STEPHEN DAVIS: “At the end of 1968, Mick and Marianne and Keith and Anita took ship for Brazil, telling the press they were making a pilgrimage to visit a famous magician. The two couples were trying to patch things up after a difficult year. Anita was pregnant with Keith’s baby, but she liked to tease Mick about it being his. On the crossing, Anita hemorrhaged, inspiring the ‘clean white sheets stained red’ in Marianne’s final version of ‘Sister Morphine.’ New Year’s Eve was spent at a macumba voodoo ceremony on the beach in Rio.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita, Mick, Marianne and I took a ship from Lisbon to Rio, maybe ten days at sea. We thought, let’s go to Rio and let’s do it in the old style. If any of us had been seriously hooked by then, we wouldn’t have taken that form of transport. We were still dabbling, except perhaps for Anita, who was going to the ship’s surgeon to ask for morphine from time to time. There was nothing to do on the boat, so we’d go around filming Super 8 – the footage still exists. I think it may even show Spiderwoman, as we called her. This was a refrigeration ship, but it had passengers as well. And it was all very ‘30s – you expected Noel Coward to walk in. The Spiderwoman was one of those with all the bangles and the perm and the expensive dresses and the cigarette holder. We used to go down and watcher her act at the bar. Buy her a drink now and again. ‘Fascinating, darling.’ She was kind of like a female Stash, full of shit. The bar was crowded with these upper-class English people, all drinking like mad, pink gins and pink champagne, all prewar conversation. I was dressed in a diaphanous djellaba, Mexican shoes and a tropical army hat, deliberately outlandish.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We already knew Rupert Loewenstein, who soon started to run our affairs, by this time, and he checked us into the best hotel in Rio. And suddenly Anita was mysteriously going through the phone book. I said, what are you looking for? She said, I’m looking for a doctor. ‘A doctor?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘What for?’ ‘Don’t worry about it.’ When she came back later that afternoon, she says, I’m pregnant. And that was Marlon.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We met some Brazilians who found us a little hut by the sea on the edge of the most beautiful tropical forest. No beds or cots, just hammocks. We were very happy in this place, on our own. While we were living in the hut another saint’s day came along, this time dedicated to the goddess of the sea. Only the women of the village participated in the ceremony, and this time they invited me to take part. It concluded with a ceremony where all the women brought flowers and threw them as an offering into the sea. I got hold of twenty-four red roses, I don’t know how (Mick, probably). I broke the petals off and threw them into the sea. It was absolutely glorious, the flowers floating on the sea, the sun setting, the women chanting, the goddess rising up out of our collective devotion.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “In self-defense I draped myself from head to toe. I wore large hats with veils, long-sleeved dresses that trailed along the ground and high red boots. And this is how I would walk around in the jungle, an apparition with a persistent cough.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick was very fond of Nicholas and Nicholas loved him. Mick’s wonderful with kids. He has that quality that Hitler and Goring had: nice to dogs and children.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I definitely remember that I didn’t want to have anything to do with Mick Jagger. I did not want to be his girlfriend. I never did. But Mick and me still had this kind of secret, or thought we did, so for me it was exciting because I thought I was in the middle of this high drama. And Keith was willing to go along with it. He could have just said, ‘No, I don’t want to know. You do whatever you want to and that’s it.’ But Keith was willing to go along with it. Me and Mick would jokingly talk about all those things and it was like, you can’t always get what you want.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Mick wanted to do another movie with me, and other people made offers for us to make films together, but I just didn’t want it. Mick just wanted to walk around and show me off like he did with all his women, and I felt Keith needed a more human kind of attention and care and love.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was beginning to cool it with drugs, because she was now pregnant with Marlon, but Keith and I blazed on. Smoking the powerful Brazilian grass, macuna, guzzling cough mixtures, anything we could get our hands on. It was on this trip to Brazil that Mick wrote ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ He could see it was getting out of hand. Mick knew that if I went on along the path I was on, we weren’t going to be together much longer, but he never talked about it except in songs.”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Pallenberg, still immersed in witchcraft and Satanism, had originally conceived of a month-long trek across South America as a way to commune with native shamans while looking for flying saucers. Richards told a British journalist that they were ‘hoping to see this magician who practices both black and white magic. He has a very long and difficult name which we can’t pronounce. We call him ‘Banana’ for short.’”