The party that night at the Café des Arts was a blowout. Caviar, champagne, lobster. The bride wore a turban and a see-through lace top. Bobby Keys ran the jam session, joined by Steve Stills, Nicky Hopkins, and Michael Shrieve, Santana’s drummer. Mick got up with Doris Troy and Pat Arnold for a medley of soul hits. Bianca left early. So did Joe and Eva Jagger, still holding their wedding present. They’d been unable to secure a private moment in which to give it to their son and his bride.
Mick had wanted the Stones to play at his wedding. Keith, who’d pleaded with him not to marry Bianca, had nodded off in a corner, snoring, and some guests wondered if he was turning into Brian Jones. His friends knew that Keith was despondent. Bianca was his enemy: a snooty petite bourgeoise who disdained him and Anita (Bianca referred to Anita as “that cow”). To Keith, Bianca was a pampered party girl who hung out with the elderly squares that Keith liked to mock, and she was stealing his friend and posing a serious threat to the band.
Mick left the party with the last guests at four in the morning. Later that day, Mick and Bianca boarded a yacht in Cannes for a honeymoon at an Italian cliffside palazzo, accessible only by boat. One can only imagine what Bianca thought was in store for her as she experienced the whirlwind events of her wedding, but she later was famously quoted: “My marriage ended on my wedding day.”
That June, Nellcote, Keith’s villa in Villefranche, was a hectic rock and roll commune as the Stones and their allies gathered to record the Stones’ crucial next record. Nellcote was set in a park planted with palm and cypress trees brought from around the world by its nautical builder. A long flight of steps led to a private beach. There was a water bed on the balcony, a bright parrot in a cage in the front garden, a rabbit in a hutch in the back. Keith’s dogs had the run of the place. In the rooms downstairs, the ceilings were thirty feet high and the mistral howled down the chimneys. A giant Sticky Fingers promo poster of Mick was propped on the mantel of the main fireplace. Country music—Merle Haggard, George Jones—blared from the record player, alternating with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly albums. Hired chefs fed large stoned groups of musicians and friends at long tables at odd hours; at the height of the sessions, Keith was spending $7,000 a week on food, rent, and dope. The hot ambience of Nellcote reminded journalist Robert Greenfield, who was on the scene to interview Keith for Rolling Stone, of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Riviera novel Tender Is the Night crossed with The Shirelles’ Greatest Hits.
The Stones were supposed to record in a separate house, but Stu couldn’t find one near Keith, who insisted he had to work close to his family and his stash. So Stu drove the Stones’ mobile studio to France, and they built a recording room in Nellcote’s cellar. The old villa’s frail wiring couldn’t handle the new demands for current, so the crew illegally tapped into the French railway system’s nearby power lines and ran heavy cables through the kitchen window and down to the dark, humid basement. So Exile on Main Street became Keith’s trip, done on his time at his house. The rest of the band also moved into Nellcote when they realized that Keith would only be working downstairs as Marlon’s erratic sleep schedule permitted. The Stones’ sidemen, engineers, and technicians rented other houses nearby, and Anita often had twenty-five guests for meals.
The proximity of Marseilles, heroin capital of Europe, assured that no annoying dope shortages occurred. Mafia-level dealers arrived at Nellcote carrying top-grade Thai heroin (called cotton candy for its bright pink sheen) in smart attaché cases. Cocaine was often smuggled in by the van making weekly runs between London and Nellcote.
Villefranche was a deep-water port of call for battleships of various navies. Reasoning that the sailors might have opium or hash to sell, Keith bought a sleek Riva powerboat so he could buzz out to the huge gray ships moored offshore. Anita, pregnant with their second child (because Marlon was lonely), would watch Keith put to sea from her balcony, unsure whether he would make it home, as the sky turned sunset pink over Cap Ferrat. He ran the boat over rocks, crashed into other boats, and ran out of fuel a few times. Since he had no radio, he drifted until someone rescued him.
One evening in late May, Keith and Spanish Tony went to see Errol Flynn’s old yacht, moored in nearby Beaulieu. As they were leaving, an Italian tourist accidentally dented Keith’s red Jaguar. Keith got mad and displayed his switchblade. The Beaulieu harbormaster intervened, knocked Keith down, and got punched out by Spanish Tony. Keith then produced Marlon’s toy pistol from the glove box, so the harbormaster drew his own quite real revolver and called the gendarmes. This fracas was resolved over dinner at Nellcote with the local police chief, who was bought off with some autographed albums and promises to behave.
