CHAPTER 28

TUMBLING DICE

ROBERT GREENFIELD: The Stones are way beyond peace, love, and flowers; they’re way ahead of the culture in America.

DON WAS: I think you can use the Stones as markers. The peace, love, hippie, acid thing, that was long gone. There was definitely the sense that the ’60s didn’t work and you had to blow up the system or flee from it.

The Stones chose to flee. Their new business manager, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, determined that they’d be able to save a tremendous amount of money if they left the country for twenty-one months.

MICK JAGGER: We’d sold a lot of records but we weren’t getting paid for it because we had such a low royalty. We found out that we had a management company guy [Allen Klein] who claimed that he owned everything that we were doing. So we had to get rid of him and try to get out of this ridiculous, byzantine mess that you’d created for yourself.

BILL WYMAN: Tax, under the labor government, Wilson, was 93 percent. If you had a million quid, which we didn’t, you’d end up with seventy grand. It was impossible to earn enough money to pay back the inland revenue and stay in our own country.

The next step was to find a place to record.

 

ROBERT GREENFIELD MEETS THE STONES

Robert Greenfield has done some of the best writing on the Stones, touring with them in 1971 and again in 1972. In fact, his landmark 1971 interview with Keith for Rolling Stone is quoted throughout this book. Here’s the story of how he came to cover—and be accepted by—the band.

Bob Greenfield in the Rolling Stone magazine offices in London

ROBERT GREENFIELD: I was the associate editor of the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine, and the Stones were about to do their English farewell tour before they moved to France. The first day I just showed up at King’s Cross Station. The band came walking down the platform, got into this train heading for Newcastle, and no one had told anyone who I was. We were just sitting in compartments. It was the band, the Stones, the supporting musicians, the tour personnel . . . and no one knew who I was. I wasn’t going to introduce myself to anybody. We got to the hotel and somebody handed me a key. And I went upstairs and I was twenty-five years old, straight out of Brooklyn, and it was the first time in my life I had stayed in my own hotel room . . .

They do the show that night and I’m standing right behind the piano—Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart are taking turns. Chip Monck, who was the stage manager, introduces them. I’m standing next to Chip, right behind the piano. Maybe there are one thousand people there and they’re doing most of Sticky Fingers. That’s dandy, except Sticky Fingers hadn’t come out yet. I’d never seen them play. I’m standing on stage with them watching them play. What I left out: the only person who’s not on the train is of course Keith Richards. Because Keith, at this point in time, unbeknownst to me, is pretty smacked-out. He’s traveling separately with Anita and Marlon, and Gram Parsons. They’re a separate entity. They get to every gig late. Nothing happens until Keith gets there.

They finish the gig and we go back to this hotel we’re staying in . . . The gig is over by eleven thirty, twelve o’clock. You can’t get any food. There’s no restaurants open. England shuts . . . So, they have a big dinner catered in a ballroom in the hotel. I’m sitting between Charlie Watts and Jim Price, who’s a trumpet player. Neither one of them knows who I am . . . Charlie, who is one of the great jazz fanatics of all time. Charlie is trying to remember, “Harry James. ‘We Meet and the Angels Sing.’ Who’s playing the trumpet solo on that?”

I’m eating and I say “Ziggy Elman” and I go back to eating. Charlie looks at me and says, “Yeah. Ziggy. Nice.” After that, Charlie figures I’m probably one of the crew . . . I don’t know if they ever get my name. They travel by bus; they travel by train. There are no limos. There are no cars. They walk up the street to all these town halls. And I’m on the road with the Rolling Stones.

I’m hanging out with Marshall Chess, who knows who I am, and I get off with Marshall right away because Marshall is just wild. He’s taking over the Stones; he’s at the peak of his power; he’s hysterically funny. All we do is laugh together. As happens the first time you go out with the Stones, I’m getting crazier.

The key to the whole thing with them is I never take notes where they can see me. I never write anything down. I listen and then I go to the bathroom and I sit in the bathroom and I take copious notes—I think I still have the notebook—and I write down everything they are saying.

They work a terrible place in Brighton called the Big Apple; it’s freezing cold and we’re waiting to get in the dressing room. Down the hallway, as only he can, comes Keith. He sweeps. He’s not walking. It’s a royal procession. Anita with the tiger-skin coat, with Marlon and Gram Parsons. “What’s going on?” Keith right away goes off on a riff: “My baby. My baby’s freezing.”

