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>> MORE: Read our original 1971 "Exile" album review.
In the spring of 1971, nine years into their existence as the
world's greatest rock & roll band, the Rolling Stones learned
to their great dismay that they were not only broke but would also
have to leave England to avoid paying British income tax. They
decamped to the French Riviera -- aptly described by Somerset
Maugham as "a sunny place for shady people," where all forms of
aberrant behavior had always been tolerated so long as the bill was
always paid on time -- and began recording their new album in the
basement of Villa Nellcôte, Keith Richards' sumptuous mansion
by the sea. The result was the Stones' only double album, the
classic "Exile on Main Street."
This excerpt from Robert Greenfield's forthcoming book "Exile on Main St..: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones" includes online-only photos of the band.
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On June 7th, 1971, after a four-day drive from London, the Rolling Stones' recording truck, also known as the mobile, finally arrives at Nellcote. For a solid month before Mick left on his honeymoon, he and Keith had scoured the French countryside for places where the band might record. "Of course," road manager Jerry Pompili would later say, "no one liked anything. We wasted a month, and then in the end they decided to do it in Keith's house. Typical Stones."
In large part, the truck exists not just because the Stones have wasted so much money over the years by booking expensive studio time by the hour only to then show up late or not at all for sessions but also because of the residual guilt Mick and Keith still feel about allowing Andrew Oldham, the Stones' first manager, to boot original pianist Ian Stewart out of the band in 1963 because he neither looked nor acted like a pop star. "I think by way of making it up to him," recording engineer Andy Johns will later say, "they built the truck and said, 'Here ya go, Stu. You run this.' " The Stones have also pumped an astronomical 65,000 pounds into building what Johns will later call "the first proper mobile in Europe." It has already been used at Stargroves, Mick's country estate in England, to record tracks that appear on Sticky Fingers as well as "Sweet Black Angel," which eventually makes it way onto Exile on Main Street.
Shortly after the mobile arrives, what in retrospect will prove to be the most significant event of the entire summer occurs. Keith and Tommy decide to spend the day driving go-carts around a local track. Based on Keith's driving record in England, it should come as no surprise to anyone that calamity results. Deciding to have a go at Tommy, who in any vehicle is by far the better driver, Keith takes a running shot at him with his go-cart. "It definitely felt like murder," Tommy recalls. "He was trying to knock into me. He drove straight at me and the thing flipped. . . . I was still trying to slow the cars down and I had him with his head in my lap, the go-cart on top of him, and his back was scraping along the tarmac. His back was like raw steak. A little later, he was looking at me and he said, 'OK, Tommy, I think it's about time you went to the doctor and get him to get us some you-know-what,' which everyone had been staying away from. And that was the beginning of it. The go-cart accident instigated the opiates."
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Since the Rolling Stones make it a practice never to travel anywhere without having a doctor around, their local physician by this point had already been sending around what in France is called a piquer (someone like a district nurse) to administer injectibles at Nellcote. To this point in time, the substance being injected on a daily basis is vitamin B-12. Back then, this practice was all the rage for those with money on both sides of the Atlantic who found themselves in high-pressure situations and could not be bothered to exercise in order to keep the old immune system up.
"Keith was absolutely in physical pain," says Tommy Weber. "And he knew what it was about. And he knew what it was going to do. He saw it in the world. He was actually pissed off that he had to be the person who had to keep all these people in line, including Mick, who was the whipping boy. When you realize that, you understand that Keith was free. He could go as far as he wanted to. He could allow Mick to take all the judgment of the straight world while he was able to really try and find out what the fuck was going on."
Whether it is just a simple desire to numb the physical pain that causes Keith to begin using again or the realization that with the mobile parked outside the villa, the time has finally come for him to begin work on the new album and that in order to do so, he will not only have to go down into that dank basement each night but also plumb the hidden depths of his own musical soul, an expedition he does not feel he can undertake without serious chemical assistance, no one can say for sure. "That was why he said it," Tommy explains. "Obviously, it had been weighing on his mind and he'd been trying not to start himself back up again, knowing that the work was there and the work required that level of decadence. I don't think it was being in an altered state to make the music. It was the way of life. 'It's only rock & roll, but I like it.' I like it. It was the liking, the decadent state, that gave them that fantastic self-confidence to create that incredible work."
Whatever his real reasons may have been, Keith is the one who places the order. And so the madness at Villa Nellcote that summer begins in earnest.
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At some point during the second week in June, the Stones actually begin playing together for the first time at Nellcote. From then on, Bill Wyman remembers them working every night from eight until three in the morning for the rest of the month. However, according to Wyman, "not everyone turned up every night. This was, for me, one of the major frustrations of this whole period. For our previous two albums we had worked well and listened to producer Jimmy Miller. At Nellcôte things were very different and it took me a while to understand why."
Within the tightly cloistered world of the Rolling Stones, which Mick Jagger rules with complete dominion, there is one person he cannot control: Keith Richards. Day after day, as Keith gets high and dawdles in the loo upstairs, Mick and the rest of the Rolling Stones sit down in the basement waiting. There is nothing Mick can do to make Keith write new music to which he can write lyrics. He is squarely under the thumb of his oldest friend. Similarly, without the help of Mick, Keith cannot complete the album on which the Stones are working. Without the album, the Stones cannot tour America. Without the money they will earn there, they cannot survive as a band.
