I packed all my stuff up at the Wick when Ronnie Wood emigrated for tax reasons to America that year, 1976. We couldn’t go back to Cheyne Walk because of the twenty-four-hour patrols and the “Oh hello, Keith.” If we stayed there, it was with windows closed and curtains closed, a hermetic existence, a real siege, drawn into ourselves.
We were just trying to stay alive and stay one step ahead of the law all the time. Always traveling, a phone call in front, can you get needles there? Mundane fucking junkie shit. It was a prison of my own making. We lived for a while at the Ritz Hotel in London until we were forced to flee on account of our room being in need of refurbishment courtesy of Anita. Marlon began going to school for the first time properly, to Hill House, a school where they wore orange uniforms and seemed to spend much time walking in crocodile lines through the streets of London. The boys of Hill House were a London institution, like the Chelsea pensioners. Marlon, needless to say, found this a profound shock, or what he terms in retrospect a “bloody nightmare.”
At this moment John Phillips, of the disbanded Mamas and Papas, was living in London. He and his new wife, the actress Geneviève Waïte, and his small child, Tamerlane, had a house in Glebe Place, Chelsea. And we took refuge there for a time. We moved in. There were already plans to work together, for Rolling Stones Records to produce John’s solo album, with Ronnie, Mick, Mick Taylor and me playing on it. Ahmet Ertegun was funding it from Atlantic Records. Good idea too—on paper. John was a great guy, really funny and interesting to work with (although he was nuts). He’d written almost all those songs for the Mamas and others that defined a certain period, some with his ex-wife Michelle Phillips—“California Dreamin’,” “Monday, Monday,” “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair).”
Phillips was amazing. I’ve never known anybody to be so hooked on dope so quick, and I had something to do with it. The night Ronnie was leaving the Wick, John had called up and said, I’ve got a bottle of this stuff called Merck. And he said, does anybody have some use for it? I don’t do that stuff. I said I would drop by on my way out of Ronnie’s. I left the Wick and went straight to John’s joint. We were playing and everything, and he’d shown me the bottle. We were there two or three hours and I said, John, can I use your john? I’ve got to take a hit. So I went in the john, shot up. I mean, I didn’t want to pull it in front of the family or anything like that. And when I came out, John said, what was that you were doing? I said, John, it’s called smack. And I did the thing I never, or very rarely, did. I think it was the only time. You don’t turn other people on; you keep it to yourself. He’d just given me this cocaine, and I felt, well, you want to know what I’m doing? Here we go. So I shot him up. Just in the muscle.
I always felt responsible for John because I turned him on to smack. Within a week, he’s got a pharmacy under control and he’s become a dealer. I’ve never seen a guy become a junkie that quick. Usually it takes months, sometimes years, for a guy to get hooked hooked hooked. But John, ten days later, he’s running the show. It changed his life. He moved back to New York, and so did I, the following year, when even greater madness took place, but more of that later. The music we played together with Mick and others was released after John’s death in 2001, with the title Pay Pack & Follow.
Anita, Marlon and I moved around. We stayed in Blakes Hotel. We didn’t last long there either, so we moved into a rented house in Old Church Street in Chelsea, recently vacated by Donald Sutherland. It was here, in this house, where Anita really lost it with me. She had become delusional, very paranoid. It was one of her darkest periods and it developed with the dope. Wherever we went, she was convinced that someone had left a stash before doing a runner. She’d take the whole place apart looking for it. The bathroom at the Ritz, sofas, wallpaper, paneling. I remember once I took her in the car and told her to concentrate on the number plates, something mundane to try and calm her, connect her to reality. We made a pact, at her request, that I would never take her to the nuthouse.
