Befitting our status as two serious long-haired dudes who had been out on the road with the Rolling Stones, both of us were wearing faded jeans and dark blue denim work shirts. For want of a better term, call it the early seventies rock ’n’ roll hippie cowboy look for guys who would not have known one end of a horse from the other if their lives depended on it. Although we were with a French woman who knew everyone in town and kept whispering incredible bits of gossip about them in my ear as they walked in the door, all the other guests just kept staring at Jerry and me like we were the original ugly Americans.
As the French woman quickly explained to me, this was simply because of how we were dressed. In St.-Tropez that summer, everyone was wearing worn military fatigues. Because it was “la mode,” Jerry and I looked so out of place that people were wondering aloud whether we were on our way to “le rodeo.”
Which was just the way it was back then in the South of France. As the Rolling Stones themselves soon learned, the locals were always either at your throat or at your feet. Speaking the language definitely helped as did having vast amounts of money to spend but the highest trump card in the deck was being as famous as, how you say, “les Rolling Stones.”
And so when Mick and Bianca showed up that night, every eye in the room followed them as they made their way through the crowded room to our table so they could sit down with the only people they knew. While Bianca was dressed to the teeth, Mick just happened to be wearing a pair of faded jeans and the same kind of dark blue denim work shirt that Jerry and I had on.
Before the week was out in St.-Tropez, every last hip young thing in town was walking around in faded jeans and a dark blue denim work shirt. Was this an accident? A simple twist of fate? You decide. What I do know for certain is that none of them would have been caught dead in such an outfit before seeing Mick that night had convinced them all that there was now simply nothing hipper to be worn in the world.
After spending a week in the front room at Villa Eden pounding away on the lightweight portable typewriter I had brought with me from London, I finally finished what amounted to nearly one hundred pages of transcript. Sliding the original into a manila envelope along with the carbon copy, I made my way back to Nellcôte.
As always, the front door was unlocked. Because the Stones had started jamming until all hours of the night down in the basement, the house seemed unusually quiet. When I finally found Keith, he was standing in the dining room. Explaining that I needed him to go over the interview to make sure I had quoted him accurately, I handed him the transcript. That Keith could take out anything he did not want to see in print went without saying.
For the next thirty minutes, I stood there in silence watching Keith smoke one cigarette after another as he read each page of the transcript of the interview before flinging it across the table. For any writer, watching someone read what you have written is always a nightmare. When what you have written is about that person, the experience becomes ten times worse. Would Keith hate the interview? Would he ask me to tone down some of the very explicit language? Or would he just sadly shake his head and tell me it would be better for all concerned if the interview never saw the light of day?
Unable to ask him any of those questions, all I could do was stand there and wait. Coming at long last to the bottom of the final page, Keith tossed it aside. Squinting sideways at me through the cloud of cigarette smoke that always seemed to be hanging around his head, he said, “Yeah, man. I said it. Go on and print it.”
And that was it. No corrections. No additions. No subtractions. Keith did not care what anybody might think about what he had said because insofar as he was concerned, it was all true. In that moment, Keith Richards let me know who he really was.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
VILLA NELLCÔTE III, JUNE 19–NOVEMBER 30, 1971
AS I WOULD LATER LEARN, there were so many hidden dramas going on at Villa Nellcôte during the long and fateful summer when the Rolling Stones were recording Exile on Main St. in Keith Richards’s incredibly hot and humid basement that no one person could have been aware of them all. And while nobody actually died during the making of the album, so many lives were irrevocably altered in the process that I now feel compelled to examine the human toll that was exacted.
Seated right beside producer Jimmy Miller in the mobile recording truck parked outside the villa, Andy Johns recorded every take the Stones did over the course of those five months. Tall and lean with long dark hair hanging to his shoulders and a fine-boned face, Andy was then just twenty-one years old and looked every inch like the rock star he had always wanted to become.
