Life

by Keith Richards

  Don’t try this at home. Even I can’t do it anymore; they don’t make them the same. They suddenly decided in the mid-’70s that they would make downers that would put you to sleep without the high. I would raid the lockers of the world to find some more barbiturates. No doubt somewhere in the Middle East, in Europe, I could find some. I love my downers. I was so hyper all the time that I needed to suppress myself. If you didn’t want to go to sleep and just enjoy the buzz, you just stood up for a little bit and listened to some music. It had character. That’s what I would say about barbiturates. Character. Every man who is worth his salt in downers knows what I’m talking about. And even that wouldn’t put me down; that would keep me on a level. To me, the sensible drugs in the world are the pure ones. Tuinals, Seconals, Nembutals. Desbutal was probably one of the best that there ever was, a capsule in a weird red and cream color. They were better than later versions, which acted on the central nervous system. You could piss them out in twenty-four hours; they didn’t hang on to your nerve endings.

  In December 1968, Anita, Mick, Marianne and I took a ship from Lisbon to Rio, maybe ten days at sea. We thought, let’s go to Rio and let’s do it in the old style. If any of us had been seriously hooked by then, we wouldn’t have taken that form of transport. We were still dabbling, except perhaps for Anita, who was going to the ship’s surgeon to ask for morphine from time to time. There was nothing to do on the boat, so we’d go around filming Super 8—the footage still exists. I think it may even show Spiderwoman, as we called her. This was a refrigeration ship, but it had passengers as well. And it was all very ’30s—you expected Noël Coward to walk in. The Spiderwoman was one of those with all the bangles and the perm and the expensive dresses and the cigarette holder. We used to go down and watch her act at the bar. Buy her a drink now and again. “Fascinating, darling.” She was kind of like a female Stash, full of shit. The bar was crowded with these upper-class English people, all drinking like mad, pink gins and pink champagne, all prewar conversation. I was dressed in a diaphanous djellaba, Mexican shoes and a tropical army hat, deliberately outlandish. After a while they discovered who we were and became very perturbed. They started asking questions. “What are you trying to do? Do try to explain to us what this whole thing is about.” We never answered them, and one day Spiderwoman stepped forward and said, “Oh, do give us a hint, just give us a glimmer.” Mick turned to me and said, “We’re the Glimmer Twins.” Baptized on the equator, the Glimmer Twins is the name we used later for ourselves as producers of our own records.

  We already knew Rupert Loewenstein, who soon started to run our affairs, by this time, and he checked us into the best hotel in Rio. And suddenly Anita was mysteriously going through the phone book. I said, what are you looking for? She said, I’m looking for a doctor.

  “A doctor?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What for?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  When she came back later that afternoon, she says, I’m pregnant. And that was Marlon.

  Oh, well… great! I was very happy, but we didn’t want to stop the trip now. We were headed for the Mato Grosso. We lived for a few days on a ranch, where Mick and I wrote “Country Honk,” sitting on a veranda like cowboys, boots on the rail, thinking ourselves in Texas. It was the country version of what became the single “Honky Tonk Women” when we got back to civilization. We decided to put “Country Honk” out as well, on Let It Bleed, a few months later in late ’69. It was written on an acoustic guitar, and I remember the place because every time you flushed the john these black blind frogs came jumping out—an interesting image.

  Marianne went home to get medical help for her child Nicholas, who had been sick on the boat and confined to his cabin for most of the journey. So Mick and Anita and I worked our way to Lima, Peru, and then up to Cusco, which is eleven thousand feet. Everybody’s been a bit short of breath, and we get to the hotel lobby, and it’s lined wall to wall with these huge oxygen tanks. We get to our rooms, and in the middle of the night, Anita finds that the john’s not working. So she takes a pee in the sink, and in the middle of the pee, the sink collapses to the floor and water comes shooting out of a huge pipe. Real Marx Brothers, slapdash, carry on… stuff some rags down there, call the people. The sink was shattered, lying in pieces, but the weird thing is that when they finally arrived in the middle of the night, the Peruvians were very nice. They didn’t go, “What are you doing! How did you break the sink!” They just mopped it up and gave us another room. I thought they were going to bring the cops with them.

