DAVID CAVANAGH: “The sun was overhead as we reached the top of the driveway and pushed open the enormous front doors of Villa Nellcote. We were expecting darkness, like Turner’s lair in ‘Performance,’ but the house was dazzlingly bright. Our eyes made a slow inventory of crystal chandeliers, rococo mirrors and unconscious bodies: Gram Parsons, James Caan, Faye Dunaway, Evel Knievel. Grabbing a bottle of vintage cognac, we headed down to the cellar. The Stones had been jamming all night. Jagger turned and waved as we… (sound distorts, picture goes fuzzy).”
NICK KENT: “Keith loved Anita. He loved her desperately. You know that song, ‘Angie?’ It means ‘ANITA-I-NEED-YA.’ There’s not many people who know that. ANITA-I-NEED-YA.”
TERRY SOUTHERN: “The relationship between Keith and Anita is very complex. Keith is up front in a very natural way, whereas Anita is more complicated. She has a mischievous deviousness which always reminded me of that scene in ‘The Third Man,’ where Joseph Cotton asks the girl, ‘What is it, comedy or drama?’ and she says, ‘Comedy, I never play drama.’ That’s exactly what Anita would say. That’s her idea of a very attractive way to be. She’s hip enough to remember that it’s corny to tell you her problems. But Keith is not into that. He’s Mr. Pure guy. He’s not into deception or complexity. Even his music is very straightforward.”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “There was music going on nonstop. It was a weird atmosphere. Keith was in this extraordinary state because he managed all of it. He had a boat and he was thriving on this whole thing. He worked beautifully, he sang brilliantly, he played hard, and he slept a great deal. But if you weren’t one of the people actually doing the recordings, there were all of these weird little tragedies that went on. This guy went insane. There was this ex-racing driver who was there with his kids who had mysterious schemes. There were these weird floating characters.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Bobby Keys, the great saxophone player, my closest pal (we were born within hours of each other). A soul of rock and roll, a solid man, also a depraved maniac. You have to ask Bobby Keys how big Texas is. It took me thirty years to convince him that Texas was actually just a huge landgrab by Sam Houston and Stephen Austin. ‘No fucking way. How dare you!’ He’s red in the face. So I laid a few books on him about what actually happened between Texas and Mexico, and six months later he says, ‘Your case seems to have some substance.’ I know the feeling, Bob. I used to believe that Scotland Yard was lily-white.”
BOBBY KEYS: “The French Riviera was a wonderful place to record
– Villa De Vigne was the name of the house that Nicky Hopkins, Jim Price and I
shared. It was so big that we hardly saw
each other; I don’t remember a lot about that whole period of time; Keith and I
got to be very good friends – we were both born same day, same month, same
year, within a few minutes of each other – and we entertained ourselves in the
downtime, so to speak. You’re either
Mick’s friend or Keith’s friend, and I started out being Mick’s friend, but
found it was a hell of a lot more fun being Keith’s. And Keith is a lot better friend. Jagger’s kind of phony!”
CHARLIE WATTS: “I ended up living there because my house was so far away… Keith was very comfortable to live with. Nellcote was like a nightclub, but a very cool one. It wasn’t all shouting and everything. Keith used to read books and sleep in the sun. He still does the same thing. He reads great, thick books and then nods off. He loves the sun. He did then, too. He would always have jeans on and his top off.”
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ANDY JOHNS: “We bought a full-sized roulette wheel and people would come by and we would play roulette until one or two in the morning and then it would change into poker. Sometimes craps. And we were making quite a bit of money on the craps and the roulettes. We were the house. Keith came once. And he didn’t want to join in. I think that was because he might lose. Or we might win. Which of course would have been an act of lese majeste. It was the time that he shot me up… These poker games continued. We would just stop for work, as it were, not the other way around. These games were getting sillier in as much as, ‘Oh, whoever has the lowest hand has to take four Quaaludes. Whoever has the lowest hand has to take a tab of acid.’”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “It was this marathon of music, it was incredible, but it was also a nightmare. I mean, creatively it was really great, and everybody was on the spot, and then Mick would get there and he would sing ‘Black Angel’ and that went on for like two days, but in all the time we were in that place we were never by ourselves. Day after day it was ten people for lunch, twenty-five for dinner. I don’t think anyone slept that whole summer. I was completely responsible for everything that was happening. I was basically the only person who could speak French well. And there were the local cowboys. They kind of moved in on us. They said, ‘we’re going to come here, we’re going to destroy this place, we’re going to do this, that, and the other.’ So I thought, ‘well, might as well hire them and make them work for us,’ so we had all these kinds of locals working in the kitchens. And eventually we found, outside the door, drug dealers, and they were doing all kinds of things, and that’s how it came to a bust. We had opened the gates; the doors were open because basically everybody was coming and going – the musicians, everybody – so it was open house. I mean, one day, I walked into the living room and there were these two bad characters and they each had half a kilo of smack in their boots and I just kicked them out. It was mad. There were people like Bobby Keys, who was a complete maniac, and everybody was doing outrageous things.”
