Life

by Keith Richards

  When I first saw Nellcôte, I thought that I could probably handle a spell of exile. It was the most amazing house, right at the base of Cap Ferrat, looking out over Villefranche Bay. It had been built around the 1890s by an English banker, with a large garden, a little overgrown, behind the great iron gates. The proportions were superb. If you felt a little ragged in the morning, you could walk through this glittering château and feel restored. It was like a hall of mirrors, with twenty-foot ceilings and marble columns, grand staircases. I’d wake up thinking, this is my house? Or, about bloody time someone’s got it right. This was the grandeur we felt we deserved after the shabbiness of Britain. And since we’d committed ourselves to living abroad, how hard really was it to sit in Nellcôte? We’d been on the road forever, and Nellcôte was a lot better than the Holiday Inn! I think everybody felt a sense of liberation compared to what had been going on in England.

  It was never our intention to record at Nellcôte. We were going to look around for studios in Nice or Cannes, even though the logistics were a little daunting. Charlie Watts had taken a house miles away in the Vaucluse, several hours’ drive. Bill Wyman was up in the hills, near Grasse. He was soon hanging out with Marc Chagall, of all people. The most unlikely couple I can think of, Bill Wyman and Marc Chagall. Neighbors, pop round for a cup of Bill’s terrible tea. Mick lived first in the Byblos hotel in Saint-Tropez while he waited for his wedding day, then rented a house belonging to Prince Rainier’s uncle and then a house owned by someone called Madame Tolstoy. Talk about falling in with the cultural Euro trash, or they with the white trash. They, at least, welcomed us with open arms.

  One of the features of Nellcôte was a little staircase down to a jetty, to which I soon attached the Mandrax 2, a very powerful twenty-foot motorboat, a Riva, built of mahogany, the crème de la crème of Italian speedboats. Mandrax was an anagram of its original name; all I had to do was knock off a couple of letters and move a couple around. It was irresistible to call it that. I bought it off a guy, renamed it and set off. No skipper’s license or pilot’s license. There wasn’t even the formal “Have you ever been on the water before?” Now I’m told you have to take exams to drive a boat in the Mediterranean. It required the companionship of Bobby Keys, not long coming, Gram Parsons and others to put the Mandrax to the test on the glassy Mediterranean, to strike out for the Riviera and adventure. But this was later. First there was the matter of Mick’s wedding to Bianca, his Nicaraguan fiancée, which came up in May, four weeks after our arrival. Marianne had gone from his life in 1970, the previous year, and into the beginning of a lost decade.

  Mick arranged what he saw as a quiet wedding, for which he chose Saint-Tropez at the height of the season. No journalist stayed at home. In these presecurity days, the couple and the guests wrestled their way through the streets against photographers and tourists, from the church to the mayor’s office—hand-to-hand combat, like trying to get to the bar in a rowdy club. I slid off, leaving Bobby Keys, who was a close friend of Mick’s in those days, to act as assistant best man or whatever. Roger Vadim was best man.

  Bobby’s role is mentioned here because Bianca’s bridesmaid was the very pretty Nathalie Delon, estranged wife of the French movie star Alain Delon, and Bobby took a great and dangerous fancy to her. She and Delon had been in the center of a scandal that had embroiled the French prime minister Georges Pompidou and his wife, as well as the crime underworld from Marseilles to Paris. Delon’s Yugoslav bodyguard, with whom Nathalie had had a brief affair, had been shot, his body found in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Paris. No one was ever convicted of killing him. Delon had left Nathalie and taken up with the actress Mireille Darc. It was a big mess and wrapped in considerable danger. Behind Delon and Nathalie were powerful figures from the Marseilles milieu a few miles down the road, as well as a band of Yugoslav toughs. There was clearly a lot of bad feeling and some major political blackmail flying about—Nathalie herself had had the wheels loosened on her car. Not a great moment, maybe, to become her new beau.

  Bobby, knowing nothing of all this, developed an instant fascination with Nathalie and blew his heart out at the party that night to attract her attention. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. He went back to London before returning to work on the music at Nellcôte. And when he got back, Nathalie was still there, staying with Bianca. What happened then? Well, they’re both still alive as I write, but I’m not sure why. Weeks would pass before that trouble became real.

