| 9th September 2006 10:31 AM |
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| GotToRollMe |
From rollingstone.com:
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/11569598/the_rolling_stones_making_their_masterpiece_exile_on_main_street?source=music_news_rssfeed
Making "Exile on Main Street"
Sex, drugs, and rivalries: new details about making the Rolling Stone's 1971 masterpiece
Robert Greenfield
In the spring of 1971, nine years into their existence as the world's greatest rock & roll band, the Rolling Stones learned to their great dismay that they were not only broke but would also have to leave England to avoid paying British income tax. They decamped to the French Riviera -- aptly described by Somerset Maugham as "a sunny place for shady people," where all forms of aberrant behavior had always been tolerated so long as the bill was always paid on time -- and began recording their new album in the basement of Villa Nellcôte, Keith Richards' sumptuous mansion by the sea. The result was the Stones' only double album, the classic "Exile on Main Street."
Perhaps life at Nellcôte has become too peaceful for Keith Richards. Perhaps he just feels bored. Perhaps, as "Spanish Tony" Sanchez -- whom Marianne Faithfull once described as the "dealer by appointment to the Rolling Stones" -- would have us believe, Keith is simply reacting to what happened the night before. Whatever the reason, the never-ending need for chaos with which Keith seems to have been born suddenly kicks in with a vengeance and all hell breaks loose. It all begins one night during a dinner at Nellcôte attended by Keith, his longtime companion Anita Pallenberg, Spanish Tony and Tommy Weber, a fabulous character right out of the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night. Tommy, who grew up on the estate in the English countryside where Charles Darwin once lived, was a professional racing-car driver until a broken neck put an end to his career. Now thirty-three years old, with long blond hair hanging to his shoulders, he can usually be found walking around the villa barefoot in loose trousers and a flowing shirt that he may not have remembered to button up the front. Down on Nellcôte's rocky little beach, Tommy can sometimes be seen sunbathing in the nude, establishing beyond all doubt that he is one of the truly beautiful people on the planet. Although no one talks about it, Tommy and Anita look so much alike that they could be twins hatched from a single egg. Together, they make a stunning pair. Based on what Spanish Tony insists happened later that evening, Tommy and Anita may have already reached the same conclusion.
But then at Villa Nellcôte that summer, Anita was always the center of attention. How could she not be? The woman was a natural wonder, as well as a force of nature. Though she rarely went swimming, the outfit she preferred to wear around the house was a microscopic leopard-skin bikini that left nothing to the imagination yet made everyone wonder how she might look without it. Anita had first come to the band as the girlfriend/female mirror image of lead guitarist Brian Jones, who always liked to refer to himself as "the undisputed leader of the Rolling Stones." Together, Brian and Anita became the very first alpha couple of rock. Unable to be faithful to anyone for very long, they fought and fucked and paraded their ambiguous sexuality in public for all to see. When Brian finally became too much even for Anita, she left him to live with Keith, who by then had also fallen in love with her. At the rock & roll round table occupied by the Rolling Stones, Anita was the key. Whoever possessed her had the power. But as time would prove, no one could keep her for long. For in the end, she belonged only to herself.
Lest anyone doubt that we are now entering purgatory and the road we travel will be littered with lost souls, consider the other two women also at dinner this evening at Nellcôte. One of them is Madeleine D'Arcy, a beautiful blond dancer for whom Spanish Tony left his wife and two children some years earlier. In a photo he took of her that summer, Madeleine stands by the front door of Nellcôte in an impossibly short minidress and a pair of stacked platform high-heel hooker shoes. Her bare legs are strong and muscular. Her hair is thick and lustrous, and she has a huge smile on her face. Two years later, she would be turning tricks in Brighton for fifteen pounds a night to support her heroin habit. Her dead body, bruised and battered beyond recognition, was discovered by her close friend Marianne Faithfull. "She had been taking methadone in an attempt to withdraw from heroin," Tony would later write, "and somehow the drug had driven her into an inexplicable frenzy. She'd banged her face again and again against a bedside cupboard until she was battered, bloody -- and dead." Beside himself with grief, Tony shoots heroin for the first time two weeks after her death. In "Lady Madeleine," a song on Marianne's 1977 album, Dreamin' My Dreams, she sings, "And I walk down the avenue/And I'm missing you, Lady Madeleine/And Spanish Tony don't know what to do/His strange world has all fallen through/And he wonders, was his love in vain?/And I think I might go quite insane."
