The most debauched album ever made: As a Stones classic is re-released, the truth about wife-swapping, all-out war between Mick and Keith and heroin on tap in an old Nazi HQ
By Alison Boshoff
30th April 2010
Anita Pallenberg was often to be found lounging on the terrace in a leopard-print bikini. A volatile woman, described by her friend Marianne Faithfull as 'the dark queen in an evil spell', she was made lazy both by the heat and the heroin.
Indeed, there was a curious, tropical, damned atmosphere in Villa Nellcote - the house in the South of France where, in 1971, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts and Mick Taylor recorded the album
Exile On Main Street, by night in the basement.
Today, this Gothic pile is surrounded by a jungle of palms, with the sea glittering in the distance. But it is a tainted paradise. It is rumoured to have served as HQ during World War II for the Gestapo, who would torture locals in the very basement where the Rolling Stones put their album together. Swastikas were apparently carved into the heat vents on the floor.
Just married: Mick and Bianca Jagger leave their wedding in May 1971.
The Rolling Stones began recording Exile On Main Street shortly afterwards.
The Stones enjoyed telling the Nazi stories, and Keith loved the grandeur of the 16-bedroom house. 'Who decorated this place?' he said when he arrived. 'Marie Antoinette?'
Anita and Keith's toddler son, Marlon, was happily oblivious to the decadent atmosphere.
For several months that summer, Marlon's playmates were Jake and Charlie - the two children of Tommy Weber, a socialite, racing driver and drug runner. Weber was one of the crowd who gathered for what turns out to be the most dissolute house party ever thrown.
Everyone swung by. John Lennon, with Yoko in tow, even came for a quick 45-minute visit over the summer - but exited rapidly after vomiting on the marbled floor.
Anita tactfully tried to gloss over Lennon's illness by saying he had just overdone it on the sun and the wine, but in fact he was more likely having a reaction to the methadone he had been prescribed.
Drugs of all sorts were everywhere. Indeed, Weber arrived with his children just in time for Mick's wedding to Bianca in St Tropez, which took place just before recording officially began.
Weber's children were pageboys at the wedding. When they arrived at the villa, the children were discovered each to have around 1lb of cocaine strapped to their bodies in two moneybelts - a ploy which assured Tommy of a warm welcome from his rock star friends.
The story of how the album was made during that blazing summer is one of the most extraordinary in rock history. And the Stones themselves are now revisiting their glory days, with a re-release of
Exile On Main Street and a new documentary, produced with the band's blessing, which will tell some of the debauched tale.
In the film, Keith Richards tells the cameras with his usual swagger: 'Mick needs to know what he's going to do tomorrow. Me, I'm just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around. Mick's rock, I'm roll.'
Charlie Watts adds: 'A lot of Exile was done how Keith works: which is play it 20 times, marinade, play it another 20 times. He knows what he likes, but he's very loose. Keith's a very bohemian and eccentric person, he really is.'
But the official documentary will certainly not cover the full story. It glosses over, for instance, the presence of Gram Parsons, the country rock legend, who drove a terrible wedge between Mick and Keith, and the other jealousies between the bandmates which made the process torture for all involved.
It also won't tell of the extraordinary tussle Mick and Keith had over Anita, and the mysterious pregnancy which followed.
Co-stars: Jagger and Keith Richards' girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg,
in the 1970 film Performance.
The pair were rumoured to have had an on-set affairAnd you can bet that the documentary won't tell the story of the drugs and who took them. They were largely supplied by rock 'n' roll's favourite drug dealer, the legendary Spanish Tony, and by another dealer, Jean de Breteuil, who gave Jim Morrison his fatal dose soon after.
De Breteuil brought the Stones pure Thai heroin, tinged pink, which was known as cotton candy. Everyone indulged in something - at least, some dope and booze. Even the relatively straitlaced Charlie Watts was working through the tequila.
Spanish Tony, whose real name is Tony Sanchez, recalls that Mick asked for three grams of cocaine just to get him through his wedding day, muttering: 'I'm not going to get through this gig without it.'
