Go to Interview

An image of Brian Jones appears below the iconic headline of this CBC interview from April 1965 when Jones was still the leader of the band, soon to be replaced by the more diplomatic Mick Jagger who was also the band's erotic focus. Here we see the fragile Jones defending the “screamies" – girls who screamed so loud they ended concerts

Over the fall and winter of 1964-5 Stones' manager Andrew Loog Oldham devised a promotional campaign around the "bad boy" image in the wake of the Beatles' international success. First reported in the British press and picked up by fan magazines, the question "Would You Let Your Daughter Marry a Rolling Stone?" generated commentary and even heated debate as the band began their second North American tour which opened on April 23 1965 in Montreal.

It also fuelled a covert war between daughters and fathers over who really owned girls' bodies (and minds).

Wherever the Stones went they caused nervous breakdowns, while paramedics and ambulances stood by ready to cart away the casualties. Though some of the hysteria was probably faked, it was still highly contagious.

Like most of their early performances, the one at Montreal's Maurice Richard Arena in Montreal had been drowned out by screaming girls and shut down by the police after the first few songs.

The next night the Stones played Ottawa then boarded a train for Toronto. En route they were interviewed by CBC reporter Larry Zolf who repeats the question “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone" in a clear attempt to provoke an angry reaction worthy of their image.

This was more than clever marketing and the social engineering agenda is plainer now than it was in 1965. Depending on the setup, the Stones could come across as sensitive and serious, or as pawns in a strategy to create a youth underclass that could be controlled through “sex, drugs, rock and roll" marketed as liberation.

Understandably, parents were worried about their sexually provocative style and its effect on their daughters (and sons).

In the two minute interview, which aired nationally, Zolf followed the Oldham script labeling them “vulgar, obstinate and hostile”.  The Stones fail to grab the bait regarding the girls who overpowered stadium sound systems with their screams.

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A strange subliminal sequence was inserted at the beginning of the train interview. We get five seconds of a screaming girl filmed in a hospital where a nurse assists a doctor in admonistering electroshock while another nurse holds her down.

Viewers probably mistook this for a technical glitch if they noticed at all. Why was it added to the interview? As an inside joke, or warning? Was CBC suggesting Stones fans were candidates for shock therapy which was underreported but widespread in Canada in the 1960s. In Montreal alone, 10,000 patients a year received electroshocks. The new, electrified music often mimicked it.

Dr Ewen Cameron whose notorious Montreal Experiments were funded by the CIA
"…. believed that mental illness was literally contagious – that if one came into contact with someone suffering from mental illness, one would begin to produce the symptoms of a mental disease. 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.”

A growing army of psychiatrists and social scientists believed the battlefield of the future was the human mind.

While right wing McCarthyism and the Red Scare preoccupied Americans, Cold War psychiatrists on the CIA payroll adopted methods used by Nazi doctors in the concentration camps and were testing them on unwitting Canadians and Americans in the top secret program known as MKULTRA.

Growing up in this weaponized atmosphere, baby boomers embraced rock and roll with a vengeance.

While future sixties stars were gathering “like lemmings" at Laurel Canyon, military minds were scheming to to program a whole generation.

Few parents really had to deal with letting their daughter marrying a Rolling Stone but many coped with collateral damage from overt and covert "culture wars".

“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