Like a Rolling Stone
It's 40 years since Mick Jagger and co fled to the French Riviera to record their masterpiece, Exile on Main St, but what legacy has the band left behind there? We retraced their footsteps to find out
Featured February 12 Words by Rob Crossan
It's 2am and five young musicians are huddled together in a basement, arguing about the arrangement of a song they are recording. Sweat and condensation are streaming down the decaying, cracked walls, while around them, numerous hangers-on and groupies sit slouched on the floor in varying states of consciousness. The sound of the gentle lapping of waves beneath a full moon is suddenly destroyed by the bilious holler of a Stratocaster guitar pouring out raw blues riffs.
The year is 1971. Keith Richards hasn't slept for three days, and another night of chaos is about to commence for the Rolling Stones as they attempt to complete what will become, on its release the following year, probably the greatest rock and roll album of the 20th century.
Exile on Main St, a swampy, discordant double record with a chaotic cover of photo-booth snapshots, was far from their most accessible work, but it is considered by many to be their masterpiece.
The making of it, however, did not take place in a multimillion-pound recording studio in LA or New York, but in the crumbling cellar of a gone-to- seed mansion in the tiny French fishing village of Villefranche-sur-Mer, about 8km outside of Nice.
In the summer of 1971, when Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor fled the UK to avoid a tax rate of 83% on the pound, the Côte d'Azur, in the extreme south-east corner of France, was a playground for the wealthy entertainment and business-world elite. Today, the photos that line the breakfast room of the Hotel Welcome, which stands directly in front of the small natural harbour in Villefranche, are testament to the calibre of names that have frequented the region, from Cary Grant to Winston Churchill, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton (who only stopped in long enough for a glass of Champagne) to Jean Cocteau, who considered the hotel a second home.
But the Welcome, still refined and charming to this day, was not quite to the Stones' taste. Indeed, the closest they ever got to it was when Keith Richards and his girlfriend, the Italian actress Anita Pallenberg, would visit the town to drink pastis, with their young son Marlon in tow. For the more serious pastimes of partying and making rock and roll, the Stones guitarist needed somewhere a lot more private.
And that's just what the chateau,Nellcôte, could provide. Indeed, even today, it is a building shrouded in mystery. Located on the far side of the harbour of Villefranche, surrounded by custard-coloured sand, it is just possible to make out the small jetty and private beach that belong to the house. Nobody in town today seems to have met the chateau's current owner and the 9m high, black, wrought-iron gates suggest that, whomever they may be, they seem to like it that way.
The house was no less secretive in 1971. It had served as the headquarters of the Gestapo during World War II and people who visited during the Stones' time there spoke of seeing swastikas printed on the heating vents.
Keith instantly fell in love with the cascading chandeliers, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, gold filigree, vast Louis XIV beds and marble stairs that had been in place since the building was built in the 1890s.
Robert Greenfield, a journalist for the American music magazine Rolling Stone, who went to Nellcôte to interview the guitarist and ended up staying for nearly a month, had plenty of stories to tell when we spoke, 40 years on.
"France was a lot further away from England back in the early 70s than it is now," he says. "Communications were primitive. So this was somewhere where Keith could be himself. Nellcôte was just one big house party. There would be 20 or 30 people living there at a time. It was like one giant, trashed hotel suite. It was fun, but it was also Keith's Rubicon. It was the cross-over point between the Stones being a slick, organised group and becoming a mass of dissolute chaos."
The guests who headed to Villefranche that summer to party with Keith and the Stones included John Lennon and Yoko Ono - who had to take the ex-Beatle to an early bed after he downed an entire bottle of wine in one gulp and then threw it up - country-music legend Gram Parsons, and assorted court jesters with names like Johnny Braces, Spanish Tony and a man called Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, who was rumoured to be related to the last crown prince of Poland.
The locals were far from impressed. Away from the ostentatious excess of nearby St Tropez, Villefranche was a quiet, conservative, traditional fishing village where literate bohemians such as Cocteau and W Somerset Maugham were embraced, but debauched rock and rollers were given distinctly less bonhomie by the natives.
That attitude remains intact today. As I strolled through the tiny town, with its winding alleyways, small cafés serving pastis and steak tartare, tiny chapels and even an underground passageway called Rue Obscure, where villagers hid during World War II, it is clear that this stretch of the Riviera is totally removed from the more famous playgrounds of the Côte d'Azur.
The lack of obvious attractions is its appeal. Yachts sit in the harbour, but they sit cheek by jowl with sturdy fishing vessels and, rather than neck Cristal with the super-rich, this is more a village to buy fresh fish from the locals as the boats come in of a morning, before settling down in the garden of the citadel with a copy of Le Monde.
Today, the old citadel is devoted to three art galleries which showcase work by artists with connections to the area, including Volti, whose stout bronze models of the female form lie inside and out of the restored fortress, and painter Henri Goetz, a friend of Picasso whose work veers between surrealist horror and subterranean peace.
Back then, however, the citadel lay empty and Keith, fresh from demanding that the in-house cook at Nellcôte stop cooking French cuisine and start serving meat pies and fish and chips, decided to race his sports car around the winding coastal roads. When a couple of Italian tourists scraped their car against his, Keith produced a gun, which he began waving in their direction. It was only a few signed copies of Stones' albums to the local gendarmes that prevented him from being locked up.
In between the madness, and in 32°C heat, the band recorded basic versions of the tunes that would make up Exile, including "Ventilator Blues", "Rip this Joint" and "Happy", on which Keith sings lead vocals.
"The acoustics were terrible in that basement, which explains the strange bluesy sound of the record," Greenfield recalls. "They had a mobile recording unit parked outside the house, but the electricity supply was erratic and the heat was so intense that all the guitars kept going out of tune."
Progress remained slow as summer turned into autumn. With a newly married Jagger commuting in from Paris, and Watts and Wyman living miles away from the coast, tensions began to flare. Increasingly, shady characters from the Marseille drug mafia began to spend more time at the house; Keith's collection of guitars was stolen and then, in October, after seven months at Nellcôte, the inevitable warrant for Keith's arrest was made - on a charge of drug trafficking.
Before the legal process could begin, however, Keith and Anita raced to Nice Airport, ending up in Los Angeles with the rest of the group, to mix and overdub the Nellcôte sessions.
Today there are no plaques, no monuments to the Stones' time in Villefranche. As the decades drift by, there are fewer left alive who remember their summer there. The record, however, continues to be regarded as an all-time classic. Having sold over 26 million copies in the US alone, the double album's claustrophobic, sweaty sound is a testament to the crazed mayhem that took place there.
"It was never boring," concludes Greenfield. "Although there was a lot of lethargy and lots of waiting around for the band, as Mick and co sat about waiting for Keith to emerge from upstairs, it was a place where the atmosphere was just incredible."
Much as its residents may not like it, four decades on, this quiet corner of the French Riviera seems destined to be forever associated with one of the most decadent rock and roll summers of all time.
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