The Rest Is History
559. The Rolling Stones: Satanic Majesties of Sixties Rebellion (Part 2)
23 Apr 2025
"We're not worried about petty morals." What happened to the Rolling Stones in 1967 to see them on the brink of imprisonment and mass censure, while at the height of their success, with fame, fortune, mansions, world tours, and best selling albums to their names? Was Brian Jones, the band's founder, murdered, after being found floating in his swimming pool? Under what pressures and against the backdrop of what other controversies, did they produce some of the best rock albums of all time? And, what occurred during their infamously deadly concert at the Altamont Raceway…? Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the uproarious climax of the Rolling Stones’ extraordinary career: their entanglements with the law, the evolution of their sound, their personal lives; sex, drugs, death, and the birth of rock… EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ https://nordvpn.com/restishistory Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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There's a big knock at the door. Eight o'clock. Everybody's just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day. Freaking about. Everyone has managed to find their way back to the house. TV is on with the sound off and the record player is on. Strobe lights are flickering. Mary Ann Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath. and has wrapped herself up in a rug, and is watching the box.
Bang, bang, bang, this big knock at the door, and I go to answer it. Oh, look, there's lots of little ladies and gentlemen outside. He says, read this.
unmistakable tones there of Keith Richards, of course. And he was being interviewed in Rolling Stone on the 19th of August, 1971, about one of the most notorious episodes, really from the 1960s, one of the kind of iconic moments. And it is the evening of the 12th of February, 1967. The scene is Keith Richards' country house at Redlands in Sussex,
And the man at the door is Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley of the West Sussex Constabulary. And Dominic, he's come basically to search the house and to arrest as many Rolling Stones as he possibly can, hasn't he? Make an example of them.
Yes, so this is the queue for one of the most famous trials in post-war British history. It's a very funny story, sort of trashy comic, and it's a brilliant window, I think, to the cultural life of Britain in the late 1960s. So last time we looked at the rise of the Rolling Stones and the way they became folk devils in early 60s Britain.
And today we're going to focus on the Rolling Stones in the last three years of the 60s. So we have the Redlands drugs case, a huge story at the time in Britain, front page news day after day. We have the tragic fate of Brian Jones, who is set up as this sort of doomed protagonist last time. And we have probably the two most celebrated concerts the Rolling Stones ever gave.
Two of the most celebrated rock concerts of all time, their appearance at Hyde Park and their appearance at the Altamont Raceway in 1969. There will be a lot of drugs involved. And perhaps surprisingly, given that this is an apparently trivial story about a rock band who are still in their mid-twenties, there'll be an awful lot of death.
So we're in February 1967, 1967, the summer of love of psychedelia. So not natural territory for the Stones, certainly as they promote themselves, one might argue. And this will be a bit of the context for the story we're about to tell, isn't it? So what's the broader political context?
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