Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (22 page)

Going into complete panic mode after a few more days had passed without being able to make this happen, I called Marshall
Chess in London. Throwing myself on his mercy, I explained how badly things had been going for me at Nellcôte lately and told him that if Keith did not sit down to talk to me again, the
Rolling Stone
interview with him would never appear in the magazine because it would not exist.

Getting on the case as only he could, Marshall immediately flew to the South of France. After he and Keith had vanished behind closed doors for what I later learned was a prolonged sit-down, Marshall told me that I would have just as much time as I needed with Keith the next morning.

On what I still remember as a particularly lovely day in the South of France, Keith and Marshall and I sat down at a wooden table beneath some trees behind the house. As a hot breeze from the sea rustled through the leaves above our heads, tiny songbirds trilled lilting melodies in the fragrant sunshine. Taking one hit after another off a tightly rolled joint as we talked so that the sound of the match scraping against the side of the box in his hand rumbled like thunder into my microphone, Keith was just as good as his word. Once the session was over, I had no more questions to ask.

At long last I was done. I had my parole. Packing my bag as quickly as I could, I said goodbye to one and all and walked out the front door of Villa Nellcôte for what I thought was the very last time. As I began driving back to Cannes in a car that now looked as though I had left it parked in the middle of the Gobi Desert for the past few months, I realized I could not submit the interview until I had given Keith a chance to read it. Which meant that I would be going back to Nellcôte again.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

VILLA EDEN, JUNE 12–18, 1971

IN THE APTLY NAMED VILLA EDEN IN CANNES
, I found myself sharing a dark apartment on the bottom floor with Jerry Pompili, whom the Stones had brought over to the South of France to continue working for them after the English tour had ended. For reasons neither one of us understood, this otherwise very ordinary block of flats on rue de Campestre seemed to have come equipped with a never-ending supply of hot and cold running stewardesses, all of whom were willing to do anything they could to get closer to the Rolling Stones.

Setting myself up at a table in the front room, I began transcribing the cassettes I had brought with me from Nellcôte. Without using earphones or a foot pedal, I sat for hours listening to what Keith had said to make sure I got every word right. Never all that easy to understand under the best of circumstances, Keith was virtually impossible to comprehend when he began slurring his words in what has since come to be his characteristic manner of speaking.

After piling up as many single-spaced pages of transcript as I could, I would climb into the front seat of Jerry’s redoubtable
VW van so we could get something to eat. Since he had already determined that St.-Tropez was the place to be, we found ourselves there on more than one occasion. Having been invited to a birthday party for a local deejay one evening, Jerry and I arrived at the very posh Hotel Byblos where Mick and Bianca had spent their wedding night together just a month before.

Befitting our status as two serious long-haired dudes who had been out on the road with the Rolling Stones, both of us were wearing faded jeans and dark blue denim work shirts. For want of a better term, call it the early seventies rock ’n’ roll hippie cowboy look for guys who would not have known one end of a horse from the other if their lives depended on it. Although we were with a French woman who knew everyone in town and kept whispering incredible bits of gossip about them in my ear as they walked in the door, all the other guests just kept staring at Jerry and me like we were the original ugly Americans.

As the French woman quickly explained to me, this was simply because of how we were dressed. In St.-Tropez that summer, everyone was wearing worn military fatigues. Because it was “la mode,” Jerry and I looked so out of place that people were wondering aloud whether we were on our way to “le rodeo.”

Which was just the way it was back then in the South of France. As the Rolling Stones themselves soon learned, the locals were always either at your throat or at your feet. Speaking the language definitely helped as did having vast amounts of money to spend but the highest trump card in the deck was being as famous as, how you say, “les Rolling Stones.”

And so when Mick and Bianca showed up that night, every eye in the room followed them as they made their way through the
crowded room to our table so they could sit down with the only people they knew. While Bianca was dressed to the teeth, Mick just happened to be wearing a pair of faded jeans and the same kind of dark blue denim work shirt that Jerry and I had on.

