Life (30 page)
A
nita and
I
went back
to Morocco for Christmas in 1967, with Robert Fraser, soon after he'd got out of jail. Chrissie Gibbs took a house belonging to an Italian hairdresser in Marrakech. It was a house with a big garden that had run wild, and the garden was full of peacocks and white flowers coming up through weeds and grass. Marrakech gets very dry, and when the rains come all this vegetation comes piercing through. It was cold and wet, so there was a lot of making of fires in the house. And we were also smoking a lot of dope. Gibbs had a big pot of majoun, the Moroccan candy made of grass and spices, that he'd brought from Tangier, and Robert was very keen about this person who Brion Gysin had put us all onto, who was also a maker of majoun, Mr. Verygood, who worked in the "mishmash"--the jam--factory and made us apricot jam in the evening.
We had dropped in on Achmed in Tangier on the way. His shop was now decorated with collages of the Stones. He'd cut up old seed catalogues, and our faces peered out from a forest of sweet peas and hyacinths. This was the period when dope could be mailed in various ways. And the best hash, if you could get any, was Afghani primo, which used to come in two shapes: like flying saucers, with a seal on it, or in the shape of a sandal, or the sole of a sandal. And it used to have white veins in it that were apparently goat shit, part of the cement. And over the next couple of years Achmed would send out large quantities of hashish sealed in the bases of brass candlesticks. Soon he had four shops in a row and big American cars with Norwegian au pair girls falling out the back. All kinds of wonderful things happened to him. And then a couple of years later, I heard he was in the slammer with everything taken from him. Gibbs looked after him and kept in touch with him until he died.
Tangier was a place of fugitives and suspects, marginal characters acting other lives. On the beach in Tangier on that trip we saw these two strange beach boys walking along, dressed in suits, looking like the Blues Brothers. It was the Kray twins. Ronnie liked little Moroccan boys, and Reggie used to indulge him. They'd brought a touch of Southend with them, handkerchief knotted on the corners over the head and trousers rolled up. And those were the days when you were reading about how they'd murdered the axman, and all those people they'd nailed to the floor. The rough mixed with the smooth. Paul Getty and his beautiful and doomed wife, Talitha, had just bought their huge palace at Sidi Mimoun, where we stayed one night. There was a character called Arndt Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, whose name I remember because he was the gaily painted heir to the Krupp millions, and a degenerate even by my standards. I believe he may have been in the car during one of the most terrifying moments I've had in a motorcar and one of my closest shaves with mortality.
Certainly Michael Cooper was in the car, and maybe Robert Fraser, and one other, who might have been Krupp. And had it been the heir to the munitions empire, it would have been ironic what nearly befell us. We'd gone on a trip to Fez in a rented Peugeot, and left at night to go back to Marrakech, across the Atlas Mountains. I was driving. Up there among the hairpin bends, halfway down, round the corner right in front of me, without any by-your-leave, coming at us there were these two motorcycles, military I realized by the uniforms, and they were covering all of the road. So he managed to swerve there, I managed to get round here, but down below is half a mile of forget-about-it. So I pull back in and swerve around, and in front of me now is this huge truck, with more motorcycle outriders, and I ain't going over, so I clipped one of the motorcyclists and I went right by the thing. They went bananas. And as we were passing by it, there's a huge missile, a rocket on the truck. We're going round the bend and we've just made it--I've got one wheel over the abyss; I just managed to save us. What the fuck is this doing in the middle of the road? And seconds later,
booom.
It went over. We hear this huge crash and explosion. It was so fast I don't think they knew what happened. This was a long, big motherfucker, an articulated truck. But how we got away with it I don't really know. Just drove on. Foot down. Deal with the hairpins. My night-driving abilities were famous at that time. We changed cars when we got down to Meknes. I went to the garage and said, "This car isn't working very well. Can we rent another one?" We just got the hell out of there. I was expecting NATO on my tail or something, at least an immediate military response, helicopters and searchlights. The next day we're looking in the papers. Not a mention. Falling down a cliff into an abyss astride a third world rocket would have been a sad end, perhaps the only fitting send-off for the heir to the Krupp armaments fortune.
