August 9, 2023 • 54 mins
At the dawn of the ‘70s, The Rolling Stones discover they’re broke. After resettling in Southern France as a tax dodge, the band begin sessions for what would become their gritty masterpiece, Exile on Main Street, in the sweltering basement of Keith Richards’ seaside mansion, Villa Nellcote. The notorious (possibly) Nazi-haunted home played host to the most debauched parties of all time, multi-day binges that drew a who’s-who of rock royalty. But Keith’s heroin relapse derails the sessions and threatens his relationship with bandmate Mick Jagger, which is further strained by the frontman’s ongoing affair with Keith’s partner, Anita Pallenberg. The mood turns dark when Keith runs afoul of both Corsican drug heavies and French authorities. Caught between bought sides of the law, the Stones make a run for it — with their cache of new songs.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to villefranc Sir Mayer on the French Riviera. Writer
Somerset Mom described it as a sunny place for shady people.
And this was before Keith Richards got there. No, this
isn't a stop on the STP tour that comes later.
Right now, we're headed to the capitol of a pirate
nation known as the Rolling Stones, established in the spring
(00:33):
of nineteen seventy one at a seaside mansion called Villainelcut
for six months, this was a site of urjastic revelry
unknown since the last days of Rome, with scenes of
debaucherous decadence akin to an f. Scott Fitzgerald novel on
Angel Dust. In addition to its reputation as the party
capital of the Cotizure, Nokud also hosted sessions for one
(00:54):
of the greatest albums of all time, Exile on Main Street.
These nocturnal gatherings ensured that you could often hear the
villa before you could see it. Ear splitting rock emanated
from the basement and echoed among the yachts bobbing in
the harbor for detizens of this most moneyed coast, the
last survivors of the Gilded Age. This was in an
(01:14):
importable sin, but for everyone else it was a good time.
You do know how to get to nelfit right. You
have your choice of roads, all beautiful yet treacherous as
they wrap around the water's edge. But on the other hand,
it doesn't really matter what way you take. In truth,
you can't get there from here, at least not anymore
(01:35):
as a destination. Villa Nelcut now exists only in the
odd continuum of space, time and memory. Still it's a
journey worth making, So follow us. We'll get you there.
Even after you park your car and the curving gravel
(01:55):
driveway before the great front doors, guarded on either side
by a crouching stone female deity with lions, pause, you're
still not there, not really, see You can't just drop in.
That wouldn't be cool. You have to know someone to
go inside. You have to be invited. Calling first to
say you're coming won't do it either. Quite possibly, no
(02:17):
one will pick up the phone, and even if they do,
they might be so out of it that they forget
your message. In every sense, no could is a completely
closed shop, a very exclusive private club with rules for
admission that are clearly defined. In order to get in,
you have to know someone who lives there. It also
helps if you become bearing gifts, preferably a fresh supply of
(02:39):
something currently being used at the villa on a daily basis.
All those who wish to enter the court of the
Crimson King must first offer tribute. Nonetheless, it's still well
worth the effort to get inside, for as soon as
you step through the two huge imperial front doors, you'll
know that you've left the ordinary world behind. Inside Nelkut
(03:02):
and alternate reality prevails. Over the course of the summer,
a venerable who's who of Rock and Roll Royalties Circle
nineteen seventy one will spend the night there. A definite
scene of all to Keith Richard's home composed of people
who would drop in to say hello and then stay
for a week. Mostly young, semi rich and or nearly famous,
(03:24):
and almost always physically attractive. They'd make themselves at home,
drinking Keith's white wine and eating his food. Some nights,
when the lightning would crack over the bay outside, sixteen
twenty two or some equally preposterous numbers sat down to dinner.
All of it was from another era when money was
easier to come by and the spirit of true celebration
(03:46):
was upon the world. Surrounded by his friends, their chaos,
his family, and his music, Keith lived in the grand manner.
At times it seemed as though the towering ornamental gates
at his home served both to keep the world out
and those inside in. Others came and went, offering business deals,
hustling favors, and smiling until it came time to buy
(04:08):
a plane ticket and move the party elsewhere. That description
comes courtesy of legendary rock journalist Robert Greenfield. As a
twenty something, he paid a visit to Nelcotte in June
of seventy one to interview Keith Richards for a Rolling
Stone cover story, which he later expanded into the book
Exile on Main Street, A Season in Hell with the
(04:30):
Rolling Stones. He stayed three weeks in all, and somehow
lived to tell the tale. His winning combination of talent
and ability to hang earned him a spot on the
STP Tour, which was born in those sweltering basement sessions
at Nelcott. He was loud, he was loose, it was hot,
and quite possibly haunted by Nazis. But if you were
(04:53):
at Nelcott. The basement was where you wanted to be.
Take a pool from the bottle of jack going around.
It will be fine to truly understand The Rolling Stones
nineteen seventy two Exile on Main Street tour and helps
to know how the Stones became exiles themselves, first World
fugitives fleeing their British homeland to seek tax shelter along
the sunny coast line of southern France. Hey, there are
(05:15):
worst places in addition to Greenfield that has never before
heard tapes of The Stones in their seventies exile. Eric
Glory will be joined by his friend and fellow SDP
tour mate Gary Stromberg, the band's pr supremo who's represented
a whole jukebox of the twentieth century's greatest artists. My
name is Jordan Runtogg and this is the Stones Touring Party.
(05:42):
The world's biggest rock and roll band found themselves in
a perilous position at the start of the seventies. They
were still reeling from the death of founding member Brian Jones,
struggling with intermittent addiction, navigating a changing musical landscape, and
grappling with the fallout from their fatal concert at the
Ultamont Speedway, a tragedy that resulted in a press and
put them in the crosshairs of an armed motorcycle gang
(06:03):
with a violent reputation. But perhaps most worryingly, they were broke.
Maybe not broken the way that you and I think
of it, but after half a decade atop the pop
pecking order, the Rolling Stones had shockingly little to show
for it. It was a classic rock and roll ripoff
the deal signs when they were hopelessly green club rats
years earlier, and sapped them of their earnings through royalties,
(06:24):
publishing and touring. Changes in management and record labels offered
hope for more lucrative days ahead, but if they wanted
to maintain the first class lifestyle to which they become accustomed,
they needed a constant influx of cash, so they kept working,
whether they wanted to or not. For years, journalists had
asked that favorite question, when do you think you guys
(06:45):
are going to break up? And the honest answer was
quite simply when they could afford it. According to Robert Greenfield,
money and the accumulation of it was a crucial consideration
when planning the nineteen seventy two American Tour.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Here's the aten point. They needed that tour to survive financially.
They were broke. You cannot imagine how these boys spent money.
They didn't spend it. It ran through them like a river.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Certainly Keith wasn't aware of He.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Didn't keep he didn't look at how much the housekeeping costs,
for they had servants. They lived in the Grand Manor
without keeping track.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Drummer Charlie Watts copped to their excessive spending when talking
to Greenfield back in nineteen seventy three. Here's the vintage
audio courtesy of our friends at the Northwestern Archives.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
We spend it. I'm gonna have a lot of things
because I was.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
All my money goes in objects, by the fucking houses
full of objects.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
The houses. I've never been.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Anywhere near it Stone's basis. Bill Wyman defended their choice
necessity really so travel on what they call the thin
end of the plane. You know, whether space, the stretch
your legs, and they don't mind if you have that
third complimentary drink.
Speaker 6 (07:59):
I mean it was like class because there you go
not only because of the comfort, because of this a
bit more room, but that is comforts, but because it's
you get less hussles and you never get tourists. You're
always travel in a limo because taxi drivers won't even
take you, you know. But now, of course it is comfort.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Mick Jagger, a one time London School of Economic student,
was too cool to be bothered by financial particularities, at
least in public.
Speaker 7 (08:25):
And I'm rich and I.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Don't have really very much play, but I don't care.
You know, I'm.
Speaker 7 (08:32):
In called a businessman or anything. I mean, that's bullshit.
I mean I've been called at hundreds of times. But
you're a businessman. Yeah, But I'm not interested in money.
I mean all it's not a businessman wants to be
rich and I don't.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
But Bill Wyman, the oldest member of the band, was
more of a realist going into the nineteen seventy two tour.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
We need the money, absolutely, you got to keep what
we do. We live at a.
Speaker 6 (08:56):
Certain level and it's it's it's fairly high level. You've
got to keep working. You haven't got enough money in
the bank to see you through for the next ten years.
And known about lifetime. I read these incredible right outs
all the time, and ever since we've been going about
the Stones, who've got more money than they know what
to do with. I've never had a lot of money it.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
In addition to these lavish expenditures, the Stone's budget balancing
was further hampered by a devastating discovery. As the band
took control of their business affairs in the new decade,
they learned that not a penny of income tax had
been paid during their sixties prime. For a group who
were barely scraping by financially, a gargantuan back tax bill
was a full scale disaster.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
But that was a very serious financial position because the
people that have been looking after us and we trusted
and didn't do their job, you know, because the tax
was never taken care of as we thought it was.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
They discovered, you know, an American company and the royalties
you never paid them, the classic welcome to the record business. Okay.
Also no expersions here. They were in the ninety percent
tax bracket in England. You know, it's like taxman, you know,
to tax you when you die. Put a penny on
your eye. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The Stones had learned the hard way what George Harrison
had sniped about in song in years earlier. The British
labor government had introduced a super tax of over ninety
percent to its highest earners. This meant that for every
million pounds earned, members of this ultra exclusive tax bracket
were left with just seventy thousand pounds. So, in other words,
the Stones didn't just owe back taxes. They owed a
(10:32):
lot of back taxes. In order to make enough money
to live and chip away at their massive tax bill,
they would have to earn a substantial amount of cash rapidly.
As Bill Wyman could attest, this just wasn't in the cards.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
It's totally mathematically impossible to earn more money to be
taxed more, to be left with more to pay back
what you owed in one year, to be able to
finish out with nothing to nabled are paying eighty six
percent tax on that and be left with enough money
to pay that Richuodian land revenue and finish up right now,
(11:08):
I've got nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
To square their debts and rebuild their fortunes. They needed
to leave the UK and its oppressive inland revenue service
and settle somewhere with lower taxes. America was considered, but
prior drugs convictions made them unwelcome immigrants in the eyes
of Uncle Sam and the NBI, so they looked across
the channel, and so it was decided they would move
(11:33):
to France. In April nineteen seventy one, just before the
start of the British tax year. The band spent their
last months as UK residents mounting a goodbye tour of
their homeland. The ignoble victory lap culminated in a going
away soareet the notorious Skindle's Hotel for friends like John Lennon,
Eric Clapton and The Who's Roger Daltrey. As was the fashion,
(11:54):
the party raged until two am, drawing complaints from the
more respectable guests. Request the quiet down went unheated. Hotel
management literally pulled the plug by cutting the power supply.
An inebriated Mick Jagger was reportedly so enraged that he
hurled a table through a plate glass window. All things considered,
(12:15):
leaving the country a short time later probably wasn't the
worst idea.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
They had to leave. You got to go, and so
that was what exile was all about. They had to
go live in France, which trust me, Mars would have
been more welcoming to them. I mean, they were english
Man like, what they ate for breakfast, and the big
event was when that day old English newspapers would arrive.
(12:43):
Oh thank god, man, I could read the Daily Mail.