Before the week was out in St.-Tropez, every last hip young thing in town was walking around in faded jeans and a dark blue denim work shirt. Was this an accident? A simple twist of fate? You decide. What I do know for certain is that none of them would have been caught dead in such an outfit before seeing Mick that night had convinced them all that there was now simply nothing hipper to be worn in the world.

After spending a week in the front room at Villa Eden pounding away on the lightweight portable typewriter I had brought with me from London, I finally finished what amounted to nearly one hundred pages of transcript. Sliding the original into a manila envelope along with the carbon copy, I made my way back to Nellcôte.

As always, the front door was unlocked. Because the Stones had started jamming until all hours of the night down in the basement, the house seemed unusually quiet. When I finally found Keith, he was standing in the dining room. Explaining that I needed him to go over the interview to make sure I had quoted him accurately, I handed him the transcript. That Keith could take out anything he did not want to see in print went without saying.

For the next thirty minutes, I stood there in silence watching Keith smoke one cigarette after another as he read each page of the transcript of the interview before flinging it across the table. For any writer, watching someone read what you have written is always a nightmare. When what you have written is about that
person, the experience becomes ten times worse. Would Keith hate the interview? Would he ask me to tone down some of the very explicit language? Or would he just sadly shake his head and tell me it would be better for all concerned if the interview never saw the light of day?

Unable to ask him any of those questions, all I could do was stand there and wait. Coming at long last to the bottom of the final page, Keith tossed it aside. Squinting sideways at me through the cloud of cigarette smoke that always seemed to be hanging around his head, he said, “Yeah, man. I said it. Go on and print it.”

And that was it. No corrections. No additions. No subtractions. Keith did not care what anybody might think about what he had said because insofar as he was concerned, it was all true. In that moment, Keith Richards let me know who he really was.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

VILLA NELLCÔTE III, JUNE 19–NOVEMBER 30, 1971

AS I WOULD LATER LEARN,
there were so many hidden dramas going on at Villa Nellcôte during the long and fateful summer when the Rolling Stones were recording
Exile on Main St.
in Keith Richards’s incredibly hot and humid basement that no one person could have been aware of them all. And while nobody actually died during the making of the album, so many lives were irrevocably altered in the process that I now feel compelled to examine the human toll that was exacted.

Seated right beside producer Jimmy Miller in the mobile recording truck parked outside the villa, Andy Johns recorded every take the Stones did over the course of those five months. Tall and lean with long dark hair hanging to his shoulders and a fine-boned face, Andy was then just twenty-one years old and looked every inch like the rock star he had always wanted to become.

Following in his older brother Glyn’s footsteps, Andy had begun his career by working as a “tape jockey” at Olympic Studios in London in 1967. Asked by Jimmy Miller to come join him at Stargroves where the Stones were recording tracks for
Sticky
Fingers
in April 1970, Andy got to see for the first time precisely what it was that Keith Richards did for the Rolling Stones.

As Andy Johns would later say, “They were doing ‘Bitch,’ but Keith was very late so they were playing it without him with Jagger on guitar and the song didn’t sound very good at all. I walked out of the kitchen and Keith was sitting on the floor with no shoes on eating a bowl of cereal listening to what they were doing and giving them all funny looks. Then he said, ‘Oy, Andy, give me that guitar.’ He put on his clear Perspex guitar and kicked up the tempo and put just the right vibe on it and the song went from a laconic mess to being all about groove. Just instantly. As soon as Keith started playing, he transformed the song into what it was meant to be.”

After being asked by Mick Jagger to do the final mixes on “Wild Horses” and “Dead Flowers,” Andy began working with Eric Clapton on the follow-up album to the hugely successful
Layla
by Derek and the Dominos. Although Clapton had just made Andy coproducer of the new album as a twenty-first birthday present, he did not hesitate for a moment when Jimmy Miller called to offer him another job. “I just said, ‘Look, Eric, I’ve got to go work with the Stones for a few weeks in the South of France. I’ll be back.’ And of course that was
Exile
and I wasn’t back for a year.”

