BARNEY HOSKYNS: “All rock records should be made in dark basements of old Nazi strongholds on the Cote d’Azur, with reliable heroin connections in Marseille and Gram Parsons hovering in the paneled hallways. That way they might sound half as good as ‘Exile on Main Street.’”
IAN FORTNAM: "Smack and swastikas! High rollers and lowlife criminals! Bonkable birds and Anita Pallenberg in her leopard-pattern bikini! ('It never came off,' Andy Johns says. 'For two months. A bit rank.') Nellcote's opiated opulence seems to fit 'Exile's' dark, ragged sonorities, its general air of sexy menace and its beat-up, bottomed-out lyrics: 'Kick me like you've kicked before/I can't even feel the pain no more.'"
ANITA PALLENBERG: "All the Stones' magic holds into a few words: a creative exchange, sentimental and experimental that culminated with the Nellcote experience."
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I never really saw Mick and Keith sitting together and working as they used to in the old days, when they kind of relied on each other. Because of families and everybody distancing themselves, that hadn’t happened for a few years. Mick suffered most from that. Keith didn’t mind. Mick would expect to go to work with a notebook and keep it all on paper. Keith improvised and would go into the studio and play. Mick always wanted to have Keith around but he doesn’t always oblige!”
KEITH RICHARDS: "I never plan anything, which is probably the difference between Mick and myself; Mick needs to know what he's going to do tomorrow and I'm just happy to wake up. Mick's rock, I'm roll."
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Mick and Keith have two ways of working. Mick likes to write black and white ABC; with Keith it’s just getting a feeling. Mick likes to write ‘brrrm’ and Keith is just like, all about sound. He plays what he hears and knocks up a song when it comes. So a lot of that was going on and Gram was always a bit like a pig in the middle.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “My only problem with Gram was Mick. That was the first time I noticed there was some weird thing that anybody who was a friend of mine, it was like ‘You can’t have him.’ A very possessive thing. Mick had met a bigger gentleman. The biggest gent that I have ever known. Gram got the picture right away. We used to talk about it: ‘Are you and I going to be friends, or are we going to let somebody else dictate whether we can know each other?’ And Gram would say, ‘But for you it’s important. This cat, you work with him, you know…’”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “To a certain extent Mick will bitch about whoever is in Keith’s life. He always put down all of Keith’s friends. But Mick didn’t realize that because he is the one who actually writes the tunes Keith needs his own sources. Gram had an enormous influence on Keith, that’s for sure. Keith used to listen to Vivaldi and classical music for inspiration and Gram was definitely a source of inspiration.”
DAVID MEYER: “Among the legends that sprang from this time is one that has a ring of truth and plenty of supporters, but no direct confirmation: that Keith sincerely feared that Gram was doing an unhealthy amount of heroin. It hardly needs saying that if Keith Richards is running your intervention, you’re in trouble.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Gram Parsons is using too much of their stuff, he is falling out all over the place, and, as much as Keith may love playing and singing with the man, their time together is doing nothing to help the new album get made… According to Gretchen Parsons, Gram is so upset at being booted out of Nellcote that he tries to overdose on the toilet one afternoon… Prodigious as Keith’s grief at the loss of his good friend may have been, once Gram Parsons is asked to leave Nellcote, the two of them never see each other again.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “I’m aware of those rumblings – Oh Gram would still be around if it wasn’t for Keith Richards – I’ve heard it put as boldly as that. And there is a possibility, to be totally honest, that yes, maybe hanging around the Rolling Stones didn’t help him in his attitude toward drugs. But I would honestly say that his attitude toward those things reminded me of what was going on everywhere.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Downstairs at Villa Nellcote, there was now a constant stream of people trying to help the Stones record their new album so the band could tour America, thereby generating enough cash to sustain themselves. Retreating to the bedrooms on the second floor of the house, those in the inner circle began shooting heroin, snorting cocaine, popping Mandrax, and smoking opium on a regular basis. Because Nellcote was Keith’s house and these were his friends, no one could ask any of them to leave.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Recording at my place was a necessity. The idea was to find another place to record, like a farmhouse in the hills. But they couldn’t find anywhere so they eventually turned around and looked at me. I looked at Anita and said, ‘Hey babe, we’re gonna have to handle it.’ We were clean when we first got there. Anita had to organize dinner sometimes for something like 18 people. We redid the basement kitchen into a studio. The strain was mainly on Anita.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “It was a massive basement – they only used half of it for the studio. We opened up the old kitchen down there because we had so many people in the house we had to have 24-hour room service basically – hamburgers and chips at midnight all the time, it was like an ongoing McDonald’s.”
