THREE: Deadlines, Detox and the L.A. High Life

After fleeing France to avoid jail time resulting from Keith Richards' gargantuan drug purchases, the Rolling Stones settle in Los Angeles in the fall of 1971. There they race the clock to finish their new album before their summer tour is due to kick off. The progress is delayed by their perfectionist streak, a blizzard of cocaine, and Keith's ever-worsening heroin addiction. As the band struggles, preparations are made for the biggest rock 'n' roll roadshow the world has ever seen — and both journalist Robert Greenfield and PR exec Gary Stromberg endure the hazing required to hang with the Stones. But before Keith can hit the road, he's sent to Switzerland to get clean. The harrowing experience is excruciating but successful — for now. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Stone's Touring Party is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:04):
Welcome to Hollywood. It's May nineteen seventy two. The Rolling
Stones tool up and down the Sunset Strip in their
big black Mercedes limousine, a not uncommon occurrence. The radio
blasts their new song, Tumbling Dice. This is impressive considering
the song wasn't technically released yet, but Mick Jagger and

(00:28):
Keith Richards had wanted to hear what it sounded like
on this the primary medium for music discovery in the
early seventies, FM bantwaves after months obsessing over every single
sound on their new record, Exile on Main Street. They
were well aware that most people would first hear the
lead single in their cars attuned to their favorite station.

(00:49):
This was, after all, the fruits of their very laborious
labors that have begun in France one year earlier. First
impressions were important in the seventies. Singles lived or died
by the radio. If it sounded good on crappy mono
car speakers, it would sound good on anything. Brian Wilson
had a similar test when assembling final mixes for his

(01:10):
Beach Boys hits in the mid sixties. So did Barry
Gordy and the quality control squad at Motown. But those
guys just rigged up a car speaker in a conference
room and took a listen. The Stones went one step
further by actually taking their rough mixes to a local
station and persuading the stun DJ to give it a spin.
In truth, very little persuasion was needed, and so when

(01:32):
the Stones wanted to hear their playbacks, the whole city
knew it. The band always had a special relationship with
Los Angeles. Well, it may be is Neil Young once
sang an uptight city in the smog La has also
always been a Stones town as far back as the
band's first tour of America in nineteen sixty four. The
city of Falling Angels has always welcomed the Rolling Stones

(01:55):
as one of their own hell They're recorded satisfaction here,
with a hip underground deaf m radio stations constantly blasting
the Stones. Their music has literally become the soundtrack of
the city, and so is most definitely here that the
Stones belong. Technically, however, there's still an exile, although of

(02:15):
a native speaker, rough approximation of the English language and cocaine,
which soon becomes the drug of choice is the excruciating
process of mixing the album begins. It's much easier to
procure here in southern California than it was in the
south of France. LA doesn't feel like home, But then
for those who were born and raised in England, how

(02:37):
could it? Those words come courtesy of legendary rock journalist
Robert Greenfield. The previous June, he'd spent several weeks at Villeneka,
Keith Richard's rented home in southern France, where the band
were living as tax exiles. He chronicled the experience and
a cover story for Rolling Stone Magazine, which he later
expanded into the book Exile on Main Street, A Season

(02:59):
in Hell with the Rolling Stones. At the time, the
bands were just beginning sessions for their gritty double Discopus,
Born of Decadence and Depravity in Keith's sweltering basement. Now
they doubled down on both by decamping to Hollywood, where
Greenfield cross passed with them again shortly before the STP
tour was due to kick off. Preparations were well underway

(03:20):
for the biggest rock production the world had ever known,
but before they could hit the road, they needed to
actually finish the album they were supposed to be promoting.
This task was complicated by the perfectionistreak and the blizzard
of cocaine. Also, Keith's crippling heroin addiction threatened the tour
and his life. In addition to Greenfield and has never

(03:42):
before heard tapes of the Stones in their seventies exile,
Eric Glory, will also be joined by his friend and
fellow STP tour mate Gary Stromberg, the band's pr sprimo,
who's represented a whole jukebox of the twentieth century's greatest artists.
My name's Jordan Runtogg and this is the Stone Owns
touring party. At the end of nineteen seventy one, the

(04:07):
Stones had traded the faded glamour of the French Riviera
for the faded glamour of old Hollywood. They settled in
the so called Golden Triangle of ultra rich la hillside
enclaves that included Beverly Hills, bel Air and Holmby Hills.
Daily life there doesn't hold a candle to the debauched
madness they just left behind in the south of France,

(04:28):
but you could hardly call it ordinary. Mick his new
wife Bianca, and their baby daughter Jade, are ensconced in
a thirty room mansion that had formerly belonged to Marion Davies,
the silent film star and longtime mistress of newspaper Psion
William Randolph Hurst. For listeners seeking a visual, imagine the
Home and The Godfather, where the studio executive wakes up

(04:50):
with a horsehead in his bed. It's the same place.
The vibe is southern California Gothic, and the atmosphere is spooky.
Paths choked with vines and underbrush lead past an artificial
waterfall that was long gone dry. There's barely any sign
of human life. The only sound around is the whisper

(05:13):
of a sprinkler outside. Needless to say, it made an
impression on Robert Greenfield when he came to interview Mick.