The next thing I know, Keith is taking the door off the hinges with a buck knife. I pull something out of my pocket—could have been a comb—and he and I who have never spoken, we take the door off the hinges. He throws it in the fucking hallway: “Right! Now we’re in. If nobody saw us do it, nobody is going to rat us out.” So I qualified with Keith.

I still hadn’t qualified with Mick. On the last night of the tour, he waited to get me. He said to me in the dressing room, “You haven’t taken a single note on this tour. You’ve been as fucked-up as anyone. You have no idea what’s going on, have you?” I said, “Mick, I don’t know. I had a good time.” Then when the article came out, he saw that I remembered everything. I passed the Mick test after the tour was over.

Poster from the Goodbye Great Britain tour

KEITH RICHARDS: We looked around for studios but there were no good rooms and the equipment was shabby. Nobody felt comfortable anywhere we looked.

JIMMY MILLER: We tried various cinemas and public halls, we just never found a suitable site and in the end we chose convenience, I suppose, over sound, and went for the basement of Keith’s house.

Nellcôte was built by an English admiral, Admiral Byrd, and was a Nazi stronghold during World War II.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: The house was literally surrounded by a jungle. You could not see the house from the road. You had to turn in and drive up. That’s how overgrown it was. It was really dense. It was lush. You could get lost on the grounds. It wasn’t a huge estate. Everybody sat on the back steps. Then you went down from the back steps and there was a flat area. Then there was a private staircase.

There was a set of very old moss-covered stone steps leading down to the private beach. Off the beach, Keith kept the speedboat moored. The back patio overlooked the Bay of Villefranche, which is a deepwater port. The US Navy would have ships of war in there. Anita was obsessed with looking at them through her binoculars. Onassis’s ship would be there. All the richest men in the world would bring their private yachts into that harbor. The villa was literally on the edge of the western world. You walk down from the villa to the water. It overlooked the ocean.

It had been beautiful inside. But Keith had the ability to make any space look like a trashed hotel room in three days. So there were cardboard cutouts of Mick Jagger standing in the living room . . . The music was non-stop and it was fabulous . . . For some reason, one night I seemed to be the last one up . . . Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon had just come out, James Taylor. Something that would never be played in that house. And I loved James Taylor and I put it on. I was listening to this . . . and here comes Keith. He gives me this look like, “You fuck, you’re listening to James Taylor” . . . It’s midnight and he’s working his way through the living room before heading upstairs and he stops and he looks at the rug. And there’s some kind of pill, like a large capsule. He looks at it a second, picks it up and throws it in his mouth and goes upstairs.

I was there during the good time it was a party. Keith was happy; they were having a good time. The weather was beautiful. And it seemed like paradise. Then it became hell.

In May, Mick married his finacée, Bianca, who was pregnant during the recording of Exile on Main St. He was frequently visiting her in Paris.

JIMMY MILLER: I think that was Keith’s album. Mick was always jumping off to Paris ’cause Bianca was pregnant and having labor pains. I remember many mornings after great nights of recording, I’d come over to Keith’s for lunch. And within a few minutes of seeing him I could tell something was wrong. He’d say, “Mick’s pissed off to Paris again.” I sensed resentment in his voice because he felt we were starting to get something, and when Mick returned the magic might be gone.

THE MIGHTY MOBILE

Recording at Nellcôte wouldn’t have been possible without the Mighty Mobile Unit.

KEITH RICHARDS: The Mighty Mobile, as we called it, was a truck with eight-track recording machines that Stu had helped to put together. We didn’t realize when we put it together how rare it was. Soon we were renting it out to the BBC and ITV because they only had one apiece. It was another one of those beautiful, fortuitous things that happened to the Stones.

The Mobile Unit was first used to record the Hyde Park concert and then used again at Stargroves.

ANDREW MOSKER: Ian Stewart felt that given the lifestyle of the Rolling Stones, this idea of having a mobile recording studio at their disposal was a good one. So that they could remove themselves from the confines of having to go into a stand-alone recording studio that was booked at a certain time at a certain day. The mobile was able to catch some of that improvised, unplanned, spontaneous music making that came out of Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. The space became part of the sound. The mobile became an enabler for the Rolling Stones and their creative process.