These boys were English, England and France. That's why there
was a channel. They don't like each other. They had
nothing to do with one another, and so they were
so alienated.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Bill Wyman said as much when speak the green Field
in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Next time, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
It does because you're totally out of touch with the
music scene.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
There isn't any in France.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
There's no TV shows you can watch, there's no bands
you can go and see unless you're right in Paris
and there's not too many. Then you can't get the
latest records. You know. You have to have a the
sent from America or sim from.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
England and you go on from there.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
The pot papers come if you ask well them a
week later. You're never right on right there all the time.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Keith Richards was especially aggrieved by the resettlement. He couldn't
shake the sense that the Stones have been chased out
of their home by the government who feared their influence
over the youth was too great. Given Mick Jaggers place
on Richard Nixon's enemies list, he may well have been right.
Whatever the case, Keith preferred to spend his money on
drugs and guitars rather than help the British government purchase
(13:53):
more h bombs, and deeply resented the disruption of his lifestyle.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
It is a fucking drake not to be able to
know that I particularly want to be in England all
that amount of time here, But it is.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
A dragon not to be able to if.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
You want to go there.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Joined by his longtime partner Anita Pallenberg and their young
son Marlin, Keith's adjustment was probably made easier by his
palatial rental home, Villa Nelcott, which quickly became the band's
base of operations while abroad. Perched on the rocky cliffs
high above the Franch Harbor on the French Riviera, the
sixteen room Bellapuck mansion was, like Keith himself, equal parts
(14:36):
fabulous and feral. Just beyond the heavy iron gates lay
an overgrown jungle that shielded the house from the road,
filled with cypress, palm and pine trees, as well as
more exotic species assembled from across the globe. Around back,
a long flight of steps led to a private beach
and jetty, all overlooked by a broad veranda framed by
(14:57):
a double tier of Romanesque columns. Inside, the rooms glittered
like jewels. Brilliant light from the azure expanse beyond streamed
in through the thirty foot windows. Reflecting off the mirrored doors,
rose marble fireplaces, enormous crystal chandeliers, and well polished parquet floors.
It lent a surreal shimmer to a scene that would
(15:17):
grow more and more unreal by the day. The ornate
molding atop the walls were carved with angels and cherubs.
These gilded figures kept watch over Keith Richards, the fallen Angel.
If there ever was one who did the decorating, he
asked upon first seeing the place. Bloody Marie Antoinette Vick
Jagger had been the first of you the property, but
(15:38):
he felt it too ostentatious and a bit too public. Keith,
on the other hand, had no such concerns, and the
prolence of the times, it was cool with him. The
astronomical twenty five hundred dollars a month rent seemed to
defeat the purpose of the whole cost cutting venture, but
the home came with a suitably seedy reputation, and you
(15:59):
can't put up on that. According to rumor, it had
been inhabited by Nazis during World War Two, and the
expansive basement was allegedly the scene of Gestapo interrogations. House
guests that summer claimed they saw vintage heating vents decorated
with gold swastikas, or a Nazi era box in the
basement filled with vials of morphine. But let's just say
(16:20):
Nelcott guests aren't the most reliable narrators. True or not,
there were certainly a sinister vibe surrounding the elegantly decrepit property,
and it was about to get an extra dose of
infamy that summer. Villa Nelkut would play host to the
notoriously debought sessions of the Rolling Stones, griny musical masterpiece
(16:40):
Exile on Main Street.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Somebody said that the seventies were born in Villa Nellcutt,
where the Stones were recording Exile on Main Street. It
all figures into the seventies two two are to record exile.
They were exiles, you know, they weren't on Main Street,
but they were tax exiles.
Speaker 8 (17:06):
And so.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
I think a lot of the darkness in the album
comes from how alienated they were from everything.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Sessions wound up at Nelcook through a mix of necessity
and laziness. The original plan had been to find a
proper recording studio somewhere near the Stones home base in
southern France, but when producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy
Johns failed to find a suitable room, Keith healthfully offered
up his basement bunker. The chance to record in the
comfort of his own home had two major pluses for Keith.
(17:38):
The first was that it kept him close to his family,
longtime partner Anita Pallenberg and their young son Marlin. The second,
it must be said, was that it kept them close
to his stash. So Jimmy, Andy and the Stones loyal
roadie Ian Stewart set about transforming the labyrinthine cellar complex
into a makeshift studio. Endless yards of cables were snaked
(17:59):
up the stage and out the kitchen window to the
Rolling Stones mobile recording unit, essentially a million dollar trailer
parked in the driveway. The demands of amps and other
musical equipment proved too much for the villa's ancient electrical system,
so the ever enterprising Ian Stewart came up with a
novel solution. He tapped nearby power lines belonging to the
French railway system, one of the many stunts that Nell
(18:21):
could that could and probably should have gotten them deported.
But despite his efforts, power outages were frequent, and so
was the odd electrical fire. Both of these occurrences were
frequently blamed on the spirits of Nazis that they erroneously
believed that previously inhabited the basement. Even without the flames,
the dark and dingy space felt like a sauna, impressively
(18:42):
hot and so humid that the guitars never stated tune
the homegrown nature, with Keith colefully called the tropical disease.
Sessions might have helped foster the US against the world
outlaw spirit that prevailed as the band embraced their status
as exiles, but mostly it was hell.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
You could not have come up with a more insane
way to make an album. This was attempting to record
an album in what was not a studio. Again the insanity.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Keith was so delighted he said to me, oh, you know,
man couldn't find a studio. They looked everywhere and said,
guess what, it's gonna be making it in my own home.
It's going to be in the basement, I said. I
didn't say anything. But this didn't prove to be the
smartest idea of all time. Working all night because it
was so blazing hot during the day, it was just
(19:38):
chaos and anarchy, and they functioned like that for a
long time.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I'm at Erdigan, the music industry titan and head of
the Rolling Stones new record label, was anxious to see
how the band's follow up to their chartbusting previous album,
Sticky Fingers, was going. He paid a visit to Noka
that summer and was taken aback by the decidedly funky situation.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Several of the sessions struck by the madness of the operation.
I mean every yeah, it was it was a bit mad,
but it was it works all right.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
You know, everything they do is a bit you know
that madness and extravagance is part of you know, of
their you know the way they can that they carry
on their faces. Now I understand there's a marvelously mad,
outrageous goings on, you know, surround most of the things,
(20:29):
which I think is what gives you know, gives the
magic to the you know, to not it don't really
related to the music in a strange sense. It is,
you know, in a way, it is the way that
but certainly you know, to the average person that s
their way of life and so forth. You know is
UH is dramatic, you know UH and dramatically different, and
(20:50):
everybody loves them for that.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The limitations and utter impracticality of the recording process played
a crucial part in shaping the album that many have
come to call The Stone's Best. It's an unapologetically imperfect
collection of ragged, rambling mood pieces that blended the American blues, gospel, country,
and R and B influences that were part of the
band's DNA. That's the stuff America's given the rest of
(21:14):
the world, Keith would later say, far bigger than h bombs.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
The sound comes from the fact that they were in
the basement of villain Nell Cut Jimmy Miller and Andy
John's were sitting in the Rolling Stones mobile unit. I
was there the day they drove that down, this huge
trailer truck packed with what would now be nine million
dollars worth of sound equipment, state of the art, and
(21:39):
so Andy and Jimmy are sitting outside next to the villa,
and anytime they want to talk to Keith or Micker
tell them to stop playing. They have to get out
of the truck, go around the front of the house,
go up the steps like a castle, Go into the house,
go into the kitchen, go down the stairs into this
warren of you know, so up human subterranean spaces, and say, okay,
(22:03):
stop stop stop. That's one of the reasons it sounds
like it does. They could have been in the congo.
It was recorded in a manner that no one had
recorded an album before.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Sessions were further complicated by the fact that, since it
was Keith's house, things were done on Keith time, which
roughly translated to whatever he felt like it. The idea
of playing a note of music before the sun went
down was ludicrous, he later proclaimed, so he worked dracula hours.
To be fair, there were lots of distractions from the
moment Keith decided to open his eyes, the timing of
(22:41):
which varied wildly from day to day. Like a hippie
sun king, he would descend to the living room, where
a life size cutout of a shirtless Mick Jagger hung
over the fireplace. There he would greet his endlessly revolving
cast of not especially loyal subjects, often several dozen in number.
These were friends or friends, users and pushers, wheelers and dealers, French,
(23:05):
American and British, all struggling to be heard over the oversized,
state of the art pioneer speaker system that constantly blasted
Keith's preferred soundtrack outlaw country stars like Merle Haggard and
George Jones, early sixties girl groups, or doo wop classics.
A chef known to all as fat Jack, was hired
to prepare daily gourmet luncheons for one and all. Keith's partner, Anita,
(23:27):
the only French speaker to reside at Nelcott, presided over
meals for twenty five or more that often lasted three hours,
and then they were gone again, leaving her to moan
why is it that no one even says goodbye? People
just appeared and disappeared. Last names were never used. It
was a Felliniesque freak show of the first order. The
(23:49):
party was costing Keith a reported seven thousand dollars a week,
so much for saving money, he also purchased a two
thousand dollars speedboat, which he called the Mandras. It was
named after a recreational downer, clearly a joke about the
velocity of the craft reached. With Keith at the wheel,
Anita would watch from the verandahs, the father of her child,
(24:10):
took off at high speeds, occasionally ramming other boats or
running aground on rocks. He also ran out of gas
on more than one occasion. Without a radio, he would
just drift waiting to be rescued. And he always was.
God looks out for drunks, babies and Keith Richards. It seems.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Keith, Yeah, bring over the Mandras, my speedboat and my jaguar,
and you know then I'm going to get into a
fight with the harbor mester and pull a toy gun
on him.
Speaker 8 (24:41):
And I mean they just you had people to clean
up the whatever mission made, and they just weren't aware.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
W Somerset mom said about the French riviera, it's a
sunny place for shady people. Absolutely correct.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Some of the guests were more illustrious than others. Not
speedscribe William Burrows arrived to persuade the Stones to contribute
a soundtrack to a film adaptation of his novel Naked Lunch.
Marshall Chess, the president of the Rolling Stones new record label,
dropped by to check on business, only to get sidetracks
smoking opium with Anita. John Lennon paid a visit on
(25:17):
his way to the nearby con Film Festival, but a
day living like Keith Richards was too much for him.
Feeling nauseous after an indulgent afternoon on the terrace, the
ex beatle excused himself to the WC. He didn't make it.
They found them lying at the foot of the grand staircase,
having emptied the contents of his stomach on the hall carpet.
Too much wine, too much sun, or maybe it was
(25:39):
the forty five minutes he and Keith spent closeted in
an upstairs bedroom doing god knows what. Who's to say, really,
The guest most able to keep pace with Keith's prodigious
consumption habits was one time bird Graham Parsons. The pair
shared a passion for country music and illicit substances, especially
(26:03):
the latter, so much so that Parsons had recently been
fired from his band, The Flying Burrito Brothers. Even to
the other transient house guests, hardly post her children for
clean and orderly living. Graham and Keith's toxic code dependency
was playing to see. It was especially obvious to Mick Jagger,
though he generally kept his distance from the nell cut
(26:25):
Back in how Mick remained protective and even slightly possessive
of his fellow Glimmer twin he had a right to
be wary of Graham. Within two years he would die
of a heroin overdose.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Graham came to stay with Keith at Nellcutt while they
were making egg Sile. This is of interest in terms
of Mick control and Keith. So I left at the
end of June. This would have been maybe second or
third week in July. Graham came with his wife Gret
(27:01):
and Keith was not showing up at night when they recorded,
but he was sitting and playing all day with Graham
all day acoustic guitars. There's great photographs of them on
one of the many porches in the living room, and
Mick made it plain that they were no longer welcome
(27:22):
there and he had to leave to get the album made.
