On November 10, Marsha Hunt gave birth to Mick’s first child, a daughter she named Karis. This was at first kept secret from everyone, including Mick’s family. He didn’t want his mother to know. With the advent of Bianca, Mick’s relationship with Marsha Hunt was officially over.
Further recording took place at Olympic Studio that autumn to finish Sticky Fingers. Billy Preston played gospel organ on “I Got the Blues.” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” got its guitar overdubs, with Mick Taylor playing in Carlos Santana’s jazzy, repetitive style. String sections for magisterial “Sway” and evocative “Moonlight Mile” were scored by Paul Buckmaster, Elton John’s arranger, in November. “Moonlight Mile” was Mick, Jim Price on piano, and Mick Taylor playing what Jagger called a “real dreamy, kind of semi–Middle Eastern piece.” Keith was too stoned to make it to the studio, so “Mile” became the first Rolling Stones track whose credits didn’t include him.
Around this time, the Stones gathered in a Soho screening room to watch the Maysles brothers’ film, now titled Gimme Shelter and ready for release. Afterward, they had an argument about whom the late Meredith Hunter had wanted to shoot. As they were leaving, Mick said to Keith, “Flower Power was a load of crap, wasn’t it?”
Work on the new album continued into December at Olympic. “Good Time Woman” was in development, and “Sweet Virginia” came to life as another Stones hillbilly joke. On December 18, a studio party was held for Keith’s twenty-sixth birthday. Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Bobby Keys, and Al Kooper all came, and all but Harrison played on a convulsive live version of “Brown Sugar,” recorded after the party had been cleared away. With Clapton burning blue on slide guitar, this new version of “Brown Sugar” was so good it almost made it onto Sticky Fingers.
* * *
A Sunny Place for Shady People
The seventies got under way in January 1971 with the Rolling Stones’ affairs in flux. The Beatles had officially disbanded the month before when Paul McCartney sued the others, who had signed with Allen Klein. The Stones were bitter about their losses and leaving England, furious about their tax situation, and concerned about their new record deal. Atlantic Records, designated distributor of Rolling Stones Records, had been sold to a corporation that managed parking lots, and despite Ahmet Ertegun’s assurances to Mick that he retained control, no one quite knew what would happen.
Keith didn’t want to move to France, but the United States was off limits because Mick’s recent drug conviction prevented him from even visiting for a year. Keith was also upset because Mick was besotted with Bianca Perez, and Keith was jealous. He hated Bianca almost at once. He thought her pretentious, self-absorbed, square, too young, and not at all rock and roll, and he worried that she would come between Mick and the Stones.
Keith was addicted to heroin and lived permanently in its twilight world with Anita and their fellow junkie Michael Cooper. Keith skin-popped his doses, injecting them into his muscles instead of his veins, which provided an illusion of self-control. Concerned about his health and probable supply problems, he decided to clean up before the move to France. He spoke to Mick about it, and Mick consulted William Burroughs, with whom Mick was meeting at Burroughs’s Duke Street flat about a possible movie based on Naked Lunch.
Burroughs had been famously cured of a twenty-year narcotics habit by a British doctor, John Dent, who used the metabolic regulator apomorphine to achieve controlled and relatively painless withdrawals for his patients. Burroughs explained that although Dent had died, his veteran nurse, known as Smitty, continued to get satisfactory results from the apomorphine protocol.
Smitty duly arrived at Redlands in early February and put Keith through four howling, shivering days of heroin withdrawal, which left Keith a pale, emaciated ghost, though free of his usual craving for dope. The cure lasted about seventy-two hours, when Michael Cooper arrived at Redlands with a taste of good smack. Then Gram Parsons arrived in mid-February to hang out, which snuffed the whole cure idea. Keith now switched from pure heroin to skin-popping speedballs, a heroin-cocaine cocktail he found particularly conducive to songwriting. The drugs occasionally percolated in the muscle tissue of his arms, causing abscesses that left ghastly-looking scars.
Anita saw that the apomorphine cure didn’t take, so a month later she tried a seven-day sleep cure at Bowden House clinic. While she was away, Keith nodded off in the London suburbs while driving down to the country, wrecking the now Pink Lena. Grabbing his stash, with police sirens wailing in the distance, he vaulted a nearby wall and found himself in the back garden of Nicky Hopkins’s house. Nicky, home from a stint playing with Quicksilver Messenger Service in San Francisco, offered Keith a cup of tea. The Pink Lena was replaced with a red E-type Jaguar.
