Life

by Keith Richards

  It had reached the papers that the Stones were under investigation for dealing heroin, which began a whole long saga; the cat, as it were, was out of the bag. Aha, a heroin problem in the group and in the music industry at large. It came with the standard slanders, such as Anita peddling heroin to minors; many witches’ tales went into circulation about bad things going on at Nellcôte. The story wasn’t over in France. We went to LA, but in our absence, in the middle of December, the police raided Nellcôte and found what they were looking for, though it took them a full year to bring charges and a warrant for the arrest of Anita and me. When it came, they found us guilty of drug possession, fined us and banned us from entering France for two years. All those peddling charges had been dropped, and finally I could stop paying the rent on Nellcôte, tearing up thousand-dollar bills.

  What we brought to LA from France was only the raw material for Exile, the real bare bones, no overdubs. On almost each song we’d said, we’ve got to put a chorus on here, we’ve got to put some chicks in there, we need extra percussion on that. We were already planning ahead without noting it down. So LA was basically to put the flesh on. For four or five months in LA in early 1972, we mixed and overdubbed Exile on Main St. I remember sitting in the parking lot of Tower Records or Gold Star Studios, or driving up and down Sunset, listening at precisely the moment when our favorite DJ was teed up to play an unreleased track, so that we could judge the mix. How did it sound on radio? Was it a single? We did it with “Tumbling Dice,” “All Down the Line” and many others, called up a DJ at KRLA and sent him a dub. Fingers burning from the last cut and we’d just take the car out and listen to it. Wolfman Jack or one of several other DJs in LA would put it on, and we’d have a guy standing over him to take it back again. Exile on Main St. had a slow start. It was the kiss of death to make double albums, according to the lore of record companies and their anxieties about pricing and distribution and all that. The fact that we stuck to it, saying, look, that’s what it is, that’s what we’ve done here, and if it takes two albums, that’s what we’re going to do, was a bold move, and totally against all business advice. At first it seemed that they’d been proven right. But then it just kept going and going and getting bigger and bigger, and it always had incredible reviews. And anyway, if you don’t make bold moves, you don’t get fucking anywhere. You’ve got to push the limits. We felt we’d been sent down to France to do something and we’d done it, and they might as well have it all.

  When that finished, Anita and I lived in Stone Canyon and I hooked back up with Gram, for the last time I saw him. Stone Canyon was nice, but there was still the dope to get. There’s a photograph of Gram on his Harley motorcycle, me on the back wearing Biggles glasses, and we’re off to score. “Hey, Gram, where we going?” “Through the cracks of the city.” He’d take me to places in LA I never knew existed. In fact, a lot of the dealers I remember going to were chicks. Female junkies. FJs, as they were known in the trade. Once or twice it was a guy, but otherwise Gram’s connections were female. He thought they were cooler than guys as far as dealing dope and being available. “Got the shit, but I ain’t got a fix.” “Oh, I know a chick.…” He had a few bitches living up at the Riot House, the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset—very popular with bands, cheap and you could park your bus. And there’d be some very pretty chick, total junkie, who’d lend you her needle. This was before the days of worrying about AIDS. It wasn’t around then.

  This was when Gram was hanging with Emmylou Harris for the first time, though it was over a year before he recorded his great duets with her. Mind you, I bet it didn’t start out as an idea to vocalize. He was a randy son of a bitch. Otherwise the bad news was the dearth of any high-grade smack anywhere on the West Coast. We were reduced to Mexican shoe scrapings, MSS as we used to call it. This is really street shit, brown, came over from Mexico. It looked like shoe scrapings, and sometimes it was and sometimes you’d have to do a test on it. You’d burn a little in a spoon first just to see whether it liquefied or not, and smell it. There’s a definite smell to it when you burn it. And you didn’t mind if the smell you got was the smell of the cut, because old heroin, street heroin, was cut with lactose. But this stuff was thick. Sometimes you could hardly push it through the needle. It was a pretty low life.

  I never usually let it get to where I would be left without clean shit. And street dope, that’s where I drew the line. I decided to quit. This is not the stuff; this is not where it’s at. All it’s doing is keeping the motor going.

  One day you wake up and there’s been a change of plans, you’ve got to go somewhere unexpected, and you realize that the first thing you think about is, OK, how do I handle the dope? The first thing on the list isn’t your underwear, isn’t your guitar, it’s how do I hook up? Do I carry it with me and tempt fate? Or do I have phone numbers where I’m going, where I know that it’s definitely there? Around now, with a tour coming up, was the first time it really hit me. I’d reached the end of the rope. I didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere with no stuff. That was the biggest fear. I’d rather clean up before I went on the road. It’s bad enough cleaning up by yourself, but the idea of putting the whole tour on the line because I couldn’t make it was too much, even for me.

  My visa had run out for America, so I had to get out of there anyway. It was also time for Anita and me to leave LA. She was pregnant with Angela; it was time to clean up, girl. I don’t think Anita was particularly hooked; she didn’t need it at the time. And obviously our robust Angela proves there was no serious health risk. Anita would have a hit now and again. It was me that was hooked big-time. It was pretty dire. We lived on the edge. But I don’t think Anita or I had any doubt that we could pull this off. It was just a matter of doing it. I can’t remember any sense of fear or apprehension about quitting. It was just, this is what has to be done, and it has to be done now. We couldn’t do it in England or France, because I couldn’t go into either of those countries, so Switzerland became our destination.