There's pressure for them to come up with this album.
You need to follow sticky fingers. We have this brand
new audience, and Keith is more interested in playing Merle
Haggard with Graham in the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
For the Stones, the days of living together in vans
or swallowed flats were long gone. Indeed, they were no
longer as close as they once were metaphorically or literally.
The rental pads were strewn across the country, a decent
trek from one another. Bill Wyman was a relative neighbor
just down the road in Nice, but he was turned
off by nell Cutt's narcotic vibes and stayed away. All told,
(28:04):
he played bass on less than half of the Exile
on Main Street tracks. Here's his interview with Robert Greenfield,
courtesy of our friends at the Northwestern University Archives.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
So I like to be separate. I like to be.
Speaker 6 (28:17):
Right at times, and it creates a much better thing.
You can put up with each other much better if
you're not on top of each other all day long.
Maybe day it's Roadie Rowster together, because we do separate
when we need to, when we're not working, we do
go into our own private lives.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
They all lived as far from one another in the
South of France as they could.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Well, that makes a lot of sense. You have to
get to nell Cut.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
That's where you're recording this album. Charlie's An Hour Away
Bill is here. It's like utterly chaos, so nobody understands
the chaos. They thrived on chaos right.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Mick preferred to reside in Paris with his new wife,
Bianca Perez Moro marcias than pregnant with their first child.
They met less than a year earlier at a Parisian party,
Mick it asserted as alpha status by snatching the two
pay off the head of her fifty something year old escort.
Cynical gossip columnist speculated that he was drawn to Bianca
chiefly because her slight figure and fine boned face closely
(29:15):
resembled his own, but in truth, he was attracted to
their differences, qualities he wished to cultivate it himself. Mick
had been linked to models and pop stars in the past,
but Bianca was easily the most impressive woman to enter
his orbit. Cultured, refined, and extremely well educated. Keith, meanwhile,
was less impressed. He initially considered her just some bimbo,
(29:37):
to use his words, and found her humorless and aloof
Bianca must be said, wasn't exactly bowled over by him either,
but Keith's almost instant is like a Bianca, hints at
something deeper at play, unspoken and likely unconscious. The relations
between the two chief stones have been drifting from friendship
(29:58):
towards mutually beneficial alliance years at a steady clip. Keith
struggled with his diminishing influence over his partner, a mirrored
mixed resentment of Graham Parsons. Rather than blame each other
for their growing divisions, it was easier to blame the outsider.
They each saw these interlopers as enablers, feeding the addictions
(30:18):
that were drawing them apart, Keith's for drugs and Mixed
for flattery. In the society columns, Keith found Bianca self absorbed,
Mick found Graham self destructive. Never the twain shall meet.
The bandmate's bond was further strained by the rather indiscreet
affair that was going on between Keith's partner, Anita and Mick.
The general vibe of Melcote was that of a royal court,
(30:41):
with noblemen feeling entitled to sleep with each other's wives
or girlfriends. But even this was a bridge too far.
Yet the laid back less. A fair of the era,
coupled with their stubborn englishness, prevented the two from ever
addressing the drama directly. Everything was always kept under the
covers and between the buttons, So the repressed hostility and
anger slowly built to a fever pitch that summer, creating
(31:03):
an atmosphere of tensions so thick and palpable that you
could have cut it with a dull knife. As a result,
it's no surprise that Nick and Keith began to fall
out of touch.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Was it Nell cut by myself? One day? Which is
shocking because that place was like Macy's on the fourth
of July. They people came and went. You didn't know
who anybody was. They had all gone somewhere, okay, and
I was all alone in this incredible villa, and here
comes Mick. And so there were phones back then. I
(31:33):
don't know why Mick dropped in, Okay, and I came
out of my room. Was there for two weeks and
here's Mick, and God love him one to one, no audience.
One of the great actors I've ever encountered in my life.
He could play roles like he just break your heart, okay,
(31:53):
and he's sitting at the piano in the living room,
which you've seen any photographs of nelcut. The living room
looked like a jump sale in somebody's yard.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
There were you know, like those record store things of Mick,
like a cardboard figure. There were boxes of records. It
was just chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
But he's at the piano and he's noodling and he's
picking out notes and I said, Mick, oh, well hello man,
you know where and then he goes, I won't do
the dialogue. It's like, where is everybody? I said, oh,
they just left. They went the thing and he's got
his head down. He's playing little Boy Blue, that's the role.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
I came here to see Keith. We were supposed to
ride together today. You know, he fucking forgot. It wasn't
he didn't have a calendar or a diary or a
day book. It's like you forgot. And he sat there
and he talked to me like really openly, and it's
just kind of made conversation and then he kind of
all right, Matt, see you, and he got I mean
(32:51):
you see you could see the camera moving behind him, right.
He got up and he walked slowly out of the village.
He got in his car or on his motorcycle and
went home alone. And this is the two pre eminent
guys in rock and roll songwriters, great songwriters. Yeah, they
didn't show up.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
The best hope for connection was in the studio, or
more appropriately, the sweltering basement catacombs at Nellcotte. It was
here where Keith retired at the end of the night.
After evenings spent shirtless and barefoot on the veranda sketching
out his latest compositions with an acoustic guitar as the
mistrel swept across the harbor. Then he would record for
(33:29):
as long as the biochemical tornado in his body allowed.
For example, Keith finished up rocks Off at nine am
after an all night session, rousing the engineers had retired
at dawn. The autobiographical track Happy also started this way,
Born after Anita told them she was pregnant with their
second child. Keith took a rare lead vocal on that one.
(33:49):
It was his life after all. But most of these
interminable jams started out as instrumentals that could go on
for hours as he reached for the perfect riff. Songs
like torn and frayed in sweet Virginia were steeped in
the soulful country sounds that echoed throughout the villa from
Keith's record player. Standouts like Tumbling Dice and Casino Boogie
nodded to the riviera gambling palaces down the road in Monaco,
(34:13):
whereas titles like Shina Light and Stop Breaking Down Very
Well may have referenced the spotty power supply and the
less than glamorous basement. Basic tracks would begin with a
skeleton crew of Melcote mainstays rather than Keith's actual bandmates.
The fundamental flaw on this approach was that the more
time you spend in that house, the more likely you
were to be stoned out of your mind when it
(34:33):
came time to record. As a result, the sessions were
unfocused and there's that word again, chaotic. Weeks ticked by
without completing a single track. The lineup included Bobby Keys,
a long, tall Texan whose beast level sax prowess made
him a favorite of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Leon Russell,
Joe Cocker and of course the Stones, who previously tapped
(34:56):
him for the solo on Brown Sugar. His beasts level
party prowess also made him a favorite of Keith Richards.
He'll be a familiar face on the STP tour, during
which he and Keith will be inseparable. Producer Jimmy Miller
filled in for Charlie Watts on drums and Rookie Rolling Stone,
Mick Taylor handled the bass, and Bill Wyman's absence brought
(35:16):
into replace co found the guitarist Brian Jones just two
years earlier. This was Mick Taylor's first complete Stones album,
and he found himself wondering if things were always this haphazard, fractured,
and messy. He was pleased to earn as one and
only Stone songwriting credit for Ventilator Blues, with its title
inspired by the stifling heat in the Nlcott basement, but
(35:36):
he was less pleased when Mick Jaggers started hitting on
his wife that summer. They lived a dual existence. Upstairs
was Versailles, downstairs was Dante's Inferno, with just a small
fan above Charlie's drum kit for relief. The fetid, windowless
basement frequently reached upwards of one hundred degrees. They took
to playing with their pants off, but the humidity rot
(35:58):
havoc on their vocal cords. This made it even more
unpleasant for Mick when he decided to come around. Like
the rest of the band, his presence was intermittent. For
the first time in the group's history, his chief focus
was on something other than the Stones. This gave Keith
his first and really only time as the band's primary
creative force, the facto role he both relished and resented.
(36:21):
Mick predictably hated the unstructured nature of the sessions, which
would stop and start at random. It was impossible to
know if you were recording or having dinner, but it
was Keith's house and Keith's rules. He knew that the
Stones were at their best when they didn't realize they
were working. Keith later summed up their differing work methods,
thus mix rock on roll, but when they did join
(36:44):
forces and voices, the results were undeniable. The personal bonds
between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards continue to deteriorate during
sessions for Excel on Main Street, but there were business
(37:04):
concerns to consider. The Rocks fabled Glimmer Twins continue to drift.
They set aside their differences to focus on finishing the album,
which would allow them to earn some serious cash by
touring America in the upcoming summer. Regardless of relations they
simply weren't the Stones without one another. And if they
weren't the Stones, who were they?
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Nick knows he can't do it without Keith. There's no
riff until Keith shows up.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Andy Johns told this great story, and this thing is
like dead on its feet, you know, and I can't.
They've been playing for twelve hours. Keith's always late, It's
never there on time. Ever, he shows up and says, oh, Andy,
give me that guitar, and he picks it up and
he plays this riff. They record the song in like
twenty minutes because they didn't have Keith to play the riff.
The point about it, once they get back in the studio,
(37:55):
there's no separation. They are one music brain. They don't
fight in.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
The studio without each other's cooperation. They can't complete the
new album without the album. The Rolling Stones can't tour
America without the money. They'll aarn there. The Rolling Stones
can't survive as a band. The stakes couldn't have been higher.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
It's a relationship of need and mutual respect.
Speaker 8 (38:21):
They tolerated each other. They knew that they were both
dependent on each other to be who they were, so
there was a respect and accent, but there was no
wish that they would get closer together. I think that
they both understood that the differences between them, and they
were accepting of that.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Charlie Watts, the Stones resident Sage, articulated their differences when
speaking to Robert Greenfield in nineteen seventy two. Here he
is courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Keith is always what he is when you look at him.
That's what he is there. He don't lie it. He
don't lie anyone, lie to anyone, lie about you. You
know it's not a liar. Mick is much more flamboyant
about that because it isn't you know it's it can move.
The whole thing can change. The situation would change, it
(39:11):
will change with it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
It's a former.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Situation which would change its Coke many times that well
he is, he changed very well.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I think I've seen him.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
He can play anybody's game, can it. That's why he
know he can't play anything true love playing anybody else's.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Differences in personalities, men, differences in social groups, and Nick
began to move in more elite circles.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
I know, it's spend a lot of time and any
one particular group of people to all.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
I never do, you know. I really what I like
to be is just other musicians, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
But I find that rather limited.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
English people are always brought up to get on with
everyone in every circumstance. I mean that's everyone, I mean one,
not particular class group.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Keith found such aspirational behavior distasteful.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
He is always enamored with those society things in a
strange kind of way.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Godless boy.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
So the two best things to my mind that Keith
ever said about Mick was one, Mick, he's a nice
bunch of guys, that's okay. And the second one was
when Mick took the knight ship, became a knight Mick,
you know, knighted. Keith said, it should have held out
(40:38):
for the lordship. It's a paltry honor. It's paltry man. Mick,
way back in London, was hanging out with members of
Parliament and he was he was always He went to
LSC London School of Economics. He was comfortable with these people.
