But a song should come from the heart. I never had to think about it. I’d just pick up the guitar or go to the piano and let the stuff come to me. Something would arrive. Incoming. And if it didn’t, I’d play somebody else’s songs. And I’ve never really had to get to the point of saying, “I’m now going to write a song.” I’ve never ever done that. When I first knew I could do it, I wondered if I could do another one. Then I found they were rolling off my fingers like pearls. I never had any difficulty in writing songs. It was a sheer pleasure. And a wonderful gift that I didn’t know I had. It amazes me.
Sometime in July, Gram Parsons came to Nellcôte with Gretchen, his young bride-to-be. He was already working on the songs for his first solo record, GP. I had been hanging with him for a couple of years by then and I just had the feeling that this man was about to come out with something remarkable. In fact, he changed the face of country music and he wasn’t around long enough to find out. He recorded his first masterpieces with Emmylou Harris a year later, with “Streets of Baltimore,” “A Song for You,” “That’s All It Took,” “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.” Whenever we were together we played. We played all the time; we’d write stuff. We’d work together in the afternoons, sing Everly Brothers songs. It’s hard to describe how deeply Gram loved his music. It was all he lived for. And not just his own music but music in general. He’d be like me, wake up with George Jones, roll over and wake up again to Mozart. I absorbed so much from Gram, that Bakersfield way of turning melodies and also lyrics, different from the sweetness of Nashville—the tradition of Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, the blue-collar lyrics from the immigrant world of the farms and oil wells of California, at least that’s where it had its origins in the ’50s and ’60s. That country influence came through in the Stones. You can hear it in “Dead Flowers,” “Torn and Frayed,” “Sweet Virginia” and “Wild Horses,” which we gave to Gram to put on the Flying Burrito Brothers record Burrito Deluxe before we put it out ourselves.
We had plans, or at least great expectations, Gram and I. You work with somebody that good and you think, we’ve got years, man, no rush, where’s the fire? We can put some really good stuff together. And you expect it to evolve. Once we get over the next cold turkey, we’ll really come out with some good shit! We thought we had all the time in the world.
Mick resented Gram Parsons. It took me a long time to discover that people around me were much more conscious of this than I was. They describe how he made life uncomfortable for Gram, hitting on Gretchen to put pressure on him, making it plain he wasn’t welcome. Stanley Booth remembers Mick being like a “tarantula” around Gram. That I was writing and playing with somebody else seemed to him to be a betrayal, though he could never put it in those terms. And it never occurred to me at the time. I’m just expanding my club. I’m getting around, meeting people. But it didn’t stop Mick from sitting around and playing and singing with Gram. That’s all you wanted to do around Gram. It would just be song after song after song.
Gram and Gretchen left under some bad feeling, although it must be said that Gram wasn’t in great physical shape. I really don’t remember the circumstances of his departure clearly. I had insulated myself against the dramas of the crowded household.
I’ve no doubt, in retrospect, that Mick was very jealous of me having other male friends. And I’ve no doubt that that was more of a difficulty than women or anything else. It took me a long time to realize that any male friend I had would automatically get the cold shoulder, or at least a suspicious reception, from Mick. Any guys I got close to would tell me, sooner or later, “I don’t think Mick likes me.” Mick and I were very tight friends and we’d been through a lot. But there is a weird possessiveness about him. It was only a vague aura to me, but other people pointed it out. Mick doesn’t want me to have any friends except him. Maybe his exclusivity is bound up with his own siege mentality. Or maybe he thinks he’s trying to protect me: “What does that asshole want from Keith?” But quite honestly, I can’t put my finger on it. People he thought were getting close to me, he would preempt them, or try to, as if they were girlfriends rather than just friends.
But back then with Gram, was Mick feeling excluded? It wouldn’t have occurred to me at the time. Everybody was moving around, meeting different people and experiencing things. And I don’t know if Mick would even agree with this. But I have the feeling that Mick thought that I belonged to him. And I didn’t feel like that at all. It’s taken me years to even think about that idea. Because I love the man dearly; I’m still his mate. But he makes it very difficult to be his friend.
