Stones fans not welcome at French 'Exile' mansion
Published On Fri May 21 2010
By Peter Howell
The Nellcote sign is on the outside of the French mansion where the Rolling Stones recorded Exile on Main Street.
A digital remaster of Exile was released this past week, along with newly discovered extra tracks,
and a documentary titled Stones in Exile has debuted at the Cannes Film Festival.
Peter Howell/Toronto Star
VILLEFRANCHE-SUR-MER, FRANCE — Behold the gates of rock ’n’ roll heaven and hell.
Through these massive rods of black-and-gold iron passed the Rolling Stones and their retinue in the summer of 1971, seeking refuge from the Britain taxman and from their increasingly complicated lives.
These gates are the frontal access to Villa Nellcôte, the place where Keith Richards shot up, John Lennon threw up and the Stones made
Exile On Main Street. The double LP vinyl album is acclaimed by many pop music fans as being not only the Stones’ masterpiece, but arguably the defining statement of the rock era. A digital remaster of Exile was released this past week, along with newly discovered extra tracks, and the hoopla includes the Cannes Film Festival debut of a documentary titled
Stones In Exile.
The Stones came to the south of France, here in this waterfront billionaires’ preserve, to shut the world off for a while. They chose a good hideout: The place is difficult to find (many people wrongly assume it’s in nearby Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat) and its address at No. 10, avenue Louise Bordes, is on a narrow road that doesn’t exactly beckon to tourists — but it also doesn’t stop them.
With the tragedy of Altamont’s concert murder 18 months earlier still fresh in their minds, and band relations torn and frayed and problems with drugs, money and women, the Stones were badly in need of rejuvenation in the hot summer of ’71.
They holed up in Villa Nellcôte, a 16-room mansion built by a banker in the late 1890s.
It wasn’t the most likely of places for Richards, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts, Mick Taylor and Bill Wyman to record the band’s 10th album. Villa Nellcôte’s hard marble columns and dank basement were less than ideal for optimum sound and delicate instruments. The band used a recording mobile studio packed into a truck parked outside, a rolling powerhouse later hailed by Deep Purple in “Smoke On The Water.”
Richards had rented Nellcôte for its privacy — huge palm trees and a woodland preserve keep it free from prying eyes —and because he was amused that the place had been used as the local Gestapo headquarters during the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. The metal grates for the heating vents of the villa still bore swastika emblems.
As Robert Greenfield tells it in his recent book
Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones, Nellcôte attracted beautiful people and major tensions, that warm summer of ‘71.
Jagger had recently married Nicaraguan model Bianca Pérez Morena de Macías, having also recently abandoned girlfriend Marianne Faithfull. His attention was divided and his patience was wearing thin with the rock-star shenanigans of his band mates — particularly Richards, Jagger’s main creative partner, who kept vampire hours and often dozed off from the affects of his increasing dependency on heroin. Jagger also resented the presence of ex-Byrds guitarist Gram Parsons, a country rocker whom Keith had befriended and whom Mick viewed as a hanger-on.
Richards had his own personal issues. He didn’t like Bianca, whom he judged to be a snooty gold-digger. He was trying to be a good father to his 2-year-old son Marlon, borne to him by model Anita Pallenberg, a friend of Faithfull’s, whom Mick had reportedly “plundered” (as the newly issued Exile outtake “Plundered My Soul” strongly suggests.)
Always sociable and at all hours, Richards invited along any number of drug dealers, fellow musicians and general hangers-on to the Nellcôte clambake. John Lennon and Yoko Ono were amongst the visitors, with Lennon reportedly hurling on the front steps of the mansion after one refreshment too many with Richards.
Out of this chaos came the four sides and 18 songs of
Exile On Main Street, a sprawling slab of rock, blues, country, folks, gospel and soul that was initially panned by many critics (the “swampy” sound of Nellcôte bothered some), and which yielded just two semi-hits: “Tumbling Dice” and “Happy.”
Yet the album has gained mythic status since its 1972 release, influencing everyone from the punks of The Clash to girl-power diva Liz Phair. Exile was often cited by the grunge rockers of the 1990s as the only classic rock album they could enthusiastically support, and “Happy,” with its gravelly, Richards-lead vocal, has become a concert anthem for the Stones’ axeman.
“I think tales of its universal derision have been largely exaggerated,” said Stephen Kijak, the U.S. filmmaker whose Cannes premiere doc
Stones In Exile is loaded with unseen footage documenting the album’s birth at Nellcôte.
“The album was huge and the tour was massive,” he told the
Star.
“It’s a double album. People didn’t make a lot of double albums back then, and it was notoriously hard to mix: It was recorded in the most unusual circumstances, but that’s what gives the sound its character. I’d like to think it will be appreciated by a new generation that can actually get their heads around it as a complete work, and not just by hand picking songs off iTunes or something. In a perfect world, it will help encourage a re-appreciation of the album as an art form.”
Kijak tried but failed to gain access to Nellcôte for his movie, said Didier Gayraud, a Riviera local and Stones fan who assisted him with Nellcôte.
Gayraud told the
Star the current owners of Nellcôte don’t encourage fans to visit, unlike the way Elvis Presley’s admirers are invited into Graceland in Memphis.
“The house was bought five years ago by a Russian who paid 100 million euros ($128 million). The house has a swimming pool now and the next villa has been bought to make a larger property. I don’t think that the owner is interested in the Stones,” Gayraud said.
Fans come to visit the property, but they aren’t welcome — a man in black emerged from house to shoo the
Star away after a few too many photos were snapped.
The main mansion of Nellcôte is set way back from the access road, along the Riviera waterfront, and it is hidden by a smaller building that apparently serves as a guest house. It’s difficult to see the mansion even from the local beaches, because access is severely limited. A full view can only be seen from the water or air, although Google Earth provides a dandy aerial view of the property.
If anything, Nellcôte is about to become even more imposing. There is construction currently underway on either side of the property that may make the limited sightlines even more constrained.
In contrast, the legend of
Exile On Main Street continues to grow, something that is a mystery for Jagger, who has long maintained the album is “overrated.”
Stones fans beg to differ, though, and Kijak thinks he knows why.
“People seem to see that album, and the circumstances in which it was made, as the apotheosis of the rock and roll lifestyle; the ultimate fantasy of living the music — they were kings, but still outlaws, and the album is steeped in all the mysterious contradictions that goes with that.”
Kijak had the full support of the band in making his film, with access to outtakes from the unreleased documentary of the era by Robert Franks (who also designed the photo montage album cover) that is known under the publication-friendly title
CS Blues. Jagger showed up at Cannes this week for a Q&A session following the debut screening of
Stones In Exile.
“It’s just one of those albums that carries with it the weight of myth,” Kijak continued.
“And, it’s an amazing piece of music, almost a culmination of everything the Stones had explored musically up to that point, a dense, murky tour through the American idioms they always celebrated, but sleazier, darker.
“Given the year it came out, it’s easy to say that it signalled the end of the ’60s, that it was a reaction to Altamont, or that it signalled the dark times ahead, and perhaps it does — but it endures as a musical statement, and is still rich and rewarding some 40 years on, and that’s just down to the music.”
Toronto Star
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