Would You Let Your Daughter Marry A Rolling Stone?

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The late Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, 1965

 BAD BOYS AND LOST GIRLS

Any image of the late Brian Jones in his heyday might be viewed as “iconic" but the attached one appeared below an iconic headline in a CBC interview from April 1965.

In response to the Beatles’ international success, late in 1964 Rolling Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham devised a campaign promoting his clients' "bad boy" image.

First reported in Melody Maker magazine, the slogan "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?" crossed the Atlantic just as the Stones were launching their second North American tour, which opened in Montreal.

I remember the thrilling Teen magazine article we girls shared between classes at our high school. Marry a Rolling Stone? Definitely. The question helped fuel a covert war between daughters and fathers over who really owned our bodies (and minds).

Like most of their early performances, the one I was not allowed to attend at Maurice Richard Arena got shut down by the police after a few songs. Wherever the Stones went they caused nervous breakdowns, and ambulances stood ready to cart away the casualties. Though some of the hysteria was probably faked, it was still highly contagious.

The Stones played Ottawa before boarding a train for Toronto on April 25. En route they were interviewed by a CBC reporter who followed the script in an obvious attempt to provoke an angry reaction worthy of their image.

Brian Jones was still the leader - not yet replaced by the more diplomatic Mick Jagger who was the main erotic focus for teen audiences of both sexes. Here, Jones is seen defending the “screamies" – who often screamed so loudly they drowned out the music.

In the two-minute clip, which aired nationally, Larry Zolf tries to get the band to act “vulgar, obstinate and hostile” as they’re described in the accompanying text. In fact, unlike the screamies who overpowered stadium sound systems, the Stones behave like gentlemen despite his persistent hammering.

Other strange tricks were being deployed against youth -- not just clever marketing. Watch closely: a revealing subliminal sequence precedes the actual interview: five seconds of a screaming girl filmed in a hospital where a nurse assists a doctor in administering electroshock while another nurse holds the patient down.

Viewers probably mistook this for a technical glitch if they noticed at all, but why was it inserted and why was it never explained? Was it intended as a joke, or a warning? Was CBC suggesting Stones fans were candidates for shock treatment?

Is she clutching an album cover???

I find this clip shocking in a very personal way. On April 25, 1965,  I was electro-shocked in a Montreal hospital. I was 14 years old, at the top of my class in high school, with no behavioral problems. The following Monday I was back at school, hearing about the Rolling Stones concert from my friend Irene Shanefield, whose brother had bought her ticket. 

It seems incredible but massive electro shock is the only explanation for my memory gap, which would re-open 50 years later in 2015. Through various sources, including Jagger himself, I now know Mick came to my house in a Montreal suburb on April 24, 1965 -- causing a chain reaction that totally changed my life. But I'll get to that in a minute.

The new, electrified music could mimic ECT, especially with strobe lights added as they were later. Electroshock therapy was widespread in Canada in the 1960s. Montreal hospitals (where this footage likely originated), shocked upwards of 10,000 patients a year. 

Just the year before, McGill University had fired its world-famous head psychiatrist, Dr. Ewen Cameron, whose now notorious Montreal Experiments were funded by the CIA.

Cameron "…. believed that mental illness was literally contagious …  For example, something like rock music could be created by mentally ill people and would produce mentally ill people through infection, which in turn would be transmitted to the genes. Thus, this group would have to be studied and controlled as a contagious social disease.”

While right-wing McCarthyism and the Red Scare preoccupied Americans, here in Canada military psychiatrists on the CIA payroll studied methods used by Nazi doctors in European concentration camps and were testing them on unwitting subjects, including rebellious teenagers. A growing army of psychiatrists and social scientists believed the battlefield of the future was the human mind. Growing up in this Cold War atmosphere, baby boomers embraced rock and roll with a vengeance. And while future sixties stars were gathering “like lemmings" at Laurel Canyon to create the psychedelic movement, military minds were already dreaming up ways to program a whole generation.

Understandably, parents of the era were worried about the Stones' sexually provocative style and its effect on their daughters (and sons).  Few families had to deal with a daughter marrying a Rolling Stone but many coped with collateral damage from overt and covert "culture wars".

Behind the "bad boy" sales strategy, a social engineering agenda is plainer now than it was in 1965.

“Police, hospitals, government, and schools would need to use the correct psychiatric authority to stop mental contagions from spreading. Cameron also hoped to generate families capable of using authority and techniques to take measures against mental illness…." - Wikipedia

Depending on social context, the Stones could come across as sensitive, serious young men, or degenerate pawns in a strategy to create a youth underclass controlled through “sex, drugs, rock and roll" marketed as Liberation.

REFLECTIONS IN A REAR-VIEW MIRROR

I was 14 years old and living at my parents' house in the suburbs of Montreal. I believe it was a Saturday afternoon in late April. My father and brother were not around and my mother was at the kitchen sink which faced the street. Looking out the window, she said, "There's someone here to see you. Go let him in."

That's me, second from left, age 14, Baron Byng High School 1965

I stopped whatever I was doing and went to open the front door, and there was Mick Jagger. My first impression was that he'd recently had a haircut -- he looked neater than when I'd last seen him months earlier, on the T.A.M.I. Show. Stunned, I opened the outer screen door and he stepped into the entrance and stood for a moment in the hall next to the living room, looking around. He was 21, wearing a jean jacket, and was very polite and well spoken, just the kind of boy my mother would have liked me to go out with -- someday, when I was old enough to go out with boys, that is.

She said, "Why don't you go down in the basement and talk?" I led Mick through the kitchen and down the basement stairs and to the cavernous recreation room which had a ping pong table in the middle, crammed opposite an upright piano beside a little shelf with a record player. My father's giant short wave radio sat on a table nearby.

