Life

by Keith Richards

  I liked John a lot. He was a silly sod in many ways. I used to criticize him for wearing his guitar too high. They used to wear them up by their chests, which really constricts your movement. It’s like being handcuffed. “Got your fucking guitar under your fucking chin, for Christ’s sake. It ain’t a violin.” I think they thought it was a cool thing. Gerry & the Pacemakers, all of the Liverpool bands did it. We used to fuck around like that: “Try a longer strap, John. The longer the strap, the better you play.” I remember him nodding and taking it in. Next time I saw them the guitar straps were a little lower. I’d say, no wonder you don’t swing, you know? No wonder you can only rock, no wonder you can’t roll.

  John could be quite direct. The only rude thing I remember him saying to me was about my solo in the middle of “It’s All Over Now.” He thought it was crap. Maybe he got out the wrong side of the bed that day. OK, it certainly could have been better. But you disarmed the man. “Yeah, it wasn’t one of my best, John. Sorry. Sorry it jars, old boy. You can play it any fucking way you like.” But that he even bothered to listen meant that he was very interested. He was so open. In anybody else, this could be embarrassing. But John had this honesty in his eyes that made you go for him. Had an intensity too. He was a one-off. Like me. We were attracted to each other in a strange way. Definitely a two-alpha clash to start with.

  “Post-acid” was the prevailing mood at Redlands on a cold February morning in 1967. Post-acid: everybody arrives back with their feet on the ground, so to speak, and you’ve been with them all day, doing all kinds of nuts things and laughing your head off; you’ve gone for walks on the beach and you’re freezing cold and you’re not wearing any shoes and you’re wondering why you’ve got frostbite. The comedown hits everybody in a different way. Some people are going, let’s do it again, and others are going, enough already. And you can flash back into full acid drive at any moment.

  There’s a knock at the door, I look through the window and there’s this whole lot of dwarves outside, but they’re all wearing the same clothes! They were policemen, but I didn’t know it. They just looked like very small people wearing dark blue with shiny bits and helmets. “Wonderful attire! Am I expecting you? Anyway, come on in, it’s a bit chilly out.” They were trying to read a warrant to me. “Oh, that’s very nice, but it’s a bit cold outside, come on in and read it to me over the fireplace.” I’d never been busted before and I was still on acid. Oh, make friends. Love. Not from me would there be “You cannot come in until I speak to my lawyer.” It was “Yeah, come on in!” And then roughly disabused.

  While we’re gently bouncing down from the acid, they’re trampling through the place, doing what they’ve got to do, and none of us are really taking much notice of them. Obviously there was a shiver of the usuals, but there didn’t seem to be much we could do about it at that moment, so we just let them walk about and look in ashtrays. Incredibly enough, what they did come up with was only a few roaches and what Mick and Robert Fraser had in their pockets, which was a minute amount of amphetamine, bought legally by Mick in Italy, and in Robert’s case heroin tabs. Otherwise we just carried on.

  There was the thing of course of Marianne. Hard day on acid, she had taken a bath upstairs, just finished, and I had this huge fur rug, made of pelts of some kind, rabbit, and she just wrapped herself up in that. I think she had a towel around her too and was lying back on the couch after a nice bath. How the Mars bar got into the story I don’t know. There was one on the table—there were a couple, because on acid suddenly you get sugar lack and you’re munching away. And so she’s stuck forever with the story of where the police found that Mars bar. And you have to say she wears it well. But how that connotation came about and how the press managed to make a Mars bar on a table and Marianne wrapped in a fur rug into a myth is a kind of classic. In fact, Marianne was quite chastely attired for once. Usually when first you said hi to Marianne you started talking to the cleavage. And she knew she was thrusting it. A naughty lady, bless her heart. She was more dressed in this fur bedspread than she’d been all day. So they had a woman police officer who took her upstairs and made her drop the rug. What else do you want to see? From there—it shows you what’s in people’s minds—the evening paper headlines are “Naked Girl at Stones Party.” Info directly from the police. But the Mars bar as a dildo? That’s rather a large leap. The weird thing about these myths is that they stick when they’re so obviously false. Perhaps the idea is that it’s so outlandish or crude or prurient that it can’t have been invented. Imagine allowing a group of policemen and -women to see this evidence—keeping it on display as they came tramping through the house. “Excuse me, Officer, I think you may have missed something. Over here.”

