Life (26 page)

What Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs had in common was nerve and fearlessness—more front than Selfridges. And they were mama’s boys. Big mama fear amongst the lot of them. Maybe that’s why they were all poofs. Strawberry Bob—he was always scared of his mum. “Oh! My mother’s coming.” “So what?” Which didn’t mean they were soft or pussy whipped. It was the respect for their mothers that was overpowering. Obviously they had very strong mothers, because these guys were very strong guys. Only now have I learned that Gibby’s mother was queen of the Girl Guides worldwide, the chief commissioner for overseas. It’s not something we talked about in those days. I never realized the influence of this duo back then, but they changed the landscape and greatly influenced the style of the times.

Gibbs and Fraser were only the front names in all that. There were Lampsons and Lambtons, Sykeses, Michael Rainey. There was Sir Mark Palmer, page boy to the queen and inveterate didicoy, bless his heart, him of the gold teeth and the whippets tied to baling twine and the caravans that he used to trundle through the country lanes and park on the estates of his friends. I guess if you’re brought up and trained to carry the queen’s frock, a Gypsy caravan might look kind of attractive after a while. It was all right before you got hair on your cock. But after that, what do you do? “I haul the queen’s frock.”

Suddenly we were being courted by half the aristocracy, the younger scions, the heirs to some ancient pile, the Ormbsy-Gores, the Tennants, the whole lot. I’ve never known if they were slumming or we were snobbing. They were very nice people. I decided it was no skin off of my nose. If somebody’s interested, they’re welcome. You want to hang, you want to hang. It was the first time I know of when that lot actively sought out musicians in such large numbers. They realized there was something blowin’ in the wind, to quote Bob. They felt embarrassed up there, the Knights in Blue, and they felt they were being left out of things if they didn’t join in. So there was this weird mixture of aristos and gangsters, the fascination that the higher end of society has with the more brutish end. That was particularly the case with Robert Fraser.

Robert liked to mix with the underworld. Maybe it was his rebellion against the suffocation of his background, the repression of homosexuality. He gravitated towards people like David Litvinoff, who was on the borders of art and villainy, a friend of the Kray brothers, the East End gangsters. There were villains in the story as well. That’s how Tony Sanchez came into it, because Tony Sanchez helped Robert out of a tight spot when he had gambling debts. That’s how Robert met Tony. So Tony became Robert’s conduit, sort of helper-out with villains, and his dealer.

Tony ran a gambling casino for Spanish waiters in London, after-hours. He was a dope dealer and a gangster with a Mark 10 Jaguar, two-tone, all done up pimp-style. His father ran a famous Italian restaurant in Mayfair. Spanish Tony was a hard man.
Biff bang.
One of those. He was a great guy until he became a bad one. His trouble, just like many others’, was that you can’t be like that and also become a junkie. The two don’t mix. If you’re going to be a hard man, if you’re going to be smart and be on your toes, which is what Tony could have been and was for a while, you can’t afford to be on dope. It slows you down. If you’re going to be selling it, OK, that’s the way it is, but don’t sample it. There’s a big difference between a dealer and a consumer. To be a dealer, you’ve got to be way in front, otherwise you slip up, and that’s what happened to Tony.

He set me up a couple of times. Without my knowing it—I found out later—he used me as a getaway driver on a hit-and-run jewel theft in the Burlington Arcade. “Here, Keith, I’ve got this Jag. Want to try it out?” What they wanted was a clean car and a clean driver. And Tony had obviously told these blokes that I was a good night driver. So I waited outside this place, not knowing what was happening. Tony was a good mate of mine, but he used to stitch me up.

Another good friend, Michael Cooper, I used to hang with a lot. Great photographer. He could hang and hang; he could take so much stuff. He was the only photographer I ever knew who actually had a tremor when he was taking pictures, and yet they’d come out right. “How did you do that? Your hands were trembling. The whole picture should be a blur.” “I know just when to push.” Michael recorded the early Stones life in great detail because he never stopped taking pictures. Pictures were a total way of life for Michael. He was absolutely captured by images, or, more likely, images had captured him.