  When I slid off at the wedding, it was towards a cubicle in the john of the Byblos, and I’m taking a leak and in the next cubicle I hear sniffing. “Keep it down,” I say, “or break it out.” And a voice comes back, “Want some?” And that’s how I met Brad Klein, who became a great friend of mine. His forte was transshipment, rerouting dope from here to there. He was a very well-educated, clean-cut-looking boy and used this persona to brass his way through. He did get into dealing coke later and got more involved than he should have, but when I met him it was the smoke. Brad’s dead now. It was the usual old story. If you’re dealing in this shit, don’t dabble in it. He dabbled and he always wanted to stay in the game a little longer. But on that day of our meeting, Brad and I went off together to hang and left the wedding to itself.

  I only got to know the qualities of Bianca later on. Mick never wants me to talk to his women. They end up crying on my shoulder because they’ve found out that he has once again philandered. What am I gonna do? Well, it’s a long ride to the airport, honey; let me think about it. The tears that have been on this shoulder from Jerry Hall, from Bianca, from Marianne, Chrissie Shrimpton… They’ve ruined so many shirts of mine. And they ask me what to do! How the hell do I know? I don’t fuck him! I had Jerry Hall come to me one day with this note from some other chick that was written backwards—really good code, Mick!—“I’ll be your mistress forever.” And all you had to do was hold it up to a mirror to read it. “Oh, what a bastard that guy is.” And I’m in the most unlikely role of consoler, “Uncle Keith.” It’s a side a lot of people don’t connect with me.

  At first I thought Bianca was just some bimbo. She was also quite aloof for a while, which didn’t endear her to anybody around us. But as I got to know her, I discovered that she’s bright and, what really impressed me later on, a strong lady. She became a mouthpiece for Amnesty International and a sort of roving ambassador for her own human-rights organization, which is some achievement. Very pretty and everything like that, but a very forceful character. No wonder Mick couldn’t handle it. The only drawback was that she was never one for a joke. I’m still trying to think of something to make her laugh. If she’d had a sense of humor, I’d have married her!

  Mick’s taking up with Bianca did coincide with our leaving England. So there was a definite schism in place already, a fault line. Bianca brought with her a whole load of baggage and society that Mick got into that nobody else was at all interested in and I’ve no doubt Bianca by now is no longer interested in either. Even then I had nothing against her personally, it was just the effect of her and her milieu on Mick that I didn’t like. It distanced him from the rest of the band, and Mick’s always looking to separate himself from the band. Mick would disappear for two weeks on vacation; he would commute from Paris. Bianca was pregnant, and their daughter, Jade, was born in the fall, when Bianca was in Paris. Bianca didn’t like Nellcôte life, and I don’t blame her. So Mick was torn.

  In those early days at Nellcôte we’d do our promenades down by the harbors, or to the Café Albert in Villefranche, where Anita would drink her pastis. We were obviously conspicuous in those parts, but we were also pretty hardened and unworried by what people thought. Violence happens when you least expect it, though. Spanish Tony, who came down early on, saved my life a couple of times—either literally or not—and in the town of Beaulieu, on one of those outings near Nellcôte, he saved my hide. I had an E-Type Jaguar that I drove down to Beaulieu harbor with Marlon and Tony aboard and parked in what was pointed out to us—by what
appeared to be two harbor officials—as the wrong place. One came across and said, “Ici,” beckoning me and Tony into the harbor office, so Tony and I wandered over, leaving Marlon in the car for what we imagined would be a couple of minutes, and we could see him.

