I would like to order from the Times a copy of the 1960's paper with this article in so I can frame it. But I can't remember the date. Anyone know that.
Cheers.

jagger50 Wrote:
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> I would like to order from the Times a copy of the
> 1960's paper with this article in so I can frame
> it. But I can't remember the date. Anyone know
> that.
> Cheers.


GOOGLE IT!!!

tat2you Wrote:
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> GOOGLE IT!!!

July 1, 1967. No need to be a twat about it....

Not quite sure who you're calling a twat. BV said normal manners expected.

What's this article about?

jagger50 Wrote:
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> Not quite sure who you're calling a twat.

Not you.

It was written by William Rees Mogg about a trial of MJ drugs related. He took the title from William Blake. He made a social comment defending MJ. I give you the last passage.

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.

Interesting, thanks.

As the younger fans among us may not be so much aware that in the early days the Stones were considered a threat to our society. A very threat to the core of England. They were hounded, especially Brian. There were several drug arrrests.
Not so in tact now but the then establishment felt threatened by The Stones.
They even caused uoproar by urinating in a gas station. Such were the times.
What makes the Times article so interesting was part of the establishment defended the rights of MJ. I know it's hard to imagine how things were. But William Rees Moggs article really shook things up.

>> He took the title from William Blake. <<

not Alexander Pope?

with sssoul Wrote:
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> >> He took the title from William Blake.
> <<
>
> not Alexander Pope?


Not sure what you mean. I have got my info from Philip Normans book The Stones.

i remember that editorial really well - how *confused* the grown-ups were! there they thought some kind of "hah so there" victory had been scored,
and the next thing they knew another grown-up - and someone really *serious* at that! - was pointing out that it was just plain wrong.
i was 12 years old at the time, and had no idea what this "drug" stuff was all about, and this was really my first big "consciousness-raising" incident -
the concept of social injustice, how very much the grown-ups had got so indefensibly wrong - and boy did it hit home!
little did we suspect what was yet to come, huh ...
the Stones always denied having any "political" agenda, but man did they ever help wake up a generation, just by being who they are and not backing down.
and if anyone had had any doubts about these cats, they sure found out in 67: the Rolling Stones ain't fakin.


- 1967, by David Bailey (courtesy of BrownEyedGirll)





Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2006-02-10 00:03 by with sssoul.

>> Not sure what you mean. <<

the line is from Alexander Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735). maybe Blake quoted him.

with sssoul Wrote:
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> >> Not sure what you mean. <<
>
> the line is from Alexander Pope's Epistle to Dr.
> Arbuthnot (1735). maybe Blake quoted him.


OK thanks for that. I have a bog standard education. I enjoyed your comment.
What interests me about all this is how things were then. The Stones must have been a journalists dream. Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone.
Even the Trudea affair got on the front pages of the national press. I remember the Stones being criticised for having long hair. WHAT!

in restrospect it all seems closely tied in with the civil rights movement,
which of course the Stones didn't launch, but it sure seems to me that they lent it a lot of force by waking up a whole generation of white kids
not only to African American music, but also to the way you get treated if you look different from what was standard for the white middle-class at the time.
and add to that the fact that it just happened to be the largest generation that had ever lived, and mass media were just coming into full bloom at the same time,
so that this handful of skinny English cats could deliver their message through the kids' record players, via radio and television -
through the Ed freakin Sullivan show even - hear it for a thousand miles! yikes, no wonder the grown-ups were scared shirtless.

besides that, of course, the Stones were just dripping with sex - that sure scared a lot of grown-ups! still does, obviously -
but a TV network censoring "a synonym for rooster" is nothing compared with the history of assorted governments' attempts to bring the Stones down -
man the oh-lordy those cats have been through, just for wanting to play music for people! hail hail Rolling Stones.


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2006-02-10 00:02 by with sssoul.

As paranoid as Brian Jones was, there was reason to believe the British bobbies were watching the Stones carefully, following them to see if there was any drug activity going down! The bust at Redlands was the culmination of lots of weeks of surveliance.

hI,
I HAVE BOOK ON THIS WHICH IS TO DO WITH MICK AND KEITH BEING PUT IN JAIL
AFTER THE DRUG BUST,VERY GOOD BOOK TOO.KISH.

Everything about the Stones in the early days was so different. The first two albums had no writing on which was unheard of then. If ALO had his own way the Decca logo would have been taken off. The Stones recorded some tracks in Chicago which again was so unusual for a UK band. They thought there was a plot set against them by the estasblishment. This could have been understandable. The drug bust of 1967 came about by a drug taking friend of the Stones informing on them. Brian had good reason to be paronoid that the police was watching him. When MJ sported the old ermine he said at the palace that the establihment did not exist anymore as it did now. A testament to post war stuffy old England.
What the Sex Pistols did was nothing in comparison. It's all been done before.

