Redlands

SPANISH TONY: “Redlands, Keith’s country house, was as perfectly set as any jewel. Around the rambling thatched main building were glistening, scrupulously manicured emerald green lawns, and around the lawns was a wide, deep moat which had been built centuries before to protect the historic house from attack by highwaymen or pirates. On a hot day the moat sparkled, reflecting the blue of the sky, and guests would often suggest a swim – until Keith told them about the rats.”

SIMON WELLS: “Keith’s property hunt led him down towards Chichester in West Sussex.  Whether Richards knew it or not, the area had long been a retreat for those seeking pastoral and spiritual relaxation.  Over the years, numerous artists had committed the quintessential beauty of the area to canvas, while writers such as the poet Hilaire Belloc had eulogized the understated beauty of the region.  The close proximity to the sea was also a strong lure.  In search of a suitable retreat, Keith chanced upon an area just outside Chichester known as the Witterings, a peninsula with an array of charming villages.  West Wittering was one such hamlet, its chocolate box environs appearing as if they had been passed over by time.  Just outside the village lay Redlands, a beautiful 13^th century thatched cottage situated at the end of a narrow road.  Despite its modest presence from the driveway, a moat ran around the edges of the property with only a small bridge allowing entry towards the house.  To its rear were fields that slowly dissolved towards the sea.  Referenced in the Doomsday Book, it was rumored that Anne Boleyn had once lodged at the property.”

 

KEITH RICHARDS: “They got in touch with me on tour in Hawaii and said, ‘We’ve found this incredibly old bit of wall, what do you want us to do with it?’ I said, ‘Frame it.’ And when I got there it was like one of the most beautiful paintings in the world.  It’s got glass over it to protect it and it’s beautifully framed.  It’s just these old bricks with cowshit and straw holding them together.  A work of art!  Redlands is a beautiful joint.  I’ll always keep that.”

SUE MAUTNER: “It was a beautifully sunny day when I drove down to Keith’s house. ‘Mr. Richards hasn’t arrived yet,’ said the old gardener when I approached the drive. Much to my surprise, I found the porch door open.  So I took the liberty of entering.  I was very interested and surprised to learn that his books consisted of ‘The Great War,’ ‘Dictionary of Slang,’ ‘Guns,’ ‘Great Land Battles,’ ‘Drawings of Rembrandt,’ and other books on England.  I was even more surprised with his record collection.  Among the Beatles, Otis Redding, Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Everlys, Temptations, and Elvis were albums of Chopin’s Nineteen Waltzes, Rossini and Segovia.  The upstairs consisted of five bedrooms and a bathroom.  I knew which was Keith’s room, because the bed was unmade and there was a pair of shoes and a Dennis Wheatley book lying on the floor.  All the rooms were unfurnished, and like the downstairs, it was all wooden beams and floors.  One bedroom had half the floor missing, so I could immediately look down into the kitchen.  I came downstairs through the large dining room and into the kitchen to find some dirty dishes, a burnt sausage in the frying pan in the cooker, a rifle on the wall, a spur hanging on the other wall and a clock on the door, not to mention a truncheon hanging from the ceiling (Keith had pinched it off a gendarme in Paris).”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Keith bought a dark blue Bentley S Touring Continental that he couldn’t as yet drive. He mounted a Confederate flag on the front bumper, had a record player installed, and named the car Blue Lena, after Lena Horne.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Redlands was Keith’s playground. Activities included shooting the water rats that lived on the banks of the moat, riding motorcycles, archery, throwing knives, rolling joints, playing with the changing cast of dogs that kept disappearing as neighboring farmers poisoned or shot them for bothering their sheep. The house was burglarized every few weeks until Keith had a nine-foot wall built around the house and its two-acre garden. The place was full of friends and music all the time.”

SPANISH TONY: “Keith also became obsessed with archery for a spell, and since he rarely hit the targets, he needed the boat to retrieve all his lost arrows. After one particularly arduous session he announced, ‘This is too much like hard work, man. What I need is a little Hovercraft so I can zip straight across the lawn, into the moat, pick up my arrows and skim out again.’ If anyone else had made such a suggestion, I would merely have laughed, but I had learned long before that in the millionaire world of rock superstars every whim rapidly becomes reality, so I merely agreed that a personal Hovercraft sounded like an excellent idea.”