He catered to them and they had you know, fostered him,
gave them both fame on some level.
Speaker 8 (40:58):
Mick was English Parliament, Keith was Parliament Funkadelic.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
But they were equally good at punishing one another.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
They were drawn further apart by Keith's disturbing talent for
punishing himself with drugs. Naukot's geography on the French Riviera
was ideally suited to score with a heroin trafficking hub
of Marseilles on the right, when the Italian Mafiosa's on
the left, you could get anything you wanted. Sometimes Keith
enlisted fat Jack the Chef, for the task of procuring
(41:33):
from a gang of local thugs known as the Cowboys.
Other times it came direct from Corsican dealers who delivered
uncut pink cotton candy from Thailand or snowy China, white
and bags the size of two pounds sacks of sugar.
Keith's preferred method of consumption was skin popping, or injecting
directly into the muscles, opposed to the veins. It was
(41:56):
the distinction that, as far as he was concerned, meant
he was keeping his drug use and check the ugly
abscesses and scars on his arms suggested otherwise. No one
knows when Keith Richards first took heroin. Even he doesn't
know for sure. His best guess is that he first
snorted it by accident in the late sixties, mistaking it
(42:17):
for some other powder. By most accounts, his dangerous liaison
began in earnest after the Altamont disaster in December in
nineteen sixty nine. Keith would use and then head to
the toilet, where he would play guitar for hours, no doubt,
believing he was carrying on the grand tradition of blues
men since time immemorial. It helped him with the music,
he'd claim. It also provided an emotional hiding place for
(42:40):
this most extrovert of introverts. He'd later say, with a
hit of smack, I could walk through anything and not
give a damn. Within months, his use had slid into addiction.
Both Keith and Anita had managed to kick Heroin prior
to their arrival in France. Not wishing to jeopardize their
residency in their new home country, he remained opi it
(43:00):
free into a few months into his stay at Melcotte,
when a day at the gokart track turned tragic Keith,
someone inevitably flipped the four wheeler, sending himself skidding across
the pavement like a stone across the surface of a pond.
With his back now resembling raw steak, A well meaning
nurse offered him a painkilling morphine injection. It was a
(43:21):
slippery slope. Keith was candid about the lure of heroin
when Robert Greenfield traveled to Nelcott that summer to interview
him for a cover story in Rolling Stone magazine. If
you're going to get into junk, it takes the place
of everything, he said. You don't need a chick, you
don't need music, you don't need nothing. But it doesn't
lead you anywhere. It ain't called junk for nothing.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
Keith was.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I was gonna say Keith was straight when I was there.
Keith was never straight. Okay, even using heroin, Keith Richards
could smoke more reefer in the course of a day
than any and drink constantly and go, you know, seventy
seven hours without sleep and just superhuman stuff, you know,
just not comprehensible. This is not a lie. I saw
(44:10):
him at nell Cut. I was up late one night.
It was just me and him. He's working his way
across the living room picking up Marlin's toys. He stops
and there's some pill like capsule lying on Now. There
have been guys in and out all day. It's not
his picked it up. He's not performing. He's all by
himself as me. I'm just in the corner, looks throws
it down his throat. I thought, oh, it was like midnight,
(44:33):
Like dude, what if that's major amphetami?
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Didn't matter what prompted this pathological mad dash towards oblivion.
Was it a simple desire to numb physical pain? Or
was it something more? Some of linked Keith's Heroin used
to the murder at Altamont, a painful event for both
the Stones and the counterculture at large, less a cause
than an effect. The tragedy telegraphed the sad truth that
(44:58):
the idealism of the sixties, with his promises of universal
brotherhood and total enlightenment, were not to be, and the
cynicism and naked self interest of the seventies were nigh.
The drug use reflected this, as Heroin supplanted LSD as
a substance of choice on the street. Acid was aspirational, optimistic, hopeful.
(45:22):
Heroin was nihilistic. Perhaps for Keith it was just a
sign of the times, or maybe it was something more personal.
With financial concerns compounding the pressure to follow up their
last hit album, stress levels among the Stones were high.
In order to ensure the future of the group. Keith
was very aware that he needed not only to descend
(45:43):
into the dark, dank basement each night, but also plumb
the depths of his own musical soul. Maybe he felt
he couldn't make the trip without some serious chemical assistance.
Just as we'll never know when is heroin you started,
we'll also never truly know why. But each night at Nelcotte,
(46:04):
the musicians assembled in the basement waited for the inevitable
moment when Keith would halt the sessions and announced that
he was going to put his son Marl in the bed.
That was code that he needed to fix. He could
be gone for three hours or more, having knotted off
in his bed.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Nobody would dare go upstairs at Nelcott to wake up
Keith when they knew you did not want to wake
up Keith. I lived there for two weeks. Then a
week later I came back with the interview for Rolling
Stone Magazine. I never went upstairs.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Never Once Producer Jimmy Miller summoned the nerve to go
upstairs and check on Keith. He found him passed out
in bed, needle an arm, with blood splattered on the walls.
But Mick knew better than to invade the sanctity of
Keith's solitary refuge and a house overrun with users in
every sense of the word, growing more frustrated by the minute,
(47:02):
the singer would finally leave the sessions in a huff.
Then Keith would come to see that Mick had gone
and throw a fit. Needless to say, none of this
was beneficial to group morale, and yet none of the
Stones found it appropriate to intervene Keith had always lived
his life his way. That's just how it was.
Speaker 6 (47:22):
But that's that's his business, you know.
Speaker 4 (47:24):
If he wants to do that, it's fine. That's fine
by me, and it's nothing to do with me.
Speaker 6 (47:31):
If I want to surround myself as any people I
cared to, I don't think that's any business of anybody
else's either. As I say, these things do result in
problems that affect the whole band.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
It wasn't that Mick was with the elite although he
was even in the south of France.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
You know, it's just that.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
Keith's life was a circus and he loved it. He
was the greatest host of all time. Because the party
didn't end. Lunch was three hours, so Nick didn't live
that way. He didn't have twenty people in his house.
You know, that was the gap in the lifestyle while recording,
you know, Keith passing out in the bedroom while they're
waiting for him to come down and play. It took
(48:15):
forever and it still wasn't done. And then they had
to leave France because they would have all been thrown
in jail. It's amazing that all of them got out,
didn't go to prison, and survived to go on tour.
In seventy two, the mood.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Turned dark and now could have summer turn the winter,
and by November the Rolling Stones rock and roll circus
had left town. The choice wasn't entirely voluntary. The threat
of arrest, deportation and retribution from some powerful drug movers
was very real. The beginning of the end came some
month before, when Keith had run a foul of a
local harbor master pulling his son Marlin's toy gun on
(49:05):
him during a scuffle after someone had dented his red Jaguar.
The harbor master responded by pulling a real gun, which
did little to de escalate the matter. After a car
chase and a lot of bad noise with the local cops,
the matter was smoothed over with some autographs and vague
promises of good behavior, but the unwanted attention ensured their
cover had been blown. The authority started to keep a
(49:27):
close eye on the comings and goings at Keith's villa,
waiting for their moment to pounce. The consequence free hedonistic
caved of Nellcotte was finally breached that October when thieves
made off with the majority of Keith's beloved guitar collection,
vintage Gibson's, fenders and Martin's, valued at upwards of forty
four thousand dollars. The violation leaves him understandably shaken. Friends
(49:51):
would say it was the first time they'd ever seen
him cry. The house immediately goes into lockdown, and Keith
considers buying guard dogs and security cameras. He must have
known this would do little good. The theft had occurred
in the daylight hours, when Keith himself was home watching
TV with friends. Clearly it was an inside job. The
likely culprits were the local drug dealers, who not only
(50:12):
had access to the villa but were also owed substantial
amounts of money. But theft had probably been in their
eyes at least a form of payment. As with most
things that went down at Villa Neelcut, it was all
about dope and cash. The black seed of paranoia begins
to take root in the souls of Keith and company,
and no one's immune. Convinced that Corsican drug heavies will
(50:35):
kidnap Marlin and hold him for ransom. Keith applies for
a gun permit and then there are problems on the
other side of the wall. Months after the Harbormaster incident,
Keith finally managed to antagonize the authorities to the point
of reason. In the French riviera were all manner of
bad behaviors tolerated as long as the bills are paid
on time. This is an impressive feat. Police closed in
(50:58):
on Keith's dealers, who promptly ratted him out to save themselves.
A bus seems so imminent that the nel Cut residents
held drills. Recording sessions were suspended and the rest of
the Stones kept their distance, all without a certain amount
of resentment, especially on the part of the band's relatively
sober bassist Bill Wider.
Speaker 6 (51:16):
It's very strange being involved in that when you won't.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
Because unfortunately, if anything happens to.
Speaker 6 (51:22):
Keith, it's always the Stones, the Stones on drugs cards.
You always get bunched in on it, you know, and
therefore it does affect you privately.
Speaker 5 (51:33):
You still go through the same.
Speaker 6 (51:36):
Things that they're going through in public.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
When investigators finally showed up at new Cut that fall,
demanding to know why corsic and drug dealers have been
seen visiting the property, Keith started to form an exit plan. Unfortunately,
police got wind of his schemes to skip town and
forbade him to leave, pending a laundry list of charges,
including suspicions of heroin tracking because his orders were so massive,
as well as the slightly more dubious claims of organized
(52:03):
prostitution and supplying drugs to teens. Most people in this
situation would find themselves sitting in jail for an indeterminate
amount of time. The Stones, as you may have guessed,
are not most people. Thanks to their connections Keith was
given permission to travel abroad as long as he continued
paying the astronomical rent on Nelcotte supposedly proof that he
planned the return someday, and he would some two years later,
(52:27):
following the release of Exile on Main Street. In the
accompanying tour, in his haste to leave, the Mandras and
his Jaguar were abandoned, as were Marlin's toys, Anita's wardrobe,
and Keith's record collection. Making these legal headaches go away
through proper and improper methods would wind up costing him
roughly all the money he'd saved by moving to France
as a tax exile in the first place. Sylvie, at
(52:51):
least he got some new songs out of it, and
to Keith that pretty much made it all worth it.
Speaker 9 (53:14):
Stone's Touring Party is written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk,
co Executive produced by Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk, Edited in.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Sound designed by Noel Brown and Michael Alder June.
Speaker 9 (53:23):
Original music composed and performed by Michael Alder June and
Noel Brown, with additional instruments performed by Chris Suarez, Nick
Johns Cooper and Josh Thay vintage Rolling Stones.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
Audio courtesy of the Robert Greenfield Archive at the Charles.
Speaker 9 (53:34):
Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in Northwestern University Libraries.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 9 (53:47):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Welcome to villefranc Sir Mayer on the French Riviera. Writer
Somerset Mom described it as a sunny place for shady people.
And this was before Keith Richards got there. No, this
isn't a stop on the STP tour that comes later.
Right now, we're headed to the capitol of a pirate
nation known as the Rolling Stones, established in the spring
(00:33):
of nineteen seventy one at a seaside mansion called Villainelcut
for six months, this was a site of urjastic revelry
unknown since the last days of Rome, with scenes of
debaucherous decadence akin to an f. Scott Fitzgerald novel on
Angel Dust. In addition to its reputation as the party
capital of the Cotizure, Nokud also hosted sessions for one
(00:54):
of the greatest albums of all time, Exile on Main Street.
