Life

by Keith Richards

  When I first heard of him, he was in a ménage à trois with Deborah Dixon and Anita, long before Anita and I were together, and they were all jolly jolly. He was a procurer, an arranger of orgies and threesomes—in a pimpish way, though I don’t think Anita saw it like that.

  One of the first things that happened between Anita and me was the shit of Performance. Cammell wanted to fuck me up, because he had been with Anita before Deborah Dixon. Clearly he took a delight in the idea that he was screwing things up between us. It was a setup, Mick and Anita playing a couple. I felt things through the wind. I knew Mouche—Michèle Breton, the third one in the bath scene in the movie; I’m not totally out of this frame—who used to be paid to “perform” as a couple with her boyfriend. Anita told me Michèle had to have Valium shots before every take. So he was basically setting up third-rate porn. He had a good story in Performance. He got the only movie of any interest in his life because of who was in it, and Nic Roeg, who shot it, and James Fox, who he drove round the bend. The normally pukka-voiced Fox couldn’t stop talking like a gangster from Bermondsey on and off the set until he was rescued by the Navigators, a Christian sect that claimed his attention for the next two decades.

  Donald Cammell was more interested in manipulation than actually directing. He got a hard-on about intimate betrayal, and that’s what he was setting up in Performance, as much of it as he could engineer. He made only four films, and three of them ended the same way—with the main character getting shot or shooting someone they were very close to. Always the watcher. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of Ready Steady Go! in its early days and later of the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus, told me that when he was shooting Let It Be, the rooftop swan song of the Beatles, he looked over to another nearby roof and there was Donald Cammell. In at the death, again. The final film Cammell made was a real-life video of him shooting himself, the last scene in Performance again, prepared elaborately and filmed over many minutes. The person he was very close to in this case was his wife, who was in the next room.

  I met Cammell later in LA, and I said, you know, I can’t think of anybody, Donald, that’s ever got any joy out of you, and I don’t know if you’ve ever got any joy out of yourself. There’s nowhere else for you to go, there’s nobody. The best thing you can do is take the gentleman’s way out. And this was at least two or three years before he finally topped himself.

  I didn’t find out for ages about Mick and Anita, but I smelled it. Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelled it. The old lady comes back at night complaining about the set and about Donald and blah blah blah. But at the same time, I know the old lady, and the odd time she didn’t come home at night, I’d go round somewhere and see another girlfriend.

  I never expected anything from Anita. I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian. So you’ve had Mick now; what do you fancy, that or this? It was like Peyton Place back then, a lot of wife swapping or girlfriend swapping and… oh, you had to have him, OK. What do you expect? You’ve got an old lady like Anita Pallenberg and expect other guys not to hit on her? I heard rumors, and I thought, if she’s going to be making a move with Mick, good luck to him; he can only take that one once. I’ve got to live with it. Anita’s a piece of work. She probably nearly broke his back!

  I’m not that jealous kind of guy. I knew where Anita had been before, and where she’d been before that with Mario Schifano, who was a successful painter. And with this other guy who was an art dealer in New York. I didn’t expect to put any reins on her. It probably put a bigger gap between me and Mick than anything else, but mainly on Mick’s part, not mine. And probably forever.

  I gave no reaction at all to Mick about Anita. And decided to see how things would pan out from there. It wasn’t the first time we’d been in competition for a bird, even for a night on the road. Who’s going to get that one? Who’s Tarzan round here? It was like two alphas fighting. Still is, quite honestly. But it’s hardly the basis for a good relationship, right? I could have given Anita shit for it, but what was the point? We were together. I was on the road. By then I was so cynical about that stuff. I mean, if I’d stolen her off Brian, I didn’t expect Mick not to knock her off, under the direction of Donald Cammell. I doubt whether it would have happened without Cammell. But, you know, while you were doing that, I was knocking Marianne, man. While you’re missing it, I’m kissing it. In fact, I had to leave the premises rather abruptly when the cat came back. Hey, it was our only time, hot and sweaty. We were just there in, as Mick calls it in “Let Me Down Slow,” the afterglow, my head nestled between those two beautiful jugs. And we heard his car drive up, and there was a big flurry, and I did one out the window, got my shoes, out the window through the garden, and I realized I’d left my socks. Well, he’s not the sort of guy to look for socks. Marianne and I still have this joke. She sends me messages: “I still can’t find your socks.”