With Sticky Fingers almost completed, the Stones booked sessions at Olympic in February to begin the next album. They played badly, usually without Keith, and the tapes were later scrapped. Howlin’ Wolf, the grand master of the blues, was in town to record with English rock stars in sessions arranged by Marshall Chess. Charlie, Bill, and Ian Stewart served as Wolf’s rhythm section while he taught Eric Clapton the right way to play “Little Red Rooster.” Ringo Starr and Steve Winwood sat in as well. The sometimes-thrilling tracks would be released later in the year as The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions on the Stones’ label in England and by Chess Records in America.
In March 1971, the Rolling Stones undertook a farewell tour of England. Their first English tour in five years, and they stunk. Everyone said so.
They went out as an eight-piece show band, with the horns and Nicky Hopkins on piano, playing mostly in the north. The rhythms were sluggish because Keith was so stoned. Traditionally Keith set the tempos. He would start playing, quickly followed by Charlie, but if Keith was off—and he was really off that year—it could take time, often the whole set, for Charlie to catch up. Mick couldn’t hear the piano through the stage monitors, so his vocals were often off too.
Keith was traveling with his gang (Anita, Marlon and the nanny, Gram Parsons) and his dog, a puppy named Boogie. After the Glasgow show, he tried to smuggle the dog onto a commercial flight, but the pilot wouldn’t take off. The cops were called. Keith was holding enough heroin to land him back in Wormwood Scrubs for a few years, but he gave the cops a hard time anyway. After a big hassle, Boogie rode in the cargo hold and the band got back to London that night.
Although almost all the shows on the farewell tour sucked, the set did have its moments. Mick, in a pink satin suit with a floppy, multicolored cap, still got the girls screaming every time he turned his back and wiggled his bum. “Midnight Rambler” got a major rethink, with the harp, drums, and piano providing a Bo Diddley overture to a cool, fast version of the three-year-old charger. During the rape scene, Mick gurgled, “Go down on me, bay-beh, ooooh yeah,” and assorted blow-job-recipient moans. “Satisfaction” had a vamping, soul-show intro, bump-and-grind with the horns, and then a long jam with Mick Taylor improvising floral arrangements. The unfamiliar new songs—“Wild Horses,” “Dead Flowers,” “Bitch” (“a song for all you whores in the audience”)—were received quietly by the fans. The chugging finale “Let It Rock” woke everyone up when Keith started to play his ass off, sometimes taking three hot guitar choruses when his tired blood got boiling. No encores on this tour either. Keith kept missing trains and planes, and shows would start hours late. The Stones were so-so in Bristol, sloppy in Leeds, late in Liverpool. Bill Wyman got upset that they were playing so badly. “I just want everyone to say it was shit,” he complained in the Liverpool dressing room, after a show that started five hours late. Bored Mick Jagger told Bill and everyone else that he just didn’t care. Mick had the label deal to worry about, and still had to cut verses out of “Moonlight Mile,” sequence Fingers, supervise the cover, design the new logo, and leave the country. Plus, Bianca was along, distracting him, her cruel features a mask of elegant, hot-blooded froideur. She was a couple of months pregnant and lovelier than ever as her tiny figur
e began to blossom. Completely upstaged in the crucial glamour department, Anita started to hate Bianca too, tried to mind-fuck her and put her down, but Bianca had a steely determination and the adoring support of Mick. She treated Anita with blithe detachment, like a vulgar relative, which made Anita really livid. Mick told Bianca she had to put up with Anita. Anita was one of the Stones.
The tour ended with shows at the Roundhouse in London. The band’s families came, everyone’s parents. “It was weird wigglin’ me bum at me mum,” Mick said, “like an incestuous thing.” On March 26, the Stones played before an invited audience at the Marquee, taping TV shows for Europe and Brazil. Backstage, Keith cursed at his old enemy, the club’s owner, Harold Pendleton. Keith swung at him, missed. It took Mick an hour to persuade Keith to get onstage. Keith was schwacked, played poorly, and the audience got bored with the band stopping numbers and starting again. So Mick had them all thrown out, and the band taped a set in an empty club. The result was so inert that the tapes weren’t broadcast.