Michael was Robert’s creature in a way. Robert had a Svengali side to him and was strongly attracted to Michael Cooper on all sorts of levels, but he particularly admired Michael’s artistry and he promoted him. Michael was a networker. He was the glue between us, all these different parts of London, the aristos and the hoods and the others.

When you take all the stuff we took, you’re always talking about everything else rather than what you’re working at. Which meant Michael and me sitting around talking about the quality of the dope. Two fiends looking to see if they can get higher than ever before without damaging themselves too much. No talking about the “great work” I’m going to do or you’re going to do or anybody else is going to do. That was peripheral. I knew how hard he worked. He was manic, like me, but you took it for granted.

One thing about Michael was he would spiral into deep, ominous depressions. Black dogs. The poet of the lens was a more fragile creature than one imagined. Michael spun slowly towards a bourne from which there was no return. But for now we were basically gangsters. Not that we pulled any jobs, but we were an elite little circle. Flamboyant and outrageous, quite honestly, pushing all the margins because it had to be done.

T
here’s not much
you can really say about acid except God, what a trip!
S
tepping off into this area was very uncertain, uncharted. In the years ’67 and ’68 there was a real turnover in the feeling of what was going on, a lot of confusion and a lot of experimentation. The most amazing thing that I can remember on acid is watching birds fly—birds that kept flying in front of my face that weren’t actually there, flocks of birds of paradise. And actually it was a tree blowing in the wind. I was walking down a country lane, it was very green, and I could almost see every wing movement. It was slowed down to the point where I could even say, “Shit, I could do that!” That’s why I understand the odd person jumping out of a window. Because the whole notion of how it’s done is suddenly clear. A flock of birds took about half an hour to fly across my vision, an incredible fluttering, and I could see every feather. And they looked at me while they did it like, “Try that on for size.” Shit… OK, there’s some things I can’t do.

You had to be with the right people when you were taking acid, otherwise beware. Brian on acid, for example, was a loose cannon. Either he’d be incredibly relaxed and funny, or he’d be one of the cats that would lead you down the bad road when the good road closes. And suddenly you’re going there, down the street of paranoia. And on acid you can’t really control it. Why am I going into his black dot? I just don’t want to go there. Let’s go back to the crossroads and see if the good road opens. I want to see that flock of birds again and have a few astounding ideas for playing and find the Lost Chord. The holy grail of music, very fashionable at the time. There were a lot of Pre-Raphaelites running around in velvet with scarves tied to their knees, like the Ormsby-Gores, looking for the Holy Grail, the Lost Court of King Arthur, UFOs and ley lines.

With Christopher Gibbs you actually couldn’t tell whether he was on acid or not, because that’s the way he was. Maybe I never knew Christopher off acid, but I must say he was an adventurous lad. He was ready to jump into the unknown, into the valley of death. He was ready to look into it. It was something that had to be done. I never saw Gibbs unbalanced by acid, never saw any sign of a bad trip. My memories of Christopher are that he was somehow always angelically three feet off the ground. As we all were, perhaps.

No one knew much about this; we were tapping in the dark. I found it very interesting, but at the same time I found other people got quite distressed, and that’s all you need on that kind of stuff, is to deal with somebody who really is having a bad trip. People could change and become very paranoid or very uptight or very scared. Especially Brian. It could happen to anybody, but that would turn other people into a bad time too. It was the unknown with acid. You didn’t know if you’d come back or not. I had a couple of terrible trips. I remember Christopher talking me down. “Hey, everything is cool. It’s all right.” He was just like a nurse, a night nurse. I can’t even remember what the hell I was going through; it just wasn’t pleasant. Paranoia, maybe—the same with a lot of people with marijuana, it makes them paranoid. It’s basically fear, but you don’t know of what. So you have no defense, and the further you go down there, the bigger it gets. Sometimes you’ve got to slap yourself.

But it didn’t stop me from having another trip. It was the idea of a boundary that had to be pushed. There was a bit of stupidity there as well. Wasn’t so good last time? Let’s try it again. What, are you chicken now? It was the Acid Test, Ken Kesey’s goddamn thing. It meant if you hadn’t been there you ain’t nowhere, which was really dumb. A lot of people felt obliged to take it even if they didn’t want to, if they wanted to stay and hang with the crowd. It was a gang thing. But it could shake you if you weren’t careful, and that happened a lot. Even if you’ve taken it once, it’s probably done something to you. It’s too volatile.

