Old Gods Almost Dead (46 page)

In England, the Labour government was again raising taxes. Denis Healey, chancellor of the exchequer, talked about squeezing the rich “until the pips squeak.” On March 30, a few days before they left for tax exile in France, the Stones threw a farewell party at an old inn in Maidenhead. John and Yoko, William Burroughs, Eric Clapton, and many friends came to say good-bye. They were jamming at 2
A.M.
when the sound went dead. The hotel had cut the power because the neighbors were complaining. Drunk and enraged by
jam-us interruptus,
Mick picked up a table and threw it through a huge plate-glass window that gave onto the placid Thames. Then he ran out into the night and was across the English Channel within hours, having bid a Byronic farewell to Albion.

                

The Rolling Stones
were all in France by April 6, 1971. Mick and Bianca were in a hotel in Paris. The rest of the band settled into exile in the south of France in the tradition of English artistic exiles like Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene, who called the Riviera “a sunny place for shady people.” They all rented houses amid the most beautiful springtime landscape in the world, a subtropical garden of jasmine and lavender. Bill and Mick Taylor's family were in Grasse, perfume capital of Provence. Charlie and family were in the Cévennes, the arid hills to the west.

The Richards family rented a palatial villa called Nellcote for 10,000 pounds a month. Overlooking the deep harbor of Villefranche, near Cap Ferret on the Riviera, the villa had wide balconies, hanging gardens, and endless blue vistas of the Mediterranean. Nellcote had a suitably shady past. The nineteenth-century British admiral who built it had later thrown himself off the roof. Germans had occupied it during World War II, and the fetid cellar was supposedly the scene of Gestapo interrogations. It turned out to be a good place to record the next Rolling Stones album.

                

On April 6,
the Rolling Stones sailed into Cannes on a yacht and appeared at the Carlton Hotel to sign their new record deal with Kinney National, an American parking lot corporation that now owned the Atlantic, Elektra, and Warner Bros. labels. Kinney boss Steve Ross and Atlantic chief Ahmet Ertegun presided. The deal required the Stones to produce six albums in the next four years, including
Sticky Fingers.
“The band is
not
retiring,” Mick said. “We'll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a
happy
group.” The Stones were horrified by the tacky public breakup of the Beatles in December 1970, and would avoid this fate at all costs.

“Rolling Stones Records was a licensing deal,” he later admitted, “not a real record label for other artists. It gave us at least the
image
that we were independent.” The Stones were still tied to Allen Klein, whom they were about to sue for millions, but—under new management and with their precarious finances controlled by someone they trusted—the band was on its way out of near bankruptcy.

“Control was what Ahmet and Prince Lowenstein had to offer the Stones,” wrote George Trow in a contemporary
New Yorker
profile of Ertegun. “Both offered access to productive adult modes—financial and social—that could prolong a career built on non-adult principles.” The suave socialite Ertegun became Mick's entrée to the international jet set and the upper Manhattan bohemia, a world that had eluded him so far.

There was a party that night in Cannes. The press had been flown in, and the photographers mobbed Bianca, who wore nothing under a black voile blouse. Keith Richards, outlaw junkie trouvère, who cared nothing for any of this, left early. “I have to find my dog,” he told a journalist. “He's my only friend at the party, man.”

The Tongue of Kali

“Brown Sugar,”
the first Stones single on their new (yellow) label, was released a few days later, April 16, 1971, with “Bitch” on the flip side. The English single had a bonus track, “Let It Rock,” recorded at the Leeds show on March 15. The rocking taste of sex and race in “Brown Sugar” propelled it to no. 1 in America, no. 2 in England.

Sticky Fingers
followed in early May. The album's jacket, a pop art assemblage of jeans (with a real zipper) that opened to reveal well-hung white underwear, was designed by Andy Warhol. This evolved from artwork Warhol had submitted in 1969 for
Let It Bleed,
which had the vinyl record in girls' panties inside cutoff Levi's (and which had been misplaced by the Stones' office staff). In case anyone missed the design's phallic statement, the Stones cataloged their first album on their new label as COC 59100. The album also marked the debut of the Stones' new logo, a cartoon of lips, teeth, and lolling tongue in red, white, and black. Often attributed to Warhol, it was actually devised by Mick Jagger and graphic designer John Pashe in homage to the iconographic tongue of Kali, the Hindu goddess of creation, life, and destruction.