The police, however, started watching Keith and the British invasion of freaks that had followed him to town.
* * *
Tropical Disease
July 1971. The Stones had been jamming almost every night for several weeks and began recording in Keith’s basement around July 10. They had songs left over from both the last album and Stargroves, and were also writing new material as the “Tropical Disease Sessions,” as Keith called them, got under way.
It was rough. Everyone was stoned out of their minds, disconnected from familiar surroundings, in exile. There were serious cash flow problems, and the Stones were suing Allen Klein, Andrew Oldham, and Eric Easton. Since Keith was a junkie, the recording schedule ran on heroin time. Charlie and Bill would arrive around 8 P.M., and Keith would show up at midnight. After working for a while, he would go upstairs, saying he had to put Marlon to bed, and be gone for three hours. This drove Mick crazy; tempers often flared, and then Mick would leave to be with Bianca, who refused to come to the Riviera and was living in a Paris hotel. Keith would come back downstairs, find Mick gone, often for days, and flip out.
“Everybody was stoned on something,” Mick later said. “So it wasn’t particularly pleasant. I didn’t have a very good time. It was this communal thing when you didn’t know whether you’re recording or living or having dinner. You don’t know when you’re going to play, when you’re going to sing. Very difficult. Too many hangers-on. I went with the flow, and the album got made [but] it got impossible. Everyone was so out of it. And the engineers, the producers—all the people that were supposed to be organized—were more disorganized than anybody.”
These guys (Jimmy Miller, Andy Johns) were themselves shocked at how badly the Stones were playing—unfocused and out of tune. Andy Johns thought they sounded like the worst band on the planet and wondered if the tracks would even get released. Mick Taylor was upset because this was his first complete Stones album and things seemed so fucked-up. He was also freaked that Mick Jagger was coming on to his wife, Rosie.
But over the summer, some of the songs began to gel, and the Tropical Disease music started to sound like a new, lurid, really drugged-out version of the Stones. “Rocks Off” was an early success, a lurid tale of lust and impotence that Keith nailed in two takes at nine in the morning after the engineers, who had left at dawn, had been summoned back from their beds. Mick and Keith wrote upstairs, Mick mumbling vowel movements while Keith riffed on the guitar, and by the time they came down to the basement they had something, like “Rip This Joint,” that they could show Bobby Keys and Jim Price. “Casino Boogie” and the new lyrics for “Tumbling Dice” were influenced by the lavish gambling casinos just down the road in Monte Carlo. Mick was either rushing his lines or slurring them, so the lyrics were unintelligible, a technique copped from bluesman Slim Harpo, whose style so influenced the boogie “Hip Shake” that his name got into the song. “Torn and Frayed” was one of a series of cracked country tunes inspired in part by the brief presence of Gram Parsons at Nellcote. Keith summoned him from L.A. early in July, and Gram arrived with his wife, Gretchen, whom Anita loathed. Gram stayed up nights with Keith, played some guitar and piano, and later claimed to have sung on a couple of the finished songs. With Mick not around much, it was good for Keith to have Gram to bounce ideas off, but Pars
ons was strung out on heroin and going downhill. After weeks of Gram snorting up all the drugs while his old lady complained, Keith threw them out. Crushed and suicidal, Gram headed to London, never again to find himself completely welcome in the Stones’ fickle milieu.
While the Stones were working downstairs, the parade of characters continued in the spacious salons upstairs. William Burroughs and Terry Southern arrived to hustle a Stones sound track for a Naked Lunch movie. Corsicans arrived with half kilos of heroin, 6,000 pounds per, and were paid in cash. The Bauls, a tribal band from Bengal, came to Nellcote to tape some drums that eventually weren’t used. A gang of petty criminal “cowboys” from the St. Tropez underbelly was installed by Anita in the villa’s gatehouse, where they dealt drugs and stole everything they could. Half-naked Anita smoked opium with Marshall Chess. A chef was hired to prepare the gourmet luncheons served daily to one and all. Keith drove him crazy by ignoring the sumptuous buffet and demanding a cheeseburger. After lunch, Keith would sit on his verandah, shirtless and barefoot, strumming his guitar, thinking up the words to a new, autobiographical song called “Happy.” Anita hired the chef’s daughter as a nanny for Marlon and shot her up with heroin. The girl got sick and Anita made her swear not to tell her father. Everyone knew that eventually there would be hell to pay.
