A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Song 176: “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones, part 2: Traps for Troubadours

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

For those who haven’t heard the announcement I posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the song “Sympathy for the Devil” and the career of the Rolling Stones. This episode takes us from April 1966 through to the release of “Let’s Spend the Night Together”/”Ruby Tuesday” Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on “Laurel Canyon Home” by John Mayall. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ (more…)

A History of rock music in 500 songs By Andrew Hicke Song 176 Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones Part 2 Traps for Trubedores A few notes before we begin I've mentioned a few times

that the next few episodes are going to get darker That means of necessity that these content warnings will also get longer for a little while. Bear with me. This episode talks about governmental and societal homophobia. It also uses the term queer. As always in this podcast, when I use that term, it's as the term most accepted by the members of that community for use as an umbrella term. But I know some people see it as a slur, and it has been used that way in the past. As there is no way to talk about queer people without using a term that has been used as a slur at some point, I'm going with the

general community consensus, but thought it worth warning people. There's also some mention of sexual exploitation of children. This episode also features discussion of drug use and of domestic abuse, both physical and mental, and of mental illness and suicide attempts. Nobody comes out of this episode well. Also, I would just like to say something here. These episodes on the Rolling Stones, by necessity, involve a little more talking about the group members' personal lives than I am personally comfortable with. I try to avoid talking about the

personal lives of the musicians I discuss, except insofar as it affects either the music they were making or the wider culture. Sadly, in the case of the mid-60s Rolling Stones, a lot of their impact on the culture, and a lot of the lyrics to their songs, require the airing of dirty laundry to explain properly and without giving an unrealistic picture. I have still, as always, tried to keep that to a minimum, and I hope it comes across as I intend, as a window on the music and the culture in which it was made, rather than tabloid pruriance. Anyway, on with the show.

On the 14th of February 1895, Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Ernest saw its stage debut. It's generally considered Wilde's masterpiece, and one of the great stage comedies of all time. It's still regularly revived to this day, I've seen numerous productions of it, and has been filmed twice, the first time in 1952,

in an adaptation that for decades led to every comedian in the country, attempting to do an imitation of Dame Edith Evans. Wedding is a place in Sussex. It is a seaside resort. And where did the charitable gentleman who had a first-class ticket for this seaside resort,

find you? In a handbag. A handbag? Yes, Lady Brackmore, I was in a handbag, a somewhat large, black leather handbag, with handles to it, an ordinary handbag, in fact. In what locality did this Mr. James or Thomas Cardew come across this ordinary handbag? That opening was a triumph for Oscar Wilde, but that same week he made a decision. that was to lead to his imprisonment, the destruction of his career,

and his eventual death. For some time, Wilde had been in a relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquis of Queensbury. Douglas and Queensbury had a very strained relationship, and Queensbury was virulently homophobic, even for the time. His eldest son had died

in what was officially a shooting accident, but which Queensbury believed was a suicide, after the eldest son had had an affair with the Prime Minister. Wilde attempted to persuade Queensbury on a couple of occasions that his relationship with Douglas was purely platonic. But Queensbury didn't believe him, partly because while Wilde was relatively discreet, Douglas liked to rug his sexuality in his father's face. Queensland's plan to attend the opening night of the importance of being earnest, and throw rotting vegetables at Wilde when he came to take his bow. But Wilde found out his plans

and had him banned from the theatre. Four days later, Queensbury left a card at Wilde's club, with the message, For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite, a misspelling of Sodomite. This was a provocation, and Wilde fell for it.

Egged on by Douglas, he brought a libel suit against Queensbury. British libel laws have always been particularly harsh, and there were even more so in the 19th century. Queensland was arrested for criminal libel, and if found guilty could have been sentenced to two years in prison. Queensbury had only one defence open to him to prove that Wilde was in fact queer,

and so he hired private detectives to go out and investigate Wilde's private life. They found plenty of male sex workers willing to testify that they had had sexual relationships with Wilde. The trial collapsed, and instead Wilde found himself being prosecuted for gross indecency, a vague crime that had been put on the books ten years earlier, inserted as a last-minute amendment into a bill which had otherwise been aimed at preventing the sexual exploitation of female children. It had things like raising the age of consent from 13 to 16, making it illegal to force someone into sex work, and so on.