Also sitting at the dinner table at Nellcôte that night is Michele Breton, a very thin and boyish-looking French girl with short-cropped hair and shockingly full breasts who along with Mick Jagger and Anita appears naked in the bathtub scene in Performance, the life-imitates-art-even-as-it-imitates-life psychodrama of a movie in which a Cockney gangster on the run (James Fox) has his mind blown after being drawn into the bent world of a fading rock star (Mick Jagger) and his beautiful omnisexual companion (Anita Pallenberg). Just seventeen years old when the film was shot, Breton would never make another movie and seems to have been cast in the role of Lucy primarily because she had already participated in a ménage à trois with writer and co-director Donald Cammell and his girlfriend, the Texas-born model Deborah Dixon. As had Anita.
Stoned on hashish and psychedelics during filming, Breton would spend the next five years of her life drifting around France and Spain. Busted for possession on the Spanish island Formentera, she lives for a year in Kabul shooting morphine. During this period, she sells her passport as well as all her belongings. Deciding to give up intravenous drug use after an LSD trip, Breton goes to India, where she is hospitalized for three months. She then returns to Kabul, travels to Italy and eventually settles for thirteen years in Berlin, where Mick Brown, an English writer working on a book about Performance, finds her in 1995. "I've done nothing with my life," she tells him. "Where did it start going wrong? I can't remember. It's something like destiny." Much the same can be said in 1971 about the state of the relationship between Keith Richards and his partner in musical crime, Michael Philip Jagger. One of the major themes that runs through the making of the new album is the ever-increasing tension between these two brothers-in-arms. Like so much going on at the table tonight at Nellcôte, it is not so far wrong to say that the difficulties between them began in earnest during the making of Performance. Brian Jones, who founded the Stones only to lose his band to Mick, the woman he loved to Keith and then his life as well, was the one who first taught both Mick and Keith that it was no big thing to have it off with each other's women, because no female could ever come between two Rolling Stones.
Nonetheless, Mick had seriously crossed the line three years earlier. Day after day as Keith sat brooding in his Rolls-Royce outside the house in Lowndes Square in London, where Performance was being shot during the fall of 1968, Mick was carrying on a torrid affair with Anita -- the best friend of Marianne Faithfull, then Mick's girlfriend. Mick and Anita getting it on together, even before the cameras, was one thing. Mick's insistence on continuing to pursue Anita, while he and Marianne were on holiday with Anita and Keith in South America after the film was done, was quite another. Two lesser or perhaps more ordinary men, despite how long they had known each other and how much brilliant work they had done together, would have come to blows and stopped speaking right then and there. Not Mick and Keith. The two were joined not only at the hip but the pocketbook as well. They were also particularly English in their steadfast refusal to ever confront one another directly about anything. Like the slightly naughty schoolboys they still often seemed to be, each would instead snidely slag the other behind closed doors to a neutral third party while continuing to work together. Because Mick is currently off cruising through the Mediterranean with his brand-new bride, the lovely Bianca, the Stones are now doing no work at all on their new album. In his palatial villa by the sea in the south of France, Keith has to find some means other than recording to while away the time.
>> MORE: Read our original 1971 "Exile" album review.
This excerpt is from Robert Greenfield's forthcoming book "Exile on Main St..: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones."
[Edited by GotToRollMe] |
| 9th September 2006 12:15 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Those were the good ole' days to be sure. Even I might spring for this book. |
| 9th September 2006 12:44 PM |
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| GotToRollMe |
quote:
Ten Thousand Motels wrote:
Those were the good ole' days to be sure. Even I might spring for this book.
Yeah, I'd like to pick this one up myself. Well-written, if the excerpts are any indication.
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| 9th September 2006 02:35 PM |
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| Highwire Rob |
Great post GotToRollMe! I just received my issue of RS Mag yesterday and I'm about ready to dig in to reading the excerpt (then the book) on the Making of Exile.
WHY THE HELL DID ROLLING STONE magazine have to put Justin Timbertwinkie on the cover AGAIN?!!
