Life (37 page)
But there’s probably a million different reasons you do. I think it’s maybe to do with working on the stage. The high levels of energy and adrenaline require, if you can find it, a sort of antidote. And I saw smack as just becoming part of that. Why do you do it to yourself? I never particularly liked being that famous. I could face people easier on the stuff, but I could do that with booze too. It isn’t really the whole answer. I also felt I was doing it not to be a “pop star.” There was something I didn’t really like about that end of what I was doing, the blah blah blah. That was very difficult to handle, and I could handle it better on smack. Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk—a departure from reality. I chose junk. And also I was with my old lady Anita, who was as avid as I was. I think we just wanted to explore that avenue. And when we did, we only meant to explore the first few blocks, but we explored it to the end.
Off of Bill Burroughs, I got apomorphine, along with Smitty, the vicious nurse from Cornwall. The cure that Gram Parsons and I did was total anti-heroin aversion therapy. And Smitty loved to administer it. “Time, boys.” There’s Parsons and me in my bed, “Oh no, here comes Smitty.” Gram and I needed to take a cure just before the farewell tour of 1971, when he and his soon-to-be wife, Gretchen, came over to England and we went about our usual ways. Bill Burroughs recommended this hideous woman to administer the apomorphine that Burroughs talked endlessly about, a therapy that was pretty useless. But Burroughs swore by it. I didn’t know him that well, except to talk about dope—how to get off or how to get the quality you’re after. Smitty was Burroughs’s favorite nurse and she was a sadist and the cure consisted of her shooting you up with this shit and then standing over you. You do as you’re told. You don’t argue. “Stop sniveling, boy. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t screwed up.” We took this cure in Cheyne Walk, and it was Gram and me in my four-poster bed, the only guy I ever slept with. Except that we kept falling off the bed because we were twitching so much from the treatment. With a bucket to throw up in, if you could stop twitching for enough seconds to get near it. “You got the bucket, Gram?” Our only outlet, if we could stand up, would be to go down and play the piano and sing for a bit, or as much as possible to kill time. I wouldn’t recommend that cure to anybody. I wondered if that was Bill Burroughs’s joke, to send me to probably the worst cure he’d ever had.
It didn’t work. It’s a long seventy-two hours, and you’ve been shitting yourself and pissing yourself and twitching and spasms. And after that, your system’s washed. When you take the stuff you put all the other stuff—your endorphins—to sleep. They think, oh, he doesn’t need us, because something else is in there. And they take seventy-two hours to wake up and go back to work. But usually as soon as you’ve finished, you go back on it. After all that, after a week of that shit, I need a fix. And there you go, the number of times I’ve cold turkeyed, only to go straight back on. Because the cold turkey is so rough.
The powers that be couldn’t break the butterfly on the wheel, but they tried again and again at my house in Cheyne Walk in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I got quite used to being thrown up against my own doorposts, coming home from a club at three in the morning. Just as I reached my front gate, out of the bushes would leap these people with truncheons. Oh OK, here we go again, assume the position. “Up against the wall, Keith.” That fake familiarity annoyed me. They wanted to see you cringe, but I’ve been there, pal. “Oh, it’s the Flying Squad!” “We’re not flying as high as you, Keith,” and all that bullshit. They wouldn’t have a warrant, but they were playing their own game.
“Oh, I’ve got you this time, my boy, flash ol’ sod”—their glee in thinking they’d pinned me. “Oh, what have we got here, Keith?” and I know I’ve got nothing on me. They come on heavy because they want to see if they can make a big rock-and-roll star quiver in his boots. You’ll have to do better than that. Let’s see how far you want to go. Officers walking in and out and looking at bits of paper, confused as to what’s going to happen when the newspapers hear that I’ve been pulled in again, and wondering whether Detective Constable Constable has made the right move tonight in his fervor to clear the world of junkie guitarists.
It was also a real drag to wake up every day with these bluebottles around your door, these bobbies, to wake up realizing you’re a criminal. And you start to think like one. The difference between waking up in the morning and saying, “Oh, nice day,” and peering through the curtains to see if the unmarked cars are still parked outside. Or waking up grateful that during the night there wasn’t a knock at the door. What a mind-bending distraction. We’re not destroying the virtue of the nation, but they think we are, so eventually we’re drawn into a war.