The bill had been controversial, because many of the kinds of people who were active in politics at the time saw it as a blackmailer's charter, because if you made having sex with 13-year-old girls illegal, like all sorts of respectable gentlemen, would become criminals who could be blackmailed. Indeed, many have suggested that the amendment under which Wilde was punished was inserted as a wrecking amendment to try to destroy the whole bill. The amendment was part of a reactionary backlash

to a growing push for the acceptability of homosexuality. Prior to that point, only specific penetrative acts had been illegal, but now anything that a jury could consider gross indecency, and what that was was left up to the jury's discretion, was punishable by up to two. two years imprisonment and hard labour,

and that was the punishment wild received. He came out of jail a broken man and had to emigrate to France to escape the opprobrium that was heaped upon him. He lived in poverty, became an alcoholic, and died of meningitis within three years of his release from prison.

According to at least some sources, because of an infection he got from a wound he'd received in prison that never properly healed. Spring and early summer, and 1966 was a time of first and last in the world of the Rolling Stones, though many of them were ones they wouldn't realise at the time. In May, they appeared for the last time on the same bill as the Beatles, when both bands once again appeared at the NME Poll Winners Party.

Sadly, unlike the 1964 and 1965 shows, neither the Beatles nor the Stones' performances at that show were recorded. Much of April and May were spent either on holiday or at home in London, where they did a few TV appearances and also spent time socialising with other rock stars. And as they did, they ended up playing bit parts in other bits of rock history. They all attended one of Bob Dylan's shows at the Albert Hall

and his famous Electric tour. Jagger and Oldham met up with Bruce Johnston to hear pet sounds before it was released to the general public. And Brian Jones took part in the sessions for the Beatles' Yellow Submarine, helping with the sound effects and singing backing vocals. and something happened on April the 18th that would have a profound effect on the Rolling Stones a couple of years later.

Eric Clapton was already planning to leave John Mayle's Blues Breakers, even though his one album with them hadn't been released. As we heard in the episode on Cream, he had in fact already left once and been replaced by Peter Green before coming back. That night though, he didn't show up for the gig. Mayole and the band did the first half of the set without a guitarist, but then a 17-year-old in the audience offered to sit in.

That 17-year-old had been playing guitar since he was nine and had recorded one single, There's a Pretty Girl, a couple of years earlier with a band he formed at school called the Juniors. Mayle was impressed with this kid who had the guts to volunteer to take Clapton's place and with the fact that he actually more or less managed to. While Mail had already promised Peter Green that if Clapton left the band, Green would return.

When Green himself left the group in 1967, Mayol remembered Mick Taylor, the kid who had sat in a year earlier. The Rolling Stones' 1966 tour of the US would turn out to be their last with Brian Jones and their last tour of the US for more than three years. The group started with a publicity stunt by Andrew Oldham, in which he claimed he was suing 14 hotels for refusing to book them. and this would be the last major publicity stunt Oldham would organise for the group.

For most of the trip, the group were managed by people in Alan Klein's organisation, and things were on a very different scale to anything the group had seen before. Klein got them billboards in Times Square. They were playing arena shows for a minimum fee of $10,000 a show. The gigs were properly booked as a tour by the William Morris Agency, rather than the random patchwork of gigs they'd had in the past, and they travelled everywhere by private plane rather than on a tour bus. As far as the group were concerned, Klein was already proving to be the best decision they ever made.

The increased comfort likely played a part in something else that everyone noted on that tour. For the first time in a long while, Brian Jones was getting on well with both Jagger and Richards. By all accounts, the tour was a happy one, and Jones seemed particularly happy when Anita Palenberg, his new girlfriend, joined them on the tour. Jones was as close as it was possible for him to be to being in love with Palenberg. Possibly this was because for the first time

he had met a woman he couldn't completely dominate with his combination of physical and sexual abuse and occasional bursts of charm. Rather, Palenberg fought back and by all accounts even sometimes instigated the violence. And a lot of the men who were in the stone's circle at the time talk about her as having been violent and obsessed with the occult

and having a darkness about her, though one suspects that there was more than an element of misogyny to that, in that Palenberg was also, by all accounts, an extremely intelligent, cultured woman who was direct and unafraid to say what she thought. But unlike Jones's other relationships, where he was bad for his partners, in this relationship they were both bad for each other.