  Next day Mick and I went for a walk, sat on a bench and did what you do in the daytime, started chewing coca leaves. When we got back to the hotel, we found a card delivered, as if from the British consul: “General So-and-so… It would be fortuitous to meet.” The general in question was the military governor of Machu Picchu, who had invited us to his home for dinner, and you can’t very well say no to that. He did run the area, and he gave out the permissions and travel passes. Obviously he was very bored in this province, so he summoned us to his villa outside of Cusco. He was living with a German DJ, a blond boy. I’ll never forget the decor; it had all been ordered from Mexico or straight from the States. He was one of those guys that kept the furniture wrapped in plastic covers, probably because the insects would eat everything the minute you unwrapped it. All terrible furniture, but the actual villa was very nice, like an old Spanish mission, as far as I can remember. The general was charming and a great host and we had good food. And then came the pièce de résistance, performed by his boyfriend, the German DJ. They put on these terrible twist records, phony soul—and this was ’69—and then he orders this poor boy to demonstrate how to do the swim, a dance already so old I could barely remember it. He lay on the floor and started rolling around doing the breaststroke. Mick and I looked at each other. Where the fuck? How do we get out of here? It was almost impossible to not burst out laughing, because the guy’s doing his best, he thinks he’s doing the best swim south of the border. Yeah, get down, man! And he would do anything the general ordered him to do. “Now do the mashed potato,” and he would instantly obey. We really thought we’d gone back a hundred years or so.

  We traveled to Urubamba, a village not far from Machu Picchu on a river of the same name. Once you got out there, you were out there, man. There was nothing there. No hotel, certainly. This place was not on the tourist map. The only white people they ever saw were lost. In fact we were, basically (lost). But eventually we found this bar and had a nice meal, shrimps and rice and beans, and we said, well, we’ve only got this car; any chance of some dormir? And at first a lot of no’s went around the room, but they noticed we had a guitar with us, so Mick and I serenaded them for about an hour, trying to come up with any old thing we could think of. It seemed to me you needed a majority vote to get invited to sleep on the premises. And Anita being pregnant, I did want to give her a bed for the night. We must have done all right. I did a few bits of “Malagueña” and a few other songs that sounded vaguely Spanish that Gus had taught me. And finally the landlord said we could have a couple of rooms upstairs. The only time Mick and I sang for a bed.

  It was a good writing period. Songs were coming. “Honky Tonk Women,” which came out as a single before the next album, Let It Bleed, in July 1969, was the culmination of everything we were good at at the time. It’s a funky track and dirty too; it’s the first major use of the open tuning, where the riff and the rhythm guitar provide the melody. It’s got all that blues and black music from Dartford onwards in it, and Charlie is unbelievable on that track. It was a groove, no doubt about it, and it’s one of those tracks that you knew was a number one before you’d finished the motherfucker. In those days I used to set up the riffs and the titles and the hook, and Mick would fill it in. That was basically the gig. We didn’t really think too much or agonize. There you go, this one goes like this, “I met a fucking bitch in somewhere city.” Take it away, Mick. Your job now, I’ve given you t
he riff, baby. You fill it in and meanwhile I’ll try and come up with another one. And he can write, can Mick. Give him the idea and he’ll run with it.

  We also composed using what we called vowel movement—very important for songwriters. The sounds that work. Many times you don’t know what the word is, but you know the word has got to contain this vowel, this sound. You can write something that’ll look really good on paper, but it doesn’t contain the right sound. You start to build the consonants around the vowels. There’s a place to go ooh and there’s a place to go daah. And if you get it wrong, it sounds like crap. It’s not necessarily that it rhymes with anything at the moment, and you’ve got to look for that rhyming word too, but you know there’s a particular vowel involved. Doo-wop is not called that for nothing; that was all vowel movement.

