Life

by Keith Richards

  As the evening went dark and we went on stage, the atmosphere became very lurid and hairy. As Stu said—he was there—“Getting a bit hairy, Keith.” I said, “We’ve got to brass it out, Stu.” Such a big crowd, we could only see in front of our immediate circle, with lights, which are already in your eyes, because stage lights always are. So you’re virtually half blinded; you can’t see and judge everything that’s going on. You just keep your fingers crossed.

  Well, what can you do? The Stones are playing, what can I threaten you with? “We’re not playing.” I said, “Calm down or we ain’t going to play no more.” What’s the point of traipsing your ass all the way out here and not seeing anything? But by then certain things were set.

  It wasn’t long after that before the shit hit the fan. In the film you can see Meredith Hunter waving a pistol and you can see the stabbing. He had a pale lime green suit on and a hat. He was foaming at the mouth too; he was as nuts as the rest. To wave a shooter in front of the Angels was like, well, that’s what they’re waiting for! That’s the trigger. I doubt the thing was loaded, but he wanted to be flash. Wrong place, wrong time.

  When it happened, nobody knew he’d been stabbed to death. The show went on. Gram was there too, he was playing that day with the Burritos. We all piled into this overloaded chopper. It was like getting back from any other gig. Thank God we got out of there, because it was hairy, though we were used to hairy escapes. This one was just on a bigger scale in a place we didn’t know. But it was no hairier than getting out of the Empress Ballroom in Blackpool. In actual fact, if it hadn’t been for the murder, we’d have thought it a very smooth gig by the skin of its fucking teeth. It was also the first time “Brown Sugar” was played to a live audience—a baptism from hell, in a confused rumble in the Californian night. Nobody knew what had happened until we’d gotten back to the hotel later or even the next morning.

  Mick Taylor being in the band on that ’69 tour certainly sealed the Stones together again. So we did Sticky Fingers with him. And the music changed—almost unconsciously. You write with Mick Taylor in mind, maybe without realizing it, knowing he can come up with something different. You’ve got to give him something he’ll really enjoy. Not just the same old grind —which is what he was getting with John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. So you keep looking for ways. Hopefully turning the musicians on translates into turning the audience on. Some of the Sticky Fingers compositions were rooted in the fact that I knew Taylor was going to pull something great. By the time we got back to England, we had “Sugar,” we had “Wild Horses” and “You Gotta Move.” The rest we recorded at Mick’s house, Stargroves, on our new “Mighty Mobile” recording studio, and some at Olympic Studios in March and April 1970. “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking” came out flying—I just found the tuning and the riff and started to swing it and Charlie picked up on it just like that, and we’re thinking, hey, this is some groove. So it was smiles all around. For a guitar player it’s no big deal to play, the chopping, staccato bursts of chords, very direct and spare. Marianne had a lot to do with “Sister Morphine.” I know Mick’s writing, and he was living with Marianne at the time, and I know from the style of it there were a few Marianne lines in there. “Moonlight Mile” was all Mick’s. As far as I can remember, Mick came in with the whole idea of that, and the band just figured out how to play it. And Mick can write! It’s unbelievable how prolific he was. Sometimes you’d wonder how to turn the fucking tap off. The odd times he would come out with so many lyrics, you’re crowding the airwaves, boy. I’m not complaining. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to do. It’s not like writing poetry or just writing down lyrics. It’s got to fit what has already been created. That’s what a lyricist is—a guy that has been given a piece of music and then sets up how the vocals are going to go. And Mick is brilliant at that.

