Exiles on Main street.

Robert Greenfield did such a good job with ‘STP’, an account of the Stones 72 US tour, that it’s hard not to be disappointed with his latest effort. Granted it can’t be easy to come up with a new angle on the Stones. Greenfield focuses on the making of ‘Exile On Main Street’ but he doesn’t focus very hard and the result, to put it kindly, is good but not outstanding. Which is a pity because the subject has a lot of potential. It’s not a bad read but it isn’t clear if Greenfield was actually at Nellcote himself. He gives the impression he was. He certainly talked to some people who were and he borrows extensively from other peoples’ memoirs and interviews. There’s a comprehensive list of sources at the end of the book.

One step ahead of the British taxman, who wanted 83% of their earnings, the Stones descended on the same part of France that appealed so much to Somerset Maugham. They rented a house called Nellcote on St. Jean Cap Ferrat and tried to sort themselves out. The house itself had a lot of character. It was a sort of Napoleonic extravaganza with chandeliers etc. and it’s well described in the book. Lots of people came and went and there was no shortage of drama, mostly supplied by Anita Pallenberg. If you weren’t invited you didn’t get in. Once in you soon found out there was a loose hierarchy, a pyramid with Keith and Anita at the top. It was no place for the paranoid. There was even a stuffy basement room they used for a studio that may or may not have been a Gestapo torture chamber. Good story anyway. And great for the legend.

Greenfield works hard to convey his concept of the Nellcote atmosphere. He’s at his best when he describes the various supporting roles played by visitors like Tommy Weber, ‘Stash’ Klossowski, Olivier Boelen and the ubiquitous Marshall Chess. Were they more than just court-jesters we wonder? So do they probably. The Stones attracted a lot of people who couldn’t keep up the pace. Normal rules didn’t apply and a big part of the book deals with the hangers-on especially the ones like Madeleine d’Arcy, Michele Breton and more famously Gram Parsons who went on to become casualties. There was also a constant stream of drug dealers passing through, ‘les cowboys’, supplying pharmaceutical refreshment and with Keith’s personal purveyor, the nefarious Spanish Tony lurking about the sense of dis-ease (Tropical Disease was the original title) must have been palpable. We also learn a few things about Keith Richards’ heroine habit and Anita Pallenberg’s healthy sexual appetite. But we never discover how they dealt with their contradictory urges. Was Manuel Stimulation involved? It's not really any of our business...but still.

Greenfield’s basic take on Keith is that is he doesn’t give a shit. Richards has seen it all, done all the drugs and met enough ‘important’ people to know that most of them are pretentious idiots. All he cares about is his guitars. Well maybe. Greenfield is obviously a fan but he may be projecting his own fantasies just a little bit here. Clearly the Stones’ arrogance attracts him but when he tries it himself he comes across as an arsehole. There are passages in the book for instance where Greenfield tries to settle some scores with other writers, Stephen Davis and A.E. Hotchner for two. He does it in a Stonesy kind of way but without Jagger’s panache and ends up making himself look snarky. Which probably doesn’t bother him too much.

Greenfield doesn’t talk much about the music or the song-writing process, ‘this sort of travail being the bailiwick of rock critics as opposed to rock writers’ he says, though he does have an irritating way of co-opting Stones song titles and lines to make a point between the buttons. That stuff has all been done to death. As fiction the purple prose works well enough but the reader gets the sense that he’s trying to make it all appear more gonzo than it probably was. Total chaos is difficult to maintain over extended periods. As drug scene veterans well know there’s a lot of sitting around staring into space involved. There’s an interesting bit where Keith freaks out and gets in a punch-up with the local harbour-master making good use of his famous heavy silver skull ring (copies available from Messrs. Courts & Hackett of Hatton Garden).

I’d put Greenfield slightly ahead of Victor Bockris in the rock-writing stakes, behind Stanley Booth and neck-and neck with Nick Kent. He tries hard but he just can’t out-Bang Lester. There are some unforgivable factual errors too. ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ is NOT on Sticky Fingers and Altamont took place 3 1/2 months after Woodstock not 14. Greenfield throws the usual Jagger/Richards friction into the mix (Jagger has to get an album together, cope with the chaos and keep his new pregnant wife Bianca happy) and we’re left wondering how anything got done. But it did. Which is another reason for thinking the Stones may have been more together than Greenfield likes to suggest. The album is one of their worst, or most authentic, depending who you ask.

Everybody left Nellcote in a hurry. Were the Stones consciously making rock history or did it all just happen? Was it, as Mick Taylor says, just a bunch of stoned musicians cooped up in a basement or was something else going on there, some kind of alchemy with an agenda of its own? Take your pick. Greenfield’s book doesn’t shine a lot of light.

If you need another point of view you may want to try ‘Even When It Was Bad It Was Good’ by June Shelley one time wife of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. She was at Nellcote and she went on to become an executive at RKO.