Life (25 page)
He barely ever played guitar in the last few years with us. Our whole thing was two guitars and everything else wove around that. And when the other guitar ain’t there half the time or has lost interest in it, you start getting overdubbing. A lot of those records is me four times. I learned a lot more about recording doing that, and also how to cover unexpected situations. And just by the process of overdubbing, and talking to the engineers, I learned a lot more about microphones, about amplifiers, about changing sounds of guitars. Because if you’ve got one guitar player playing all the parts, if you’re not careful, it sounds like it. What you really want is to make them each sound different. On albums like
December’s Children
and
Aftermath,
I did the parts that Brian normally would have done. Sometimes I’d overlay eight guitars and then just maybe use one bar of the takes here and there in the mixing, so at the end of it, it sounds like it’s two or three guitars and you’re not even counting anymore. But there’s actually eight in there, and they’re just in and out, in the mix.
Then Brian met Anita Pallenberg. He met her backstage around September 1965 at the show in Munich. She followed us to Berlin, where there was a spectacular riot, and then slowly, over several months, she started going out with Brian. She was working hard as a model and traveling about, but eventually she came to London and she and Brian began their relationship with, soon enough, its bouts of high-volume violence. Brian graduated from his Humber Snipe to a Rolls-Royce—but he couldn’t see out of that either.
Acid came into his picture around the same time. Brian disappeared late in 1965 when we were in mid tour with the usual complaints of ill health and surfaced in New York, jamming with Bob Dylan, hanging with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, and doing acid. Acid to Brian was something different than to your average drug taker. The dope at the time really wasn’t, at least as far as the rest of us were concerned, a big deal. We were only smoking weed and taking a few uppers to keep us going. Acid made Brian feel he was one of an elite. Like the Acid Test. It was that cliquishness; he wanted to be a part of something, could never find anything to be part of. I don’t remember anybody else going about saying, “I’ve taken acid.” But Brian saw it as a sort of Congressional Medal of Honor. And then he’d come on like, “You wouldn’t know, man. I’ve been tripping.” And he’s primping himself, that terrible primping, the hair. The little idiosyncrasies become so annoying. It was the typical drug thing, that they think they’re somebody special. It’s the head club. You’d meet people who’d say, “Are you a head?” as if it conferred some special status. People who were stoned on something you hadn’t taken. Their elitism was total bullshit. Ken Kesey’s got a lot to answer for.
I remember well the episode Andrew Oldham describes in his memoir and gives such symbolic weight to—when Brian lay collapsed on the floor of the RCA studio in March 1966, straddling his guitar, which was buzzing and interfering with the sound. Someone had to unplug it, and in Andrew’s telling, this was as if Brian were being cast adrift forever. To me it was just an annoying noise, and the concept was not something we were particularly shocked about, because Brian had been toppling over here and there for days. He really loved to take too many downers, Seconals, Tuinals, Desbutals, the whole range. You think you’re playing Segovia and think it’s going
diddle diddle diddle,
but actually it’s going
dum dum dum.
You can’t work with a broken band. If there’s something wrong in the engine, an attempt has to be made to fix it. In something like the Stones, especially at that time, you can’t just say, fuck it, you’re fired. At the same time, things couldn’t go on with this really rancorous fission. And then Anita introduced Brian to the other lot, the Cammells and that particular set. Of which there will be more bad news.
Michael Cooper / Raj Prem Collection
In which I get busted in Redlands. Escape to Morocco in the Bentley. Do a moonlight flit with Anita Pallenberg. Make my first courtroom appearance, spend a night in the Scrubs and the summer in Rome.
No group makes more of a mess at the table. The aftermath of their breakfast with eggs, jam, honey everywhere, is quite exceptional. They give a new meaning to the word untidiness.… The drummer, Keith [sic] of the Stones, an eighteenth-century suit, long black velvet coat and the tightest pants.… Everything is shoddy, poorly made, the seams burst. Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender and dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colors. Brian appears in white pants with a huge black square applied at the back. It is very smart in spite of the fact that the seams are giving way.
—
Cecil Beaton in Morocco, 1967, from
Self Portrait with Friends: The Selected Diaries of Cecil Beaton, 1926–1974
N
ineteen sixty-seven was the watershed year, the year the seams gave way. There was that feeling that trouble was coming, which it did later, with all the riots, street fighting and all of that. There was a tension in the air. It’s like negative and positive ions before a storm, you get that breathlessness that something’s got to break. In fact, all it did was crack.
We’d finished touring the previous summer, a grueling American tour, and wouldn’t tour there again for two years. In all that time, the first four years of the band, I don’t think we ever had more than two days’ rest between playing, traveling and recording. We were always on the road.