ARC SPITZ: “With its green hills, flower beds, and ancient stones, Redlands was the perfect locale for a psychedelic idyll.  Far from the city, under the stars, with a skull full of frizzled matter, it was easy to believe the world was changing for the better, and the Stones, truly pampered now, let their guard down fatally.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Keith decorated the big living room with lion skin rugs, a wildebeest-skin mat, rabbit and wolf skin rugs, Moroccan cushions, tapestries, and a state-of-the-art sound system. A comfortable settee and stone table were the main pieces of furniture. The centerpiece was a baronial fireplace… Kenneth Anger, who lived with them at Redlands for a couple of months in 1969, was a typical example of Keith’s guests. Richards often slept on the couch in the living room at Redlands and would occasionally wake to see Anger pottering around the lawn between the house and the moat, building a shrine while entwining himself in psychedelic scarves.”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “There were the days Redlands could be like a house out of the ‘Twilight Zone.’ Where rows of stone Buddhas held silent vigil beneath a canopy emblazoned with shrieking gorgons’ heads. Where violet candles dripped and flowed across lead-lined table tops inlaid with crimson glass stars. Keith’s own rural pursuits included tinkering with guns and knives, lying prone in a hammock, drawing on a bubble pipe and noting the strange preponderance of UFOs hovering over the South Downs. No wonder, perhaps, Les Perrin stopped arranging visits from the likes of ‘Teen’ and ‘Valentine.’”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “The music room was the dark womb of the place, furnished with oriental rugs and chairs apparently made out of antlers, tightly shut in by Moroccan drapes. An indoor forest of metal, bone and wooden masks could have doubled as the clubhouse of a voodoo cult or the set of a rather heavy-handed Stones biopic. Where Redlands had once echoed to madrigals sung here over 300 years earlier there now arose the clang of Keith’s guitar. It was said by several visitors who knew these things that the place was haunted, and Keith himself sometimes spoke of it that way when, late at night, he turned off the lights and lay on his back in front of the log fire. Several of his best songs had been written in this posture.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Great echo in the long room. Great for listening to Wagner records.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Ry Cooder visiting the Fifth Dimension.  That was my cottage!  Downstairs in part of it we knocked three rooms into one and called it the Fifth Dimension.  It was great, and mostly everyone used to come over there.  ‘C’mon, everybody over to Keith’s!’”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Yeah, Ry Cooder came down to visit for the weekend.  He was just passed out, as I remember, on the couch.  Then he’d just get up and play.  He was a very quiet person, but then I was probably as passed out as he was – so it’s difficult to remember any meaningful things that might have been exchanged!”

SIMON WELLS: “Infused by the damp February mist, Redlands took on a wholly fantastical appearance in the moonlight.  The temperature was slightly above normal for a winter’s evening, and all appeared just perfect for the touch of mystery that lay ahead.  With Schneiderman’s LSD to look forward to the next day, a sense of adventure permeated the atmosphere.  After settling into the house the party tucked into a late night supper of bacon and eggs cooked by Mohammed, and stayed up talking until around 5am.  Happily tired, all but Keith repaired upstairs.  The one double and three single bedrooms were all occupied so Richards was content to sleep in an armchair in his living room.  In the morning, the freshly dosed ensemble made their way down the winding stairwell into Redlands’ expansive lounge.  With its inordinate space making a mockery of the property’s outward bijou charm, the group settled into the drawing room in varying states of elevation.  While everyone was engaged in their own mind games, Schneiderman prepared a further concoction for anyone not fully blasted by the onset of the LSD.”

PATTIE BOYD: "The day of the big bust was the first time that we'd been to Redlands and I can't remember why we were invited. It didn't seem to be a special party; it just seemed to be friends of Keith."

KEITH RICHARDS: "I woke up around 11:00 AM. Schneiderman, the acid dealer, was up and dressed when I awoke. Mohammed was in the kitchen. I went into the garden for an hour or so. I had no idea what the rest of the guests were doing indoors, but went back in because I heard there was talk of a beach party. Except for two, all the guests went in Schneiderman's minivan. Later on during the afternoon, everybody went on a minibus mystery tour around West Sussex."

SIMON WELLS: “With the weather unusually warm for a mid-February morning, it appeared as though the spirits were with them.  Enchanted by the rich, mysterious woodlands that surround Redlands, Marianne briefly escaped the house to commune with the trees.  When she returned, much to the delight of her fellow trippers she brought with her pieces of natural ephemera – branches, leaves and such.  Keith, too, would spend an hour or so wandering around Redlands’ lawns while his house guests kept close to the cottage.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “It was a beautiful winter day, and after breakfast most of the guests piled into the cars and embarked on a mystery tour of the countryside while the acid wormed its way into their brains. Michael Cooper’s photographs show the flared trousers, white loafers, bug-eyed mirrored shades, floppy hats, and bushy Afghan jackets so in vogue that year.”

