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L inda K eith was the one that first broke my heart. It was my fault. I asked for it and I got it. The first look was the deepest, watching her, with all her tricks and movements, fearfully, from across the room and feeling that hit of longing, and thinking she was out of my league. I was sometimes in awe of the women I was with at the start, because they were the creme de la creme, and I'd come from the gutter as far as I was concerned. I didn't believe these beautiful women wanted to say hello, let alone lie down with me! Linda and I met at a party given by Andrew Oldham, a party for some forgotten Jagger-Richards-written single. It was the party where Mick first met Marianne Faithfull. Linda was seventeen, strikingly beautiful, very dark hair, the perfect look for the '60s: a blinder, very self-assured in her jeans and a white shirt. She was in the magazines, she was modeling, David Bailey was photographing her. Not that she was particularly interested. The girl just wanted something to do, to get out of the house.

When I first met Linda I was just astounded that she wanted to come along with me. Once again the girl puts the make on me. She bedded me, I didn't bed her. She made a line straight for me. And I was totally, absolutely in love. We fell for each other. And the other surprise was that I was Linda's first love, the first boy she ever fell for. She had been actively pursued by all kinds of people who she'd rejected. To this day I don't understand it. Linda was the best friend of Andrew Oldham's then almost-wife, Sheila Klein. These beautiful Jewish girls were a powerful cultural force in West Hampstead bohemia, which became my stomping ground, and Mick's too for a couple of years. It centered around Broadhurst Gardens, West Hampstead, near where Decca Records was situated, and a few venues around there where we played. Linda's father was Alan Keith, who for forty-four years presented a program on BBC radio called Your Hundred Best Tunes. Linda had been allowed to grow up fairly wild. She loved music, jazz, blues--a blues purist, in fact, who didn't really approve of the Rolling Stones. She never did. She probably doesn't now. She had been hanging out when she was very young at a place called the Roaring Twenties, a black club, when she was wandering around London in bare feet.

The Stones played every night, we were on the road all the time, but still somehow, for a while Linda and I managed to have a love affair. We lived first in Mapesbury Road, then in Holly Hill with Mick and his girlfriend Chrissie Shrimpton, and finally just the two of us in Carlton Hill, the flat I had in St. John's Wood. The rooms there never got decorated: everything piled up around the walls, mattress on the floor, many guitars, an upright piano. We lived, despite all this, almost like a married couple. We used to take the tube before I bought Linda a Mark 2 Jaguar, which had a letterbox 45 player on which she wouldn't play the Stones. We'd hang out in Chelsea at the Casserole, the Meridiana, the Baghdad House. The restaurant we went to in Hampstead is still there--Le Cellier du Midi--and probably still has the same menu after forty years. It certainly looks identical from the outside.

It was bound to unravel with the long absences--through confusion more than anything, the confusion of suddenly living this life that nobody, or certainly nobody that I knew, had a road map for. All of us were pretty young and we were trying to make this thing up as we went along. "I'm going to America for three months. I love you, darling." And meanwhile we're all changing. For one thing, I'd met Ronnie Bennett, and I spent more time on the road with her than I did with Linda. We grew apart slowly. It took a couple of years. We would still hook up, but in those years the band had a total of ten days off for the entire three-year period. Linda and I did manage to have one brief holiday in the South of France, though Linda remembers this as a flight she took away from London, an escape, a job as a waitress in Saint-Tropez, and me following her and installing her in a hotel, giving her a hot bath. Linda also began taking a lot of drugs. For me to disapprove is an irony, but I did disapprove then.

I've seen Linda a couple of times since those days. She's happily married to a very well-known record producer, John Porter. She remembers my disapproval. I was taking little more than weed in those days, but Linda was getting into the heavy stuff, and it was having a dangerous effect on her. That was clear to see. She came with me to New York when we were touring the USA in the summer of 1966, our fifth tour there. I'd put her up at the Americana Hotel, though she spent much of her time with her girlfriend Roberta Goldstein. When I turned up, they'd put all the gear away, the downers, the Tuinals, which I wouldn't have touched--imagine!--and strew wine bottles around to give probable cause if they staggered a bit.

Then she met Jimi Hendrix, saw him play and adopted his career as her mission, tried to get him a recording contract with Andrew Oldham. In her enthusiasm, during a long evening with Jimi, as she tells it, she gave him a Fender Stratocaster of mine that was in my hotel room. And then, so Linda says, she also picked up a copy of a demo I had of Tim Rose singing a song called "Hey Joe." And took that round to Roberta Goldstein's, where Jimi was, and played it to him. This is rock-and-roll history. So he got the song from me, apparently.