The High School I attended that year - Baron Byng High School -  was famous for its music department and was in fact a stone's throw from the Allan Memorial Institute.  My dad had taught vocal music there for a few years, beginning in 1947. We were a musical family -- except that my twin brother inherited most of the talent. As for me, I sang in my class choir, which had swept the awards in that year's Protestant School Board choir competition. At 5'10" I was the tallest girl in the school.

I leaned against the ping pong table and Mick stood over by the metal door to the garage. We must have chatted a little until he came to the purpose of his visit. "I've come to ask for your hand in marriage." There was a pause and then the scene in the dream speeds up like a tape on FF. I'm not sure what I said next - just that my mouth opened and I gave utterance to my emotions, a mixture of shock and my developing sense of adolescent irony, acquired in the hallways of Baron Byng High School where nothing was sacred and Jewish comedy reigned. All I know is Mick was deeply offended. He got up and charged out of my life forever. Or almost.

In the time it took me to digest this scene and its aftermath and wake from the dream, I was flooded with a 14-year-old's confused emotions. Maybe I cried. I must have, given what had just happened.

I have always had a very clear memory of the following Monday, April 26, 1965. I'm in the hallway at Baron Byng, outside our classroom - the bell has rung. I'm listening with mute envy as tall, razor-witted Irene Shanefield describes the concert Friday night at the Maurice Richard arena and her inability to hear anything over the noise of hysterical fans. I remember turning away thinking I hadn't missed much after all. 

I think over that weekend in my family there must have been panic and disarray in the wake of Mick's rapid visit and exit. I think at that point, my dad probably stepped in. His Air Force superior was RAF officer and Psychiatrist Peter Roper, who in 1965 was still brainwashing patients at the Allan. He had "depatterned" my father and sent him home in 1963 with parts of his memory gone. So it's not so farfetched to think I was taken downtown and put through the same memory-wiping process that was then being used so effectively to treat "mental illness."  My parents probably thought they were sparing their daughter a world of heartbreak.

The doctors couldn't wipe away everything, or prevent me from harboring private feelings over the years, from the moment I first saw the Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show on October 26, 1964, and also the next time when they performed Little Red Rooster and Everybody Needs Somebody to Love on Ed Sullivan for the second time, on May 2, 1965. Throughout my early adulthood, I used to tell my friends that I felt I somehow knew Mick from somewhere - I just couldn't think where. 

Much of my childhood is lost to me, behind a memory wall likely installed while I was in Subproject 68, Cameron's infamous CIA-funded experiment with drugs, hypnosis and sensory isolation.  Like Snow White, who pricked her finger and fell asleep for 100 years, I think I went to sleep in 1965, if not before. Until one day in April of  1992 I waded to shore at the beach on Mustique and a 48-year-old Mick came down the steps to meet me. And the rest is Voodoo.

When my dream of knowing Mick as a teenager surfaced a few years ago, I had been in a relationship with a man on a Greek island for over a decade. But previous to that I had been in frequent contact with Jagger's people through the internet, subsequent to my 1992 trip to Mustique, and my photo and name had appeared on a CD-ROM the Stones produced in 1995 in conjunction with their Voodoo Lounge tour.

When my basement dream finally hit and I relived the scene and guessed the aftermath, I was quick to dismiss it as some quirky fantasy, not a recovered memory (which it resembled) which on its face was impossible, could not have happened, and made no sense in real life. Or so I believed at the time. It seemed so obvious that Mick could never have come to see me at our house -- how would he have found it? How would he even know I existed back in 1965. But then, much of my early life remains a mystery even now.

Up until recently, I hadn't thought much about this at all. It didn't occur to me until last April to go look up the actual date of the Stones' first concert in Montreal, but when I did find this video I recognized Mick's shy good manners, and the haircut. In the interview we learn that the Stones spent a few days in Montreal, not just at their hotel. They went out to clubs and drove around in a rented station wagon.

In a retrospective news item we learn they broke a rear-view mirror on their way to Ottawa for the April 24 concert, and stopped in lower NDG to get it repaired. That's where these children found them and helped them find an open garage. And 50 years later, this photo appeared in the Montreal Gazette, commemorating the moment. Obviously, these kids never forgot their meeting with Mick Jagger which had been all positive: something was broken, and got repaired.

Rolling Stones in Montreal, April 24, 1965 (Coolopolis Blog)

As for me, I just wish I could remember what I said to Mick in the basement earlier that day. In this photo, his eyes look puffy, almost as if he'd been crying. He's still wearing the jean jacket - it must have been one of those sunny, crisp days. The article says he was feeling tired and napped in the car while Brian crossed Saint Jacques with the kids to look at the train yard down below. Then they all drove to Ottawa.

I wonder what my parents thought, although they certainly never mentioned any of this to me. I remember sometime later my mother telling me I needed to modulate my voice, especially around boys. My brother had informed her he had seen me in the hallway at Baron Byng, acting frenetic with my Stones and Beatles-crazed girlfriends. "Boys don't like girls who talk loud," my mother intoned with gravity. "You could attract more flies with honey than with vinegar." I resented my brother snitching, but secretly took her advice to heart. The next year they sent me to another high school, and I never saw my wild girlfriends again. I fell in love with the boy who sat behind me in English class -- with him I was calm and sphynx-like. He sang  Dylan's "Love Minus Zero/ No Limit" to me at a party but we never progressed beyond music and French literature.

It was the year after Dylan went electric.

PODCAST!!!
March 23, 2020  in Conversation with Jasun Horsley (Liminalist #234)