Keith Richards talked about their relationship in his autobiography, saying, I would hear the thumping some nights and Brian would come out with a black eye. Brian was a woman beater, but the one woman in the world you did not want to try and beat up on was Anita Palenberg.

Every time they had a fight, Brian would come out bandaged and bruised. But for the most part, the Stones enjoyed themselves on the tour, other than the normal scandals that were plagued them at this point. And as we heard in the episode on Hey Joe, the group once again got caught up in rock music history

because Keith Richard's girlfriend, Linda Keith, had gone on to the US ahead of the band, and ended up discovering the guitarist then named Jimmy James, but soon to revert to his birth name of Jimmy Hendricks, introducing him to the music of Bob Dylan and getting him his first contacts in the British music industry, though also making Richards at least very suspicious of the nature of her relationship with Hendricks. During the tour, Klein also rented a 70-foot yacht called the Princess for the group to use for a press event, and to travel up and down the East Coast afterwards. That press event was, as it happens, the first job

for a young photographer named Linda Eastman, whose entry into the rock music world would eventually cause immense trouble for Klein. The group's next single, recorded in LA after the end of the tour, would end up causing a further strain between Oldham and the group. Keith Richards had wanted horns on satisfaction

because he was becoming more and more influenced by soul music, and he finally got them on what was planned to be another Shawfire number one single. Specifically, he got a horn section made up entirely of trumpets. The group cut a backing track in RCA with Dave Hassinger Engineering as part of a session where they also cut the basic tracks

for what became the UK version of their album between the buttons. The US version would have a couple of hit singles replacing some of the album tracks. The initial track they recorded was, by all accounts, fantastic, with Jack Nitchie adding piano to the group's rhythm section, as he so often did. But rather strangely, given they had Jack Nitchie,

probably the most talented arranger for rock music in the world at that, point working for them for nothing. They decided that the best way to do the horns wasn't to record them live in the studio with the band, with Nitchie arranging them, but to overdub them, and not in L.A. where they had recorded the backing track, but in London, with an arrangement by Mike Leander, who had arranged the strings on as tears go by. So they bounced down the rhythm track to a new tape, freeing up space for the horn overdubs, and flew over to the UK, where Glyn Johns recorded the horn overdubs at IBC, with Jagger, Richards and Oldham present.

Then they bounced down that track to a new tape, which went back with them to RCA and LA, where they had further overdubs, including Jagger's lead vocal, and backing vocals by Richards and uniquely Oldham. But there was a problem.

All that bouncing down had locked them into particular mixed decisions that, in retrospect, could have been better. The balance of the instruments was off, and everything sounded muddy and murky because of the generations of tape hiss. Nobody was happy with the track, and none of the group have liked it since, and they've tended to blame Oldham's production, though Oldham did come up with an idea to

fix at least the intro, which was the weakest part when they listened back. The guitars weren't cutting through the muddy mix, and Hassinger suggested that Riches double the part an octave up, but Jagger objected that this would make the record sound like the birds, which was something they wanted to avoid. Then Oldham suggested that to beef up the guitar, part, he, Jagger and Richards, should hold their noses and sing the guitar part through their throats like this. And that's what made the intro of the record. The band members have pretty much uniformly said that they hated the way that track came out and thought it was rushed and the mix was terrible. They've also said they needed the single to be put out in order for their next

dead Sullivan show appearance to promote the single. On that appearance, they had to mime to backing tracks rather than playing live as they had previously. This was because Brian Jones couldn't play guitar. He'd broken his hand trying to punch Palenberg. She'd ducked out of the way and he'd hit an iron window frame while on holiday. He told Oldham he'd broken it mountain climbing. While satisfaction, get off of my cloud and paint it black, had all gone to number one on both sides of the Atlantic,

and 19th Nervous breakdown, released between the latitude, had reached number two. Kept off the top in the UK by Nancy Sennetra's, these boots were made for walking, and rather more ignominiously in the US by Ballad of the Green Berets by Sergeant Barry Sadler. Have you seen your mother baby standing in the shadow would only make number five in the UK and nine in the US. Still a hit, but not on anything like the same scale. While Mick and Keith were finishing the sessions for Have You Seen Your Mother Baby standing in the shadow, two things were happening that would between them end up creating what little non-stone's legacy Brian Jones left. The first of these was an awesome,