  I loaded well up before we got on the plane, because I would go straight into cold turkey by the time I arrived, with no provisions for supplies in Switzerland. In fact it was pretty bad. There was confusion when we got there. I don’t remember it, but I was taken in an ambulance from the hotel to the clinic. June Shelley, who had looked after all our affairs at Nellcôte and was overseeing this episode as well, wrote in her memoir that she thought I was going to die in the ambulance; I looked like it, anyway. I have no recollection of that; I was just being pushed around from pillar to post. Get me to the joint, let’s cut it out and go through the shit. Dope me up so I can sleep through as much of seventy-two hours of hell as possible.

  I was being cleaned up by a Dr. Denber in a clinic in Vevey. He was American. He looked Swiss, close shaven and rimless glasses, Himmleresque; he spoke with a midwestern twang. In actual fact Dr. Denber’s treatment was useless for me. Dodgy little bugger too. I’d have rather cleaned up with Smitty, Bill Burroughs’s nurse, that hairy old matron. But Dr. Denber was the only one that spoke English. There was nothing I could do about it. You have a guy in cold turkey, you’ve got him where you want him.

  I can’t imagine what other people think cold turkey is like. It is fucking awful. On the scale of things, it’s better than having your leg blown off in the trenches. It’s better than starving to death. But you don’t want to go there. The whole body just sort of turns itself inside out and rejects itself for three days. You know in three days it’s going to calm down. It’s going to be the longest three days you’ve spent in your life, and you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing walls. Why do you do that to yourself? I don’t know. I still don’t know. Your skin crawling, your guts churning, you can’t stop your limbs from jerking and moving about, and you’re throwing up and shitting at the same time, and shit’s coming out your nose and your eyes, and the first time that happens
for real, that’s when a reasonable man says, “I’m hooked.” But even that doesn’t stop a reasonable man from going back on it.

  While I was in the clinic, Anita was down the road having our daughter, Angela. Once I came out of the usual trauma, I had a guitar with me and I wrote “Angie” in an afternoon, sitting in bed, because I could finally move my fingers and put them in the right place again, and I didn’t feel like I had to shit the bed or climb the walls or feel manic anymore. I just went, “Angie, Angie.” It was not about any particular person; it was a name, like “ohhh, Diana.” I didn’t know Angela was going to be called Angela when I wrote “Angie.” In those days you didn’t know what sex the thing was going to be until it popped out. In fact, Anita named her Dandelion. She was only given the added name Angela because she was born in a Catholic hospital where they insisted that a “proper” name be added. As soon as Angela grew up a little bit, she said, “Never again do you call me Dandy.”

  Dominique Tarlé

  Chapter Nine

  We embark on the great tour of 1972; Dr. Bill opens his medicine bag, and Hugh Hefner has us to stay; I meet Freddie Sessler. We move to Switzerland, then to Jamaica. Bobby Keys and I get in trouble on the road and are saved by Hawaii’s Pineapple King. I buy a house in Jamaica; Anita is jailed there and expelled. Gram Parsons dies, and I am put on the most-likely-to list. Ronnie Wood joins the band.

  The Stones’ big, ugly 1972 tour started on June 3. You can see how a sensitive person like Keith might need medication, but none of this stuff cheered me up. I hoped for better things. The idealism of the 1969 tour had ended in disaster. The cynicism of the 1972 tour included Truman Capote, Terry Southern (would have included William S. Burroughs if the Saturday Review had come up with Bill’s price), Princess Lee Radziwill, and Robert Frank. Featured sideshows on the tour involved a traveling physician, hordes of dealers and groupies, big sex-and-dope scenes. I could describe for you in intimate detail the public desecrations and orgies I witnessed and participated in on this tour, but once you’ve seen sufficient fettuccine on flocked velvet, hot urine pooling on deep carpets, and tidal waves of spewing sex organs, they seem to run together. So to speak. Seen one, you seen ’em all. The variations are trivial.

  —Stanley Booth, Keith: Standing in the Shadows

  I have never been on anything like this. I have been on trips with extraordinary people before but they were always directed outward.… This totally excludes the outside world. To never get out, to never know what city you are in… I cannot get used to it.

  —Robert Frank, photographer and director, Cocksucker Blues

  The ’72 tour was known by other names—the Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise tour or the STP, Stones Touring Party. It was mythologized along the lines of Stanley Booth’s list of excesses, above. Personally I never saw anything like this. Stanley must have been exaggerating or he was a very innocent boy. It was the case nevertheless that by this time we couldn’t get a reservation in any hotel above a Holiday Inn. It was the beginning of the booking of whole hotel floors, with no one else allowed up, so that some of us—like me—could get privacy and security. It was the only way we could have a degree of certainty that when we decided to party, we could control the situation or at least get some warning if there was trouble.

