Four long-estranged friends from London's turbulent Sixties scene of sex, drugs and rock and roll are thrown together after seventeen years when one of them accidentally discovers the secret identity of their betrayer; a man they knew only as The Acid King, a charismatic figure who orchestrated a weekend of alluring drugs ending with a bust, jail time and death.
- What the friends don’t know is that a New York FBI Agent, another old enemy of the Acid King, has been on a long frustrating manhunt of his own, driven by the same rage for revenge. Until, by coincidence, he discovers the mystery man’s hidden Los Angeles location and tracks him to his lair. Resulting in a dangerous confrontation that puts lives, both guilty and innocent, on the line.
- The Acid King is the thinly veiled story of the famous Redlands drug bust of 1967; an event that put Mick Jagger and Keith Richards behind bars and nearly destroyed the world’s most famous rock band. All orchestrated by an unidentified man who set them up and then disappeared.
- By a strange twist of fate the Author (former film agent for Mick Jagger) met the Acid King in Los Angeles and became involved with him for several years, never knowing who he really was, until her friend Marianne Faithfull (former lover of Jagger) surprisingly identified him.
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Enjoy this guest post from author Maggie Abbott!
EDGY TIMES – LONDON IN THE
LATE SIXTIES
I was a busy agent
in the London office of Creative Management Associates when the drug bust at
the heart of my story The Acid King shook
up our lives. We had an exclusive
list of star clients, with Steve McQeen, Paul Newman and others, all
making Hollywood movies in Europe.
The Rolling Stones were clients too – and we were aiming to put them all
together in a movie of The Clockwork Orange, but resistance from major studios was hard to beat,
and producer Si Litvinoff instead made a deal with Stanley Kubrick for the
movie we all know.
Mick and Keith were
good friends, so of course I got all the dramatic phone calls following the
bust, with ceaseless conversations about what could have happened. Who was this guy, David Snyderman, who
called himself “The Acid King”?
How had he infiltrated their circle? Who did he know?
The mystery was never solved, and he vanished, so the London newspapers
called him Mister X, and the painful court appearances went on without him as a
witness, resulting in Mick and Keith getting a few days in prison. But there
was no question our lives were changed, the carefree sixties were over.
My colleague Sandy
Lieberson and I went on to put together the movie starring Mick Jagger called Performance — and the edgy times continued.