I felt I’d come to the end of an episode with Brian. At least it couldn’t go on as it had while we were touring. Mick and I had gotten incredibly nasty to Brian when he became a joke, when he effectively gave up his position in the band. Things had been bad before that too. There had been tension way before Brian started becoming an asshole. But I was trying to mend fences at the end of 1966. We were a band, after all. I was footloose and fancy-free, having ended my affair with Linda Keith. When Brian wasn’t working, it was easier. And naturally I gravitated to Brian’s—and Anita’s—on Courtfield Road, near Gloucester Road.
We had a lot of fun, becoming friends again, getting stoned together. It was wonderful at first. So I started to move in with them. Brian saw my attempts to bring him back into the center as an opportunity to start a vendetta against Mick. Brian always had to have an imaginary enemy, and around this time he’d decided it was Mick Jagger who had grossly mistreated and offended him. I just hung out as a guest and got a ringside seat on the world that Anita attracted around her—which was an exceptional gang of people. I used to walk back through Hyde Park to St. John’s Wood at six in the morning, at first, to pick up a clean shirt, and then I just stopped going home.
In those days on Courtfield Road I had nothing to do with Anita, strictly speaking. I was fascinated by her from what I thought was a safe distance. I thought certainly that Brian had got very lucky. I could never figure out how he got his hands on her. My first impression was of a woman who was very strong. I was right about that. Also an extremely bright woman, that’s one of the reasons she sparked me. Let alone that she was so entertaining and such a great beauty to look at. Very funny. Cosmopolitan beyond anyone I’d come across. She spoke three languages. She’d been here, she’d been there. It was very exotic, to me. I loved her spirit, even though she would instigate and turn the screw and manipulate. She wouldn’t let you off the hook for a minute. If I said, “That’s nice… ,” she would say, “
Nice?
I hate that word. Oh, stop being so fucking bourgeois.” We’re going to fight about the word “nice”? How would you know? Her English was still a bit patchy, so she would break out in German occasionally when she really meant something. “Excuse me. I’ll have that translated.”
Anita, sexy fucking bitch. One of the prime women in the world. It was all building up in Courtfield Gardens. Brian would crash out sometimes, and Anita and I would look at each other. But that’s Brian and his old lady and that’s it. Hands off. The idea of stealing a band member’s woman was not on my agenda. And so the days went by.
The truth was I’m looking at Anita and I’m looking at Brian and I’m looking at her, and I’m thinking, there’s nothing I can do about this. I’m going to have to be with her. I’m going to have her or she’s going to have me. One way or another. The realization didn’t help things. There was this obvious electricity over a few months, and Brian became more and more tangential. It took a lot of patience on my part. I’d stay around there three or four days and once a week I’d walk to St. John’s Wood. Better give some space here; it’s too transparent what my feelings are. But there were many other people around; it was a continuous party. Brian was desperately in need of attention all the time. But the more he got, the more he wanted.
Also I was getting the flavor of what was going on between Brian and Anita. I would hear the thumping some nights, and Brian would come out with a black eye. Brian was a woman beater. But the one woman in the world you did not want to try and beat up on was Anita Pallenberg. Every time they had a fight, Brian would come out bandaged and bruised. But it was nothing to do with me, was it? I was there only to hang with Brian.
Anita came out of an artistic world, and she had quite a bit of talent herself—she was certainly a lover of art and pally with its contemporary practitioners and wrapped up in the pop art world. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were painters, a family that had gone down, apparently, in a blaze of syphilis and madness. Anita could draw. She grew up in her grandfather’s big house in Rome but spent her teens in Munich at a decadent German aristos school where they threw her out for smoking, drinking and—worst of all—hitchhiking. When she was sixteen she got a scholarship to a graphics school in Rome near the Piazza del Popolo, which was when she started hanging out at that tender age in the cafés with the Roman intelligentsia, “Fellini and all those people,” as she put it. Anita had a lot of style. She also had an amazing ability to put things together, to connect with people. This was Rome in the
Dolce Vita
period. She knew all the filmmakers—Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini; in New York she’d connected with Warhol, the pop art world and the beat poets. Mostly through her own skills, Anita was brilliantly connected to many worlds and many different people. She was the catalyst of so many goings-on in those days.
If there was a genealogical tree, a tree of genesis of London’s hip scene, the one that it was known for in those days, Anita and Robert Fraser, the gallery owner and art dealer, would be at the top, beside Christopher Gibbs, antiques dealer and bibliophile, and a few other major courtiers. And that was mainly because of the connections they made. Anita had met Robert Fraser a long way back, in 1961, when she was tied up with the early pop art world through her boyfriend Mario Schifano, a leading pop painter in Rome. Through Fraser she’d met Sir Mark Palmer, the original Gypsy baron, and Julian and Jane Ormsby-Gore and Tara Browne (subject of the Beatles’ “A Day in the Life”), so already a basis is laid for the meeting of music—which played a big part in the art underground from early on—and aristos, though these were not your usual aristos. Here you had three old Etonians, Fraser, Gibbs and Palmer—though it turned out that two of them, Fraser and Gibbs, had been sacked from Eton or left prematurely—and each had special, eccentric talents and a strong personality. They were not born to follow the herd. Mick and Marianne would make pilgrimages with John Michell, a writer and the Merlin of the group, to Herefordshire to observe flying saucers and ley lines and all that. Anita had a Paris life, dancing around nightly and diaphanously in Régine’s, where they let her in for free; she had an equally glamorous Roman life. She worked as a model and she got parts in movies. The people she mixed with were hard-core avant-garde in the days when hard core hardly existed.