In England, the Labour government was again raising taxes. Denis Healey, chancellor of the exchequer, talked about squeezing the rich “until the pips squeak.” On March 30, a few days before they left for tax exile in France, the Stones threw a farewell party at an old inn in Maidenhead. John and Yoko, William Burroughs, Eric Clapton, and many friends came to say good-bye. They were jamming at 2 A.M. when the sound went dead. The hotel had cut the power because the neighbors were complaining. Drunk and enraged by jam-us interruptus, Mick picked up a table and threw it through a huge plate-glass window that gave onto the placid Thames. Then he ran out into the night and was across the English Channel within hours, having bid a Byronic farewell to Albion.
The Rolling Stones were all in France by April 6, 1971. Mick and Bianca were in a hotel in Paris. The rest of the band settled into exile in the south of France in the tradition of English artistic exiles like Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who called the Riviera “a sunny place for shady people.” They all rented houses amid the most beautiful springtime landscape in the world, a subtropical garden of jasmine and lavender. Bill and Mick Taylor’s family were in Grasse, perfume capital of Provence. Charlie and family were in the Cévennes, the arid hills to the west.
The Richards family rented a palatial villa called Nellcote for 10,000 pounds a month. Overlooking the deep harbor of Villefranche, near Cap Ferret on the Riviera, the villa had wide balconies, hanging gardens, and endless blue vistas of the Mediterranean. Nellcote had a suitably shady past. The nineteenth-century British admiral who built it had later thrown himself off the roof. Germans had occupied it during World War II, and the fetid cellar was supposedly the scene of Gestapo interrogations. It turned out to be a good place to record the next Rolling Stones album.
On April 6, the Rolling Stones sailed into Cannes on a yacht and appeared at the Carlton Hotel to sign their new record deal with Kinney National, an American parking lot corporation that now owned the Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Bros. labels. Kinney boss Steve Ross and Atlantic chief Ahmet Ertegun presided. The deal required the Stones to produce six albums in the next four years, including Sticky Fingers. “The band is not retiring,” Mick said. “We’ll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a happy group.” The Stones were horrified by the tacky public breakup of the Beatles in December 1970, and would avoid this fate at all costs.
“Rolling Stones Records was a licensing deal,” he later admitted, “not a real record label for other artists. It gave us at least the image that we were independent.” The Stones were still tied to Allen Klein, whom they were about to sue for millions, but—under new management and with their precarious finances controlled by someone they trusted—the band was on its way out of near bankruptcy.
“Control was what Ahmet and Prince Lowenstein had to offer the Stones,” wrote George Trow in a contemporary New Yorker profile of Ertegun. “Both offered access to productive adult modes—financial and social—that could prolong a career built on non-adult principles.” The suave socialite Ertegun became Mick’s entrée to the international jet set and the upper Manhattan bohemia, a world that had eluded him so far.
There was a party that night in Cannes. The press had been flown in, and the photographers mobbed Bianca, who wore nothing under a black voile blouse. Keith Richards, outlaw junkie trouvère, who cared nothing for any of this, left early. “I have to find my dog,” he told a journalist. “He’s my only friend at the party, man.”
* * *
The Tongue of Kali
“Brown Sugar,” the first Stones single on their new (yellow) label, was released a few days later, April 16, 1971, with “Bitch” on the flip side. The English single had a bonus track, “Let It Rock,” recorded at the Leeds show on March 15. The rocking taste of sex and race in “Brown Sugar” propelled it to no. 1 in America, no. 2 in England.
Sticky Fingers followed in early May. The album’s jacket, a pop art assemblage of jeans (with a real zipper) that opened to reveal well-hung white underwear, was designed by Andy Warhol. This evolved from artwork Warhol had submitted in 1969 for Let It Bleed, which had the vinyl record in girls’ panties inside cutoff Levi’s (and which had been misplaced by the Stones’ office staff). In case anyone missed the design’s phallic statement, the Stones cataloged their first album on their new label as COC 59100. The album also marked the debut of the Stones’ new logo, a cartoon of lips, teeth, and lolling tongue in red, white, and black. Often attributed to Warhol, it was actually devised by Mick Jagger and graphic designer John Pashe in homage to the iconographic tongue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation, life, and destruction.
