Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  On a rare day off between tours I did manage to buy Redlands, the house I still own in West Sussex, near Chichester Harbour; the house where we were busted, which burned down twice, the house I still love. We just spoke to each other the minute we saw each other. A thatched house, quite small, surrounded by a moat. I drove up there by mistake. I had a brochure with a couple of houses marked and I’m poncing around in my Bentley, “Oh, I’m going to buy a house.” I took a wrong turn and turned into Redlands. This guy walked out, very nice guy, and said, yeah? And I said, oh sorry, we’ve come to the wrong turning. He said, yes, you want to go Fishbourne way, and he said, are you looking for a house to buy? He was very pukka, an ex-commodore of the Royal Navy. And I said yes. And he said, well, there’s no sign up, but this house is for sale. And I looked at him and said, how much? Because I fell in love with Redlands the minute I saw it. Nobody’s going to let this thing go, it’s too picturesque, ideal. He said twenty grand. This is about one o’clock in the afternoon and the banks are open till three. I said, are you going to be here this evening? He said, yes, of course. I said, if I bring you down twenty grand, can we do the deal? So I zoomed up to London, just got to the bank in time, got the bread—twenty grand in a brown paper bag—and by evening I was back down at Redlands, in front of the fireplace, and we signed the deal. And he turned over the deeds to me. It was like cash on the barrelhead, done in really an old-fashioned way.

  By the end of 1966, we were all exhausted. We’d been on the road without a break for almost four years. The crack-ups were coming. We’d already had a wobbler with the formidable but brittle Andrew Oldham in Chicago in 1965, when we were recording at Chess. Andrew was a lover of speed, but this time he was drunk too and very distressed about his relationship with Sheila, his old lady at the time. He started waving a shooter around in my hotel room. This we didn’t need. I hadn’t come all the way to Chicago to get shot by some wonky public schoolboy whose gun barrel I was staring down. Which looks very ominous at the time, that little black hole. Mick and I got the gun away from him, slapped him around a bit, put him to bed and forgot about it. I don’t even know what happened to the shooter, an automatic. Tossed it out the window, probably. We’re just getting going. Let’s make this a forget-it.

  But Brian was a different story. What was comic about Brian was his illusions of grandeur, even before he got famous. He thought it was his band for some weird reason. The first demonstration of Brian’s aspirations was the discovery on our first tour that he was getting five pounds more a week than the rest of us because he’d persuaded Eric Easton that he was our “leader.” The whole deal with the band was we split everything like pirates. You put the booty on the table and split it, pieces of eight. “Jesus Christ, who do you think you are? I’m writing the songs round here, and you’re getting five pounds extra a week? Get outta here!” It started with little things like that, which then exacerbated the friction between us as it went on and he became more and more outrageous. In the early negotiations, it was always Brian who would go to the meetings as our leader. We were not permitted —by Brian. I remember Mick and me once waiting for the results around the block, sitting in Lyons Corner House.

  It happened so fast. After we did a couple of TV shows, Brian turned into this sort of freak, devouring celebs and fame and attention. Mick and Charlie and I were looking at it all a bit skeptically. This is shit you’ve got to do to make records. But Brian—and he was not a stupid guy—fell right into it. He loved the adulation. The rest of us didn’t think it was bad, but you don’t fall for it all the way. I felt the energy, I knew that there was something big happening. But some guys get stroked and they just can’t get over it. Stroke me some more, stroke me some more, and suddenly “I’m a star.”

  I never saw a guy so much affected by fame. The minute we’d had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn’t noticed. The minute the chicks started screaming, he seemed to go through a whole change, just when we didn’t need it, when we needed to keep the whole thing tight and together. I’ve known a few that were really carried away by fame. But I never saw one that changed so dramatically overnight. “No, we’re just getting lucky, pal. This is not fame.” It went to his head, and over the next few years of very difficult road work, in the mid-’60s, we could not count on Brian at all. He was getting really stoned, out of it. Thought he was an intellectual, a mystic philosopher. He was very impressed by other stars, but only because they were stars, not because of what they were good at. And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment. When you’re schlepping 350 days a year on the road and you’ve got to drag a dead weight, it becomes pretty vicious.

  We were on a swing through the Midwest, and Brian’s asthma had got him and he was in hospital in Chicago. And, hey, when a guy’s sick, you double for him. But then we saw pictures of him zooming around Chicago, hanging at a party with so-and-so, fawning over stars with a silly little bow around his neck. We’d done three, four gigs without him. That’s double duty for me, pal. There’s only five of us, and the whole point of the band is that it’s a two-guitar band. And suddenly there’s only one guitar. I’ve got to figure out whole new ways to play all of these songs. I’ve got to perform Brian’s part as well. I learned a lot about how to do two parts at once, or how to distill the essence of what his part was and still play what I had to play, and throw in a few licks, but it was damn hard work. And I never got a thank-you from him, ever, for covering his arse. He didn’t give a shit. “I was out of it.” That’s all I would get. All right, are you gonna give me your pay? That’s when I had it in for Brian.