These nocturnal gatherings ensured that you could often hear the
villa before you could see it. Ear splitting rock emanated
from the basement and echoed among the yachts bobbing in
the harbor for detizens of this most moneyed coast, the
last survivors of the Gilded Age. This was in an
(01:14):
importable sin, but for everyone else it was a good time.
You do know how to get to nelfit right. You
have your choice of roads, all beautiful yet treacherous as
they wrap around the water's edge. But on the other hand,
it doesn't really matter what way you take. In truth,
you can't get there from here, at least not anymore
(01:35):
as a destination. Villa Nelcut now exists only in the
odd continuum of space, time and memory. Still it's a
journey worth making, So follow us. We'll get you there.
Even after you park your car and the curving gravel
(01:55):
driveway before the great front doors, guarded on either side
by a crouching stone female deity with lions, pause, you're
still not there, not really, see You can't just drop in.
That wouldn't be cool. You have to know someone to
go inside. You have to be invited. Calling first to
say you're coming won't do it either. Quite possibly, no
(02:17):
one will pick up the phone, and even if they do,
they might be so out of it that they forget
your message. In every sense, no could is a completely
closed shop, a very exclusive private club with rules for
admission that are clearly defined. In order to get in,
you have to know someone who lives there. It also
helps if you become bearing gifts, preferably a fresh supply of
(02:39):
something currently being used at the villa on a daily basis.
All those who wish to enter the court of the
Crimson King must first offer tribute. Nonetheless, it's still well
worth the effort to get inside, for as soon as
you step through the two huge imperial front doors, you'll
know that you've left the ordinary world behind. Inside Nelkut
(03:02):
and alternate reality prevails. Over the course of the summer,
a venerable who's who of Rock and Roll Royalties Circle
nineteen seventy one will spend the night there. A definite
scene of all to Keith Richard's home composed of people
who would drop in to say hello and then stay
for a week. Mostly young, semi rich and or nearly famous,
(03:24):
and almost always physically attractive. They'd make themselves at home,
drinking Keith's white wine and eating his food. Some nights,
when the lightning would crack over the bay outside, sixteen
twenty two or some equally preposterous numbers sat down to dinner.
All of it was from another era when money was
easier to come by and the spirit of true celebration
(03:46):
was upon the world. Surrounded by his friends, their chaos,
his family, and his music, Keith lived in the grand manner.
At times it seemed as though the towering ornamental gates
at his home served both to keep the world out
and those inside in. Others came and went, offering business deals,
hustling favors, and smiling until it came time to buy
(04:08):
a plane ticket and move the party elsewhere. That description
comes courtesy of legendary rock journalist Robert Greenfield. As a
twenty something, he paid a visit to Nelcotte in June
of seventy one to interview Keith Richards for a Rolling
Stone cover story, which he later expanded into the book
Exile on Main Street, A Season in Hell with the
(04:30):
Rolling Stones. He stayed three weeks in all, and somehow
lived to tell the tale. His winning combination of talent
and ability to hang earned him a spot on the
STP Tour, which was born in those sweltering basement sessions
at Nelcott. He was loud, he was loose, it was hot,
and quite possibly haunted by Nazis. But if you were
(04:53):
at Nelcott. The basement was where you wanted to be.
Take a pool from the bottle of jack going around.
It will be fine to truly understand The Rolling Stones
nineteen seventy two Exile on Main Street tour and helps
to know how the Stones became exiles themselves, first World
fugitives fleeing their British homeland to seek tax shelter along
the sunny coast line of southern France. Hey, there are
(05:15):
worst places in addition to Greenfield that has never before
heard tapes of The Stones in their seventies exile. Eric
Glory will be joined by his friend and fellow SDP
tour mate Gary Stromberg, the band's pr supremo who's represented
a whole jukebox of the twentieth century's greatest artists. My
name is Jordan Runtogg and this is the Stones Touring Party.
(05:42):
The world's biggest rock and roll band found themselves in
a perilous position at the start of the seventies. They
were still reeling from the death of founding member Brian Jones,
struggling with intermittent addiction, navigating a changing musical landscape, and
grappling with the fallout from their fatal concert at the
Ultamont Speedway, a tragedy that resulted in a press and
put them in the crosshairs of an armed motorcycle gang
(06:03):
with a violent reputation. But perhaps most worryingly, they were broke.
Maybe not broken the way that you and I think
of it, but after half a decade atop the pop
pecking order, the Rolling Stones had shockingly little to show
for it. It was a classic rock and roll ripoff
the deal signs when they were hopelessly green club rats
years earlier, and sapped them of their earnings through royalties,
(06:24):
publishing and touring. Changes in management and record labels offered
hope for more lucrative days ahead, but if they wanted
to maintain the first class lifestyle to which they become accustomed,
they needed a constant influx of cash, so they kept working,
whether they wanted to or not. For years, journalists had
asked that favorite question, when do you think you guys
(06:45):
are going to break up? And the honest answer was
quite simply when they could afford it. According to Robert Greenfield,
money and the accumulation of it was a crucial consideration
when planning the nineteen seventy two American Tour.
Speaker 3 (06:59):
Here's the aten point. They needed that tour to survive financially.
They were broke. You cannot imagine how these boys spent money.
They didn't spend it. It ran through them like a river.
Speaker 2 (07:14):
Certainly Keith wasn't aware of He.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Didn't keep he didn't look at how much the housekeeping costs,
for they had servants. They lived in the Grand Manor
without keeping track.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Drummer Charlie Watts copped to their excessive spending when talking
to Greenfield back in nineteen seventy three. Here's the vintage
audio courtesy of our friends at the Northwestern Archives.
Speaker 4 (07:33):
We spend it. I'm gonna have a lot of things
because I was.
Speaker 5 (07:36):
All my money goes in objects, by the fucking houses
full of objects.
Speaker 4 (07:40):
The houses. I've never been.
Speaker 2 (07:45):
Anywhere near it Stone's basis. Bill Wyman defended their choice
necessity really so travel on what they call the thin
end of the plane. You know, whether space, the stretch
your legs, and they don't mind if you have that
third complimentary drink.
Speaker 6 (07:59):
I mean it was like class because there you go
not only because of the comfort, because of this a
bit more room, but that is comforts, but because it's
you get less hussles and you never get tourists. You're
always travel in a limo because taxi drivers won't even
take you, you know. But now, of course it is comfort.
Speaker 2 (08:17):
Mick Jagger, a one time London School of Economic student,
was too cool to be bothered by financial particularities, at
least in public.
Speaker 7 (08:25):
And I'm rich and I.
Speaker 4 (08:27):
Don't have really very much play, but I don't care.
You know, I'm.
Speaker 7 (08:32):
In called a businessman or anything. I mean, that's bullshit.
I mean I've been called at hundreds of times. But
you're a businessman. Yeah, But I'm not interested in money.
I mean all it's not a businessman wants to be
rich and I don't.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
But Bill Wyman, the oldest member of the band, was
more of a realist going into the nineteen seventy two tour.
Speaker 4 (08:51):
We need the money, absolutely, you got to keep what
we do. We live at a.
Speaker 6 (08:56):
Certain level and it's it's it's fairly high level. You've
got to keep working. You haven't got enough money in
the bank to see you through for the next ten years.
And known about lifetime. I read these incredible right outs
all the time, and ever since we've been going about
the Stones, who've got more money than they know what
to do with. I've never had a lot of money it.
Speaker 2 (09:15):
In addition to these lavish expenditures, the Stone's budget balancing
was further hampered by a devastating discovery. As the band
took control of their business affairs in the new decade,
they learned that not a penny of income tax had
been paid during their sixties prime. For a group who
were barely scraping by financially, a gargantuan back tax bill
was a full scale disaster.
Speaker 6 (09:36):
But that was a very serious financial position because the
people that have been looking after us and we trusted
and didn't do their job, you know, because the tax
was never taken care of as we thought it was.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
They discovered, you know, an American company and the royalties
you never paid them, the classic welcome to the record business. Okay.
Also no expersions here. They were in the ninety percent
tax bracket in England. You know, it's like taxman, you know,
to tax you when you die. Put a penny on
your eye. Okay, thank you.
Speaker 2 (10:09):
The Stones had learned the hard way what George Harrison
had sniped about in song in years earlier. The British
labor government had introduced a super tax of over ninety
percent to its highest earners. This meant that for every
million pounds earned, members of this ultra exclusive tax bracket
were left with just seventy thousand pounds. So, in other words,
the Stones didn't just owe back taxes. They owed a
(10:32):
lot of back taxes. In order to make enough money
to live and chip away at their massive tax bill,
they would have to earn a substantial amount of cash rapidly.
As Bill Wyman could attest, this just wasn't in the cards.
Speaker 6 (10:46):
It's totally mathematically impossible to earn more money to be
taxed more, to be left with more to pay back
what you owed in one year, to be able to
finish out with nothing to nabled are paying eighty six
percent tax on that and be left with enough money
to pay that Richuodian land revenue and finish up right now,
(11:08):
I've got nothing.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
To square their debts and rebuild their fortunes. They needed
to leave the UK and its oppressive inland revenue service
and settle somewhere with lower taxes. America was considered, but
prior drugs convictions made them unwelcome immigrants in the eyes
of Uncle Sam and the NBI, so they looked across
the channel, and so it was decided they would move
(11:33):
to France. In April nineteen seventy one, just before the
start of the British tax year. The band spent their
last months as UK residents mounting a goodbye tour of
their homeland. The ignoble victory lap culminated in a going
away soareet the notorious Skindle's Hotel for friends like John Lennon,
Eric Clapton and The Who's Roger Daltrey. As was the fashion,
(11:54):
the party raged until two am, drawing complaints from the
more respectable guests. Request the quiet down went unheated. Hotel
management literally pulled the plug by cutting the power supply.
An inebriated Mick Jagger was reportedly so enraged that he
hurled a table through a plate glass window. All things considered,
(12:15):
leaving the country a short time later probably wasn't the
worst idea.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
They had to leave. You got to go, and so
that was what exile was all about. They had to
go live in France, which trust me, Mars would have
been more welcoming to them. I mean, they were english
Man like, what they ate for breakfast, and the big
event was when that day old English newspapers would arrive.
(12:43):
Oh thank god, man, I could read the Daily Mail.
These boys were English, England and France. That's why there
was a channel. They don't like each other. They had
nothing to do with one another, and so they were
so alienated.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
Bill Wyman said as much when speak the green Field
in nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
Next time, Yeah, it does.
Speaker 6 (13:07):
It does because you're totally out of touch with the
music scene.
Speaker 4 (13:11):
There isn't any in France.
Speaker 6 (13:12):
There's no TV shows you can watch, there's no bands
you can go and see unless you're right in Paris
and there's not too many. Then you can't get the
latest records. You know. You have to have a the
sent from America or sim from.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
England and you go on from there.
Speaker 6 (13:25):
The pot papers come if you ask well them a
week later. You're never right on right there all the time.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
Keith Richards was especially aggrieved by the resettlement. He couldn't
shake the sense that the Stones have been chased out
of their home by the government who feared their influence
over the youth was too great. Given Mick Jaggers place
on Richard Nixon's enemies list, he may well have been right.
Whatever the case, Keith preferred to spend his money on
drugs and guitars rather than help the British government purchase
(13:53):
more h bombs, and deeply resented the disruption of his lifestyle.
Speaker 7 (13:57):
It is a fucking drake not to be able to
know that I particularly want to be in England all
that amount of time here, But it is.
