Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’s lot or Niarchos’s, who had the big yachts there. You could almost see the guns pointed at each other. That’s why we called it Exile on Main St. When we first came up with the title it worked in American terms because everybody’s got a Main Street. But our Main Street was that Riviera strip. And we were exiles, so it rang perfectly true and said everything we needed.

  The whole Mediterranean coast was an ancient connection of its own, a kind of Main Street without borders. I’ve hung in Marseilles, and it was all it was cracked up to be and I’ve no doubt it still is. It’s like the capital of a country that embraces the Spanish coast, the North African coast, the whole Mediterranean coast. It’s basically a country all its own until a few miles inland. Everybody that lives on the coast—fishermen, sailors, smugglers —belongs to an independent community, including the Greeks, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Tunisians, the Libyans, the Moroccans, the Algerians and the Jews. It’s an old connection that can’t be broken by borders and countries.

  We’d piss about; we’d go to Antibes. We used to go to Saint- Tropez to score all the bitches. This boat could kick through. It had a big engine. And the Mediterranean when it’s smooth is a quick ride. The summer of ’71 was one of those Mediterranean summers where every day was perfect. You hardly needed to know any navigation; you’d just follow the coastline. I never had charts. Anita refused ever to board this boat on the grounds of my lack of familiarity with the submerged rocks. She would wait and watch for the distress flares as we ran out of petrol. I just figured if they could get an aircraft carrier into the damn bay, I should be able to navigate it. The only bit I did check out was the landing, the dockside. Land is always the dangerous thing for a boat. The only time I thought about the actual art of boatmanship was docking. Otherwise it was a laugh.

  Villefranche harbor is very deep and was a big hang for the American navy, and one day, suddenly, there was this huge aircraft carrier in the middle of the bay. The navy on a courtesy call. They did all the flag-waving around the Mediterranean during the summer. And as we were pulling away from our dock, we got this whiff of marijuana on a large scale blowing out of the portholes. Out of their brains. I had Bobby Keys with me. So we went to have breakfast, and when we came back we circled around the aircraft carrier, and there were all these sailors there who were glad they weren’t in Vietnam. And I was in my little Mandrax. And we sniffed. “Oh, hi, guys. I smell…” And they threw us a bag of weed. And in exchange we told them which were the best whorehouses in town. The Cocoa Bar, the Brass Ring was a good ’un.

  When the fleet was in, all of these damn dark streets in Villefranche would suddenly burst with lighting as if it were Las Vegas. It’s the “Café Dakota” or the “Nevada Bar”—they’d put anything that sounded American on it: the “Texan Hang.” The streets of Villefranche would come alive with neon and fairy lights. All the bitches from Nice would come in, and Monte Carlo, all the whores from Cannes. The crew of an aircraft carrier is two thousand–odd men, randy and ready to serve. It was enough to attract the whole south coast. Otherwise, when they weren’t in town, Villefranche was dead as a doornail.

  It’s amazing that the music we made down in that basement is still going, given that the record wasn’t even that highly rated when it first came out. The outtakes of Exile on Main St. were released as part of a reissue in 2010. The music was recorded in 1971, nearly forty years ago as I write. If I had been listening to music that was forty years old in 1971, I would have been listening to stuff that was barely recordable. Maybe some early Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton. I suppose a world war in between changes the perception.

  “Rocks Off,” “Happy,” “Ventilator Blues,” “Tumbling Dice,” “All Down the Line”—that’s five-string, open tuning to the max. I was starting to really fix my trademark; I wrote all that stuff within a few days. Suddenly, with the five-string, songs were just dripping off my fingers. My first real exercise on five-string was “Honky Tonk Women” a couple of years before. At that time it was, well, this is interesting. There was “Brown Sugar” too, which came out the month we quit England. By the time we got to working on Exile, I was really starting to find all these other moves, and how to make minor chords and suspended chords. I discovered that the five-string becomes very interesting when you add a capo. This limits your room to maneuver drastically, especially if you’ve placed the capo up on the fifth or the seventh fret. But also it gives a certain ring, a certain resonance that can’t be obtained really any other way. But it’s when to use it and when not to overdo it.

