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MARCH 20, 2013

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London’s legendary Marquee Club played a pivotal role in the birth of some of the
biggest acts in Rock history. Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Rod Stewart performed there
when they were still largely unknown, as did the young singer and saxophonist,
David Jones with his band, The Lower Third, and occasionally, with other groups
such as The High Numbers, who later found fame as The Who. Jones released a
string of singles all of which opped, and he didn’t enjoy his rst signi cant
international hit until 1969 with ‘Space Oddity,’ by which time he was known to all
as David Bowie. The debut album by UK-based Rhythm & Blues band, The
Yardbirds was recorded at the club during a live appearance in February 1964, just
months after they’d recruited a talented yet largely unknown guitarist by the name
of Eric Clapton. When he left the group in 1965, he was replaced with Jeff Beck and
later, the much sought after session musician, Jimmy Page who, following the
departure of the founding members, repackaged the band and staged their debut
gig at the venue as The New Yardbirds with a line-up consisting of Page, vocalist
Robert Plant, drummer John Bonham, and bassist and keyboardist John Paul Jones.
Weeks later, they were renamed, Led Zeppelin. Perhaps most signi cantly of all, it
was the club where a newly formed Blues and Rock & Roll covers band rst
performed as The Rolling Stones on July 12th 1962. It’s widely documented that
the group’s name was born in a rush of desperation. In his 2010 biography, ‘Life,’
Keith Richards recalls the moment founder-member Brian Jones phoned a
publication known as ‘Jazz News’ which, “was a kind of ‘who’s playing where’ rag,
and said, ‘we’ve got a gig at…’ ‘What do you call yourselves?’ We stared at one
another. ‘It?’ Then ‘Thing?’ This call is costing. Muddy Waters to the rescue! First
track on ’The Best of Muddy Waters’ is ’Rollin’ Stone.’ The cover is on the oor.
’The Rolling Stones.’ Phew!! That saved sixpence.” Looking back on their landmark
appearance at the Marquee, Mick Jagger said last year, “it is quite amazing when
you think about it. But it was so long ago. Some of us are still here, but it’s a very
different group than the one that played 50 years ago.” Indeed it is. When Jagger,
Jones and Richards rst performed at the legendary venue, they were joined by
Dick Taylor on bass, Ian Stewart on piano, and, depending on who you ask, either
Mick Avory or Tony Chapman on drums. Avory himself claims he never gigged with
them although in his memoirs, Richards insists otherwise. What is clear is, in early
1963, Charlie Watts took over as drummer and Bill Wyman assumed Taylor‘s place
as bass player… and this is the very reason why ‘Conspiro Media’ is publishing it’s
three-part Rolling Stones 50th anniversary retrospective in 2013 instead of 2012.
As Keith pointed out in a magazine interview not too long ago, “The Stones always
really consider ’63 to be 50 years, because Charlie didn’t actually join until
January. So we look upon 2012 as sort of the year of conception. But the birth is
(the) next year.” 1963 was also the year when former Beatles publicist Andrew
Loog Oldham became their manager and removed Ian Stewart from the line-up
because his square-jawed features, and old-fashioned dress-sense and haircut
didn’t t in with the youthful image of the rest of the band. He then marketed
them as the anti-thesis of The Beatles; the scruffy, long-haired, loutish, trouble-
making equivalent of the cleaner-cut, be-suited ‘Fab Four.’ As their fame grew, he
encouraged the British Press to run with headlines that would enforce this
message, typi ed most memorably by the quote, “would you let your daughter
marry a Rolling Stone?” It hardly mattered what disapproving parents thought of
that loaded question,  because it didn’t stop thousands of teenage girls packing
out concert halls to see them. They weren’t the only band to play in front of
screaming, weeping adolescent females during the early part of the 1960s of
course, but what they attracted more than any other group of the time was an
uncontrollable vibe from the audience that sometimes ended in destruction, after
all, it wasn’t unusual to see a riot break out from time to time. This is what
reportedly occurred in 1967 during a performance in Austria when a smoke bomb
was thrown on stage -154 fans were arrested. In London, Ontario in 1965, the band
literally had the plug pulled on them a few minutes into their set by police. It’s
said this sparked a erce backlash from angry fans. A day earlier, The Stones cut
their appearance short of their own volition after the crowd lost control during a
show in Toronto.

In the
video
below, Bill
Wyman
looks back
at some
old footage
taken of
the group

RIOT & THE AFTERMATH, APRIL 1967, ZURICH,

SWITZERLAND: More than 12,000 fans reportedly ripped up seats
and clashed with police at this Stones concert.

performing at the Kurhaus concert hall in the Netherlands in 1964 (not “1965” as
stated) and which shows audience-members and heavy-handed police clashing
violently on stage whilst the band play on close by. As he views the scenes, Wyman
recalls that the unruly hordes had “ruined the theatre. The chairs and the
chandeliers – they tore the tapestry off the walls. They got us out after about two
songs.”

In his book ‘Life,’ Keith Richards remembers one

notable riot in the UK seaside town of Blackpool. He
writes, “we start the gig, and it’s jam-packed, a lot of
guys, a lot of them very, very p****d, all dressed up in
their Sunday best. And suddenly while I’m playing, this
little red-headed f****r obs on me. So I move aside,
and he follows me and obs on me again and hits me
in the face. So I stand in front of him again and he spits
at me again and, with the stage, his head was just
about near my shoe, like a penalty shot in football. I
just went bang and knocked his f*****g head off, with the grace of Beckham. He’s
never walked the same since. And after that, the riot broke out. They smashed
everything, including the piano. We didn’t see a piece of equipment that came
back any bigger than three inches square with wires hanging out. We got out of
there by the skin of our teeth.” As a result, Blackpool’s councillors barred The
Stones, nally lifting the ban in 2008. Re ecting on the unruly audiences during
those heady times, Keith states, “what they were reacting to was being in this
enclosed place with us – this illusion, me, Mick and Brian. The music might be the
trigger, but the bullet, nobody knows what that is.” Richards continues, “usually it
was harmless, for them, though not always for us. Amongst the many thousands a
few did get hurt, and a few died. Some chick third balcony up ung herself off and
severely hurt the person she landed on underneath, and she herself broke her neck
and died. Now and again s**t happened.” The fact is, death played heavily in the
Rolling Stones’ story, and in amongst the usual Rock & Roll pastimes of sex and
drugs, there was also a sinister but very real undertone of black magic and
Satanism. German singer, Nico, met the band in 1965. Of Brian Jones, she
reportedly told a writer, “do you know Brian was a witch? We were interested in
these things and he was very deep about it.“ According to the book, ‘Nico, the Life
and Lies of an Icon’ by Richard Witts, “she said on another occasion that Jones was
keen on the occult but ‘he was like a little boy with a magic set. It was really an
excuse for him to be nasty and sexy. He read books by an old English man (Aleister
Crowley) who was the Devil. I told Brian that I knew the Devil and the Devil was
German!’“ Witts continues, “it was not hard to get engrossed, and like many bored
boys of his generation, Brian Jones was fascinated. He read what he could and
learned to love the occult’s deviant spirit. Nico, of course was intrigued by the
inverse uses of the Christian symbols. There was a visceral thrill to be had from
touching on taboos; in such matters Jones and Nico were of like mind and easily
led.” Nico was brie y a vocalist with The Velvet Underground, the in uential 1960s
musical out t with an illustrious line-up that included John Cale, and also, Lou
Reed who wrote one of the band’s best known songs, ‘Venus in Furs,’ which was
based on and titled after a novella by 19th century author, Leopold Ritter von
Sacher-Masoch. Perhaps his most famous literary work, it depicts people deriving
sexual pleasure from pain and humiliation. Not long after it’s publication, the
writer‘s name gave rise to the term, ‘Masochism’ in order to describe this form of
behaviour that Masoch himself practised in. He’s purported to have lived out
passages from the book in real-time and even signed a contract with one of his
mistresses which made her a sex slave for a period of six months during which
time she was required to wear furs and succumb to his desires. Another of his
women whipped him and beat him with her sts at his behest, and he also urged
his rst wife to regularly thrash him with a cat-o’-nine-tails. Born in 1836, Leopold
was a Freemason with an illustrious background. His grandfather, Johann
Nepomuk Stephan Ritter von Sacher was appointed to the Austrian Order of
Leopold, and elevated to the nobility in April 1818. His mother, Charlotte von
Masoch was a Ukrainian noblewoman and when she married into the Sacher
family in 1829, the name Masoch was added at the behest of her father as she was
the last remaining member of the lineage following her brother’s death. If you’re
reading this and wondering what relevance any of this has to The Rolling Stones,
then it might interest you to learn that Leopold’s grand-niece, Eva von Sacher-
Masoch, Baroness Erisso, was the mother of Marianne Faithfull, someone whose
life will be forever linked to the band’s history. She was a 17-year-old convent
school girl when she rst met the group in 1964 at a party held by Andrew Loog
Oldham who not long after, launched her on a successful music career with the
Jagger/Richards hit, ‘As Tears Go By.’ At the time, she was involved in a long-term
relationship with John Dunbar, who founded the in uential Indica Gallery and
bookstore in 1965 with author, Barry Miles. It championed the counter-culture art
scene that was growing at the time and it became a popular haunt of London’s
‘Swinging Sixties’ set. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were notable devotees, in
fact, the classic Beatles track ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was inspired by a book that
Lennon had read there by Timothy Leary titled, ‘The Psychedelic Experience: A
Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead.’ Brian Jones was also reportedly a
customer, as was his girlfriend of the time, Anita Pallenberg, an Italian-born
model who he rst became acquainted with at a Stones gig in 1965. In the book,
‘Led Zeppelin – When Giants Walked the Earth,’ author, Mick Wall writes about a
mutual friend of Jones and Pallenberg’s by the name of “Winona,“ who claims the
couple spent time at the Indica bookstore, “buying the latest occult tomes,
searching for ‘Satanic spells to dispel thunder and lightning.’” Wall states that well
renowned Aleister Crowley devotee, Jimmy Page was a regular visitor to Brian’s
and Anita’s London at when he was a member of The Yardbirds and that the
Rolling Stone “was into paganism, Zen, Moroccan tapestries… and drugs. Anita
was an aspiring lm-star and model, into magick, sex, hanging out with Rock
stars… and drugs. A small-time crook as a teenager, not only was Brian a gifted
and successful musician, he was up for anything. He and Anita would hold séances
at the at using a ouija board; or they would pile in the car and drive off to look for
UFOs in the dead of night.” Despite starring in a number of movies, including the
sixties sci- classic, ‘Barberalla’ as The Great Tyrant, Pallenberg will perhaps
always be best remembered for her long-running high-pro le role in the story of
The Stones.

Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg.

Marianne Faithfull has reportedly said Anita, “was sort of a dark queen, beautiful
and wicked despite her blonde looks. Her smile was not like one you had ever seen
before, it seemed to be a camou age for some great, dark secret she was hoarding.
The best way I can describe her is that she was like a snake to a bird and she could
trans x you and hold you in place until she wanted to make her move.” Marianne
and John Dunbar were married in 1965 but their union was short-lived. After brief
sexual dalliances with Brian Jones and Keith Richards, the young beauty eventually
left her husband and began a four-year relationship with Mick Jagger in 1966. She
too was fascinated in the occult and was brie y involved with the ‘Process Church
of the Final Judgement,’ a religious group founded in London in the early 1960s by
former Scientologists, Mary and Robert DeGrimston. One of it’s earliest members
was Timothy Wyllie who helped create the movement after joining in 1964 when
he was a 23-year-old fresh out of architecture school. In a 2009 interview he said,
“we did have a very complex belief system. It was rather informal, because as we
became more spiritually orientated, we did get in touch with the inner aspects of
ourselves, as well as what’s going on in the universe. We were basically in contact
with something we call ‘The Beings.’ We didn’t know what they were, but they
seemed to be guiding us, and we felt they were responsible for small miracles, like
when a sh washed up and we hadn’t eaten for three days. That then developed
into a much more formal theology which we incorporated into the Church, and
what we had previously regarded as psychological archetypes got turned into a
sort of theological framework.” It’s certain aspects within this “framework” that’s
attracted a fair amount of suspicion from critics, because it brings together The
Christ with Satan. In another interview, Wyllie described the logic behind this
idea. He said, “we were working within a Western cosmology if you like, you know.
If we had of been in Japan, we might’ve mapped it against a totally different kind
of cosmology, but that’s the one we used. But it’s a little more complicated than
the Christian thing because we had these three basic archetypes of Jehovah,
Lucifer, and Satan and then we saw The Christ aspect as being the uni er, and then
the more complicated and more fundamental scenario was, came from the concept
of loving your enemy, and, as Robert would say, you know, ‘who was Christ’s
enemy? Satan was Christ’s enemy.’ So, the idea was to – through love – uniting the
opposites, uniting these different aspects. And of course it was an internal process,
an alchemical process of uniting the two aspects of the self.” He has also stated
that, “we were going back to the Christian evolution of our prime enemy, where
Satan is the prime enemy, and you should love Satan. Not in a sense worshiping,
but in a sense of understanding and comprehending. There is polarity in the
universe. Everything has polarity, and to demonise the other the way the Christian
church has demonised Satan. It’s madness, because by rejecting this aspect, we are
harming ourselves because we don’t learn.”

Wyllie was also the art and design director for the
Church’s ‘Process Magazine’ which, according to
former Blondie bassist-turned-occult researcher
and writer Gary Lachman, “favoured Hitler, Satan
and gore.” It also featured interviews with famous
celebrities of the time. In an article on the
website, ‘Fortean Times,’ Lachman states that the
magazine was “hawked on the streets of Swinging
London, hitting the King’s Road, marching into
Robert DeGrimston
places like the Indica Bookshop… In the ‘Fear’
issue, (Paul) McCartney revealed that he had no
‘fear of the world ending or anything like that,’ but did fear fear itself. An issue
dedicated to ‘Freedom of Expression,’ had Mick Jagger on the cover.” Lachman also
writes that Marianne Faithfull featured in the ‘Death’ issue. Wyllie talked of the
Rolling Stone and his girlfriend in a 2009 interview. He said, “Mick and Marianne’s
attraction was simply that we all liked one another, it was early in their careers so
perhaps they were more accessible – no Press agents to ght through. At that point
in the mid-’60s most of our generation thought and felt much same in terms of
what was wrong with the world. We just gave them an opportunity to speak openly
and honestly about how they felt. They were never part of the group.”

In his book, ‘Turn Off Your Mind:

The Mystic Sixties and The Dark
Side of the Age of Aquarius,’
Lachman quotes Faithfull as
saying of The Process, “I was
attracted to them at rst, mostly
because they took me seriously,
when nobody else did. They were
very admiring of me – they must
have recognised that I have got
magic powers. Mick told me I
had made a mistake and before I
went any further a warning bell
went off and I backed away. John
Michell, the Holy Grail, and
ying saucers were okay, but
there was something almost like
Mick Jagger on the cover of ‘Process
Fascism about The Process.”
Magazine.’
Indeed, according to Lachman in
his ‘Fortean Times’ article, by
1968, the DeGrimstons’ movement, “had spread to the States, establishing
churches in New York, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles and San Francisco. They
also canvassed Europe; in Germany they sent representatives to the neo-Nazi NPD
(National Democratic Party). Always in search of intensity, Nazi chic attracted
them.” He adds, “in Haight-Ashbury they visited the of ces of the ‘San Francisco
Oracle,’ hoping to bring the underground newspaper over to the cause. The Oracle
was too busy hyping the coming Age of Aquarius to give Satan much time. They
paid a visit to the Black Pope, Anton LaVey, head of the ‘Church of Satan,’ but he
had no use for them either. They set up a church at 407 Cole Street. Their
neighbour at 636 Cole was someone who would cause them a lot of grief in a year
or so. His name was Charles Manson, soon to become the head of ‘The Family’
responsible for the gruesome Tate/LaBianca murders in August of 1969. At that
time, Charlie was still an ex-con petty thief, strumming a guitar among the debris
of the ower children, languishing amidst the ruins of the Summer of Love. By the
end of the decade he was one of the most famous people alive, a cause célèbre in
the counter-culture, Satan incarnate for The Establishment.“ A number of authors
and researchers have claimed Manson was directly involved with The Church, an
allegation denied by the DeGrimstons’ inner circle, although it is acknowledged
that two Process members visited him in prison after the murders. During this
time, he also contributed a piece for the ‘Death’ issue of The Church’s magazine.
Timothy Wyllie has attempted to downplay the Family leader’s connection with
the publication. In 2009 he said, “a couple of years after Manson had been in
prison we were working on a magazine about death, and rather unwisely a couple
of us (not me) went to visit and talk to Manson in jail – after all, we innocently
reasoned, who’d know more about death? In retrospect, of course it was really
stupid, but not out of line with the many stupid things we did. Being so inward
looking, I think we were way out of touch with how regular people thought.” The
alleged Process connection was examined by the prosecuting attorney in the
Tate/LaBianca trial, Vincent Bugliosi. In his 1974 book, ’Helter Skelter,’ he
documents his ndings, concluding that the supposed links are “tenuous, yet…
fascinating.” To illustrate his point, he highlights a number of philosophical ideas
and pursuits Manson shared with the Church and the DeGrimstons, including a
background in Scientology. He writes, “in July 1961 he was sent to the United
States Penitentiary at McNeil Island, Washington. Manson gave as his claimed
religion ‘Scientologist,’ stating that he ‘has never settled upon a religious formula
for his beliefs and is presently seeking an answer to his question in the new
mental health cult known as Scientology.’ Manson’s teacher, i.e., ‘auditor,’ was
another convict, Lanier Rayner. Manson would later claim that while in prison he
achieved Scientology’s highest level, ‘theta clear.’” Bugliosi also makes note of
Manson’s presence in Haight-Ashbury during 1967, living as he did “just two
blocks away” from The Process’s San Francisco headquarters and states that it was
“very likely” he “at least investigated” the movement during this period claiming
“there is fairly persuasive evidence that he ‘borrowed’ some of their teachings,” for
example, The Church and the infamous cult leader, “both preached an imminent,
violent Armageddon, in which all but the chosen few would be destroyed. Both
found the basis for this in the Book of Revelation. Both conceived that the
motorcycle gangs, such as Hell’s Angels, would be the troops of The Last Days. And
both actively sought to solicit them to their side.” Bugliosi then compares The
Process’s belief system that uni es Jehovah, Lucifer, and Satan through Christ, to
Manson’s “simpler duality,” claiming that “he was known to his followers as both
Satan and Christ.” Furthermore, “within the organisation, The Process was called
(at least until 1969) ‘the family,’” adding that, “the symbol of The Process is
similar, though not identical, to the swastika Manson carved on his forehead.” The
renowned researcher and author, Michael Tsarion offers a contrary view to
Bugliosi regarding the choice of tattoo, which he etched into his skin shortly after
the Tate/LaBianca killings. At a lecture in Sweden during 2010, he told his
audience, “actually, it’s not a swastika, because Charles Manson by his own
de nition has had nothing whatever to do with Hell’s Angels or hippies, and very
adamantly will tell you that he is from an earlier generation and looks at those
people as completely clueless… so then, what is the symbol? That is the symbol of
The Process Church which was in fact a swastika slightly skewed to look like a
Malta Cross, or a Malta Cross slightly skewed to look like a swastika – either way.
And that swastika is not a Nazi symbol – and Manson knows it.”

Top left: Manson with his etched

‘swastika; Top right: The Process
Church’s logo; Below: A Maltese
Cross.