  One can get very sarcastic on the road and quite vicious. “Just shut up, you little creep. Preferred it when you weren’t here.” He had this way of ranting on, saying things that would just grate. “When I played with so-and-so…” He was totally starstruck. “I saw Bob Dylan yesterday. He doesn’t like you.” But he had no idea how obnoxious he was being. So it would start off, “Oh, shut up, Brian.” Or we’d imitate the way he cringed his head into his nonexistent neck. And then it went to baiting him in a way. He had this huge Humber Super Snipe car, but he was a pretty short guy and he had to have a cushion to see over the steering wheel. Mick and I would steal the cushion for a laugh. Wicked, schoolboy sort of stuff. Sitting at the back of the bus, we just let him have it, pretending he wasn’t there. “Where’s Brian? Shit, did you see what he was wearing yesterday?” It was the pressure of work, and the other side of it was that you hoped that kind of shock treatment would snap him out of it. There’s no time to take time off and say let’s sort this out. But it was a love-hate relationship with Brian. He could be really funny. I used to enjoy hanging with him, figuring out how Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters did this or T-Bone Walker did that.

  What probably really stuck in Brian’s craw was when Mick and I started writing the songs. He lost his status and then lost interest. Having to come to the studio and learn to play a song Mick and I had written would bring him down. It was like Brian’s open wound. Brian’s only solution became clinging to either Mick or me, which created a triangle of sorts. He had it in for Andrew Oldham, Mick and me, thought there was a conspiracy to roll him out. Which wasn’t true at all, but somebody’s got to write the songs. You’re quite welcome; I’ll sit around and write a song with you. What have you come up with? But no sparks flew when I was sitting around with Brian. And then it was “I don’t like guitar anymore. I want to play marimbas.” Another time, pal. We’ve got a tour to do. So we got to rely on him not being there, and if he turned up, it was a miracle. When he was there and came to life, he was incredibly nimble. He could pick up any instruments that were lying around and come up with something. Sitar on “Paint It Black.” The marimbas on “Under My Thumb.” But for the next five days we won’t see the motherfucker, and we’ve still got a record to make. We’ve got sessions lined up and where’s Brian? Nobody can find him, and when they do, he�
�s in a terrible condition.

  He barely ever played guitar in the last few years with us. Our whole thing was two guitars and everything else wove around that. And when the other guitar ain’t there half the time or has lost interest in it, you start getting overdubbing. A lot of those records is me four times. I learned a lot more about recording doing that, and also how to cover unexpected situations. And just by the process of overdubbing, and talking to the engineers, I learned a lot more about microphones, about amplifiers, about changing sounds of guitars. Because if you’ve got one guitar player playing all the parts, if you’re not careful, it sounds like it. What you really want is to make them each sound different. On albums like December’s Children and Aftermath, I did the parts that Brian normally would have done. Sometimes I’d overlay eight guitars and then just maybe use one bar of the takes here and there in the mixing, so at the end of it, it sounds like it’s two or three guitars and you’re not even counting anymore. But there’s actually eight in there, and they’re just in and out, in the mix.

  Then Brian met Anita Pallenberg. He met her backstage around September 1965 at the show in Munich. She followed us to Berlin, where there was a spectacular riot, and then slowly, over several months, she started going out with Brian. She was working hard as a model and traveling about, but eventually she came to London and she and Brian began their relationship with, soon enough, its bouts of high-volume violence. Brian graduated from his Humber Snipe to a Rolls-Royce—but he couldn’t see out of that either.

  Acid came into his picture around the same time. Brian disappeared late in 1965 when we were in mid tour with the usual complaints of ill health and surfaced in New York, jamming with Bob Dylan, hanging with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and doing acid. Acid to Brian was something different than to your average drug taker. The dope at the time really wasn’t, at least as far as the rest of us were concerned, a big deal. We were only smoking weed and taking a few uppers to keep us going. Acid made Brian feel he was one of an elite. Like the Acid Test. It was that cliquishness; he wanted to be a part of something, could never find anything to be part of. I don’t remember anybody else going about saying, “I’ve taken acid.” But Brian saw it as a sort of Congressional Medal of Honor. And then he’d come on like, “You wouldn’t know, man. I’ve been tripping.” And he’s primping himself, that terrible primping, the hair. The little idiosyncrasies become so annoying. It was the typical drug thing, that they think they’re somebody special. It’s the head club. You’d meet people who’d say, “Are you a head?” as if it conferred some special status. People who were stoned on something you hadn’t taken. Their elitism was total bullshit. Ken Kesey’s got a lot to answer for.