Sticky Fingers
kicked off with “Brown Sugar.” A tenor sax break instead of a guitar solo signaled that this was the New Look Stones. “Sway” and its heroin-inflected tale of “this demon life” ended with a stirring string section. The darkness continued with “Wild Horses” and its dull, aching pain of separation and loss. The mood was lifted in “Can't You Hear Me Knocking?” as the Stones built a Chicano acid rock groove with Mick Taylor's riffing, Bobby Keys's fluttering sax, and Rocky Dijon's congas. “You Gotta Move” closed side one.

“Bitch” opened side two with its all-time riff and Moroccan-sounding horns. Mick Taylor's hard-edged guitar seemed to assert its rights to rule the Stones' new style. “I Got the Blues” cast Mick as a begging soul man, reinforced by Billy Preston's gospel attack on the organ. “Sister Morphine” was the Stones' version from the spring of 1969, credited to Jagger/Richards with no mention of Marianne Faithfull. It starts with just acoustic guitar, joined by Ry Cooder's slide guitar on the second verse. By the third verse, the band joins, and there's a very doomy tag with Cooder and Jack Nitzsche on “treated” piano that carried the morbid song into a blue, mystifying underworld.

This was followed by the black parody of country rock “Dead Flowers,” with its drug paraphernalia, the needle and a spoon, and its farewell to Little Suzy, Queen of the Underground. Keith loved country music (Mick treated it as a joke), and country-style songs of varying degrees of irony would appear on almost every Stones album to come. The album ended with the Pacific Coast sonic highway of “Moonlight Mile,” a swooning California vibe best appreciated with “a headfull of snow.” This beautiful song of dreamy fatigue featured guitars by the two Micks, Jim Price on piano, and an orchestral wash of strings that ended
Sticky Fingers
on a majestic note of long distances traveled before coming to rest at home. Keith's acoustic guitar, uncredited on the album, appears at the end of the song, left over from the original demo when it was titled “Japanese Thing.”

Sticky Fingers
was a sensation, no. 1 in America and Europe—proof that the Rolling Stones would survive into the uncertain seventies. There wasn't a lot of great pop music around in 1971. American rock fans were preoccupied with bombastic Grand Funk Railroad and the macabre theatrics of Alice Cooper. In England, fans had Deep Purple, Humble Pie, Rod Stewart, and the Faces. London's glam movement was moving out of its underground beginnings of Warholesque, cross-dressing rockers (T. Rex, David Bowie) mocking sexual norms in high heels and glittery makeup. With powerful and daring “Brown Sugar” and “Bitch,” with their Memphis-style horns, orchestral colors, and Mick Taylor's cool blue guitar, the Stones now positioned themselves as keepers of a hard rock flame they'd ignited almost a decade earlier.

                

May 1971.
Mick Jagger called the Stones' London office to say he was going to marry Bianca, now four months pregnant, in St. Tropez. He gave Shirley Arnold his guest list. The press got wind of it, and his intimate wedding in an old stone chapel turned into another Stones media riot.

Mick and Bianca flew from Nice to Paris on May 2. He gave a dinner party for her, gave her a diamond bracelet, visited a jeweler to have a pair of matching wedding rings made. Roger Vadim and his wife, actress Natalie Delon, agreed to serve as witnesses. On May 7, a chartered flight brought the wedding guests: Mick's family, Paul and Linda, Ringo and Maureen, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, sundry aristocrats, Ronnie Wood from the Faces, Robert Fraser—seventy-five people in all.

On the morning of May 12, Bianca was presented with a harsh prenuptial agreement that severely limited the amount she could collect from Mick in the event of a divorce. They had a terrible fight, and Mick threatened to call off the wedding if she didn't sign. She later said this marriage contract had never even been discussed, that she hadn't a clue what it meant, that she only signed it reluctantly, and that it ruined her day.