Following in his older brother Glyn’s footsteps, Andy had begun his career by working as a “tape jockey” at Olympic Studios in London in 1967. Asked by Jimmy Miller to come join him at Stargroves where the Stones were recording tracks for Sticky Fingers in April 1970, Andy got to see for the first time precisely what it was that Keith Richards did for the Rolling Stones.
As Andy Johns would later say, “They were doing ‘Bitch,’ but Keith was very late so they were playing it without him with Jagger on guitar and the song didn’t sound very good at all. I walked out of the kitchen and Keith was sitting on the floor with no shoes on eating a bowl of cereal listening to what they were doing and giving them all funny looks. Then he said, ‘Oy, Andy, give me that guitar.’ He put on his clear Perspex guitar and kicked up the tempo and put just the right vibe on it and the song went from a laconic mess to being all about groove. Just instantly. As soon as Keith started playing, he transformed the song into what it was meant to be.”
After being asked by Mick Jagger to do the final mixes on “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers,” Andy began working with Eric Clapton on the follow-up album to the hugely successful Layla by Derek and the Dominos. Although Clapton had just made Andy coproducer of the new album as a twenty-first birthday present, he did not hesitate for a moment when Jimmy Miller called to offer him another job. “I just said, ‘Look, Eric, I’ve got to go work with the Stones for a few weeks in the South of France. I’ll be back.’ And of course that was Exile and I wasn’t back for a year.”
Taking up residence with Bobby Keys and Jim Price in a villa about forty minutes from Nellcôte, Andy sat in the mobile truck listening as the Stones jammed aimlessly night after night trying to find a groove. “On ‘Tumbling Dice,’ we spent two or three weeks just trying to get the track right. It was a performance thing and there were times when those guys could really play badly and sound fucking terrible. I had about thirty or forty or fifty reels of tape, each an hour and a half long, on just that one song. Jimmy wanted to save it all because we had a feeling that they might not ever get a good take and we’d have to stitch something together with editing.”
While recording the Rolling Stones had never been easy, working with them in the South of France proved far more difficult than even Andy Johns could ever have imagined. Now using heroin again, Keith would often leave in the middle of a session to go upstairs and put Marlon to bed and then not return because he had passed out in bed. While overdubbing a guitar part, Keith would “also sometimes play the intro and then be tacit for the first verse and never come back in again at all because he had nodded out while Jimmy and I just sat there letting the tape roll.”
As Andy Johns soon discovered, the few inspired moments of brilliant creativity at Nellcôte were far outweighed by the never-ending tedium. “I had already snorted heroin a few times but it was during the recording of that album that I really started using because it was just so fucking boring most of the time and there was so much waiting around and it was so easy to get. Marseilles was just down the road and you could buy a big bag of very powerful China White for not a lot of money. I was dipping into that all the time and not really thinking about it. Then I had to go back to England and I wasn’t going to take any of it with me on the plane. When I got there, I felt like I had a bad flu or something for a couple of days and it didn’t dawn on me what was really going on u
ntil I figured out, ‘Oh, this is what withdrawal is like. There’s not much to this.’”
Returning to the South of France, Andy continued snorting heroin while working on the album. “Jim Price and I were back at our villa one night when Keith came over. I went into my bedroom to change my shirt and Keith was sitting there with a needle and spoon and I’d been brought up to think that was very inappropriate behavior. But I was along the path a little bit by now so I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, do you want to do this too?’ And I went, ‘Yes. Okay.’ And he went, ‘Oh, this needle’s fucked. It won’t work. We’ll go back to my place.’
“So we jumped in his car and drove all the way back to Nellcôte, and Keith took me downstairs and cooked something up, and he didn’t inject it into the vein. He just skin-popped me. And went, ‘Now you’re a man.’ Which, looking back on it, makes me think, How adolescent of him. And how adolescent of me. Oh, I’ll do this too.”