Speaker 3 (05:26):
It's right out of Sunset Boulevard. You know, the pool
had the leaves in it and hadn't been cleaned. I mean,
we were like in a deserted mansion, right. Tool was
funky and it was just him and Bianca man and
then Keith living in a completely different way with Anita
usually pregnant.

Speaker 2 (05:45):
He loved it. He was happy Keith and his partner
Anita Pallenberg were holed up a short drive away on
Stone Canyon Road with their young son Marlin. Their departure
from France had been, to put it mildly stressful. The
French authorities, having noticed the disturbing number of known drug
dealers who frequented Villain Nelcott, began to suspect Keith of

(06:05):
drug trafficking in addition to a host of other crimes,
both real and imagined. In the end, he was more
or less forced to flee the country before the law closed.
In Hollywood, no doubt, proved a welcome refuge. But according
to Greenfield, the paul that hung over the last days
in France followed them to their new home.

Speaker 3 (06:23):
Now they come to La and I was with them
in La. I mean this is of interest to me
in terms of their out touring this album.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
And I'll say it.

Speaker 3 (06:33):
You'll know it had a lot of darkness in that album, man,
you know, darkness on the edge of town. There's a
lot of darkness in that album. And it wasn't just
in the recording at Nelcutt. It was even in La.

Speaker 2 (06:47):
They settled in the Sunset Sound Studios that December to
polish up the ragged nelcut tracks with fresh vocals and
a host of overdubs from first rate Hollywood session players
like Billy Preston and Doctor John. It was here the
Keith's reign as the chaotic commander of the exile on
mainStreet sessions came to an end, as Jagger reclaimed his
usual role as first stone and shepherd of the songs

(07:09):
through to completion. Partially this was because Mick was better
suited to the business of refining, with his organizational skills
and analytical mind honed by a blizzard of white powder.
But also Keith's heroin addiction continued to worsen, and by
the time final mixes were being assembled in March nineteen
seventy two, he'd flown to a drug treatment center in Switzerland.

(07:32):
This was for the best, both for obvious reasons and
also because the album might never have been finished otherwise.
Mick and Keith's mixing process when something like this. The
pair chose a song they liked, then chose the take
they liked, and then they each did a mix. Then
they'd fight over which one was the best. With producer
Jimmy Miller and engineer Andy Johns acting as referees. These

(07:54):
fights could be brutal, sometimes lasting for days or even weeks. Then,
when the dust settled, repeat the process.

Speaker 3 (08:03):
Exiler mainStreet is an album made under the influence of
heroin and mixed under the influence of cocaine. They mixed
for months. That's when they would go nuts. I mean,
that's when Keith and micked it. Another part of their genius.
I mean the way these guys could hear listening to
something they had heard ten million times and still not
satisfied the level of depth, perception, orally wanting it to

(08:29):
be perfect. Nobody gets this about them, you know, the
level of craft that they had.

Speaker 2 (08:35):
In some cases, they would call through fifteen or even
twenty five hours of material just for one song, as
Mick and Keith tried in vain to determine which was
the perfect performance. Once as the deadline loomed, they stayed
awake for some thirty one hours straight to remix everything
from scratch. For Charlie Watts, the effort was worth the results.

(08:59):
Here he is talking the Robert Greenfield in nineteen seventy three,
courtesy of the Northwestern University Archives.

Speaker 4 (09:05):
Making records is real work.

Speaker 5 (09:08):
It's not much Joe, Well, oh, it's great joy because
you know you can hear it back and it's just
right perfection.

Speaker 2 (09:15):
But Bill Wyman was painfully aware of the economic costs
as well as the psychic ones.

Speaker 4 (09:21):
But we have enormous over its.

Speaker 6 (09:22):
I'm making records because we spend so much time and
travel in every single No, if there's one note wrong,
we won't do it.

Speaker 3 (09:29):
And they could never get the mix right on Tumbling Dice.
They kept remixing it. I was in the studio with them,
and you know, the famous mixing wants to snares the crap.
You know, it just sounds like that's spins lids, that
spin lids, you know, like, dude, the indist expression is
gano enough already?

Speaker 7 (09:50):
Man.

Speaker 2 (09:51):
One day they found themselves at an impasse over which
song to pick as a single. Mick thought all down
the line had chart potential, but engineer Andy John's he
just couldn't hear it on the radio. Well do you
want to hear it on the radio, Mick asked, As
was so often the case. The Stones knew a guy,
so they piled into their limos and took off down

(10:11):
the Sunset Strip.

Speaker 3 (10:12):
They took it to a radio station, so they could
sit outside in the limo and just think. This is
the point. They wanted to know how it would sound
on a car radio. I don't know who came up
to I think Mick or Keith the guy would have
been honored to play the mix.

