Sympathy for the Defendant

Mick Jagger and William Rees-Mogg

3,725 words

In February of 1967, two men were arrested in Sussex, England, on drug-related offences. They were not politicians or members of the Royal Family, but their cultural status in the Britain of the “Swinging Sixties” made the resulting media coverage feverish. The young men, both aged 23, were a new type of upstart aristocracy, social arrivistes in a country built on tradition and privilege. They were also possibly the first male defendants in a high-profile court case whose outfits in the dock were the subject of media pieces, at least since they tried Oscar Wilde.

Michael James Jagger and Keith Richards (who has no middle name on his birth certificate) were remanded to appear in court in June of 1967. The singer and lead guitarist of The Rolling Stones respectively, Jagger and Richards (names that would appear as Jagger/Richards on as many records as Lennon/McCartney in the 1960s) appeared at their trial and exhibited two traits long associated with that band: calamity and cool.

Image counts for a great deal in rock and roll circles, and Stones fans were anticipating a sartorial treat when the pair later nicknamed “the Glimmer Twins” turned up at court, but Jagger and Richards did not push their luck at their arraignment. With their hair reasonably well brushed – even Keith’s cockatoo style – and wearing tasteful sports jackets rather than displaying their usual wasted elegance, the Stones suddenly looked tamed. That was the point.

We know a lot more about media optics now than we did then, and image is just as important in politics as it is in rock and roll. The trial of the Rolling Stones was as staged as any of their gigs. Jagger was visibly hand-cuffed to a police officer en route to the court-room, a piece of optics designed to humiliate. When the infamous London gangsters, Reggie and Ronnie Kray, were allowed out of jail to attend the funeral of their beloved mother, they were also handcuffed to officers. The Kray Twins were not short men, they were of medium height, but the prison officers they were cuffed to were all exceptionally tall. This made the Krays look small. It’s very much about the optics, just like a Stones concert.

The trial of Jagger and Richards was intended not as a show trial in the usual sense of the term. The duo were not likely to be sent to a gulag or a firing-squad wall, but it was important as a show in the theatrical sense which, of course, a theatrical band such as The Rolling Stones would understand. The importance of spectacle, highlighted by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle, is what it can do for power. People needed to see what the Establishment (as the Deep State was then known) could do to these cocky little twerps who wore their hair over their shirt-collars and drove teenage girls insane with lust.

The Establishment did not like rock and roll any more than they had liked jazz, but there was something about rock and roll that brought more violence and decadence in its train than some stoned black trumpet-player. In the UK, there was a definite turning-point in 1955, when a song by Bill Haley & The Comets, “Rock Around the Clock”, featured in the film The Blackboard Jungle. The youth cult – the bad youth cult – of the day were the “Teddy boys,” so called for their supposedly Edwardian style of dress. At a performance of the movie, when the song began, Teddy boys ran riot, tearing out cinema seats and fighting. It seems laughable now when you hear what is basically a skiffle song played by your fun but mad uncle, but it was a national scandal at the time. And that scandal was partly fueled by a media who had also set their sights on the rock and rollers.

Their morals aside, The Rolling Stones didn’t bring the drug bust that landed them in Chichester Crown Court on themselves. The notoriously intrusive Sunday newspaper, The News of the World, did that for them. They tipped off the police that there was to be a drug party at Redlands, Richards’ baronial abode in West Sussex. Parts of the building date back to the 13th century, and Richards likes all that English heritage and tradition, every bit as much as the judge who tried him would have done. The existence of the party was a guess by this scurrilous newspaper, but it was a good one, what journalists and private investigators call a “hunch.” Jagger and Richards had left the day-long party on what Jagger calls an “expedition” into the spacious grounds of Redlands. They could have had a long walk. All the big-shot English rock stars and actors of the 60s and 70s bought themselves these lord-of-the-manor English chateaux. Jagger and Richards also took acid, apparently Jagger’s first time using the drug. “It was nice sweet come down,” Keith recalls. “Then came the knock on the door.”

During the raid, legend has it that Jagger’s girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, was draped only in a fur-skin rug from which she disrobed and announced that the police were welcome to search her, causing Jagger to convulse with laughter. Poor Mick. The pair weren’t arrested at Redlands, that happened a few days later. Mick and Keith didn’t realize how much trouble they were in yet. The Establishment had sensed a new enemy in rock music, and it was time to begin manoeuvres.