Taking up residence with Bobby Keys and Jim Price in a villa about forty minutes from Nellcôte, Andy sat in the mobile truck listening as the Stones jammed aimlessly night after night trying to find a groove. “On ‘Tumbling Dice,’ we spent two or three weeks just trying to get the track right. It was a performance thing and there were times when those guys could really play badly and sound fucking terrible. I had about thirty or forty or fifty reels of
tape, each an hour and a half long, on just that one song. Jimmy wanted to save it all because we had a feeling that they might not ever get a good take and we’d have to stitch something together with editing.”

While recording the Rolling Stones had never been easy, working with them in the South of France proved far more difficult than even Andy Johns could ever have imagined. Now using heroin again, Keith would often leave in the middle of a session to go upstairs and put Marlon to bed and then not return because he had passed out in bed. While overdubbing a guitar part, Keith would “also sometimes play the intro and then be tacit for the first verse and never come back in again at all because he had nodded out while Jimmy and I just sat there letting the tape roll.”

As Andy Johns soon discovered, the few inspired moments of brilliant creativity at Nellcôte were far outweighed by the never-ending tedium. “I had already snorted heroin a few times but it was during the recording of that album that I really started using because it was just so fucking boring most of the time and there was so much waiting around and it was so easy to get. Marseilles was just down the road and you could buy a big bag of very powerful China White for not a lot of money. I was dipping into that all the time and not really thinking about it. Then I had to go back to England and I wasn’t going to take any of it with me on the plane. When I got there, I felt like I had a bad flu or something for a couple of days and it didn’t dawn on me what was really going on until I figured out, ‘Oh, this is what withdrawal is like. There’s not much to this.’”

Returning to the South of France, Andy continued snorting heroin while working on the album. “Jim Price and I were back at
our villa one night when Keith came over. I went into my bedroom to change my shirt and Keith was sitting there with a needle and spoon and I’d been brought up to think that was very inappropriate behavior. But I was along the path a little bit by now so I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And he said, ‘Oh, do you want to do this too?’ And I went, ‘Yes. Okay.’ And he went, ‘Oh, this needle’s fucked. It won’t work. We’ll go back to my place.’

“So we jumped in his car and drove all the way back to Nellcôte, and Keith took me downstairs and cooked something up, and he didn’t inject it into the vein. He just skin-popped me. And went, ‘Now you’re a man.’ Which, looking back on it, makes me think,
How adolescent of him.
And how adolescent of me.
Oh, I’ll do this too.
”

Barely able to see straight, Andy then made his way back upstairs and was sitting in the mobile recording truck when Ian Stewart walked in. Having known Andy since he was fourteen years old, Stu took one look at him and said, “You’ve been hangin’ out with Keith, haven’t you? Oh dear, he’s in trouble. I’m gonna tell your brother.” “I just lied and said, ‘Stu, no. Please don’t. I haven’t done anything.’ But he had picked up on it right away.

“I didn’t actually become a junkie until later on because I could never figure out how to make mainlining work. I was in a hotel room in London with Keith and Anita, who I think really enjoyed turning people on, and she said, ‘Oh, sveetie, come with me,’ and she took me in the bathroom and mainlined me. By the time I went to Jamaica with the Stones to record
Goats Head Soup,
I was a full-on, card-carrying junkie.”

Call it collateral damage if you like, but the list of all those who were using heroin while spending time with the Rolling
Stones at Villa Nellcôte would fill more than a single page in any reporter’s notebook. And while there are many who consider
Exile on Main St
. the greatest album the Stones ever made, I still cannot look back on that long hot summer in the South of France without thinking that the smell of death was all around me.