  The whole entourage had exploded in terms of numbers, of roadies and technicians, and of hangers-on and groupies. For the first time we traveled in our own hired plane, with the lapping tongue painted on. We had become a pirate nation, moving on a huge scale under our own flag, with lawyers, clowns, attendants. For the guys running the operation there was maybe one battered typewriter and hotel or street phones to run a North American tour through thirty cities. A feat of organization on the part of our new tour manager, Peter Rudge, a four-star general among the anarchists. We never missed a show, though we came near it. The guy that opened for us, in almost every city, was Stevie Wonder, and he was barely twenty-two.

  I remember stories about Stevie when we were on tours in Europe with his great band. They’d say, “The motherfucker can see! We walk into a brand-new hotel, he picks up his key, heads straight for the elevator.” I found out later that he’d memorized the plan of a Four Seasons Hotel. Five steps up here, two steps to the elevator.… It was no big deal to him. He only did it to fuck them up.

  The band was rocking on that tour. Better to hear an impression from another resident writer, Robert Greenfield. There were so many writers on that tour—it had become like a political campaign in terms of coverage. Our old friend Stanley Booth retired, disgusted by the new mob of socialites and famous authors who had diluted the once pure patch, “the ballrooms and smelly bordellos / And dressing rooms filled with parasites.” But we played on.

  Robert Greenfield: In Norfolk and Charlotte and Knoxville, the set seems to fly from beginning to end, the musicians completely locked into one another and on time, like a championship team in its finest, most fluid moments. But only people who listen, like Ian Stewart, and the Stones themselves and their supporting musicians, are aware of the magic that’s going down. Everyone else is either worrying about logistics or trying to find a way to get off.

  The traveling physician mentioned by Stanley we’ll call Dr. Bill, to give it a Burroughsian ring. His specialty was billed as emergency medicine. Mick, who was getting appropriately nervous about people trying to get at him—there were threats and there were freaks fixated on him; people would walk up and hit him; the Angels wanted him dead—wanted a doctor around who could keep him alive if he got shot on stage. Dr. Bill was there, however, primarily for the pussy. And being quite a young, good-looking doctor, he got plenty.

  He printed these cards, “Dr. Bill,” as it were, “Physician of the Rolling Stones.” He would scout the audience before we went on and give out twenty or thirty of those cards to the most foxy, beautiful girls, even if they were with a guy. He wrote on the back, the name of our hotel, the suite number to call. And even girls with guys would go home and come back. They’d give this to the guard, and Dr. Bill knew that out of the six or seven girls who would come, there were one or two who he could get by saying he would introduce them to us. He was into getting laid every night. And he also had this case of every kind of substance, Demerol, anything you wanted. He could write scripts in every city. We used to send chicks to his room and take his medicine bag. There would be a line waiting in the room with a waste bag of syringes while he was giving out the Demerol.

  In Chicago there was an acute shortage of hotel rooms, to add to our problem of unpopularity with booking clerks. There was a hardware convention, a McDonald’s convention, a furniture convention, the lobbies were full of name badges. So Hugh Hefner thought it would be a laugh to invite some of us to stay in the Playboy Mansion. I think he regretted it. Hugh Hefner, what a nut. We’ve worked the lowest pimps to the highest. The highest being Hefner, a pimp nonetheless. He threw the place open for the Stones and we were there for over a week. And it’s all plunges in the sauna, and the Bunnies, and basically it’s a whorehouse, which I really don’t like. The memory, however, is very, very hazy. I know we did have some fun there. I know we ripped it up. Hefner had been shot at just before our visit, and the place resembled the state house of some Caribbean dictatorship, with heavily armed security everywhere. But Bobby and I avoided that, and the tourists who had come to watch us playing in the Playboy Mansion, and retreated into our own entertainment.

  We had the doc there, and we’d get in one of the Bunnies for him. The deal was “We get free dibs on your bag and you can have Debbie.” I felt the script had been written, play it to the hilt. Bobby and I played it a little far when we set fire to the bathroom. Well, we didn’t, the dope did. Not our fault. Bobby and I were just sitting in the john, comfortable, nice john, sitting on the floor, and we’ve got the doc’s bag and we’re just smorgasbording. “I wonder what these do?” Bong. And at a certain point… talk about hazy, or foggy, Bobby says, “It’s smoky in here.” And I’m looking at Bobby
and can’t see him. And the drapes are smoldering away; everything was just about to go off big-time. To the point where I can’t see him, he’s disappeared in this fog. “Yes, I guess it is a bit smoky in here.” It was a really delayed reaction. And then suddenly a flurry at the door and the fire alarms start going, beep beep beep. “What’s that noise, Bob?” “I don’t know. Should we open the window?” Someone shouts through the door, “Are you all right?” “Oh yeah, we’re fucking great, man.” So he just turns away, and we don’t know exactly what to do. Maybe if we’re quiet and walk out and we pay for the reconstruction? And then a little later there was a thumping on the door, waiters and guys in black suits bringing buckets of water. They get the door open and we’re sitting on the floor, our pupils very pinned. I said, “We could have done that ourselves. How dare you burst in on our private affair?” Hugh decamped soon after that and moved to LA.*