He and Bianca had apparently rowed furiously over the pre-nup he made her sign that day, and he was heard to sigh: 'This whole thing is more hassle than it's ****ing worth.'
As always with Mick, everything came down to money. The Stones' sojourn abroad had come courtesy of the taxman. They were fleeing the Labour government's punitive 93 per cent tax on high earners and trying to revive their fortunes.
Their manager, Prince Rupert Lowenstein, hired by Mick to straighten them out, advised the Stones to leave the UK. He also set up the various offshore financial arrangements which are still in place today.
As Mick said: 'After working for eight years, I discovered at the end that no one had ever paid my taxes, and I owed a fortune. So then you have to leave the country.'
Everyone settled in their own villas near to Nellcote, and it was decided that they should make the album onsite, in the basement. If he only had to go downstairs, the reasoning went, then at least Keith would turn up.
On the road: The Stones toured extensively following the release of Exile On Main Street in 1972
They put down carpet, but it was so dank and hot that the guitars kept going out of tune halfway through the songs. The quality of the sound was odd, fuddled even. Mick has said he doesn't care for the album, but it is regularly voted among the greatest ever made.
The typical 'working day' would start slowly, with a long lunch and lots of chilled white wine and hash. Sometimes Keith would take his speedboat out, or drive to Villefranche.
Mick liked to write in the afternoons, but he had to wait for Keith to come up with some melodies for him to create lyrics for.
The nights were reserved for music. Bill Wyman recalls that for the first month they worked every night from 8pm to 3am, but not everyone would turn up. 'This was, for me,' he said, 'one of the major frustrations of the period.'
As Robert Greenfield reveals in his book
Exile On Main Street, Keith would habitually say he had to take Marlon to bed - then he'd go upstairs to take heroin and nod off, sometimes with the needle still in his arm. The rest of the band would be left downstairs, with Mick fuming and furious.
Keith had arrived at Nellcote declaring he was 'clean' - meaning he was taking coke and marijuana but not heroin. However, after a go-karting accident and with the recording sessions looming, he started to take heroin again.
But the drugs were only part of the problem: the fractious dynamic between Mick and Keith was very much part of the conflict, too.
As Anita said in an interview, it was cat and mouse. 'Mick would be in the basement, and Keith would not go down there. Keith always likes to give Mick a hard time.'
Mick had problems of his own with Bianca. Now pregnant with Jade, she did not bother to hide her disdain for the rest of the Stones and soon refused to visit Nellcote.
Eventually she decamped to Paris, forcing Mick to commute across France for recording sessions. More than once, she threatened to leave him for good.
The band called her 'Bianca the W****r' behind her back. Keith, in particular, couldn't stand her airs and graces and had no idea why Mick had decided to marry her. And he had been Mick's best man.
Everyone struggled, in one way or other, with the isolation. Bill Wyman missed PG Tips, Birds custard, Branston pickle and piccalilli - all of which he eventually had brought over. He also found it hard to 'deal with' French milk. He and Charlie Watts were both homesick.
Mick Taylor, new to the group, was picked on by both Keith and Mick. He was even seen in tears. Keith told him that he was playing too loudly, even though (Eric Clapton notwithstanding) he is recognised as possibly the most gifted guitarist of his generation.
All were driven to despair by the extremely slow pace of recording. Taylor's wife Rose said: 'Mick Taylor and Charlie and Bill seemed to be there all the time, and it was just always waiting. For Keith or Mick.'
There was also a divide between those who used drugs and those, like Mick Jagger, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, who largely resisted.
When Mick Taylor told Charlie Watts he simply couldn't stand it any more, Charlie deadpanned: 'I have tried to jump in the river, but it's only four inches deep.'
Into this mix came Gram Parsons, the country rock genius and junkie who was to die of an overdose two years later.
A great friend of Keith's, the two of them would jam for hours in the afternoons on the terrace - something which drove Mick wild with jealous rage. Keith wanted to go on tour with Gram, but this was something Mick would not allow.
Mick was also infuriated that Keith could seemingly come up with endless music for Gram, but little for him.