  Around now we started to gather musicians to play on tracks, the so-called supersidemen, some of whom are still around. Nicky Hopkins had been there almost since the beginning; Ry Cooder had come and almost gone. On Sticky Fingers we linked up again with Bobby Keys, the great Texan saxophone player, and his partner Jim Price. We’d met Bobby very briefly, the first time since our first US tour, at Elektra Studios when he was recording with Delaney & Bonnie. Jimmy Miller was working there on Let It Bleed and called Bobby in to play a solo on “Live with Me.” The track was just raw, straight-ahead, balls-to-the-wall rock and roll, tailor-made for Bobby. A long collaboration was born. He and Price put some horns on the end of “Honky Tonk Women,” but they’re mixed down so low you can only hear them in the very last second and a half on the fade. Chuck Berry had a saxophone just for the very end of “Roll Over Beethoven.” We loved that idea of another instrument coming in just for the last second.

  Keys and Price came over to England to play some sessions with Clapton and George Harrison, and Mick bumped into them in a nightclub. So it was get ’em while they’re here. They were a hot section and Mick felt that we needed a horn section, and it was all right with me. The Texan bulldog gave me a look. “We’ve played before,” he Texaned. “We have? Where?” “San Antonio Teen Fair.” “Oh, you were there?” “Damn fucking right.” Then and there I said, screw it, and let’s rock. A huge warm grin, a handshake to crush a rock. You’re a motherfucker! Bobby Keys! That was the session in December ’69 when Bobby blew his stuff on “Brown Sugar”—as much a blast for the times as anything else on the airwaves.

  I did a couple of cleanups with Gram Parsons at this time—both unsuccessful. I’ve been through more cold turkeys than there are freezers. I took the fucking hell week as a matter of course. I took it as being a part of what I was into. But cold turkey, once is enough, and it should be, quite honestly. At the same time I felt totally invincible. And also I was a bit antsy about people telling me what I could put in my body.

  I always felt that no matter how stoned I was, as far as I was concerned, I could cover what I was doing. And I was bigheaded in that I thought I could control heroin. I thought I could take it or leave it. But it is far more seductive than you think, because you can take it or leave it for a while, but every time you try and leave it, it gets a little harder. You can’t, unfortunately, decide the moment when you’ve got to leave it. The taking of it is easy, the leaving of it hard, and you never want to be in that position when suddenly someone bursts in and says, come with me, and you realize that you’ve got to leave it, and you’re in no condition to go to the police station and start cold turkey. You’ve got to think about that and say, hey, there’s one simple way of never being in that position. Don’t take it.

  But there’s probably a million different reasons you do. I think it’s maybe to do with working on the stage. The high levels of energy and adrenaline require, if you can find it, a sort of antidote. And I saw smack as just becoming part of that. Why do you do it to yourself? I never particularly liked being that famous. I could face people easier on the stuff, but I could do that with booze too. It isn’t really the whole answer. I also felt I was doing it not to be a “pop star.” There was something I didn’t really like about that end of what I was doing, the blah blah blah. That was very difficult to handle, and I could handle it better on smack. Mick chose flattery, which is very like junk—a departure from reality. I chose junk. And also I was with my old lady Anita, who was as avid as I was. I think we just wanted to explore that avenue. And when we did, we only meant to explore the first few blocks, but we explored it to the end.

  Off of Bill Burroughs, I got apomorphine, along with Smitty, the vicious nurse from Cornwall. The cure that Gram Parsons and I did was total anti-heroin aversion therapy. And Smitty loved to administer it. “Time, boys.” There’s Parsons and me in my bed, “Oh no, here comes Smitty.” Gram and I needed to take a cure just before the farewell tour of 1971, when he and his soon-to-be wife, Gretchen, came over to England and we went about our usual ways. Bill Burroughs recommended this hideous woman to administer the apomorphine that Burroughs talked endlessly about, a therapy that wa
s pretty useless. But Burroughs swore by it. I didn’t know him that well, except to talk about dope—how to get off or how to get the quality you’re after. Smitty was Burroughs’s favorite nurse and she was a sadist and the cure consisted of her shooting you up with this shit and then standing over you. You do as you’re told. You don’t argue. “Stop sniveling, boy. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t screwed up.” We took this cure in Cheyne Walk, and it was Gram and me in my four-poster bed, the only guy I ever slept with. Except that we kept falling off the bed because we were twitching so much from the treatment. With a bucket to throw up in, if you could stop twitching for enough seconds to get near it. “You got the bucket, Gram?” Our only outlet, if we could stand up, would be to go down and play the piano and sing for a bit, or as much as possible to kill time. I wouldn’t recommend that cure to anybody. I wondered if that was Bill Burroughs’s joke, to send me to probably the worst cure he’d ever had.