SIMON WELLS: “Once at the beach, the party reveled in the dramatic landscape that slowly dissolved into the sea, edged by rupturing dunes.  With shallow lagoons traced out at low tide and a line of iron groynes with metal tops like miniature umbrellas, the area was as fantastical as anything Schneiderman’s acid could muster.”

CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “David Schneiderman, the Acid King, was a sort of upmarket flower child. He knew more about drugs than anyone the Stones had ever met. ‘What?’ he’d say. ‘You mean you’ve never heard of dimethyl tryptomine?’  I remember him with his little suitcase full of all sorts of things.  He had this drug called DMT, which was a sort of 20-minute roller coaster hallucinogenic.  He was dripping it onto mentholated cigarettes during the morning and passing them around. 

He was at every party one went to for about 10 days, and there was this charming, smiling young man handing out ‘candy’ to all and sundry.  He was very charming, personable and friendly.  There didn’t seem to be anything horrible about him.  If anything he was just a bit crazy.  He was an acid evangelist, and his mission was to turn on the world, talking about spiking the water system and stuff like that."ED OCHS: “To make it more difficult for outsiders to crash his scene – and easier for him to crash theirs – he spoke his own language, a confusing, amusing, seemingly random blend of UFOlogy, Scientology, Crowleyisms, I-Ching anagrams, street talk, and a home-grown code he dubbed 21^st century curbstone jargon.”

SIMON WELLS: “Her romance with Mick in its first spring, Marianne Faithfull was the only female to be invited, her poetic and adventurous disposition making her the emotional center of the gathering.  With the prospect of mixing LSD with visits to ancient monuments and sacred sites around the Redlands locale, she was excited by what lay ahead.  The drug’s ability to transport its users into a fairyland of indeterminate beauty would have been more than enough to ignite her inquisitive nature.”MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was all very organized, like it was when you took acid in those days. We got hold of a van, mapped out an itinerary. You wanted to go and see marvels. The White Horse on the Downs, the Devil’s Footprint, Glastonbury, Stonehenge and Avebury were favorites. Forests, follies, ancient ruins.”

CHERRY VANILLA: “Nicky Kramer was known around London as the King’s Road Flower Child ‘cause psychedelia was clearly never going to end for him.  His looks made you think of a character out of an English fairy tale… a lanky lad, with ginger hair and skin so pale.’  He dressed like a court jester or the Fool in the Tarot – skinny mint-green panne velvet trousers tucked into rust suede over-the-knee boots, flowing silk shirts in pink, red, yellow, or orange, bells hanging from a leather strap around his neck, and a fresh flower often tucked behind one ear.  Nicky came off as a young aristocrat gone astray, showing signs of that kind of upbringing in the way he spoke, but – due, no doubt, to his drug intake – keeping you on tenterhooks as to whether or not he would manage to get the words out of his mouth.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was a tremendous relief when we finally got to the beach and raved around and looked at things and under things and through things. Gulls and seashells and waves and crabs and sand patterns. Whew! How beautiful (and benign).”

CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: "We had a quasi-cultural expedition to the house of Edward James, the father of English surrealist art, at West Dean on the Downs. In the evening we went back to the house and sat around talking, playing records, and watching TV. Everything was perfectly respectable."

SIMON WELLS: “Outside darkness had fallen and temperatures were just below freezing, but those inside Redlands were enjoying the warmth from the freshly lit fire in the living room.  Keith retired upstairs for a bath and a change of clothing which occupied him for the best part of 45 minutes.  Marianne was also slightly soiled from her adventures, and she took the opportunity to have a soak in the tub in the bathroom adjacent to the room she was sharing with Mick.  Lounging in the warm, soothing water, she watched as the detritus of her afternoon’s larking about floating among the soap suds around her.  Her instincts having overridden prior planning, Marianne hadn’t thought to bring a change of clothes for the weekend, and had left her lace blouse, black velvet trousers, and black half-coat on the back of a chair in the bedroom.  Once finished with her bath, she walked back to the bedroom and wrapped herself in the large fur rug that had covered the double bed.  Made up from animal pelts on one side with a tawny colored cover on the other, the rug was more than sufficient to cover her five-foot five-inch frame.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “As the night came on, they all gathered around the fireplace in the long lounge with its fur carpets and Moroccan cushions. Mohammed served a delicious couscous and after eating, George and Patti Harrison left for their own house in Surrey. Christopher Gibbs was resplendent in a silk costume; the scent of Moroccan cooking wafted in from the kitchen, and ‘Blonde on Blonde’ was on the stereo.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “That’s when I went and took my bath. I was the only one who hadn’t brought a change of clothes and I dealt with it by wearing this beautiful fur rug. It was very large, six by nine feet or something. It would have covered a small room.”