As any one reading this with even a basic understanding of occult symbology will
be aware, the Malta Cross that Tsarion refers to is an emblem belonging to the
Catholic Church’s Masonic Knights Templar Order and similar in design to the
Nazi ‘Iron Cross’ military decoration. This is a fact not lost on researchers such as
Jordan Maxwell who’s dedicated over 50 years in the study of secret societies and
fraternal orders. He believes it’s no accident that Adolf Hitler championed a
symbol that bore more than a slight resemblance to the Vatican’s Malta Cross, and
is actually a mark of allegiance between the two powers.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCE: Top left: The Knights of Malta (Maltese)

Cross; Top Right: A Freemason of the Knights Templar Order;
Bottom left: A Nazi Iron Cross, 1935-1945; Bottom right: Pope
Benedict XVI; Centre: A Nazi Cross to recognise the services of
German volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

In his documentary, ‘The Hidden Dimension in World Affairs,’ Maxwell talks of the
ancient Roman image of the fasces, which depicts a bundle of wooden sticks with
an axe-blade emerging from the centre, and that represents strength through
unity. He says, “fasci have been used in political symbolism, and most of the world
has no idea in the world what a fasces is. Now, the word ‘fas’… in a law dictionary,
fas means, ‘that which is right or just in the sight of God, as distinguished from jus,
which more frequently refers to that which is right in the aspect of man-made
law’… jus, which gives us that word, justice.” He continues, “Fas; divine law or
command – so when you’re talking about divine law and command, you’re talking
about God. If you’re talking about God, you’re talking about the Papacy. The Pope,
who can bring together many nations into a coalition of nations. So, Fasci-sm and
world con ict is another facet of the story of the symbol of the fasci.”

Left: The fasces; Middle: A postage stamp of Mussolini and Hitler

from 1941 complete with fasces; Right: Fasces on display either side
of President Obama in the US House of Representatives.

Maxwell continues, “Mussolini had to go to Rome… to sign contracts to allow him

to become a Fascist blood-letting dictator under the auspices of the Roman
Catholic Church. So, Hitler and his Nazis had to do the same thing. So they had to
go sign contracts with the old Mob boss in Rome.” Indeed, in July 1933, a treaty
between the Holy See and Nazi Germany took effect, and is still in force today. Not
surprisingly, the relationship was a controversial one, for example, at the end of
the Second World War, the Vatican provided safe escape for Fascists on the run
through the infamous ’ratlines,’ and the Catholic Church was also widely criticised
for failing to speak out against Nazi atrocities during the war years. On learning
that Pope Piux XII directed a Polish priest to keep silent about the murder of Jews,
Albert Einstein was quoted as saying, “since when can one make a pact with Christ
and Satan at the same time?” Well, the Process Church has apparently attempted
it, irrespective of whether it’s possible to do so or not, and it also adopted symbols
that hark back to Adolf Hitler and the Holy Roman Empire. Perhaps it too was yet
another sinister subsidiary of the malevolent Catholic Church system that Jordan
Maxwell speaks of? As he himself states, “the Vatican was always the presiding
overseer over Fascism, Nazism, wars, bloodshed, drug-running, plundering, raping
and killing throughout the whole world. So if you want to know what’s going on on
the Earth, you better check with the Vatican, ‘cos that’s where it all goes back to –
even Hitler and Mussolini had to rst of all pay tribute to the Holy Father. The
Grandmaster of ALL evil on the Earth.”
The swastika is another ancient symbol that has been adopted by numerous
cultures and civilisations over the ages, most notably in religions of varying
persuasions. Of course, in recent years, it’s image has been stigmatised in the
mainstream western world by it’s connections to Nazism. Hardly a surprise then
that Rolling Stone Brian Jones was embroiled in a critical backlash after taking
part in a particular photo-session in 1966 in which he wore a swastika armband
and a Maltese/Iron Cross around his neck. In the book, ’Paint It Black,’ author,
Geoffrey Giuliano writes that the musician “posed in full Nazi regalia for the cover
of the West German magazine, ‘Stern.’ There was Jones looking every bit the
haughty, decadent SS of cer, with a Chivalry Cross around his neck, squashing a
doll beneath his polished boots while Anita knelt submissively at his feet.
Although the shot was discarded, outtakes from the session were later published
in Britain, erupting into a major scandal. Jones tried to allay criticism by insisting:
‘I wear a Nazi uniform to show I am anti-Nazi. The meaning of it all is there is no
sense to it.’ As for Pallenberg, she explained years later: ‘It was naughty, but what
the hell! He looked good in an SS uniform!’”

CONTROVERSIAL
PHOTO-SHOOT: Brian
in Nazi garb with Anita.

In light of all the information amassed during his enquiries, Vincent Bugliosi
states, “there was at least some contact” between Charles Manson and The
Church. During the Tate/LaBianca trial, the lawyer-now-turned-writer asked the
Family leader if he knew Robert DeGrimston (real name, Robert Moore). “He
denied knowing DeGrimston,” Bugliosi recalls, “but said he had met Moore. ‘You’re
looking at him,’ Manson told me. ‘Moore and I are one and the same.’ I took this to
mean that he felt they thought alike.” Perhaps. Although Michael Tsarion has
stated that, “anyone who’s studied Mind-Control understands what the alter-ego
is, and how this is used in Mind-Control – this form of identi cation.”

Investigate reporter, Maury Terry has also documented Manson’s links to The
Church, but unlike Bugliosi, has argued that there is reason to believe his
relationship with the organisation was very real and very deep and that it was
connected to the slaying of Roman Polanski’s movie actress wife, Sharon Tate and
her friends at the couple’s rented home in Cielo Drive, Los Angeles. His claims are
to be found in ‘The Ultimate Evil,’ a book which examines the allegations of David
Berkowitz AKA ‘The Son of Sam,’ who in 1977 was arrested and then later
sentenced to life in prison following the murder of six people in a series of
shootings that continued for over a year. At the time of his capture, he declared he
was acting alone but has since amended his confession insisting that he was a
member of a Satanic cult that orchestrated the incidents as a ritual slaughter. In
conversations with Terry, he’s implicated The Process. He’s also said The Church
was involved in the Tate/LaBianca deaths. The Manson connection has been
brought to Maury’s attention by unnamed sources, including “a jailed Manson
killer” who claims The Family met Process leaders at a house near Los Angeles in
1968. To corroborate this alleged meeting, ‘The Ultimate Evil’ makes reference to
Manson’s autobiography in which “he wrote that he met individuals who
worshiped ‘multiple devils’ at the very house in question.” Terry’s book also refers
to another informant who alleges that “Manson joined the cult and later
convened” with Process members at locations in California. Furthermore, and
contrary to widespread mainstream consensus, Maury’s “reliable” source states
that Manson personally knew one of the victims slain in the Tate house that night,
namely, the heiress, Abigail Folger who was “friends for a time” with the Family
leader in San Francisco. Additionally, Terry claims, “I viewed a letter Manson wrote
in 1989. In his own hand, he described another occasion where he met named
Process leaders. Incredibly, he said this gathering actually took place at the Tate
home – the scene of future slaughter. Manson has also claimed a child
pornography element bubbled somewhere in the Tate tableau. This factor was also
present in the ‘Son of Sam’ operation, a phase Berkowitz addressed when I
interviewed him again in 1997 for New York’s WABC-TV. ‘The Process was very
sophisticated and dedicated,’ Berkowitz told me. ‘They had their hands in a lot of
things, including drugs and that disgusting child pornography. They also provided
kids for sex to some wealthy people, and I did see some of those people at
parties.’” Michael Tsarion suggests Manson carried out the 1969 murders on behalf
of The Process. He says, “all these families living on Cielo Drive were deeply
involved – not only in drugs, but in child pornography – that’s the Tate family, the
LaBianca family, and the Polanski family, and even Sharon Tate. They were all
involved in paedophilia and child pornography. And The Process hit them for
internal reasons. And also to send a message to the rest of Hollywood to fall into
line, that when these guys ask you for a payment for their drug money, you’d
better fall into line or this is an example of what’s gonna be happening to you.”
Another key gure worthy of note is Bruce Davis, Manson’s so-called ‘right-hand
man’ who Maury claims travelled to the UK “about nine months before the
killings,” and, “according to LA homicide sources,” spent time with The Process
whilst he was there. Bugliosi also writes of the high-ranking Family member’s visit
to the United Kingdom during the same timeline as documented by Terry, but in
relation to another Church. In ’Helter Skelter’ he states that Davis “was very
closely involved with Scientology for a time, working in it’s London headquarters
from about November or December of 1968 to April of 1969.” He continues,
“according to a Scientology spokesman, Davis was kicked out of the organisation
for his drug use. He returned to the Manson Family… in time to participate in the
Hinman and Shea slayings.” These killings occurred during the period of the
Tate/LaBianca murders and eventually led to Davis‘s imprisonment. Donald
‘Shorty’ Shea, was a movie stuntman who occasionally worked at Spahn Ranch, an
old disused Hollywood lm-set that had been turned into a horse-riding stables
and where Manson and his loyal followers were living rent-free with the owner,
George Spahn. It’s claimed that The Family sanctioned Shea’s murder, not only
because they discovered he was plotting to have them ejected from the property
over their unruly behaviour, but also partly due to their belief he’d reported them
to the police, which then resulted in a raid on the ranch and them being held in
custody on suspicion of car theft. The slaying of music teacher, Gary Hinman over
an alleged drug-deal gone wrong was carried out on the orders of Manson by three
Family members, one of whom was Bobby Beausoleil, a young musician and
sometime actor who played guitar during the mid-’60s for Arthur Lee‘s Folk/Rock
band, The Grass Roots, which later changed it‘s name to, ‘Love.’ Before meeting
and befriending Manson, he’d been involved in a movie project directed and
masterminded by occult avant-garde short- lmmaker, Kenneth Anger, but their
relationship eventually soured, reportedly due to disputes over money. A life-long
follower of Aleister Crowley, Anger was born Kenneth Anglemeyer in 1927 and
began making lms as a boy. The themes of homoeroticism, surrealism and magick
in his movies were ideally suited to enthral young discerning audiences during the
mid-to-late 1960s when the cultural landscape fell under the in uence of the
hippie and LSD scene and he was welcomed into the inner court of Rock Royalty
where he forged friendships with a number of major music artists of the era,
including Jimmy Page, and, The Rolling Stones.