I
t was
C
hrissie
G
ibbs
who linked Mick up with Rupert Loewenstein when it was clear that we had to try and sever ourselves from the wiles of Allen Klein. Rupert was a merchant banker, very pukka, trustworthy, and although I didn’t actually get to speak to him for about a year after he started working for us, I got on well with him from then on. He discovered I liked reading, and one book led to a library’s worth over the years, sent by Rupert.
Rupert didn’t like rock and roll; he thought “composing” was something done with a pen and paper, like Mozart. He’d never even heard of Mick Jagger when Chrissie first talked to him. We brought seven lawsuits against Allen Klein over seventeen years, and eventually it was a farce, with both sides waving and chatting in the courtroom—like a normal day at the office. So Rupert at least learned the jargon of the business, even if he never got emotionally involved in the music.
It had taken us a while to discover what Allen Klein had helped himself to and what wasn’t ours anymore. We had a company in the UK called Nanker Phelge Music, which was a company we all shared in. So we get to New York and sign this deal to a company into which everything is to be channeled henceforth, also called Nanker Phelge, which we presume is our same company with an American name, Nanker Phelge USA. Of course after a while we discovered that Klein’s company in America bore no relation to Nanker Phelge UK and was wholly owned by Klein. So all the money was going to Nanker Phelge USA. When Mick was trying to buy his house on Cheyne Walk, he couldn’t get the money out of Allen Klein for eighteen months because Allen was trying to buy MGM.
Klein was a lawyer manqué; he loved the letter of the law and loved the fact that justice and the law had nothing to do with each other; it was a game for him. He ended up owning the copyright and the master tapes of all our work—anything written or recorded in the time of our contract with Decca, which was to end in 1971. But it ended in fact with
‘Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!’
in 1970. So Klein owned unfinished and uncompleted songs up to the ’71 limit, and that was the tricky part. The fight was about whether the songs between that record and ’71 belonged to him. In the end we conceded two songs, “Angie” and “Wild Horses.” He got the publishing of years of our songs and we got a cut of the royalties.
He still owns the publishing to “Satisfaction” too, or his heirs do; he died in 2009. But I don’t give a shit. He was an education. Whatever he did, he blew us up the river, he put it together, although “Satisfaction” certainly helped at that moment. I’ve made more money by giving up the publishing on “Satisfaction,” and my idea has never been to make money. Originally it was, do we make enough to pay for the guitar strings? And then later on, do we make enough to put on the kind of show we want to put on? I’d say the same about Charlie, and Mick too. Especially initially, hey, we don’t mind making the money, but most of it’s plowed back into what it is we want to do. So the basic flavor of it is that Allen Klein made us and screwed us at the same time.
Marshall Chess, who climbed the ladder from the mail room to become president of Chess after his father died, had just sold the company and was looking to start a new label. Together we founded Rolling Stones Records in 1971 and made a deal with Atlantic Records to distribute, which is where Ahmet Ertegun came in. Ahmet! An elegant Turk who with his brother, Nesuhi, drove the music business into a total re-think of what it was that people could hear. The echoes of the Stones’ idealism (juvenile as it was) resonated. Shit, I miss the mother. The last time I saw him was backstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York. “Where’s the fucking john?” I showed him the way. He snapped the lock. I went on stage. After the show I found out he had slipped on the tiles. He never recovered. I loved the man. Ahmet encouraged talent. He was very much hands-on. It wasn’t like an EMI or a Decca, some huge conglomerate. That company was born and built up out of love of music, not business. Jerry Wexler too, it was a whole team, a family thing in a way. Need I go through the roster? Aretha… Ray… too many to mention. You felt like you’d joined the elite.
But in 1970 we had a problem.
We were in the ludicrous situation where Klein would be lending us money that we could never afford to repay because he hadn’t paid the tax and anyway we’d spent the money. The tax rate in the early ’70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that’s the same as being told to leave the country.
And I take my hat off to Rupert for figuring a way out of massive debt for us. It was Rupert’s advice that we become nonresident —the only way we could ever get back on our feet financially.
