Life (50 page)

The Mounties never did try to bust me again. I was quoted as saying, “What is on trial is the same thing that’s always been on trial. Dear old
them and us
. I find this all a bit weary. I’ve done my stint in the fucking dock. Why don’t they pick on the Sex Pistols?” Yet again someone was seriously after my ass, and the situation was further complicated by Margaret Trudeau, the wife of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, moving into the hotel as a Stones appendage, offering a double-big tabloid story. The prime minister’s young wife with the Stones, and you throw in drugs, you’re looking at a three-month run. In the end it may have played in my favor, but at the time it was the worst combination of circumstances. Margaret Trudeau was twenty-two and Trudeau was fifty-one when they got married. It was a bit like Sinatra and Mia Farrow—the power and the flower child. And now Trudeau’s bride—and this was exactly their sixth wedding anniversary—was seen walking in our corridors in a bathrobe. So then the story was that she had left him. She had, in fact, moved into the room next to Ronnie, and they were hitting it off really well, or, as Ronnie put it so nicely in his memoirs, “We shared something special for that short time.” She flew to New York to escape the publicity, but Mick flew to New York as well, so it was assumed they too were an item. Worse and worse. She was a groupie, that’s all she was, pure and simple. Nothing wrong with that. But you shouldn’t be a prime minister’s wife if you want to be a groupie.

I’m out on a bond of many dollars, but they took my passport and I’m released only to the hotel. So I’m trapped. And I’m still waiting to see if they’re going to jail me. They’re shooting fish in a barrel. At another hearing they added a charge of cocaine possession and revoked bail, but we got off that on a technicality. I would have loved to have dared them to put me in jail. It was all bullshit. They didn’t have the balls. They weren’t feeling confident. The rest of the band left Canada out of caution, and quite wisely so. I was the first one to say, you fuckers get out of here; they’re only going to involve you. Let me take the heat. It’s my heat.

It was quite likely that jail time was on the cards. I was facing a probable two years, according to my lawyers. It was Stu who suggested that I should use the waiting time to put down some tracks of my own—put something down to remember the man by. He hired a studio, a beautiful piano and a microphone. The result has been doing the circuit for a while—
KR’s Toronto Bootleg
. We just did all the country songs, nothing different from what I do any other night, but there was a certain poignancy about it because at that moment things looked a bit grim. I played the George Jones, Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Domino songs I’d played with Gram. Merle Haggard’s “Sing Me Back Home” is pretty poignant anyway. The warden is taking the prisoner down the hall to his execution.

Sing me back home with a song I used to hear…

Sing me back home before I die.

Once again it was Bill Carter who came to my rescue. Carter’s problem was that in 1975 he had assured the visa-issuing authorities that there were no problems with drugs. Now I’m busted in Toronto for drug
trafficking.
Carter had flown straight to Washington. Not to visit his friends in the State Department or Immigration, who had told him that I would never be allowed into America again. To the White House. First he had assured the Canadian court when he posted my bond that I had a medical problem and that I needed to be cured of my heroin addiction. He made the same case to his contacts in the White House, where Jimmy Carter was president, using all the political muscle he could work, talking to one counsel there who was Carter’s drug policy man, fortunately charged, at the time, with finding solutions more effective than punishment. He told them that his client had fallen off the wagon, had a medical problem, and Bill was asking their mercy to grant me a special visa to come to the United States. Why the United States and not Borneo? Well, there was only one woman who could cure me and she was called Meg Patterson and she did a “black box cure” with electric vibrations. She was in Hong Kong and needed a sponsor doctor in the United States. These were the lengths Bill Carter went to. And it worked. Miraculously, his White House contacts instructed Immigration to grant me a visa, and he got permission from the Canadian court for me to fly to the United States. We were allowed to rent a house in Philadelphia, where Meg Patterson would treat me every day for three weeks. From there, after her prescribed cure, we moved to Cherry Hill, New Jersey. I was not allowed to move outside a twenty-five-mile radius from Philadelphia, which included Cherry Hill. A deal worked out between the doctors and lawyers and the immigration department. This wasn’t so great for Marlon, however.