opportunity he got thanks to Palenberg. Jones had been interested in getting involved in film music for a while. Initially, he'd expected to do something with a planned Rolling Stones film. Part of the big sum of money client had got for the group from Decker was based on the idea that they would be making a film in a soundtrack album, much like the Beatles, though they never did so. The only films the Stones ever appeared in as a group were documentaries. But Palenberg was a minor film star, and she got Jones the job of writing the score for Morden Totschild, known in English as a degree of murder, and Jones set to work. Jones worked on the tracks for the film over a period of several months, collaborating

with engineer Glyn Johns. Jones played almost all the instruments himself, including sitar, auto harp, clarinet, banjo and dulcimer. Though Jimmy Page on guitar, drummer Kenny Jones of the small faces, and session pianist Nick. Hakey Hopkins also contributed. And there are some backing vocals by one, Peter Gosling. There are two Peter Gosling's with music business credit. This appears, as best I can tell, to be the Peter Gosling who worked as a pianist, arranger and musical director on children's TV shows like Play School, Playaway and Bottom

Moon, and those played piano on records by Ed Shearman. Gosling's son Jake was the producer on most of Shearin's early records, and not the Pete Gosling who played guitar with Reckless Eric. Glingon said of the project, which seems to have stretched over several months. Brian came to me and asked for help. He lost so much self-confidence by this time and really was in need of a hand. In a way I felt sorry for him. It wasn't that I didn't think he was capable of handling the project himself,

but clearly he wanted help in the engineering, so I agreed. Brian worked very hard in his corpfield flat on two little tape machines. He had all types of ideas which worked. He did it very well and it came out amazingly, and we had a good time doing it. Brian was extremely together and confident while he was working on it. When it was finished he was both pleased and relieved. The rock and roll bit which was written to fit

the early murder scene was really good. It would turn out to be the only music Brian Jones would ever compose and the only Brian Jones music to get any kind of audience in his lifetime. The other thing was that on that holiday with Palenberg they'd spent some time with Brian Geysen. A poet and artist who is now most famous

for having invented the cut-up writing technique that was later taken up by Geising's close friend William Burroughs, and through Burroughs influenced almost every artist of the next few decades. Geisin told Jones about some musicians he'd heard in Morocco, the master musicians of Djeduka, and promised Jones that one day he would bring Jones to hear them. While Jones was working on his soundtrack, the rest of the stones were getting on with their next album,

between the buttons, on which Jones's contributions were much diminished compared to aftermath. The initial tracks for this were mostly covered, in RCA studios in LA, with Dave Hassinger engineering and Jack Nichy on keyboards and arranging duties. But most of the overdubs were done at Olympic Studios, a newly open studio in London, with Glyn John's engineering them as he had the overdubs for Have You Seen Your Mother Baby Standing in the Shadow. Unlike that single, the amount of bouncing and overdubbing meant that the album was considered by many listeners to have a mushy, unclear sound. For the London sessions, Nicky Hopkins added keyboards where necessary on many songs,

as Ian Stewart, the Rolling Stones' former sixth member turned Rodian live keyboard player, still kept up his principled refusal to play on any song with a minor chord in it. Between the buttons had a much longer gestation than most albums the Stones have recorded at this point, taking four and a half months to record. So, needing some new product to meet Christmas demand, the group's labels released two filler albums. In the UK, they put out big hits, high-tide and green grass, a compilation of most of the group's hit singles to that point.

In the US, they'd already put out a hits album with the same title, though a different track list, the previous spring. So instead a live album was rushed out. It was titled Got Live If You Want It, just like their earlier UK EP, but was made up of recordings from a UK tour they'd done shortly after their return from the US. Or at least, it was mostly live. There's clear evidence of overdubbing on several songs,

and two of the tracks are just studio outtakes with audience applause and screams badly overdugged on them. The sound quality on the actual live tracks is pretty poor and the group have later disclaimed the album as not a proper part of their catalogue. On that UK tour, which would be the last until 1971, they'd put together a bill which would impress anyone.

