Albion Dreaming (24 page)

David Schneiderman was new to the Stones’ inner circle, having met Richards only once before, a year earlier in New York. He turned up in London a week before the Redlands drug raid and was invited to join the party there by Richards. Schneiderman was known as the “acid king” and according to Christopher Gibbs: “Schneiderman had a swag bag overflowing with every kind of mind-altering substance, including white lightening and dimethyltriptamine [DMT], which was a real revelation to all of us ...”
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During the raid, Schneiderman dissuaded the police from opening his attaché case by claiming it contained exposed film for a New York newspaper. Had they opened it the police would have found a treasure trove of psychedelic drugs.

At the trial in June the Stones’ defence lawyer, Michael Havers QC pointed the finger firmly at the
News of the World
, claiming they had tipped the police off about the drug party at Redlands. Richards agreed and, going a step further, alleged that Schneiderman had been a
News of the World
plant in order to get Jagger arrested for drug use, thus undermining the writ he had issued against the paper. Schneiderman, the only person found by the police to be in possession of cannabis and the supplier of the LSD for the party, was not in court to defend these allegations. He left the UK within a day of the police raid and did not return for his trial. No one seems to have known who he really was and he has not surfaced since the police raid. Speculation is rife that he may have been an undercover agent employed by US or British intelligence services, but there is no hard evidence to support that. Yet his sudden appearance and disappearance, together with
his access to large amounts of LSD, casts a shadow of mystery over him.

The description of him given by Christopher Gibbs paints a picture of a typical intelligence service operative or “spook”: “The infamous David Schneiderman, on the other hand, was a pied piperish character, who the hell he was and where he came from, nobody knew, he had just popped up. He was able to tune into everybody’s wavelength and was seductive, satanic, the devil in his most beguiling of disguises. After the bust he vanished as devils do, in a puff of smoke, and was never seen again.”
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Though Jagger refused to acknowledge his LSD use at the trial and the
News of the World
denied being involved in tipping off the police, both parties were being somewhat disingenuous. Ex-Police Constable Don Rambridge, who was part of the police team who carried out the raid, said later: “It was the
News of the World
story that put us on the boys, backed up with some other information from a reliable source.” Rambridge also noted that Stan Cudmore, the Detective Sergeant in charge: “... had the link with the press.”
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If true this is yet more evidence that in the middle years of the Sixties the popular press and police were working together to bring drug cases against leading musicians, and focusing specifically on their LSD use. Rambridge’s claims were given further credence by the strangely coy account of the raid published in the 19 February edition of the
News of the World
. Though the paper knew who had been at the party the report gave no names or even an indication of where the party had taken place. That they knew the intimate details of what had taken place at Redlands was evidenced by their knowledge that, minutes before the raid, “... one pop star and his wife drove off and so quite unwittingly escaped the net”. This was George Harrison and his girlfriend, clearly allowed to leave before the raid took place. The Beatles, at this stage, were still enjoying a positive image in the media, while the Rolling Stones were the bad boys of rock when it came to drugs and sex.
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The paper also understood that, “... at least one person present is believed to have been in possession of the drug LSD, a tiny dose of which gives up to 16 hours of hallucinations.” No LSD was found and nor was anyone charged with its possession. The
News
of the World
could only have known LSD was present if they knew of the contents of Schneiderman’s attaché case. And if they knew about that, whoever Schneiderman was working for, he was at the very least in touch with journalists at the
News of the World
.

Jagger, meanwhile, had spent some of the intervening time between the drug raid and the trial in Marrakesh. There he met up with the photographer Sir Cecil Beaton, Jagger claiming LSD was: “... like the atom bomb. Once it’s been discovered it can never be forgotten, and it’s too easy too make.”
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LSD was rapidly permeating all levels of society. It was coming out of the private house parties and becoming entrenched in the nightclubs frequented by the glitterati of swinging London. Record producer Simon Napier-Bell noticed the increase in LSD use in 1967 when the atmosphere at South Kensington’s Cromwellian Club, normally full of noise and gossip, changed. The regulars there were now often silent: “... they just stared into space and said how beautiful everything looked. It was acid.”
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While pop stars, minor aristocracy and the rich and famous were happy to take their LSD in exclusive clubs, and private country retreats, the growing numbers of hippies in London were attracted to clubs such as UFO, Middle Earth and Happening 44. LSD was a feature at these nightspots, available cheaply or even given away. Dave Tomlin, a regular at UFO, recalls the acid ambience: “Foxy girls with heavy mascara slink in the candlelit shadows, where sugar cubes receive their globule of nectar from the tip of a glass dropper, to be sucked like lemon drops by hopeful trippers intent on adding spice to the night.”
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Inevitably the media were infiltrating the hippie nightspots to file reports for their outraged readers. When the
People
discovered that the Electric Garden club was in Covent Garden, just round the corner from their offices, they immediately sent reporter Patrick Kent to see what was going on. Somewhat predictably he saw lots of hippies involved in a happening, many of them under the influence of drugs. The hippie cult, Kent opined in his last paragraph, was: “... degrading, decadent and just plain daft.”
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Occasionally, presaging the festivals to come, hippie celebrations broke free of the subterranean clubs. At one-off events such as the
“14 Hour Technicolour Dream”, held on 29 April 1967 at Alexandra Palace, they gathered in large numbers. Over thirty bands spread across two stages took the hippie masses through the night until dawn. A huge light show projected coloured bubbles and abstract patterns onto billowing white sheets, while fairground rides and inflatables added to the sensory overload.