There were still British Conservatives in the 1960s who more or less followed the American Baptist line: rock ‘n’ roll is the devil’s music. Well, you got that right, said British youth. That’s why we like it. One recalls William Blake’s marginalia to his copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost. When Blake realizes that Milton basically likes Satan and is behind him all the way, Blake scrawls, “That is because Milton was of the Devil’s party.” The Rolling Stones were certainly seen to embody dark forces, and flirted with infernal imagery in the famous Sympathy for the Devil and the album Their Satanic Majesties Request, released the year of the trial. A book on witchcraft was noted by the police among the paraphernalia strewn around at Redlands. The Stones didn’t go as far as buying Aleister Crowley’s old house, as Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page did, but their lifestyle had more than a whiff of brimstone about it. And the Establishment were about to show them what they thought of that lifestyle, and what they could and would do to its practitioners. Almost all the Establishment, that is.

The trial of Jagger and Richards generated newspaper column inches like no other, and this included one of the most famous editorials in British journalistic history. The piece appeared in The Times between the trial and the release of Jagger and Richards, so the original prison sentences were still in place when the Times hit the stands. The piece was written by the paper’s editor, William Rees-Mogg (the father of Jacob Rees-Mogg, the current Member of Parliament for North-East Somerset and a GB News regular). Rees-Mogg’s subject matter, superficially, was the trial of the two rock gods, but its subtext was the power of the state, particularly in the shape of its punitive measures, and the possible abuse of that power. The title used a memorable image taken from Alexander Pope’s 1735 Epistle to Doctor Arbuthnot, one which questions the unnecessary use of force: “Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?”

Apart from its cultural significance, Rees-Mogg’s article shows journalism from an age in which newspaper writers still cared about the language they used, more concerned about splitting an infinitive than offending some minority group. The piece is a measured summing-up of the facts of the case and the charges, and is unequivocal not in denying Jagger’s guilt as charged, but in its condemnation of the length of the prison sentence handed down, indeed the need for a custodial sentence at all.

Jagger had been found in possession of four pills which were very similar to Benzedrine, known then as “pep pills.” Jagger’s doctor prescribed them for him, but the pills which led to his arrest were bought while on tour in Italy, and so had actually been unknowingly smuggled into the UK. Jagger’s defense counsel argued that the doctor’s prescription covered these pills, but the prosecution made short work of that. They argued that, although Jagger’s doctor may well prescribe him Benzedrine tablets – illegal in Britain without such a prescription – he hadn’t prescribed him those particular Benzedrine tablets. Rees-Mogg is not in doubt of Jagger’s guilt as charged, he is skeptical of what we would now call, in a socially changed and convoluted sense, “two-tier policing.” The very last line of Rees-Mogg’s article is of the essence: “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.”

The article was written as soon as the sentences were handed down, Jagger’s for possession, Richards’ for allowing his premises to be used for the consumption of narcotics. Richards was given a year, Jagger three months. Richards was led expressionlessly down to the cells while Jagger looked so close to fainting police officers took his arms to support him. Mick had suddenly realized this wasn’t a rock and roll show anymore. It was all real now. Jagger was taken to HM Brixton, Richards to Wormwood Scrubs, a prison with a reputation for violence as ugly as its name.

There must have been a lot of sulky teenage girls next morning moping around a lot of suburban houses, but many of their parents were busy reading Rees-Mogg’s article. The editor of one of the world’s most famous newspapers asks the reader, a little fancifully, to imagine the Archbishop of Canterbury being given a penal sentence on discovery of a mistake similar to Jagger’s. I would respectfully suggest that, firstly, the Primate of the Anglican Church is unlikely to pop into a pharmacist at Turin Airport for a packet of travel-sickness pills, and secondly would be even more unlikely to be found with them at a drug party. More reasonably, Rees-Mogg goes on to ask whether a promising undergraduate returning from Italy “with four pep pills in his pocket” would merit a jail term. Finally, and eminently sensibly, Rees-Mogg points out that the precedent set by Jagger’s incarceration would make it unclear whether any air passenger returning from abroad with non-proprietary medicines might be breaking the law.

Rees-Mogg is also aware of optics, and considers the “public reaction” to the initial outcome of the trial:

There are many people who take a primitive 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 influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence, a word used by Miss Monica Furlong in The Daily Mail.