ANDY JOHNS: “I don’t know if Keith had any real friends at that point. They all seemed pretty dodgy to me. Tommy Weber was a very typical, very dodgy weasel boy. He would sunbathe naked on the beach because it was hip, and I used to think, ‘Please, I don’t want to stare at your luggage.’ I had a real job there, but at the same time, I was thinking, ‘What are these bastards doing here? Apart from bringing drugs.’”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Although the Stones came from England, Gram Parsons and I shared this instinctive affinity for the real American South. The reason Gram and I were together more than other musicians is because I really wanted to learn what Gram had to offer. Gram was special. If he was in a room everyone else became sweet. Anything that Gram was involved in had a touch of magic to it.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “There’s not a lot of guys in the world that you don’t mind waking up and they’re there, for weeks, and it’s a pleasure to have them around. For me, Gram was a way of getting a bit outside of the Stones, which was getting very claustrophobic in those years. It was very nice to have another musician, a writer, just to bounce ideas off, without any sense of intrusion… Like I know the blues, Gram Parsons knew country music – every nuance, every great country song that was ever written. And he could express it all – in his song writing. But he also had intelligence and honesty. That’s the kind of guy I like to hang with. Also, he loved to get stoned. At the time, that was an added plus.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Gram was as knowledgeable about chemical substances as I was. I don’t think I taught him much about drugs – I was still learning myself, much to my detriment. I think we were both basically into the same thing. He had good taste. He went for the top of the line. We liked drugs and we liked the finest quality.”
MISS PAMELA: “I think Keith and Gram were in love: not anything physical, although they did hang all over each other. They understood each other and wanted to take parts of clothing from each other and trade. Gram started wearing makeup like Keith and Keith started wearing Nudie belts. It was incredible to watch.”
MISS MERCY: “Gram got so overtaken that he started turning into Keith… He had a limp wrist. That’s how influenced he got by Keith. He was acting like he was English and gay. They changed identities basically. Gram was getting an English accent and Keith was getting a Southern one. They were inseparable. Mick was annoyed.”
ANDY JOHNS: “Keith would be downstairs at 5 p.m. playin’ a riff all on his own. You’d wander in and say hello, but his arm would still keep going round that guitar. I mean he looks so good when he plays. And he would just sit in his chair and play. He’d only get up for a piss. Everybody else would be running into the truck listening to playbacks, but Keith would still be sittin’ in that fuckin’ chair, playing the riff.”
IAN STEWART: "It was never very easy, even in the early years, holding a straight conversation with Anita. She was brilliant, her mind was always racing and she would always be well ahead of you."
ANDY JOHNS: “I never completely figured Anita out. I was scared stiff cause she had this German accent, wore dark eye make-up and wandered around out of her fuckin brain. I was petrified. She’d walk into a room and I’d be off. So finally one night at Nellcote, I said, ‘Listen, darling. I’ve always been very scared of you.’ And she told me that was silly and I felt that way cause of her accent. But she can be a little bit intimidating. Yet she’s great once you get to know her. Anita keeps Keith in control a bit. She has a lot to do with Keith not being like Mick. She keeps Keith down to earth and doesn’t let him get on that superstar ego trip. At times she isn’t the best influence on Keith. But she’s the only chick that has any clout as far as what the band is gonna do.”
SPANISH TONY: “Anita’s latest game was slipping sleeping pills into the Pimms Cups Keith drank after dinner every night. Usually he collapsed within twenty minutes on the water bed on the veranda, and we left him out there until the morning. After a week of waking up bathed in morning dew Keith began to grow suspicious, and one day he came out and openly accused Anita of her crime. I discovered later that she had told him I was knocking him out so that I could borrow his E-type to roar into town where I seduced every dolly-bird in sight.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I never managed to get a reaction from Keith. I remember one time we had this incredible argument and he threw his guitar down and I stepped on it. I think I did it expressly just because the guitar was our biggest enemy. And I thought ‘Oh, God, I’ll get a big reaction from him, like he’s going to hit me or shout at me or something,’ and all he did was get right on the phone to Ian Stewart and say, ‘I need a spare guitar.’”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “They drove the bus in through the big driveway and onto a roundabout that was quite overgrown, so that the truck was hidden but close to the house. Because we always had these escape routes in case the police would come down on us, we’d planned it so we could jump out the windows onto the truck.”
MICK JAGGER: “We were just winging it. Staying up all night… Stoned on something; one thing or another. So I don’t think it was particularly pleasant. I didn’t have a very good time. It was this communal thing where you don’t know whether you’re recording or living or having dinner; you don’t know when you’re gonna play, when you’re gonna sing – very difficult. Too many hangers-on. I went with the flow, and the album got made. These things have a certain energy, and there’s a certain flow to it, and it got impossible. Everyone was so out of it. And the engineers, the producers – all the people that were supposed to be organized – were more disorganized than anybody.”