Marlon:
They let him in to clean up, which is when we went to New Jersey. And I lived with this doctor’s family, this very religious family. That was actually the most traumatic thing, moving from this hotel with all the Stones and everyone into this house in New Jersey with a right-wing Christian American family, a white picket fence and skateboards, and I started going to an American school where you had to say prayers every day. That was really shocking. And I would go and visit Keith and Anita, who were down the road, every few days. I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I was a right brat, I think. This family thought I was wild. I had long hair, I didn’t wear shoes, I barely ever wore clothes, I used the worst language you can imagine for a seven-year-old, and I think they were just very pitying of me. It was a bit pathetic. I didn’t like that family at all; they were trying to turn me into a good little American boy. And I’d never been to America. I still thought America was full of bloody Indians, loads of buffalo wandering around, and suddenly I was in New Jersey. I thought, oh my God, I’m gonna be scalped if I go outside.

Although I was getting clean under Meg Patterson’s care, a cure imposed by the authorities lacks conviction in the heart. Meg’s method was supposed to be the painless way out. Electrodes attached to your ear released endorphins, which, theoretically, canceled the pain. Meg also believed in alcohol—in my case Jack Daniel’s, which is a strong brew—as a substitute, a diversion, let’s say. So I drank heartily under Meg’s maternal guidance. I was quite interested in Patterson’s method. It did certainly help, but it was still no fun. After it was finished, in a matter of two weeks or so, Immigration announced that they’d have to monitor me for another month. I’m clean, all right? And I’m getting antsy and restless, stuck in this nice suburb. I felt like I was in jail and I just got sick of it. Meg Patterson made her report to the State Department and Immigration that I was following the medical treatment, and, to cut a long story short, I got reinstated: as far as Immigration was concerned, the slate was wiped clean. No offenses appeared on my record. Times were different then. There was more of a belief in rehabilitation than there is now. The visa, which was originally a medical visa, overrode everything. It was extended from three to six months, from single to multiple entries. There were waivers for touring and working on the grounds that I was confirmed as clean and curing myself. As you clean up, you go up another level and another until you get to full clean status, according to my understanding of it. And I’ve always been very grateful to the US government for allowing me to come to America to get help to come off the stuff.

So we sprung Marlon and moved out of New Jersey to a rented house in South Salem, New York, called Frog Hollow—a classic Colonial-style wooden house, although haunted, according to an increasingly haunted Anita, who saw the ghosts of Mohican Indians patrolling the hilltop. It was down the road from George C. Scott. He used to crash regularly into our white wooden fence, pissed out of his brain, driving at ninety miles an hour. But that’s where we ended up—near Mount Kisco, in Westchester County.

It was at this time that Jane Rose, who is now my manager, started unofficially looking after me. Jane was working mostly for Mick, but Mick had asked Jane to stay in Toronto and help me when everybody left. And she’s still here, my secret weapon thirty years later. I have to say that during the bust in Toronto, in fact during all busts, Mick looked after me with great sweetness, never complaining. He ran things; he did the work and marshaled the forces that saved me. Mick looked after me like a brother.

Jane described herself at this time as the meat in the sandwich—between Mick and me. She witnessed the first sign of a rift between us when I came out of the junk fog and the mental fog that accompanies it and started to want to take care of business, at least musical business. Mick would come up to Cherry Hill and hear my selection of tracks for
Love You Live,
which we’d been working on all this time sporadically. And he’d go back and bitch to Jane about them. Collaboration was giving way to struggle and disagreement. It’s a two-disc album, and the result is that one disc was Mick’s and the other was mine. I started talking about things, about business, things we had to settle, which I imagine for Mick was unfamiliar, shocking. I’d kind of risen from the dead after the will had been read. But this was a skirmish, a sign only of what was to come in later years.