  Anita’s a gambler. But a gambler sometimes makes the wrong bets. The idea of status quo to Anita, in those days, was verboten. Everything must change. And we’re not married, we’re free, whatever. You’re free as long as you let me know what’s going on. Anyway, she had no fun with the tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls, but it doesn’t quite fill the gap, does it? It didn’t surprise me. In a way I kind of expected it. That’s why I was sitting in Robert Fraser’s flat, writing, “I feel the storm is threatening my very life today.” He had rented us his flat while Anita was shooting the movie, but in the end he never moved out, so when Anita went to work, I stayed there with Strawberry Bob and Mohammed, who were probably the first people I played it to. “War, children, it’s just a shot away…”

  It was just a terrible fucking day and it was storming out there. I was sitting there in Mount Street and there was this incredible storm over London, so I got into that mode, just looking out of Robert’s window and looking at all these people with their umbrellas being blown out of their grasp and running like hell. And the idea came to me. You get lucky sometimes. It was a shitty day. I had nothing better to do. Of course, it becomes much more metaphorical with all the other contexts and everything, but at the time I wasn’t thinking about, oh my God, there’s my old lady shooting a movie in a bath with Mick Jagger. My thought was storms on other people’s minds, not mine. It just happened to hit the moment. Only later did I realize, this will have more meaning than I thought at the time. “Threatening my very life today.” It’s got menace, all right. It’s scary stuff. And those chords are Jimmy Reed inspired—the same haunting trick, sliding up the fret board against the drone of the E note. I’m just working my way up A major, B major, and I go, hello, where are we ending up? C- sharp minor, OK. It’s a very unlikely guitar key. But you’ve just got to recognize the setups when you hear them. A lot of them, like this one, are accidents.

  At the same time, Anita and I had drifted into heroin. We just snorted it for a year or two, along with pure cocaine. Speedballs. A beautifully bizarre law of that time, when the National Health started, was that if you were a junkie, you registered with your doctor, and that would register you with the government as being a heroin addict, and then you would get pure little heroin pills, with a little phial of distilled water to shoot it up with. And of course any junkie is going to double how much he says he needs. Now, at the same time, whether you wanted it or not, you got the equivalent in cocaine. The theory being that the coke would counteract the junk and maybe make the junkies useful members of society, on the grounds that if they take just the junk, they’ll lie down and meditate and read things and then shit and stink. And the junkies of course would sell off their cocaine. They doubled their actual need for heroin, so they’ve got half their heroin stash to sell off, plus all of the cocaine. A beautiful scam! And it was only when the program stopped that you really began to have a drug problem in the UK. But the junkies couldn’t believe it. We want to go down, you know? And they’re giving us these pure ups. Every junkie’s rent was made out of selling off their coke.
Very few were interested at all in cocaine, and if they were, they kept a bit back to give them a boost. That’s when I first got in touch with cocaine, pure May & Baker, right out of the bottle. It used to say on it “pure fluffy crystals.” On the label! And then a skull and crossbones saying “poison.” It was a beautifully ambiguous label. That’s how I got into all this—with Spanish Tony, Robert Fraser. That’s where it all started. Because they had the connection with all these junkies. And the reason I’m here is probably that we only ever took, as much as possible, the real stuff, the top-quality stuff. Cocaine I only got into because it was pure pharmaceutical—boom. When I was introduced to dope, it was all pure, pure, pure. You didn’t have to worry about what’s it cut with and go through all that street shit. Sometimes, eventually, you would have to drift to the bottom—by the time the dope had got you by the scruff of the neck. With Gram Parsons I really went low. Mexican shoe scrapings. But basically my introduction to drugs was all crème de la crème.