  “Gimme Shelter” and “You Got the Silver” were the first tracks we recorded in Olympic Studios for what became Let It Bleed—the album that we worked on throughout the summer of ’69, the summer that Brian died. “You Got the Silver” was not the first solo vocal I recorded with the Stones—that was “Connection.” But it was one of the first ones I wrote entirely by myself and laid on Mick. And I sang it solo simply because we had to spread the workload. We’d always sung harmony, like the Everlys, so it wasn’t as if I’d suddenly started to sing. But like all my songs, it never felt like my creation. I’m a damn good antenna to pick up songs zooming through the room, but that’s all. Where did “Midnight Rambler” come from? I don’t know. It was the old days trying to knock you on the back of the head. “Hey, don’t forget us, pal. Write a damn good blues. Write one that takes the form in another way, just for a bit.” “Midnight Rambler” is a Chicago blues. The chord sequence isn’t, but the sound is pure Chicago. I knew how the rhythm should go. It was in the tightness of the chord sequence, the D’s and the A’s and the E’s. It wasn’t a blues sequence, but it came out like heavy-duty blues. That’s one of the most original blues you’ll hear from the Stones. The title, the subject, was just one of those phrases taken out of sensationalist headlines that only exist for a day. You just happen to be looking at a newspaper, “Midnight Rambler on the loose again.” Oh, I’ll have him.

  The fact that you could get that kind of tasty bite into the lyrics by mixing in contemporary stories or headlines or just what appeared to be mundane daily narrative was so far away from pop music and also from Cole Porter or Hoagy Carmichael. “I saw her today at the reception” was just very plain. No dynamics, no sense of where it was going. I think Mick and I looked at each other and said, well, if John and Paul can do it… The Beatles and Bob Dylan to a great extent changed songwriting in that way and people’s attitudes towards voice. Bob has not got a particularly great voice, but it’s expressive and he knows where to put it, and that’s more important than any technical beauties of voice. It’s almost anti-singing. But at the same time what you’re hearing is real.

  “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” was basically all Mick. I remember him coming into the studio and saying, I’ve got this song. I said, you got any verses? And he said, I have, but how is it going to sound? Because he’d written it on guitar, it was like a folk song at the time. I had to come up with a rhythm, an idea.… I’d float it around the band and just play the sequence here and there. And maybe Charlie decides which to go for. It’s all experimentation. And then we added the choir on the end, very deliberately. Let’s put on a straight chorus. In other words, let’s try and reach them people up there as well. It was a dare, kind of. Mick and I thought it should go into a choir, a gospel thing, because we’d played with black gospel singers in America. And then, what if we got one of the best choirs in England, all these white, lovely singers, and do it that way, see what we can get out of them? Turn them on a little bit, get them into a little sway and a move, you know? “You caaarnt always…” It was a beautiful juxtaposition.

  In early June, when we were working every day in Olympic Studios on these tracks, I turned over the Mercedes with Anita in it when she was seven months pregnant with Marlon. Anita broke her collarbone. I took her to St Richard’s, and they patched her up within half an hour while I sat around—really brilliant people looking after us—only to walk out straight into the arms of the Brighton CID, who then took us to Chichester police station and started to interrogate us. I’ve got a pregnant woman with a broken collarbone, for Christ’s sake, it’s three in the morning, and they don’t give a shit. The more I deal with cops, especially British cops, I must say, something’s wrong with the training. My attitude probably didn’t help, but what am I going to do, roll over for them? Get outta here. They suspected drugs. Of course there were drugs involved. They should have looked in the oak tree around the corner. They start with “How did the car turn over? You must have been out of it.” Actually no. On a corner, close to Redlands, a red light came on in the car and nothing would work. A hydraulic fault. Brakes wouldn’t work, steering wouldn’t work, it just teetered on a patch of slippery grass and then rolled over. It was a convertible, and it was three tons rolling on the windscreen and on the struts that hold up the canvas. The miracle was that the windscreen held up. I only found out later it was because the car was built in 1947 out of panzer parts and armored steel, immediately postwar, German scrap lying around the battlefield—whatever they could get their hands on. This shit was heavy-duty steel. Basically I was riding a tank with a canvas roof. No wonder they swept through France in six weeks. No wonder they almost took Russia. The panzers saved my life.