I like a high-spirited woman. And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie—she who decides who dies in battle. But she went right off the rails, became lethal. Anita had rage whether there was dope or not, but if there was no dope she’d go crazy. Marlon and I used to live in fear of her sometimes, of what she would do to herself, let alone to us. I used to take him downstairs to the kitchen and we’d hunker down and say, wait for Mum to get over it. She was slinging shit about, which might have hit the kid. You’d come back to the house, and the walls were covered in blood or wine. You didn’t know what was going to happen next. We would be there just hoping that she’d stay asleep and not wake up in one of her screaming fits, raging at the top of the stairs like Bette Davis, throwing glass objects at you. She was a tough bitch. No, there wasn’t a lot of fun for a while with Anita in the middle ’70s. She became unbearable. She was a real bitch to me, a bitch to Marlon, she was a bitch to herself. And she knows it, and I’m writing it here in this book. Basically I was looking at how the hell do I get out of there without screwing it up with the kids. I loved her dearly. I don’t get that involved with women if I don’t love them dearly. I always feel it’s my failure if it doesn’t work, if I can’t pull it together and make it all right. But with Anita I couldn’t make it right. She was unstoppably self-destructive. She was like Hitler; she wanted to take everything down with her.
I tried to clean up loads of times, but not Anita. She would go the other way. Any suggestion of it and she would go into rebellion mode and if anything take more. Domestic duties, at this point, were not something she took on gladly. I said, what the fuck am I doing? OK, she’s the mother of my children. Swallow it. I loved the woman; I’d do anything. She’s got a problem? I’ll take over. I’ll help out.
“Unscrupulous” is not a bad word for her. I don’t mind flinging it in her face right now, and she knows it. It’s up to her to live with. I just did what I had to do. Anita will still have to wonder how the hell she screwed up. I’d still be with her right now! I’m never one to change, especially with the kids. Anita and I can now sit around at Christmastime with our grandchildren and give each other a bemused smile; hey, you silly old cow, how you doing? Anita is in good shape. She’s become a benign spirit. She’s a marvelous granny. She’s survived. But things could have been better, baby.
I sealed myself off much of the time from Anita, or she didn’t care to join us in the studio at the top of the house. She spent most of her time in the Donald Sutherland memorial bedroom, which had massive chains hanging from the wall, purely decorative but giving an overall S&M feel to the room. The regulars came by—Stash, Robert Fraser. I was seeing a lot of the Monty Python people at the time, particularly Eric Idle, who used to come up and hang.
It was in this Church Street period that I achieved my longest feat of Merck-assisted wakefulness—a nine-day epic of no sleep. I was still going on the ninth day. I may have had a couple of snoozes, but no more than twenty minutes. I was busy doing my sounds, transferring this to that, making notes, writing songs, and I’d become manic, basically a hermit. But over the nine days lots of people came to visit the cave. Everybody I knew in London at the time dropped by day by day, but to me it was just one long day. They’d been doing other things, whatever they had to do. They’d slept and brushed their teeth and shit, and I’m up there writing songs, reorganizing my sounds and making double copies of everything. This was all on cassette in those days. And then I would get into artistically decorating the labels. The reggae one had a beautiful Lion of Judah.
It was into the ninth day and I was still, as far as I was concerned, in fine form. I remember I was going to copy one cassette onto another. I’d got it all down, noted which track, boom, pushed play. I turned around and fell asleep on my feet for three-tenths of a second, then I fell forward and hit the JBL speaker. Which woke me up, but worse than that, I couldn’t see a thing. It was just a curtain of blood. There were three steps, I still remember them now, and I managed to miss
every one, and I rolled over and fell asleep on the floor. I woke up with an encrusted face, maybe a day later. Eight full days, and on the ninth day, he fell.