Most guys I know are assholes, I have some great asshole friends, but that’s not the point. Friendship has got nothing to do with that. It’s can you hang, can you talk about this without any feeling of distance between you? Friendship is a diminishing of distance between people. That’s what friendship is, and to me it’s one of the most important things in the world. Mick doesn’t like to trust anybody. I’ll trust you until you prove you’re not trustworthy. And maybe that’s the major difference between us. I can’t really think of any other way to put it. I think it’s something to do with just being Mick Jagger, and the way he’s had to deal with being Mick Jagger. He can’t stop being Mick Jagger all the time. Maybe it’s his mother in him.
Bobby Keys was installed in an apartment not far from Nellcôte, where one day he caused a disturbance by throwing his furniture out of the window in a moment of Texan self-expression. But he was soon tamed into French customs by the beautiful Nathalie Delon. She was staying with Bianca up the road after the wedding. It all seemed very recent to Bobby when I asked him to recall what happened when they got to know each other.
Bobby Keys: I don’t know why she was still there. Maybe she was dodging bullets. Mick had a house north of Nice, where he and Bianca stayed, and I would ride out on my newly purchased motorcycle to see Nathalie. Mick and I went down to get motorcycles at the same time. He got the 500 or 450 or whatever the hell it was, and then I saw the 750, which had seven cylinders, four fucking tailpipes. “Give me that four-piped one, man. I need four tailpipes because I got a French movie star I want to sit back here!” We would melt the Côte d’Azur, screaming up and down the Moyenne Corniche between Nice and Monaco, on that motorcycle, with Nathalie in just a little bit of nothing, like a couple of Kleenex, me with a yard of hard and a keg full of gas! I mean rock and roll, good God almighty, can it get any better? We’d just take off and drive into the interior, the little French villages, a bottle of wine, a sandwich, while Nathalie taught me some French. Those are the things that stay with you your whole life, going on those back country roads in France. It was just such a wonderful match. She was very funny, in a quiet sort of way, and also we used to smack each other in the butt with a syringe, just a little touch. It was like being in an adult Disneyland. She was a beauty. She stole my heart. I still love her. How can you not?
It should be added that Bobby was married at the time, though not for long, to one of his many wives, and this wife was staying at their apartment while Bobby was out romancing Nathalie. Bobby must have broken some marital record by staying out four nights in a row while everybody’s telling his wife where he was.
But the romance came to an abrupt end some months later, when Nathalie told Bobby it was over and told him never to call or try to get in touch. Bobby’s heart was broken; he’d never had such a rejection, with no explanation, from someone he’d been so close to. He carried the mystery around for decades, until recently a journalist who had been close to the case explained to Bobby that it would have been too dangerous for Nathalie and Bobby to have walked out publicly. Her son, Anthony, was protected by bodyguards; Nathalie too had had police protection. Nobody was sure who had killed the bodyguard Nathalie had slept with; she had since been systematically harassed by his Yugoslav buddies. Bobby remembered that she had mentioned something about the danger, but he hadn’t listened. If Nathalie had had affection for Bobby, she wou
ldn’t have prolonged their romance, was the explanation Bobby got. When Bobby heard this he considered it a revelation. He was staying in my house, and when he came down to breakfast the next day he was feeling good, all grateful now to Nathalie for saving his life and glad she hadn’t told him the real circumstances at the time, otherwise he would have taken the unwise position of “Who are these goddamn frog motherfuckers? I’m from Texas. I’ll fucking eat ’em for dinner,” as he put it, which wouldn’t have worked. Bobby lived to blow his heart out on many more “Brown Sugar”s, though he continued to live dangerously, as will be seen.
How was all that music produced—two songs a day written on a heroin habit, on what appeared to be high energy? For all of its downsides —I’d never recommend it to anybody—heroin does have its uses. Junk really is a great leveler in many ways. Once you’re on that stuff, it doesn’t matter what comes your way; you can handle it. There was the business of trying to get the whole Rolling Stones operation into this one house in the South of France. We had a record to cut and knew that if we failed, then the English would have won. And this house, this Bedouin encampment, contained anywhere from twenty to thirty people at a time, which never bothered me, because I have the gift of not being bothered or because I was focusing, with assistance, on the music.