DAVID CAVANAGH: “’Exile’ is often called Keith’s album. Keith ran the sessions, it is said. His gaff, his rules. The dichotomy of ‘Exile,’ and its central pillar, is his awesome reputation, is that Keith was simultaneously strung-out on heroin and creatively on-fire while he directed proceedings. He was both a lion and a liability; a junkie and a workaholic. He had no concept of passing time, yet was the pendulum to whose tempo everyone grooved.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “You’ve got to realize I wasn’t considered to be any more outrageous than anybody else in the band. At this time Mick was taking everything. Charlie Watts was hitting the brandy like a motherfucker. The least of our concerns was what we ingested. These sorts of questions [about drugs] are predicated on what came a few years later, when I did become… I mean, I had no doubt about myself, but y’know… I would play the game. ‘Oh, you want THAT Keith Richards? I’ll give you the baddest mother you’ve ever seen!’”
KEITH RICHARDS: "It was a strange atmosphere. It was very, very murky - and dusty. It wasn't a great environment for, like, breathing. Mick Taylor and I would just peer through the murk at each other and say, 'OK, what key is it in?' It was very Hitleresque - the last days of Berlin sort of thing."
STEPHEN DAVIS: “The old villa’s frail wiring couldn’t handle the raw demands for current, so the crew illegally tapped into the French railway system’s nearby power lines and ran heavy cables through the kitchen window and down to the dark, humid basement.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Oh, I’ve been electrocuted so many times now. It’s quite a buzz, actually! There were snaking wires everywhere. You had to follow your own cable to find your way out.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “The basement was like a labyrinth of concrete and brick cubicles – not really separate rooms, more like stables, stalls. Charlie’s round the corner in the second cubicle on the left, Bill’s over there in that one, someone else if under the staircase. I could see Charlie’s left hand flicking away. I would never rely on headphones; as long as I could see that I knew that we were in time.”
JAKE WEBER: "The basement at night was the epicenter, and as long as we could stay awake, we were down there. It was kind of the adult area because there was a lot of drinking and smoking, bottles of Jack being passed around. It was loud and a little bit scary at the time, but it was also, before it got wild, the place where we all wanted to be."
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “I was playing guitar in one of the rooms one day and suddenly I felt this strange presence next to me. But there was no one there. It was like the moment where your hairs start to rise, this weird, uncomfortable feeling. I put the guitar down and went downstairs and found Elizabeth, a woman who had lived and worked in Nellcote for some time. I asked her in French, ‘Is this place haunted?’ She said, ‘Mais oui, monsieur.’ She was deadly serious. She said, ‘No one has ever been happy here.’”
ANDY JOHNS: “I noticed one day that the vents in the floors were decorated with swastikas… That basement was quite extensive, so I’m fairly sure those bastards got up to some very bad things down there. Which would explain the bumps in the night and the power going on and off all the time and the generally weird vibe.”
DOMINIQUE TARLE: “While in the basement I found a box with a big swastika on it, full of injection phials. They all contained morphine. It was very old of course, and everyone’s first reaction was ‘If Keith had found this box!’ So one night we carried it to the end of the garden and threw it into the sea – and were then concerned about the poor fish.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “It was a hundred twenty degrees. Everyone sat around sweating and playing their pants off. That’s when I got into Jack Daniels, because you’re trying to get the back up vocals finished… and the voice starts to go. This’ll give you another half an hour. It’s those fumes that do it, man.”
MICK JAGGER: “We recorded in Keith’s disgusting basement, which looked like a prison. I really like big rooms to record in. The humidity was incredible. I couldn’t stand it. As soon as I opened my mouth to sing, my voice was gone. It was so humid that all the guitars were out of tune by the time we got to the end of a number.”
ROBIN MILLAR: “If you weren’t taking drugs down there, you
were the only one who wasn’t, so what would you do all day and whom would you
have a meaningful conversation with?
Marshall Chess was head of the record label, master of ceremonies, and
supplier of whatever was required; you’re expected to sit at a keyboard and
make a meaningful contribution twenty-eight hours after you’ve started and if
someone offers you something, you’re going to take it because the option of
saying, ‘To hell with you lot, I’m going to bed,’ probably didn’t seem viable.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Mick complained that he couldn’t use a mike because there was someone tying off with the cord.”
IAN FORTNAM: "Keith would occasionally disappear upstairs for hours on end, sometimes at crucial points during recording. Not to conjure up Lucifer over exotic narcotics with Anita (who, it should be noted, the majority of the party were genuinely terrified of), but to set about the task of putting his 18 month old son, Marlon, to bed in spite of the ongoing turmoil below."
KEITH RICHARDS: "Sometimes I would wake up and hear this weird rumbling from the basement below and then I'd realize that I'd slept through a whole day!"
BOBBY KEYS: “I remember asking Jimmy Miller, ‘Jimmy, is this
normal?’ Because there’d be times when I’d see Keith, who’d probably been up
all night, sitting there with a guitar in his hands and a cigarette stickin’
out of his mouth, asleep. And it was
like, ‘Are you gonna wake him?’ ‘I ain’t gonna wake him. Hell, he’s liable to shoot me.’ Of course, he
wasn’t like that all the time. And when
he did work, he’d go for several days.