  If it’s Mick’s song to start with, I won’t start it off with five-string. I’ll start on a regular tuning and just learn it or feel my way around it, classico style. And then if Charlie ups the rhythm a little bit or gives it a different feel, I’ll say let me put this to five-string for a moment and just see how that alters the structure of the thing. Obviously, doing that simplifies the sound, in that you’re limiting yourself to a set thing. But if you find the right one, like “Start Me Up,” it creates the song. I’ve heard millions of bands try and play “Start Me Up” with regular tuning. It just won’t work, pal.

  We brought a lot of stuff to Nellcôte that had been incubating for a while. I would farm out the title or the idea. “This is called ‘All Down the Line,’ Mick. I hear it coming, all down the line… Off you go.” I was coming up with a couple of new songs a day. And one would work and one wouldn’t. Mick kept up with the writing at this phenomenal pace—very canny rock-and-roll lyrics, with those catchy phrases and repetitions. “All Down the Line” came directly out of “Brown Sugar,” which Mick wrote. Most of what I had to do was to come up with riffs and ideas that would turn Mick on. To write songs he could handle. They had to be good records but translatable to being played on stage. I was the butcher, cutting the meat. And sometimes he didn’t like it. He didn’t like “Rip This Joint”—it was too fast. I think we might have popped it once since then, but “Rip This Joint,” in terms of beats per minute, is something like a world record. Maybe Little Richard had done something faster, but in any case, nobody was looking to beat the world record. Some of the titles of the songs we wrote that never made it onto the album are bizarre: “Head in the Toilet Blues,” “Leather Jackets,” “Windmill,” “I Was Just a Country Boy,” “Dancing in the Light.” That must have been one of Mick’s. “Bent Green Needles,” “Labour Pains,” “Pommes de Terre”—well, we were in France at the time.

  We wrote “Torn and Frayed,” which is not often played and has some topical interest:

  Joe’s got a cough, sounds kinda rough

  Yeah, and the codeine to fix it

  Doctor prescribes, drugstore supplies

  Who’s gonna help him to kick it?

  Apart from “Sister Morphine” and a few odd references to coke, we never really wrote songs about drugs. They would only crop up in songs as they did in life, here and there. There were always rumors and folklore about songs, who they were written for, what they were really about. “Flash” was supposed to be about heroin, and I see the connotation, the reference to “Jack” —but “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” has nothing to do with heroin. The myths go deep, though. Whatever you write, somebody is going to interpret it in some other way, see codes buried in the lyrics. That’s why you have conspiracy theories. Somebody croaked. Oh, my God! Who they going to blame this one on? When the guy just keeled over! The lifeblood of good conspiracies is that you’ll never find out; the lack of evidence keeps them fresh. No one’s ever going to find out if I had my blood changed or not. The story is well beyond the reach of evidence or, if it never happened, my denials. But then, read on. I have stood back for many years from honestly addressing that burning topic.

  “Tumbling Dice” may have had something to do with the gambling den that Nellcôte turned into—there were card games and roulette wheels. Monte Carlo was around the corner. Bobby Keys and cats did go down there o
nce or twice. We did play dice. I credit Mick with “Tumbling Dice,” but the song had to make the transition from its earlier form, which was a song called “Good Time Women.” You might have all of the music, a great riff, but sometimes the subject matter is missing. It only takes one guy sitting around a room, saying, “throwing craps last night…” for a song to be born. “Got to roll me.” Songs are strange things. Little notes like that. If they stick, they stick. With most of the songs I’ve ever written, quite honestly, I’ve felt there’s an enormous gap here, waiting to be filled; this song should have been written hundreds of years ago. How did nobody pick up on that little space? Half the time you’re looking for gaps that other people haven’t done. And you say, I don’t believe they’ve missed that fucking hole! It’s so obvious. It was there staring you in the face! I pick out the holes.