It is highly unlikely that the staunchly conservative editor of The Times would have been angling for free Stones tickets with this spirited defense (although I bet the current editor would take them). That is – quite seriously – one of the aspects of Rees-Mogg’s piece which is so refreshing in a time when journalism comes with perks which would have been unthinkable to a Fleet Street hack in the late 60s. I doubt Rees-Mogg had an opinion on whether Mick Taylor could ever really replace Brian Jones, but he had an informed opinion on British law, and on its use and possible abuse.

Rees-Mogg’s central argument concerns equality of sentencing and the undue attention of public interest in certain cases. He finds Jagger’s conviction to be for “a technical offense,” and sets out Jagger’s likely sentence in the context of common judicial practice:

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.

The Stones would certainly go on to develop their careers, although perhaps fell short of avoiding the drug risks.

Rees-Mogg rather expertly views the case without the filter of morality. The Stones may be decadent, but what has that to do with the law, provided their decadence – and their music, and shows, and interviews, and publicity material – does not break it? As for any dismay caused by the Stones’ louche lifestyle, Rees-Mogg is admirably clear: “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 curious thing about Rees-Mogg’s article on the trial of Jagger and Richards is that it isn’t, it’s about the trial of Mick Jagger. Richards got a sentence four times as long as his singer just for letting his friends smoke dope in his sitting-room, or library, or Great Hall, or whatever room Keith chilled in, and Rees-Mogg doesn’t mention him once. Why not? If he was trying, for some obscure reason, to make Jagger a sole martyr, then the condemned was taken down from the cross the next day, so no martyrdom. Perhaps it was just efficient journalism, as his point could be made considering Jagger’s case in isolation, but not to mention “the human riff” at all seemed odd. Perhaps Rees-Mogg just didn’t like the way Keith tunes his guitar to Drop-G.

The errant musicians were released after a day, a prison officer informing Richards as he was walking in a circle with his fellow inmates for exercise. The Establishment used the same psychological tactic the Spanish Inquisition used: show the prisoner the instruments of torture, and you probably won’t have to use them. It seems likely that the judiciary had no intention of the two men serving out their sentences, eating porridge and potatoes, and meat on alternate days. They didn’t actually want Jagger to spend three months terrified that someone was going to stab him with a knife fashioned from a spoon-handle. The state didn’t want that. They just wanted to give them a taste. The Stones’ lunch during the trial, incidentally, is perfectly in line with (I believe) Charles Shaar Murray’s description of Rod Stewart’s old band, The Faces, as “yobbo Gatsbys.” So, a culinary note to judicial proceedings.

When Jagger and Richards were being held (in separate cells) during their trial, Mick Jagger ordered food to be brought in for his lunch. Not fish and chips or a pie for the Dagenham boy, but a prawn cocktail, roast lamb with mint sauce and all the trimmings, fresh strawberries and cream, and a bottle of Beaujolais. The bill came to “ten bob,” or ten shillings, or today, 50p or about 65 cents. That’s what cool is, grace under fire—not in the trenches but in the face of the Establishment, Orwell’s “wrong family” in control of England.

As for the rock and roll fraternity, in a great show of solidarity, The Who were the first band to react to news of the two “busted Stones,” as the papers put it. A statement was sent to the press by the band which stated that Jagger and Richards “have been treated as scapegoats for the drug problem.” The Who put out a double-A sided single, The Stones’ Under My Thumb, and The Last Time. Royalties went to Jagger and Richards’ legal defense, and The Who even lost money as they cut short recording their own next single to make the tribute. Pete Townshend and Keith Moon, in particular, will also have been made aware that using illegal substances was now a formidable and possibly career-ending risk.

Paul McCartney made a rather mealy-mouthed statement to the press about not stopping naughty children by slapping them, but might have had something else to say had his bandmate, George Harrison, not left the party at Redlands shortly before the police arrived. Harrison said of his lucky escape, perhaps half-seriously, that the police had started by arresting pop-folk singer Donovan and had now graduated to The Rolling Stones before the grand prize, taking down a Beatle. The guitarist’s hint is that the drug squad might have timed their raid to give him time to get well clear.