Bill Wyman found Nellcote’s narcotic vibes distasteful, so he stayed away and took up smoking grass. He only played bass on eight of Exile’s eighteen tracks. Down in the cellar, Mick Taylor earned his only songwriting credit on a Stones album by coming up with the guitar lick of “Ventilator Blues” during a humid Mediterranean summer night when the only air in the room came from a little fan hung above Charlie’s drums. Some nights the temperature reached a hundred degrees, and the band played with their pants off. It was so humid Mick and Keith couldn’t sing. They medicated their vocal cords with Jack Daniel’s and kept working.
The sessions carried on into the autumn, with Mick shuttling between the Riviera and Paris, since Bianca refused to go anywhere near Nellcote. Tempers and the band were starting to shred. The basic track for “Happy” was cut one night with Keith on guitar and vocals, Bobby Keys on sax, and Jimmy Miller playing drums. These three, along with Mick Taylor on bass, formed the core group that did the basic tracks of Exile on Main Street.
In August, Rolling Stone published Robert Greenfield’s long interview with Keith, a landmark of Stonesology that introduced Keith’s often-hilarious facility as a wordsmith and quote-factory to the world. Keith was surprisingly candid about the lure and the danger of heroin. “If you’re going to get into junk, it takes the place of everything. You don’t need a chick, you don’t need music, you don’t need nothing. But it doesn’t get you anywhere. It ain’t called ’junk’ for nothing. Why did [William] Burroughs kick it, after 25 years? He’s thankful he kicked it, believe me. There’s a lot of Chinese shit around. That’s all I can say. That’s another one of those rumors.”
Rolling Stones Records, the band’s new label, released its first album in September 1971. Brian Jones Presents the Pipes of Pan at Joujouka was a spacey-sounding version of Brian’s 1968 Moroccan tapes, electronically enhanced and edited into a post-psychedelic orientalist fantasia that still captured the time-tripping essence of the village’s music. The Stones’ vast audience remained indifferent to the late Brian’s epic quest for the square root of the blues, and few who bought the album understood the dark North African spirits it conjured. But the perceptive critic Bob Palmer aptly described the record’s magical ambience in Rolling Stone: “a backward drum track here, a phased melody there, an electronic undercurrent that suggests the menace of the darkness outside the circle of firelight.” The record was Brian Jones’s final bow, two years after his death, and was later seen as the alpha project of the world music movement, which integrated non-Western music into the mainstream of popular culture. And up on Jajouka’s mountain, the tribal musicians put a photo of Brian on the wall of their clubhouse and continued to sing their Brahim Jones song. The old glossy photo of Brian seemed to jiggle in its frame every time they sang it.
By October 1971, the bright Mediterranean days were getting shorter, and darkness of the soul began to settle around Nellcote. Bianca delivered her daughter Jade in Paris, and Mick informed Keith he wasn’t coming back. On October 11, thieves broke into Nellcote and stole eleven guitars while everyone slept upstairs. Keith’s eyes filled with tears when he was told. Friends like Bobby Keys and Michael Cooper had never seen him cry before. A second burglary relieved Keith and Anita of cash and clothes. Bobby Keys’s behavior was getting him thrown out of casinos, and a local boy complained to the cops that he’d been molested at Nellcote by someone from the Living Theater. When Jacques the chef learned that Anita had given his daughter heroin, he tried to blackmail Keith and was fired. The police arrived the next day, took statements, asked about drugs, and demanded to know why Corsican dope dealers had been seen visiting Nellcote.