Barely able to see straight, Andy then made his way back upstairs and was sitting in the mobile recording truck when Ian Stewart walked in. Having known Andy since he was fourteen years old, Stu took one look at him and said, “You’ve been hangin’ out with Keith, haven’t you? Oh dear, he’s in trouble. I’m gonna tell your brother.” “I just lied and said, ‘Stu, no. Please don’t. I haven’t done anything.’ But he had picked up on it right away.
“I didn’t actually become a junkie until later on because I could never figure out how to make mainlining work. I was in a hotel room in London with Keith and Anita, who I think really enjoyed turning people on, and she said, ‘Oh, sveetie, come with me,’ and she took me in the bathroom and mainlined me. By the time I went to Jamaica with the Stones to record Goats Head Soup, I was a full-on, card-carrying junkie.”
Call it collateral damage if you like, but the list of all those who were using heroin while spending time with the Rolling Stones at Villa Nellcôte would fill more than a single page in any reporter’s notebook. And while there are many who consider Exile on Main St. the greatest album the Stones ever made, I still cannot look back on that long hot summer in the South of France without thinking that the smell of death was all around me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LOS ANGELES, MARCH 24–25, 1972
FORCED TO LEAVE THE SOUTH OF FRANCE in the fall of 1971 as quickly as possible so as to avoid being thrown into jail by the local gendarmes on a variety of drug charges, the Rolling Stones had come to ground in Los Angeles, a city where they had always felt very much at home. Under incredible pressure to finish the new album so they could tour America, Mick and Keith had just spent the past four months working together in the studio as harmoniously as they ever had before.
Which did not mean the work itself had gone all that smoothly. As Andy Johns would later say, “We all traipsed off to Los Angeles and it was still a bit tedious but we were getting things done and then I started mixing and it was going slowly. Mick wanted me to work faster but I got four or five mixes done and then I told him I was going home for Christmas and I got the feeling I was not going to be asked back. Which was what happened and they started working with someone else.
“Jimmy Miller had me come back to LA to produce a solo album with Jim Price. We were out in Malibu and someone had just given me a hash cookie that had started to come on really strong and I don’t like that kind of stuff anyway so I was sitting in my room paranoid as hell with the chair under the door handle so no one could come in and the phone rang and it was Jagger. Who then had to proceed to eat a little bit of humble pie without sounding like it. When I said, ‘You didn’t call to say hello. What is it?’ he told me, ‘Well, you know, those mixes of yours, we can’t seem to beat them.’”
Along with Mick, Andy Johns went into Wally Heider’s studio to begin mixing again only to decide that he preferred working at Sunset Sound. “Mick said, ‘Here are the tapes. Just finish the fucking thing. You’ve got two days.’ I already had four or five songs done so I just stayed there and ended up mixing two-thirds of the record in one huge great mammoth forty-eight-hour session.”
Nevertheless, the mixing process was still not done. Two days before Marshall Chess was scheduled to fly to New York City to hand-deliver the masters to Atlantic Records so the album could be released before the Stones began their tour, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Miller, and Andy Johns were still driving themselves crazy trying to come up with the final version of Exile on Main St.
One year to the weekend after I had seen the Stones play the final two shows on their farewell tour of England, I left the house high on a twisting road overlooking Topanga Canyon where I had been living for the past three months to talk to Mick for an article about the new album and the upcoming tour that would not appear in Rolling Stone until nearly another month had passed.
Back then, Los Angeles was most definitely not the city it has since become. While you could still get anywhere you needed to go on the freeway in twenty minutes no matter when you left your house or in which direction you were headed, the maleficent spirit of Charlie Manson was not yet entirely dead. Without warning up in those hot, dry canyons, things could suddenly get weirder than hell and often did.
This was also the era when the “Riot House” (aka the Hyatt House) on the Sunset Strip was filled with English music business heavies whose accents gave them total license to get just as crazy as they liked without ever having to suffer the consequences. However, even for those at the very top of the food chain in rock ’n’ roll, actually trying to live in Los Angeles back then could induce a form of culture shock so severe that the only cure for it was to go back home again just as quickly as possible.