Anger is widely quoted as saying, “the occult

unit within The Stones was Keith, Anita and
Brian. I believe that Anita is, for want of a
better word, a witch…” Indeed, Pallenberg
has reportedly declared, “yes, I did have an
interest in witchcraft, in Buddhism, in the
black magicians that my friend, Kenneth
Kenneth Anger pictured in 2010.
Anger, the lm-maker, introduced me to.
The world of the occult fascinated me…” Of
Jones, it’s claimed that Anger said, “you see, Brian was a witch too. I’m convinced.
He showed me his Witch’s Tit. He had a supernumerary tit in a very sexy place on
his inner thigh. He stated, ‘in another time they would have burned me.’ He was
very happy about that.“ Of course, Jones wasn’t wrong to assume that his
purported third nipple might’ve led to persecution in a long bygone age. At the
height of the witch-hunts in Europe in the 17th century, it was said supernatural
entities which appeared in animal form fed off these marks on the body. Known as
‘familiars,’ these spirits were supposedly assigned by the Devil to act as the
servants of witches; to aid them in their magick and protect them from attack.
Blood was their nourishment and their masters provided it for them, either by
sacri cing animals, or directly from the much maligned lumps or blemishes on
their skin dubbed, “witches’ teats.” Of all the members in the Rolling Stones,
Anger reportedly said that “Brian was the most psychic… He saw the spirit world;
for the others it was just the climate of the times. One gets the impression he just
dissolved into it.” He was also dissolving into a sea of drugs and booze. A talented
musical genius, he was the leading light of the group during their formative years
and Jagger and Richards were once his lesser-experienced eager students. In a
2002 interview, Bill Wyman said Jones was “hugely important at the beginning
because he formed the band. He chose the members. He named the band. He chose
the music we played. He got us gigs… did marvellous things on a lot of songs in the
mid-’60s with dulcimers, marimbas – anything he put his hands on he could get a
tune out of and turned songs around into something they weren’t when they
started. Very in uential, very important…” By 1967 though, he was a shadow of his
former self; a drug and alcohol addled side-man eclipsed by Mick and Keith who’d
by this point, formed a strong and successful song-writing partnership. Wracked by
insecurity and jealousy, and opposed to The Stones‘ musical direction which was
veering away from their R&B and Blues roots towards a more psychedelic vibe in
keeping with the soundscape of the times, he reportedly grew increasingly isolated
from his band-mates. His personal life was equally fraught. In his memoirs, ‘Life,’
Keith Richards labels Jones “a woman beater,” but also claims that the tortured
musician couldn’t match up to girlfriend, Anita. He writes, “I would hear the
thumping some nights, and Brian would come out with a black eye… the one
woman in the world you did not want to try and beat up on was Anita Pallenberg.”
It would certainly seem that way if one incident in particular is to be believed.
“Scraped and bloody” after yet another violent exchange with Jones, Pallenberg
sought refuge at a friend’s house. “I was sitting there, in tears, angry, getting my
wounds treated, feeling terrible,” she’s said to have recalled. “I decided to make a
wax gure of Brian and poke him with a needle. I molded some candle wax into an
ef gy and said whatever words I said and closed my eyes and jabbed the needle
into the wax gure. It pierced the stomach… Next morning when I went back to
where I was living with Brian, I found him suffering from severe stomach pains.
He’d been up all night, and he was in agony, bottles of Milk of Magnesia and other
medications all around him. It took him a day or two to get over it.” Eventually,
after one too many beatings and humiliating showdowns, Anita ended their
stormy, violent two-year relationship during a continental jaunt across Europe and
Africa in 1967 and ran into the arms of Keith Richards who was accompanying
them on their excursion. He charts the events that led to the break-up in his
memoirs recalling that Jones was struck down with pneumonia on the rst-leg of
their vacation in France and admitted to a hospital in Toulouse. Anita and Keith
decided to travel on without him and arranged to meet their bed-bound travelling
companion in Morocco at a later date. The two drove to Spain and then Tangier
where they spent time with the American writer, William S. Burroughs, and the
British-born artist, author and occultist, Brion Gysin before moving on to
Marrakech where Jones eventually joined them. Pallenberg and Richards had
embarked on an affair in his absence but quickly ended it when he reappeared on
the scene hoping it would remain a secret. This did little to dampen his suspicions
though and he faced up to Anita in their hotel room. Keith claims his band-mate
reacted with “more violence… trying to take Anita on for fteen rounds. And once
again he breaks two ribs and a nger or something. Then Brian dragged two
tattooed whores down the hotel corridor and into the room, trying to force Anita
into a scene, humiliating her in front of them. He started to ing food at her from
the many trays he’d ordered up. At that point Anita ran to my room. I said, ‘this is
pointless. Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s just leave him.’ Anita was in tears.
She didn’t want to leave, but she realised that I was right when I said Brian would
probably try and kill her.” Keith hastily hatched an escape plan that would ensure
his and Anita’s speedy departure out of Morocco. To avoid attracting Brian’s
attention during their breakout attempt, Richards enlisted Brion Gysin to act as an
unwitting diversion, falsely informing him that the Press had located Jones’s
whereabouts and were hunting him down. It was decided that Gysin take him on a
sightseeing trip to evade this supposed media onslaught. In the meantime, Keith
and Anita ed to Tangier and then London. It wasn’t until Brian returned to his
hotel much later that he discovered what had occurred. The Stone was alone, and
he was devastated.

For all the emotional turmoil that Jones is said to have

experienced in Morocco during the period of his bust-up
with Pallenberg, the country itself rarely disappointed him
and he was greatly inspired by it‘s sights and sounds. In
1968, he visited the ancient mountain village of Joujouka to
meet the native Su Master Musicians whose centuries-old
form of trance music had captured his imagination. Largely
unknown to the outside world, the Rolling Stone was made
aware of their existence by Brion Gysin and Mohamed
Hamri, a Moroccan artist and author who later encouraged
Brion Gysin the Irish-born singer Frank Rynne to embark on a similar
pilgrimage during the 1990s. A former member of the 1980s
/ ‘90s bands, Those Handsome Devils, The Baby Snakes, and more recently, the
Islamic Diggers, Rynne eventually recorded an album with the Master Musicians
and has since become their manager, helping to promote them to a wider global
audience. In a 2007 interview, he talked about the Persian Su scholar, Saint (Sidi)
Ahmed Sheikh, who is widely believed to have blessed the music of Joujouka with
spiritual powers upon rst visiting the region over 1,000 years ago. He said, “Sidi
Ahmed Sheikh… is credited with founding Joujouka. Having wandered from Persia
in the 860s AD, he and his seven companions encountered a tribe of musicians in
the Ahl Srif Djebel. Hearing them play the saint felt their music was useful. He
wrote music for them with a spiritual intent; to calm and cure ailments of the
mind and to promote peace and harmony. Sidi Ahmed drew a line in the sand in
Joujouka: those who follow his path, remaining on his side of the line may reap
bountiful rewards and fertility, those who are outside the line can nd no
happiness in Joujouka.” 

When Brian Jones returned to London

following his brief stay with the Master
Musicians, he set about editing and remixing
a batch of recordings he’d made of the
Moroccan group on a portable tape-
machine, the results of which were released
as an album in 1971. It’s title, ‘Brian Jones
Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka,’ is
JOUJOUKA MUSICIANS… Their
derived from a fertility rite the villagers
music is played with a variety of
carry out each year which centres on a half-
traditional reed, pipe, and
man half-goat character named, Boujeloud
percussion instruments native to
who’s enticed by the dancing temptress,
their region, including a goat-skin
Aisha. He holds branches in his hand, and
drum known as the ‘tebel,’ and a
any female onlooker hit with them is
bamboo ute made in the village
destined to become fertile.
called, the ‘lira.’

In the
sleeve-notes attached to Jones’s album,
Brion Gysin equates the rite with the ancient
God, Pan. He commented on this during an
interview with the writer, Terry Wilson. He
said, “I recognised very quickly that what
they were performing was the Roman
Lupercal, and the Roman Lupercalia was a
BOUJELOUD: The person taking
race run from one part of Rome, a cave
on the role of Boujeloud wears a
under the Capitoline Hill, which Mussolini
straw hat and is dressed in an
claimed to have discovered, but is now
out t made of goat-skins.
generally conceded to be some 10 or
15 metres further down… and in this cave
goats were killed and skinned and a young man of a certain tribe was sown up in
them, and one of these young men was Mark Antony, and when in the beginning of
Julius Caesar, when they meet, he was actually running this race of Lupercalia
through Rome on the 15th March, the Ides of March… and the point was to go out
to the gates of Rome and contact Pan, the God of the Forests, the little Goat God,
who was Sexuality itself, and to run back through the streets with the news that
Pan was still out there f*****g as he ailed the women in the crowds, which is why
Julius Caesar asked him to be sure to hit Calpurnia, because his wife Calpurnia was
barren.”

——————————————————————————————————————–

The physical depiction of The Devil as a horned, goat-like gure is generally

regarded to have been an invention of Christianity during the Middle Ages when it
was targeting pagans who worshiped horned gods such as the Celtic deity,
Cernunnos, and of course, Pan, who as a consequence, is often identi ed with
Satan.

When the Knights Templar were arrested, tortured and

interrogated by King Philip IV of France in the 14th
century at the time of the Roman Catholic Inquistion,
some of them confessed that they had participated in
the worship of a “heathen” idol, usually consisting of a
severed head and known as, Baphomet. In the mid-
1800s, the French occultist, magician, and freemason,
Eliphas Levi drew a picture of an androgynous gure
with a goat’s head dubbed, the ‘Baphomet of Mendes,’
a name which harks back to themes explored and
Pan. recorded by Greek historian, Herodotus thousands of
years earlier in ‘The History – Book II.’ He wrote of
Djedet, an ancient Egyptian city known in Greek as, Mendes and in it’s native
language as, Banebdjed in honour of the ram deity of the same name. Herodotus
described how this Mendesian God was represented with the head, legs, and eece
of a goat. He also stated that “in Egyptian, the goat and Pan are both called
Mendes.”