  It didn’t work. It’s a long seventy-two hours, and you’ve been shitting yourself and pissing yourself and twitching and spasms. And after that, your system’s washed. When you take the stuff you put all the other stuff—your endorphins—to sleep. They think, oh, he doesn’t need us, because something else is in there. And they take seventy-two hours to wake up and go back to work. But usually as soon as you’ve finished, you go back on it. After all that, after a week of that shit, I need a fix. And there you go, the number of times I’ve cold turkeyed, only to go straight back on. Because the cold turkey is so rough.

  The powers that be couldn’t break the butterfly on the wheel, but they tried again and again at my house in Cheyne Walk in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I got quite used to being thrown up against my own doorposts, coming home from a club at three in the morning. Just as I reached my front gate, out of the bushes would leap these people with truncheons. Oh OK, here we go again, assume the position. “Up against the wall, Keith.” That fake familiarity annoyed me. They wanted to see you cringe, but I’ve been there, pal. “Oh, it’s the Flying Squad!” “We’re not flying as high as you, Keith,” and all that bullshit. They wouldn’t have a warrant, but they were playing their own game.

  “Oh, I’ve got you this time, my boy, flash ol’ sod”—their glee in thinking they’d pinned me. “Oh, what have we got here, Keith?” and I know I’ve got nothing on me. They come on heavy because they want to see if they can make a big rock-and-roll star quiver in his boots. You’ll have to do better than that. Let’s see how far you want to go. Officers walking in and out and looking at bits of paper, confused as to what’s going to happen when the newspapers hear that I’ve been pulled in again, and wondering whether Detective Constable Constable has made the right move tonight in his fervor to clear the world of junkie guitarists.

  It was also a real drag to wake up every day with these bluebottles around your door, these bobbies, to wake up realizing you’re a criminal. And you start to think like one. The difference between waking up in the morning and saying, “Oh, nice day,” and peering through the curtains to see if the unmarked cars are still parked outside. Or waking up grateful that during the night there wasn’t a knock at the door. What a mind-bending distraction. We’re not destroying the virtue of the nation, but they think we are, so eventually we’re drawn into a war.

  It was Chrissie Gibbs who linked Mick up with Rupert Loewenstein when it was clear that we had to try and sever ourselves from the wiles of Allen Klein. Rupert was a merchant banker, very pukka, trustworthy, and although I didn’t actually get to speak to him for about a year after he started working for us, I got on well with him from then on. He discovered I liked reading, and one book led to a library’s worth over the years, sent by Rupert.

  Rupert didn’t like rock and roll; he thought “composing” was something done with a pen and paper, like Mozart. He’d never even heard of Mick Jagger when Chrissie first talked to him. We brought seven lawsuits against Allen Klein over seventeen years, and eventually it was a farce, with both sides waving and chatting in the courtroom—like a normal day at the office. So Rupert at least learned the jargon of the business, even if he never got emotionally involved in the music.

  It had taken us a while to discover what Allen Klein had helped himself to and what wasn’t ours anymore. We had a company in the UK called Nanker Phelge Music, which was a company we all shared in. So we get to New York and sign this deal to a company into which everything is to be channeled henceforth, also called Nanker Phelge, which we presume is our same company with an American name, Nanker Phelge USA. Of course after a while we discovered that Klein’s company in America bore no relation to Nanker Phelge UK and was wholly owned by Klein. So all the money was going to Nanker Phelge USA. When Mick was trying to buy his house on Cheyne Walk, he couldn’t get the money out of Allen Klein for eighteen months because Allen was trying to buy MGM.