Speaker 5 (14:06):
A dragon not to be able to if.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
You want to go there.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
Joined by his longtime partner Anita Pallenberg and their young
son Marlin, Keith's adjustment was probably made easier by his
palatial rental home, Villa Nelcott, which quickly became the band's
base of operations while abroad. Perched on the rocky cliffs
high above the Franch Harbor on the French Riviera, the
sixteen room Bellapuck mansion was, like Keith himself, equal parts
(14:36):
fabulous and feral. Just beyond the heavy iron gates lay
an overgrown jungle that shielded the house from the road,
filled with cypress, palm and pine trees, as well as
more exotic species assembled from across the globe. Around back,
a long flight of steps led to a private beach
and jetty, all overlooked by a broad veranda framed by
(14:57):
a double tier of Romanesque columns. Inside, the rooms glittered
like jewels. Brilliant light from the azure expanse beyond streamed
in through the thirty foot windows. Reflecting off the mirrored doors,
rose marble fireplaces, enormous crystal chandeliers, and well polished parquet floors.
It lent a surreal shimmer to a scene that would
(15:17):
grow more and more unreal by the day. The ornate
molding atop the walls were carved with angels and cherubs.
These gilded figures kept watch over Keith Richards, the fallen Angel.
If there ever was one who did the decorating, he
asked upon first seeing the place. Bloody Marie Antoinette Vick
Jagger had been the first of you the property, but
(15:38):
he felt it too ostentatious and a bit too public. Keith,
on the other hand, had no such concerns, and the
prolence of the times, it was cool with him. The
astronomical twenty five hundred dollars a month rent seemed to
defeat the purpose of the whole cost cutting venture, but
the home came with a suitably seedy reputation, and you
(15:59):
can't put up on that. According to rumor, it had
been inhabited by Nazis during World War Two, and the
expansive basement was allegedly the scene of Gestapo interrogations. House
guests that summer claimed they saw vintage heating vents decorated
with gold swastikas, or a Nazi era box in the
basement filled with vials of morphine. But let's just say
(16:20):
Nelcott guests aren't the most reliable narrators. True or not,
there were certainly a sinister vibe surrounding the elegantly decrepit property,
and it was about to get an extra dose of
infamy that summer. Villa Nelkut would play host to the
notoriously debought sessions of the Rolling Stones, griny musical masterpiece
(16:40):
Exile on Main Street.
Speaker 3 (16:49):
Somebody said that the seventies were born in Villa Nellcutt,
where the Stones were recording Exile on Main Street. It
all figures into the seventies two two are to record exile.
They were exiles, you know, they weren't on Main Street,
but they were tax exiles.
Speaker 8 (17:06):
And so.
Speaker 3 (17:08):
I think a lot of the darkness in the album
comes from how alienated they were from everything.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
Sessions wound up at Nelcook through a mix of necessity
and laziness. The original plan had been to find a
proper recording studio somewhere near the Stones home base in
southern France, but when producer Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy
Johns failed to find a suitable room, Keith healthfully offered
up his basement bunker. The chance to record in the
comfort of his own home had two major pluses for Keith.
(17:38):
The first was that it kept him close to his family,
longtime partner Anita Pallenberg and their young son Marlin. The second,
it must be said, was that it kept them close
to his stash. So Jimmy, Andy and the Stones loyal
roadie Ian Stewart set about transforming the labyrinthine cellar complex
into a makeshift studio. Endless yards of cables were snaked
(17:59):
up the stage and out the kitchen window to the
Rolling Stones mobile recording unit, essentially a million dollar trailer
parked in the driveway. The demands of amps and other
musical equipment proved too much for the villa's ancient electrical system,
so the ever enterprising Ian Stewart came up with a
novel solution. He tapped nearby power lines belonging to the
French railway system, one of the many stunts that Nell
(18:21):
could that could and probably should have gotten them deported.
But despite his efforts, power outages were frequent, and so
was the odd electrical fire. Both of these occurrences were
frequently blamed on the spirits of Nazis that they erroneously
believed that previously inhabited the basement. Even without the flames,
the dark and dingy space felt like a sauna, impressively
(18:42):
hot and so humid that the guitars never stated tune
the homegrown nature, with Keith colefully called the tropical disease.
Sessions might have helped foster the US against the world
outlaw spirit that prevailed as the band embraced their status
as exiles, but mostly it was hell.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
You could not have come up with a more insane
way to make an album. This was attempting to record
an album in what was not a studio. Again the insanity.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
I mean.
Speaker 3 (19:16):
Keith was so delighted he said to me, oh, you know,
man couldn't find a studio. They looked everywhere and said,
guess what, it's gonna be making it in my own home.
It's going to be in the basement, I said. I
didn't say anything. But this didn't prove to be the
smartest idea of all time. Working all night because it
was so blazing hot during the day, it was just
(19:38):
chaos and anarchy, and they functioned like that for a
long time.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
I'm at Erdigan, the music industry titan and head of
the Rolling Stones new record label, was anxious to see
how the band's follow up to their chartbusting previous album,
Sticky Fingers, was going. He paid a visit to Noka
that summer and was taken aback by the decidedly funky situation.
Speaker 4 (20:01):
Several of the sessions struck by the madness of the operation.
I mean every yeah, it was it was a bit mad,
but it was it works all right.
Speaker 5 (20:08):
You know, everything they do is a bit you know
that madness and extravagance is part of you know, of
their you know the way they can that they carry
on their faces. Now I understand there's a marvelously mad,
outrageous goings on, you know, surround most of the things,
(20:29):
which I think is what gives you know, gives the
magic to the you know, to not it don't really
related to the music in a strange sense. It is,
you know, in a way, it is the way that
but certainly you know, to the average person that s
their way of life and so forth. You know is
UH is dramatic, you know UH and dramatically different, and
(20:50):
everybody loves them for that.
Speaker 2 (20:52):
The limitations and utter impracticality of the recording process played
a crucial part in shaping the album that many have
come to call The Stone's Best. It's an unapologetically imperfect
collection of ragged, rambling mood pieces that blended the American blues, gospel, country,
and R and B influences that were part of the
band's DNA. That's the stuff America's given the rest of
(21:14):
the world, Keith would later say, far bigger than h bombs.
Speaker 3 (21:18):
The sound comes from the fact that they were in
the basement of villain Nell Cut Jimmy Miller and Andy
John's were sitting in the Rolling Stones mobile unit. I
was there the day they drove that down, this huge
trailer truck packed with what would now be nine million
dollars worth of sound equipment, state of the art, and
(21:39):
so Andy and Jimmy are sitting outside next to the villa,
and anytime they want to talk to Keith or Micker
tell them to stop playing. They have to get out
of the truck, go around the front of the house,
go up the steps like a castle, Go into the house,
go into the kitchen, go down the stairs into this
warren of you know, so up human subterranean spaces, and say, okay,
(22:03):
stop stop stop. That's one of the reasons it sounds
like it does. They could have been in the congo.
It was recorded in a manner that no one had
recorded an album before.
Speaker 2 (22:18):
Sessions were further complicated by the fact that, since it
was Keith's house, things were done on Keith time, which
roughly translated to whatever he felt like it. The idea
of playing a note of music before the sun went
down was ludicrous, he later proclaimed, so he worked dracula hours.
To be fair, there were lots of distractions from the
moment Keith decided to open his eyes, the timing of
(22:41):
which varied wildly from day to day. Like a hippie
sun king, he would descend to the living room, where
a life size cutout of a shirtless Mick Jagger hung
over the fireplace. There he would greet his endlessly revolving
cast of not especially loyal subjects, often several dozen in number.
These were friends or friends, users and pushers, wheelers and dealers, French,
(23:05):
American and British, all struggling to be heard over the oversized,
state of the art pioneer speaker system that constantly blasted
Keith's preferred soundtrack outlaw country stars like Merle Haggard and
George Jones, early sixties girl groups, or doo wop classics.
A chef known to all as fat Jack, was hired
to prepare daily gourmet luncheons for one and all. Keith's partner, Anita,
(23:27):
the only French speaker to reside at Nelcott, presided over
meals for twenty five or more that often lasted three hours,
and then they were gone again, leaving her to moan
why is it that no one even says goodbye? People
just appeared and disappeared. Last names were never used. It
was a Felliniesque freak show of the first order. The
(23:49):
party was costing Keith a reported seven thousand dollars a week,
so much for saving money, he also purchased a two
thousand dollars speedboat, which he called the Mandras. It was
named after a recreational downer, clearly a joke about the
velocity of the craft reached. With Keith at the wheel,
Anita would watch from the verandahs, the father of her child,
(24:10):
took off at high speeds, occasionally ramming other boats or
running aground on rocks. He also ran out of gas
on more than one occasion. Without a radio, he would
just drift waiting to be rescued. And he always was.
God looks out for drunks, babies and Keith Richards. It seems.
Speaker 3 (24:29):
Keith, Yeah, bring over the Mandras, my speedboat and my jaguar,
and you know then I'm going to get into a
fight with the harbor mester and pull a toy gun
on him.
Speaker 8 (24:41):
And I mean they just you had people to clean
up the whatever mission made, and they just weren't aware.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
W Somerset mom said about the French riviera, it's a
sunny place for shady people. Absolutely correct.
Speaker 2 (24:56):
Some of the guests were more illustrious than others. Not
speedscribe William Burrows arrived to persuade the Stones to contribute
a soundtrack to a film adaptation of his novel Naked Lunch.
Marshall Chess, the president of the Rolling Stones new record label,
dropped by to check on business, only to get sidetracks
smoking opium with Anita. John Lennon paid a visit on
(25:17):
his way to the nearby con Film Festival, but a
day living like Keith Richards was too much for him.
Feeling nauseous after an indulgent afternoon on the terrace, the
ex beatle excused himself to the WC. He didn't make it.
They found them lying at the foot of the grand staircase,
having emptied the contents of his stomach on the hall carpet.
Too much wine, too much sun, or maybe it was
(25:39):
the forty five minutes he and Keith spent closeted in
an upstairs bedroom doing god knows what. Who's to say, really,
The guest most able to keep pace with Keith's prodigious
consumption habits was one time bird Graham Parsons. The pair
shared a passion for country music and illicit substances, especially
(26:03):
the latter, so much so that Parsons had recently been
fired from his band, The Flying Burrito Brothers. Even to
the other transient house guests, hardly post her children for
clean and orderly living. Graham and Keith's toxic code dependency
was playing to see. It was especially obvious to Mick Jagger,
though he generally kept his distance from the nell cut
(26:25):
Back in how Mick remained protective and even slightly possessive
of his fellow Glimmer twin he had a right to
be wary of Graham. Within two years he would die
of a heroin overdose.
Speaker 3 (26:40):
Graham came to stay with Keith at Nellcutt while they
were making egg Sile. This is of interest in terms
of Mick control and Keith. So I left at the
end of June. This would have been maybe second or
third week in July. Graham came with his wife Gret
(27:01):
and Keith was not showing up at night when they recorded,
but he was sitting and playing all day with Graham
all day acoustic guitars. There's great photographs of them on
one of the many porches in the living room, and
Mick made it plain that they were no longer welcome
(27:22):
there and he had to leave to get the album made.
There's pressure for them to come up with this album.
You need to follow sticky fingers. We have this brand
new audience, and Keith is more interested in playing Merle
Haggard with Graham in the afternoon.
