50 Licks Read online

  ANDY JOHNS: This French chef would put out these lavish spreads for lunch and you’d walk out to a big table of artichokes, stuffed tomatoes, sautéed asparagus, salads, and lobsters. Wonderful stuff. Big luncheon on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and these big yachts.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: There’s sixteen people at lunch every day on the patio; we’re drinking blanc de blancs . . . Lunch is three hours. Joints are being smoked. Then we’re in the speedboat on the bay. I’m trying to water-ski. Keith is laughing because I can’t water-ski. We’re walking on beaches. I teach Keith how to skim stones. He loves it. We skim stones for twenty minutes. “This is great, man.”

  KEITH RICHARDS: We had a couple of French chefs who blew it up. Fat Jacques, he certainly blew it up.

  That’s not a compliment; Keith was being literal. Jacques once left the gas on too long before lighting the stove and caused a big explosion. A possible explanation:

  KEITH RICHARDS: He was a junkie, too. He used to go to Marseille. You’d say, “Where’s Jacques?” “It’s Thursday.” “Oh, right, he’s gone to score.”

  Kidding aside, drugs became a real problem at Nellcôte.

  ANITA PALLENBERG: I walked into the living room and this guy pulled out a bag of smack. The whole thing kind of disintegrated and we got heavily into drugs, like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At the end especially, I thought I was cursed.

  ANDY JOHNS: One night I go into my room to change my shirt, and Keith’s there and he’s got a needle and a spoon. I said, “What are you doing Keith?” “I thought I’d jack myself up a bit. Do you want to try this?” It’s Keith Richards so I say, “Yeah, OK.” He says, “This needle’s a bit bent. Why don’t we go back to my place?” We go into the Nazi basement. Afterwards he went, “Now you’re a man.” I thought that was a strange thing to say. I went upstairs and I can’t even see my feet. And Stu came in, and he looked at me and said, “You’ve been hanging out with Keith, haven’t you?” He said, “Andrew, what time is it?” I looked at my watch. I could see the watch, but I couldn’t see what time it was. I said, “I think it’s twelve thirty.” “It’s eight thirty! I know what’s been going on and I’m going to tell your brother.” I went, “Stu, don’t do it. OK?” He said, “I’m going to have to have a chat with little fairy boy Keith.”

  Reportedly, Miller and Mick Taylor developed heroin habits as well.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: Jimmy was also using heroin by the time they got to Nellcôte. The thing that I think really blew Jimmy out was the combination of using smack and that they were playing endlessly without getting anywhere, and he just kind of lost it. What the Stones always did—Keith and Mick—brought in a genius, sucked everything the genius knew out, and got rid of the genius.

  The French authorities became aware of what was going on at Nellcôte and launched a probe. Since there’s no habeas corpus in France, Keith and Anita could have been imprisoned for months while they were being investigated.

  KEITH RICHARDS: Prince Rupert Loewenstein came into play. Later 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 named Jean Michard-Pellissier. You couldn’t have reached higher. He had been a lawyer for de Gaulle and was a friend of the prefect of the region. Nice one, Rupert.

  And what happened at the hearing?

  KEITH RICHARDS: Instead of the prospect of jail, 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 twenty-four hundred dollars a week.

  ANDY JOHNS: I remember talking to Keith in his basement in France. Just Keith and I, and I said, “Look, the next step is that we’ve got to go and finish the overdubs and mix. Why don’t we go to Sunset?” And they worked there before. So, “Yeah, all right.” And of course, I loved LA. Twenty-one-year-old English guy, and I had done a couple or three projects there. So I knew people and chicks eventually. “Yeah. Let’s do that then.”

  THE STORY OF THE 1971 ROLLING STONE INTERVIEW

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: I get to Keith’s house, I’m standing there waiting, a little nervous. He sweeps down the stairs. “Oh man, Bob Greenfield!”

  I wind up living with him for two weeks in Nellcôte. A day or two after I got there, we do the first interview and he’s great. The second one, Keith and I drinking tequila from the bottle, something that no one was doing back then. The interview degenerates to monosyllabic grunts that have no meaning whatsoever.

  Keith’s unbelievable to talk to. Any question I ask him, he answers. And he’s smoking a spliff constantly throughout the interview. After I’ve got two sessions done with him, it goes to the next level, which is: I’m a guest; it’s a party; but we’re not sitting down to talk. He’s dodging me. I was starting to lose my mind. I talk to Marshall Chess on the phone. I said, “This is bad, man. I can’t get him to sit down and talk to me. I need to finish this.” Marshall shows up . . . He brings some form of chaotic law and order to the house and we do two more sessions . . . On the last one, the only sound you hear is the sounds of the birds in the trees and the scratching of the matches against the box as Keith lights and smokes another spliff.

