Paper saved me from jail – Jagger
Sympathy for the Devil: how a British newspaper editorial got the Rolling Stones singer out of jail.
Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel? So ran the headline over one of the the most famous editorials of the past century in the British Times newspaper, published 50 years ago this week.
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 Times editor, 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 counterculture 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 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’ girlfriend, the late 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.
The Redlands weekend has 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... 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 they were a group of identically dressed dwarves: ‘‘All these little people, wearing the same clothes.’’ Faithfull was famously 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 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 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 hangerson 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 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 £1700 – $3000 – 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, was by no means a product of the counter-culture.
‘‘I was not a fan of their music,’’ he later said of the Rolling Stones. But behind the double-breasted pinstripes was a man of granite principle.
The headline of his editorial was a nod to 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.’’
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.
Looking back, Jagger believes his release and the collapse of the case against him were directly attributable to Rees-Mogg’s words. ‘‘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.’’’
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 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.
– The Times