The last thing I think the powers that be expected when they hit us with super-super tax is that we’d say, fine, we’ll leave. We’ll be another one not paying tax to you. They just didn’t factor that in. It made us bigger than ever, and it produced
Exile on Main St.,
which was maybe the best thing we did. They didn’t believe we’d be able to continue as we were if we didn’t live in England. And in all honesty, we were very doubtful too. We didn’t know if we would make it, but if we didn’t try, what would we do? Sit in England and they’d give us a penny out of every pound we earned? We had no desire to be closed down. And so we upped and went to France.
Dominique Tarlé
In which we leave for France in spring of 1971 and I rent Nellcôte, a house on the Riviera. Mick gets married in Saint-Tropez. We set up our mobile truck to record
Exile on Main St.
and settle into a prolific nighttime recording schedule. We motorboat to Italy for breakfast in the
Mandrax.
I hit my stride on the five-string guitar. Gram Parsons comes and Mick gets possessive. I insulate myself with drugs; we get busted. I hang out for the last time with Gram in LA and get badly hooked on second-rate dope. I flee to Switzerland with Anita for a cure, undergo cold-turkey horrors and compose “Angie” while recovering.
W
hen I first saw Nellcôte, I thought that I could probably handle a spell of exile. It was the most amazing house, right at the base of Cap Ferrat, looking out over Villefranche Bay. It had been built around the 1890s by an English banker, with a large garden, a little overgrown, behind the great iron gates. The proportions were superb. If you felt a little ragged in the morning, you could walk through this glittering château and feel restored. It was like a hall of mirrors, with twenty-foot ceilings and marble columns, grand staircases. I’d wake up thinking, this is my house? Or, about bloody time someone’s got it right. This was the grandeur we felt we deserved after the shabbiness of Britain. And since we’d committed ourselves to living abroad, how hard really was it to sit in Nellcôte? We’d been on the road forever, and Nellcôte was a lot better than the Holiday Inn! I think everybody felt a sense of liberation compared to what had been going on in England.
It was never our intention to record at Nellcôte. We were going to look around for studios in Nice or Cannes, even though the logistics were a little daunting. Charlie Watts had taken a house miles away in the Vaucluse, several hours’ drive. Bill Wyman was up in the hills, near Grasse. He was soon hanging out with Marc Chagall, of all people. The most unlikely couple I can think of, Bill Wyman and Marc Chagall. Neighbors, pop round for a cup of Bill’s terrible tea. Mick lived first in the Byblos hotel in Saint-Tropez while he waited for his wedding day, then rented a house belonging to Prince Rainier’s uncle and then a house owned by someone called Madame Tolstoy. Talk about falling in with the cultural Euro trash, or they with the white trash. They, at least, welcomed us with open arms.
One of the features of Nellcôte was a little staircase down to a jetty, to which I soon attached the
Mandrax
2
,
a very powerful twenty-foot motorboat, a Riva, built of mahogany, the crème de la crème of Italian speedboats.
Mandrax
was an anagram of its original name; all I had to do was knock off a couple of letters and move a couple around. It was irresistible to call it that. I bought it off a guy, renamed it and set off. No skipper’s license or pilot’s license. There wasn’t even the formal “Have you ever been on the water before?” Now I’m told you have to take exams to drive a boat in the Mediterranean. It required the companionship of Bobby Keys, not long coming, Gram Parsons and others to put the
Mandrax
to the test on the glassy Mediterranean, to strike out for the Riviera and adventure. But this was later. First there was the matter of Mick’s wedding to Bianca, his Nicaraguan fiancée, which came up in May, four weeks after our arrival. Marianne had gone from his life in 1970, the previous year, and into the beginning of a lost decade.
Mick arranged what he saw as a quiet wedding, for which he chose Saint-Tropez at the height of the season. No journalist stayed at home. In these presecurity days, the couple and the guests wrestled their way through the streets against photographers and tourists, from the church to the mayor’s office—hand-to-hand combat, like trying to get to the bar in a rowdy club. I slid off, leaving Bobby Keys, who was a close friend of Mick’s in those days, to act as assistant best man or whatever. Roger Vadim was best man.