One epic of that period was an acid-fueled road trip with John Lennon—an episode of such extremes that I can barely piece together a fragment. It took in, I thought, Torquay and Lyme Regis over what seemed like a two- or three-day period with a chauffeur. Johnny and I were so out there that sometimes years later, in New York, he would ask, “What happened on that trip?” With us was Kari Ann Moller, now Mrs. Chris Jagger; I think the Hollies wrote a song about her, or was it about Marianne? Very sweet girl, had a place on Portland Square, where I lived when in town for about two years. Her reminiscences, which I sought out recently for this book, were quite different from mine. But hers were at least not almost a total blank, like mine.

What is clear to me now is that we never thought we were overworked, but later on you realize you didn’t give yourself a break, boy. So when we had three unfamiliar days off, we got a little wild. I remembered going in a chauffeur-driven car. But Kari Ann says we didn’t have a chauffeur. We went in a cramped two-door car with one other unidentifiable passenger—so maybe we did have a chauffeur. According to Kari Ann, we started in Dolly’s nightclub, the precursor of Tramp, and drove around Hyde Park Corner several times, wondering where to go. We drove to John’s house in the country, she says, and said hi to Cynthia, and then Kari Ann decided we’d go and visit her mother in Lyme Regis. What a nice visit for her mother—a couple of flying acid heads who’d been up for a couple of nights. We got there about dawn, so her story goes. One greasy-spoon caff wouldn’t serve us. John got recognized. And Kari Ann realized that we couldn’t go and visit her mother because we were so out of it. There follow therefore some missing hours, because we didn’t get back to John’s house until after dark. There were palm trees, so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy. It was one of those cases of John wanting to do more drugs than me. Huge bag of weed, lump of hash and acid. I usually picked my spots with acid; moving around didn’t come into it if you could avoid it.

I liked John a lot. He was a silly sod in many ways. I used to criticize him for wearing his guitar too high. They used to wear them up by their chests, which really constricts your movement. It’s like being handcuffed. “Got your fucking guitar under your fucking chin, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t a violin.” I think they thought it was a cool thing. Gerry & the Pacemakers, all of the Liverpool bands did it. We used to fuck around like that: “Try a longer strap, John. The longer the strap, the better you play.” I remember him nodding and taking it in. Next time I saw them the guitar straps were a little lower. I’d say, no wonder you don’t swing, you know? No wonder you can only rock, no wonder you can’t roll.

John could be quite direct. The only rude thing I remember him saying to me was about my solo in the middle of “It’s All Over Now.” He thought it was crap. Maybe he got out the wrong side of the bed that day. OK, it certainly could have been better. But you disarmed the man. “Yeah, it wasn’t one of my best, John. Sorry. Sorry it jars, old boy. You can play it any fucking way you like.” But that he even bothered to listen meant that he was very interested. He was so open. In anybody else, this could be embarrassing. But John had this honesty in his eyes that made you go for him. Had an intensity too. He was a one-off. Like me. We were attracted to each other in a strange way. Definitely a two-alpha clash to start with.

“P
ost-acid” was the prevailing mood
at Redlands on a cold February morning in 1967. Post-acid: everybody arrives back with their feet on the ground, so to speak, and you’ve been with them all day, doing all kinds of nuts things and laughing your head off; you’ve gone for walks on the beach and you’re freezing cold and you’re not wearing any shoes and you’re wondering why you’ve got frostbite. The comedown hits everybody in a different way. Some people are going, let’s do it again, and others are going, enough already. And you can flash back into full acid drive at any moment.

There’s 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. “Wonderful attire! Am I expecting you? Anyway, come on in, it’s a bit chilly out.” 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 fireplace.” I’d never been busted before and I was still on acid. Oh, make friends. Love. Not from me would there be “You cannot come in until I speak to my lawyer.” It was “Yeah, come on in!” And then roughly disabused.