For some Stones fans, the scare that at least Jagger received from the Establishment may have kick-started the band’s most creative period. The year of the trial had seen the album Their Satanic Majesties Request released, and The Stones were still in their underwhelming psychedelic period. Those of The Beatles and The Kinks were much better, and She’s a Rainbow and 2,000 Light Years from Home don’t really do it for me. But the band’s output from 1968’s Beggar’s Banquet and the following year’s Let it Bleed, through Sticky Fingers, peaking with 1972’s peerless Exile on Main Street, and continuing to 1973’s Goat’s Head Soup, showed The Stones in their pomp. Maybe ditching the acid helped, perhaps Jagger was too scared to go back and try again. Acid became associated with jail. Best leave it alone, like not being able to drink the first spirit you ever got badly drunk on (Southern Comfort, in my case. I couldn’t even smell the stuff now). Richards’ long and well-documented heroin addiction is another tale entirely, but at no point did it prevent his contributions to the albums noted, although it did get him arrested again in Canada, ten years after the Redlands bust.

When I saw The Stones, having just turned 15, their best albums (I now think) were already behind them, all done and dusted while I was a little boy. But that worked to my advantage, as The Stones had honed those songs in the live arena, and I saw them at the height of their powers. I know it was the week the electric-piano-soaked and weepy single Fool to Cry was released, and Google tells me I must have seen the band at the Earl’s Court Exhibition Centre in the last week of May, 1976. There really is nothing in rock music like hearing Richards chop out that staccato opening riff to Brown Sugar, a song the band now refuses to play due to its racial connotations. Some rebels. The Establishment broke a butterfly on a wheel, eventually. They just reinvented the wheel.

Jagger and Richards were never in danger of going to jail for more than the night they both spent in the cells. They had been involved in a miniature Truman Show, in which everything happening to them had been carefully staged. They were taught a lesson by the Establishment, a lesson about power. Also, a lesson about justice, not the one we are familiar with concerning impartiality and the blindness of the goddess, but how it is changing into something darker. And this insight is partly courtesy of William Rees-Mogg’s piece, which rightly sits high in the annals of British journalism.

Lord Parker, the High Court Judge who quashed the convictions of Jagger and Richards and replaced them with conditional discharges, made a speech which would be extraordinary today. He told Jagger of his responsibilities as a role model for the young, trusting that Jagger was not, as Blake’s felt Milton to be, of the Devil’s party.

Three months after the trial, Jagger was interviewed for a special edition of the British current affairs program, World in Action. He was joined by William Rees-Mogg, as well as Father Thomas Corbishley, a leading British Jesuit, Lord Stowe-Hill, a former Home Secretary and Attorney General, and Dr. John Robinson, Bishop of Woolwich. I was particularly interested in the latter, having recently written a piece on agnosticism. Dr. Robinson’s book, Honest to God, is widely credited as being at the center of the reappraisal of divinity by the Anglican Church in the 1960s.

The World in Action interview, at which Jagger arrived by helicopter, is of minor interest if you are not a Stones fan. But if you are interested in changing British culture in the post-World War 2 era, and particularly in the 1960s, this is a fascinating cultural artefact. Mick – now Sir Mick – Jagger, one of the biggest symbols of rebellion in the land, was up against the backbone of the British Establishment. Pop stars are not anti-Establishment any more, they are the Establishment. As Joe Strummer would sing on that very subject in The Clash’s Death or Glory; “He who fucks nuns will later join the church.”

The trial of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards was among the first to show an evolution in British law, and not a welcome one. Justice at its capillary point, the punitive stage of the judicial process, had become elastic to suit the needs of the rulers, which it is not supposed to be. The idea of British justice is sacrosanct, or should be, but the trial of two of the most famous English musicians in history is a chapter in its decline. Marianne Faithfull said much the same thing after the trial. “I grew up with British justice,” she says, “but now it’s gone.” The testament of a rock and roll popsy may not be Edmund Burke or Mill, but it is becoming a familiar sentiment among the English.

Finally, the whole trial might have been staged, but The Stones put on a show of their own. The superficial side of rock and roll is one of its most alluring attributes, and Mick and Keith breezed through their trial and press conferences looking like what they were, rhythm and blues godlings in Savile Row suits. The court case may have been manufactured by the deep state, and was not a legal process which could stand much probity, what with the press collusion and the outrageous sentencing highlighted by Rees-Mogg. But Mick ‘n’ Keef still looked the business, still made their own show out of the script they had been given. The way The Stones came out of this with their rebel credentials enhanced recalls Jagger’s question to Richards after the latter had seen Francois Truffaut’s documentary on the band, One Plus One. “What’s it like?” Mick wanted to know. “Shit,” Keith replied. “But we look good.”