I was suffering from hepatitis on that trip and virtually crawled out of there, but, my luck still holding, into the welcoming arms of one of medicine's great Dr. Feelgoods, Dr. Bensoussan, in Paris. Anita took me to Catherine Harle. She was a model agent, a Sufi, an incredible woman who had a great range of contacts. She was like Anita's spiritual mother, and took her in when she was ill or in trouble. It was she who Brian Jones went to when Anita left, to try and get her back. It was Catherine who put me in touch with Dr. Bensoussan. Already the name, Algerian probably, gave me the hope of something other than conventional medicine. Dr. Bensoussan used to go to Orly Airport and meet sheikhs and kings and princes who were just stopping off on their way to somewhere else, and he would go and fix them up, whatever the time of day or night. In my case it was heavy-duty hepatitis, and it was really sucking me out. I had no strength. I went to visit Dr. Bensoussan, who gave me this shot that took twenty minutes to go in. And it was basically a concoction of vitamins, everything that's good for you, and then something else very nice. I'd crawl into his store and just manage to get my ass in there, and half an hour later I'd walk back, "Forget the car." An amazing shot, amazing cocktail concoction. Whatever it was, I've got to take my hat off. I mean, in six weeks he had me rockin'. And not only did he deal with the hepatitis, he built me up and made me feel good at the same time. But I also have an incredible immune system. I cured myself of hepatitis C without even bothering to do anything about it. I'm a rare case. I read my body very well.
The only trouble was that with these preoccupations and interruptions, the legal problems, the flights abroad, the wobbling of our relationship with Oldham, we had been temporarily distracted from what was now alarming and evident: the Rolling Stones had run out of gas.
Robert Altman /
altmanphoto.com
In which, in the late 1960s, I discover open tuning, and heroin. Meet Gram Parsons. Sail to South America. Become a father. Record "Wild Horses" and "Brown Sugar" in Muscle Shoals. Survive Altamont, and re-meet a saxophonist named Bobby Keys.
W
e'd run out of gas. I don't think I realized it at the time, but that was a period where we could have foundered--a natural end to a hit-making band. It came soon after
Satanic Majesties,
which was all a bit of flimflam to me. And this is where Jimmy Miller comes into the picture as our new producer. What a great collaboration. Out of the drift we extracted
Beggars Banquet
and helped take the Stones to a different level. This is where we had to pull out the good stuff. And we did.
I remember our first meeting with Jimmy. Mick was instrumental in getting him involved. Jimmy came from Brooklyn originally, grew up in the West--his father was entertainment director of the Vegas gambling hotels the Sahara, the Dunes, the Flamingo. We turned up at Olympic Studios and said, we'll have a run-through and see how things go. We just played--anything. We weren't trying to make a track that day. We were feeling the room, feeling Jimmy out; and Jimmy was feeling us out. I'd like to go back and be a fly on that wall. All I remember is having a very, very good feeling about him when we left the session, about twelve hours later. I was playing the stuff, going into the control room, the usual old trek, and actually hearing on the playback what was going on in the room. Sometimes what you're playing in the room is totally different from what you hear in the control room. But Jimmy was hearing the room, hearing the band. So I had a very strong thing with him from that first day. He had a natural feel for the band because of what he'd been doing, working with English guys. He'd produced things like "I'm a Man" and "Gimme Some Lovin' " by the Spencer Davis Group; he'd worked with Traffic, Blind Faith. He'd worked a lot with black guys. But most of all it was because Jimmy Miller was a damn good drummer. He understood groove. He's the drummer on "Happy"; he was the original drummer on "You Can't Always Get What You Want." He made it very easy for me to work, mainly for me to set the groove, set the tempos, and at the same time, Mick and Jimmy were communicating well. It gave Mick confidence to go along with him too.