Speaker 2 (27:41):
For the Stones, the days of living together in vans
or swallowed flats were long gone. Indeed, they were no
longer as close as they once were metaphorically or literally.
The rental pads were strewn across the country, a decent
trek from one another. Bill Wyman was a relative neighbor
just down the road in Nice, but he was turned
off by nell Cutt's narcotic vibes and stayed away. All told,
(28:04):
he played bass on less than half of the Exile
on Main Street tracks. Here's his interview with Robert Greenfield,
courtesy of our friends at the Northwestern University Archives.
Speaker 4 (28:14):
So I like to be separate. I like to be.
Speaker 6 (28:17):
Right at times, and it creates a much better thing.
You can put up with each other much better if
you're not on top of each other all day long.
Maybe day it's Roadie Rowster together, because we do separate
when we need to, when we're not working, we do
go into our own private lives.
Speaker 3 (28:34):
They all lived as far from one another in the
South of France as they could.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Well, that makes a lot of sense. You have to
get to nell Cut.
Speaker 3 (28:41):
That's where you're recording this album. Charlie's An Hour Away
Bill is here. It's like utterly chaos, so nobody understands
the chaos. They thrived on chaos right.
Speaker 2 (28:53):
Mick preferred to reside in Paris with his new wife,
Bianca Perez Moro marcias than pregnant with their first child.
They met less than a year earlier at a Parisian party,
Mick it asserted as alpha status by snatching the two
pay off the head of her fifty something year old escort.
Cynical gossip columnist speculated that he was drawn to Bianca
chiefly because her slight figure and fine boned face closely
(29:15):
resembled his own, but in truth, he was attracted to
their differences, qualities he wished to cultivate it himself. Mick
had been linked to models and pop stars in the past,
but Bianca was easily the most impressive woman to enter
his orbit. Cultured, refined, and extremely well educated. Keith, meanwhile,
was less impressed. He initially considered her just some bimbo,
(29:37):
to use his words, and found her humorless and aloof
Bianca must be said, wasn't exactly bowled over by him either,
but Keith's almost instant is like a Bianca, hints at
something deeper at play, unspoken and likely unconscious. The relations
between the two chief stones have been drifting from friendship
(29:58):
towards mutually beneficial alliance years at a steady clip. Keith
struggled with his diminishing influence over his partner, a mirrored
mixed resentment of Graham Parsons. Rather than blame each other
for their growing divisions, it was easier to blame the outsider.
They each saw these interlopers as enablers, feeding the addictions
(30:18):
that were drawing them apart, Keith's for drugs and Mixed
for flattery. In the society columns, Keith found Bianca self absorbed,
Mick found Graham self destructive. Never the twain shall meet.
The bandmate's bond was further strained by the rather indiscreet
affair that was going on between Keith's partner, Anita and Mick.
The general vibe of Melcote was that of a royal court,
(30:41):
with noblemen feeling entitled to sleep with each other's wives
or girlfriends. But even this was a bridge too far.
Yet the laid back less. A fair of the era,
coupled with their stubborn englishness, prevented the two from ever
addressing the drama directly. Everything was always kept under the
covers and between the buttons, So the repressed hostility and
anger slowly built to a fever pitch that summer, creating
(31:03):
an atmosphere of tensions so thick and palpable that you
could have cut it with a dull knife. As a result,
it's no surprise that Nick and Keith began to fall
out of touch.
Speaker 3 (31:13):
Was it Nell cut by myself? One day? Which is
shocking because that place was like Macy's on the fourth
of July. They people came and went. You didn't know
who anybody was. They had all gone somewhere, okay, and
I was all alone in this incredible villa, and here
comes Mick. And so there were phones back then. I
(31:33):
don't know why Mick dropped in, Okay, and I came
out of my room. Was there for two weeks and
here's Mick, and God love him one to one, no audience.
One of the great actors I've ever encountered in my life.
He could play roles like he just break your heart, okay,
(31:53):
and he's sitting at the piano in the living room,
which you've seen any photographs of nelcut. The living room
looked like a jump sale in somebody's yard.
Speaker 4 (32:02):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
There were you know, like those record store things of Mick,
like a cardboard figure. There were boxes of records. It
was just chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:11):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (32:12):
But he's at the piano and he's noodling and he's
picking out notes and I said, Mick, oh, well hello man,
you know where and then he goes, I won't do
the dialogue. It's like, where is everybody? I said, oh,
they just left. They went the thing and he's got
his head down. He's playing little Boy Blue, that's the role.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
You know.
Speaker 3 (32:30):
I came here to see Keith. We were supposed to
ride together today. You know, he fucking forgot. It wasn't
he didn't have a calendar or a diary or a
day book. It's like you forgot. And he sat there
and he talked to me like really openly, and it's
just kind of made conversation and then he kind of
all right, Matt, see you, and he got I mean
(32:51):
you see you could see the camera moving behind him, right.
He got up and he walked slowly out of the village.
He got in his car or on his motorcycle and
went home alone. And this is the two pre eminent
guys in rock and roll songwriters, great songwriters. Yeah, they
didn't show up.
Speaker 2 (33:08):
The best hope for connection was in the studio, or
more appropriately, the sweltering basement catacombs at Nellcotte. It was
here where Keith retired at the end of the night.
After evenings spent shirtless and barefoot on the veranda sketching
out his latest compositions with an acoustic guitar as the
mistrel swept across the harbor. Then he would record for
(33:29):
as long as the biochemical tornado in his body allowed.
For example, Keith finished up rocks Off at nine am
after an all night session, rousing the engineers had retired
at dawn. The autobiographical track Happy also started this way,
Born after Anita told them she was pregnant with their
second child. Keith took a rare lead vocal on that one.
(33:49):
It was his life after all. But most of these
interminable jams started out as instrumentals that could go on
for hours as he reached for the perfect riff. Songs
like torn and frayed in sweet Virginia were steeped in
the soulful country sounds that echoed throughout the villa from
Keith's record player. Standouts like Tumbling Dice and Casino Boogie
nodded to the riviera gambling palaces down the road in Monaco,
(34:13):
whereas titles like Shina Light and Stop Breaking Down Very
Well may have referenced the spotty power supply and the
less than glamorous basement. Basic tracks would begin with a
skeleton crew of Melcote mainstays rather than Keith's actual bandmates.
The fundamental flaw on this approach was that the more
time you spend in that house, the more likely you
were to be stoned out of your mind when it
(34:33):
came time to record. As a result, the sessions were
unfocused and there's that word again, chaotic. Weeks ticked by
without completing a single track. The lineup included Bobby Keys,
a long, tall Texan whose beast level sax prowess made
him a favorite of Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Leon Russell,
Joe Cocker and of course the Stones, who previously tapped
(34:56):
him for the solo on Brown Sugar. His beasts level
party prowess also made him a favorite of Keith Richards.
He'll be a familiar face on the STP tour, during
which he and Keith will be inseparable. Producer Jimmy Miller
filled in for Charlie Watts on drums and Rookie Rolling Stone,
Mick Taylor handled the bass, and Bill Wyman's absence brought
(35:16):
into replace co found the guitarist Brian Jones just two
years earlier. This was Mick Taylor's first complete Stones album,
and he found himself wondering if things were always this haphazard, fractured,
and messy. He was pleased to earn as one and
only Stone songwriting credit for Ventilator Blues, with its title
inspired by the stifling heat in the Nlcott basement, but
(35:36):
he was less pleased when Mick Jaggers started hitting on
his wife that summer. They lived a dual existence. Upstairs
was Versailles, downstairs was Dante's Inferno, with just a small
fan above Charlie's drum kit for relief. The fetid, windowless
basement frequently reached upwards of one hundred degrees. They took
to playing with their pants off, but the humidity rot
(35:58):
havoc on their vocal cords. This made it even more
unpleasant for Mick when he decided to come around. Like
the rest of the band, his presence was intermittent. For
the first time in the group's history, his chief focus
was on something other than the Stones. This gave Keith
his first and really only time as the band's primary
creative force, the facto role he both relished and resented.
(36:21):
Mick predictably hated the unstructured nature of the sessions, which
would stop and start at random. It was impossible to
know if you were recording or having dinner, but it
was Keith's house and Keith's rules. He knew that the
Stones were at their best when they didn't realize they
were working. Keith later summed up their differing work methods,
thus mix rock on roll, but when they did join
(36:44):
forces and voices, the results were undeniable. The personal bonds
between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards continue to deteriorate during
sessions for Excel on Main Street, but there were business
(37:04):
concerns to consider. The Rocks fabled Glimmer Twins continue to drift.
They set aside their differences to focus on finishing the album,
which would allow them to earn some serious cash by
touring America in the upcoming summer. Regardless of relations they
simply weren't the Stones without one another. And if they
weren't the Stones, who were they?
Speaker 3 (37:25):
Nick knows he can't do it without Keith. There's no
riff until Keith shows up.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
You know.
Speaker 3 (37:31):
Andy Johns told this great story, and this thing is
like dead on its feet, you know, and I can't.
They've been playing for twelve hours. Keith's always late, It's
never there on time. Ever, he shows up and says, oh, Andy,
give me that guitar, and he picks it up and
he plays this riff. They record the song in like
twenty minutes because they didn't have Keith to play the riff.
The point about it, once they get back in the studio,
(37:55):
there's no separation. They are one music brain. They don't
fight in.
Speaker 2 (38:02):
The studio without each other's cooperation. They can't complete the
new album without the album. The Rolling Stones can't tour
America without the money. They'll aarn there. The Rolling Stones
can't survive as a band. The stakes couldn't have been higher.
Speaker 3 (38:17):
It's a relationship of need and mutual respect.
Speaker 8 (38:21):
They tolerated each other. They knew that they were both
dependent on each other to be who they were, so
there was a respect and accent, but there was no
wish that they would get closer together. I think that
they both understood that the differences between them, and they
were accepting of that.
Speaker 2 (38:39):
Charlie Watts, the Stones resident Sage, articulated their differences when
speaking to Robert Greenfield in nineteen seventy two. Here he
is courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives.
Speaker 4 (38:50):
Keith is always what he is when you look at him.
That's what he is there. He don't lie it. He
don't lie anyone, lie to anyone, lie about you. You
know it's not a liar. Mick is much more flamboyant
about that because it isn't you know it's it can move.
The whole thing can change. The situation would change, it
(39:11):
will change with it.
Speaker 2 (39:12):
It's a former.
Speaker 4 (39:15):
Situation which would change its Coke many times that well
he is, he changed very well.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I think I've seen him.
Speaker 4 (39:23):
He can play anybody's game, can it. That's why he
know he can't play anything true love playing anybody else's.
Speaker 2 (39:30):
Differences in personalities, men, differences in social groups, and Nick
began to move in more elite circles.
Speaker 5 (39:36):
I know, it's spend a lot of time and any
one particular group of people to all.
Speaker 4 (39:41):
I never do, you know. I really what I like
to be is just other musicians, you know.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
But I find that rather limited.
Speaker 4 (39:50):
English people are always brought up to get on with
everyone in every circumstance. I mean that's everyone, I mean one,
not particular class group.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
Keith found such aspirational behavior distasteful.
Speaker 6 (40:07):
He is always enamored with those society things in a
strange kind of way.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
Godless boy.