He has a constitution unlike anyone else’s I’ve ever come across. I used to think that I had a pretty strong
resistance – you know, I could drink as much, stay up, whatever – and I could,
but then I couldn’t play very well.
Keith, he’d just come to and start strumming.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Keith would sit up in the bath until like five o’clock, like disappear completely from Mick’s face, and Mick would go completely crazy and so he’d turn to me and say, ‘Christ, what’s happening with Keith? You know we’re supposed to write songs and there he is, God knows what he’s doing, I haven’t seen him yet!’ I didn’t feel there was any creativity going on at all at the time, but now, thinking back, that’s how it works for them. They’ve always got this kind of battle going on.”
MARSHALL CHESS: "Keith would fall asleep while he was doing a vocal, Mick wouldn't show up... I was coming from a background where you had to cut three sides in three hours!"
KEITH RICHARDS: "I'm off and I'm on. It's no big deal to me. Cold turkey? I spit on it. Oh, agony... It's no fun. People did what they wanted to do. It was like, 'Are you going to go into that room and come up with something? If you do then I don't give a damn if you're snorting God.' What fuel you're running on is immaterial, as long as you come up with the goods."
KEITH RICHARDS: “I was a taskmaster. Especially in those days, I was a maniac for not letting up. If I’ve got the idea and if it’s right, it has to be put down now. I might lose it in five minutes. Sometimes I found it was better if I turned up and appeared pissed off without anybody knowing why. I’d get more out of them. It made them go, wow, he’d weird; he’s gone a bit eccentric or cantankerous. But at the end of the day, what I was looking for in a track or in a song came to fruition. It was a trick I only pulled if I thought it necessary. Also, it gave me forty minutes in the john to shoot up while they considered what I’d said.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “One day at eleven in the morning, Mick, Bianca, and Jo Bergman dropped by to say hello only to discover Bobby Keys and Nathalie Delon eating baked potatoes with caviar while drinking Dom Perignon. According to June Shelley, Mick looked at the two of them like they were completely out of their minds and said, ‘Even a Rolling Stone wouldn’t do that.’ When Bobby offered to pour Mick a glass of the bubbly, his response was ‘I’ll have a beer.’ Live fast, die young, and leave a beautiful shadow was Bobby Keys’ credo. Because he did everything to excess, Keys was someone whom both Mick and Keith could appreciate, if not always understand.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "It was loud... real, real loud. I would go to Villefranche sometimes in the evening and I could hear the music from Villefranche! I was amazed that the people there were so patient."
MICK TAYLOR: “It was such a dump. It could have been in the worst part of King’s Cross. Dilapidated, dingy, mouldy, musty – there was always damp running down the walls. I’d like to say it was very homely but it wasn’t, it was just crazy.”
MICK TAYLOR: “We’d usually start recording in the evening and go on all night. I’d emerge into the driveway and be blinded by sunlight. Then I’d drive home with my first wife, Rose, to our little house up in the hills near Grasse, where Bill Wyman had actually bought a house. We had Tolstoy’s old writing desk. Madame Tolstoy would occasionally come down from Paris to check up on us.”
MICK TAYLOR: “I think it was just a bunch of stoned musicians cooped up in a basement, trying to make a record.”
DAVID CAVANAGH: “With a steady supply of heroin entering the house, it was only a matter of time before the French police took an interest in Nellcote. An audacious robbery occurred in October (‘while Keith and his entourage were watching t.v.,’ tuts Bill Wyman), in which nine guitars and some saxophones were stolen – supposedly by dealers furious at being owed money. In one story (possibly apocryphal), Anita Pallenberg is alleged to have persuaded the teenage daughter of Nellcote’s chef to try heroin for the first time, resulting in a blackmail demand from her father. In a different story, the chef was a heroin dealer himself, and had no daughter. The gendarmes moved in, and Richards and Pallenberg were charged a year later with possession and trafficking. They were found guilty and given suspended sentences in 1973. Keith was banned from France for two years.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "When we all left, Keith paid the rent for another six months just to keep the dog there, because he loved it so much."
PHILIP NORMAN: “In this season of self-indulgence and conceit, the Stones reached their musical apotheosis. While Mick was busy socializing with Bianca, Keith took over the direction of the group and wrote a series of pared-down classics built around lazy, lethal chord riffs that plunged the songs into the bloodstream almost before Jagger could open his mouth. Their vital energy was tapped from a physique in which the most murderous of all drugs could not dull or smother the instinct to make marvelous sound.”
LESTER BANGS: “’Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them. The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable… It is a brilliant projection of the nerve-torn nights that follow all the arrogant celebrations of self-demolition, a work of love and fear and humanity.”
MICK JAGGER: “To use a cliché, the sixties never really ended until later on in the seventies. I sort of remember the album ‘Exile on Main Street’ being done in France and also in the United States, and after that going on tour and becoming complacent, thinking, ‘It’s ’72. Fuck it. We’ve done it.’ We still tried after that, but I don’t think the results were ever that wonderful.”