  I spend a week transcribing the interview in Cannes. I drive back to the villa. I walk in and say, “Keith, I want you to read this.” He’s reading the original. It’s ninety-eight pages long, and as he reads each page, he throws it on the floor. It must’ve taken forty-five minutes or an hour . . . He flips the last page on the floor and says, “Yeah man, I said it. Print it.” It eventually ran on the cover in August. It was a big deal. No one had heard Keith talk before. He had never been the face of the band.

  Upon release, the record received mixed reviews and some harsh notices even from within the Stones camp.

  JIMMY MILLER: I was never happy with the sound of that album, especially after Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers.

  MICK JAGGER: Exile . . . is not one of my favorite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling. When I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I’ve ever heard. I’d love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly.

  MARSHALL CHESS: We certainly didn’t think we were working on an album that would be hailed as a masterpiece all these years later. You never hear something that way. Also you never hear it like a member of the public hears it when he drops the needle on the vinyl or pops the CD into the deck. I’m hearing the album from the acoustic versions when they first play the songs, through the tracks and vocals being laid down, to the final mixes. When you’re involved you see it more like a sculptor does, remembering how it evolved from a block of stone. You don’t ever hear it fresh. Besides, there was no time to think about posterity. Everything about the making of Exile was so intense.

  Keith on the other hand was more immediately proud of Exile.

  KEITH RICHARDS: I always thought, somewhere in the back of my mind that what we were doing, it wasn’t just for now. There might have been some sort of feeling since we had to move out of England while we were doing it, well, we better make this bloody work.

  And work it did . . . a few final thoughts about Exile:

  ANDY JOHNS: With Exile, its mostly blues-based stuff. “Stop Breaking Down” is probably my favorite track. I remember getting Mick to play harmonica on that. It did not seem like it was finished. My brother [Glyn] had recorded earlier. I said, “We’ve got to use this,” because Mick Taylor plays some gorgeous lines and I’m very sure that it’s Mick Jagger playing the rhythm guitar as well. That’s why it’s a little choppier.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: At the time, Exile confused people. There was so much music on it and it was so dense. It was made under the influence of heroin and mixed under the influence of cocaine. The album reflects what Keith w
anted to be in the Stones’ music: blues, funk, who gives a shit if it ain’t perfect, it fucking sounds good to me. It took a long time for it to reach masterpiece status. It took a damn long time.

  Interestingly, Greenfield himself has some reservations about Exile musically.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: For me the songs go on too long. The endings trail away. The thing about Exile is that it is a very dark stew.

  And why is Exile so great?

  ANDY JOHNS: It’s an intangible. Exile just turned out to be a great collection of music. And I think it was good that it was a double album. Some people say it should have been a single album, but you get the feeling of what they were going through at the time, and the confusion and the angst and the joy and the drugs and they moved out of England. There were a lot of emotions.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: They were so estranged from everything. They were in control of this album because of Rolling Stones Records. Sticky Fingers had made so much money that they could tell Ahmet, “We’re not ready.” They could say no. That’s why Marshall set it up the way that he did. Mick was never going to be under the thumb of someone like Allen Klein again. He was going to control what was going on with the Stones’ product. Mick was so smart. He knew this would be a bombshell and it was. Exile is the closest they ever got to pure art. Everything on there is basically not commercial. There is no precedent for Exile. It’s a leap; it’s an inductive leap. And when a band makes an inductive leap, they leave people behind . . .

  CHAPTER 29

  LET IT LOOSE

  THE ROLLING STONES’ 1972 tour has been described as the first modern rock ’n’ roll tour. Many feel it was the best that any band has sounded live, ever. It amounted to more than just a series of concerts.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: That tour was special. It was a social event. It was a cultural event. It was a business event. It’s the kind of thing that rock ’n’ roll can’t do anymore. It has to do with timing, it has to do with setting; it was a perfect crossroads. This is what’s called history.

  One of the many interesting people who traveled with the Stones on the ’72 tour was Swiss-born iconic photographer and observer of the American condition Robert Frank. Frank was making the never-to-be-officially-released documentary of excess on the tour called Cocksucker Blues.

  ROBERT FRANK: 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.

  Marshall Chess describes the Stones’ partying during this period:

  MARSHALL CHESS: Oh, it was right up there. To the max. It was at the very start of that whole sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. I was the same age as the Stones and fell right in with all that. What was there not to like about any of it? I was in my twenties. My marriage had broken up so I had no responsibilities in that way. I wouldn’t say I was a major womanizer but I definitely knew how to enjoy myself. Like any man I appreciate a pretty woman. On those Stones tours there was a lot of very hot women around the band and a lot of extra ones to go around.

  Unused ticket from one of the most famous concerts of all time, Mick’s Birthday Show

  The bigger issue for Marshall was drugs.