SIMON WELLS: “Dressed in the rug, Marianne ambled down the stairs towards Redlands’ living room, the big fur-rug easily covering her body.  Elsewhere, others had prepared themselves for what the evening had to offer.  Jagger, keen as always to maintain a sense of order around his profile, had utilized some lipstick and other cosmetics before relaxing on the lounge sofa.  In the spirit of the gathering, Gibbs paid homage to the exotic flavors in the room by dressing for the evening in what he describes as ‘a Pakistani pyjama suit.’ According to Marianne, an ‘overwhelming sensation of warmth and safety’ permeated the house.  The time was around 6:30pm.  With two of the three downstairs windows having their curtains drawn, the outside world might have been a thousand miles away.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “How the Mars bar got into the story I don’t know. There was one on the table – there were a couple, because on acid suddenly you get sugar lack and you’re munching away. And so she’s stuck forever with the story of where the police found that Mars bar. And you have to say she wears it well. But how that connotation came about and how the press managed to make a Mars bar on a table and Marianne wrapped in a fur rug into a myth is a kind of classic. In fact, Marianne was quite chastely attired for once. She was more dressed in this fur bedspread than she’d been all day.”

KEITH RICHARDS: "Eight o'clock. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everybody has managed to find their way back to the house. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself up in a rug and is watching the box. 'Bang, bang, bang,' this big knock at the door and I go to answer it. 'Oh, look, there's lots of little ladies and gentlemen outside...' We were just gliding off from a twelve-hour trip when the police arrived. You know how that freaks people out when they walk in on you. The vibes were so funny for them. I told one of the women with them they'd brought to search the ladies, 'Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion? Because you're ruining the tapestries.' We were playing it like that. They tried to get us to turn the record player off but we said, 'No. We won't turn it off but we'll turn it down.' And they went, as they started going out the door, somebody put on 'Rainy Day Women' really loud: 'Everybody must get stoned.' And that was it."

KEITH RICHARDS: “The cops left a bag of heroin down the sofa and took the incense sticks.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “I was working pretty continually throughout this whole period – modeling, filming… Brian got involved in the music for one of my films, and that was another major number.  To a certain extent, though, that was a breakthrough, because Jimmy Page and Brian did the music for that film, which was presented in Cannes. That was the first time that had happened – rock stars writing the soundtrack for a movie.  So I’d been in Germany doing the film.  I’d just got back and Brian, who was supposed to have finished the music, had finally been given a deadline.  Everyone had gone down to Redlands, so we said we’d just finish the music, then join them.  Then, when we called up, Keith said, ‘Don’t bother coming, because they’ve just busted us.’ It was as drastic as that.  Then they busted Brian in London.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “I guess ’67 was the explosion of the drug culture, if there is such a thing.  It came into to open from the underground, and everybody started talking about it.  And through this whole year we were trying to put up with this incredible hassle, this continual confrontation with policemen and judges.  I really feel uncomfortable looking at a uniform anyway, and having to deal with those people for a whole year, it did wear us down a bit.  In fact, it put us on our back, really, for eighteen months or so.  It was a painful year, a year of change for everybody.”

SIMON WELLS: “Marianne was desperately trying to come to terms with what was happening to her closest friends.  While the details of her role in the Redlands saga had yet to surface in court, she knew that Keith’s hearing the following day would almost certainly draw attention to her involvement.  In a whirl of confusion, Marianne had escaped the first day of the trial by going over to the Chiswick residence of Steve Marriott, the puckish vocalist with The Small Faces.  Friendly with the singer’s girlfriend Saida, Faithfull, along with fellow Small Faces’ Ronnie Lane and Ian McLagan, decided much in the spirit of the times that the best way to escape the underlying nightmare was to drop acid and dance away their woes.  From Marianne’s own accounts, it was a crazy, hugely psychedelic day, although the subconscious ticking away in her mind would manifest visions of Mick in court, twisting away in the wind with vultures ready to pick at his fragile body."

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “In the stereotyped cock-and-bull story that had been cooked up about us, Mick was a filthy, depraved maniac and I was the Dickensian innocent caught in the monster’s clutches. This is as absurd a concoction as can be imagined, but these images proved incredibly adhesive.”