Levi’s illustration, which combined elements from The

Devil in Tarot cards, lives on, most notably through
organisations such as ‘The Church of Satan’ which has
adopted and adapted the iconic image as it’s of cial
logo. The so-called ‘Great Beast,’ Aleister Crowley, was
also inspired by Baphomet, as he was by Pan whom he
referred to in his written works. According to his
friend, the writer, Dennis Wheatley, Crowley attempted
to invoke the ancient fertility god in a hotel room in
Paris in the days before the First World War. He writes,
Eliphas Levi’s notorious, “one of his disciples owned a small hotel on the Left
Baphomet. Bank. Crowley greatly wished to raise Pan; so the hotel
proprietor got rid of his staff for the weekend and
Crowley’s coven of disciples assembled there. The furniture from a room under the
roof was removed and it was swept clean. In the evening Crowley, in his magician’s
robes, went into it accompanied by MacAleister (son of Aleister), one of his
disciples. He then told the other eleven members of the coven that whatever
noises they might hear in no circumstances were they to enter the room before
morning. The eleven went downstairs to a cold buffet, very nervous. A little after
midnight they heard an appalling racket in the upper room, but obeyed the
Master’s orders and did not go up. When in the morning they did go up, they
knocked on the door but there was no reply, so they broke it in. Both MacAleister
and Crowley had had their robes ripped from them and were naked. MacAleister
was dead and Crowley a gibbering idiot crouching in a corner. Perhaps Crowley did
succeed in raising Pan and the horned god strongly objected to being taken away
from whatever he was doing. Anyhow, Crowley spent four months in a loony-bin
outside Paris before he was allowed about again.”

——————————————————————————————————————–

It wouldn’t require a great leap of faith to entertain the possibility that Brian
Jones’s fascination in the Moroccan Master Musicians was to some extent fuelled
by his well documented interest in the occult, even when taking into account the
denials from some quarters that the half-man half-goat Boujeloud has no
af liation with Pan, or any other pagan deity for that matter. There’s a mystical,
esoteric force underpinning the music, the history, and the heritage of Joujouka
that would perhaps have appealed to the Rolling Stone. Consider for example the
comments of renowned scholar and artist, Jean-Jacques Lebel made during an
interview for the documentary on the life and times of Brion Gysin titled, ‘Flicker.’
He describes the villagers as, “a bunch of… heavy witchcraft, pre-Islamic
brotherhood of men doing strange things like bringing about ghosts.” If true, one
can only imagine how such occultish practises might’ve energised Jones’s curiosity
in the Master Musicians and their ancient culture.
A year prior to his visit to Joujouka and the subsequent recordings which resulted
from it came the release of, ‘A Degree of Murder,’ a West German movie that Jones
composed, produced, arranged, and performed the music for, and which features
Anita Pallenberg in the lead role of Marie, a woman who accidentally shoots her
boyfriend and then hires two men to help her dump the dead body. Although never
of cially issued in it’s own right, Brian’s soundtrack is the rst signi cant solo
outing by a member of The Rolling Stones.
However, this milestone in the band’s long and lively history was overshadowed at
the time by a series of events that are now rmly ingrained in the annals of Rock &
Pop culture. As the movie was being unveiled at the Cannes Film Festival in April /
May 1967, the long arm of the law was descending upon the group in one fell
swoop. In London, police raided Brian’s apartment and arrested him on suspicion
of drugs possession whilst in another part of the country on the very same day,
Mick and Keith were in court being charged in connection with an unrelated bust
earlier in the year. Jagger was accused of illegally possessing amphetamine pills,
and Richards with allowing his house to be used for the purpose of smoking
cannabis. Both pleaded ‘not guilty.’ Released on bail, their trial date was set for
June. In his memoirs, Keith makes note of the police raid on Brian’s London
residence which occurred “almost on the hour” that he and Mick were standing
before magistrates. The “stitch-up,” as he describes it, “was orchestrated and
synchronised with rare precision. But due to some small glitch of stage
management, the Press actually arrived, television crews included, a few minutes
before the police knocked on Brian’s door with their warrant. The police had to
push through the army of hacks that they had summoned to get to the door. But
this collusion was barely noticeable in the farce that unfolded.” The unfolding
“farce” that he refers to is a short but eventful chapter in the Rolling Stones story
in which two young, long-haired, drug-using Pop-star upstarts are pitted against
the old guard of the Great British Establishment and it’s disapproving justice
system which seeks to make examples of them and quash the power and in uence
they wield over an impressionable generation of youth. The February 1967 raid on
‘Redlands‘ – Richard’s country home in the English county of Sussex – provided
the backdrop for this story, and for a brief period during the rst half of that year,
Mick and Keith were carried off in a headline-hitting whirlwind of controversy and
scandal the likes of which they’d never experienced before (or since). However, for
all the ‘hype & hoopla’ that was undoubtedly generated by the media at the time
in order to boost public interest in the lurid details of the drug bust, it’s perhaps
the less reported aspects of it that are actually the most sensational, complete
with allegations and evidence implicating the police, the UK tabloid Press, and
even the secret services in a web of conspiracy and deceit. The origins of the
Redlands raid has been linked back to an article in the ‘News of the World,’ the
British newspaper with a noted and notorious reputation for specialising in stories
of a salacious nature. In early February 1967, it published extracts of what it
claimed was an interview with Mick Jagger who was apparently seen out enjoying
drinks at a London nightclub. He was quoted as saying, “I don’t go much on it
(LSD) now the cats have taken it up. It’ll just get a dirty name. I remember the rst
time I took it. It was on our tour with two American Rock & Roll stars.” He
reportedly swallowed down a number of amphetamines during the candid
discussion explaining that, “I just wouldn’t keep awake in places like this if I didn’t
have them.” As it turned out, the Rolling Stone cited in the article wasn’t Mick
Jagger, but, Brian Jones. The newspaper – whether intentionally or not – had
attributed the quotes to the wrong name. When Jagger read the article, he
contacted his lawyers and made moves to sue the ’News of the World’ for libel. An
account describing what happened as a result of his legal bid was aired recently by
author, Simon Wells. He’s interviewed a number of key gures closely associated
with the Redlands raid and it’s aftermath, and has also pored through of cial
documents from police, courts, and solicitors of the time. His book ‘Butter y on
the Wheel. Rolling Stones – The Great Bust’ documents those ndings. Speaking to
the radio/music website, ‘IconFetch.com’ last year he said, “the possibility of a
defamation of character suit against the paper would’ve been enormous – given
Jagger’s reputation. I was told it could’ve run to quarter of a million pounds in
1967… it’s a massive lawsuit. It could’ve effectively derailed the paper. So, to
stymie that lawsuit, they got together and decided, ‘well, we’ve got to nd him in
possession of drugs, or in a situation where there’s drugs – basically to embarrass
the lawsuit.’ They got one of their most… prominent… reporters to in ltrate the
Stones’ circle, pay off a driver, and nd out the movements of The Stones – there
was also some phone-tapping going on, and some other stuff as well.” In ‘Life,’
Keith Richards recalls, “it was Patrick, my Belgian chauffeur, who sold us out to the
‘News of the World’… I’m paying this driver handsomely, and the gig’s the gig,
keep schtum. But the ‘News of the World’ got to him. Didn’t do him any good. As I
heard it, he never walked the same again.” That the newspaper should be linked to
untoward surveillance techniques is nothing new of course. It’s involvement in a
series of ongoing phone-hacking scandals dating from 2005 onwards were
examined in 2011 by a public government inquiry chaired by the judge, Lord
Justice Leveson. Employees of the tabloid have been accused of accessing the
voicemails of various celebrities, politicians, and other well known gures as well
as relatives of British soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, victims of the London
7/7 bombings, and murdered schoolgirl, Milly Dowler. A succession of police
investigations have resulted in the imprisonment of a royal correspondent, and
the arrest of a number of reporters and also former ‘News of the World’ editor,
Rebekah Brooks, who is due to stand trial in September 2013. In March this year, a
counter-terrorism of cer in the London Metropolitan Police was jailed for 15
months for offering to sell information to the newspaper. Simon Wells says
intelligence gathered by the tabloid back in 1967 on Mick Jagger’s movements led
it to Redlands where the singer was planning to spend some time with Keith and a
small group of friends and associates. He explains, “they determined that the party
was going to happen at the Redlands house and that they would tip off police – I
found in… papers which I rediscovered that the ’News of the World’ tipped off
London police who…refused to act on it by saying that… if they actually found
Mick Jagger in possession of drugs, it could well back re on the squad. ’News of
the World’ were undeterred – they actually then turned it over to the local police
in Chichester in Sussex… and they leant on the head of the police there, and this
person… from what I can gather from the intelligence I received from people who
worked there at the time – that the ’News of the World’ made it clear that if the
raid didn’t take place, they would then embarrass the police force for not being
hard on drugs – so their hand was forced.”

Mick Jagger and girlfriend Marianne

Faithfull made their way to Redlands on the
Saturday night of February 11th 1967. There
they were joined by renowned British
photographer, Michael Cooper; the reputed
antiques dealer, Christopher Gibbs; Keith’s
upper-class drifter friend and hanger-on,
Nicky Kramer; in uential modern-art dealer,
Simon Wells. Robert Fraser, and his Moroccan servant,
Mohammed. Also present was a mysterious
individual thought to be either of Canadian or American descent going by the
name of, David Schneiderman and who’d own into London not long before. Keith
Richards recalls that “Schneiderman, who also went by the moniker of ‘Acid King,’
was the source of that very high-quality Acid of the time, such brands as
Strawberry Fields, Sunshine, and Purple Haze – where do you think Jimi (Hendrix)
got that from? All kinds of mixtures, and that’s how Schneiderman got in on the
crowd, by providing this super-duper Acid.”