That was when the drug culture had started to explode. First came the Mandrax with the grass, then the acid in late ’66, then the coke sometime in ’67, then the smack—always. I remember David Courts, the original maker of my skull ring, still a close friend, coming out to dinner in a pub near Redlands. He’d had some Mandrax and some bevvies and now wanted to rest his head in the soup. I remember it only because Mick carried him on his back to the car. He would never do something like that now —and I realize, remembering that incident, how very long ago it was that Mick changed. But that is another country.
There were some fascinating people. Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the King’s African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant. He’d turned into Strawberry Bob, floating around in slippers and Rajasthani trousers by night, and gangster-sharp pinstripes and polka-dot suits by day. The Robert Fraser Gallery was pretty much the cutting edge. He was putting on Jim Dine shows, he represented Lichtenstein. He did Warhol’s first thing in London, showing
Chelsea Girls
in his flat. He showed Larry Rivers, Rauschenberg. Robert saw all the changes coming; he was very into pop art. He was aggressively avant-garde. I liked the energy that was going into it rather than necessarily everything that was being done—that feeling in the air that anything was possible. Otherwise, the stunning overblown pretentiousness of the art world made my skin crawl cold turkey, and I wasn’t even using the stuff. Allen Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything. It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making
ommm
sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.
Captain Fraser really loved his Otis Redding and his Booker T. and the MGs. I’d sometimes drop by his flat in Mount Street —the salon of the period—in the morning if I’d been up all night and I’d just got the new Booker T. or Otis album. And there was Mohammed, the Moroccan servant in the djellaba, preparing a couple of pipes, and we’d listen to “Green Onions” or “Chinese Checkers” or “Chained and Bound.” Robert was into smack. He had a cupboard full of double-breasted suits, all superbly made, with great fabrics, and his shirts were often handmade bespoke shirts, but the collars and cuffs were always frayed. And that was part of the look. And he used to keep spare jacks, a sixth of a grain—it was six jacks to a grain of heroin —loose in these suit pockets, so he’d always be going to the cupboard and going through all the pockets to find the odd spare jack. Robert’s flat was full of fantastic objects, Tibetan skulls lined with silver, bones with silver caps on the end, Tiffany art nouveau lamps and beautiful fabrics and textiles everywhere. He’d float around in these bright-colored silk shirts he’d brought back from India. Robert really liked to get stoned, “wonderful hashish,” “Afghani primo.” He was a weird mixture of avant-garde and very old-fashioned.
The other thing I really liked about Robert was he had no side on him. He could have easily hidden behind Eton and the patrician style. But he looked around—he deliberately showed works of art by people not in the Royal Academy. And then of course there was the homosexual poofter bit that also put him at odds. He didn’t flaunt it, but he certainly didn’t hide it. He had a steely eye and I always admired his guts. And I put a lot of that persona of his down to the African Rifles, really. He had his eyes opened in Africa. Captain Robert Fraser, retired. If he wanted to, he could pull rank. But I have the feeling with Robert that he just detested more and more the way that the establishment at that time, as they called it, was still trying to cling on to something that was obviously crumbling. I admired his stand on “this cannot go on.” And I think that’s why he attached himself to us and the Beatles and the avant-garde artists.
Fraser and Christopher Gibbs had been at Eton together. When Anita first met Gibby, way back, he’d just come out of jail for taking a book from Sotheby’s, aged eighteen or something—always a passionate collector and with a very good eye. We linked up with Gibbs again through Robert when Mick decided he wanted to have a country life. Robert was not country inclined and said you’d better get Gibby onto this. So Gibbs started showing Mick and Marianne around England, and they looked at various palaces and estates. I’ve always loved Gibby in his own way. I used to stay at his apartment in Cheyne Walk on the embankment. He had a great library of books. I could just sit around, look at beautiful first editions and great illustrations and paintings and stuff that I hadn’t had time to get into because I’d been working on the road. Very much into flogging the furniture. Very nice pieces. A subtle promoter of his own wares. “I’ve got this wonderful chest, sixteenth century.” He was always flogging something off, or something was always available. At the same time he was crazy, Christopher. He’s the only guy I know that would actually wake up and break an amyl nitrate popper under his nose. That even took
me
out. He’d have one by the side of the bed. Just twist that little yellow phial and wake up. I saw him do it. I was amazed. I didn’t mind the poppers, but usually later at night.