  Others at Redlands that day were Christopher Gibbs and Nicky Kramer, an upper-class drifter and hanger-on who befriended everybody, a harmless enough soul who was innocent of betraying us, although David Litvinoff held him out of a window by his ankles to find out. And of course Mr. X, as he was later referred to in court, David Schneiderman. Schneiderman, who also went by the moniker of Acid King, was the source of that very high-quality acid of the time, such brands as Strawberry Fields, Sunshine and Purple Haze—where do you think Jimi got that from? All kinds of mixtures, and that’s how Schneiderman got in on the crowd, by providing this super-duper acid. In those innocent days, now abruptly ended, nobody bothered about the cool guy, the dealer in the corner. One big happy party. In fact, the cool guy was the agent of the constabulary. He came with this bag full of goodies, including a lot of DMT, which we’d never had before, dimethyltryptamine, one of the ingredients of ayahuasca, a very powerful psychedelic. He was at every party for about two weeks and then mysteriously disappeared and was never seen again.

  The bust was a collusion between the News of the World and the cops, but the shocking extent of the stitch-up, which reached to the judiciary, didn’t become apparent until the case came to court months later. Mick had threatened to sue the scandal rag for mixing him up with Brian Jones and describing him taking drugs in a nightclub. In return they wanted evidence against Mick, to defend themselves in court. It was Patrick, my Belgian chauffeur, who sold us out to the News of the World, who in turn tipped off the cops, who used Schneiderman. I’m paying this driver handsomely, and the gig’s the gig, keep schtum. But the News of the World got to him. Didn’t do him any good. As I heard it, he never walked the same again. But it took us time to piece these little details together. As far as I remember, the atmosphere was fairly relaxed at the time. Shit, anything we’d done we’d done already. It was only later on, the next day when we started to get the letters from solicitors and everything, Her Majesty’s Government and blah blah blah, we thought, “Ah, this is serious.”

  * * *

  We decided to get out of England and not go back until it was time for the court case. And it would be better to find somewhere where we could get legal drugs. It was one of those sudden things, “Let’s jump in the Bentley and go to Morocco.” So in early March we did a runner. We’ve got free time and we’ve got the best car to do it in. This was Blue Lena, as it was christened, my dark blue Bentley, my S3 Continental Flying Spur—an automobile of some rarity, one of a limited edition of eighty-seven. It was named in honor of Lena Horne—I sent her a picture of it. Having this car was already heading for trouble, breaking the rules of the establishment, driving a car I was definitely not born into. Blue Lena had carried us on many an acid-fueled journey. Modifications included a secret compartment in the frame for the concealing of illegal substances. It had a huge bonnet, and to turn it you really had to swing it about. Blue Lena required some art and knowledge of its contours in tight situations —it was six inches wider at the back than the front. You got to know your car, no doubt about that. Three tons of machinery. A car that was made to be driven fast at night.

  Brian and Anita had been to Morocco the previous year, 1966, staying with Christopher Gibbs, who had to take Brian to hospital with a broken wrist after a punc
h he’d thrown at Anita had hit the metal window frame in the El Minzah Hotel in Tangier. He was never good at connecting with Anita. I learned later just how violent Brian had already become with her, as the downward slide began, throwing knives, glass, punches at her, forcing her to barricade herself behind sofas. It’s probably not well known that Anita had a very sporty childhood—sailing, swimming, skiing, outdoor sports of every kind. Brian was no match for Anita, physically or in terms of wit. She was always on top of it. He always came off second best. And she thought, at the start at least, that Brian’s rampages were quite funny—but they were becoming unfunny and dangerous. Anita told me later that at Torremolinos on their way to Tangier the previous year, they had had massive fights after which Brian ended up in jail—and Anita too, once, for stealing a car coming out of a club. She was often trying to bail Brian out, screaming at the turnkeys, “You can’t keep him in jail. Let him out.” All this time they had grown to look like each other; their hair and clothes were becoming identical. They’d merged their personas, stylistically at least.