As Rose Millar would later say, “Mick Taylor and Chloe and I moved into this house on Stone Canyon Road just up a bit from Keith and Anita and it was awful and I couldn’t stand it. There was this concrete log in the fireplace and everything was white and made of plastic. Even in January it seemed like summer and what saved our lives was the Edwin Hawkins Singers doing ‘Oh Happy Day.’ Both Mick and I loved that song so much and every morning we’d wake up and say, ‘Oh no, we’re still here,’ and put on the song and go back under the bedclothes. I thought LA was much worse than the South of France because there was so much cocaine around and that was when Mick Taylor began doing it in excess.”
Authentically depressed by his new surroundings as well as by the glacial pace at which work on the album was proceeding, Mick Taylor had begun writing notes about how he no longer wanted to be in the Rolling Stones. Taylor had also told the young woman who was taking care of his daughter just how lonely he felt because he never got to meet anyone anymore. For someone stuck in Los Angeles without enough to do to occupy his time, it was not an atypical reaction.
Not surprisingly, this was not the way Mick Jagger felt about Los Angeles. For starters, he had set himself up with Bianca and their five-month-old daughter Jade in a huge southern California Gothic mansion on St. Pierre Road in Bel Air. Originally built for Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller with an artificial waterfall that had long since gone dry, the house was surrounded by thickets of tangled vines and dense underbrush and looked as though it had come straight out of Sunset Boulevard.
On the Saturday I went to see him, Mick came padding barefoot down the sweeping staircase at four o’clock in the afternoon. Wearing a shiny silk zippered jacket with two tigers snarling at one another across the shoulders, he walked into the huge dining room and sat down at the table to talk to me with a beer in his hand.
As a sprinkler whispered softly outside the window, Mick began describing Exile on Main St. by saying, “It was cut during the summer and we’ll be touring this summer, so it all fits in. It’s a summer-y album and very commercial, I think. It’s a double album like Electric Ladyland. God knows, there was enough in that for a year’s listening.”
Shifting his focus to the upcoming tour, Mick noted that the schedule was really not all that grueling. “It’s like the one we did last time. Five cities a week for six weeks
. We wanted to have rest in the middle, two weeks off to recover, but that meant we’d have been in the country more than six months and eligible for national service. You know, the draft.”
The concept of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards being summoned to take their draft physicals so they could then be inducted into the United States Army and sent off to fight in Vietnam because the Rolling Stones had spent too much time in America was so completely ludicrous that I should have laughed out loud when Mick said this to me. Instead, I reported his words just as he had said them and his statement then ran in its entirety in Rolling Stone.
Continuing to make it all up as he went along, Mick talked about how he wanted to see the Stones begin experimenting onstage as they had done while making Their Satanic Majesties Request. “I mean,” he said, “Mick Taylor has even more strange ideas than me and I know Charlie wouldn’t mind going along with it. I wouldn’t want us to be a band people think they could rely on.”
With what I have now come to recognize as the kind of improvisational genius even the great Charlie Parker might have admired, Mick said the Stones would be doing “a little bus tour of the Deep South.” He then expressed his desire to put on a concert in Los Angeles “outside in the open air, smoggy and all.” That the Rolling Stones would not be doing any such thing until all the lawsuits still pending against the band for their ill-fated concert at Altamont had finally been laid to rest, Mick did not bother to say.
Although Mick did find it a bit annoying that movie star tourist buses had begun stopping outside the driveway of his house, he said, “The anonymity here is pretty good. It’s not like England where it’s so crowded that one has to buy a thousand acres to have any privacy and where they line up outside your house to find out who you fucked the night before. I hate that place. You think if only they’d let you, you could take it over and really get it together because it’s so small really. You think that something like the miners’ strike is going to really bring about a change. But it’s such a pathetic little village sometimes.”
Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye Page 13