  I realize now that Exile was made under very chaotic circumstances and with innovative ways of recording, but those seemed to be the least of the problems. The most pressing problem was, do we have songs and do we get the sound? Anything else that went on was peripheral. You can hear a load of my outtakes ending, “Oh well, run out. That’s the story so far.” But you’d be surprised when you’re put right on the ball and you’ve got to do something and everybody’s looking at you, going, OK, what’s going to happen? You put yourself up there on the firing line—give me a blindfold and a last cigarette and let’s go. And you’d be surprised how much comes out of you before you die. Especially when you’re fooling the rest of the band, who think you know exactly what you’re going to do, and you know you’re blind as a bat and have no idea. But you’re just going to trust yourself. Something’s going to come. You come out with one line, throw in a guitar line and then another line’s got to come out. This is where supposedly your talent lies. It’s not in trying to meticulously work out how to build a Spitfire.

  Maybe I would crash out, if I crashed out at all, around ten in the morning, get up around four in the afternoon, subject to the usual variations. Nobody’s going to arrive until sunset anyway. So then I had a couple of hours to think about or play back what we did last night so I could pick it up where we left off. Or if we had it already, it was a matter of what to do when the guys arrived a little later. And you sometimes start to panic when you realize you have nothing to offer them. It’s always that feeling when these guys are expecting material as if it comes from the gods, whereas the reality is it comes from Mick or me. When you see the documentary on Exile, it gives an impression of jamming away spontaneously for hours in the bunker until we’ve got something, until we’re ready to go for a take, as if we’re trusting to incoming from the ether. That’s the way it’s been portrayed, and some of it might have happened that way, but ask Mick. He and I would look at each other, what do we give them today? What ammo do we put in today, baby? Because we know everybody is going to go along with this as long as there’s a song, there’s something to play. We might have occasionally lapsed and decided to overdub something we did yesterday. But basically Mick and I both felt it was our duty to come up with a new song, a new riff, a new idea, or two, preferably.

  We were prolific. We felt then that it was impossible that we couldn’t come up with something every day or every two days. That was what we did, and even if it was the bare bones of a riff, it was something to go on, and then while they were trying to get the sound on it or we were trying to shape the riff, the song would fall into place of its own volition. Once you’re on a roll with the first few chords, the first idea of the rhythm, you can figure out other things, like does it need a bridge in the middle, later. It was living on a knife edge as far as that’s concerned. There was no preparation. But that’s not the point; that’s rock and roll. The idea is to make the bare bones of a riff, snap the drums in and see what happens. And it was the immediacy of it that in retrospect made it even more interesting. There was no time for too much reflection, for plowing the field twice. It was “It goes like this” and see what comes out. And this is when you realize that with a good band, you only really need a little sparkle of an idea, and before the evening’s over it will be a beautiful thing.

  We did dry up. “Casino Boogie” came out of when Mick and I had just about run ourselves ragged. Mick’s looking at me, and I go, I don’t know. And it came to my mind, the old Bill Burroughs cut-up method. Let’s rip headlines out of newspapers and pages out of a book and then throw ’em on the floor and see what comes up. Hey, we’re obviously in no mood to write a song in the usual fashion, so let’s use somebody else’s method. And it worked on “Casino Boogie.” I’m surprised we haven’t used it since, quite honestly. But at the time, it was desperation. One phrase bounces off another, and suddenly it makes sense even though they’re totally disconnected, but they have the same feel about them, which is a fair definition of writing a rock or pop lyric anyway.

  Grotesque music, million dollar sad

  Got no tactics, got no time on hand

  Left shoe shuffle, right shoe muffle

  Sinking in the sand

  Fade out freedom, steaming heat on

  Watch that hat in black

  Finger twitching, got no time on hand.