Our thing was playing Chicago blues; that was where we took everything that we knew, that was our kickoff point, Chicago. Look at that Mississippi River. Where does it come from? Where does it go? Follow that river all the way up and you'll end up in Chicago. Also follow the way those artists were recorded. There were no rules. If you looked at the regular way of recording things, everything was recorded totally wrong. But what is wrong and what is right? What matters is what hits the ear. Chicago blues was so raw and raucous and energetic. If you tried to record it clean, forget about it. Nearly every Chicago blues record you hear is an enormous amount over the top, loading the sound on in layers of thickness. When you hear Little Walter's records, he hits the first note on his harp and the band disappears until that note stops, because he's overloading it. When you're making records, you're looking to distort things, basically. That's the freedom recording gives you, to fuck around with the sound. And it's not a matter of sheer force; it's always a matter of experiment and playing around. Hey, this is a nice mike, but if we put it a little closer to the amp, and then take a smaller amp instead of the big one and shove the mike right in front of it, cover the mike with a towel, let's see what we get. What you're looking for is where the sounds just melt into one another and you've got that beat behind it, and the rest of it just has to squirm and roll its way through. If you have it all separated, it's insipid. What you're looking for is power and force, without volume--an inner power. A way to bring together what everybody in that room is doing and make one sound. So it's not two guitars, piano, bass and drums, it's one thing, it's not five. You're there to create one thing.
Jimmy produced
Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers
--every Stones record through
Goats Head Soup
in 1973, the backbone stuff. But the best thing we ever did with Jimmy Miller was "Jumpin' Jack Flash." That song and "Street Fighting Man" came out of the very first sessions with Jimmy at Olympic Studios for what would become
Beggars Banquet,
in the spring of 1968--the May of street fighting in Paris. Suddenly between us this whole new idea started to blossom, this new second wind. And it just became more and more fun.
Mick was coming up with some great ideas and great songs, like "Dear Doctor"--I think probably Marianne had something to do with that--and "Sympathy for the Devil," although it was not in the way he envisioned it when it started. But that's in the Godard movie--I'll deal with Godard later--where you hear and see the transformation of the song. "Parachute Woman," with that weird sound area like a fly buzzing in your ear or a mosquito or something--that song came so easily. I thought it was going to be difficult because I had that concept of that sound and wasn't sure it would work, but Mick jumped on the idea just like that, and it took little time to record. "Salt of the Earth," I think I came up with the title of that and had the basic spur of it, but Mick did all the verses. This was our thing. I'd spark the idea, "Let's drink to the hardworking people, let's drink to the salt of the earth," and after that, Mick, it's all yours. Halfway through he'd say, where do we break it? Where do we go to the middle? Where's the bridge? See how long he would take this one idea before he turned to me and said, we've got to go somewhere else now. Ah, the bridge. Some of that is technical work, a matter of discussion, and usually very quick and easy.
There was a lot of country and blues on
Beggars Banquet:
"No Expectations," "Dear Doctor," even "Jigsaw Puzzle." "Parachute Woman," "Prodigal Son," "Stray Cat Blues," "Factory Girl," they're all either blues or folk music. By then we were thinking, hey, give us a good song, we can do it. We've got the sound and we know we can find it one way or another if we've got the song--we'll chase the damn thing all around the room, up to the ceiling. We know we've got it and we'll lock on to it and find it.
I don't know what it was in this period that worked so well. Maybe timing. We had barely explored the stuff where we'd come from or that had turned us on. The "Dear Doctor"s and "Country Honk"s and "Love In Vain" were, in a way, catch-up, things we had to do. The mixture of black and white American music had plenty of space in it to be explored.
We also knew that the Stones fans were digging it, and there were an awful lot of them by then. Without thinking about it, we knew that they'd love it. All we've got to do is what we want to do and they're gonna love it. That's what we're about, because if
we
love it, a certain thing comes across from it. They were damn good songs. We never forget a good hook. We've never let one go when we've found it.
I think I can talk for the Stones most of the time, and we didn't care what they wanted out there. That was one of the charms of the Stones. And the rock-and-roll stuff that we
did
come out with on
Beggars Banquet
was enough. You can't say apart from "Sympathy" or "Street Fighting Man" that there's rock and roll on
Beggars Banquet
at all. "Stray Cat" is a bit of funk, but the rest of them are folk songs. We were incapable of writing to order, to say, we need a rock-and-roll track. Mick tried it later with some drivel. It was not the interesting thing about the Stones, just sheer rock and roll. A lot of rock and roll on stage, but it was not something we particularly recorded a lot of, unless we knew we had a diamond like "Brown Sugar" or "Start Me Up." And also it kind of made the up-tempo numbers stand out even more, against a lovely bedrock of really great little songs like "No Expectations
.
" I mean, the body of work was not to smash you between the eyes. This was not heavy metal. This was music.
"Flash!" Shit, what a record! All my stuff came together and all done on a cassette player. With "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and "Street Fighting Man" I'd discovered a new sound I could get out of an acoustic guitar. That grinding, dirty sound came out of these crummy little motels where the only thing you had to record with was this new invention called the cassette recorder. And it didn't disturb anybody. Suddenly you had a very mini studio. Playing an acoustic, you'd overload the Philips cassette player to the point of distortion so that when it played back it was effectively an electric guitar. You were using the cassette player as a pickup and an amplifier at the same time. You were forcing acoustic guitars through a cassette player, and what came out the other end was electric as hell. An electric guitar will jump live in your hands. It's like holding on to an electric eel. An acoustic guitar is very dry and you have to play it a different way. But if you can get that different sound electrified, you get this amazing tone and this amazing sound. I've always loved the acoustic guitar, loved playing it, and I thought, if I can just power this up a bit without going to electric, I'll have a unique sound. It's got a little tingle on the top. It's unexplainable, but it's something that fascinated me at the time.
In the studio, I plugged the cassette into a little extension speaker and put a microphone in front of the extension speaker so it had a bit more breadth and depth, and put that on tape. That was the basic track. There are no electric instruments on "Street Fighting Man" at all, apart from the bass, which I overdubbed later. All acoustic guitars. "Jumpin' Jack Flash" the same. I wish I could still do that, but they don't build machines like that anymore. They put a limiter on it soon after that so you couldn't overload it. Just as you're getting off on something, they put a lock on it. The band all thought I was mad, and they sort of indulged me. But I heard a sound that I could get out of there. And Jimmy was onto it immediately. "Street Fighting Man," "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and half of "Gimme Shelter" were all made just like that, on a cassette machine. I used to layer guitar on guitar. Sometimes there are eight guitars on those tracks. You just mash 'em up. Charlie Watts's drums on "Street Fighting Man" are from this little 1930s practice drummer's kit, in a little suitcase that you popped up, one tiny cymbal, a half-size tambourine that served as a snare, and that's really what it was made on, made on rubbish, made in hotel rooms with our little toys.
That was a magic discovery, but so were these riffs. These crucial, wonderful riffs that just came, I don't know where from. I'm blessed with them and I can never get to the bottom of them. When you get a riff like "Flash" you get a great feeling of elation, a wicked glee. Of course, then comes the other thing of persuading people that it is as great as you actually know it is. You have to go through the pooh-pooh. "Flash" is basically "Satisfaction" in reverse. Nearly all of these riffs are closely related. But if someone said, "You can play only one of your riffs ever again," I'd say, "OK, give me 'Flash.' " I love "Satisfaction" dearly and everything, but those chords are pretty much a de rigueur course as far as songwriting goes. But "Flash" is particularly interesting. "It's allllll right now." It's almost Arabic or very old, archaic, classical, the chord setups you could only hear in Gregorian chants or something like that. And it's that weird mixture of your actual rock and roll and at the same time this weird echo of very, very ancient music that you don't even know. It's much older than I am, and that's unbelievable! It's like a recall of something, and I don't know where it came from.
But I know where the lyrics came from. They came from a gray dawn at Redlands. Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, "What's that?" I said, "Oh, that's Jack. That's jumping Jack." I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase "Jumping Jack." Mick said, "Flash," and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.
I can hear the whole band take off behind me every time I play "Flash"--there's this extra sort of turbo overdrive. You jump on the riff and it plays you. We have ignition? OK, let's go. Darryl Jones will be right next to me, on bass. "What are we on now, 'Flash'? OK, let's go, one two three..." And then you don't look at each other again, because you know you're in for the ride now. It'll always make you play it different, depending what tempo you're in.
Levitation is probably the closest analogy to what I feel--whether it's "Jumpin' Jack" or "Satisfaction" or "All Down the Line"--when I realize I've hit the right tempo and the band's behind me. It's like taking off in a Learjet. I have no sense that my feet are touching the ground. I'm elevated to this other space. People say, "Why don't you give it up?" I can't retire until I croak. I don't think they quite understand what I get out of this. I'm not doing it just for the money or for you. I'm doing it for me.