  MARSHALL CHESS: Before I joined the Stones I’d smoked marijuana, that was it. Suddenly every drug on the planet was freely available. As soon as we started touring, I found myself with multiple addictions. By the end of the first big tour I was doing everything there was to do. I liked to be high all the time. When you’re living that life you don’t stop for a moment to think that there’s gonna be a long, dark tunnel waiting for you somewhere down the line.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: The brilliance of Keith was you didn’t know about the junk unless you were using junk. You didn’t get in the room with him unless you were using junk. They had lived in public since they were eighteen, nineteen, twenty. They were very clever at presenting a public face, a second face, a third face. Then it was a secret life even further back than that. They had everything compartmentalized. You had to really pass tests to get to the inner circle.

  Marshall was in that inner circle. When did things get out of hand for him personally?

  MARSHALL CHESS: It was on tour that the real partying went on, after the shows. I did seven years of sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. I came out of it a better man than when I went in. I made it out. Jimmy Miller and Nicky Hopkins didn’t make it out alive.

  What was it like touring with the Stones in those days?

  MARSHALL CHESS: Those tours were epics. I even got to play on stage with the band a few times. On the 1973 tour of Europe I played trumpet and conga drums on the last three numbers of the Stones’ set, finishing up with “Street Fighting Man.” I used to be a bugler in the Boy Scouts, then I played in my high school band. My dream was to become a musician but my family discouraged that. They thought it was a stupid life. They had a point. In those days being a musician was a hard road to travel. There were no rock stars. But I regret it to this day because I think I’d have been a great musician. I had it in me.

  The Stones were using Stevie Wonder’s horn section to fatten their sound and they insisted I join them on stage. Walking out to play in front of twenty thousand people, that was a thrill. I blew so hard my lips were bruised. My abiding memory is Mick showering me with rose petals at the end of the show and thirty thousand people focusing their energy on me. It was such an intense feeling.

  PETER RUDGE: THE RINGMASTER

  Before Peter Rudge got the job as road manager of the Stones, he was on the road with the Who.

  PETER RUDGE: We were making a rock opera called Tommy. That attracted the attention of Mick and the Stones and Rupert Loewenstein, because they were coming off the back of Altamont. I got a call from somebody saying, “The Stones would like to meet with you.” I went in and I met the Stones at the Beverly Hills Hotel at Rupert Loewenstein’s bungalow. It was hysterical: Keith kept leaving the room. Mick was in and out of the room. Rupert was the only constant. We just talked. I sensed even then that Mick ran the show. Keith was the conscience of the group. There were a lot of discussions about the ticket prices. They were mindful of all the pitfalls of the ’69 tour. About two or three months later I got a call that said, “Hey, the Stones would like you to come work with them on the ’72 tour.” I was a pretty young kid.

  How was his experience on the ’72 tour?

  PETER RUDGE: That tour is unique in terms of what we accomplished. It was a fusion of rock ’n’ roll and celebrity that transcended music and attracted a huge media curiosity at that time. It was Ahmet Ertegun and all his social circles. Mick reached out to people like Bob Ellis, who managed Billy Preston [and] happened to be married to Diana Ross. We had parties at Diana Ross’s house in LA and [Motown founder] Barry Gordy was there.

  It was a self-contained traveling tour. We controlled everything. I was the guide horse. It was kind of like playing the media themselves because there was such a fascination with the Stones: here comes the devil incarnate, lock your daughters up. We created the template for the modern tour from a structural, organizational, and a production point of view. And the gigs were phenomenal.

  Is it true that the Stones had issues with disgruntled Hells Angels on the tour?

  PETER RUDGE: There was the underlying issue of the Hells Angels. They wanted the Stones to pay their legal fees from Altamont. The Stones said, “It’s your problem. You killed the kid. You’re the ones who decided on taking that course of action.” So we were constantly being harassed by Hells Angels. Once, I was walking down Madison Avenue, two bikers rode up the side of me when I was pushing my three-month-old kid down the road. I was wired up by the FBI, because the Angels were trying to shake us down for money. On that tour, you had Hells Angels trying to knock the back door down and Truman Capote sitting in the dressing room with Jackie Onassis’s sister.

  What were the Stones
themselves like during the ’72 tour?

  PETER RUDGE: The Stones knew that the gig didn’t finish when they walked off stage. They really understood that everything they did would either add or subtract from the Stones legend. So they were really good at working that. Mick and Keith had an incredible chemistry. Keith, the dark gypsy, with his rat retinue that hangs on, and Mick prancing around with Ahmet, prancing around with Nancy Reagan, prancing around with David Geffen. No one could pin him down.

  Charlie was probably the only one that could speak to all five of them. Mick was coming along—the new boy, the baby. Dear old Bill would plod along being Bill, worried more about the football results back home than anything else. But it worked. If bands like each other, they don’t last long. If bands don’t like each other, they tend to last forever.

  The official tour chronicler was Robert Greenfield.

  ROBERT GREENFIELD: Now we hear that the Stones are going to go on tour in America. I want to write about the tour, but I’m not really the choice of Rolling Stone magazine. Then, they’re informed by the Stones that I’m the only guy acceptable. I didn’t pay for anything on the tour. Nor did Rolling Stone pay for anything. My expenses were covered by the Stones. I’m on the Stones’ touring party . . .