  Tony smelled it before I did. Two French fishermen, older guys. One had his back to us. He was locking the door, and Tony looked at me. He just said, “Watch my back.” He moved like a flash, shoved a chair into my hand, jumped on the table with another chair and tore into them, splinters everywhere. These guys were wined out of their heads; they’d had a big lunch, some of it still on the table. I just trod on the neck of one of them while Tony did the other one in. Then Tony came back for my one, who was scared shitless, so Tony gave him another smack around the head. “Let’s get out of here.” Kicked the door open. It was over in a matter of seconds. They’re on the floor moaning and whining, claret everywhere, broken furniture. The last thing they were expecting was an assault—they were big sailors, no pussyfooting, and they were going to fuck around with us, slap us about. They were planning to have some fun with the longhairs. Marlon’s sitting in the Jaguar. “Where you been, Dad?” “Don’t worry about it.” Vroom vroom. “Let’s go.” What moves from Spanish Tony. It was a ballet; it was his finest moment. That day Douglas Fairbanks had nothing on him. It was the swiftest move that I’ve seen happen, and I’ve seen a few. I took a lot of leaves out of Tony’s book that day—when you smell that trouble coming, act. Don’t wait for it to start.

  Three days later, cops turned up at the house. They had warrants on me only, because Tony wasn’t known and had gone back to England by now. A whole lot of rigmarole went down with examining magistrates, but by the time it got to the second or third level, they realized that these guys didn’t have a leg to stand on. When the facts came out that they’d intimidated us, that I’d had a child in the car, that there was no reason for us to be hauled into the office in the first place, suddenly, miraculously, the charges wafted away. I’ve no doubt it cost me a bit of money with the lawyer, but in the end, these guys chose not to get up in court and say they’d been done in their own office by two insane Englishmen.

  I was not totally clean when I got to Nellcôte. But there’s a difference between being not clean and being hooked. Hooked is when you’re not going to do anything until you get your hands on the stuff. All your energy goes into that. I’d brought a small maintenance dose with me, but as far as I was concerned, I’d just cleaned up. Sometime in May, not that long after our arrival, we went to a go-kart track in Cannes, where my car flipped over on me and rushed me fifty yards down the tarmac on my back, stripping off my skin like bark. I scraped it almost to the bone. And this when I was just about to make a record. All I needed. I was advised by the doctor, “This is going to be very painful, monsieur. The wound must be kept clean. I’ll send a nurse to you every day to dress it and check it.” There arrived each morning a male nurse who had been a frontline medic for the French army. He’d been at Dien Bien Phu, the last stand of the French army in Indochina; he’d been in Algeria; he’d seen plentiful blood, and his style was accordingly robust. Little wizened guy, hard as nails. He gave me a shot of morphine each day, and I needed morphine badly. Each time, after he’d fixed me, he would throw the syringe as a dart, always at the same spot, at a painting, right in the eye. Then of course the treatment stopped. But now I’m on the morphine because of this wound, just when I’d cleaned up off the dope. So, first things first, I need some shit.

  Fat Jacques was our cook, who now doubled as the heroin dealer. He was the Marseilles connection. He had a bunch of sidekicks, this team of cowboys who we decided were safer on the payroll than off it, who were good at running “errands.” Jacques emerged because I said, “Who knows how to get some shit around here?” He was young, he was fat and he was sweaty, and one day he went to Marseilles on the train and he brought back this lovely little bag of white powder and this huge supply, almost the size of a cement bag, of lactose, which was the cut. And he explained to me in his bad English and my even worse French—he had to write it down—mix ninety-seven percent lactose with three percent heroin. This heroin was pure. Normally when you bought it it was premixed. But this stuff you had to mix very precisely. Even at these proportions, it was incredibly powerful. And so I’d be in the bathroom with these scales, going ninety-seven to three; I was scrupulous in my weighing out. You had to be careful; the old lady was taking it and a couple of other people. Ninety-six to four and you could croak on it. One hit of it pure and boom. Good-bye.

  There were obvious advantages to buying in such quantity. The price was not phenomenal. It was coming straight from Marseilles to Villefranche, just down the road. There were no transport costs, just Jacques’s train ticket. The more times you have to score, the more things are likely to screw up. But you also have to really try not to overdo it, because the bigger the score, the more people are interested. Just get enough to get settled for a couple of months, so you don’t have to go out and scrabble around for it. This bag, however, never seemed to disappear. “Well, once we finish this bag we can straighten out.…” Let’s put it this way: it lasted from June to November, and we still left some behind.