It did bother Anita. It drove her up the wall. She was one of the few people who spoke French, and German to the Austrian housekeeper. So she became the bouncer, getting rid of people sleeping under beds and overstaying their welcome. There were tensions, no doubt, and paranoia—I have heard her accounts of her nightmare spell as doorkeeper—and there were of course a lot of drugs. There were many people to feed, and one day some holy men in orange robes came to visit and sat at the table with us and within two seconds, diving for the food, they’d cleaned us out, eaten everything. In terms of staff relations, Anita was reduced to going into the kitchen and making throat-cutting gestures; she felt very threatened by the cowboys who surrounded us.
Fat Jacques lived around the corner in the cookhouse, which was separated from the main building. One day we heard this enormous explosion, a big dull thud. We were all sitting around the great dining room. And suddenly there at the entrance is Jacques, with his hair singed and soot over his face, like a comic-book illustration. He’s blown up the kitchen. Left the gas on too long before lighting it. He announces that there is no dinner. It has, literally, he says, gone through the roof.
The smack helped my siege mentality. It was my wall against all of that daily stuff, because rather than deal with it, I shut it out, to concentrate on what I wanted to do. You could go out and about, totally insulated. Without it, in certain cases you wouldn’t have walked into that room at that time to deal with something. With it, you could go in there, brazen it off and be very smooth. And then go back and get the guitar out and finish what it was you were doing. It made everything possible. Whereas straight, I don’t know, there were too many things going on. While you’re insulated like this, you live in a world where other people go round with the sun and the moon. They wake up, go to sleep.… If you break that cycle and you’ve been up for four, five days, your perception of these people who have just got up, who have crashed out, is very distant. You’ve been working, writing songs, transferring tape to tape, and these people come in and they’ve been to bed and everything! They’ve even eaten stuff! Meanwhile, you’re sitting at this desk with a guitar and this pen and paper. “Where the fuck you been?” It got to the point where I’d be thinking, how can I help these poor people who have to sleep every day?
For me there’s no such thing as time when I’m into recording. Time changes. I only realize that time’s come into it when the people around me are dropping. Otherwise I’d go on and on. Nine days was my record. Obviously, eventually, you hit the deck. But that perception of time—Einstein is pretty right: it’s all relative.
It’s not only to the high quality of the drugs I had that I attribute my survival. I was very meticulous about how much I took. I’d never put more in to get a little higher. That’s where most people fuck up on drugs. It’s the greed involved that never really affected me. People think once they’ve got this high, if they take some more they’re going to get a little higher. There’s no such thing. Especially with cocaine. One line of good coke and you should be popped all night. But no, within ten minutes they’re going to take another one and another one. That’s crazy. Because you’re not going to get any higher. Maybe that’s a measure of control, and maybe I’m rare in that respect. Maybe there I have an advantage.
I was a taskmaster. Especially in those days, I was a maniac for not letting up. If I’ve got the idea and if it’s right, it has to be put down now. I might lose it in five minutes. Sometimes I found it was better if I turned up and appeared pissed off without anybody knowing why. I’d get more out of them. It made them go, wow, he’s weird; he’s gone a bit eccentric or cantankerous. But at the end of the day, what I was looking for in a track or in a song came to fruition. It was a trick I only pulled if I thought it necessary. Also, it gave me forty minutes in the john to shoot up while they considered what I’d said.
I suppose the schedule was rather strange. It became known as Keith Time, which in Bill Wyman’s case made him a little cranky. Not that he said anything. At first we were going to start at two p.m., but that never happened. So we said we’d start at six p.m., which usually meant around one a.m. Charlie didn’t seem to mind. Bill was particularly sensitive to it. I can understand that. I’d be famous. I’d go down to the john and I’d be thinking about the song and I’d take a shot, and forty-five minutes later I’m still sitting there, trying to work out what I’m doing. I should have said, hey, take some time off, I’m thinking about this. That’s what I didn’t do. It was rude of me, thoughtless.