Bobby’s role is mentioned here because Bianca’s bridesmaid was the very pretty Nathalie Delon, estranged wife of the French movie star Alain Delon, and Bobby took a great and dangerous fancy to her. She and Delon had been in the center of a scandal that had embroiled the French prime minister Georges Pompidou and his wife, as well as the crime underworld from Marseilles to Paris. Delon’s Yugoslav bodyguard, with whom Nathalie had had a brief affair, had been shot, his body found in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Paris. No one was ever convicted of killing him. Delon had left Nathalie and taken up with the actress Mireille Darc. It was a big mess and wrapped in considerable danger. Behind Delon and Nathalie were powerful figures from the Marseilles milieu a few miles down the road, as well as a band of Yugoslav toughs. There was clearly a lot of bad feeling and some major political blackmail flying about—Nathalie herself had had the wheels loosened on her car. Not a great moment, maybe, to become her new beau.
Bobby, knowing nothing of all this, developed an instant fascination with Nathalie and blew his heart out at the party that night to attract her attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He went back to London before returning to work on the music at Nellcôte. And when he got back, Nathalie was still there, staying with Bianca. What happened then? Well, they’re both still alive as I write, but I’m not sure why. Weeks would pass before that trouble became real.
When I slid off at the wedding, it was towards a cubicle in the john of the Byblos, and I’m taking a leak and in the next cubicle I hear sniffing. “Keep it down,” I say, “or break it out.” And a voice comes back, “Want some?” And that’s how I met Brad Klein, who became a great friend of mine. His forte was transshipment, rerouting dope from here to there. He was a very well-educated, clean-cut-looking boy and used this persona to brass his way through. He did get into dealing coke later and got more involved than he should have, but when I met him it was the smoke. Brad’s dead now. It was the usual old story. If you’re dealing in this shit, don’t dabble in it. He dabbled and he always wanted to stay in the game a little longer. But on that day of our meeting, Brad and I went off together to hang and left the wedding to itself.
I only got to know the qualities of Bianca later on. Mick never wants me to talk to his women. They end up crying on my shoulder because they’ve found out that he has once again philandered. What am I gonna do? Well, it’s a long ride to the airport, honey; let me think about it. The tears that have been on this shoulder from Jerry Hall, from Bianca, from Marianne, Chrissie Shrimpton… They’ve ruined so many shirts of mine. And they ask
me
what to do! How the hell do I know? I don’t fuck him! I had Jerry Hall come to me one day with this note from some other chick that was written backwards—really good code, Mick!—“I’ll be your mistress forever.” And all you had to do was hold it up to a mirror to read it. “Oh, what a bastard that guy is.” And I’m in the most unlikely role of consoler, “Uncle Keith.” It’s a side a lot of people don’t connect with me.
At first I thought Bianca was just some bimbo. She was also quite aloof for a while, which didn’t endear her to anybody around us. But as I got to know her, I discovered that she’s bright and, what really impressed me later on, a strong lady. She became a mouthpiece for Amnesty International and a sort of roving ambassador for her own human-rights organization, which is some achievement. Very pretty and everything like that, but a very forceful character. No wonder Mick couldn’t handle it. The only drawback was that she was never one for a joke. I’m still trying to think of something to make her laugh. If she’d had a sense of humor,
I’d
have married her!
Mick’s taking up with Bianca did coincide with our leaving England. So there was a definite schism in place already, a fault line. Bianca brought with her a whole load of baggage and society that Mick got into that nobody else was at all interested in and I’ve no doubt Bianca by now is no longer interested in either. Even then I had nothing against her personally, it was just the effect of her and her milieu on Mick that I didn’t like. It distanced him from the rest of the band, and Mick’s always looking to separate himself from the band. Mick would disappear for two weeks on vacation; he would commute from Paris. Bianca was pregnant, and their daughter, Jade, was born in the fall, when Bianca was in Paris. Bianca didn’t like Nellcôte life, and I don’t blame her. So Mick was torn.
In those early days at Nellcôte we’d do our promenades down by the harbors, or to the Café Albert in Villefranche, where Anita would drink her pastis. We were obviously conspicuous in those parts, but we were also pretty hardened and unworried by what people thought. Violence happens when you least expect it, though. Spanish Tony, who came down early on, saved my life a couple of times—either literally or not—and in the town of Beaulieu, on one of those outings near Nellcôte, he saved my hide. I had an E-Type Jaguar that I drove down to Beaulieu harbor with Marlon and Tony aboard and parked in what was pointed out to us—by what appeared to be two harbor officials—as the wrong place. One came across and said, “Ici,” beckoning me and Tony into the harbor office, so Tony and I wandered over, leaving Marlon in the car for what we imagined would be a couple of minutes, and we could see him.