The MC was Long John Baldry, the king of British blues singers. Here only speaking, not singing, but Baldry was impressive enough just speaking, as his later career as a voice artist for cartoons, most notably as the voice of Dr. Robotnik in Sonic the Hedgehog, would attest. At the bottom of the bill were a few lesser acts like Peter J. and the Jaywalkers,

a one-hit wonder group who'd had a novelty hit four years earlier and who had split up soon after this tour. But then there were the Eichentina Turner review. Then the Yardbirds would their new and brief dual guitar line-up with both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck playing league guitar, before the Stones came on. According to Oldham, the reason that the yard birds were on

between Eichentina Turner and the Stones was that Mick Keith and I had decided they were cocky little upstart had one more hit than they deserved and this sandwiching between the headlinder should put pay to their career. As it happened, Beck would leave the band shortly after that tour

and they would never have another hit. But that seems not to have been caused by feelings of inadequacy when faced with Eichinna Turner and the Stones, no matter how great they were as live performers, that we'll pick that up when we get to song 180. The Stones and Oldham were fans of Ike and Tina Turner's then recent single River Deep Mountain High. But they were astonished by just how good they were as a live act,

and also impressed by other things about the act. The instrumentalists were all in awe of Aik Turner after discovering that he played on many of their favourite blues records by people like Howling Wolf in the 50s and would ask him to demonstrate the parts he played on those records. Jagger, though, was in awe of Tina's stage present, and would ask her to show him dance moves, which made Ike violently jealous.

There were rumours that Jagger and Turner had an affair on the tour, but it seems his main interest at the time was a backing vocalist in the Iquette, Pat Arnold. Jagger and Arnold started a passionate, though brief, romantic affair, and Arnold, who wanted to escape from the toxic situation she saw happening because of Ike Turner, was persuaded by Jagger to sign to immediate records. Arnold was slightly renamed to P.P. Arnold, a name she hated because of its urinary connotations, and became a successful soul singer in the UK, having hits on immediate with versions of

Kat Stevens' The First Cut is the Deepest, and Chip Taylor's Angel of the Morning. She also recorded a duet with a friend of the Stones, with Jagger for juicing. But sadly, that went unreleased at the time. and Rod Stewart didn't get the benefit of Jagger's name as producer on a single. Jagger's affair with Arnold was a sign, if any were needed, that his relationship with Chrissy Shrimpton wasn't going to last much longer. But Arnold wouldn't be his next major relationship. That would be someone else who had a singing career because of Andrew Oldham,

and whose first hit had been written by Jagger and Richards. I am faithful was part of the hip aristocratic circles the group now moved in. Her father was a British intelligence officer and professor of Italian literature. while her mother was Ava von Sackamasok, Baroness Erizo, a member of the Austro-Hungarian nobility, whose great-uncle, Leopold von Sackermasok, was the author of the novella Venus in Furs, which around this time had inspired Lou Reed to write a song of the same name. Von Sacka Massoc had also been the inspiration for the term massacism being coined, much to his own annoyance.

Here was someone who could rival Anita Palenberg for beauty, sophistication and talent. This was someone who was the kind of woman that Mick Jagger deserved. Faithful moved in the rarefied circles that Jagger and Jones particularly were now also moving in. She was married to John Dunbar, the co-owner of the Indica Gallery, and also close to scenes like Robert Fraser, an art dealer who was also friends with Paul McCartney, and who would soon suggest Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton for the cover of the Beatles' next two albums,

and to Tara Brown, the heir to the Guinness Fortune, who was a close friend of many members of the band. And it's around the time that Mick and Marianne started dating that everything started going very wrong. The timeline around events seems very confused, with every source giving slightly different events in a slightly different order. But this is the version of events that seems to fall out of the various narratives. One date we know for sure is that on the only date we know for sure is that,

On the 17th of December in 1966, Tara Brown was driving his sports car with his girlfriend, the model Suki Potter, in the passenger seat, and ran a red light at over 100 miles an hour. The car crashed into a park lorry, and Brown died of his injuries the next day, though Pottye was unharmed. Obviously, this devastated everyone who knew Brown. The Rolling Stones were all on holidays for Christmas. Brian and Keith were on holiday together with Anita, and Jagger and Chrissy Shristen. and Jagger and Chrissy Shrimpton were meant to be flying off to Jamaica for a holiday. On hearing the news, Jagger cancelled the holiday and went shopping with Faithful instead.