We went off on tour, and when I came back, London was suddenly hippie-ville. I was already into that in America, but I wasn't expecting it when I came home to London. The scene had changed totally in a matter of weeks. Linda was on acid and I'd been jilted. You shouldn't expect somebody of that age to hang around for four months with all this stuff going on. I knew it was on the break. It was my presumptuousness to think she was going to sit like a little old lady at home at eighteen or nineteen years old, while I gallivanted around the world doing what I wanted. I found out that Linda had taken up with some poet, which I went bananas about. I went running through the whole of London, asking people, anybody seen Linda? Crying my eyes out from St. John's Wood to Chelsea, screaming, "Bitch! Get out of my fucking way." Fuck the traffic lights. I only remember some very close accidents, nearly getting run over on the way through London to Chelsea. After I'd found out, I wanted to be sure, I wanted to see. I checked with my friends, where does this motherfucker live? I even remember his name, Bill Chenail. Some poet so-called. He was a hip little bugger at the time because he came on with the Dylanesque bit. Couldn't play anything. Ersatz hip, as it's called. I stalked her a couple of times, but I remember thinking, what would I say? I hadn't got that act down yet, how to confront my rival. In the middle of a Wimpy bar? Or some bistro? I even walked to where she was living with him in Chelsea, almost into Fulham, and stood outside. (This is a love story.) And I could see her in there with him, "silhouettes on the shade." And that was it. "Like a thief in the night."

That's the first time I felt the deep cut. The thing about being a songwriter is, even if you've been fucked over, you can find consolation in writing about it, and pour it out. Everything has something to do with something; nothing is divorced. It becomes an experience, a feeling, or a conglomeration of experiences. Basically, Linda is "Ruby Tuesday."

But our story wasn't quite over. After she left me, Linda was in a really bad way, Tuinals had given way to harder stuff. She went back to New York and took up further with Jimi Hendrix, who may have broken her heart, as she broke mine. Certainly, her friends say, she was very much in love with him. But I knew she needed medical help--she was getting very close to the danger line, as she herself acknowledged later, and I couldn't deal with it because I'd burned my boats. I went to see her parents and gave them all the telephone numbers and places where they'd find her. "Hey, your daughter is in distress. She won't admit it, but you've got to do something. I can't. I'm already persona non grata anyway. And this is going to be the final nail in my coffin with Linda, but you've got to do something about her because I'm on the road tomorrow." Linda's father went to New York and found her in a nightclub, brought her back to England, where her passport was removed and she was made a ward of court. She felt that this was a great betrayal on my part, and we didn't speak or see each other again until many years later. She had some close shaves with drugs after that, but she survived and recovered and brought up a family. She now lives in New Orleans.

On a rare day off between tours I did manage to buy Redlands, the house I still own in West Sussex, near Chichester Harbour; the house where we were busted, which burned down twice, the house I still love. We just spoke to each other the minute we saw each other. A thatched house, quite small, surrounded by a moat. I drove up there by mistake. I had a brochure with a couple of houses marked and I'm poncing around in my Bentley, "Oh, I'm going to buy a house." I took a wrong turn and turned into Redlands. This guy walked out, very nice guy, and said, yeah? And I said, oh sorry, we've come to the wrong turning. He said, yes, you want to go Fishbourne way, and he said, are you looking for a house to buy? He was very pukka, an ex-commodore of the Royal Navy. And I said yes. And he said, well, there's no sign up, but this house is for sale. And I looked at him and said, how much? Because I fell in love with Redlands the minute I saw it. Nobody's going to let this thing go, it's too picturesque, ideal. He said twenty grand. This is about one o'clock in the afternoon and the banks are open till three. I said, are you going to be here this evening? He said, yes, of course. I said, if I bring you down twenty grand, can we do the deal? So I zoomed up to London, just got to the bank in time, got the bread--twenty grand in a brown paper bag--and by evening I was back down at Redlands, in front of the fireplace, and we signed the deal. And he turned over the deeds to me. It was like cash on the barrelhead, done in really an old-fashioned way.

By the end of 1966, we were all exhausted. We'd been on the road without a break for almost four years. The crack-ups were coming. We'd already had a wobbler with the formidable but brittle Andrew Oldham in Chicago in 1965, when we were recording at Chess. Andrew was a lover of speed, but this time he was drunk too and very distressed about his relationship with Sheila, his old lady at the time. He started waving a shooter around in my hotel room. This we didn't need. I hadn't come all the way to Chicago to get shot by some wonky public schoolboy whose gun barrel I was staring down. Which looks very ominous at the time, that little black hole. Mick and I got the gun away from him, slapped him around a bit, put him to bed and forgot about it. I don't even know what happened to the shooter, an automatic. Tossed it out the window, probably. We're just getting going. Let's make this a forget-it.

