Mick Jagger: ‘The Times hit the floor of my cell. The same day I was out’


Mick Jagger believes that a landmark editorial led to the quashing of his jail sentence for drugs in 1967
OLAVI KASKISUO COLLECTION/LEHTIKUVA/CAMERA PRESS

Ben Macintyre
July 1 2017 The Times

Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? So ran the headline over one of the most famous Times editorials of the past century, published 50 years ago today.

The butterfly in question was Mick Jagger. The wheel was the judicial system, which had just sentenced the Rolling Stone to a draconian prison sentence for a minor drug offence.

And the author was the late William Rees-Mogg, then editor of this newspaper, a man as far removed from Jagger in sensibility, demeanour, style, background and musical taste as it is possible to imagine.

His decision to come to Jagger’s defence in July 1967 marked a turning point in cultural history, when one of the most powerful figures in the British establishment sided with the strutting bad boy of rock’n’roll. It was the moment when the ruling class began to take the counter-culture seriously.

From his home in France, Jagger, (not without irony) now Sir Michael, has spoken in depth for the first time about the infamous drug bust that led to his incarceration, the generational culture-clash that lay behind it, and the Times leader that, he believes, led to his sudden and surprise release and the quashing of his sentence.

“What did it mean to me personally? That editorial got me out jail. One day it dropped, and the next thing I was out.”

The saga began in February 1967, when Keith Richards threw a party at Redlands, his country home in West Sussex. Present were Jagger, then 23, and his girlfriend, the singer Marianne Faithfull, Richards’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, the art dealer Robert “Groovy Bob” Fraser, and David Schneidermann, known as “The Acid King”. George Harrison and Pattie Boyd were also said to be there.

he Redlands weekend has since been mythologised as a decadent, drug-fuelled debauch. Jagger remembers it differently. “It was just a rather ordinary bohemian party, you know what I mean. We had a nice day wandering across the downs. And then we just came back and were hanging out, talking and watching telly.”

The words “bohemian” and “know what I mean” are significant: there were drugs in abundance.

“Of course the press were wanting to sensationalise it, to make it sound like there was some sort of orgy going on.”

About 5.30pm, a large police posse swooped on the building. Richards was so high, he recalled in his memoirs, that he thought the police were a group of identically dressed dwarves: “All these little people, wearing the same clothes.” Faithfull was wearing nothing but a fur rug. Contrary to the enduring myth, there was no British confectionery in evidence, anywhere.

“It was a surreal moment,” Jagger recalls. “A rather ordinary nice English farmhouse and a lot of young people enjoying themselves in a sort of normal way without causing anybody any trouble, and suddenly 20 policemen barged in.”

The police may have been tipped off by the News of the World, possibly by Schneidermann (alias Britton), who disappeared back to the US soon after. Mysteriously, Harrison and Boyd apparently left before the raid. The Beatles had been awarded MBEs, and were considered far less radical and dangerous than the Stones.

The police searched the house, and came away with a number of substances.

Four amphetamine tablets were found in Jagger’s pocket. These had been purchased abroad, legally, but required a prescription in the UK. It was a thin legal peg to hang him on, but it was enough: “They had to do you for something. That was the whole point.”

Jagger was charged with possession of amphetamines, and Fraser with possessing heroin. Richards was charged with permitting the smoking of cannabis resin in his property. Jagger remains astonished by the pettiness of that charge. “You could even be busted for someone else smoking a joint in your house [even though] you’re not doing anything to hurt anyone else.”

At the trial in June, the judge peered at the accused rock stars and asked whether it was normal for a young girl to be wearing only a fur rug in the presence of eight men, “two of whom were hangers-on and one a Moroccan servant”.

Richards responded, magnificently: “We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.”

And that, says Jagger, was the reason for the bust. The Stones had become emblematic of a louche and defiant way of life, deeply threatening to many in an older generation. “The Stones were good targets. We made good copy. It was the idea of degenerative moral standards. They were looking for scapegoats for some sort of generational lifestyle thing.”