The first Shrimpton knew about the holiday being cancelled was when Jagger never turned up to their home to travel with her to the airport. She phoned the Rolling Stones office and was told the flights had been cancelled. She finally realised that Jagger didn't love her anymore and decided to take her own life, taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Someone, likely Jagger, found her and got her to her private hospital, where she woke up to find people calling her the wrong name. She'd been checked in under a false name to make sure the story didn't get out

about a Rolling Stone's girlfriend attempting suicide. On December the 19th, announcements by both Jagger and Shrimpton were placed in the press, saying that their engagement was at an end. Going from Shrimpton's accounts, it's quite possible she had nothing to do with the announcement in her name. Andrew Oldham was a devotee of what he referred to as sleep cures Every few months he would have himself sedated for a few days So he could sleep through the withdrawal symptoms for the various substances he was misusing

And this seems to be what happened to Shrimpton after she was found She spent large periods of time unconscious But eventually managed to get to a pay phone and contact her parents While recuperating at her parents She read in the newspaper about Jagger and Faithful being on holiday together When she went back to the home she'd shared with Jagger to collect her belongings. She found her locks had been changed,

and she had to make an appointment with the Stone's business office to be let in. According to at least one biography of the Stones, the bill for her treatment was sent to Jagger, who refused to pay. Jagger would, though, still occasionally call on her for sex for the next year or so, and there was one final song about her on Between the Buttons, written and recorded before the split, but released afterwards. That was the first ever

He ever wrote to Jagger and Richards. The group's next single had different sides promoted in different countries. According to Klein, Olden wanted Let's Spend the Night Together to be the A-side, while Klein wanted Ruby Tuesday. so in the US Ruby Tuesday was the track that was promoted though it's likely that this decision also had to do with the other song's lyrics being a little risque and unlikely to get radio play in the Bible Belt. Let's Spend the Night Together, the UK A Side,

was recorded by the group at Olympic, with John's Engineering and Old and Producing. Nietzsche came over to the UK to play on the sessions and there is one instrumental contribution that deserves special mention given what's about to happen. Listen to the percussion. That's the sound of two police truncheons. During the session to record Jagger's vocals, the group had been smoking cannabis when suddenly two policemen entered the smoke-filled studio,

thinking they were interrupting a burglary in progress, and somewhat bemused to find that they were, in fact, interrupting one of the biggest pop groups in the world, making their next hit record. Oldham's chauffeur got out of the studio holding the group's cannabis, and either Jagger or Oldham, depending on which version of the story you believe, took control of the situation by distracting the police,

asking if the group could borrow their trunchons. They'd just been talking, they said, about how they needed a new percussion sound, and those would be just a thing. The group clanked the trunchons together, and the police officers watched delightedly, completely oblivious to the slowly fading smell of illicit substances. The Rolling Stones had been spared a drug bust.

The other side of the single, and the hit in the USA, was Ruby Tuesday. Just as Jagger had written all of yesterday's papers, by most accounts, Ruby Tuesday is a solo Keith Richards' composition, though again credited to both men, with lyrics about Richard's feelings of loss over his ex-girlfriend Linda Keith,

who had left him for Jimmy Hendricks. I say, according to most sources, because according to Marianne Faithful, Brian Jones actually came up with the melody and played it for Richards, saying it was a cross between Dowlands' heir on the late Lord Essex and a Skip James blues. Without knowing which Skip James song Jones was talking about, it's hard to see any obvious candidates.

But it is vaguely similar to the Dowland piece, more usually known as the Earl of Essex Galliard, or Can She Excuse My Wrongs? According to Faithful, Richards took Jones's melody and turned it into the song without crediting Jones. This is not in itself implausible. Bill Wyman in particular has often complained that he and others made songwriting contributions

to songs that were later credited to Jagger and Richards without their contributions getting acknowledged or rewarded. However, I suspect that there was another inspiration and that it either directly inspired Richards or that Jones was inspired by it in the melody he played for Richards. We saw in the last episode how several Stone's records in 1966 seemed to have been at least partly inspired

by the King's recent records. Not that they were plagiarising or anything like that, just that they were picking up on and responding to what their rivals were producing. There's an album track by the kinks from a year or so earlier, ring the bells, that I never see anyone mentioned in the context of Ruby Tuesday, but which seems to me to be very, very similar indeed. Compare the kinks to the stones.

