Life

by Keith Richards

  If there was a genealogical tree, a tree of genesis of London’s hip scene, the one that it was known for in those days, Anita and Robert Fraser, the gallery owner and art dealer, would be at the top, beside Christopher Gibbs, antiques dealer and bibliophile, and a few other major courtiers. And that was mainly because of the connections they made. Anita had met Robert Fraser a long way back, in 1961, when she was tied up with the early pop art world through her boyfriend Mario Schifano, a leading pop painter in Rome. Through Fraser she’d met Sir Mark Palmer, the original Gypsy baron, and Julian and Jane Ormsby-Gore and Tara Browne (subject of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”), so already a basis is laid for the meeting of music—which played a big part in the art underground from early on—and aristos, though these were not your usual aristos. Here you had three old Etonians, Fraser, Gibbs and Palmer—though it turned out that two of them, Fraser and Gibbs, had been sacked from Eton or left prematurely—and each had special, eccentric talents and a strong personality. They were not born to follow the herd. Mick and Marianne would make pilgrimages with John Michell, a writer and the Merlin of the group, to Herefordshire to observe flying saucers and ley lines and all that. Anita had a Paris life, dancing around nightly and diaphanously in Régine’s, where they let her in for free; she had an equally glamorous Roman life. She worked as a model and she got parts in movies. The people she mixed with were hard-core avant-garde in the days when hard core hardly existed.

  That was when the drug culture had started to explode. First came the Mandrax with the grass, then the acid in late ’66, then the coke sometime in ’67, then the smack—always. I remember David Courts, the original maker of my skull ring, still a close friend, coming out to dinner in a pub near Redlands. He’d had some Mandrax and some bevvies and now wanted to rest his head in the soup. I remember it only because Mick carried him on his back to the car. He would never do something like that now —and I realize, remembering that incident, how very long ago it was that Mick changed. But that is another country.

  There were some fascinating people. Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the King’s African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant. He’d turned into Strawberry Bob, floating around in slippers and Rajasthani trousers by night, and gangster-sharp pinstripes and polka-dot suits by day. The Robert Fraser Gallery was pretty much the cutting edge. He was putting on Jim Dine shows, he represented Lichtenstein. He did Warhol’s first thing in London, showing Chelsea Girls in his flat. He showed Larry Rivers, Rauschenberg. Robert saw all the changes coming; he was very into pop art. He was aggressively avant-garde. I liked the energy that was going into it rather than necessarily everything that was being done—that feeling in the air that anything was possible. Otherwise, the stunning overblown pretentiousness of the art world made my skin crawl cold turkey, and I wasn’t even using the stuff. Allen Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.

  Captain Fraser really loved his Otis Redding and his Booker T. and the MGs. I’d sometimes drop by his flat in Mount Street —the salon of the period—in the morning if I’d been up all night and I’d just got the new Booker T. or Otis album. And there was Mohammed, the Moroccan servant in the djellaba, preparing a couple of pipes, and we’d listen to “Green Onions” or “Chinese Checkers” or “Chained and Bound.” Robert was into smack. He had a cupboard full of double-breasted suits, all superbly made, with great fabrics, and his shirts were often handmade bespoke shirts, but the collars and cuffs were always frayed. And that was part of the look. And he used to keep spare jacks, a sixth of a grain—it was six jacks to a grain of heroin —loose in these suit pockets, so he’d always be going to the cupboard and going through all the pockets to find the odd spare jack. Robert’s flat was full of fantastic objects, Tibetan skulls lined with silver, bones with silver caps on the end, Tiffany art nouveau lamps and beautiful fabrics and textiles everywhere. He’d float around in these bright-colored silk shirts he’d brought back from India. Robert really liked to get stoned, “wonderful hashish,” “Afghani primo.” He was a weird mixture of avant-garde and very old-fashioned.