The other Stones got nervous about doing any more work at Keith’s. Someone organized a bust drill at Nellcote, and the occupants made plans to skip town. The Stones had twenty new songs, enough for a double album, so they decided to finish recording in Los Angeles. The police learned of the move and tried to prevent Keith and Anita from leaving France while their investigations of heroin trafficking were going on. Keith’s lawyers persuaded the cops that Keith would continue to rent the expensive villa as assurance of his intent to return. So in late November, the Rolling Stones all slipped out of the country. Mick and Keith and their families flew to L.A., with Keith and his new guitar technician, an affable southern lad named Ted Newman Jones III, detouring through Memphis so they could begin to replace the vintage Gibson, Fender, and Martin guitars that had been stolen from Nellcote.
* * *
Jackson Pollock in Stereo
January 1972. The Stones were working at Sunset Sound in Los Angeles, polishing the muggy, hellish Nellcote tracks, recording new songs and overdubs with the cream of L.A.’s musicians. Billy Preston was a huge presence with his gospel keyboard on “Shine a Light.” He took Mick to Rev. James Cleveland’s church one Sunday to listen to the soaring choir as it lifted its voice to the heavens. Keith brought in Dr. John—Mac Rebennack—who showed up with his crew of Creole percussionists to work on “Let It Loose” and other numbers. Rebennack also brought in the female voices—Tami Lynn, Clydie King, Shirley Goodman, and Vanetta Lee—that effectively painted Exile black. “They weren’t necessarily totally stand-up people,” Dr. John later said of the Stones, “but I dug working with them.” With Bill Wyman still sulking in France, bassist Bill Plummer, a jazz player who’d worked with George Shearing and Paul Horn, played upright acoustic “doghouse” bass on “Rocks Off,” “Turd on the Run,” and “All Down the Line.”
Mick Jagger was living in a rented mansion with Bianca and Jade, deep into planning the Stones’ year. The new album would come out in the spring, followed by a big American tour. The tour would spawn another live album, perhaps a double with Stevie Wonder, who would open the shows, and at least two films: one an underground newsreel, the other a full-blown concert film. Mick went to see the Who play in L.A. and hired away their road manager, Peter Rudge, to run the Stone’s 1972 tour. He also hired star L.A. publicist Gary Stromberg, who suggested helping the best writers in the country to get magazine assignments and then taking them on tour with the band for a few days each, giving them a taste of life on the road.
The Stones were out on the town a lot. Charlie was in the jazz clubs, digging Dexter Gordon. Mick went to see Merry Clayton, who had made a career out of her star turn on “Gimme Shelter.” One night Mick, Keith, and Ian Stewart showed up at a club where Chuck Berry was playing. Berry’s road manager invited them onstage, so Keith plugged in and started to play along with “Sweet Little Sixteen.” Berry glowered at Keith, told him to turn down, screwed up the rhythms, and threw them all off the stage after two songs because the audience was going crazy. Chuck later explained that
Keith was playing too loud.
Anita was due to have her baby in April and was taking three shots of heroin a day. When she couldn’t stop and her time grew short, Keith moved his family to Switzerland, where the situation could be managed discreetly. Anita entered a private clinic, while Keith and Marlon checked into the Hotel Metropole in friendly Montreux on Lake Geneva, where local music promoter Claude Nobs looked after English bands. On March 17, Anita gave birth to a daughter, Dandelion, born with a cleft palate. Naming the girl after a weed (“Go away dandelion” ran a famous Stones chorus) was perhaps an indication of how things ran in the Richards family in those days.
With the rumor of a vague Hell’s Angels death threat in the air, Mick and Bianca left L.A. with Exile almost finished and headed for Bali, soulful South Pacific isle of cultured peace and spiritual tranquillity. Mick was back in New York by early May 1972 to settle the Allen Klein lawsuit. So anxious were the Stones to get out from under Klein’s thumb that they gave him the farm. Their original suit for multiple millions in back royalties was dropped. ABCKO Industries, Klein’s holding company, wound up with the publishing rights to all Jagger/Richards and Nanker Phelge songs through 1969; the master tapes to the Stones back catalog through Get Your Ya-Yas Out and subsequent anthology albums; and a reported $14 million. Basically the Rolling Stones had to give Klein the entire recorded output of the past ten years, and Mick Jagger convinced the rest of the band it was worth it. The deal was announced on May 10, 1972. “The settlement,” Mick told the press, “is that Allen Klein never has anything else to do with us.”
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