See what I mean? I find it very hard to believe that there was no connection between the two tracks. By this time, the group had decided that, like the Beatles, they were going to take some time off from live performance to concentrate on studio work. Other than a three-week tour of Europe, already booked for the end of March and beginning of April, the only live performances they would give

for the next two and a half years would be for TV cameras. And of course, there was some of those to promote the new single, and both were controversial in different ways. The first of these appearances was on the Ed Sullivan show, where they were to perform both sides of the new single, or at least, that was the plan. The problem was the title of Let's Spend the Night Together. Ed Sullivan and the network were absolutely against Jagger being allowed to sing that phrase

on a family TV show, because those lyrics were simply too suggestive. But they were on there to perform the single. What could they do? A compromise was eventually reached, and Jagger agreed to sing Let's Spend Some Time Together instead. For many years after that, Jagger would try to spin what happened next, saying that he had mumbled the words indistinctly so that they could be heard either way. Sadly for Jagger, the advent of the internet means that anyone

who's interested can check YouTube and see that he and Richards both very distinctly articulate some time rather than the night. Jagger and Bill Wyman did, though, give the most petulant eye rolls to the camera you've ever seen every time the offending line came up. The other controversy was due to the group's appearance on the London Palladium show. The UK biggest variety show and roughly the equivalent and popularity to Ed Sullivan in America. On that show, at the end, all the performers who had appeared on the show

would appear on a circular turntable, something like a roundabout, which would slowly revolve a few times while all the performers waved and smiled to the audience. All the other big names in British entertainment had done this without complaint. The Beatles, Ackabilk, Shirley Bassie, the swinging blue jeans, Larry Adler,

Frank Eiffield, the Hollies, Tom Jones, Jimmy Tarbuck, the Beverly Sisters, the problem was that the Rolling Stones didn't think of themselves as a light entertainment kind of act, and thought they'd look ridiculous doing that. Jagger told Disc Magazine, we agreed to do the show but not go on the roundabout. It's so predictable. The same thing happens regularly each week, and we don't want to conform to what has gone on before. According to reports, Jagger was yelling at Andrew Oldham backstage, telling him he didn't want the Rolling Stones to be part of some circus. The stones not showing us. The Stone's not showing

up at the end to smile and wave at the audience like everyone else was a major, major controversy in Britain at the time. The London Palladium show was not the Stone's normal kind of TV show, and reached a far broader audience than something like Ready, Steady Go. That audience had already been outraged by the group appearing on the show in their normal hippie clothes, rather than dressing up smartly in suits and ties. But now they weren't even doing the wave! The tabloids had already had it in for the stones, and now things ramped up to the next level. Jagger and Faithful went off on holiday for a week in the Riviera, and while they were there, Faithful bought a bottle of amphetamins from a dealer, and put it in the pocket of Mick's jacket. Both of them forgot it was there.

They flew back to the UK, where the group was going to be making an appearance on the Amon Andrews show on February 5th. Their palladium appearance had been so controversial that's also on February the 5th, a full two weeks after they'd made that appearance, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, who in 1967 were probably the two hippest comedians in Britain, appeared on the London Pladium show and brought in life-sized caricatures of the stones by the cartoonist Gerald Scarf, and had them appear on the roundabout. That morning, Jagger had opened the news of the world, the most notorious British tabloid, to find an article about how he had chatted to reporters in a club for hours about his drug habits, admitting to taking LSD, popping benzodia tablets, and showing lumps of hash

to teenage girls and inviting them back to his flat. Jagger was livid. He did use drugs, but compared to his band rates, he used emmeratively little, and more importantly he kept quiet about it, not going around blabbing about his illegal activities to random strangers he met in clubs. What had happened was obvious. The journalists had been spending the night together with Brian Jones, and he told him he was the leader of the Rolling Stones, and they'd assumed he was Jagger. That night, Aym and Andrews asked Jagger about the drug allegations, and Jagger was very clear. The news of the world hadn't spoken to him, and he was going to sue for liable. It was, as the group's friend Robert Fraser pot it, the Oscar Wild mistake.

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