Ever since the Toronto SARS concert it seems he's got to show up in every otherwise perfect issue that has Stones content! |
| 9th September 2006 02:45 PM |
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| gotdablouse |
excellent stuff, sounds better than the original STP book really. |
| 9th September 2006 05:04 PM |
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| Bloozehound |
probably the Stones most fascinating period, they should've made a movie about this instead of that Brian Jones one |
| 10th September 2006 09:01 AM |
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| corgi37 |
The making of Exile would indeed be a great movie. At the very least, it should be on one of those "Rocks greatest album" shows. Though the Stones probably wouldnt help out. I will definately have a try at this book. |
| 10th September 2006 03:56 PM |
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| pdog |
Isn't Greenfield the guy who wrote STP? I'm a bit out of it, so it's kinda a non question, since I'll check after I type this. STP is one of the best books I've ever read concerning anything rock and roll. |
| 10th September 2006 05:51 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
quote:
GotToRollMe wrote:
Yeah, I'd like to pick this one up myself. Well-written, if the excerpts are any indication.
Fascinating.
(them crazy bastards LOL)
[Edited by Ten Thousand Motels] |
| 10th September 2006 07:29 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
The making of Exile. Where was the photographer????? Sleeping? Passed out? Where are the photos of that summer at Nelcotte? I just got to knows!
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| 10th September 2006 07:29 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
I think the papparazzi fucked up. A dark period in papparazzi history. |
| 11th September 2006 03:59 PM |
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| texile |
quote:
pdog wrote:
Isn't Greenfield the guy who wrote STP? I'm a bit out of it, so it's kinda a non question, since I'll check after I type this. STP is one of the best books I've ever read concerning anything rock and roll.
yeah, its the same guy and stp is my favorite book on the stones.....not trashy or cheesy - just excellent fly-on-the-wall journalism.
i can't wait for the book to come out ... |
| 11th September 2006 09:34 PM |
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| Soldatti |
It's time for a re-issue of Exile in 2 CD's with Bonus tracks and a DVD with interviews, photos, clips... |
| 12th September 2006 11:08 PM |
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| Kilroy |
quote:
Soldatti wrote:
It's time for a re-issue of Exile in 2 CD's with Bonus tracks and a DVD with interviews, photos, clips...
Yes, I agreed That would top off the year, or any year, now wouldn't it.
[Edited by Kilroy] |
| 13th September 2006 07:27 AM |
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| corgi37 |
A true 5.1 remastering with bonus pics, unreleased tracks, commentary for each track and bonus dvd of available clips of tracks + doco on making of the album.
Now, THAT is a Christmas prezzie from Heaven.
Allahu Akbar! |
| 13th September 2006 07:39 AM |
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| FotiniD |
Yes, yes, a movie on the making of Exile and / or a re-release... *sigh* We should write a petition, sign it and send it 
I'm definitely buying the book. The whole Nellcote period must be one of the most creative and fascinating the Stones have ever had. An eternal summer. Love it.
And of course, still saving to maybe get my hands on the Genesis book some day...  |
| 13th September 2006 08:07 AM |
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| LadyJane |
quote:
Soldatti wrote:
It's time for a re-issue of Exile in 2 CD's with Bonus tracks and a DVD with interviews, photos, clips...
Best idea I've heard in a long, long time.
I think RO could do a much better job of managing the Stones, no????
LJ. |
| 13th September 2006 08:13 AM |
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| FotiniD |
quote:
LadyJane wrote:
I think RO could do a much better job of managing the Stones, no????
No question about that LJ. The setlists would be great, half the shows would be club gigs, we'd earn them more respect and they'd even make more $$$ |
| 13th September 2006 05:13 PM |
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| texile |
quote:
FotiniD wrote:
Yes, yes, a movie on the making of Exile and / or a re-release... *sigh* We should write a petition, sign it and send it
I'm definitely buying the book. The whole Nellcote period must be one of the most creative and fascinating the Stones have ever had. An eternal summer. Love it.
And of course, still saving to maybe get my hands on the Genesis book some day...
agree - and i will also get my hands on that genesis tome someday....
my firnd thought i was crazy for wanting to spend that much and made me feel stupid...
but it WILL be mine one day.
and i will keep it on a pedestal wrapped in something sacred and let NO one touch it.
where would you keep something like that anyway?
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| 13th September 2006 05:35 PM |
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| Riffhard |
quote:
texile wrote:
where would you keep something like that anyway?
Just an idea.
Riffy |
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