The band was waiting for me in Toronto early in 1977. I put off going for many days. They sent me telegrams: “Where are you?” We had a gig at the El Mocambo, which would provide more tracks for our Love You Live album. We needed some days of rehearsal. I couldn’t, apparently, extract myself from the rituals of Old Church Street. And I had to get Anita on the road too, which was just as difficult. But finally we flew there on February 24. The gigs—two nights at the club—were scheduled for ten days later. I took a hit on the airplane and somehow the spoon ended up in Anita’s pocket. They found nothing on me at the airport, but they found the spoon on Anita and busted her. Then they bided their time. They went to great effort to prepare the big bust of me in the Harbour Castle Hotel, knowing that they’d find something— just follow the junkies. They had intercepted a package of stuff I’d sent ahead. Alan Dunn, the longest-serving Stones man, the logistics and transport supremo, discovered later that the regular personnel who worked in the hotel suddenly found themselves working alongside many extra people, who had been hired mostly as telephone and television engineers. The police were setting it up: massive resources against one guitar player. The hotel manager would have known, but of course nobody tipped us off. To save money, Peter Rudge, the tour manager, had taken any personnel off the floor. So the police came straight to the room. Marlon would not normally have let in any policemen, but they were dressed as waiters. They couldn’t wake me up. By law you have to be conscious to be arrested. It took them forty-five minutes—I’d been up for five days and I’d had a heavy-duty shot and I was out. This was my last rehearsal day, and I’d been asleep for about two hours. My memory of it is waking up and them going slap slap, two Mounties dragging me about the room slapping me. Trying to get me “conscious.” Bang bang bang bang bang. Who are you? What’s your name? Do you know where you are and do you know why we’re here? “My name’s Keith Richards, and I’m in the Harbour Hotel. What you’re doing here I have no idea.” Meanwhile they’d found my stash. And it was about an ounce. Quite a lot. No more than a man needs. I mean, it wouldn’t feed the city. But obviously they knew their shit, like I knew my shit, and it was clearly not the Canada smack. It had come from England. I’d put it in the flight case.
So they arrest me, take me to this Mountie police station, and it’s really not my time of day. They put me through the books and everything. And because of the amount they found, they decided to charge me with trafficking, which is an automatic jail sentence for a very long time, in Canada. I said, OK, fine. Give me a gram back. “Oh, we can’t do that.” I said, so what are you going to do now? You know I need it and that I’m going to have to get it. What are you going to do? Follow me and bust me again? Is that your game? How are you going to play this? Give me some back till I figure this out. “Oh no, no.” And that was when Bill Wyman came through. Bill was the first one to come around and say, is there anything I can do? And I said quite honestly, I’m out of shit and I need some shit. And of course that’s not Bill’s area, but he said, I’ll see what I can do. And he found somebody. We’d been working at the El Mocambo club, so we had local connections. Bill came through and got some shit to get me off the hook, over the hill. And that was a big risk for Bill, considering the attention I was getting. That was about the closest emotional thing that I can remember with Bill.
The Mounties never did try to bust me again. I was quoted as saying, “What is on trial is the same thing that’s always been on trial. Dear old them and us. I find this all a bit weary. I’ve done my stint in the fucking dock. Why don’t they pick on the Sex Pistols?” Yet again someone was seriously after my ass, and the situation was further complicated by Margaret Trudeau, the wife of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, moving into the hotel as a Stones appendage, offering a double-big tabloid story. The prime minister’s young wife with the Stones, and you throw in drugs, you’re looking at a three-month run. In the end it may have played in my favor, but at the time it was the worst combination of circumstances. Margaret Trudeau was twenty-two and Trudeau was fifty-one when they got married. It was a bit like Sinatra and Mia Farrow—the power and the flower child. And now Trudeau’s bride—and this was exactly their sixth wedding anniversary—was seen walking in our corridors in a bathrobe. So then the story was that she had left him. She had, in fact, moved into the room next to Ronnie, and they were hitting it off really well, or, as Ronnie put it so nicely in his memoirs, “We shared something special for that short time.” She flew to New York to escape the publicity, but Mick flew to New York as well, so it was assumed they too were an item. Worse and worse. She was a groupie, that’s all she was, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with that. But you shouldn’t be a prime minister’s wife if you want to be a groupie.
I’m out on a bond of many dollars, but they took my passport and I’m released only to the hotel. So I’m trapped. And I’m still waiting to see if they’re going to jail me. They’re shooting fish in a barrel. At another hearing they added a charge of cocaine possession and revoked bail, but we got off that on a technicality. I would have loved to have dared them to put me in jail. It was all bullshit. They didn’t have the balls. They weren’t feeling confident. The rest of the band left Canada out of caution, and quite wisely so. I was the first one to say, you fuckers get out of here; they’re only going to involve you. Let me take the heat. It’s my heat.