Marianne Faithfull remembers waking up on

the morning of Sunday February 12th to a
cup of tea and a tab of LSD courtesy of the
Acid King who was making his rounds
through the house ensuring the guests were
supplied with their trips for that day. In her
memoirs, she writes, “we took it and the rst
bit was a sort of waiting-for-the-Acid-to-
Mick and Keith pictured at
come-on time. I remember getting quite sick
Redlands, 1967.
and I think Mick did, too. It was very strong
Acid, stronger than anything I’ve ever had
since. Nobody talked a lot that day. The usual conscious babble subsided. It was
very strong Acid and the experience was so overwhelming that there wasn’t much
you could put into words.” As daylight dimmed and the evening hours set in, Keith
remembers, “there was a knock at the door, I look through the window and there’s
this whole lot of dwarves outside, but they’re all wearing the same clothes! They
were policemen, but I didn’t know it. They just looked like very small people
wearing dark blue with shiny bits and helmets. They were trying to read a warrant
to me. ’Oh that’s very nice, but it’s a bit cold outside, come on in and read it to me
over the replace.’ I’d never been busted before and I was still on Acid. While we‘re
gently bouncing down from the Acid, they‘re trampling through the place, doing
what they‘ve got to do… ” One of the 18 police of cers deployed for the raid that
night was Detective Constable Evelyn Florence Fuller. In documents presented in
the subsequent court case, she describes what she found whilst searching through
Jagger’s and Faithfull’s bedroom – and it makes for interesting reading…

“I went up the stairs, turned left and at the end of the landing there was a large
bedroom which had a double bed in it which had no bed-clothes on it. There were pink
ostrich feathers lying on the bed and on a chair in the bedroom were items of clothing;
a pair of black velvet trousers, a white bra, a white lace Edwardian blouse, a black
cloth half coat, a black sombrero-type hat, and a pair of mauve-coloured ladies boots.
I also noticed a large chest of drawers on the top of which were a number of books on
witch-craft; one book was called ’Games to Play.’ On the oor was a large hold-all
which contained two or three dagger-type weapons.”

“Books on witchcraft“?… “Dagger-type weapons”? What exactly was going on at

‘Redlands’ that weekend?… Some form of Acid-fuelled occult magick group-ritual
perhaps?

During the search, police found four amphetamine tablets in the pocket of a jacket
that Jagger said belonged to him, although Marianne has since maintained that he
was assuming responsibility for drugs that were in fact hers. Robert Fraser,
meanwhile, tried to convince of cers that the heroin pills they discovered in his
possession were actually for his diabetes. These substances, along with various
other items, were taken away that night for analysis. No arrests were made and the
Redlands party, in Richard’s words, “just carried on.”
One of the most intriguing aspects of the raid is the cloud of suspicion that hangs
over the enigmatic David Schneiderman who Keith and Marianne believe was sent
to discredit The Stones. Of particular interest is his attache case which was
supposedly full of drugs and which police allegedly failed to search, even though it
sat on a table in full view of them at Redlands that night. Richards has reportedly
said, “when a cop asked to see the contents of his case, Schneiderman said it was
full of exposed lm and couldn’t be opened, and the cop let it go at that.” In her
1994 autobiography, Faithfull writes, “almost the classic dealer’s suitcase you’d
see on any cop show, and they didn’t examine one thing in it!” Marianne also
questions the timing of Schneiderman’s unexpected arrival in the UK, which just
so happened to coincide with Mick Jagger’s legal moves against the ‘News of the
World.’ She states, “of course, nobody knew about this writ. The only people who
knew were those at the ‘News of the World.’ It wasn’t released to the Press. And it’s
this fact that makes everything else that happened highly suspicious. The ‘News of
the World’ obviously called the little men in MI5 and said: ‘Look, these people
need to be taken down. Will you help us?’ And the little men said, ‘Of course, we’d
only be too pleased.’ The snare was going to be the drugs, of course. They would
set it all up with the West Sussex police and that would be that. Their master
stroke was to bring David Schneiderman over from California with loads of LSD to
set us up. They must have own him in for this bust. He appeared very fast; right
after the writ had been issued he showed up at Robert Fraser’s at. Robert called
up and said: ‘We’ve got this guy here, David Schneiderman, a Yank, just got in from
California and he’s brought this great Acid with him from the States. It’s called
White Lightning or something fabulous like that and he wants to lay some on us,
man.’ So I said, ‘how f*****g great! Wait, Robert, I’ve got a fantastic idea, why
don’t we all go down to Redlands for the weekend. I’ll call Keith right now and set
it up.’ And right after all this, Schneiderman vanished into thin air (whisked out of
the country I should think).” In ‘Life,’ Richards offers a similar observation
regarding the Acid King’s eeting presence, stating, “he was at every party for
about two weeks and then mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again.”
Later in the book, he too accuses him of colluding with the ’News of the World.’
After the two Stones stood trial in June, the notorious tabloid reportedly published
a front-page editorial in which it denied any association with Schneiderman and
rejected claims it had planted him at Redlands in order to discredit Jagger’s libel
action. It also dismissed accusations that it had spied on the singer. The
newspaper did admit tipping off police about Keith‘s party, but stated it was acting
on the information of a reader.

Faithfull’s and Richards’ accounts of what

occurred at Redlands have also been
rebuffed by those associated with Thomas
Davies, a member of the 18-strong team that
searched through the Rolling Stone’s house
that night. This is according to Simon Wells
and information collected during his own
Keith photographed with the ‘Acid investigation into the bust which doesn’t
King’ during that notorious support Keith’s and Marianne’s claims that
February weekend. Schneiderman‘s alleged attache case of
drugs was left unopened. Although now
deceased, the author learned of Davies’s version of events from of cial police-
notes written after the raid. Wells says, “certainly from the knowledge I gathered
from colleagues of Thomas Davies… if someone said to you, ‘don’t open my bag…’.
the rst thing you do is, you tear it to bits. So, his bag was searched.” Simon has
also questioned the validity of fresh allegations that have surfaced in recent
months which correspond with Marianne Faithfull’s long-established suspicions
that Schneiderman was a secret service asset sent to destroy the Rolling Stones.
The latest claims appeared on the news-site ’Mail Online’ in September 2012, just
weeks before the release of, ‘Mick Jagger,’ a biography by reputed Rock music
writer, Philip Norman. Whilst researching the Redlands incident in preparation for
the book, the author came into contact with Maggie Abbott, a British lm agent
based in Los Angeles who, during the 1980s, befriended David Jove, a pioneering
TV producer who later con ded to her that his real name was David Snyderman
AKA the Acid King. In the ‘Mail Online,‘ Norman states, “in January 1967,
according to the account he gave Maggie Abbott, Snyderman was a failed TV actor,
drifting around Europe in the American hippie throng with Swinging London as
his nal destination. At Heathrow Airport he was caught with drugs in his luggage
and expected to be thrown into jail and instantly deported. Instead, British
Customs handed him over to some ‘heavy people’ who hinted they belonged to
MI5 and told him there was ‘a way out’ of his predicament. This was to in ltrate
the Rolling Stones, supply Mick Jagger and Keith Richards with drugs, and then get
them busted. According to Snyderman, MI5 were operating on behalf of an FBI
offshoot known as COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program) set up by the
FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, in the 1920s to protect national security and
maintain the existing social and political order. By 1967, COINTELPRO was
focusing on the subversive effect of Rock music on America’s young, particularly
the kind coming from Britain, and most particularly the kind played by The Rolling
Stones.” The ‘Mail Online’ feature, which also appears to support Richards’ and
Faithfull’s allegations regarding Schneiderman’s infamous bag of drugs, was
slammed by Simon Wells. In comments posted on a Rolling Stones internet forum,
he described it as reeking “of revived sensationalism to sell a new book” and
criticised the author for apparently failing to acknowledge the claims of police
of cer, Thomas Davies who “made copious reference in his notes that he did
search the attache case.”
Simon’s frustration is understandable, and he has legitimate reason to question
some of Norman’s claims too. However, there’s nothing ‘sensational’ in the idea of
the FBI willingly targeting in uential Rock musicians in a drug-sting. Back in the
early-to-mid 1970s, the secret services considered entrapping former Beatle John
Lennon in a narcotics bust in a bid to ensure his deportation from the United
States at a time when he was aligning himself closely with radical political
activists of the era including Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin. This is according to
history professor, Jon Wiener who was nally granted access to pages of
con dential FBI documents in 1997 after ling a Freedom of Information request
in 1981. His research led to the book, ‘Gimme Some Truth: The John Lennon FBI
Files.’ Speaking to reporter Amy Goodman during an interview on the TV news-
show ’Democracy Now!’ in December 2005, he claimed the organisation was
uneasy with Lennon’s plans to stage a series of thought-provoking concerts in
1972. Wiener said then-President Richard Nixon, “was preparing to run for re-
election. The war in Vietnam had reached a peak. It was clear that this was going
to be a big issue in ’72. The concert-tour that Lennon was planning would have
been quite a big deal… what Lennon had in mind was something different. He
wanted to combine Rock music with radical politics and use the tour to urge young
people to register to vote – 1972 was the rst year that 18-year-olds were given the
right to vote, so that was going to be an important project – and vote against the
war, and that meant voting against Nixon. Nixon got wind of this plan and
promptly began deportation proceedings against Lennon to try to get him out of
the country to prevent this tour from ever happening.” According to a February
1972 memo, Republican Senator and Nixon supporter, Strom Thurmond suggested
that “deportation would be a strategic counter-measure” against Lennon. A month
later, the United States ‘Immigration and Naturalization Service’ began formal
proceedings to have him deported, arguing that his 1968 conviction for cannabis
possession in London had made him ineligible for admission to the U.S. This
prompted a three-year court battle as Lennon fought to remain in the country.
Speaking during an earlier interview for ’Democracy Now!’ in May 2000, Weiner
claims the FBI seriously considered the bene ts of a drug bust to eject the former
Beatle from the US after it received reports from an undercover agent attending a
meeting of radical political gures that plans were afoot to stage anti-war
demonstrations at the Republican National Convention in Miami where President
Nixon was poised to be re-nominated. Weiner says, “the FBI continued to worry
throughout the summer of 1972 that Lennon was going to participate in
demonstrations outside the Republican National Convention, so they sent word
down to the Miami FBI to, quote, ‘arrest Lennon, if at all possible, on possession of
narcotics charges,’ which they said would make him more immediately deportable.
This seems to me to be an effort to set Lennon up for a drug bust, since the FBI
doesn’t enforce possession of narcotics charges; this is a State and local matter. So
it’s clearly, you know, an abuse of power.”