But Brian was a different story. What was comic about Brian was his illusions of grandeur, even before he got famous. He thought it was his band for some weird reason. The first demonstration of Brian's aspirations was the discovery on our first tour that he was getting five pounds more a week than the rest of us because he'd persuaded Eric Easton that he was our "leader." The whole deal with the band was we split everything like pirates. You put the booty on the table and split it, pieces of eight. "Jesus Christ, who do you think you are? I'm writing the songs round here, and you're getting five pounds extra a week? Get outta here!" It started with little things like that, which then exacerbated the friction between us as it went on and he became more and more outrageous. In the early negotiations, it was always Brian who would go to the meetings as our leader. We were not permitted --by Brian. I remember Mick and me once waiting for the results around the block, sitting in Lyons Corner House.

It happened so fast. After we did a couple of TV shows, Brian turned into this sort of freak, devouring celebs and fame and attention. Mick and Charlie and I were looking at it all a bit skeptically. This is shit you've got to do to make records. But Brian--and he was not a stupid guy--fell right into it. He loved the adulation. The rest of us didn't think it was bad, but you don't fall for it all the way. I felt the energy, I knew that there was something big happening. But some guys get stroked and they just can't get over it. Stroke me some more, stroke me some more, and suddenly "I'm a star."

I never saw a guy so much affected by fame. The minute we'd had a couple of successful records, zoom, he was Venus and Jupiter rolled into one. Huge inferiority complex that you hadn't noticed. The minute the chicks started screaming, he seemed to go through a whole change, just when we didn't need it, when we needed to keep the whole thing tight and together. I've known a few that were really carried away by fame. But I never saw one that changed so dramatically overnight. "No, we're just getting lucky, pal. This is not fame." It went to his head, and over the next few years of very difficult road work, in the mid-'60s, we could not count on Brian at all. He was getting really stoned, out of it. Thought he was an intellectual, a mystic philosopher. He was very impressed by other stars, but only because they were stars, not because of what they were good at. And he became a pain in the neck, a kind of rotting attachment. When you're schlepping 350 days a year on the road and you've got to drag a dead weight, it becomes pretty vicious.

We were on a swing through the Midwest, and Brian's asthma had got him and he was in hospital in Chicago. And, hey, when a guy's sick, you double for him. But then we saw pictures of him zooming around Chicago, hanging at a party with so-and-so, fawning over stars with a silly little bow around his neck. We'd done three, four gigs without him. That's double duty for me, pal. There's only five of us, and the whole point of the band is that it's a two-guitar band. And suddenly there's only one guitar. I've got to figure out whole new ways to play all of these songs. I've got to perform Brian's part as well. I learned a lot about how to do two parts at once, or how to distill the essence of what his part was and still play what I had to play, and throw in a few licks, but it was damn hard work. And I never got a thank-you from him, ever, for covering his arse. He didn't give a shit. "I was out of it." That's all I would get. All right, are you gonna give me your pay? That's when I had it in for Brian.

One can get very sarcastic on the road and quite vicious. "Just shut up, you little creep. Preferred it when you weren't here." He had this way of ranting on, saying things that would just grate. "When I played with so-and-so..." He was totally starstruck. "I saw Bob Dylan yesterday. He doesn't like you." But he had no idea how obnoxious he was being. So it would start off, "Oh, shut up, Brian." Or we'd imitate the way he cringed his head into his nonexistent neck. And then it went to baiting him in a way. He had this huge Humber Super Snipe car, but he was a pretty short guy and he had to have a cushion to see over the steering wheel. Mick and I would steal the cushion for a laugh. Wicked, schoolboy sort of stuff. Sitting at the back of the bus, we just let him have it, pretending he wasn't there. "Where's Brian? Shit, did you see what he was wearing yesterday?" It was the pressure of work, and the other side of it was that you hoped that kind of shock treatment would snap him out of it. There's no time to take time off and say let's sort this out. But it was a love-hate relationship with Brian. He could be really funny. I used to enjoy hanging with him, figuring out how Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters did this or T-Bone Walker did that.

What probably really stuck in Brian's craw was when Mick and I started writing the songs. He lost his status and then lost interest. Having to come to the studio and learn to play a song Mick and I had written would bring him down. It was like Brian's open wound. Brian's only solution became clinging to either Mick or me, which created a triangle of sorts. He had it in for Andrew Oldham, Mick and me, thought there was a conspiracy to roll him out. Which wasn't true at all, but somebody's got to write the songs. You're quite welcome; I'll sit around and write a song with you. What have you come up with? But no sparks flew when I was sitting around with Brian. And then it was "I don't like guitar anymore. I want to play marimbas." Another time, pal. We've got a tour to do. So we got to rely on him not being there, and if he turned up, it was a miracle. When he was there and came to life, he was incredibly nimble. He could pick up any instruments that were lying around and come up with something. Sitar on "Paint It Black." The marimbas on "Under My Thumb." But for the next five days we won't see the motherfucker, and we've still got a record to make. We've got sessions lined up and where's Brian? Nobody can find him, and when they do, he's in a terrible condition.

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

Chapter Six

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 cafes 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 Regine'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.

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