These women behind the Rolling Stones were even cooler than the band
08.07.2023 - 16:01
/ nypost.com
“Vant to smoke a joint?” she dared them.Before that night in September 1965, the Stones had never done drugs. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had barely slept with anyone.
They didn’t even drink. At that point, only Brian Jones partied like a rocker, swigging brandy and fathering a string of illegitimate children.
Yet even he still wore pants bought by his mom.The Stones, at that point, “were not much more than unbrushed Beatles dressed in play-clothes,” writes Elizabeth Winder in her new book, “Parachute Women” (Hachette Books), about the women behind the world’s most storied, most mythic rock band. “Yet in the span of a few short years, they’d be the unassailable pirates that we know today — the world’s first rock stars.”Winder credits four women with catapulting The Stones into gods, of giving them “all their strut and glamour.” These ladies — artists and individuals in their own right — were “the real rebels, progressives and contrarians,” Winder argues. “The Rolling Stones may have risen to fame as rock’s favorite outlaws but only under the tutelage of these remarkable women,” Winder writes.Only Brian Jones accepted Pallenberg’s invitation to toke up that fateful evening in 1965.
They spent the night in Brian’s hotel room smoking and talking. The next day, she accompanied The Stones on their next tour stop in Berlin. Soon, Brian and Anita were the 1960s’ hottest, most dangerous couple.
She introduced him to S&M, LSD and the occult — they tore through London in his black Rolls-Royce with the license plate DD666 (for “Devil’s Disciple”). She dressed him in her clothes, too. Actually, all the Stones pilfered from her wardrobe: Brian, her velveteen trousers and silk scarves; Keith, her skull rings and Victorian mourning
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