  My body left the car. I watched it all happen from twelve, fifteen feet above. You can leave your body, believe me. I’d been trying all my life, but this was the first real experience of it. I watched that thing roll over in slow motion three times, very dispassionate, very cool about it. I was an observer. No emotion involved. You’re already dead; forget about it. But meanwhile, before the lights actually went out… I noticed the underside of the car, and I noticed it was built with these diagonal riveted struts underneath. Very solid-looking things. It all appeared to be slow motion. You’re holding a very long breath. And I know that Anita is in the car, and I’m wondering in another part of my mind if Anita is also watching from above. I’m more concerned about her than I am myself, because I’m not even in the car. I’ve escaped, in the mind, or wherever you think you are when things like that happen in a split second. But then it came pounding rubber side down, after three turns, into this hedge. And suddenly I’m back behind the wheel.

  So Marlon had his first car crash two months before he was born. No wonder he has never driven, never obtained a driving license. Marlon’s full name is Marlon Leon Sundeep. Brando called up while Anita was in hospital, to compliment her on Performance. “Marlon, that’s a good name. Why don’t we call him Marlon?” The poor kid was forced through this religious ceremony when he arrived home in Cheyne Walk, the rice and the flower petals and the chanting and all of that shit. Well, Anita’s the mother, right? Who am I to say no? Anything you like, Mother. You’ve just given birth to our son. So the Bauls of Bengal came, courtesy of Robert Fraser. And Robert had a crib made, beautiful little one that rocked. So that’s his full name, Marlon Leon Sundeep Richards. Which is the most important bit. The rest is mere pretext.

  It’s strange, given the fact that we’d had to pull the plug on Brian in the studio three years earlier, when he was lying in a coma beside his buzzing amp, to be reminded that he was still playing on tracks early in 1969, the year of his death. Autoharp on “You Got the Silver,” percussion on “Midnight Rambler.” Where did that come from? A last flare from the shipwreck.

  By May we were playing in his replacement, Mick Taylor, at Olympic Studios—playing him in on “Honky Tonk Women,” on which his overdub is there for posterity. No surprise to us, how good he was. He seemed just to step in naturally at the time. We had all heard Mick, and we knew him because he’d played with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. Everybody was looking at me, because I was the other guitar player, but my pos
ition was, I’d play with anybody. We could only find out by playing together. And we did the most brilliant stuff together, some of the most brilliant stuff the Stones ever did. Everything was there in his playing—the melodic touch, a beautiful sustain and a way of reading a song. He had a lovely sound, some very soulful stuff. He’d get where I was going even before I did. I was in awe sometimes listening to Mick Taylor, especially on that slide—try it on “Love in Vain.” Sometimes just jamming, warming up with him, I’d go, whoa. I guess that’s where the emotion came out. I loved the guy, I loved to work with him, but he was very shy and very distant. I’d get close to him when we were working out stuff and playing, and when he let his hair down he was extremely funny. But I always found it very difficult to find any more than the Mick Taylor I’d met the first time. You can see it on the screen in Gimme Shelter—his face has no animation. He was fighting himself somewhere inside. There’s not a lot you can do about that, with guys like that; you can’t bring them out. They’ve got to fight their own demons. You’d bring him out for an hour or two, for an evening or a night, but the next day he was brooding again. Not a barrel of laughs, let’s put it like that. Well, you give certain people their space. You realize, some guys you can spend a day with them and basically you’ve learned all you’re ever going to know about them. Like Mick Jagger in exact reverse.

  We’d already fired Brian two or three weeks before he died. It had come to a head and Mick and I had been down to Winnie-the-Pooh’s house. (Cotchford Farm had belonged to author A. A. Milne, and Brian had recently bought it.) Mick and I didn’t fancy the gig, but we drove down together and said, “Hey, Brian… It’s all over, pal.”