It was quite likely that jail time was on the cards. I was facing a probable two years, according to my lawyers. It was Stu who suggested that I should use the waiting time to put down some tracks of my own—put something down to remember the man by. He hired a studio, a beautiful piano and a microphone. The result has been doing the circuit for a while—KR’s Toronto Bootleg. We just did all the country songs, nothing different from what I do any other night, but there was a certain poignancy about it because at that moment things looked a bit grim. I played the George Jones, Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Domino songs I’d played with Gram. Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” is pretty poignant anyway. The warden is taking the prisoner down the hall to his execution.
Sing me back home with a song I used to hear…
Sing me back home before I die.
Once again it was Bill Carter who came to my rescue. Carter’s problem was that in 1975 he had assured the visa-issuing authorities that there were no problems with drugs. Now I’m busted in Toronto for drug trafficking. Carter had flown straight to Washington. Not to visit his friends in the State Department or Immigration, who had told him that I would never be allowed into America again. To the White House. First he had assured the Canadian court when he posted my bond that I had a medical problem and that I needed to be cured of my heroin addiction. He made the same case to his contacts in the White House, where Jimmy Carter was president, using all the political muscle he could work, talking to one counsel there who was Carter’s drug policy man, fortunately charged, at the time, with finding solutions more effective than punishment. He told them that his client had fallen off the wagon, had a medical problem, and Bill was asking their mercy to grant me a special visa to come to the United States. Why the United States and not Borneo? Well, there was only one woman who could cure me and she was called Meg Patterson and she did a “black box cure” with electric vibrations. She was in Hong Kong and needed a sponsor doctor in the United States. These were the lengths Bill Carter went to. And it worked. Miraculously, his White House contacts instructed Immigration to grant me a visa, and he got permission from the Canadian court for me to fly to the United States. We were allowed to rent a house in Philadelphia, where Meg Patterson would treat me every day for three weeks. From there, after her prescribed cure, we moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I was not allowed to move outside a twenty-five-mile radius from Philadelphia, which included Cherry Hill. A deal worked out between the doctors and lawyers and the immigration department. This wasn�
�t so great for Marlon, however.
Marlon: They let him in to clean up, which is when we went to New Jersey. And I lived with this doctor’s family, this very religious family. That was actually the most traumatic thing, moving from this hotel with all the Stones and everyone into this house in New Jersey with a right-wing Christian American family, a white picket fence and skateboards, and I started going to an American school where you had to say prayers every day. That was really shocking. And I would go and visit Keith and Anita, who were down the road, every few days. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was a right brat, I think. This family thought I was wild. I had long hair, I didn’t wear shoes, I barely ever wore clothes, I used the worst language you can imagine for a seven-year-old, and I think they were just very pitying of me. It was a bit pathetic. I didn’t like that family at all; they were trying to turn me into a good little American boy. And I’d never been to America. I still thought America was full of bloody Indians, loads of buffalo wandering around, and suddenly I was in New Jersey. I thought, oh my God, I’m gonna be scalped if I go outside.
Although I was getting clean under Meg Patterson’s care, a cure imposed by the authorities lacks conviction in the heart. Meg’s method was supposed to be the painless way out. Electrodes attached to your ear released endorphins, which, theoretically, canceled the pain. Meg also believed in alcohol—in my case Jack Daniel’s, which is a strong brew—as a substitute, a diversion, let’s say. So I drank heartily under Meg’s maternal guidance. I was quite interested in Patterson’s method. It did certainly help, but it was still no fun. After it was finished, in a matter of two weeks or so, Immigration announced that they’d have to monitor me for another month. I’m clean, all right? And I’m getting antsy and restless, stuck in this nice suburb. I felt like I was in jail and I just got sick of it. Meg Patterson made her report to the State Department and Immigration that I was following the medical treatment, and, to cut a long story short, I got reinstated: as far as Immigration was concerned, the slate was wiped clean. No offenses appeared on my record. Times were different then. There was more of a belief in rehabilitation than there is now. The visa, which was originally a medical visa, overrode everything. It was extended from three to six months, from single to multiple entries. There were waivers for touring and working on the grounds that I was confirmed as clean and curing myself. As you clean up, you go up another level and another until you get to full clean status, according to my understanding of it. And I’ve always been very grateful to the US government for allowing me to come to America to get help to come off the stuff.
Life Page 41