The judge threw the book at them. Jagger was sentenced to three months in prison and a fine of £100 (about £660 today); Richards was fined £500 and given one year’s imprisonment. They immediately appealed, but in the meantime Jagger was taken to Brixton prison, and Richards to Wormwood Scrubs.

Which is when The Times stepped in.

William Rees-Mogg (1928–2012), later Lord Rees-Mogg, product of Charterhouse and Balliol, was by no means a product of the counter-culture. The modernity of his musical tastes extended as far as Jerome Kern’s interwar Broadway musicals, and not much further. “I was not a fan of their music,” he later said of the Rolling Stones. There is no evidence he ever heard a single Stones song. But behind the double-breasted pinstripes was a man of granite principle.

The headline of his editorial was a quotation from Alexander Pope’s poem Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, “butterfly upon a wheel” being a metaphor for using excessive force (the wheel was an ancient form of torture) against a delicate and defenceless victim. The editorial was a zinger.

“If we are going to make any case a symbol of the conflict between the sound traditional values of Britain and the new hedonism, then we must be sure that the sound traditional values include those of tolerance and equity.”

Rees-Mogg believed that Jagger had been singled out for excessive punishment, not because of what he had done, but because of who he was, and what he represented. “Mr Jagger’s is about as mild a drug case as can ever have been brought before the courts,” Rees-Mogg thundered. “It should be the particular quality of British justice to ensure that Mr Jagger is treated exactly the same as anyone else, no better and no worse . . . There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.”

Rees-Mogg was not defending drug use. Indeed, a few months later, in another editorial, he wrote that psychedelic drugs were “dangerous and wrong”. He was defending the right of a “new hedonist” to a fair trial.

Today Jagger is phlegmatic about his night in Brixton prison: “It was not particularly nice in Brixton. Not to be recommended.” At the time he was scared, knowing there was a probability he would be in jail for three months. “That was definitely on the cards. I wasn’t so full of it that I thought, ‘Oh, they’ll never put me in prison’. It was the opposite.” Jagger had stayed in a lot of luxury hotels that provided a free morning newspaper, but he had not expected this service to extend to HM Prison Brixton.

“The Times was thrown through the slot in my cell door, and thudded and hit the concrete floor of my cell and I thought, ‘What the f*** is that?’ I thought, ‘Well, that’s nice, they’re delivering me The Times’. I hadn’t had a lot of experience of being in jail. When I read it I realised why they had in fact delivered it to me.

“The same day I was out.”

Even a Times editorial cannot directly spring a man from jail, but it probably influenced the decision to quash the sentences against Richards and Jagger. Fraser pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to six months’ hard labour. A heroin addict, he later died of Aids: “Poor Robert, it really ruined his life. They weren’t really after Robert Fraser.”

Looking back, Jagger believes his release and the collapse of the case against him were directly attributable to Rees-Mogg’s words and the influence of this paper.

“The Times editorial was something to be reckoned with. There’s no real equivalent today — today you’d have to have a mass onslaught on social media or something, but in those days The Times had an impact that meant people had to actually say, ‘OK, this is something that the actual establishment press is saying’. Rees-Mogg was really pointing out the hysteria of the rest of the press and the justice system in general and he was saying, ‘Come on guys, this is just not English fair play kind of thing’.”

“Sir Mick” is now himself almost an establishment figure, but in 1967 the Rolling Stones and their lead singer were seen by many as a genuine threat to society, civilisation and morality, a sexual rebel with, as the official Times history observed, his “thick-lipped mouthings and corybantic contortions”.

“There was such a sea change in society in every way, but not only in the arts, in philosophy, everything, ways of behaving. It was such a quick sea change: either people really rather loved it and thought, ‘Oh well, it’s a bit like the roaring 20s’, or they thought it was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to England, and didn’t understand it.”