  We flew to Paris, Brian, Anita and I, and met Deborah Dixon, an old friend of Anita, in the Hotel George V. Deborah was a piece of work, a beauty from Texas who had been on every magazine cover in the early ’60s. Brian and Anita first met on the Stones tour, but it was in Deborah’s house in Paris that they first got together. My new driver to replace the snitch Patrick, Tom Keylock—a tough bloke from north London soon to become the Stones’ fixer-in-chief—brought Blue Lena over to Paris, and we set off for the sun.

  I sent a postcard to Mum: “Dear Mum, Sorry I didn’t phone before I left, but my telephones aren’t safe to talk on. Everything will be all right, so don’t worry. It’s really great here and I’ll send you a letter when I get where I’m going. All my love. Your fugitive son, Keef.”

  Brian, Deborah and Anita occupied the backseat and I sat in the front next to Tom Keylock, changing the 45s on the little Philips car record player. It’s hard to know, on this journey, how and why the tension built up in the car as it did. It was helped on by Brian being even more obnoxious and childish than usual. Tom’s an old soldier, fought at Arnhem and everything like that, but even he couldn’t ignore the tension in that car. Brian’s relationship with Anita had reached a jealous stalemate when she refused to give up whatever acting work she was doing to fulfill domestic duties as his full-time geisha, flatterer, punchbag—whatever he imagined, including partaker in orgies, which Anita always resolutely refused to do. On this trip he never stopped complaining and whining about how ill he felt, how he couldn’t breathe. No one took him seriously. Brian certainly suffered from asthma, but he was also a hypochondriac. Meanwhile, I was the DJ. I had to keep feeding the goddamn thing with little 45s, the favorite sounds—much Motown at the time. Anita claims that these choices were full of meaning and communication to her, songs of the moment like “Chantilly Lace” and “Hey Joe.” All songs are like that. You can take the meaning any way you want.

  The first night of our journey through France, we stayed all in the same room, five of us in a kind of dormitory in the top of a house—the only accommodation we could find late at night. Next day, we got to a town called Cordes-sur-Ciel that Deborah wanted to see—a pretty village on top of a hill—and from out of its medieval walls, as we approached, emerged an ambulance, and at this point Brian insisted that we should follow it to the nearest hospital, which was in Albi. There Brian was diagnosed with pneumonia. Well, it was hard to know with Brian—what was real and what wasn’t. But this meant that he was transferred to a Toulouse hospital, where he would stay for several days, and it was there we left him. I discovered much later that he gave instructions to Deborah not to leave Anita and me alone together. So it was pretty clear to him. We said, “OK, Brian, you’re cool. We’ll drive down through Spain, and then you fly over to Tangier.”