Annoyed, Mick made a play for Gram's girlfriend, Gretchen, to put him in his place. As she said later: 'It wasn't about me, that's for sure.' Eventually, Gram and Gretchen were asked to leave.
Bill later said: 'It was obvious drugs were at the centre of the problem. Whatever people tell you about the creative relationship of hard drugs and the making of rock 'n' roll records, forget it. Believe you me, they are more of a hindrance than a help.'
By the end of the summer, Anita was seriously addicted to heroin, shooting up three times daily. Once, she and Keith nearly died when the bed on which they were passed out caught fire. (They were rescued by security guards.)
Again, it won't be in the sanitised documentary, but the story of the Stones' women is perhaps even more fascinating. Anita hated Bianca so much that she even spread the false rumour that Bianca had been born a man.
Late that summer, when Anita fell pregnant, she asked Keith's PA for help in arranging an abortion. Keith was delighted that she was pregnant, but Anita was not so sure. She asked several times for flights to be booked so she could have an abortion back home - but never took them.
Extraordinarily, Keith apparently believed that the baby Anita was carrying was Mick Jagger's. He thought the baby was conceived when Jagger and Anita rekindled the purely sexual affair they had enjoyed some time before - all while Keith was too fuddled under the influence of heroin to notice.
Marshall Chess, an executive with Atlantic Records who was at Nellcote that summer, said: 'It was tossed around whose kid it was, but never discussed in front of me. [Anita] thought it was Jagger's kid. There were major problems between Mick and Keith over it. A cold ****ing wall went up between the two of them over it.'
So might the baby have been Mick's? Anita was heard complaining that Keith was not interested in her any more sexually (though it is likely that the heroin made it difficult for him to perform sexually).
And, of course, the Stones were famous for trading their women.
Anita had been Brian Jones's girlfriend before moving on to Keith; Marianne Faithfull started out as Keith's girlfriend before he suggested she try Mick out.
However, in a recent interview, Anita said the baby wasn't Mick's.
'I don't really like Jagger that much,' she said. 'I never felt his charm the way other women did - the way Marianne did. I always thought Keith was more interesting. I would never, ever have jeopardised the relationship with Keith.'
In the end, everyone accepted that the child was Keith's. The child, born Dandelion Richards in Switzerland, was brought up by Keith's mother because Anita was too addicted to heroin to care for her. Now, going by the name of Angela, she lives quietly in Kent and runs a stables.
Some suggest that Mick and Keith's always fractious and competitive relationship has never quite recovered - even though the matter has not been openly discussed by the two men.
Others say that the question of who slept with whom is a complete irrelevance to the Stones. They say the conflict stems from the fact Keith sees Mick as a phoney sell-out, and Mick disapproves of Keith's rock 'n' roll lifestyle.
Despite the tensions, relations between the pair certainly aren't that bad. Keith says that they are working together now, and may well release a new Stones album towards the end of this year.
Soon after this paternity crisis came another: a drugs bust. Anita and Keith were charged with possession of heroin and intent to traffic. Eventually, probably after several bribes and certainly after much manoeuvring by the Stones' lawyers, they got off all charges. They left Nellcote suddenly in November 1971, leaving behind the dog, the parrot and Marlon's toys.
The album was eventually finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary, Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute, including the album's first single, Tumbling Dice.
He had to issue an ultimatum to have the mixes finished. 'I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies,' he told an interviewer.
But producer Don Was, who went through all the old tapes to put the re-release together, begs to differ. 'Everything in the legend may or may not be true, but when they went downstairs to make a record, they were a great rock 'n' roll band and very professional,' he says.
'The myth says this is a sloppy record - and it's not sloppy at all. It's artistically really solid.'
The final word should go to Jake Weber, who, don't forget, was just eight when he spent his summer with the Stones.
'There was cocaine, a lot of joints. If you're living a decadent life, there is always darkness there,' he says. 'But, at this point, this was the moment of grace. This was before the darkness: the sunrise before the sunset.'
Daily Mail
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