  The other thing I really liked about Robert was he had no side on him. He could have easily hidden behind Eton and the patrician style. But he looked around—he deliberately showed works of art by people not in the Royal Academy. And then of course there was the homosexual poofter bit that also put him at odds. He didn’t flaunt it, but he certainly didn’t hide it. He had a steely eye and I always admired his guts. And I put a lot of that persona of his down to the African Rifles, really. He had his eyes opened in Africa. Captain Robert Fraser, retired. If he wanted to, he could pull rank. But I have the feeling with Robert that he just detested more and more the way that the establishment at that time, as they called it, was still trying to cling on to something that was obviously crumbling. I admired his stand on “this cannot go on.” And I think that’s why he attached himself to us and the Beatles and the avant-garde artists.

  Fraser and Christopher Gibbs had been at Eton together. When Anita first met Gibby, way back, he’d just come out of jail for taking a book from Sotheby’s, aged eighteen or something—always a passionate collector and with a very good eye. We linked up with Gibbs again through Robert when Mick decided he wanted to have a country life. Robert was not country inclined and said you’d better get Gibby onto this. So Gibbs started showing Mick and Marianne around England, and they looked at various palaces and estates. I’ve always loved Gibby in his own way. I used to stay at his apartment in Cheyne Walk on the embankment. He had a great library of books. I could just sit around, look at beautiful first editions and great illustrations and paintings and stuff that I hadn’t had time to get into because I’d been working on the road. Very much into flogging the furniture. Very nice pieces. A subtle promoter of his own wares. “I’ve got this wonderful chest, sixteenth century.” He was always flogging something off, or something was always available. At the same time he was crazy, Christopher. He’s the only guy I know that would actually wake up and break an amyl nitrate popper under his nose. That even took me out. He’d have one by the side of the bed. Just twist that little yellow phial and wake up. I saw him do it. I was amazed. I didn’t mind the poppers, but usually later at night.

  What Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs had in common was nerve and fearlessness—more front than Selfridges. And they were mama’s boys. Big mama fear amongst the lot of them. Maybe that’s why they were all poofs. Strawberry Bob—he was always scared of his mum. “Oh! My mother’s coming.” “So what?” Which didn’t mean they were soft or pussy whipped. It was the respect for their mothers that was overpowering. Obviously they had very strong mothers, because these guys were very strong guys. Only now have I learned that Gibby’s mother was queen of the Girl Guides worldwide, the chief commissioner for overseas. It’s not something we talked about in those days. I never realized the influence of this duo back then, but they changed the landscape and greatly influenced the style of the times.

  Gibbs and Fraser were only the front names in all that. There were Lampsons and Lambtons, Sykeses, Michael Rainey. There was Sir Mark Palmer, page boy to the queen and inveterate didicoy, bless his heart, him of the gold teeth and the whippets tied to baling twine and the caravans that he used to trundle through the country lanes and park on the estates of his friends. I guess if you’re brought up and trained to carry the queen’s frock, a Gypsy caravan might look kind of attractive after a while. It was all right before you got hair on your cock. But after that, what do you do? “I haul the queen’s frock.”

  Suddenly we were being courted by half the aristocracy, the younger scions, the heirs to some ancient pile, the Ormbsy-Gores, the Tennants, the whole lot. I’ve never known if t
hey were slumming or we were snobbing. They were very nice people. I decided it was no skin off of my nose. If somebody’s interested, they’re welcome. You want to hang, you want to hang. It was the first time I know of when that lot actively sought out musicians in such large numbers. They realized there was something blowin’ in the wind, to quote Bob. They felt embarrassed up there, the Knights in Blue, and they felt they were being left out of things if they didn’t join in. So there was this weird mixture of aristos and gangsters, the fascination that the higher end of society has with the more brutish end. That was particularly the case with Robert Fraser.

  Robert liked to mix with the underworld. Maybe it was his rebellion against the suffocation of his background, the repression of homosexuality. He gravitated towards people like David Litvinoff, who was on the borders of art and villainy, a friend of the Kray brothers, the East End gangsters. There were villains in the story as well. That’s how Tony Sanchez came into it, because Tony Sanchez helped Robert out of a tight spot when he had gambling debts. That’s how Robert met Tony. So Tony became Robert’s conduit, sort of helper-out with villains, and his dealer.