ZACHARY LAZAR: “Though her actual name had been kept out of the papers, there was no question that Marianne was the ‘NAKED GIRL FOUND UPSTAIRS.’ She was a pop star herself, a singer of love ballads and folk songs, but unlike them she was a woman. Her career was almost certainly over.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Every day a pile of letters would arrive in the mail that were pure poison: ‘And the sooner you leave this island with your long blond hair floating in the sea, it will be a cleaner place.’”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It went too far, and when it got too much, they had to slap us down.  That’s when it really became a nightmare.  The drug busts, the persecution.  It was really a reaction of society against what society itself had done – they had built us up too high and now they would tear us down.  But that was unfair.  I mean Mick and I existed, whether the cameras were there or not.  We were real, we weren’t the sort of people who were only real if they’re in the newspaper.”

ALLEN KLEIN: “I was thrilled when they got off.  I can’t do this job any other way than to get completely involved with my artists.  But I got pissed the day I got them out on bail because when Mick and Keith and Marianne got back to my hotel room she pulled out a hash pipe and lit up.  I mean, how goddamn stupid can you get?  I grabbed the thing away from her and fucking threw it out the window.  She stood there saying the law is unrealistic; well, I don’t give a shit if it is.  I didn’t want them to go to jail.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I felt a rage against society.  I felt it was incredibly unfair that we were persecuted as we were.  We really weren’t doing anyone any harm, and I had this incredible feeling that they really wanted to take away our power, which is the worst thing you can do to somebody because you’re born with it and you need it, and if people try to remove it, it’s like taking the sting from a bee – you’re finished without it.  And I know how that feels because for a long time after the sixties I felt as if someone had unplugged me from the life-force and my power wasn’t there.  And I know that when I went on stage to act in those years, I would stand there waiting to go on, waiting for that feeling of my power, and it wouldn’t come.  And it was awful.  And then eventually – I don’t know why or how – I got it back again.  It took an awfully long time.  It took almost ten years.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When a woman loses her reputation at 19 she loses everything.  What people thought of me and the Stones was downright unfair.  It’s happened before, to Oscar Wilde, where somebody just gets too grand and too successful, and is having too much fun.  In Australia it’s called ‘Tall Poppy Syndrome.’ A poppy grows up too high you cut it down.  If you’re not humble and groveling enough and if you’re operating outside of society they will come down on you.  The clever thing they do is pick on a weakness that a person has anyway and let them hang themselves.  They didn’t manage to destroy Mick and Keith and, though I was the most vulnerable, they didn’t manage to get me.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “She’s got a lot of guts, that girl… apart from a great pair.”

CHRIS O’DELL: “The press behaved disgustingly towards her.  They are an absolute disgrace to humanity.  Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll became an icon, and Marianne became sacrificial to this end.  She was a symbol for the general moral degeneracy.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “A curse is a very real thing. Like the Lady of Shalott I got into a boat, painted my name on it and drifted downstream.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “The trial judge just blew it.  I mean, he said things to me while I was up there that if I’d caught him by himself I’d have wrung his neck.  When he gave me the year sentence he called me ‘scum’ and ‘filth’ and ‘People like this shouldn’t be…’”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “So exquisitely dressed, they seemed more like fragile aristocrats being bullied by beefy cops than the sinister types the prosecution were trying to foist on the court. The effect was to make them into romantic figures. There’s always been great affection in England for that sort of foppish gallantry: Sir Walter Raleigh at the block, Francis Drake playing bowls before going off to fight the Spanish Armada.”

MICK JAGGER: “Judge Block calling Keith and me ‘scum’ and ‘filth’ – he really blew it.  Got thrown out of his club, the Garrick Club, a London club for barristers.  They invited me to join.  I may, too.  They have very nice lunches.  It’s a very cool place.  Anyway, they threw him out of the Garrick Club.  I don’t know whether you know what that means, but for them that’s quite a bad scene.  It’s a very heavy number.  For those people to be thrown out of their club – that their fathers belonged to, and it goes back and back – it’s really a very heavy number, because in England ‘my club’ is a whole social thing, like being in the Roman Catholic Church and being excommunicated.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Before Redlands, Keith had been overshadowed by Mick and Brian, but his defiance on the stand made him a major folk hero. This was the beginning of Keith’s legend. A symbol of dissipation and the demonic. And the amazing thing is that subsequently he actually became that. Satan’s righthand man with the skull rings and the demonic imagery. He turned it all to his advantage.”