Life (32 page)

Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn’t know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that’s just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You’re going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who’s selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game. And when that happens, you either start to go for it or you fight it. Some people don’t even realize how the game works. And Gram was a bold man. This guy never had a hit record. Some good sellers, but nothing to point to, yet his influence is stronger now than ever. Basically, you wouldn’t have had Waylon Jennings, you wouldn’t have had all of that outlaw movement without Gram Parsons. He showed them a new approach, that country music isn’t just this narrow thing that appeals to rednecks. He did it single-handed. He wasn’t a crusader or anything like that. He loved country music, but he really didn’t like the country music business and didn’t think it should be angled just at Nashville. The music’s bigger than that. It should touch everybody.

Gram wrote great songs. “A Song for You,” “Hickory Wind,” “Thousand Dollar Wedding,” great ideas. He could write you a song that came right round the corner and straight in the front, up the back, with a little curve on it. “I’ve been writing about a guy that builds cars.” And then you listen to it and it’s a story—“The New Soft Shoe.” Written about Mr. Cord, innovative creator of the beautiful Cord automobile, built on his own dime and deliberately crushed out by the triumvirate of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors. Gram was a storyteller, but he also had this unique thing that I’ve never seen any other guy do: he could make bitches cry. Even hardened waitresses in the Palomino bar who’d heard it all. He could bring tears to their eyes and he could bring that melancholy yearning. Guys he could rub pretty hard too, but his effect on women was phenomenal. It wasn’t boo-hoo, it was heartstrings. He had a unique hold on that particular string, the female heart. My feet were soaking from walking through tears.

I remember well the trip with Mick and Marianne and Gram to Stonehenge under Chrissie Gibbs’s leadership early one morning, a jaunt photographed by Michael Cooper. The pictures are also a record of the early days of my friendship with Gram. Gibby recalls it thus:

Christopher Gibbs:
We started off very early from some club in South Kensington; set off about two or three in the morning in Keith’s Bentley. And we walked from where Stephen Tennant lived, from Wilsford, across a sort of track to Stonehenge in order to approach it in a properly reverent manner, and watched the dawn come up there. And we were all gibbering with acid. We had breakfast in one of the Salisbury pubs, lots of acid freaks trying to dismember kippers, get the spine out. Imagine that if you can. And like all these things one does on acid, it seemed to take a very long time but actually it took about thirty seconds. No one’s ever got a kipper cleaner or more swiftly.

It’s difficult to put those middle and late ’60s together, because nobody quite knew what was happening. A different kind of fog descended and much energy was around and nobody quite knew what to do with it. Of course, being so stoned all the time and experimenting, everybody, including me, had these vague, half-baked ideas. You know, “Things are changing.” “Yeah, but for what, for where?” It was getting political in 1968, no way to avoid that. It was getting nasty too. Heads were getting beaten. The Vietnam War had a lot to do with turning it around, because when I first went to America, they started drafting the kids. Between ’64 and ’66 and then ’67, the attitude of American youth was taking drastic turns. And then when you got the killings at Kent State in May of 1970, it turned really sour. The side effects hit everybody, including us. You wouldn’t have had “Street Fighting Man” without the Vietnam War. There was a certain reality slowly penetrating.

Then it became a “them against us” sort of thing. I could never believe that the British Empire would want to pick on a few musicians. Where’s the threat? You’ve got navies and armies, and you’re unleashing your evil little troops on a few troubadours? To me it was the first demonstration of how insecure establishments and governments really are. And how sensitive they can get to something that is trivial, really. But once they perceive a threat, they keep looking for the enemy within, without realizing that half the time, they’re it! It
was
an assault upon society. We had to assault the entertainment business, and then later the government took us seriously, after “Street Fighting Man.”

A flavor of the period is contained in
The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones,
by our friend Stanley Booth—our writer in residence on the early tours. He picked up a flyer in Oakland, back in the late ’60s or early ’70s, that proclaimed: “The Bastards hear us playing you on our little transistor radios and know that they will not escape the blood and fire of the Anarchist revolution. We will play your music, dear Rolling Stones, in rock and roll marching bands as we tear down the jails and free the prisoners and arm the poor. Tattoo Burn, Baby, Burn on the asses of the wardens and generals.”

Taking “Street Fighting Man” to the extremes, or “Gimme Shelter.” But without a doubt it was a strange generation. The weird thing is that I grew up with it, but suddenly I’m an observer instead of a participant. I watched all these guys grow up; I watched a lot of them die. When I first got to the States, I met a lot of great guys, young guys, and I had their phone numbers, and then when I got back two or three years later, I’d call them up, and he’s in a body bag from Nam. A whole lot of them got feathered out, we all know. That’s when that shit hit home with me. Hey, that great little blondie, great guitar player, real fun, we had a real good time, and the next time, gone.

Sunset Strip in the ’60s, ’64, ’65—there was no traffic allowed through it. The whole strip was filled with people, and nobody’s going to move for a car. It was almost off-limits. You hung out in the street, you just joined the mob. I remember once Tommy James, from the Shondells—six gold records and blew it all. I was trying to get up to the Whisky a Go Go in a car, and Tommy James came by. “Hey, man.” “And who are you?” “Tommy James, man.” “Crimson and Clover” still hits me. He was trying to hand out things about the draft that day. Because obviously he thought he was about to be fucking drafted. This was Vietnam War time. A lot of the kids that came to see us the first time never got back. Still, they heard the Stones up the Mekong Delta.

Politics came for us whether we liked it or not, once in the odd personage of Jean-Luc Godard, the great French cinematic innovator. He somehow got fascinated with what was happening in London in that year, and he wanted to do something wildly different from what he had done before. He probably took a few things he shouldn’t have, not being used to it, just to get himself in the mood. Nobody, I think, has ever quite honestly been able to figure out what the hell he was aiming at. The film
Sympathy for the Devil
is by chance a record of the song by us of that name being born in the studio. The song turned after many takes from a Dylanesque, rather turgid folk song into a rocking samba—from a turkey into a hit—by a shift of rhythm, all recorded in stages by Jean-Luc. The voice of Jimmy Miller can be heard on the film, complaining, “Where’s the groove?” on the earlier takes. There wasn’t one. There are some rare instrumental switches. I play bass, Bill Wyman plays maracas, Charlie Watts actually sings in the
wooo-woooo
chorus. As did Anita and maybe Marianne too. So far so good. I’m glad he filmed that, but Godard! I couldn’t believe it; he looked like a French bank clerk. Where the hell did he think he was going? He had no coherent plan at all except to get out of France and score a bit of the London scene. The film was a total load of crap—the maidens on the Thames barge, the blood, the feeble scene of some brothers, aka Black Panthers, awkwardly handing weapons to one another in a Battersea scrap yard. Jean-Luc Godard up until then made very well-crafted, almost Hitchcockian work. Mind you, it was one of those years when anything was flyable. Whether it would actually take off was another thing. I mean, why, of all people, would Jean-Luc Godard be interested in a minor hippie revolution in England and try to translate it into something else? I think somebody slipped him some acid and he went into that phony year of ideological overdrive.

Godard at least managed to set Olympic Studios on fire. Studio one, where we were playing, used to be a cinema. To diffuse the light, he had tissue paper taped up under these very hot lights on the ceiling. And halfway through—I think there are some outtakes where you can actually see this—all of this tissue paper and the whole ceiling caught alight at ferocious speed. It was like being inside the Hindenburg. All of the heavy light rigging started to crash to the floor because it had burned through the cables; lights going out, sparks. Talk about sympathy for the fucking devil. Let’s get the fuck out of here. It was the last days of Berlin, down to the bunker. The end.
Fin.

I
wrote “
G
imme
S
helter”
on a stormy day, sitting in Robert Fraser’s apartment in Mount Street. Anita was shooting
Performance
at the time, not far away, but I ain’t going down to the set. God knows what’s happening. As a minor part of the plot, Spanish Tony was trying to steal the Beretta they were using as a prop off the set. But I didn’t go down there, because I really didn’t like Donald Cammell, the director, a twister and a manipulator whose only real love in life was fucking other people up. I wanted to distance myself from the relationship between Anita and Donald. Donald was a decadent dependent of the Cammell shipyard family, very good-looking, a razor-sharp mind poisoned with vitriol. He’d been a painter in New York, but something drove him mad about other clever and talented people—he wanted to destroy them. He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met. Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women, and he must have fascinated many of them. He would sometimes take the piss out of Mick for his Kentish accent and sometimes me, Dartford yokel. I don’t mind a good put-down now and again; I come up with a few. But putting people down was almost an addiction for him. Everybody had to be put in their place. Anything you did in front of Cammell was up for his ridicule. He had a fairly developed sense of inferiority in there somewhere.

When I first heard of him, he was in a ménage à trois with Deborah Dixon and Anita, long before Anita and I were together, and they were all jolly jolly. He was a procurer, an arranger of orgies and threesomes—in a pimpish way, though I don’t think Anita saw it like that.

One of the first things that happened between Anita and me was the shit of
Performance
. Cammell wanted to fuck me up, because he had been with Anita before Deborah Dixon. Clearly he took a delight in the idea that he was screwing things up between us. It was a setup, Mick and Anita playing a couple. I felt things through the wind. I knew Mouche—Michèle Breton, the third one in the bath scene in the movie; I’m not totally out of this frame—who used to be paid to “perform” as a couple with her boyfriend. Anita told me Michèle had to have Valium shots before every take. So he was basically setting up third-rate porn. He had a good story in
Performance
. He got the only movie of any interest in his life because of who was in it, and Nic Roeg, who shot it, and James Fox, who he drove round the bend. The normally pukka-voiced Fox couldn’t stop talking like a gangster from Bermondsey on and off the set until he was rescued by the Navigators, a Christian sect that claimed his attention for the next two decades.

Donald Cammell was more interested in manipulation than actually directing. He got a hard-on about intimate betrayal, and that’s what he was setting up in
Performance,
as much of it as he could engineer. He made only four films, and three of them ended the same way—with the main character getting shot or shooting someone they were very close to. Always the watcher. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, director of
Ready Steady Go!
in its early days and later of the Stones’
Rock and Roll Circus,
told me that when he was shooting
Let It Be,
the rooftop swan song of the Beatles, he looked over to another nearby roof and there was Donald Cammell. In at the death, again. The final film Cammell made was a real-life video of him shooting himself, the last scene in
Performance
again, prepared elaborately and filmed over many minutes. The person he was very close to in this case was his wife, who was in the next room.

I met Cammell later in LA, and I said, you know, I can’t think of anybody, Donald, that’s ever got any joy out of you, and I don’t know if you’ve ever got any joy out of yourself. There’s nowhere else for you to go, there’s nobody. The best thing you can do is take the gentleman’s way out. And this was at least two or three years before he finally topped himself.

I didn’t find out for ages about Mick and Anita, but I smelled it. Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelled it. The old lady comes back at night complaining about the set and about Donald and blah blah blah. But at the same time, I know the old lady, and the odd time she didn’t come home at night, I’d go round somewhere and see another girlfriend.

I never expected anything from Anita. I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian. So you’ve had Mick now; what do you fancy, that or this? It was like Peyton Place back then, a lot of wife swapping or girlfriend swapping and… oh, you had to have him, OK. What do you expect? You’ve got an old lady like Anita Pallenberg and expect other guys not to hit on her? I heard rumors, and I thought, if she’s going to be making a move with Mick, good luck to him; he can only take that one once. I’ve got to live with it. Anita’s a piece of work. She probably nearly broke his back!