Tony smelled it before I did. Two French fishermen, older guys. One had his back to us. He was locking the door, and Tony looked at me. He just said, “Watch my back.” He moved like a flash, shoved a chair into my hand, jumped on the table with another chair and tore into them, splinters everywhere. These guys were wined out of their heads; they’d had a big lunch, some of it still on the table. I just trod on the neck of one of them while Tony did the other one in. Then Tony came back for my one, who was scared shitless, so Tony gave him another smack around the head. “Let’s get out of here.” Kicked the door open. It was over in a matter of seconds. They’re on the floor moaning and whining, claret everywhere, broken furniture. The last thing they were expecting was an assault—they were big sailors, no pussyfooting, and they were going to fuck around with us, slap us about. They were planning to have some fun with the longhairs. Marlon’s sitting in the Jaguar. “Where you been, Dad?” “Don’t worry about it.”
Vroom vroom.
“Let’s go.” What moves from Spanish Tony. It was a ballet; it was his finest moment. That day Douglas Fairbanks had nothing on him. It was the swiftest move that I’ve seen happen, and I’ve seen a few. I took a lot of leaves out of Tony’s book that day—when you smell that trouble coming, act. Don’t wait for it to start.
Three days later, cops turned up at the house. They had warrants on me only, because Tony wasn’t known and had gone back to England by now. A whole lot of rigmarole went down with examining magistrates, but by the time it got to the second or third level, they realized that these guys didn’t have a leg to stand on. When the facts came out that they’d intimidated us, that I’d had a child in the car, that there was no reason for us to be hauled into the office in the first place, suddenly, miraculously, the charges wafted away. I’ve no doubt it cost me a bit of money with the lawyer, but in the end, these guys chose not to get up in court and say they’d been done in their own office by two insane Englishmen.
I was not totally clean when I got to Nellcôte. But there’s a difference between being not clean and being hooked. Hooked is when you’re not going to do anything until you get your hands on the stuff. All your energy goes into that. I’d brought a small maintenance dose with me, but as far as I was concerned, I’d just cleaned up. Sometime in May, not that long after our arrival, we went to a go-kart track in Cannes, where my car flipped over on me and rushed me fifty yards down the tarmac on my back, stripping off my skin like bark. I scraped it almost to the bone. And this when I was just about to make a record. All I needed. I was advised by the doctor, “This is going to be very painful, monsieur. The wound must be kept clean. I’ll send a nurse to you every day to dress it and check it.” There arrived each morning a male nurse who had been a frontline medic for the French army. He’d been at Dien Bien Phu, the last stand of the French army in Indochina; he’d been in Algeria; he’d seen plentiful blood, and his style was accordingly robust. Little wizened guy, hard as nails. He gave me a shot of morphine each day, and I needed morphine badly. Each time, after he’d fixed me, he would throw the syringe as a dart, always at the same spot, at a painting, right in the eye. Then of course the treatment stopped. But now I’m on the morphine because of this wound, just when I’d cleaned up off the dope. So, first things first, I need some shit.
Fat Jacques was our cook, who now doubled as the heroin dealer. He was the Marseilles connection. He had a bunch of sidekicks, this team of cowboys who we decided were safer on the payroll than off it, who were good at running “errands.” Jacques emerged because I said, “Who knows how to get some shit around here?” He was young, he was fat and he was sweaty, and one day he went to Marseilles on the train and he brought back this lovely little bag of white powder and this huge supply, almost the size of a cement bag, of lactose, which was the cut. And he explained to me in his bad English and my even worse French—he had to write it down—mix ninety-seven percent lactose with three percent heroin. This heroin was pure. Normally when you bought it it was premixed. But this stuff you had to mix very precisely. Even at these proportions, it was incredibly powerful. And so I’d be in the bathroom with these scales, going ninety-seven to three; I was scrupulous in my weighing out. You had to be careful; the old lady was taking it and a couple of other people. Ninety-six to four and you could croak on it. One hit of it pure and
boom.
Good-bye.
