Jagger Busted For Possession
London — Mick Jagger returned here from the Altamont fiasco to find yet another bummer waiting for him at home. He was found guilty of possessing grass and fined $480 plus $126 court costs. Charges against Marianne Faithful were dismissed.
At a hearing in London on December 18th, police said that when they stopped Jagger in Chelsea last May 28th, he rushed to his house and shouted, “Marianne, Marianne, don’t open the door. It’s the police. They’re after the weed.”
Jagger allegedly asked the police, “Why don’t you leave us alone? I haven’t got any drugs.” The police, however, brandished a search warrant and claim to have found a box of marijuana downstairs and another cache upstairs. At the hearing it was reported that when Jagger was asked what was in the box he replied: “I don’t think I’d better answer that.”
Currently, he’s not answering on much of anything. He and Marianne both pleaded not guilty and he then disappeared on an incommunicado vacation outside England, to last until the trial. Rumor has Marrakesh as his destination.
Four days before the hearing, the Stones had played a concert at the Saville Theater. Naturally, the two welcome home concerts sold out within hours, but whether you dug it or not seemed to depend on which of the two shows you attended. The first set, two nowhere bands and one exceedingly lame magician preceded the Stones, puting the audience to sleep quite early in the evening. The Stones did nothing to wake them up. By the second set, though, in front of a different audience, they managed to get it on and everyone went home happy.
But Altamont had followed them home. Attending that concert were 32 security men inside the theater, 10 cops outside, and 15 members of the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade in the ladies’ toilet. They were there, according to the chief inspector of the police force, “basically to see that no one is born improperly or dies illegally.”
This is a story from the February 21, 1970 issue of Rolling Stone.