Life by Keith Richards & James Fox

Author:Keith Richards & James Fox [Richards, Keith & Fox, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Biography, Cultural History, Britain, Entertainment
ISBN: 9780316034388
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Published: 2010-01-01T15:00:00+00:00

Dominique Tarlé

Chapter Eight

In which we leave for France in spring of 1971 and I rent Nellcôte, a house on the Riviera. Mick gets married in Saint-Tropez. We set up our mobile truck to record Exile on Main St. and settle into a prolific nighttime recording schedule. We motorboat to Italy for breakfast in the Mandrax. I hit my stride on the five-string guitar. Gram Parsons comes and Mick gets possessive. I insulate myself with drugs; we get busted. I hang out for the last time with Gram in LA and get badly hooked on second-rate dope. I flee to Switzerland with Anita for a cure, undergo cold-turkey horrors and compose “Angie” while recovering.

When I first saw Nellcôte, I thought that I could probably handle a spell of exile. It was the most amazing house, right at the base of Cap Ferrat, looking out over Villefranche Bay. It had been built around the 1890s by an English banker, with a large garden, a little overgrown, behind the great iron gates. The proportions were superb. If you felt a little ragged in the morning, you could walk through this glittering château and feel restored. It was like a hall of mirrors, with twenty-foot ceilings and marble columns, grand staircases. I’d wake up thinking, this is my house? Or, about bloody time someone’s got it right. This was the grandeur we felt we deserved after the shabbiness of Britain. And since we’d committed ourselves to living abroad, how hard really was it to sit in Nellcôte? We’d been on the road forever, and Nellcôte was a lot better than the Holiday Inn! I think everybody felt a sense of liberation compared to what had been going on in England.

It was never our intention to record at Nellcôte. We were going to look around for studios in Nice or Cannes, even though the logistics were a little daunting. Charlie Watts had taken a house miles away in the Vaucluse, several hours’ drive. Bill Wyman was up in the hills, near Grasse. He was soon hanging out with Marc Chagall, of all people. The most unlikely couple I can think of, Bill Wyman and Marc Chagall. Neighbors, pop round for a cup of Bill’s terrible tea. Mick lived first in the Byblos hotel in Saint-Tropez while he waited for his wedding day, then rented a house belonging to Prince Rainier’s uncle and then a house owned by someone called Madame Tolstoy. Talk about falling in with the cultural Euro trash, or they with the white trash. They, at least, welcomed us with open arms.

One of the features of Nellcôte was a little staircase down to a jetty, to which I soon attached the Mandrax 2, a very powerful twenty-foot motorboat, a Riva, built of mahogany, the crème de la crème of Italian speedboats. Mandrax was an anagram of its original name; all I had to do was knock off a couple of letters and move a couple around. It was irresistible to call it that. I bought it off a guy, renamed it and set off.

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