  So of course everybody eventually had their own pet junkie. Steve and Penny were a registered junkie couple. I’d probably been taken round by Spanish Tony when we used to score from them in London. They were living in a shabby basement flat in Kilburn. And after we’d been round there for a couple of months, they were saying, “I’d like to get out of here. I’d like to live in the country.” I said, “I’ve got a cottage!” So Anita and I installed them in the cottage across from Redlands, which was where I was living at the time. And once a week, “Steve!” Into Chichester, pop into Boots for a minute, go back home and then I’d have half of his smack. Steve and Penny were a very sweet, shy, unassuming couple. They weren’t some lowlifes. He was very ascetic, with a little beard. He was a philosopher, always reading Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Big, tall, thin bloke with ginger hair, mustache and glasses. He looked like a fucking professor, though he didn’t smell like one. It must have gone on for about a year. They were such a sweet and gentle couple. “Can we make you a cup of tea?” Nothing that you think about “junkies.” It was all very civilized. Sometimes I’d go to the cottage and—because they were mainliners—say, “Penny, is Steve still alive?” “I think so, darling. Anyway, have a cup of tea and then we’ll wake him up.” It was all so genteel. For every stereotypical junkie, I can point to ten others who live perfectly ordered lives, bankers and whatever.

  That was the golden era. At least until ’73, ’74, it was all perfectly legal. After that, they knocked it on the head and it was methadone, which is worse, or certainly no better. Synthetic. One day the junkies woke up and they only got half their script in pure heroin and half in methadone. And then that turned it into a bit more of a market, the era of the all-night drugstore in Piccadilly. I used to park around the corner. But there was always a queue of people outside waiting for their pet junkies to come out with the stuff and then split it. The system couldn’t really support it anymore against the voracious demands. We were creating a nation of junkies!

  I have no clear recollection of the first time I had heroin. It was probably slipped in with a line of coke, in a speedball —a mixture of coke and smack. If you were around people who were used to doing that in one line, you didn’t know. You found out later on. “That was very interesting last night. What was that? Oh.” That’s how it creeps up on you. Because you don’t remember. That’s the whole point of it. It’s suddenly there.

  They don’t call it “heroin” for nothing. It’s a seductress. You can take that stuff for a month or so and stop. Or you can go somewhere where there isn’t any and you’re not really that interested; it’s just something you were taking. And you might feel like you’ve got the flu for a day, but the next day you’re up and about and you feel fine. And then you come into contact again, and you do it some more. And months can pass. And the next time, you’ve got the flu for a couple of days. No big deal, what are they talking about? That’s cold turkey? It was never in the front of my mind until I was truly hooked.

  It’s a subtle thing. It grabs you slowly. After the third or fourth time, then you get the message. And then you start to economize by shooting it up. But I’ve never mainlined. No, the whole delicacy of mainlining was never for me. I was never looking for that flash; I was looking for something to keep me going. If you do it in the vein, you get an incredible flash, but then you want more in about two hours. And also you have tracks, which I couldn’t afford to show off. Furthermore, I could never find a vein. My veins are tight; even doctors can’t find them. So I used to shoot it up in the muscles. I could slap a needle in and not feel a thing. And the spank, the smack, is, if you do it right, more of a shock than the actual injection. Because the recipient reacts to that and meanwhile the needle has come and gone. Especially interesting on the butt. But not politically correct.

  That was a very productive and creative period, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed—some good songs were written, but I never thought drugs per se had very much to do with whether I was productive or not. It might have changed a few chords, a few verses here and there, but I never felt any diminishment or any extra lift as far as what I was doing was concerned. I didn’t look upon smack as an aid or a detraction from what I was doing. I would probably have written “Gimme Shelter” whether I was on or off the stuff. It doesn’t affect your judgment, but in certain cases it helps you be more tenacious about something and follow it further than you would have, than if you just threw up your hands and said, oh, I can’t figure this one out right now. On the stuff sometimes you would just nag at it and nag at it until you’d got it. I’ve never believed that bullshit like all those saxophone players who went on dope because they thought that’s what made Charlie Parker so great. Like anything else in this world, it’s either good for you or it’s bad for you. Or at least it has a use for you. A lump of heroin sitting on the table is totally benign. The only difference is, will you take any? I took loads of other drugs I really didn’t like and never went back to.