It took nineteen months from the bust in March 1977 in Toronto to the trial in October 1978. But at least now I was living in striking distance of New York. The visas were of course not without conditions. I had to travel back and forth to Toronto for various hearings. I had to prove that I’d cleaned up and had been following a steady course of rehab. And I was obliged to attend psychiatric evaluation and treatment in New York. I had this doctor in New York City who would say, “Oh, thank God you’re here. I’ve been dealing with other people’s brains all day.” She would open the drawer and pull out a bottle of vodka. She’d say, “Let’s sit here for half an hour and have a drink. You look all right.” I’d say, “I’m feeling pretty good.” But she helped me. She was doing her job. She made sure the program worked.

John Phillips called me one day when I was in South Salem and said, “I’ve got one. Get your ass down here and I’ll show you, proof positive, I’ve got one!” He was into the coke bugs. I thought, I’ll drive down, give my friend a hand, you know, if he’s
got one
. People had been calling him mad for weeks because he was convinced that he was infected by bugs. So I went down there, and he pulled out a napkin, a Kleenex with a little bloody hole in it. “See? I’ve got one.” John, are you serious? You’ll have to reconsider, baby. And I’d driven an hour and a half down there to see. He’d picked himself to bits. I mean, he was covered in scabs. But this time he was convinced he’d got one. He looked at the Kleenex and said, “Oh shit, it got away!” John had taken over a pharmacy. Who didn’t in those days? Freddie Sessler used to own drugstores. And John was in a state. In the bedroom he had a medical bed, one of those bendy beds; only half of it worked. His mirror in the john was held together with gaffer tape. It was a shattered image any way you looked at it. Needles were stuck in the wall where he’d used them as darts. But we’d play, never starting before midnight, sometimes not until two a.m., with other musicians. I survived that without smack. John’s solo project was stopped by Ahmet Ertegun because John was in no condition to go on.

T
he sessions for
S
ome
G
irls
always had a following wind from the moment we started rehearsing in the strangely shaped Pathé Marconi studios in Paris. It was a rejuvenation, surprisingly for such a dark moment, when it was possible that I would go to jail and the Stones would dissolve. But maybe that was part of it. Let’s get something down before it happens. It had an echo of
Beggars Banquet
about it—a long period of silence and then coming back with a bang, and a new sound. You can’t argue with seven million copies and two top ten singles out of it, “Miss You” and “Beast of Burden.”

Nothing was prepared before we got there. Everything was written in the studio day by day. So it was like the earlier times, at RCA in Los Angeles in the mid-’60s—songs pouring out. Another big difference from recent albums was that we had no other musicians in with us—no horns, no Billy Preston. Extra stuff was dubbed later. If anything the buildup of sidemen had taken us down a different path in the ’70s, away from our best instincts on some occasions. So the record was down to us, and it being Ronnie Wood’s first album with us, down to our guitar weaving on tracks like “Beast of Burden.” We were more focused and we had to work harder.

The sound we got had a lot to do with Chris Kimsey, the engineer and producer who we were working with for the first time. We knew him from his apprenticeship at Olympic Studios, and so he knew our stuff backwards. And he would, on the basis of this experiment, engineer or coproduce eight albums for us. We had to pull something out—not make another Stones-in-the-doldrums album. He wanted to get a live sound back and move away from the clean and clinical-sounding recordings we’d slipped into. We were in the Pathé Marconi studios because they were owned by EMI, with whom we’d just made a big deal. This one was way on the outskirts of town in Boulogne-Billancourt, near the Renault factory; nothing around like restaurants or bars. It was a car ride, and I remember that I was listening to Jackson Browne’s
Running on Empty
on a daily commuter basis. At first, we’d booked into this enormous rehearsal studio like a soundstage, with a tiny control room that fitted barely two people and with a primitive 1960s console and a basic sixteen-track. The shape was odd because the console faced the window and a wall, which held the speakers, but the wall went off at an angle, so one speaker was always farther away from you than the other during playbacks. The adjoining studio had a much bigger desk and generally more sophisticated equipment, but for the moment we got playing in this warehouse, sitting around in a semicircle, fencing off space with screens. We hardly went into the control room for the first few days—there wasn’t enough space.