Their Satanic Majesties' Distress

Today, The Rolling Stones are the biggest rock’n’roll band in the world. Forty years ago they were arguably the biggest, but definitely the baddest – so bad that the events of 1967 looked set to destroy them. Simon Goddard relives 12 scandalous months that almost broke the Stones…

It was all going so, so well. In just four years The Rolling Stones had progressed from Richmond’s Crawdaddy Club to the Hollywood Bowl, notching up six No 1 hits at home and another three in America. Their only serious competition came from The Beatles, who might have had the music but as Members of yhe Most Excellent Order of the British Empire were no match for the rebel magnetism exuded by Jagger’s mob. To be a Rolling Stone in 1966 was to be one of the five coolest men on the planet. But all that was to drastically change in the year that followed.

Until 1967, the Stones’ greatest crime was strictly a matter of hairdressing. As the original “long-haired louts” they were routinely pilloried in the press as a threat to the country’s moral fibre. In truth, their only brushes with the law had been over crowd control at their habitually frenzied concerts and an isolated incident at a petrol station which saw them fined 15 guineas for urinating against a wall. Hardly the kind of behaviour to warrant locking up and throwing away the key. Yet that’s exactly what was to happen.

Nowadays, media reports of Pete Doherty arriving late for court to hear another charge of drug possession have become so familiar as to seem ridiculous, but four decades ago, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones found …

by Simon Goddard
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