>> The drug bust of 1967 came about by a drug taking friend of the Stones informing on them. <<

... actually i believe it's a matter of record that it was the newspaper that Jagger was suing for libel that "tipped off" the police,
which the police were of course more than happy to comply with. the Stones had been cruising for a bruising for a long time,
playing that dirty jungle music, becoming so outlandishly successful and flamboyantly rich,
way more than was okay for kids from the wrong side of the tracks; the countercultural/drug aspects of it were just frosting.
it's noteworthy that the police waited until George Harrison had left the party at Redlands before they closed in; no one wanted to bust a Beatle,
but as Keith has pointed out, the Stones' "bad boy" image had made them an easy target for this kind of harrassment.

it's so striking that Between the Buttons came out about two weeks before the Redlands bust. "they're dying to add me to their collection" -
the boy saw it coming, and he got up on his hind legs and met it head on, just like ... well i'll be darned: just like a Rolling Stone.
and then listen to their next album! anyone wondering if the Stones' close brush with the law had scared them into playing nice and timid and docile -
LoFL! Satanic Majesties is such a great glorious UP YOURS to the whole authoritarian world that had tried to bring them down -
"where's that joint" indeed ... guts & balls, baby. it's the Rolling Stones.


- out on bail, july 1st 1967 (Bettman)




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2006-02-10 20:53 by with sssoul.

aha and: i believe this is the full text of Rees-Mogg's Times editorial.
it starts rather abruptly, but that's because the papers were so full of the story that it would have been redundant to repeat the background facts.

Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?

Mr. Jagger has been sentenced to imprisonment for 3 months. He is appealing against conviction and sentence, and has been granted bail until the hearing of the appeal later in the year. In the meantime the sentence of of imprisonment is bound to be widely discussed by the public. And the circumstances are sufficiently unusual to warrant such discussion in the public interest.

Mr. Jagger was charged with being in possession of four tablets containing amphetamine sulphate and methyl amphetamine hydrochloride; these tablets had been bought perfectly legally in Italy, and brought back to this country. They are not a highly dangerous drug, or in proper dosage, a dangerous drug at all. They are a Benzedrine type and the Italian manufacturers recommend them both as a stimulant and as a remedy for travel sickness.

In Britain, it is an offence to possess these drugs without a doctors prescription. Mr. Jagger's doctor says that he knew and had authorized their use, but he did not give a prescription for them as indeed they had already been purchased. His evidence was not challenged. This was, therefore, an offence of technical character which before this case drew the point to public attention any honest man might have been liable to commit. If after his visit to the pope, the Archbishop of Canterbury had bought propriety air sickness pills on Rome Airport and imported the unused tablets into Britain on his return, he would of risked committing precisely the same offence. No one who has ever traveled and bought proprietary drugs abroad can be sure that he has not broken the law.

Judge Block directed the jury that the approval of a doctor is not a defence in law to the charge of possessing drugs without a prescription, and the jury convicted. Mr. Jagger was not charged with complicity in any other drug offence that occurred in the same house. They were separate cases, and no evidence was produced to suggest that he knew Mr. Fraser had heroin tablets or that the vanishing Mr. Snidermann had cannabis resin. It is indeed no offence to be in the same building or the same company as people possessing or even using drugs, nor could it reasonably be made an offence. The drugs that Mr. Jagger had in his possession must therefore be treated on their own as a separate issue from the other drugs that the other people may have had in their possession at the same time. It may be difficult for lay opinion to make this distinction clearly, but obviously justice cannot be done if one man is to be punished for a purely contingent association with someone else's offence.

We have therefore, a conviction against Mr. Jagger purely on the grounds that he possessed four Italian pep pills, quite legally bought, but not legally imported without a prescription. Four is not a large number. This is not a quantity which a pusher of drugs would have on him, nor even the quantity one would expect in an addict. In any case Mr. Jagger's career is obviously one that does involve great personal strain and exhaustion; his doctor says that he approves the occasional use of these drugs, and it seems likely that similar drugs would have been prescribed if there was a need for them. Millions of similar drugs are prescribed in Britain every year, and for a variety of conditions. One has to ask, therefore, how it is that this technical offence, divorced as it must be from other people's offences, was thought to deserve the penalty of imprisonment. In the courts at large it is most uncommon for imprisonment to be imposed on first offenders where the drugs are not major drugs of addiction and there is no question of drug traffic. The normal penalty is probation, and the purpose of probation is to encourage the offender to develop his career and to avoid the drug risks in the future. It is surprising therefore 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. That 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 influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence, a word used by Miss Monica Furlong in the Daily Mail.

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. One has to ask a different question: Has Mr. Jagger received the same treatment as he would have received if he had not been a famous figure, with all the criticism his celebrity has aroused? If a promising undergraduate had come back from a summer visit to Italy with four pep pills in his pocket would it have been thought necessary to display him, handcuffed, to the public? There are cases in which a single figure becomes the focus for public concern about some aspects of public morality. The Steven Ward case, with it's dubious evidence and questionable verdict, was one of them, and that verdict killed Steven Ward. There are elements of the same emotions in the reactions to this case. 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. 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.

- William Rees Mogg, july 1st 1967


"What do you want - what?!"
- Keith



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2006-02-10 19:44 by with sssoul.

Hi with ssoul. I believe the informant taking drugs with MJ & KR was Acid King
David Schneidermann, a suspected plant from The News of The World.

It's nice you took the effort to post the whole transcript.