, ‘a riotous party’ in progress. When the rozzers make their move George Harrison and his wife Patti Boyd have just left. Conveniently, one might think. A Beatle would be too big a scalp - at this stage of the game. The Acid King with his aluminium briefcase of delights Still present are Keith, Mick, Marianne Faithfull (the latter’s girlfriend and a successful pop star in her own right), the important Old Etonian art dealer Robert Fraser - ‘Groovy Bob’ - and his fellow OE Christopher Gibbs, a leading antiques dealer and designer, a big fixture in the new rock-meets-aristo scene. Plus leading pop snapper Michael Cooper (who took photographs of the pre-bust weekend), Nicky Cramer, an upper crust Kings Road layabout, and the mysterious Acid King, American David Schneiderman. (A man with more spellings to his surname than the many genera of acid he dealt in. He had supplied Sunday breakfast in the form of tabs of ‘White Lightning’.) THE GREAT ROLLING STONES REDLANDS BUST – David Bartley 2 The coppers find heroin on Fraser and four amphetamine pills in Jagger’s pocket. They also discover several roaches in ashtrays – as well as a bowl full of Mars Bars. Marianne Faithfull, down from a bath, waiting for her muddy clothes to dry, is naked under a - very large - fur rug. And by an uncanny feat of memory all the police notes (which I consulted in Chichester) mention ‘a strong sweet smell of incense.’ A phrase duly featured in Swingeing London, a Pop Art piece about the bust later created by British artist Richard Hamilton. The Acid King persuades the cops not to open his briefcase as it contains unexposed film. Or so he assures them. Curiouser and curiouser, a large lump of what sounds for all the world as though it was cannabis resin is taken from his pocket - but then returned to him. Fraser is not so lucky – he nearly manages to pass off his heroin jacks as asthma tablets, but at the last minute the plods decide to take them in for questioning. 19th February. No doubt having consulted a contemporary version of Mystic Meg, the NOTW are able to announce the raid and the charges – before any official communiqué from the police. 10th May. Jagger, Richards (both 24) and Robert Fraser (29) appear at Chichester Magistrates’ Court, plead not guilty and are bailed for £100 each. That same night Brian Jones’s London flat is raided by the infamous Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of the Drugs Squad. A one man crime wave, referenced by John Lennon in I Am The Walrus as ‘semolina pilchard’, in The Rutles as ‘Brian Plant’, Pilcher specialised in finding drugs in unlikely places. So much so that even his victims were not aware they were there. A list that went on to include George Harrison and Lennon. (Hence the latter’s problems getting a Green Card in the USA.) Eventually even the Drugs Squad determined that Pilcher was up to no good and he found his own collar being felt, serving time for his various misdemeanours. The Stones’ own attempt at police corruption – a rumoured £7,000 bribe – was placed into eager hands but then went walkabout. The grim majesty of the law refused to be nudged off course. 19th June. Paul McCartney – the nice, sensible, well-behaved one – goes public that he has taken LSD. THE GREAT ROLLING STONES REDLANDS BUST – David Bartley 3 27th June. The trial of Mick Jagger begins, with that of Richards and Fraser the following day. And what a swell party it was. The press merrily report stories of a ‘nude girl’ under a fur rug. To save this feisty number’s blushes she is known only as ‘Miss X’. A large picture of M. Faithfull is helpfully printed alongside the story – © all mass market newspapers. The Mars Bar urban myth quickly begins - most likely a police invention gleefully passed on to thirsty reporters during a lunchtime adjournment to a local hostelry. The notion being that she and an unnamed partner – who could that be? - had been using the popular chocolate treat for an unusual purpose. An idea that Faithfull later called, with resigned understatement, ‘a dirty old man’s fantasy.’ 29th June. The ludicrously draconian sentences are passed by a man from a rather different Stone Age, Judge Leslie Block. Three months for Jagger, six for Fraser, and a whole year for Keith Richards, who had allowed Redlands to be turned into a half-timbered drug den-cum-bordello. Mick is taken to Brixton nick (where, accordingly to Marianne, he cries, and writes 2000 Light Years From Home), Keith to the Scrubs. After a night of Her Majesty’s pleasure, both are released the next day pending an appeal. Groovy Bob Fraser remains incarcerated; and was never the same man on his release four months later, many friends believed. Meanwhile the big battalions of the ‘counter-culture’ swing into action. An all night vigil is held at Piccadilly Circus; demonstrators gather in front of the NOTW’s offices near Fleet St and are given a good kicking by the police and set on by alsations for their pains; in New York fans protest at the British Embassy. The Who immediately release a single of Stones covers. Two ‘establishments’ are at war here. The new hippy elite versus the old-values, hang ‘em and flog ‘em and put them in the army moralists of the police, minor judiciary and late lamented NOTW. Enraged by men wearing long hair and effeminate clothes, seething over the rockocracy’s drugs, free love, lack of due deference - and ready money. ‘We are not old men’, Keith had told the court, ‘we are not worried about petty morals.’ There was the casus belli. 1st July. But now the real Establishment joins in. As part of an editorial entitled (after Alexander Pope) ‘Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?’ The Times thunders: ‘If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity.