Life (38 page)

There were obvious advantages to buying in such quantity. The price was not phenomenal. It was coming straight from Marseilles to Villefranche, just down the road. There were no transport costs, just Jacques’s train ticket. The more times you have to score, the more things are likely to screw up. But you also have to really try not to overdo it, because the bigger the score, the more people are interested. Just get enough to get settled for a couple of months, so you don’t have to go out and scrabble around for it. This bag, however, never seemed to disappear. “Well, once we finish this bag we can straighten out.…” Let’s put it this way: it lasted from June to November, and we still left some behind.

I had to trust the orders that came with it. And they must have been correct, because every time I tried it, it was perfectly fine, and no one complained. I posted the formula on the wall so I wouldn’t forget it. Ninety-seven to three. (Of course I thought of writing a song with that title, but then I thought there was no point advertising myself.) I would be up there half the afternoon getting it right. I had these great old scales, big brass things, very, very fine, and this big scoop for the lactose. Ninety-seven grams. Put that aside and then you take a little spoon out of the heroin bag, three grams. Then you put the two together and mix ’em up. You’ve got to shake it. I remember being up there often, so I didn’t ever mix a lot together at once. I would do a couple of days’ worth, or a little more.

W
e looked at studios
in Cannes and elsewhere, reckoned up how much money the French were going to suck out of us. Nellcôte had a large basement and we had our own mobile studio. The Mighty Mobile, as we called it, was a truck with eight-track recording machines that Stu had helped to put together. We’d thought of it quite separately from any plan to move to France. It was the only independent mobile recording unit around. We didn’t realize when we put it together how rare it was—soon we were renting it out to the BBC and ITV because they only had one apiece. It was another one of those beautiful, graceful, fortuitous things that happened to the Stones.

So one day in June it trundled through the gates and we parked it outside the front door and plugged in. I’ve never done any different since. When you’ve got the equipment and the right guys, you don’t need anything else in terms of studios. Only Mick still thinks you have to take things into “real” recording studios to really make a real record. He got proved totally wrong on our latest—at the time of writing—album,
A Bigger Bang,
especially, because we did it all in his little château in France. We had got the stuff worked up, and he said, “Now we’ll take it into a real recording studio.” And Don Was and I looked at each other, and Charlie looked at me.… Fuck this shit. We’ve already got it down right here. Why do you want to spring for all that bread? So you can say it was cut in so-and-so studio, the glass wall and the control room? We ain’t going nowhere, pal. So finally he relented.

The basement in Nellcôte was big enough, but it was divided into a series of bunkers. Not a great deal of ventilation—hence “Ventilator Blues.” The weirdest thing was trying to find out where you’d left the saxophone player. Bobby Keys and Jim Price moved around to where they could get their sound right—mostly standing with their backs to the wall at the end of a narrow corridor, where Dominique Tarlé took one of his pictures of them with microphone cables snaking away around the corner. Eventually we ended up painting the microphone cable to the horn section yellow. If you wanted to talk to the horns, you followed the yellow cable until you found them. You wouldn’t know where the hell you were. It was an enormous house. Sometimes Charlie would be in a room, and I’d have to tramp a quarter of a mile to find him. But considering that it was basically a dungeon, it was fun to work there.

All the characteristics of that basement were discovered by the other guys. For the first week or so we didn’t know where Charlie was set up because he’d be trying different cubicles every night. Jimmy Miller encouraged him to try down the end of the corridor, but Charlie said, I’m half a mile down the damn road, it’s too far away, I need to be closer. So we had to check out every little cubicle. You didn’t want to add electronic echo unless you had to; you wanted natural echo, and down there you found some really weird ones. I played guitar in a room with tiles, turning the amp round and pointing it at the corner of the room to see what got picked up on the microphone. I remember doing that for “Rocks Off” and maybe “Rip This Joint.” But as weird as it was to record there, especially at the beginning, by the time we were into it, within a week or two, it was totally natural. There was no talk amongst the band or with Jimmy Miller or the engineer Andy Johns, “what a weird way to make a record.” No, we’ve got it. All we’ve got to do is persevere.

We would record from late in the afternoon until five or six in the morning, and suddenly the dawn comes up and I’ve got this boat. Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside; let’s take
Mandrax
to Italy for breakfast. We’d just jump in, Bobby Keys, me, Mick, whoever was up for it. Most days we would go down to Menton, an Italian town just inside France by some quirk of treaty making, or just beyond it to Italy proper. No passport, right past Monte Carlo as the sun’s coming up with music ringing in our ears. Take a cassette player and play something we’ve done, play that second mix. Just pull up at the wharf and have a nice Italian breakfast. We liked the way the Italians cooked their eggs, and the bread. And with the fact that you had actually crossed a border and nobody knew shit or did shit about it, there was an extra sense of freedom. We’d play the mix to the Italians, see what they thought. If we hit the fishermen at the right time, we could get red snapper straight off the boats and take it home for lunch.

We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’s lot or Niarchos’s, who had the big yachts there. You could almost see the guns pointed at each other. That’s why we called it
Exile on
Main St
. When we first came up with the title it worked in American terms because everybody’s got a Main Street. But our Main Street was that Riviera strip. And we were exiles, so it rang perfectly true and said everything we needed.

The whole Mediterranean coast was an ancient connection of its own, a kind of Main Street without borders. I’ve hung in Marseilles, and it was all it was cracked up to be and I’ve no doubt it still is. It’s like the capital of a country that embraces the Spanish coast, the North African coast, the whole Mediterranean coast. It’s basically a country all its own until a few miles inland. Everybody that lives on the coast—fishermen, sailors, smugglers —belongs to an independent community, including the Greeks, the Turks, the Egyptians, the Tunisians, the Libyans, the Moroccans, the Algerians and the Jews. It’s an old connection that can’t be broken by borders and countries.

We’d piss about; we’d go to Antibes. We used to go to Saint- Tropez to score all the bitches. This boat could kick through. It had a big engine. And the Mediterranean when it’s smooth is a quick ride. The summer of ’71 was one of those Mediterranean summers where every day was perfect. You hardly needed to know any navigation; you’d just follow the coastline. I never had charts. Anita refused ever to board this boat on the grounds of my lack of familiarity with the submerged rocks. She would wait and watch for the distress flares as we ran out of petrol. I just figured if they could get an aircraft carrier into the damn bay, I should be able to navigate it. The only bit I did check out was the landing, the dockside. Land is always the dangerous thing for a boat. The only time I thought about the actual art of boatmanship was docking. Otherwise it was a laugh.

Villefranche harbor is very deep and was a big hang for the American navy, and one day, suddenly, there was this huge aircraft carrier in the middle of the bay. The navy on a courtesy call. They did all the flag-waving around the Mediterranean during the summer. And as we were pulling away from our dock, we got this whiff of marijuana on a large scale blowing out of the portholes. Out of their brains. I had Bobby Keys with me. So we went to have breakfast, and when we came back we circled around the aircraft carrier, and there were all these sailors there who were glad they weren’t in Vietnam. And I was in my little
Mandrax
. And we sniffed. “Oh, hi, guys. I smell…” And they threw us a bag of weed. And in exchange we told them which were the best whorehouses in town. The Cocoa Bar, the Brass Ring was a good ’un.

When the fleet was in, all of these damn dark streets in Villefranche would suddenly burst with lighting as if it were Las Vegas. It’s the “Café Dakota” or the “Nevada Bar”—they’d put anything that sounded American on it: the “Texan Hang.” The streets of Villefranche would come alive with neon and fairy lights. All the bitches from Nice would come in, and Monte Carlo, all the whores from Cannes. The crew of an aircraft carrier is two thousand–odd men, randy and ready to serve. It was enough to attract the whole south coast. Otherwise, when they weren’t in town, Villefranche was dead as a doornail.

I
t’s amazing
that the music we made down in that basement is still going, given that the record wasn’t even that highly rated when it first came out. The
outtakes
of
Exile on Main St.
were released as part of a reissue in 2010. The music was recorded in 1971, nearly forty years ago as I write. If I had been listening to music that was forty years old in 1971, I would have been listening to stuff that was barely recordable. Maybe some early Louis Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton. I suppose a world war in between changes the perception.

“Rocks Off,” “Happy,” “Ventilator Blues,” “Tumbling Dice,” “All Down the Line”—that’s five-string, open tuning to the max. I was starting to really fix my trademark; I wrote all that stuff within a few days. Suddenly, with the five-string, songs were just dripping off my fingers. My first real exercise on five-string was “Honky Tonk Women” a couple of years before. At that time it was, well, this is interesting. There was “Brown Sugar” too, which came out the month we quit England. By the time we got to working on
Exile,
I was really starting to find all these other moves, and how to make minor chords and suspended chords. I discovered that the five-string becomes very interesting when you add a capo. This limits your room to maneuver drastically, especially if you’ve placed the capo up on the fifth or the seventh fret. But also it gives a certain ring, a certain resonance that can’t be obtained really any other way. But it’s when to use it and when not to overdo it.

If it’s Mick’s song to start with, I won’t start it off with five-string. I’ll start on a regular tuning and just learn it or feel my way around it, classico style. And then if Charlie ups the rhythm a little bit or gives it a different feel, I’ll say let me put this to five-string for a moment and just see how that alters the structure of the thing. Obviously, doing that simplifies the sound, in that you’re limiting yourself to a set thing. But if you find the right one, like “Start Me Up,” it creates the song. I’ve heard millions of bands try and play “Start Me Up” with regular tuning. It just won’t work, pal.

We brought a lot of stuff to Nellcôte that had been incubating for a while. I would farm out the title or the idea. “This is called ‘All Down the Line,’ Mick.
I hear it coming, all down the line
… Off you go.” I was coming up with a couple of new songs a day. And one would work and one wouldn’t. Mick kept up with the writing at this phenomenal pace—very canny rock-and-roll lyrics, with those catchy phrases and repetitions. “All Down the Line” came directly out of “Brown Sugar,” which Mick wrote. Most of what I had to do was to come up with riffs and ideas that would turn Mick on. To write songs he could handle. They had to be good records but translatable to being played on stage. I was the butcher, cutting the meat. And sometimes he didn’t like it. He didn’t like “Rip This Joint”—it was too fast. I think we might have popped it once since then, but “Rip This Joint,” in terms of beats per minute, is something like a world record. Maybe Little Richard had done something faster, but in any case, nobody was looking to beat the world record. Some of the titles of the songs we wrote that never made it onto the album are bizarre: “Head in the Toilet Blues,” “Leather Jackets,” “Windmill,” “I Was Just a Country Boy,” “Dancing in the Light.” That must have been one of Mick’s. “Bent Green Needles,” “Labour Pains,” “Pommes de Terre”—well, we were in France at the time.

We wrote “Torn and Frayed,” which is not often played and has some topical interest:

Joe’s got a cough, sounds kinda rough

Yeah, and the codeine to fix it

Doctor prescribes, drugstore supplies

Who’s gonna help him to kick it?

Apart from “Sister Morphine” and a few odd references to coke, we never really wrote songs about drugs. They would only crop up in songs as they did in life, here and there. There were always rumors and folklore about songs, who they were written for, what they were really about. “Flash” was supposed to be about heroin, and I see the connotation, the reference to “Jack” —but “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” has nothing to do with heroin. The myths go deep, though. Whatever you write, somebody is going to interpret it in some other way, see codes buried in the lyrics. That’s why you have conspiracy theories. Somebody croaked. Oh, my God! Who they going to blame this one on? When the guy just keeled over! The lifeblood of good conspiracies is that you’ll never find out; the lack of evidence keeps them fresh. No one’s ever going to find out if I had my blood changed or not. The story is well beyond the reach of evidence or, if it never happened, my denials. But then, read on. I have stood back for many years from honestly addressing that burning topic.

“Tumbling Dice” may have had something to do with the gambling den that Nellcôte turned into—there were card games and roulette wheels. Monte Carlo was around the corner. Bobby Keys and cats did go down there once or twice. We did play dice. I credit Mick with “Tumbling Dice,” but the song had to make the transition from its earlier form, which was a song called “Good Time Women.” You might have all of the music, a great riff, but sometimes the subject matter is missing. It only takes one guy sitting around a room, saying, “throwing craps last night…” for a song to be born. “Got to roll me.” Songs are strange things. Little notes like that. If they stick, they stick. With most of the songs I’ve ever written, quite honestly, I’ve felt there’s an enormous gap here, waiting to be filled; this song should have been written hundreds of years ago. How did nobody pick up on that little space? Half the time you’re looking for gaps that other people haven’t done. And you say, I don’t believe they’ve missed that fucking hole! It’s so obvious. It was there staring you in the face! I pick out the holes.