  I had to trust the orders that came with it. And they must have been correct, because every time I tried it, it was perfectly fine, and no one complained. I posted the formula on the wall so I wouldn’t forget it. Ninety-seven to three. (Of course I thought of writing a song with that title, but then I thought there was no point advertising myself.) I would be up there half the afternoon getting it right. I had these great old scales, big brass things, very, very fine, and this big scoop for the lactose. Ninety-seven grams. Put that aside and then you take a little spoon out of the heroin bag, three grams. Then you put the two together and mix ’em up. You’ve got to shake it. I remember being up there often, so I didn’t ever mix a lot together at once. I would do a couple of days’ worth, or a little more.

  We looked at studios in Cannes and elsewhere, reckoned up how much money the French were going to suck out of us. Nellcôte had a large basement and we had our own mobile studio. The Mighty Mobile, as we called it, was a truck with eight-track recording machines that Stu had helped to put together. We’d thought of it quite separately from any plan to move to France. It was the only independent mobile recording unit around. 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, graceful, fortuitous things that happened to the Stones.

  So one day in June it trundled through the gates and we parked it outside the front door and plugged in. I’ve never done any different since. When you’ve got the equipment and the right guys, you don’t need anything else in terms of studios. Only Mick still thinks you have to take things into “real” recording studios to really make a real record. He got proved totally wrong on our latest—at the time of writing—album, A Bigger Bang, especially, because we did it all in his little château in France. We had got the stuff worked up, and he said, “Now we’ll take it into a real recording studio.” And Don Was and I looked at each other, and Charlie looked at me.… Fuck this shit. We’ve already got it down right here. Why do you want to spring for all that bread? So you can say it was cut in so-and-so studio, the glass wall and the control room? We ain’t going nowhere, pal. So finally he relented.

  The basement in Nellcôte was big enough, but it was divided into a series of bunkers. Not a great deal of ventilation—hence “Ventilator Blues.” The weirdest thing was trying to find out where you’d left the saxophone player. Bobby Keys and Jim Price moved around to where they could get their sound right—mostly standing with their backs to the wall at the end of a narrow corridor, where Dominique Tarlé took one of his pictures of them with microphone cables snaking away around the corner. Eventually we ended up painting the microphone cable to the horn section yellow. If you wanted to talk to the horns, you followed the y
ellow cable until you found them. You wouldn’t know where the hell you were. It was an enormous house. Sometimes Charlie would be in a room, and I’d have to tramp a quarter of a mile to find him. But considering that it was basically a dungeon, it was fun to work there.

  All the characteristics of that basement were discovered by the other guys. For the first week or so we didn’t know where Charlie was set up because he’d be trying different cubicles every night. Jimmy Miller encouraged him to try down the end of the corridor, but Charlie said, I’m half a mile down the damn road, it’s too far away, I need to be closer. So we had to check out every little cubicle. You didn’t want to add electronic echo unless you had to; you wanted natural echo, and down there you found some really weird ones. I played guitar in a room with tiles, turning the amp round and pointing it at the corner of the room to see what got picked up on the microphone. I remember doing that for “Rocks Off” and maybe “Rip This Joint.” But as weird as it was to record there, especially at the beginning, by the time we were into it, within a week or two, it was totally natural. There was no talk amongst the band or with Jimmy Miller or the engineer Andy Johns, “what a weird way to make a record.” No, we’ve got it. All we’ve got to do is persevere.

  We would record from late in the afternoon until five or six in the morning, and suddenly the dawn comes up and I’ve got this boat. Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside; let’s take Mandrax to Italy for breakfast. We’d just jump in, Bobby Keys, me, Mick, whoever was up for it. Most days we would go down to Menton, an Italian town just inside France by some quirk of treaty making, or just beyond it to Italy proper. No passport, right past Monte Carlo as the sun’s coming up with music ringing in our ears. Take a cassette player and play something we’ve done, play that second mix. Just pull up at the wharf and have a nice Italian breakfast. We liked the way the Italians cooked their eggs, and the bread. And with the fact that you had actually crossed a border and nobody knew shit or did shit about it, there was an extra sense of freedom. We’d play the mix to the Italians, see what they thought. If we hit the fishermen at the right time, we could get red snapper straight off the boats and take it home for lunch.