ANDY JOHNS: Dick Swettenham put the truck together. It was his very cool stuff with four speakers in Lockwood cabinets. It could sound very nice in there but it could also be very difficult. The confined space. The camera never worked. The talk back never worked. So you couldn’t see or talk to people. You had to keep runnin’ out of the truck. “Stop!” Jimmy and I went to France with that truck.

Keith himself isn’t so sure.

KEITH RICHARDS: I don’t really get that. Mick was incredibly involved. Look how many songs there are. And he wrote the bulk of the lyrics. He was very involved. I don’t think I was putting in more than anybody else. Charlie was amazing. Everybody was in great form.

The journalist in residence certainly noticed the tensions between Mick and Keith.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: They weren’t coming up with any new songs. The thing that drove Mick crazy was that Keith would sit around all day long playing country-western songs with Gram Parsons. Gram was teaching Keith the lexicon of country. Gram was a scholar of that music. Then when Mick needed to write with Keith, he was nowhere to be found. When Mick needed to record with Keith, he had to go put Marlon to sleep, then he’d shoot up and fall out. By no means should Mick be construed as the villain here. He was just trying to get this album made. He couldn’t make it without Keith.

Mick would put up with a lot from Keith. I never saw him get angry, but you could tell how frustrating it was for him. Then he starts going to Paris to be with Bianca because he couldn’t take it for too long.

JIMMY MILLER: The basement of Keith’s house was in fact a series of rooms. And in the end, the separation was so poor that we’d have to have the piano in one room, an acoustic guitar in the kitchen, because it had tile and it had a nice ring. There was another room for the horns. And then there was another main studio, where the drums were, and Keith’s amp. And Bill would stand in there but his amp would be out the hall. And every time I would want to communicate, I’d have to run around to all the rooms and give the message.

Andy Johns describes the bizarre scene at Nellcôte:

 

Mick marries Bianca Pérez Morena de Macias on May 12, 1971

ANDY JOHNS: I come out the trucks, through these big front doors and down the steps, and I look down the floor: blue marble, it was. The heating vents were in the shape of swastikas—solid gold swastikas. I said, “Keith. What’s this swastika shit?” “Oh, I didn’t tell you? During the last war, this was the headquarters for the Gestapo in the south of France.” They were torturing people to death in this basement. Upstairs, they were having sumptuous dinners. Which was kind of what was going on with us.

“Happy” is one of the record’s signature tracks, featuring a rare-at-the-time Keith lead vocal.

KEITH RICHARDS: It was mainly because we had the track, we liked it, but we hadn’t worked on the lyrics or the vocal at all until we were in there doing vocal overdubs. And it came around to the point where Mick said, “Even if I spend three days on it, I don’t think I’m going to do it as well as you’re doing it trying to teach it to me.” It’s one of those, “I think you’re wrong, but if you want me to I’ll go ahead and do it anyway.” And either if he wants to do it again later he can, or it stays as it is. If I manage to pull a good vocal off then it’ll stay there.

I [like singing lead] . . . but it’s very rare that I can do it as well as Mick can do it, that’s why he does it so well. It just occasionally happens that we come across a song that either I’ve written or I’ve gotten the hang of it so quickly for some reason or other or Mick can’t get round to it or he just prefers the way I do it. And I might disagree but he’ll say no, you’re doing it better than I’d do it and that’s the way it happens.

Marshall Chess was there in France. He had a lot of responsibilities during that time, including helping with the album, setting up a world tour, and making a film.

MARSHALL CHESS: Then I was summoned to Holland Park in London for a meeting with Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who looked after the Stones’ finances. I’m sitting there with him and Keith Richards. After polite preliminaries Rupert got down to business and asked me what the hell I was thinking about, spending two hundred thousand pounds and building a kitchen. All of a sudden Keith, who is obviously inebriated on something or other, starts flapping his arms around and says, “Whatever Marshall says, we’re gonna go with.” And he’s spilling this tea all over Rupert’s forty-thousand-pound carpet. The Stones always stood up for me when necessary. They were very loyal in that way.

What does he remember most about his time at Keith’s house?