  Tony ran a gambling casino for Spanish waiters in London, after-hours. He was a dope dealer and a gangster with a Mark 10 Jaguar, two-tone, all done up pimp-style. His father ran a famous Italian restaurant in Mayfair. Spanish Tony was a hard man. Biff bang. One of those. He was a great guy until he became a bad one. His trouble, just like many others’, was that you can’t be like that and also become a junkie. The two don’t mix. If you’re going to be a hard man, if you’re going to be smart and be on your toes, which is what Tony could have been and was for a while, you can’t afford to be on dope. It slows you down. If you’re going to be selling it, OK, that’s the way it is, but don’t sample it. There’s a big difference between a dealer and a consumer. To be a dealer, you’ve got to be way in front, otherwise you slip up, and that’s what happened to Tony.

  He set me up a couple of times. Without my knowing it—I found out later—he used me as a getaway driver on a hit-and-run jewel theft in the Burlington Arcade. “Here, Keith, I’ve got this Jag. Want to try it out?” What they wanted was a clean car and a clean driver. And Tony had obviously told these blokes that I was a good night driver. So I waited outside this place, not knowing what was happening. Tony was a good mate of mine, but he used to stitch me up.

  Another good friend, Michael Cooper, I used to hang with a lot. Great photographer. He could hang and hang; he could take so much stuff. He was the only photographer I ever knew who actually had a tremor when he was taking pictures, and yet they’d come out right. “How did you do that? Your hands were trembling. The whole picture should be a blur.” “I know just when to push.” Michael recorded the early Stones life in great detail because he never stopped taking pictures. Pictures were a total way of life for Michael. He was absolutely captured by images, or, more likely, images had captured him.

  Michael was Robert’s creature in a way. Robert had a Svengali side to him and was strongly attracted to Michael Cooper on all sorts of levels, but he particularly admired Michael’s artistry and he promoted him. Michael was a networker. He was the glue between us, all these different parts of London, the aristos and the hoods and the others.

  When you take all the stuff we took, you’re always talking about everything else rather than what you’re working at. Which meant Michael and me sitting around talking about the quality of the dope. Two fiends looking to see if they can get higher than ever before without damaging themselves too much. No talking about the “great work” I’m going to do or you’re going to do or anybody else is going to do. That was peripheral. I knew how hard he worked. He was manic, like me, but you took it for granted.

  One thing about Michael was he would spiral into deep, ominous depressions. Black dogs. The poet of the lens was a more fragile creature than one imagined. Michael spun slowly towards a bourne from which there was no return. But for now we were basically gangsters. Not that we pulled any jobs, but we were an elite little circle. Flamboyant and outrageous, quite honestly, pushing all the margins because it had to be done.

  There’s not much you can really say about acid except God, what a trip! Stepping off into this area was very uncertain, uncharted. In the years ’67 and ’68 there was a real turnover in the feeling of what was going on, a lot of confusion and a lot of experimentation. The most amazing thing that I can remember on acid is watching birds fly—birds that kept flying in front of my face that weren’t actually there, flocks of birds of paradise. And actually it was a tree blowing in the wind. I was walking down a country lane, it was very green, and I could almost see every wing movement. It was slowed down to the point where I could even say, “Shit, I could do that!” That’s why I understand the odd person jumping out of a window. Because the whole notion of how it’s done is suddenly clear. A flock of birds took about half an hour to fly across my vision, an incredible fluttering, and I could see every feather. And they looked at me while they did it like, “Try that on for size.” Shit… OK, there’s some things I can’t do.

  You had to be with the right people when you were taking acid, otherwise beware. Brian on acid, for example, was a loose cannon. Either he’d be incredibly relaxed and funny, or he’d be one of the cats that would lead you down the bad road when the good road closes. And suddenly you’re going there, down the street of paranoia. And on acid you can’t really control it. Why am I going into his black dot? I just don’t want to go there. Let’s go back to the crossroads and see if the good road opens. I want to see that flock of birds again and have a few astounding ideas for playing and find the Lost Chord. The holy grail of music, very fashionable at the time. There were a lot of Pre-Raphaelites running around in velvet with scarves tied to their knees, like the Ormsby-Gores, looking for the Holy Grail, the Lost Court of King Arthur, UFOs and ley lines.