The once secret COINTELPRO project that Philip

Norman alludes to, was nally exposed and shutdown
in 1971 after an activist group burglarised an FBI of ce
and stole con dential documents that revealed it’s
existence. However, as has been con rmed in the years
since, the tactics applied by the bureau’s former
offshoot continued, despite it’s formal abolishment, and
the plot to deport Lennon in 1972 bears many of it’s
classic hallmarks. In 1976, covert tactics such as these
were revealed publicly during an investigation by the
John Wiener’s book. ‘Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations
with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the United
States Senate’ – commonly referred to as the “Church Committee.” It concluded
that the FBI’s COINTELPRO program had unlawfully “harassed” and “disrupted”
individuals and groups on the basis of their political beliefs and lifestyles, “even
when those beliefs posed no threat of violence or illegal acts on behalf of a hostile
foreign power.” Organisations such as the ‘Women’s Liberation Movement’ had
been targeted by the bureau, as well as anti-Vietnam War activists, and the civil
rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI employed undercover agents to
in ltrate groups, and adopted “unsavoury and vicious tactics… including
anonymous attempts to break up marriages, disrupt meetings,” and, “ostracise
persons from their professions.” The Church Committee also discovered evidence
of covert media manipulation in order to “in uence the public’s perception of
persons and organisations by disseminating derogatory information to the Press,
either anonymously or through ‘friendly’ news contacts.” Had a similar tactic been
used against Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, perhaps by COINTELPRO? Was
Marianne Faithfull correct then to surmise in her autobiography that the ‘News of
the World’ “obviously called the little men in MI5” to assist in bringing down The
Rolling Stones? Philip Norman does note a number of factors in his ‘Mail Online’
feature that would’ve been reason enough for the FBI and British intelligence
services to team up and work in league against the legendary group, factors that a
number of music and sociological commentators over the decades have
highlighted when assessing the cultural impact of The Stones during the 1960s.
The band’s enigmatic manager, Andrew Loog Oldham is often cited in such
appraisals, primarily for his role in marketing them in the early part of their career
as the scruffy, rebellious and dangerous equivalent to the clean, family-friendly
Beatles. Norman writes, “as Beatlemania swept the nation, and the Fab Four
appeared on the Royal Variety Show, respectfully ducking their mop-tops before
the Queen Mother, he (Oldham) realised that The Beatles’ original fans felt let
down by their mainstream success. Where was the excitement, the rebellion, in
liking the same band your parents, or even grandparents did? Oldham set about
marketing the Rolling Stones as the anti-Beatles, the scowling ip side of the
coin… When they burst on to the music scene in 1963 it was in a Britain that still
equated masculinity with the Army recruit’s stringent ‘short back and sides’.
Curling over ears and brushing collars, the Stones’ long locks were almost as much
as an affront to polite society as Mick Jagger’s unusually large mouth and vivid red
lips. These seemed to have an indecency all of their own, even before they snarled
out The Stones’ highly provocative lyrics. In June 1965, their single ‘Satisfaction’
created the greatest scandal in America since Elvis Presley rst swivelled his hips
exactly a decade earlier. With the line ‘tryin’ to make some girl’, it contained the
rst direct reference to sex in any Pop song, an outrage compounded 18 months
later when The Stones released ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together.’ There had been
innumerable songs about nocturnal trysts but never one with so barefaced an
invitation to get between the sheets. The furore was such that, when The Stones
previewed the song on America’s Ed Sullivan television show in January 1967, Mick
was forced to change the crucial phrase to ‘Let’s Spend Some Time Together.’ He
agreed to do so, but only with much pointed eye-rolling every time he reached the
newly-neutered line. All this was bad enough, but then came a truly unforgivable
incident. A week after that appearance on the Ed Sullivan show, and just three
weeks before the Redlands drugs bust, The Stones were invited to top the bill on
‘Sunday Night At The London Palladium,’ the much-loved TV variety show which
had been the making of The Beatles. During rehearsals they announced that they
would not take part in the hallowed tradition of acts waving goodbye to viewers
from a revolving podium during the grand nale. In the end they compromised –
standing off the podium and waving, with clear sarcasm and disrespect. This
highly rebellious act won them few friends.” It’s also perhaps worth noting the
trail of violence, destruction (and death) that The Stones left behind them on their
riotous concert tours and how it might have been perceived by the pillars of The
Establishment and their shadowy secret service associates who were apparently
hell bent on crushing dissent amongst the younger generation. In 1967, Mick
Jagger reportedly told a journalist, “I see a great deal of danger in the air.
Teenagers are not screaming over Pop music anymore, they’re screaming for much
deeper reasons. We’re only serving as a means of giving them an outlet. Pop music
is just the super cial tissue. When I’m on the stage I sense that the teenagers are
trying to communicate to me, like by telepathy, a message of some urgency. Not
about me or my music, but about the world and the way they live. I interpret it as
their demonstration against society and it’s sick attitudes. Teenagers the world
over are weary of being pushed around by half-witted politicians who attempt to
dominate their way of thinking and set a code for their living. This is a protest
against the system.” And so, Philip Norman continues, “the cumulative effect of all
these outrages became clear when the FBI asked for MI5’s co-operation in getting
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards charged with drug possession, thus ensuring that
they would be denied visas for the US tours which were essential if they were to
remain at the top in the music business. By now MI5 was more than happy to
assist in the thwarting of these public menaces, and the detention of David
Snyderman at Heathrow Airport presented an opportunity too good to miss.
Within a couple of weeks of agreeing to help the secret services, he had somehow
become friendly with all the front-line Stones… He duly arrived for that weekend
at Redlands… He kept his cover throughout the Saturday but the following day he
almost gave the game away, talking enigmatically to photographer Michael Cooper
about spying and espionage. ‘He was into the James Bond thing,’ recalls Cooper.
‘You know, the whole CIA bit.’”

In the biography, ‘Mick Jagger,‘ Norman claims that

Cooper, “recalled a moment at Redlands when,
searching through Acid King David’s luggage for
hash, he’d noticed a passport in the name ‘David
English.’ Even the surname they’d known him by –
Snyderman? Sniderman? Schneiderman? – now
seemed suspiciously vague, if indeed, it was genuine.”
Additionally, “not long after turning into David Jove,
he had married a comedienne named Lotus
Weinstock, whose brother, Joel, also discovered his
real surname. Jove gave Joel Weinstock a few hints Philip Norman.
about the Redlands story, but threatened to kill him if
he ever breathed a word of it.” David’s and Lotus’s daughter is the recording artist,
Lili Haydn, who Funk legend George Clinton has reportedly hailed, “the Jimi
Hendrix of the violin.” In yet another ‘Mail Online’ article, this time from 2010, it’s
claimed that she too nally learned of her father’s past identity in a confession he
made to her shortly before losing his battle to cancer in 2004 aged 61. Maggie
Abbott says, “before his death he said he was the Acid King. He never showed any
remorse for what he did. David was a heavy drug user but had a quick wit. He was
the perfect choice to in ltrate The Stones. He told me he wasn’t a drug dealer. He
felt he was expanding the consciousness of some of the greatest minds of his day.”

When she and David met in the early ’80s, he was a

pioneering television producer, perhaps best known for
creating the US TV programme, ‘New Wave Theatre,’
which showcased up and coming Punk and New Wave
acts. Ironically, Abbott used to represent Mick Jagger in
her role as a lm-agent and also knew Marianne
Faithfull whom she unwittingly introduced to David in
1985 when she was still unaware of his alleged former
life. “Taking her over to his den late one night when
everywhere else was closed,” she writes on her website,
Maggie Abbott with Rod “he broke his years of underground cover by telling her
Stewart. his real name, must have been his ego, too hard to
resist seeing her shock too.” In the ‘Mail Online’
Maggie says, “when we got into my car, she said, ‘it’s him, the Acid King. He set up
the Redlands bust. Don’t ever see him again.’ Two months after the evening with
Marianne, I nally had it out with him. To my amazement, he told me everything.
He said, ‘it’s a relief to be able to talk about it.’”

In her 1994 autobiography, Marianne also

recalls coming into contact with Jove /
Schneiderman / Snyderman / Sniderman /
English, although she appears to be referring
to a meeting that occurred some years after
her alleged encounter with him in 1985. She
writes, “I saw him about ve years ago in Los
David Jove the alleged Acid King Angeles. He’s become quite harebrained. I
with wife, Lotus Weinstock. think the Redlands business derailed him.
When somebody comes apart after
something like this, it’s usually because
they’ve done something they can’t live with.” The former Acid King was, according
to Philip Norman, forever haunted by his actions back in February 1967 because
although he “had done everything asked of him, and afterwards had been discreet
to the point of changing his identity, his reward was what he called a ‘lifetime of
fear.’ For the rest of his days, even after COINTELPRO no longer existed, he half
expected those heavy people who’d spirited him out of Britain in 1967 to come
after him and make sure he never did blow his cover.” Maggie Abbott says, “I
thought about trying to persuade David to come clean publicly. But he was always
armed with a handgun and I feared that if I gave him away, he’d shoot me.” Joel
Weinstock, who Philip Norman claims David had threatened, reportedly told the
‘Mail Online,’ “one New Year’s Eve, he showed me a gun and said he’d just killed a
man who was messing with his car.” It’s also rumoured that Jove murdered Peter
Ivers, the presenter of ‘New Wave Theatre.’ He was found bludgeoned to death
with a hammer in his Los Angeles apartment in 1983. The killer has never been
identi ed. Abbott says, “there was talk that Peter had decided to leave the show
and David was angry.” Although the Los Angeles Police Department has reportedly
re-opened the investigation into his slaying, it’s perhaps safe to assume that the
killing will forever remain a mystery, as will the exact circumstances surrounding
the movements of David ‘Jove’ during February 1967. However, in her 1994
autobiography, Marianne Faithfull is unequivocal. “In retrospect it was obvious to
all of us that Schneiderman had set us up,” she writes. “At the time this conspiracy
theory business sounded like your typical drugged-out, paranoid hippie ravings,
but if you read the recent revelations of what MI5 was up to around this time, it
doesn’t seem so far-fetched.” In ‘Life,’ Keith Richards states, “we’d become the
focal point of a nervous Establishment. I’d obviously p****d off the authorities.
I’m a guitar player in a Pop band and I’m being targeted by the British government
and it’s vicious police force, all of which shows me how frightened they are. We
won two world wars, and these people are shivering in their Goddamn boots. ‘All
your children will be like this if you don’t stop this right now.’ There was such
ignorance on both sides. We didn’t know we were doing anything that was going to
bring the empire crashing to the oor, and they were searching in their sugar
bowls not knowing what they were looking for.” At the trial, Mick Jagger was
sentenced to three months in prison for possession of amphetamines and Keith
Richards to one year for allowing cannabis to be smoked in his home.