MARSHALL CHESS: The meals. Soon after we arrived it dawned on everyone that there was fifteen people to feed every day and we needed a chef. In this fabulous mansion there was this great long baronial table that was half inside the house and half outside but covered, looking out on the bay. To make this work, I had to restore a kitchen in the cellar and all the food was sent up in one of those dumbwaiters. Then I had to hire a chef. Every afternoon at five o’clock we all gathered around this long table for our first meal of the day. Most of us had just got out of bed. I’d pass around bowls of joints as we waited for the food to arrive. It was like something from a King Arthur movie, quite a thing for a boy from Chicago.

ANDY JOHNS: This French chef would put out these lavish spreads for lunch and you’d walk out to a big table of artichokes, stuffed tomatoes, sautéed asparagus, salads, and lobsters. Wonderful stuff. Big luncheon on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and these big yachts.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: There’s sixteen people at lunch every day on the patio; we’re drinking blanc de blancs . . . Lunch is three hours. Joints are being smoked. Then we’re in the speedboat on the bay. I’m trying to water-ski. Keith is laughing because I can’t water-ski. We’re walking on beaches. I teach Keith how to skim stones. He loves it. We skim stones for twenty minutes. “This is great, man.”

KEITH RICHARDS: We had a couple of French chefs who blew it up. Fat Jacques, he certainly blew it up.

That’s not a compliment; Keith was being literal. Jacques once left the gas on too long before lighting the stove and caused a big explosion. A possible explanation:

KEITH RICHARDS: He was a junkie, too. He used to go to Marseille. You’d say, “Where’s Jacques?” “It’s Thursday.” “Oh, right, he’s gone to score.”

Kidding aside, drugs became a real problem at Nellcôte.

ANITA PALLENBERG: I walked into the living room and this guy pulled out a bag of smack. The whole thing kind of disintegrated and we got heavily into drugs, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the end especially, I thought I was cursed.

ANDY JOHNS: One night I go into my room to change my shirt, and Keith’s there and he’s got a needle and a spoon. I said, “What are you doing Keith?” “I thought I’d jack myself up a bit. Do you want to try this?” It’s Keith Richards so I say, “Yeah, OK.” He says, “This needle’s a bit bent. Why don’t we go back to my place?” We go into the Nazi basement. Afterwards he went, “Now you’re a man.” I thought that was a strange thing to say. I went upstairs and I can’t even see my feet. And Stu came in, and he looked at me and said, “You’ve been hanging out with Keith, haven’t you?” He said, “Andrew, what time is it?” I looked at my watch. I could see the watch, but I couldn’t see what time it was. I said, “I think it’s twelve thirty.” “It’s eight thirty! I know what’s been going on and I’m going to tell your brother.” I went, “Stu, don’t do it. OK?” He said, “I’m going to have to have a chat with little fairy boy Keith.”

Reportedly, Miller and Mick Taylor developed heroin habits as well.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: Jimmy was also using heroin by the time they got to Nellcôte. The thing that I think really blew Jimmy out was the combination of using smack and that they were playing endlessly without getting anywhere, and he just kind of lost it. What the Stones always did—Keith and Mick—brought in a genius, sucked everything the genius knew out, and got rid of the genius.

The French authorities became aware of what was going on at Nellcôte and launched a probe. Since there’s no habeas corpus in France, Keith and Anita could have been imprisoned for months while they were being investigated.

KEITH RICHARDS: Prince Rupert Loewenstein came into play. Later he would set up a global network of lawyers, of top-ranking legal gunslingers, to protect us. For now, he managed to acquire the services of a lawyer named Jean Michard-Pellissier. You couldn’t have reached higher. He had been a lawyer for de Gaulle and was a friend of the prefect of the region. Nice one, Rupert.

And what happened at the hearing?

KEITH RICHARDS: Instead of the prospect of jail, a real possibility, Anita and I got one of several skin-of-teeth legal agreements that I’ve received in my time. It was decreed that we should leave French territory until I was “allowed back,” but I had to keep renting Nellcôte, as some kind of bond, at twenty-four hundred dollars a week.

ANDY JOHNS: I remember talking to Keith in his basement in France. Just Keith and I, and I said, “Look, the next step is that we’ve got to go and finish the overdubs and mix. Why don’t we go to Sunset?” And they worked there before. So, “Yeah, all right.” And of course, I loved LA. Twenty-one-year-old English guy, and I had done a couple or three projects there. So I knew people and chicks eventually. “Yeah. Let’s do that then.”

THE STORY OF THE 1971 ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW

ROBERT GREENFIELD: I get to Keith’s house, I’m standing there waiting, a little nervous. He sweeps down the stairs. “Oh man, Bob Greenfield!”