  I remember being a little dismayed that Charlie had decided to live three hours away. I would have loved to have Charlie around the corner so I could call him and say, got an idea; can you pop by? But the way Charlie wanted to live and where he wanted to live was in fact about 130 miles away, in the Vaucluse, above Aix-en-Provence. So he would come down from Monday till Friday. So then I had him there, but I could have used a little more. And Mick was a lot of the time in Paris. The only thing I was afraid of on Exile was that with people living so far away, it would break their concentration. And once I’d got them there, I wanted them for the duration. I’d never lived on top of the work before, but once I was, I said, damn it, the rest of you better get used to it. Fuck it, I’m doing it, and I’ve committed my house to it. If I can do it, you can all get a little closer. To Charlie it was an absolute no-no. He has an artistic temperament. It’s just uncool for him to live down on the Côte d’Azur in summer. Too much society going on and too much blah blah. I can understand totally. Charlie’s the kind of guy that would go down in winter when it’s horrible and empty. He found where he wanted to live and it certainly wasn’t on the coast, and it certainly wasn’t Cannes, Nice, Juan-les-Pins, Cap Ferrat or Monte Carlo. Charlie cringes from places like that.

  One sublime example of a song winging in from the ether is “Happy.” We did that in an afternoon, in only four hours, cut and done. At noon it had never existed. At four o’clock it was on tape. It was no Rolling Stones record. It’s got the name on it, but it was actually Jimmy Miller on drums, Bobby Keys on baritone and that was basically it. And then I overdubbed bass and guitar. We were just waiting for everybody to turn up for the real sessions for the rest of the night and we thought, we’re here; let’s see if we can come up with something. I’d written it that day. We got something going, we were rocking, everything was set up and so we said, well, let’s start to work it down and then we’ll probably hit it with the guys later. I decided to go on the five-string with the slide and suddenly there it was. Just like that. By the time they got there, we had it. Once you have something, you just let it fly.

  Well, I never kept a dollar past sunset

  Always burned a hole in my pants

  Never made a school mama happy

  Never blew the second chance, oh no

  I need a love to keep me happy.

  It just came, tripping off the tongue, then and there. When you’re writing this shit, you’ve got to put your face in front of the microphone, spit it out. Something will come. I wrote the verses of “Happy,” but I don’t know where they came from. “Never got a lift out of Learjet / When I can fly way back home.” It was just alliteration, trying to set up a story. There has to be some thin plot line, although in a lot of my songs you’d be very hard-pressed to find it. But here, you’re br
oke and it’s evening. And you want to go out, but you ain’t got shit. I’m busted before I start. I need a love to keep me happy, because if it’s real love it will be free! Don’t have to pay for it. I need a love to keep me happy because I’ve spent the fucking money and I have none left, and it’s nighttime and I’m looking to have a good time, but I ain’t got shit. So I need love to keep me happy. Baby. Baby, won’t you keep me happy.

  I’d have been happier if more came like “Happy”: “It goes like this.” Great songs write themselves. You’re just being led by the nose, or the ears. The skill is not to interfere with it too much. Ignore intelligence, ignore everything; just follow it where it takes you. You really have no say in it, and suddenly there it is: “Oh, I know how this goes,” and you can’t believe it, because you think that nothing comes like that. You think, where did I steal this from? No, no, that’s original—well, about as original as I can get. And you realize that songs write themselves; you’re just the conveyor.

  Not to say that I haven’t labored. Some of them had us on our knees. Some are about thirty-five years old and I’ve not quite finished them yet. You can write the song, but that’s not the whole deal. The thing is what kind of sound, what tempo, what key and is everybody really into it? “Tumbling Dice” took a few days to get right. I remember working on that intro for several afternoons. When you’re listening to music, you can tell how much calculation has gone into it and how much is free-flow. You can’t do the free-flow all the time. And it’s really a matter of how much calculation and how little you can put into it. Rather than the other way round. Well, I’ve got to tame this beast one way or another. But how to tame it? Gently, or give it a beating? I’ll fuck you up; I’ll take you twice the speed I wrote you! You have this sort of relationship with the songs. You talk to the fuckers. You ain’t finished till you’re finished, OK? All that sort of shit. No, you weren’t supposed to go there. Or sometimes you’re apologizing: I’m sorry about that. No, that was certainly not the way to go. Ah, they’re funny things. They’re babies.