  I remember well the episode Andrew Oldham describes in his memoir and gives such symbolic weight to—when Brian lay collapsed on the floor of the RCA studio in March 1966, straddling his guitar, which was buzzing and interfering with the sound. Someone had to unplug it, and in Andrew’s telling, this was as if Brian were being cast adrift forever. To me it was just an annoying noise, and the concept was not something we were particularly shocked about, because Brian had been toppling over here and there for days. He really loved to take too many downers, Seconals, Tuinals, Desbutals, the whole range. You think you’re playing Segovia and think it’s going diddle diddle diddle, but actually it’s going dum dum dum. You can’t work with a broken band. If there’s something wrong in the engine, an attempt has to be made to fix it. In something like the Stones, especially at that time, you can’t just say, fuck it, you’re fired. At the same time, things couldn’t go on with this really rancorous fission. And then Anita introduced Brian to the other lot, the Cammells and that particular set. Of which there will be more bad news.

  Michael Cooper / Raj Prem Collection

  Chapter Six

  In which I get busted in Redlands. Escape to Morocco in the Bentley. Do a moonlight flit with Anita Pallenberg. Make my first courtroom appearance, spend a night in the Scrubs and the summer in Rome.

  No group makes more of a mess at the table. The aftermath of their breakfast with eggs, jam, honey everywhere, is quite exceptional. They give a new meaning to the word untidiness.… The drummer, Keith [sic] of the Stones, an eighteenth-century suit, long black velvet coat and the tightest pants.… Everything is shoddy, poorly made, the seams burst. Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender and dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colors. Brian appears in white pants with a huge black square applied at the back. It is very smart in spite of the fact that the seams are giving way.

  —Cecil Beaton in Morocco, 1967, from Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974

  Nineteen sixty-seven was the watershed year, the year the seams gave way. There was that feeling that trouble was coming, which it did later, with all the riots, street fighting and all of that. There was a tension in the air. It’s like negative and positive ions before a storm, you get that breathlessness that something’s got to break. In fact, all it did was crack.

  We’d finished touring the previous summer, a grueling American tour, and wouldn’t tour there again for two years. In all that time, the first four years of the band, I don’t think we ever had more than two days’ rest between playing, traveling and recording. We were always on the road.

  I felt I’d come to the end of an episode with Brian. At least it couldn’t go on as it had while we were touring. Mick and I had gotten incredibly nasty to Brian when he became a joke, when he effectively gave up his position in the band. Things had been bad before that too. There had been tension way before Brian started becoming an asshole. But I was trying to mend fences at the end of 1966. We were a band, after all. I was footloose and fancy-free, having ended my affair with Linda Keith. When Brian wasn’t working, it was easier. And naturally I gravitated to Brian’s—and Anita’s—on Courtfield Road, near Gloucester Road.

  We had a lot of fun, becoming friends again, getting stoned together. It was wonderful at first. So I started to move in with them. Brian saw my attempts to bring him back into the center as an opportunity to start a vendetta against Mick. Brian always had to have an imaginary enemy, and around this time he’d decided it was Mick Jagger who had grossly mistreated and offended him. I just hung out as a guest and got a ringside seat on the world that Anita attracted around her—which was an exceptional gang of people. I used to walk back through Hyde Park to St. John’s Wood at six in the morning, at first, to pick up a clean shirt, and then I just stopped going home.

  In those days on Courtfield Road I had nothing to do with Anita, strictly speaking. I was fascinated by her from what I thought was a safe distance. I thought certainly that Brian had got very lucky. I could never figure out how he got his hands on her. My first impression was of a woman who was very strong. I was right about that. Also an extremely bright woman, that’s one of the reasons she sparked me. Let alone that she was so entertaining and such a great beauty to look at. Very funny. Cosmopolitan beyond anyone I’d come across. She spoke three languages. She’d been here, she’d been there. It was very exotic, to me. I loved her spirit, even though she would instigate and turn the screw and manipulate. She wouldn’t let you off the hook for a minute. If I said, “That’s nice… ,” she would say, “Nice? I hate that word. Oh, stop being so fucking bourgeois.” We’re going to fight about the word “nice”? How would you know? Her English was still a bit patchy, so she would break out in German occasionally when she really meant something. “Excuse me. I’ll have that translated.”

  Anita, sexy fucking bitch. One of the prime women in the world. It was all building up in Courtfield Gardens. Brian would crash out sometimes, and Anita and I would look at each other. But that’s Brian and his old lady and that’s it. Hands off. The idea of stealing a band member’s woman was not on my agenda. And so the days went by.

  The truth was I’m looking at Anita and I’m looking at Brian and I’m looking at her, and I’m thinking
, there’s nothing I can do about this. I’m going to have to be with her. I’m going to have her or she’s going to have me. One way or another. The realization didn’t help things. There was this obvious electricity over a few months, and Brian became more and more tangential. It took a lot of patience on my part. I’d stay around there three or four days and once a week I’d walk to St. John’s Wood. Better give some space here; it’s too transparent what my feelings are. But there were many other people around; it was a continuous party. Brian was desperately in need of attention all the time. But the more he got, the more he wanted.

  Also I was getting the flavor of what was going on between Brian and Anita. I would hear the thumping some nights, and Brian would come out with a black eye. Brian was a woman beater. But the one woman in the world you did not want to try and beat up on was Anita Pallenberg. Every time they had a fight, Brian would come out bandaged and bruised. But it was nothing to do with me, was it? I was there only to hang with Brian.