Tony Sanchez - Up and Down with the Rolling Stones: My Rollercoaster Ride with Keith

I WAS STILL JUST A LITTLE IN AWE OF THE R OLLING S TONES IN THE mid-sixties. The Beatles were richer and sold more records. But they had compromised their integrity with neat hair and command performances. In London the Stones were the new potentates. Their hairstyles, their attitudes, their clothes were aped by every young man with aspirations to style from elegant, leisured aristocrats to schoolboys barely out of short trousers. It is hard to remember now just how vast, if transient, an influence they were. No other musicians in history had wielded such power for social revolution.

At the centre of it was Brian Jones. He was the musically gifted Stone, the one who could pick up any instrument from a saxophone to a sitar and learn to play it in less than half an hour. The one who was playing pure, soaring rhythm and blues for a living when Mick Jagger was a mediocre student at the London School of Economics and Keith Richard was just another grubby, delinquent art student who thought he was Chuck Berry because he could pluck three chords on his out-of-tune guitar.

Brian epitomized the arrogantly hedonistic attitude that was the mainstay of the Rolling Stones special appeal. He had left six illegitimate children all boys and all by different girls in his wake. He was the one who grew his hair longest. He was the first to wear outrageously androgynous clothes chiffon blouses and Ascot hats with make-up and yet carry such an aura of street guerrilla aggressiveness that no one would dare suggest to his face that he looked anything less than totally masculine. Where Brian led the other Stones limped along behind.

Lately things had changed. The word among those who worked with the Stones was that Mick and Keith were inadvertently grinding Brian down, breaking him, destroying him. Egocentric, obsessed with becoming stars themselves, they couldnt forgive Brian Jones for having bent them to his will musically and visually in their early days. Such rumours are common in the tough, bitchy world of rock music, and I hadnt taken them seriously until now.

I was sipping a scotch on the rocks in a dark London nightclub called the Speakeasy, waiting for my girl friend, a nightclub dancer, to show up. It was two in the morning, and the club was crowded with the young and beautiful men and women who had turned London, momentarily, into the hip capital of the Western world. Swinging London may be a dusty clich now. But then it was a reality we all were working hard to perpetuate.

At clubs like the Speakeasy everyone tries to appear supercool but spends most of the evening looking around for famous faces. You can tell when a star arrives because everyone even the dancers starts gaping. When it happened this time, I glanced up, and there, lurching towards me, was Brian Jones.

This wasnt the Brian I knew from twelve months before. Then his golden hair had glowed like the sun, and he had been tanned and lithe and beautiful. Now his hair hung lank and greasy around his deathly pale face, his eyes were bloodshot and the shadows across his face were those of a man who hadnt slept for a long time. Hi, Tony hows it going, man? He smiled, and I ordered him a scotch and felt flattered that the lead guitarist with the Rolling Stones had not only remembered my name but had singled me out among all the other people he knew in a fashionable club like the Speakeasy.

We talked for a while about records and new films; then he casually dropped the question Id been expecting: Any drugs about, Tony? Im not a pusher, but as a boy Id worked in Soho, first as a nightclub bouncer, then as a croupier, so I knew exactly where to go for anything from a bag of grass to a Thompson submachine gun. Consequently people in the rock world had come to use me as a reluctant go-between in their flirtations with the London underworld. Though I was frightened that my role might lead to big trouble, I was young enough and star struck enough to figure that the risks were worth taking if they were the price I had to pay for friendship with people like Brian Jones.

What are you looking for?, I asked Brian, though what I really longed to do was change the subject.

He clutched my arm and almost shouted, Anything, get me anything. I dont care what it fucking well is, just get me something.

I remember his lost, sad eyes. Brian Jones, the most famous, outrageous, flamboyant superstar of them all was now pathetic. I pulled my arm away and walked over to a black guy I knew who sometimes pushed drugs for a little pocket money.

What do you want?, he whispered. Ive got anything you want, man: coke, acid, smoke.

Hang on. I went back to Brian to see which goodies took his fancy.

Brian didnt even think for half a second. Get me everything, Tony, he urged, the whole thing. I dont care what it costs.

The price was 250. I promised the black guy the money would be in his hands the next day, and since he knew and trusted me, he handed the whole stash over in a small brown paper bag. By the time I got back to our table in the middle of the room, next to the dance floor, Brian was behaving so strangely that I was frightened he would gobble the drugs right in front of everyone. Before I handed over the bag, I warned him that he would have to go to the toilet if he were going to use anything at all while he was at the Speakeasy.

Before I could finish what I was saying, he snatched the bag, like a kid grabbing a lollipop, and sprinted off to the loo. When he returned, he appeared relaxed, and he was smiling as he handed me the bag and asked me to look after it in case he was searched by the police. I had started to use a certain amount of cocaine and when Brian invited me to help myself to whatever I wanted from his bag of tricks, I accepted gratefully. I could hardly believe my eyes when I locked myself into the toilet and opened the bag. Not only had Brian taken an entire bottle of coke, but he had also apparently swallowed a whole handful of mixed uppers and downers. I returned to the table, steeling myself to find Brian unconscious on the dance floor, but instead, he was smiling and joking with a girl friend while he sipped his fifth scotch of the evening.

We stayed for another hour, and even after a couple more scotches, Brian seemed to be only mildly stoned. It took me some weeks before I realised that Brian was like the variety of alcoholic who walks around in a permanent twilight world never really drunk, but never really sober either.

I drove him back to his flat in Courtfield Road, Earls Court, in my white Alfa Romeo. It was a warm night with a huge full moon, so we drove fast, very fast, with the top down. Brian seemed to enjoy the speed and the feel of the wind blowing his hair into his eyes because I could hear him mumbling to himself, Go baby, go faster, baby, faster.

He invited me into the second storey flat in the big red brick building for a smoke Brians name for a joint and I accepted. As he fumbled with his door key, I asked conversationally, Whats all this I hear about Anita going off with Keith, man?

It was common knowledge that Anita Pallenberg, whom I knew fairly well, had left Brian for Keith Richard. Brian jerked back as if hed been knifed. Dont ever mention that chicks name to me again, he said. But his words couldnt hide the pain that was eating him up inside, destroying him. When Keith lured Anita away, he had pulled out the last prop that was holding Brian up and had condemned him to a life where the only reality Brian wanted was oblivion.

This became even more obvious when we walked into the flat to be greeted by Nikki and Tina, two beautiful lesbian girls who had been living with Brian for some weeks. Brian made it perfectly clear that the three of them all shared his outsize bed. It was almost equally obvious that they all loathed one another.

As I rolled a joint from Brians paper bag, he dipped in and scooped out a scrap of blotting paper that had been impregnated with LSD. After all the booze and the cocaine and the uppers and downers he had taken I was worried about the effect this was going to have on him, but he seemed to know what he was doing, so I kept my mouth shut.