The Times editorial prompted an entire page of readers’ letters, split between Jagger’s delighted supporters and furious opponents. The playwright John Osborne, scourge of the establishment, called the Times stance “a reassurance and welcome contrast to the odd silence from most of Fleet Street”.

Rees-Mogg was surprised and pleased by the public response, though he noted, typically, that Pope’s scansion had been tampered with: “A sub-editor found that my heading was too long by two letters and altered ‘upon’ to ‘on’, thereby throwing Pope’s line out of its true iambic rhythm.”

The saga had a bizarre finale that revealed the gulf between generations in stark relief. On the day of his release, Jagger agreed to be flown by helicopter to the garden of the lord lieutenant of Essex, where he was interviewed for television by a bishop, a leading Jesuit, a former attorney-general and the editor of The Times. The footage, accessible on YouTube, is hilarious. Jagger seems to have landed from another planet which, in a way, he had.

“It was quite mad,” he says. “Impossible to satirise. Why was I doing that? It was the day I got out of prison. I was absolutely hopeless on that programme.”

Questioned on drug policy today, Jagger is circumspect. “Certainly we still have huge drug problems. And we haven’t come up with that many solutions . . . It’s not something you want to do all the time, that’s what I say.” What does he say to his own children about drugs? “That depends on which child.” Since he has eight children, this gives him considerable scope.

Despite their profound differences, Jagger and Rees-Mogg found that they had common ground. “He had a certain moral principle. He wouldn’t agree with you, but he had his opinions and they were influential. When I met him he was a quite interesting, a very establishment sort of bloke, bit awkward in that English way, not quite able to communicate with you easily at the beginning of your friendship, but afterwards warmed up.”

In the end, that is why the “butterfly” editorial mattered, and matters still: the establishment reached out to the new culture, opposites reconciled, age and youth allied, at least for a beat. Up until that moment, most of the media had painted the Rolling Stones, and Jagger in particular, in diabolical colours.

The Times reflected the changing times, by showing sympathy for the Devil.

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

Thank you very much, bye bye johnny. I reached my article limit for this week, so I couldn't read it on the Times' website.

"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"

Someone also retweeted a short video posted by @thetimes showing Rees-Mogg talking about it. I don't know how to post it but you'll see it if you scroll down the page here:

[twitter.com]

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Beast
Someone also retweeted a short video posted by @thetimes showing Rees-Mogg talking about it. I don't know how to post it but you'll see it if you scroll down the page here:

[twitter.com]

Thank you, Beast!

[twitter.com]

Thanks for posting.
I don't see Keith mentioned. Perhaps that is because he wanted to focus his argument on one person; perhaps also Keith was not as well known to the general public as Mick.

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wonderboy
Thanks for posting.
I don't see Keith mentioned. Perhaps that is because he wanted to focus his argument on one person; perhaps also Keith was not as well known to the general public as Mick.

I think more to do with the fact that Mick was sentenced on a technicality, the pills he had were bought legally on the continent although they needed a prescription in the UK. Keith was sentenced for allowing his home to be used for the consumption of illegal drugs something which was, and still is, illegal.
Both sentences were excessive, though.


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2017-07-02 21:26 by Deltics.

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wonderboy
perhaps also Keith was not as well known to the general public as Mick.

Keith was scary, scruffy and unapologetic about his lifestyle, therefore he was undefendable.
Jagger was more "salvageable" in the eyes of the upper crust : a nice boy led astray by nefarious influences.

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dcba

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wonderboy
perhaps also Keith was not as well known to the general public as Mick.

Keith was scary, scruffy and unapologetic about his lifestyle, therefore he was undefendable.
Jagger was more "salvageable" in the eyes of the upper crust : a nice boy led astray by nefarious influences.

That too. I don't imagine his "petty morals" quote went down too well with Judge Block.


"As we say in England, it can get a bit trainspottery"