My saying “I’ll just go and put Marlon to bed” was, it appears, the signal for my disappearance for several hours. A story is told by Andy Johns of Mick and Jimmy Miller and him standing at the bottom of the stairs, going, “Who’s gonna wake him up? I’ve had enough of this.” “I’m not fucking going up there. Why don’t you do it, Andy?” “I’m just little Andy. Come on, you guys. I can’t be dealing with this.” All I can say is, it got worse in the later ’70s on tour, when Marlon became the only one permitted to wake me up.
But it worked—somehow. Let Andy, the tireless engineer in the Mighty Mobile, give a testimonial.
Andy Johns: We were working on “Rocks Off,” and everyone else had left. Keith said, “Play that back for me, Andy.” And it was four or five in the morning, and he went to sleep while the playback was on, and I thought, great! I can get out of here. So I went all the way back to this villa that Keith had been kind enough to rent for me and Jim Price. Just getting to sleep and ring, ring, ring, ring… “Where the fuck are you? I’ve got this great idea.” It was a half-hour drive. “Oh sorry, Keith. I’ll be right back.” So I jumped in the car, went back, and he played this other Telecaster part, which is why the two-guitar interchange happens on “Rocks Off,” which is still stunning to me. And he just went right through it in one take. Bang, done. And I’m so glad that it went that way.
Then the circus left, and I was there in Nellcôte with Anita and Marlon and a few skeleton crew into the late autumn, when the clouds roll in and it gets stormy and gray and the colors change, and then into the winter, which was pretty miserable, especially when you remembered the summer. It also became menacing. The brigade des stupéfiants, as the drugs squad was called, was on our back. Gathering evidence, collecting statements from their usual suspects about the admittedly heavy activity at Nellcôte, not just mine and the cowboys’, but that of all the other consumers of stupéfiants in the group. They had been snooping and spying, and it wasn’t that difficult. In October we were burgled and my guitars, a great many of them, were stolen. We would have fled, but the French authorities wouldn’t let us go. We were told we were officially under investigation on a number of heavy charges and we’d
have to go to a hearing in Nice in front of an investigating magistrate—when all the gossip and accusations from disgruntled or police-pressured informants at Nellcôte would be aired. We were in some bad trouble. There was no habeas corpus in France to speak of; the state had total power. We could be locked up for months while the investigations took place, if the judge thought the evidence was strong enough, and maybe if he didn’t. And this is where the—at that time fledgling—structure created by our manager Prince Rupert Loewenstein came into play. Later on 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 called Jean Michard-Pellissier. You couldn’t have reached higher. He had been a lawyer for de Gaulle and he had just been named as cabinet adviser to Prime Minister Jacques Chaban-Delmas, who was his bosom friend. Furthermore, our mouthpiece was also the legal adviser to the mayor of the Antibes region. And if that wasn’t enough, the gifted Mr. Michard-Pellissier was a friend of the prefect of the region, who was in charge of the police. Nice one, Rupert. The hearing took place in Nice, with Rupert interpreting for us. I remember after it was over Rupert describing as “terrifying” the stuff that the police were leveling at us. But it was also very comic. It was, in fact, hilarious—a Peter Sellers French comedy, a movie in which a detective was solemnly and slowly typing while the judge got everything radically wrong. He was convinced that we were running a huge ring of prostitutes, that dope was being bought and sold by sinister people with German accents and this English guitarist. “He wants to know whether you know a Mr. Alphonse Guerini.” Or whatever. “Never heard of him.” “Non, il ne le connaît pas.” Whoever was grassing us up had had to dress up the information with ludicrous exaggerations and inventions to oblige the gendarmerie. So what came out was nothing but false information. Loewenstein had to point out that no, no, this was a man trying to buy things, not sell them, and the crooks were trying to work out how they could charge him double or treble the rate. In the meantime, the wheels of Michard-Pellissier were turning. So instead of the prospect of being in jail, even for a few years, 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 $2,400 a week.
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