  With Christopher Gibbs you actually couldn’t tell whether he was on acid or not, because that’s the way he was. Maybe I never knew Christopher off acid, but I must say he was an adventurous lad. He was ready to jump into the unknown, into the valley of death. He was ready to look into it. It was something that had to be done. I never saw Gibbs unbalanced by acid, never saw any sign of a bad trip. My memories of Christopher are that he was somehow always angelically three feet off the ground. As we all were, perhaps.

  No one knew much about this; we were tapping in the dark. I found it very interesting, but at the same time I found other people got quite distressed, and that’s all you need on that kind of stuff, is to deal with somebody who really is having a bad trip. People could change and become very paranoid or very uptight or very scared. Especially Brian. It could happen to anybody, but that would turn other people into a bad time too. It was the unknown with acid. You didn’t know if you’d come back or not. I had a couple of terrible trips. I remember Christopher talking me down. “Hey, everything is cool. It’s all right.” He was just like a nurse, a night nurse. I can’t even remember what the hell I was going through; it just wasn’t pleasant. Paranoia, maybe—the same with a lot of people with marijuana, it makes them paranoid. It’s basically fear, but you don’t know of what. So you have no defense, and the further you go down there, the bigger it gets. Sometimes you’ve got to slap yourself.

  But it didn’t stop me from having another trip. It was the idea of a boundary that had to be pushed. There was a bit of stupidity there as well. Wasn’t so good last time? Let’s try it again. What, are you chicken now? It was the Acid Test, Ken Kesey’s goddamn thing. It meant if you hadn’t been there you ain’t nowhere, which was really dumb. A lot of people felt obliged to take it even if they didn’t want to, if they wanted to stay and hang with the crowd. It was a gang thing. But it could shake you if you weren’t careful, and that happened a lot. Even if you’ve taken it once, it’s probably done something to you. It’s too volatile.

  One epic of that period was an acid-fueled road trip with John Lennon—an episode of such extremes t
hat I can barely piece together a fragment. It took in, I thought, Torquay and Lyme Regis over what seemed like a two- or three-day period with a chauffeur. Johnny and I were so out there that sometimes years later, in New York, he would ask, “What happened on that trip?” With us was Kari Ann Moller, now Mrs. Chris Jagger; I think the Hollies wrote a song about her, or was it about Marianne? Very sweet girl, had a place on Portland Square, where I lived when in town for about two years. Her reminiscences, which I sought out recently for this book, were quite different from mine. But hers were at least not almost a total blank, like mine.

  What is clear to me now is that we never thought we were overworked, but later on you realize you didn’t give yourself a break, boy. So when we had three unfamiliar days off, we got a little wild. I remembered going in a chauffeur-driven car. But Kari Ann says we didn’t have a chauffeur. We went in a cramped two-door car with one other unidentifiable passenger—so maybe we did have a chauffeur. According to Kari Ann, we started in Dolly’s nightclub, the precursor of Tramp, and drove around Hyde Park Corner several times, wondering where to go. We drove to John’s house in the country, she says, and said hi to Cynthia, and then Kari Ann decided we’d go and visit her mother in Lyme Regis. What a nice visit for her mother—a couple of flying acid heads who’d been up for a couple of nights. We got there about dawn, so her story goes. One greasy-spoon caff wouldn’t serve us. John got recognized. And Kari Ann realized that we couldn’t go and visit her mother because we were so out of it. There follow therefore some missing hours, because we didn’t get back to John’s house until after dark. There were palm trees, so it looks as if we sat on the Torquay palm-lined esplanade for a great many hours, engrossed in a little world of our own. We got home, and so everyone was happy. It was one of those cases of John wanting to do more drugs than me. Huge bag of weed, lump of hash and acid. I usually picked my spots with acid; moving around didn’t come into it if you could avoid it.