Sticky Fingers kicked off with “Brown Sugar.” A tenor sax break instead of a guitar solo signaled that this was the New Look Stones. “Sway” and its heroin-inflected tale of “this demon life” ended with a stirring string section. The darkness continued with “Wild Horses” and its dull, aching pain of separation and loss. The mood was lifted in “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking?” as the Stones built a Chicano acid rock groove with Mick Taylor’s riffing, Bobby Keys’s fluttering sax, and Rocky Dijon’s congas. “You Gotta Move” closed side one.
“Bitch” opened side two with its all-time riff and Moroccan-sounding horns. Mick Taylor’s hard-edged guitar seemed to assert its rights to rule the Stones’ new style. “I Got the Blues” cast Mick as a begging soul man, reinforced by Billy Preston’s gospel attack on the organ. “Sister Morphine” was the Stones’ version from the spring of 1969, credited to Jagger/Richards with no mention of Marianne Faithfull. It starts with just acoustic guitar, joined by Ry Cooder’s slide guitar on the second verse. By the third verse, the band joins, and there’s a very doomy tag with Cooder and Jack Nitzsche on “treated” piano that carried the morbid song into a blue, mystifying underworld.
This was followed by the black parody of country rock “Dead Flowers,” with its drug paraphernalia, the needle and a spoon, and its farewell to Little Suzy, Queen of the Underground. Keith loved country music (Mick treated it as a joke), and country-style songs of varying degrees of irony would appear on almost every Stones album to come. The album ended with the Pacific Coast sonic highway of “Moonlight Mile,” a swooning California vibe best appreciated with “a headfull of snow.” This beautiful song of dreamy fatigue featured guitars by the two Micks, Jim Price on piano, and an orchestral wash of strings that ended Sticky Fingers on a majestic note of long distances traveled before coming to rest at home. Keith’s acoustic guitar, uncredited on the album, appears at the end of the song, left over from the original demo when it was titled “Japanese Thing.”
Sticky Fingers was a sensation, no. 1 in America and Europe—proof that the Rolling Stones would survive into the uncertain seventies. There wasn’t a lot of great pop music around in 1971. American rock fans were preoccupied with bombastic Grand Funk Railroad and the macabre theatrics of Alice Cooper. In England, fans had Deep Purple, Humble Pie, Rod Stewart, and the Faces. London’s glam movement was moving out of its
underground beginnings of Warholesque, cross-dressing rockers (T. Rex, David Bowie) mocking sexual norms in high heels and glittery makeup. With powerful and daring “Brown Sugar” and “Bitch,” with their Memphis-style horns, orchestral colors, and Mick Taylor’s cool blue guitar, the Stones now positioned themselves as keepers of a hard rock flame they’d ignited almost a decade earlier.
May 1971. Mick Jagger called the Stones’ London office to say he was going to marry Bianca, now four months pregnant, in St. Tropez. He gave Shirley Arnold his guest list. The press got wind of it, and his intimate wedding in an old stone chapel turned into another Stones media riot.
Mick and Bianca flew from Nice to Paris on May 2. He gave a dinner party for her, gave her a diamond bracelet, visited a jeweler to have a pair of matching wedding rings made. Roger Vadim and his wife, actress Natalie Delon, agreed to serve as witnesses. On May 7, a chartered flight brought the wedding guests: Mick’s family, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, sundry aristocrats, Ronnie Wood from the Faces, Robert Fraser—seventy-five people in all.
On the morning of May 12, Bianca was presented with a harsh prenuptial agreement that severely limited the amount she could collect from Mick in the event of a divorce. They had a terrible fight, and Mick threatened to call off the wedding if she didn’t sign. She later said this marriage contract had never even been discussed, that she hadn’t a clue what it meant, that she only signed it reluctantly, and that it ruined her day.
They were staying at the Hotel Byblos in St. Tropez. That morning, a rabid pack of photographers occupied the town hall where the civil ceremony would take place. Mick didn’t want to marry in public, and the wedding was delayed until finally the mayor threatened to walk out. So, amid a perspiring scrum of paparazzi, the wedding couple arrived in their beautiful clothes, the bride’s rouged nipples peeking out of her jacket. Fights broke out among the press during the brief ceremony. Keith smashed a camera, a wild gleam in his eye. A few hours later, they were married again, this time in private, in the old Chapel of St. Anne, by a priest who had (supposedly) been giving Mick some pointers in Catholicism. As requested by the bride, a selection of music from Love Story was played in the chapel.
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