STEPHEN DAVIS: “At dawn, they all piled into a Rolls and drove down to Stonehenge, then still accessible to anyone. Michael Cooper shot several rolls of Keith and Anita and Mick and Marianne cavorting around the ancient sarsen stones with Gram Parsons and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. They took Gram to Redlands, stoned, wined, and dined him, and he started teaching Keith – on piano – the old country songs he knew.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “The Stonehenge visit was part of a period of Visiting Famous Places While Whacked Out. We’d drop a little sunshine, pile into the old Bentley, slip an Otis Redding 45 into the deck, and head for the hills, or the desert… or wherever.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “That March, Anita hosted Tony Foutz and
Sam Shepard at Redlands while they wrote the screenplay of an experimental
film. Gradually, the themes revolved
more and more around Anita’s obsessions – UFOs, esoteric rituals, desert
wanderings, and magic. The more time
they spent in Anita’s sparkling wake, the more they absorbed her potent energy,
and the script shimmered with her Mad Hatter riddles and deft turns of
phrase. Eventually, they wrote Anita
into the story as an extraterrestrial ninja assassin clad in buskins and beads.”
BARRY MILES: “The King’s Road led straight to Glastonbury in those days. The people we knew led double lives, experimenting with acid, spending entire evenings discussing flying saucers, ley lines and the court of King Arthur. Other people waited patiently at Arthur’s Tor for saucers to land.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “We’d been at a club where Gram Parsons was playing; he was with the Byrds then – and we kind of just took him away and went down there. But these clothes… I mean, that was our normal getup, to go out in London.”
BARNEY HOSYKNS: “Gram first met the Stones when they came to see The Byrds play Covent Garden’s Middle Earth in May. Afterwards, to Gram’s great delight, a Rolls Royce transported Jagger and Richards and The Byrds to Stonehenge, where a multitude of substances was consumed and a bunch of spacey pictures snapped by Stones insider Michael Cooper.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “’Got anything?’ was probably the first question Gram asked me, or the more discreet ‘Erm, anywhere, erm…?’ ‘Sure, come back to…’ It began an instant friendship that already seemed ancient the first time we sat down and talked. It was like a reunion with a long-lost brother for me, I suppose, never having had one. He had a troubled background, a lot of Spanish moss and Garden of Good and Evil. We lived with Gram for months and months, certainly the rest of that summer of 1968, mostly at Redlands. We just sat around one night, and five nights later we were still sitting up talking and catching up on old times, which was five nights ago. And we played music without stopping. I learned the piano from Gram and started writing songs on it.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “He taught me the mechanics of country music, the Nashville style as opposed to the Bakersfield style. Also he got me playing piano. I like to write a lot on the piano as opposed to the guitar. He started to turn me on to certain classic tracks and certain styles of playing things – George Jones, Merle Haggard, Jimmie Rodgers. We used to sit around at the piano for ages, trying to figure out little licks. Not all country – that was the overwhelming impression, but also blues; Robert Johnson.”
GRAM PARSONS: “When the three of us sang together, it sounded like Gaelic music. Like the Incredible String Band. On one occasion at the piano, with me and Jagger and Richards, we had Little Richard. ‘It’s all the same,’ that’s what Keith said. Two Georgia peaches and two English boys, stinky English kids. Fun, it’s really far out. Drunk. DRUNK.”
CHRIS HILLMAN: “Gram was just like a puppy dog with the Stones. It was sort of embarrassing, like bringing your kid brother along on a date.”
TONY FOUTZ: “I had gone up to London for the weekend and was staying at Jagger’s rented house on Chester Square, a three-floor Regency pile with next to no furniture. I was with Anita Pallenberg – an old friend from Rome – and we were met by Marianne Faithfull as we came in, who announced, ‘I’ve found the most beautiful boy…’ And there Gram was: dressed in white, propped up on an elbow, all stretched out on a creamy carpet like a poolside parvenu in ‘Paradise Lost,’ a fetishlike necklace of turquoise and feathers at his throat. Man-child musician in the fold of newfound friends. I recall the mischief in his eyes, the lazy-boy smile. It was July of 1968 and he’d walked away from The Byrds’ tour to South Africa. He was on the corrosive threshold of his run down fame’s gauntlet and ruptured recognition as a gifted individual artist. The future was fatally bright.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick and I had wonderful times when we’d go off ley-line hunting in his Aston Martin, or Keith’s Bentley. We traveled all over the West Country and Ireland. We went to the north in disguise. Mick was very interested in all that ley-line stuff and the Arthurian legends [at one point he believed he and Keith were Lancelot and Galahad and Faithfull was Guinevere]. He was into aliens and UFOs. I got into the communing with the earth stuff from my husband, John Dunbar. Mick was a wonderfully civilized partner in all that.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Extraterrestrials were going to read these signs from their spaceship windows and get the message. It was the local credo: Glastonbury, ley lines, and intelligent life in outer space. I’ve forgotten exactly what it was we believed, but we believed it fiercely! And if little green men were going to contact anybody on the planet it would have to be us, wouldn’t it?”