Down in the cellar, the Stones discover another problem: the humidity that tends to collect in the basements of large houses on the French Riviera during the summer. "The guitars would go out of tune halfway through a song," says Andy Johns. "Always. You'd stop them or they'd go to the end and you'd go, 'We have to do that again because we're going out of tune.' "
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Despite these problems, everyone still believes that recording the album at the villa is a brilliant plan. The reason for this is simple. In the deck of cards that is the Rolling Stones, Keith has now become the grinning joker. Although he was the one who always railed the loudest at Brian for turning up so stoned at sessions that he would sometimes fall asleep on the floor, thereby forcing Keith to record all the guitar parts on his own, he now lives in a time zone that is all his own.
Late one night down in the basement, as Keith is putting an overdub on "Rocks Off," the track that will eventually become the first cut on the album, he falls asleep. In itself, this is nothing new. As Johns will later recall, "Keith used to nod out. He would play the intro and he'd be tacit for the first verse because he'd nod out and never come back in again." The mobile was equipped with a talk-back system and a black-and-white camera designed to allow whoever was at the board to see and communicate with the band as they played. Because neither worked very well, Johns spent most of his summer running from the truck into the basement at Nellcôte so he could talk to the musicians. "And I wasn't going to stop the tape and go, 'Wake up!' . . . So we would just sit there and let the tape roll. You would know you were getting close if Keith came out of the basement to listen to a playback. That meant we were getting somewhere. He knew what he wanted, oh, yeah."
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Regaining consciousness at three in the morning, Keith asks to listen to what he has just done, only to fall asleep once more. Deciding the night is now conclusively over, Johns leaves the mobile, gets into his car and returns to the villa where he lives with trumpet player Jim Price, easily half an hour's drive from Nellcôte. When Johns gets there, the phone rings. "Oi!" Keith says, none too pleased at having woken up only to find everyone gone. "Where the fuck are you? I've got this idea for another guitar part." Johns promptly drives all the way back to Nellcôte, where at five in the morning Keith begins doing this rhythm track that, as Johns will later say, "was spectacular. Made the song work. It was excellent. Like a counter-rhythm part. Two Telecasters, one on each side of the stereo, and it's absolutely brilliant. So I'm glad he got me back there."
Still, with so little real progress being made down in the basement, time begins to weigh heavily on everyone. For want of anything better to do, Andy Johns and Jim Price decide to set up a casino at the villa where they live. "We bought a full-sized roulette wheel," Johns recalls, "and people would come by and we would play roulette until one or two in the morning and then it would change into poker. Sometimes craps. And we were making quite a bit of money on the craps and the roulette. We were the house. Keith came once. And he didn't want to join in. I think that was because he might lose. Or we might win. Which of course would have been an act of lese-majeste. It was the time that he shot me up."
Johns, then twenty-one years old, has snorted heroin a few times but never injected the drug. "During the course of that project," he says, "I started using. Because it was easy to get. Marseilles was just down the road, and you could get this China White that was very powerful for not a lot of money. So I started taking this stuff. I mean, it was so fucking boring most of the time. So much waiting around."
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On the night that Keith comes to visit Johns and Price at their makeshift casino on the French Riviera, Johns goes into his bedroom "to change my shirt or for some fucking reason, and Keith had a needle and a spoon, and I'd been brought up to think that was very inappropriate behavior. But I was along the path a little bit by now, and I said, 'What are you doing?' And he said, 'Oh, do you want to do this too?' And I went, 'Yes. OK.' And he went, 'Oh, this needle's fucked. It won't work. We'll go back to my place.' So we jump in his car and drive all the way back to Nellcote, and he takes me downstairs and cooks something up, and he didn't inject it in the vein. He just skin-popped me. And went, 'Now, you're a man.' Which I thought, looking back on it now, 'How adolescent of him.' And how adolescent of me. 'Oh, I'll do this, too.' "
Johns then goes back upstairs and is sitting in the mobile when Ian Stewart walks in, takes one look at him, and says, "Andy, what's the time? Andy, what's the time?" "And of course," Johns would later recall, "I couldn't see. So I was looking at my watch and going, 'It's, uh, I think it might be . . . well . . .' And Stu said, 'You've been hangin' out with Keith, haven't you? Ohhhh, dear, he's in trouble. . . .' So Stu picked up on it within ten fucking minutes. I said, 'Stu, no, I haven't done anything.' I just lied. He knew. I didn't become a junkie per se until a little later on. By the time we went to Jamaica to do Goat's Head Soup, I was deep into it."
One of the lucky ones, Andy Johns spends the entire summer at Nellcôte yet somehow manages to live to tell the tale. The same cannot be said for John Lennon -- who passed through the house during the Cannes Film Festival -- Gram Parsons, Jimmy Miller, Madeleine D'Arcy, Ian Stewart, photographer Michael Cooper, Living Theatre producer Olivier Boelen, Jean de Breteuil, the highborn drug connection who supplied Jim Morrison with his fatal shot, or Spanish Tony Sanchez and Michele Breton, both of whom are missing in action and presumed to be gone as well. To say that the human toll exacted during the making of Exile on Main Street was extreme is an understatement of major proportions. But then even if you had tried to tell the denizens of Nellcote that far too many of them would, in the immortal words of Pete Townshend, die before they got old, no one would have listened. They were all too busy getting high.
[From Issue 1009 — September 21, 2006]
>> MORE: Read our original 1971 "Exile" album review.