The cream of London’s psychedelia was at the event both as performers and participants. John Lennon wandered freely through the audience and the bands included Soft Machine, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, and of course the band that perhaps most represented the experience of LSD at the time, Pink Floyd. Pink Floyd manager, Peter Jenner remembers the experience well: “That really was the most psychedelic experience that I’ve ever been to. At least half the audience was doing acid. I was doing acid ... I did some acid before we went, and by the time I got to Alexandra Palace the old acid was beginning to go and trying to drive the van was getting quite exciting.”
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As dawn broke the sun’s light began to filter through Alexandra Palace’s huge windows, transforming the Victorian “People’s Palace” into a psychedelic cathedral. For many hippies there it was the moment they had been waiting for. Pink Floyd, Syd Barrett high on acid, was playing and it was a high point, in all senses of the word, for psychedelic culture. Peter Jenner recalled: “The band played at dawn with all the light coming through the glass at the Palace, the high point of the psychedelic era for me. It was a perfect setting, everyone had been waiting for them and everybody was on acid; that event was the peak of acid use in England ... Everybody was on it: the bands, the organisers, the audience, and I certainly was.”
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But the idea of putting almost ten thousand people, even hippies, together for several hours had its faults. Pink Floyd lighting engineer, Peter Wynne-Wilson saw another side to the hippie dream: “I can remember thinking that the drug situation had got extremely messy and perverted because there were people completely in a state because of drink and drugs. And it seemed to me to be a real falling apart, I didn’t like it at all.”
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Wynne-Wilson’s observations were astute. When taken in
controlled circumstances LSD was a powerful but usually harmless experience. But when taken with strangers in huge venues, accompanied by disorientating lights and music, the experience was much less predictable. LSD use at the “14 Hour Technicolour Dream” showed the crossroads use of the drug had reached. Numbers of LSD users were increasing daily and were becoming bolder in going out to pubs, clubs and gigs. Entrepreneurs, both hippie and straight, saw an opening in the market and sought to provide venues for large numbers of people, many of whom would be under the influence of LSD. In their enthusiasm, whether driven by ideology or profit, to create environments in which people could enjoy the LSD experience, the organisers had ignored the absolute importance of set and setting.

After all the negative publicity surrounding LSD in the first half of 1967, its supporters received a boost in June when Paul McCartney admitted on TV to ITN’s Keith Hadfield that he had taken it four times. The revelation reverberated through the UK. Where once the Beatles had been the clean cut antithesis of the Rolling Stones, after McCartney’s frank disclosure it was obvious to all they had crossed the great divide between “straight” society and the psychedelic pioneers.

Coming as it did only weeks after the release of
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
the cynical might have viewed McCartney’s bombshell as a cynical marketing move, a trick designed to get maximum publicity. But the Beatles didn’t need the publicity and McCartney’s candour was such that he seemed to have been genuine in his desire to share his experiences with his fans.

For McCartney, taking LSD meant mind expansion and the ending of all social evils: “We only use one-tenth of our brain. Just think what we could all accomplish if we could only tap that hidden part! It would mean a whole new world. If the politicians would take LSD, there wouldn’t be any more war, poverty or famine.” Not only did the Beatle admit to enjoying LSD he was clear that: “My personal opinion is that LSD is not dangerous.” For anyone still hesitant about using LSD McCartney’s admission he had taken the drug was as near to a celebrity endorsement as was
possible. And for many
Sgt Pepper’s
was the ultimate psychedelic album, made by acidheads for acidheads.
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The album’s iconic sleeve photograph was conceived by pop artist Peter Blake and photographed by Michael Cooper at his London studio. According to McCartney two of the Beatles had taken LSD for the event.
Sgt Pepper’s
has come to define psychedelic music and the summer of 1967. From its release on 1 June the album was everywhere, playing on the radio, TV, in shops and in hippie pads across the UK. It became, for a while at least, the album to listen to while on LSD. Its bright, colourful splashes of sound and inventive lyrics made it almost impossible to have a bad experience.

Several tracks on the album appeared to be about drugs, although whether they actually were or not is a matter for conjecture. Speculation has raged to what degree socialite Tara Browne’s death inspired “A Day in the Life”, the closing track on the album. Because of his penchant for LSD, rumour spread that the phrase, “he blew his mind out in a car” referred to the possibility Browne was on an LSD trip at the time of his death. Lennon claims the song’s lyric grew from stories in the
Daily Mail
for 17 January 1967 (“I read the news today, oh boy”) which juxtaposed details of Browne’s inquest with a surreal filler about the number of road works in Blackburn, Lancashire. McCartney allows that while he didn’t connect the lyric with Browne he accepts that Lennon did.
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Though the record buying public received
Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
ecstatically, the British cultural establishment wasn’t at all happy that some of its lyrics might be affecting the nation’s youth. Prior to its releases some broadcasting mavens within the BBC already had severe doubts about the lyrics to “A Day in the Life”, mainly because of the line, “I went upstairs and had a smoke, somebody spoke and I went into a dream”. They may also have heard the rumours about the cause of Tara Browne’s death. On 19 May the BBC Press Office issued an internal statement relating to the song: “The Beatles new LP ‘Sergeant Pepper’s Lone (sic) Hearts’ Club Band’ contains one song which the BBC has decided not to broadcast. It is called “A Day in the Life’”.
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It seems from this statement that the BBC wanted to ban the song and for the ban to remain secret if at all possible: “This information is on no account to be volunteered but it may break from other sources in which case you may talk as follows.” The statement went on to describe that if challenged about the existence of the ban it was to be acknowledged but qualified with: “The BBC takes a pretty liberal attitude these days ... however, we have listened to this particular song over and over again and we have decided that as far as we are concerned it appears to go a little too far and could encourage a permissive attitude to drug-taking.”
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