Re ecting on Judge Leslie Allen Block’s ruling, Simon Wells says, “for a
misdemeanour that this day would be treated in the same way as a parking ticket,
they received exemplary sentences, but more than that… there were other less
anonymous young men who were receiving the same sort of treatment. So it
wasn’t exemplary as far as Mick and Keith were concerned, but he certainly
showed no clemency.” Jagger was sent to Brixton Prison in south London, and
Keith Richards to Wormwood Scrubs in the west of the city. The guitarist recalls
that “most of the rst day of the prison sentence was induction. You get in with
the rest of the inductees and take a shower and they spray you with lice spray. Oh,
nice one, son. The whole place is meant to intimidate you to the max. I walked
around in an orderly circle with so much rabbit going on it took me a while to get a
touch on the back. ‘Keef, you got bail, you sod.’ Our lawyers had led an appeal and
I’d been released on bail.” So had Jagger.

Judge Block’s sentencing sparked an uproar among certain quarters of society. Not
surprisingly, famous musicians of the day rallied round in solidarity. The Who
recorded cover versions of the Stones songs ‘The Last Time’ and ‘Under My Thumb’
to campaign for their release although by the time these were made available,
Mick and Keith were already out of jail.

Prior to the trial, John Lennon and Paul

McCartney sang backing vocals on The
Rolling Stones’ ‘We Love You,’ a track
written and recorded by the band in
response to the drug busts. It begins with
the jangling sound of a jailer’s keys followed
by echoing footsteps and a cell door being
The Who’s support for Mick and
slammed shut. Then, a distinctive piano-
Keith.
intro played by noted session musician,
(CLICK TO ENLARGE)
Nicky Hopkins appears before we’re led into
a four-minute-plus psychedelia-soaked
sonic collage that’s punctuated by eerie sound-effects, tribal-style drum rhythms
and hypnotic vocal harmonies. Released as a single in August ‘67, there was also an
accompanying music-video which showed the band at work in the studio
(including a seemingly ‘wasted’ Brian Jones) as well as a depiction of a court-room
scene in which Richards plays the role of the judge and Jagger a defendant.
Marianne Faithfull also appears and is seen standing at the dock before a bewigged
Keith with a fur rug in her hands looking remorseful. This is no doubt a reference
to the over-emphasis that police, the courts and news-media dedicated to her state
of (un)dress on the night of the Redlands bust when of cers witnessed her wearing
nothing but a fur rug. Having just nished a bath, she’d wrapped it around her
naked body and rejoined her fellow house-guests. In her autobiography, she recalls
that, “the lady constable wanted to search me. I dropped the fur rug just for a
second. It wasn’t one bit lascivious, just a quick ounce done very gracefully,
almost like a curtsy, so they could see I had no clothes on and that’s all. I thought
it was so hysterically funny. I couldn’t help myself. I always have been an
incorrigible exhibitionist. It was the gulf between us on Acid and them with their
note-pads that made it seem so hilarious at the time. It didn’t seem quite so funny
later. I certainly got paid back in spades.” Indeed she did. A rumour that was born
from the Redlands bust is that Faithfull was caught in a compromising situation
with a ’Mars’ chocolate-bar when police raided the house. There’s no evidence to
prove this actually occurred and Marianne has repeatedly and vehemently denied
it in the years since. Despite her protestations though, this slice of Rock folklore
has become an established part of everyday urban legend.
The ‘fur rug factor’ was also referred to by the prosecution at the trial, as Keith
Richards documents in ‘Life.’ He writes,

The actual exchange went as follows:

Morris (The Prosecutor): There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee
wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would
expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the
presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan
servant?
Keith: Not at all.
Morris: You regard that, do you, as quite normal?
Keith: We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

It was perhaps something of a surprise to The Rolling Stones that the most
signi cant and effective support in the wake of the drug bust came from what
might have been perceived at the time one of Great Britain’s bastions of ‘The
Establishment‘; None other than ’The Times’ newspaper. Some days after Mick
and Keith’s sentencing, it published an article that was specially written by it’s
editor, William Rees-Mogg, titled, ‘Who Breaks a Butter y on a Wheel?’ It not only
criticised and denounced Judge Block’s ruling, but the begrudging disdain that was
being directed by some towards Mick Jagger.

Rees-Mogg wrote,

“Mr. Jagger was charged with being in possession of four tablets containing
amphetamine sulphate and methyl amphetamine hydrochloride… They are not a
highly dangerous drug, or in proper dosage a dangerous drug at all… Four is not a
large number. This is not the quantity which a pusher of drugs would have on him, nor
even the quantity one would expect in an addict. It is surprising… that Judge Block
should have decided to sentence Mr. Jagger to imprisonment and particularly
surprising as Mr. Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought
before the Courts.

It would be wrong to speculate on the judge’s reasons

which we do not know. It is however, possible to
consider the public reaction. There are many people
who take a primitive view of the matter, what one might
call a pre-legal view of the matter. They consider that
Mr. Jagger has ‘got what was coming to him.‘ They
resent the anarchic quality of The Rolling Stones’
performances, dislike their songs, dislike their in uence
on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence…

Judge Allen Block. As a sociological concern this may be reasonable

enough, and at an emotional level it is very
understandable, but it has nothing at all to do with the case.”

William Rees-Mogg’s ‘Times’ editorial is often regarded a crucial deciding factor in

the eventual overturning of Keith’s conviction and the reduction of Mick’s
sentence to a Conditional Discharge. Brian Jones’s drug arrest back in May ‘67
meanwhile, also saw out it’s end in the courts where he was handed a nine-month
prison-term for possession of cannabis and permitting his home to be used by
others for smoking it. This was later reduced on appeal to a £1,000 ne and three
months probation.
Author, Simon Wells believes the Redlands incident and the ensuing trial was a
watershed moment that in uenced future attitudes towards drugs in Britain. He
says, “it really totally threw up into the air the whole situation of drug laws and
soft drug use. The whole debate of drug use – courtesy of what had happened to
Mick and Keith – was given a huge platform and a massive pro le… When you look
at what came off of this trial and imprisonment – it really informed drug laws, soft
drug use – and more importantly the understanding of soft narcotic use. It actually
led the way for a better understanding of that. So it’s a very important moment in
British cultural history, and I dare say, for the rest of the world.” It also perhaps
marked a turning point in the Rolling Stones’ history after which, their long-held
reputation as Pop’s perennial ‘bad boys’ was elevated to a whole new level. Their
manager, Andrew Loog Oldham had certainly played his part in cultivating this
image early on in their career, marketing them as the dirty, wicked equivalent to
The Beatles and masterminding such headlines as, ’Would You Let Your Daughter
Marry a Rolling Stone?’

However, none of his inspired trickery could perhaps compare to

the scale of events that unfolded in the wake of the Redlands bust
– after all – The Stones had apparently taken on The
Establishment… and won. In ‘Life,‘ Keith Richards writes, “in
retrospect, the judge actually played into our hands. He managed
to turn it into a great PR coup for us, even though I must say I
Pop svengali,
didn’t enjoy Wormwood Scrubs, even for 24 hours. The judge
Andrew Loog
managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight.” Marianne
Oldham
Faithfull certainly shares that view. She states, “before Redlands,
pictured
Keith had been overshadowed by Mick and Brian, but his de ance
during the
on the stand made him a major folk hero. This was the beginning
1960s.
of Keith’s legend. A symbol of dissipation and the demonic. And
the amazing thing is that subsequently he actually became that.
Satan’s right-hand man with the skull-rings and the demonic imagery. He turned
it all to his advantage.”

Keith, and, in particular, Mick, most certainly did attract a

signi cant degree of notoriety in the years that directly
followed the Redlands furore for irting as publicly as
they did with “the demonic.” In fact, when both of them
were released from prison, they returned to the studio to
continue work on the next Rolling Stones album which
was subsequently titled, ‘Their Satanic Majesties
Request.’ It was their rst recording since 1963 not to
feature Andrew Loog Oldham’s name in the production
credits and by the time it reached the stores in December
‘67, he’d effectively ceased to be their “SKULL-RINGS AND
manager. Responsible not only for shaping the band’s DEMONIC
public persona but also for convincing Jagger and IMAGERY”… Keith
Richards to start writing their own songs, he’d apparently Pictured on the cover
served his purpose. In his absence, The Stones swaggered of his 2010 memoirs,
into a phase of unparalleled creative brilliance releasing ‘Life.’
a string of landmark, classic albums between 1968 and
1972. In the second instalment of this three-part retrospective (which is scheduled
for posting here some time early 2014), ‘Conspiro Media’ will focus on this period
when the band not only hit the peak of it’s powers, but was arguably at it’s most
controversial, decadent, and devilishly dangerous.

** IN PART TWO: The Altamont Music Festival tragedy, The downfall of Brian
Jones, ‘Sympathy for the Devil,’ Kenneth Anger, and much more.

——————————————————————————————————————-
REFERENCE LINKS:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rolling_Stones

http://www.themarqueeclub.net/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marquee_Club

http://kastoffkinks.co.uk/Mick%20Avory%20interview%20part%201.htm

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/50-years-ago-today-the-rolling-stones-
played-their- rst-gig-20120712

‘Life’ by Keith Richards… Pages: 153, 183, 220, 234, 236-240, 243-246, 251, 233,
252-253

http://www.spinner.com/2008/03/07/twisted-tales-ian-stewart-the-uncool-and-
almost-forgotten-s/

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2 comments

Mark O'Blazney
MARCH 17, 2016 AT 12:20 PM

Food for thought. Yummy. Thank you.

REPLY

conspiromedia
MARCH 17, 2016 AT 12:55 PM

And this is just the hors d’oeuvre. Wait till you read Part 3!

REPLY

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