  Klein was a lawyer manqué; he loved the letter of the law and loved the fact that justice and the law had nothing to do with each other; it was a game for him. He ended up owning the copyright and the master tapes of all our work—anything written or recorded in the time of our contract with Decca, which was to end in 1971. But it ended in fact with ‘Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!’ in 1970. So Klein owned unfinished and uncompleted songs up to the ’71 limit, and that was the tricky part. The fight was about whether the songs between that record and ’71 belonged to him. In the end we conceded two songs, “Angie” and “Wild Horses.” He got the publishing of years of our songs and we got a cut of the royalties.

  He still owns the publishing to “Satisfaction” too, or his heirs do; he died in 2009. But I don’t give a shit. He was an education. Whatever he did, he blew us up the river, he put it together, although “Satisfaction” certainly helped at that moment. I’ve made more money by giving up the publishing on “Satisfaction,” and my idea has never been to make money. Originally it was, do we make enough to pay for the guitar strings? And then later on, do we make enough to put on the kind of show we want to put on? I’d say the same about Charlie, and Mick too. Especially initially, hey, we don’t mind making the money, but most of it’s plowed back into what it is we want to do. So the basic flavor of it is that Allen Klein made us and screwed us at the same time.

  Marshall Chess, who climbed the ladder from the mail room to become president of Chess after his father died, had just sold the company and was looking to start a new label. Together we founded Rolling Stones Records in 1971 and made a deal with Atlantic Records to distribute, which is where Ahmet Ertegun came in. Ahmet! An elegant Turk who with his brother, Nesuhi, drove the music business into a total re-think of what it was that people could hear. The echoes of the Stones’ idealism (juvenile as it was) resonated. Shit, I miss the mother. The last time I saw him was backstage at the Beacon Theatre in New York. “Where’s the fucking john?” I showed him the way. He snapped the lock. I went on stage. After the show I found out he had slipped on the tiles. He never recovered. I loved the man. Ahmet encouraged talent. He was very much hands-on. It wasn’t like an EMI or a Decca, some huge conglomerate. That company was born and built up out of love of music, not business. Jerry Wexler too, it was a whole team, a family thing in a way. Need I go through the roster? Aretha… Ray… too many to mention. You felt like you’d joined the elite.

  But in 1970 we had a problem.

  We were in the ludicrous situation where Klein would be lending us money that we could never afford to repay because he hadn’t paid the tax and anyway we’d spent the money. The tax rate in the early ’70s on the highest earners was 83 percent, and that went up to 98 percent for investments and so-called unearned income. So that’s the same as being told to leave the country.

  And I take my hat off to Rupert for figuring a way out of massive debt for us. It was Rupert’s advice that we become nonresident —the only way we could ever get back on our feet financially.

  The last thing I think the powers that be expected when they hit us with super-super tax is that we’d say, fine, we’ll lea
ve. We’ll be another one not paying tax to you. They just didn’t factor that in. It made us bigger than ever, and it produced Exile on Main St., which was maybe the best thing we did. They didn’t believe we’d be able to continue as we were if we didn’t live in England. And in all honesty, we were very doubtful too. We didn’t know if we would make it, but if we didn’t try, what would we do? Sit in England and they’d give us a penny out of every pound we earned? We had no desire to be closed down. And so we upped and went to France.

  Dominique Tarlé

  Chapter Eight

  In which we leave for France in spring of 1971 and I rent Nellcôte, a house on the Riviera. Mick gets married in Saint-Tropez. We set up our mobile truck to record Exile on Main St. and settle into a prolific nighttime recording schedule. We motorboat to Italy for breakfast in the Mandrax. I hit my stride on the five-string guitar. Gram Parsons comes and Mick gets possessive. I insulate myself with drugs; we get busted. I hang out for the last time with Gram in LA and get badly hooked on second-rate dope. I flee to Switzerland with Anita for a cure, undergo cold-turkey horrors and compose “Angie” while recovering.