  I suppose heroin made me concentrate on something or finish something more than I would normally. This is not a recommendation. The life of being a junkie is not recommended to anybody. I was on the top end, and that was pretty low. It’s certainly not the road to musical genius or anything else. It was a balancing act. I’ve got loads of things to do, this song’s interesting, and I want to make copies of all of this stuff, and I’d be doing it for five days, perfectly balanced on this equilibrium of cocaine and heroin. But the thing is that after about six or seven days, I’d forget what the balance was. Or I’d run out of one side of the balance or the other. Because I was always having to think about supplies. The key to my survival was that I paced myself.

  I never really overdid it. Well, I shouldn’t say never; sometimes I was absolutely fucking comatose. But I think it really became to me like a tool. I realized, I’m running on fuel and everybody else isn’t. They’re trying to keep up with me and I’m just burning. I can keep going because I’m on pure cocaine, none of that shit crap, I’m running on high octane, and if I feel I’m pushing it a little bit, need to relax it, have a little bump of smack. It sounds ridiculous now in a way, but the truth is that was my fuel, that speedball. But I have to impress on anyone who reads this that this was the finest, finest cocaine and the purest, purest heroin, this was no crap off the street, no Mexican shoe scrapings. This was the real shit. I felt very Sherlock Holmes about it all at the time. In order to deal with one’s morbidity, or in order to deal with one’s levity, it was like a balancing act. And it could keep me going for days and days without realizing that in fact I was wearing guys ragged.

  I got to know John Lennon longer and better further down the line. We’d hang for quite a while; he and Yoko would pop by. But the thing was with John—for all his vaunted bravado—he couldn’t really keep up. He’d try and take anything I took but without my good training. A little bit of this, a little bit of that, couple of downers, a couple of uppers, coke and smack, and then I’m going to work. I was freewheeling. And John would inevitably end u
p in my john, hugging the porcelain. And there’d be Yoko in the background, “He really shouldn’t do this,” and I’d go, “I know, but I didn’t force him!” But he’d always come back for more, wherever we were. I remember one night in the Plaza Hotel, he came by my room— and then he disappeared from the room. I’m talking to the chicks, and their mates are all saying, I wonder where John went? And I go to the john, and there he is, hugging the parquet, on the tiles. Too much red wine and some smack. Technicolor yawn. “Don’t move me; these tiles are beautiful”—his face a ghastly green. Sometimes I thought, are these guys just coming to see me or is there some sort of race on that I don’t know about? I don’t think John ever left my house except horizontally. Or definitely propped up.

  Maybe the frenetic pace of life had something to do with it. I would take a barbiturate to wake up, a recreational high compared to heroin, though just as dangerous in its own way. That was breakfast. A Tuinal, pin it, put a needle in it so it would come on quicker. And then take a hot cup of tea, and then consider getting up or not. And later maybe a Mandrax or quaalude. Otherwise I just had too much energy to burn. So you wake up slow, since you have the time. And when the effect wears off after about two hours, you’re feeling mellow, you’ve had a bit of breakfast and you’re ready for work. And sometimes I used to take downers to keep going. When I’m awake, I know that it’s not going to put me to sleep, because I’ve obviously slept. What it’s going to do is smooth my path into the next three or four days. I’ve no intention of going to sleep again for a while, and I know there’s enough energy in me that if I don’t slow it down, I’m going to burn it up before I finish what I think I’m going to finish, in a studio, for instance. I would use drugs like gears. I very rarely used them for pleasure. At least, that’s my excuse. They smoothed my path into the day.