They were staying at the Hotel Byblos in St. Tropez. That morning, a rabid pack of photographers occupied the town hall where the civil ceremony would take place. Mick didn't want to marry in public, and the wedding was delayed until finally the mayor threatened to walk out. So, amid a perspiring scrum of paparazzi, the wedding couple arrived in their beautiful clothes, the bride's rouged nipples peeking out of her jacket. Fights broke out among the press during the brief ceremony. Keith smashed a camera, a wild gleam in his eye. A few hours later, they were married again, this time in private, in the old Chapel of St. Anne, by a priest who had (supposedly) been giving Mick some pointers in Catholicism. As requested by the bride, a selection of music from
Love Story
was played in the chapel.

The party that night at the Café des Arts was a blowout. Caviar, champagne, lobster. The bride wore a turban and a see-through lace top. Bobby Keys ran the jam session, joined by Steve Stills, Nicky Hopkins, and Michael Shrieve, Santana's drummer. Mick got up with Doris Troy and Pat Arnold for a medley of soul hits. Bianca left early. So did Joe and Eva Jagger, still holding their wedding present. They'd been unable to secure a private moment in which to give it to their son and his bride.

Mick had wanted the Stones to play at his wedding. Keith, who'd pleaded with him not to marry Bianca, had nodded off in a corner, snoring, and some guests wondered if he was turning into Brian Jones. His friends knew that Keith was despondent. Bianca was his enemy: a snooty petite bourgeoise who disdained him and Anita (Bianca referred to Anita as “that cow”). To Keith, Bianca was a pampered party girl who hung out with the elderly squares that Keith liked to mock, and she was stealing his friend and posing a serious threat to the band.

Mick left the party with the last guests at four in the morning. Later that day, Mick and Bianca boarded a yacht in Cannes for a honeymoon at an Italian cliffside palazzo, accessible only by boat. One can only imagine what Bianca thought was in store for her as she experienced the whirlwind events of her wedding, but she later was famously quoted: “My marriage ended on my wedding day.”

                

That June,
Nellcote, Keith's villa in Villefranche, was a hectic rock and roll commune as the Stones and their allies gathered to record the Stones' crucial next record. Nellcote was set in a park planted with palm and cypress trees brought from around the world by its nautical builder. A long flight of steps led to a private beach. There was a water bed on the balcony, a bright parrot in a cage in the front garden, a rabbit in a hutch in the back. Keith's dogs had the run of the place. In the rooms downstairs, the ceilings were thirty feet high and the mistral howled down the chimneys. A giant
Sticky Fingers
promo poster of Mick was propped on the mantel of the main fireplace. Country music—Merle Haggard, George Jones—blared from the record player, alternating with Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly albums. Hired chefs fed large stoned groups of musicians and friends at long tables at odd hours; at the height of the sessions, Keith was spending $7,000 a week on food, rent, and dope. The hot ambience of Nellcote reminded journalist Robert Greenfield, who was on the scene to interview Keith for
Rolling Stone,
of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Riviera novel
Tender Is the Night
crossed with
The Shirelles' Greatest Hits.

The Stones were supposed to record in a separate house, but Stu couldn't find one near Keith, who insisted he had to work close to his family and his stash. So Stu drove the Stones' mobile studio to France, and they built a recording room in Nellcote's cellar. The old villa's frail wiring couldn't handle the new 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. So
Exile on Main Street
became Keith's trip, done on his time at his house. The rest of the band also moved into Nellcote when they realized that Keith would only be working downstairs as Marlon's erratic sleep schedule permitted. The Stones' sidemen, engineers, and technicians rented other houses nearby, and Anita often had twenty-five guests for meals.

The proximity of Marseilles, heroin capital of Europe, assured that no annoying dope shortages occurred. Mafia-level dealers arrived at Nellcote carrying top-grade Thai heroin (called cotton candy for its bright pink sheen) in smart attaché cases. Cocaine was often smuggled in by the van making weekly runs between London and Nellcote.

Villefranche was a deep-water port of call for battleships of various navies. Reasoning that the sailors might have opium or hash to sell, Keith bought a sleek Riva powerboat so he could buzz out to the huge gray ships moored offshore. Anita, pregnant with their second child (because Marlon was lonely), would watch Keith put to sea from her balcony, unsure whether he would make it home, as the sky turned sunset pink over Cap Ferrat. He ran the boat over rocks, crashed into other boats, and ran out of fuel a few times. Since he had no radio, he drifted until someone rescued him.