I wind up living with him for two weeks in Nellcôte. A day or two after I got there, we do the first interview and he’s great. The second one, Keith and I drinking tequila from the bottle, something that no one was doing back then. The interview degenerates to monosyllabic grunts that have no meaning whatsoever.

Keith’s unbelievable to talk to. Any question I ask him, he answers. And he’s smoking a spliff constantly throughout the interview. After I’ve got two sessions done with him, it goes to the next level, which is: I’m a guest; it’s a party; but we’re not sitting down to talk. He’s dodging me. I was starting to lose my mind. I talk to Marshall Chess on the phone. I said, “This is bad, man. I can’t get him to sit down and talk to me. I need to finish this.” Marshall shows up . . . He brings some form of chaotic law and order to the house and we do two more sessions . . . On the last one, the only sound you hear is the sounds of the birds in the trees and the scratching of the matches against the box as Keith lights and smokes another spliff.

I spend a week transcribing the interview in Cannes. I drive back to the villa. I walk in and say, “Keith, I want you to read this.” He’s reading the original. It’s ninety-eight pages long, and as he reads each page, he throws it on the floor. It must’ve taken forty-five minutes or an hour . . . He flips the last page on the floor and says, “Yeah man, I said it. Print it.” It eventually ran on the cover in August. It was a big deal. No one had heard Keith talk before. He had never been the face of the band.

Upon release, the record received mixed reviews and some harsh notices even from within the Stones camp.

JIMMY MILLER: I was never happy with the sound of that album, especially after Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.

MICK JAGGER: Exile . . . is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling. When I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly.

MARSHALL CHESS: We certainly didn’t think we were working on an album that would be hailed as a masterpiece all these years later. You never hear something that way. Also you never hear it like a member of the public hears it when he drops the needle on the vinyl or pops the CD into the deck. I’m hearing the album from the acoustic versions when they first play the songs, through the tracks and vocals being laid down, to the final mixes. When you’re involved you see it more like a sculptor does, remembering how it evolved from a block of stone. You don’t ever hear it fresh. Besides, there was no time to think about posterity. Everything about the making of Exile was so intense.

Keith on the other hand was more immediately proud of Exile.

KEITH RICHARDS: I always thought, somewhere in the back of my mind that what we were doing, it wasn’t just for now. There might have been some sort of feeling since we had to move out of England while we were doing it, well, we better make this bloody work.

And work it did . . . a few final thoughts about Exile:

ANDY JOHNS: With Exile, its mostly blues-based stuff. “Stop Breaking Down” is probably my favorite track. I remember getting Mick to play harmonica on that. It did not seem like it was finished. My brother [Glyn] had recorded earlier. I said, “We’ve got to use this,” because Mick Taylor plays some gorgeous lines and I’m very sure that it’s Mick Jagger playing the rhythm guitar as well. That’s why it’s a little choppier.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: At the time, Exile confused people. There was so much music on it and it was so dense. It was made under the influence of heroin and mixed under the influence of cocaine. The album reflects what Keith wanted to be in the Stones’ music: blues, funk, who gives a shit if it ain’t perfect, it fucking sounds good to me. It took a long time for it to reach masterpiece status. It took a damn long time.

Interestingly, Greenfield himself has some reservations about Exile musically.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: For me the songs go on too long. The endings trail away. The thing about Exile is that it is a very dark stew.

And why is Exile so great?

ANDY JOHNS: It’s an intangible. Exile just turned out to be a great collection of music. And I think it was good that it was a double album. Some people say it should have been a single album, but you get the feeling of what they were going through at the time, and the confusion and the angst and the joy and the drugs and they moved out of England. There were a lot of emotions.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: They were so estranged from everything. They were in control of this album because of Rolling Stones Records. Sticky Fingers had made so much money that they could tell Ahmet, “We’re not ready.” They could say no. That’s why Marshall set it up the way that he did. Mick was never going to be under the thumb of someone like Allen Klein again. He was going to control what was going on with the Stones’ product. Mick was so smart. He knew this would be a bombshell and it was. Exile is the closest they ever got to pure art. Everything on there is basically not commercial. There is no precedent for Exile. It’s a leap; it’s an inductive leap. And when a band makes an inductive leap, they leave people behind . . .