Speaker 3 (40:18):
So the two best things to my mind that Keith
ever said about Mick was one, Mick, he's a nice
bunch of guys, that's okay. And the second one was
when Mick took the knight ship, became a knight Mick,
you know, knighted. Keith said, it should have held out
(40:38):
for the lordship. It's a paltry honor. It's paltry man. Mick,
way back in London, was hanging out with members of
Parliament and he was he was always He went to
LSC London School of Economics. He was comfortable with these people.
He catered to them and they had you know, fostered him,
gave them both fame on some level.
Speaker 8 (40:58):
Mick was English Parliament, Keith was Parliament Funkadelic.
Speaker 3 (41:02):
But they were equally good at punishing one another.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
They were drawn further apart by Keith's disturbing talent for
punishing himself with drugs. Naukot's geography on the French Riviera
was ideally suited to score with a heroin trafficking hub
of Marseilles on the right, when the Italian Mafiosa's on
the left, you could get anything you wanted. Sometimes Keith
enlisted fat Jack the Chef, for the task of procuring
(41:33):
from a gang of local thugs known as the Cowboys.
Other times it came direct from Corsican dealers who delivered
uncut pink cotton candy from Thailand or snowy China, white
and bags the size of two pounds sacks of sugar.
Keith's preferred method of consumption was skin popping, or injecting
directly into the muscles, opposed to the veins. It was
(41:56):
the distinction that, as far as he was concerned, meant
he was keeping his drug use and check the ugly
abscesses and scars on his arms suggested otherwise. No one
knows when Keith Richards first took heroin. Even he doesn't
know for sure. His best guess is that he first
snorted it by accident in the late sixties, mistaking it
(42:17):
for some other powder. By most accounts, his dangerous liaison
began in earnest after the Altamont disaster in December in
nineteen sixty nine. Keith would use and then head to
the toilet, where he would play guitar for hours, no doubt,
believing he was carrying on the grand tradition of blues
men since time immemorial. It helped him with the music,
he'd claim. It also provided an emotional hiding place for
(42:40):
this most extrovert of introverts. He'd later say, with a
hit of smack, I could walk through anything and not
give a damn. Within months, his use had slid into addiction.
Both Keith and Anita had managed to kick Heroin prior
to their arrival in France. Not wishing to jeopardize their
residency in their new home country, he remained opi it
(43:00):
free into a few months into his stay at Melcotte,
when a day at the gokart track turned tragic Keith,
someone inevitably flipped the four wheeler, sending himself skidding across
the pavement like a stone across the surface of a pond.
With his back now resembling raw steak, A well meaning
nurse offered him a painkilling morphine injection. It was a
(43:21):
slippery slope. Keith was candid about the lure of heroin
when Robert Greenfield traveled to Nelcott that summer to interview
him for a cover story in Rolling Stone magazine. If
you're going to get into junk, it takes the place
of everything, he said. You don't need a chick, you
don't need music, you don't need nothing. But it doesn't
lead you anywhere. It ain't called junk for nothing.
Speaker 6 (43:47):
Keith was.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
I was gonna say Keith was straight when I was there.
Keith was never straight. Okay, even using heroin, Keith Richards
could smoke more reefer in the course of a day
than any and drink constantly and go, you know, seventy
seven hours without sleep and just superhuman stuff, you know,
just not comprehensible. This is not a lie. I saw
(44:10):
him at nell Cut. I was up late one night.
It was just me and him. He's working his way
across the living room picking up Marlin's toys. He stops
and there's some pill like capsule lying on Now. There
have been guys in and out all day. It's not
his picked it up. He's not performing. He's all by
himself as me. I'm just in the corner, looks throws
it down his throat. I thought, oh, it was like midnight,
(44:33):
Like dude, what if that's major amphetami?
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Didn't matter what prompted this pathological mad dash towards oblivion.
Was it a simple desire to numb physical pain? Or
was it something more? Some of linked Keith's Heroin used
to the murder at Altamont, a painful event for both
the Stones and the counterculture at large, less a cause
than an effect. The tragedy telegraphed the sad truth that
(44:58):
the idealism of the sixties, with his promises of universal
brotherhood and total enlightenment, were not to be, and the
cynicism and naked self interest of the seventies were nigh.
The drug use reflected this, as Heroin supplanted LSD as
a substance of choice on the street. Acid was aspirational, optimistic, hopeful.
(45:22):
Heroin was nihilistic. Perhaps for Keith it was just a
sign of the times, or maybe it was something more personal.
With financial concerns compounding the pressure to follow up their
last hit album, stress levels among the Stones were high.
In order to ensure the future of the group. Keith
was very aware that he needed not only to descend
(45:43):
into the dark, dank basement each night, but also plumb
the depths of his own musical soul. Maybe he felt
he couldn't make the trip without some serious chemical assistance.
Just as we'll never know when is heroin you started,
we'll also never truly know why. But each night at Nelcotte,
(46:04):
the musicians assembled in the basement waited for the inevitable
moment when Keith would halt the sessions and announced that
he was going to put his son Marl in the bed.
That was code that he needed to fix. He could
be gone for three hours or more, having knotted off
in his bed.
Speaker 3 (46:21):
Nobody would dare go upstairs at Nelcott to wake up
Keith when they knew you did not want to wake
up Keith. I lived there for two weeks. Then a
week later I came back with the interview for Rolling
Stone Magazine. I never went upstairs.
Speaker 2 (46:38):
Never Once Producer Jimmy Miller summoned the nerve to go
upstairs and check on Keith. He found him passed out
in bed, needle an arm, with blood splattered on the walls.
But Mick knew better than to invade the sanctity of
Keith's solitary refuge and a house overrun with users in
every sense of the word, growing more frustrated by the minute,
(47:02):
the singer would finally leave the sessions in a huff.
Then Keith would come to see that Mick had gone
and throw a fit. Needless to say, none of this
was beneficial to group morale, and yet none of the
Stones found it appropriate to intervene Keith had always lived
his life his way. That's just how it was.
Speaker 6 (47:22):
But that's that's his business, you know.
Speaker 4 (47:24):
If he wants to do that, it's fine. That's fine
by me, and it's nothing to do with me.
Speaker 6 (47:31):
If I want to surround myself as any people I
cared to, I don't think that's any business of anybody
else's either. As I say, these things do result in
problems that affect the whole band.
Speaker 3 (47:44):
It wasn't that Mick was with the elite although he
was even in the south of France.
Speaker 4 (47:50):
You know, it's just that.
Speaker 3 (47:54):
Keith's life was a circus and he loved it. He
was the greatest host of all time. Because the party
didn't end. Lunch was three hours, so Nick didn't live
that way. He didn't have twenty people in his house.
You know, that was the gap in the lifestyle while recording,
you know, Keith passing out in the bedroom while they're
waiting for him to come down and play. It took
(48:15):
forever and it still wasn't done. And then they had
to leave France because they would have all been thrown
in jail. It's amazing that all of them got out,
didn't go to prison, and survived to go on tour.
In seventy two, the mood.
Speaker 2 (48:42):
Turned dark and now could have summer turn the winter,
and by November the Rolling Stones rock and roll circus
had left town. The choice wasn't entirely voluntary. The threat
of arrest, deportation and retribution from some powerful drug movers
was very real. The beginning of the end came some
month before, when Keith had run a foul of a
local harbor master pulling his son Marlin's toy gun on
(49:05):
him during a scuffle after someone had dented his red Jaguar.
The harbor master responded by pulling a real gun, which
did little to de escalate the matter. After a car
chase and a lot of bad noise with the local cops,
the matter was smoothed over with some autographs and vague
promises of good behavior, but the unwanted attention ensured their
cover had been blown. The authority started to keep a
(49:27):
close eye on the comings and goings at Keith's villa,
waiting for their moment to pounce. The consequence free hedonistic
caved of Nellcotte was finally breached that October when thieves
made off with the majority of Keith's beloved guitar collection,
vintage Gibson's, fenders and Martin's, valued at upwards of forty
four thousand dollars. The violation leaves him understandably shaken. Friends
(49:51):
would say it was the first time they'd ever seen
him cry. The house immediately goes into lockdown, and Keith
considers buying guard dogs and security cameras. He must have
known this would do little good. The theft had occurred
in the daylight hours, when Keith himself was home watching
TV with friends. Clearly it was an inside job. The
likely culprits were the local drug dealers, who not only
(50:12):
had access to the villa but were also owed substantial
amounts of money. But theft had probably been in their
eyes at least a form of payment. As with most
things that went down at Villa Neelcut, it was all
about dope and cash. The black seed of paranoia begins
to take root in the souls of Keith and company,
and no one's immune. Convinced that Corsican drug heavies will
(50:35):
kidnap Marlin and hold him for ransom. Keith applies for
a gun permit and then there are problems on the
other side of the wall. Months after the Harbormaster incident,
Keith finally managed to antagonize the authorities to the point
of reason. In the French riviera were all manner of
bad behaviors tolerated as long as the bills are paid
on time. This is an impressive feat. Police closed in
(50:58):
on Keith's dealers, who promptly ratted him out to save themselves.
A bus seems so imminent that the nel Cut residents
held drills. Recording sessions were suspended and the rest of
the Stones kept their distance, all without a certain amount
of resentment, especially on the part of the band's relatively
sober bassist Bill Wider.
Speaker 6 (51:16):
It's very strange being involved in that when you won't.
Speaker 4 (51:20):
Because unfortunately, if anything happens to.
Speaker 6 (51:22):
Keith, it's always the Stones, the Stones on drugs cards.
You always get bunched in on it, you know, and
therefore it does affect you privately.
Speaker 5 (51:33):
You still go through the same.
Speaker 6 (51:36):
Things that they're going through in public.
Speaker 2 (51:41):
When investigators finally showed up at new Cut that fall,
demanding to know why corsic and drug dealers have been
seen visiting the property, Keith started to form an exit plan. Unfortunately,
police got wind of his schemes to skip town and
forbade him to leave, pending a laundry list of charges,
including suspicions of heroin tracking because his orders were so massive,
as well as the slightly more dubious claims of organized
(52:03):
prostitution and supplying drugs to teens. Most people in this
situation would find themselves sitting in jail for an indeterminate
amount of time. The Stones, as you may have guessed,
are not most people. Thanks to their connections Keith was
given permission to travel abroad as long as he continued
paying the astronomical rent on Nelcotte supposedly proof that he
planned the return someday, and he would some two years later,
(52:27):
following the release of Exile on Main Street. In the
accompanying tour, in his haste to leave, the Mandras and
his Jaguar were abandoned, as were Marlin's toys, Anita's wardrobe,
and Keith's record collection. Making these legal headaches go away
through proper and improper methods would wind up costing him
roughly all the money he'd saved by moving to France
as a tax exile in the first place. Sylvie, at
(52:51):
least he got some new songs out of it, and
to Keith that pretty much made it all worth it.
Speaker 9 (53:14):
Stone's Touring Party is written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk,
co Executive produced by Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk, Edited in.
Speaker 1 (53:20):
Sound designed by Noel Brown and Michael Alder June.
Speaker 9 (53:23):
Original music composed and performed by Michael Alder June and
Noel Brown, with additional instruments performed by Chris Suarez, Nick
Johns Cooper and Josh Thay vintage Rolling Stones.
Speaker 1 (53:31):
Audio courtesy of the Robert Greenfield Archive at the Charles.
Speaker 9 (53:34):
Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in Northwestern University Libraries.
Speaker 1 (53:39):
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeart Radio.
Speaker 9 (53:47):
For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.
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