  So Anita and Deborah and I drove into Spain and when we reached Barcelona we went out to a famous flamenco guitar joint in the Ramblas. Then it was a rough part of town, and when we came outside, about three in the morning, there was a semi-riot going on. People were throwing things at the Bentley violently, especially when they saw us. Maybe they were anti-rich, anti-us, maybe it was because I was flying the pope’s flag that day. I used to have a little flagpole on the car, and I would change the flags around. The cops came, and suddenly I’m in kangaroo court in the middle of the night in Barcelona. A low room with tiles, and a judge presiding over these nocturnal assizes; opposite him a long bench with about a hundred guys all lined up, with me at the end of the row. Then suddenly these cops came in and they started to beat everyone down the line with truncheons around the head. Everyone got one. And they knew what was coming. It looked to me like a pretty normal process. You get into that court at night and you get the usual. And I’m the last cat on the end of this bench. Tom went to get my passport and took hours and when he finally procured it, I flashed it in their face, “Her Majesty Demands.” And they did the guy right next to me. After about ninety-nine broken heads, I guessed they were gonna do the whole bench. But they didn’t. The judge wanted me to confirm the culprits they had chosen, having rounded up the usual suspects, to charge with smashing the car and causing the riot. But I wouldn’t do that. So it came down to a fine for parking in the wrong place: a piece of paper to sign, money to change hands and even then they kept us in jail for the rest of the night.

  Next day we got the windscreen fixed and set off with fresh hope but not with Deborah, who had had enough of tension and police cells and wanted to go back to Paris. With no one to watch over us, we drove on to Valencia. And between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I found out that we were really interested in each other.

  I have never put the make on a girl in my life. I just don’t know how to do it. My instincts are always to leave it to the woman. Which is kind of weird, but I can’t pull the come-on bit: “Hey, baby, how you doing? Come on, let’s get it on” and all of that. I’m tongue-tied. I suppose every woman I’ve been with, they’ve had to put the make on me. Meanwhile I’m putting the make on in another way—by creating an aura of insufferable tension. Somebody has to do something. You either get the message or you don’t, but I could never make the first move. I knew how to operate amongst women, because most of my cousins were women, so I felt very comfortable in their company. If they’re interested, they’ll make the move. That’s what I found out.

  So Anita made the first move. I just could not put the make on my friend’s girl, even though he’d become an asshole, to Anita too. It’s the Sir Galahad in me. Anita was beautiful too. And we got closer and closer and then suddenly, without her old man, she had the balls to break the ice and say fuck it. In the back of the Bentley, somewhere between Barcelona and Valencia, Anita and I looked at each other, and the tension was so high in the backseat, the next thing I know she’s giving me a blow job. The tension broke then. Phew. And suddenly we’re together. You don’t talk a lot when that shit hits you. Without even saying things, you have the feeling, the great sense of relief that something has been resolved.

  It was February. And in Spain it was early spring. Going through England and France it was pretty chill, it was winter. We got over the Pyrenees and within half an hour already it was spring and by the time we got to Valencia, it was summer. I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid with Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things. We stopped in Valencia overnight and checked in as Count and Countess Zigenpuss, and that was the first time I made love to Anita. And from Algeciras, where we checked in as Count and Countess Castiglione, we took the ferry and the car over to Tangier to the El Minzah Hotel. There, in Tangier, were Robert Fraser; Bill Burroughs; Brion Gysin, Burroughs’s friend and fellow cutup artist—another of the hip public schoolboys—and Bill Willis, decorator of exiles’ palaces. We were greeted by a bundle of telegrams from Brian ordering Anita to come back and collect him. But we weren’t going anywhere except the Kasbah in Tangier.
For a week or so, it’s boinky boinky boinky, down in the Kasbah, and we’re randy as rabbits but we’re also wondering how we’re going to deal with it. Because we were expecting Brian in Tangier. We only dropped him off to have treatment. We were both, I remember, trying to be polite, at least for each other’s benefit. “When Brian gets to Tangier we’ll do this and that.” “Let’s make a phone call to see if he’s all right.” And all of that. And at the same time that was the last thing on our minds. The truth was “Oh God. Brian’s going to turn up in Tangier and then we’ve got to start to play a fucking game.” “Yeah, hope he croaks.” Suddenly, it’s Anita: is she with him or with me? We realized we were creating “an unmanageable situation,” maybe threatening the survival of the band. We decided to pull back, to make a strategic retreat. Anita didn’t want to abandon Brian. Didn’t want to go, tears and crying. She was worried about the effect on the group—that this was the big betrayal and it might bring it all down.