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Marianne left after a while because she couldn’t stand the Brazilian climate and felt sick, so it was Mick, Keith and me staying on this ranch in the middle of nowhere. It was quite a creative time. That’s where they wrote ‘Let It Bleed.’”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We worked our way up to Lima, Peru, and then up to Cusco, which is eleven thousand feet. Everybody’s been a bit short of breath, and we get to the hotel lobby, and it’s lined wall to wall with those huge oxygen tanks. We get to our rooms, and in the middle of the night, Anita finds that the john’s not working. So she takes a pee in the sink, and in the middle of the pee, the sink collapses to the floor and water comes shooting out of a huge pipe. The sink was shattered, lying in pieces, but the weird thing is that when they finally arrived in the middle of the night, the Peruvians were very nice. They didn’t go, ‘What are you doing! How did you break the sink!’ They just mopped it up and gave us another room. I thought they were going to bring the cops with them.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “We went in search of flying saucers. That was the bookend. After that I just lost touch with everyone
involved. We just kept moving. Keith and I patched up what we had to patch
up and then we came back. Then I had
Marlon, which was planned. I was getting
near to thirty and wanted a baby. I made
a conscious decision and did not want to let Keith down, as we had such a good
relationship and I loved him dearly.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We traveled to Urubamba, a village not far from Machu Picchu on a river of the same name. Once you got out there, you were out there, man. There was nothing there. No hotel, certainly. This place was not on the tourist map. The only white people they ever saw were lost. In fact we were, basically (lost). But eventually we found this bar and had a nice meal, shrimps and rice and beans, and we said, well, we’ve only got this car; any chance of some dormir? And at first a lot of no’s went around the room, but they noticed we had a guitar with us, so Mick and I serenaded them for about an hour, trying to come up with any old thing we could think of. It seemed to me you needed a majority vote to get invited to sleep on the premises. And Anita being pregnant, I did want to give her a bed for the night. We must have done all right. And finally the landlord said we could have a couple of rooms upstairs. The only time Mick and I sang for a bed.”
PERRY RICHARDSON: “Michael Cooper told me that he went with the Stones once to South America and he remembered pulling in to this tiny little village in Peru, where it turned out this kind of local music festival was going on… and they were all playing this totally unusual, hybrid style of music that they’d never heard before. No one had heard of ‘The Stones’ and they were all tired, exhausted – nowhere to stay – so Keith watched them playing for a bit, then took the guitar up there and just played their music back to them, spot on, adding all of these little touches of detail. And they were just literally stunned – amazed – couldn’t believe that this gringo stranger could be playing their music so well!”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “One night, in the city of Bahia, they stumbled into a candomble ceremony, with drumming and dancing in the streets outside the city’s rococo old cathedral. Mick was heavily bearded, with long flowing hair, Marianne was carrying Nicholas, and they were the only white people on the scene. Some of the locals made a negative connection with the two English freaks and chased them out of the plaza with curses and stones.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was in that little town that I read ‘Naked Lunch’ for the first time. William Burroughs was a cult figure among my friends. We were all the children of Burroughs. And I had a blinding flash. This was something I was going to have to pursue. I would become a junkie. Not in that high-life way like Robert Fraser – little lines on expensive mirrored tables – but a junkie on the street. This was to be my path.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I listened to Dylan’s ‘Basement Tapes’ on the plane. I took it as if the apocalypse was coming. I couldn’t stop playing it. I was in a tiny aeroplane, while Mick was looking at islands. And so I was quite scared. I just felt like the end of the world was coming. That sense of doom. It’s not in all the songs, some of them are very funny. But the side that I liked was the more doomy one. There’s a lot of stuff about water and… something coming. It was one of the first times that Dylan started talking almost in sort of ancient tongues. I always felt that the place where the great horrors were going to come from was America. And when I listened to those songs, I felt that he knew it too.”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “As soon as they returned from South America, Keith and Anita went down to Dartford to visit Doris. Being a traditional British mum, Doris had always found it hard to appreciate Anita’s continental style. When Anita proudly displayed her stomach, joking that her baby had been to Brazil, Mrs. Richards thought, this is no way to tell your mother-in-law you were pregnant! And what had happened to her wonderful Keith? He looked like Jesus Christ, floating around the house in a long white robe as if his feet were three inches above the ground. Doris had not idea that Keith had started his long, deadly relationship with what people who took heroin referred to, ironically, as Jones.”