IN THE APTLY NAMED VILLA EDEN IN CANNES, I found myself sharing a dark apartment on the bottom floor with Jerry Pompili, whom the Stones had brought over to the South of France to continue working for them after the English tour had ended. For reasons neither one of us understood, this otherwise very ordinary block of flats on rue de Campestre seemed to have come equipped with a never-ending supply of hot and cold running stewardesses, all of whom were willing to do anything they could to get closer to the Rolling Stones.
Setting myself up at a table in the front room, I began transcribing the cassettes I had brought with me from Nellcôte. Without using earphones or a foot pedal, I sat for hours listening to what Keith had said to make sure I got every word right. Never all that easy to understand under the best of circumstances, Keith was virtually impossible to comprehend when he began slurring his words in what has since come to be his characteristic manner of speaking.
After piling up as many single-spaced pages of transcript as I could, I would climb into the front seat of Jerry’s redoubtable VW van so we could get something to eat. Since he had already determined that St.-Tropez was the place to be, we found ourselves there on more than one occasion. Having been invited to a birthday party for a local deejay one evening, Jerry and I arrived at the very posh Hotel Byblos where Mick and Bianca had spent their wedding night together just a month before.
Befitting our status as two serious long-haired dudes who had been out on the road with the Rolling Stones, both of us were wearing faded jeans and dark blue denim work shirts. For want of a better term, call it the early seventies rock ’n’ roll hippie cowboy look for guys who would not have known one end of a horse from the other if their lives depended on it. Although we were with a French woman who knew everyone in town and kept whispering incredible bits of gossip about them in my ear as they walked in the door, all the other guests just kept staring at Jerry and me like we were the original ugly Americans.
As the French woman quickly explained to me, this was simply because of how we were dressed. In St.-Tropez that summer, everyone was wearing worn military fatigues. Because it was “la mode,” Jerry and I looked so out of place that people were wondering aloud whether we were on our way to “le rodeo.”
Which was just the way it was back then in the South of France. As the Rolling Stones themselves soon learned, the locals were always either at your throat or at your feet. Speaking the language definitely helped as did having vast amounts of money to spend but the highest trump card in the deck was being as famous as, how you say, “les Rolling Stones.”
And so when Mick and Bianca showed up that night, every eye in the room followed them as they made their way through the crowded room to our table so they could sit down with the only people they knew. While Bianca was dressed to the teeth, Mick just happened to be wearing a pair of faded jeans and the same kind of dark blue denim work shirt that Jerry and I had on.
Before the week was out in St.-Tropez, every last hip young thing in town was walking around in faded jeans and a dark blue denim work shirt. Was this an accident? A simple twist of fate? You decide. What I do know for certain is that none of them would have been caught dead in such an outfit before seeing Mick that night had convinced them all that there was now simply nothing hipper to be worn in the world.
After spending a week in the front room at Villa Eden pounding away on the lightweight portable typewriter I had brought with me from London, I finally finished what amounted to nearly one hundred pages of transcript. Sliding the original into a manila envelope along with the carbon copy, I made my way back to Nellcôte.
As always, the front door was unlocked. Because the Stones had started jamming until all hours of the night down in the basement, the house seemed unusually quiet. When I finally found Keith, he was standing in the dining room. Explaining that I needed him to go over the interview to make sure I had quoted him accurately, I handed him the transcript. That Keith could take out anything he did not want to see in print went without saying.
For the next thirty minutes, I stood there in silence watching Keith smoke one cigarette after another as he read each page of the transcript of the interview before flinging it across the table. For any writer, watching someone read what you have written is always a nightmare. When what you have written is about that person, the experience becomes ten times worse. Would Keith hate the interview? Would he ask me to tone down some of the very explicit language? Or would he just sadly shake his head and tell me it would be better for all concerned if the interview never saw the light of day?
Unable to ask him any of those questions, all I could do was stand there and wait. Coming at long last to the bottom of the final page, Keith tossed it aside. Squinting sideways at me through the cloud of cigarette smoke that always seemed to be hanging around his head, he said, “Yeah, man. I said it. Go on and print it.”
And that was it. No corrections. No additions. No subtractions. Keith did not care what anybody might think about what he had said because insofar as he was concerned, it was all true. In that moment, Keith Richards let me know who he really was.