Speaker 2 (10:40):
A consensus still hadn't been reached by the time the
song was over, so they called up the station and
had them played again. Just any band can listen to
playbacks on the radio. The Stone's arrival in town had
LA station managers falling all over themselves to curry favor.
Doing the band a solid by broadcasting an unreleased track

(11:00):
seemed like a win win for everyone.

Speaker 3 (11:06):
Here's the way it worked back then, km E T
and KOs. You had two hip, not underground SMA station
progressive playing albums, playing the Stones. The Stones are in
LA and we're competing with another station. We're going to
play more Stones than they do. Believe me, they were sensitive.

(11:26):
They listened to the radio.

Speaker 2 (11:28):
The Stones needed the radio arguably more than the radio
needed the Stones. For pr Supremo Gary Stromberg, it was
a crucial tool in breaking new songs.

Speaker 8 (11:38):
FM stations had just come into popularity in the late sixties,
in terms of the ability to promote careers and the
way it was. Part of the business that I had
was that it was record promotion and the way you
could get albums played because the AM stations were only
playing three minute singles. The way you promoted albums was

(11:58):
you could go to these FM stations and you could
bring that whoever was the dis jockey at the time,
whatever drug that h his preference, and you could take over.
I mean I would literally sit with dis jockeys on
KMET and k LOS. I won't name names, but if
you walked out there with a good enough amount of cocaine,
they would just let you play whatever you want and
there was no time limits. You know, you could play

(12:20):
an whole album if you kept providing drugs. So I've
launched a lot of artists careers on FM radio thanks.

Speaker 9 (12:27):
To my good quality cocaine.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
But at the moment, the Stones didn't have an album
to promote. Six weeks before the American tour was due
to kick off, Excell on Main Street was still incomplete.
Mick and Keith remains mired in the mixing, listening to
endless versions of the songs they'd heard literally a thousand
times with the deadline way in the rearview mirror and
Atlantic Records chief ahm at Urtigan breathing down his neck.

(12:53):
Rolling Stone Records president Marshall Chess was about to have
a coronary. His father, Leonard, had co founded Chess Records,
the legendary Chicago R and B label where the likes
of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley cut three sides in
three hours. These guys were taking weeks just to mix
one song. It just didn't compute. I mean they were late.
This is like Dude Tour started mid June. This is

(13:18):
like second weekend May. The album's not pressed yet. They
wouldn't let go.

Speaker 3 (13:23):
Okay, So now we're sitting in this living room, Andy Johns,
Keith Mick, Bob Marshall, they play it. It's like I
heard it and this sounds the same to me. I can't.
I don't have those kind of years. And after it's
the same deal. Like Mix says, yeah, if you just so,
here's what we need to do, and he gives Andy

(13:44):
like a shopping list, you know, like just turn this
down and you know that track we want, and Marshall
says something like lunatics. He just says it kind of
to him say, it's like he has no control over them.
He's under pressure like crazy from Ahmed Ahmitt went to
Marshall's bar Mitzvah. Marshall's known Omeda's whole life. Am It's

(14:08):
losing his mind in New York Atlantic's hole.

Speaker 2 (14:11):
You know this is it. It's a big.

Speaker 3 (14:12):
Release and this was on a Saturday and Marshall listened
to this old school flew to New York on Monday
with the Masters with the final track. And they must
have gone crazy into production because the album was out,
you know, once the tour began. And maybe maybe it

(14:34):
was earlier in May, but it was way beyond any
kind of sane deadline.

Speaker 2 (14:41):
Released in early May nineteen seventy two, Exile on Main
Street was certified gold in the US within two days
of hitting shelves and quickly reached the top spot on
charts all over the world. This was typical to the
point of tedious as far as the Stones were concerned. However,
the bewilderment agreed the album was something new instead of melody.

(15:01):
Exile in Main Street deals in mood and the moods
decidedly bad. Weariness seemed etched into the grooves as the
band grappled with their literal and metaphysical exile. For fans
who'd looked to the Stones to provide a soundtrack to
their lives for the better part of a decade, it
was difficult to relate. These people hadn't spent a summer
living in the south of France as a tax dodge,

(15:23):
Heroin hadn't yet become shockingly prevalent on the streets, and
with watergates still a few months on the horizon, generational
malaise hadn't yet gone mainstream. The songs spread across the
sprawling double disc were dispatches from the abyss about as
welcoming as a long path leading into a dark forest
at dusk. In short, it doesn't exactly grab you off

(15:44):
the bat. Instead, it demands to be taken as a
total experience rather than a series of songs. Perhaps because
of this, the lead single, Tumbling Dice, underperformed on the
hit parade, despite their fastidious radio testing. Today, Exile and
Mass place in the pantheon of rock classics as well
as Sure Look. Back in nineteen seventy two, no one

(16:06):
seemed sure if it was a masterpiece or a mess.

Speaker 3 (16:12):
I recently had a conversation where I was informed that
it was more critically praised than I thought. But I
found my recollection as people were confused by it as
an album. The album may have sold, but it wasn't
the masterpiece that it has since become. I have witnessed
this incredible phenomenon that later generations chose to embrace this

(16:38):
as The Stone's greatest album. I would say at the time,
no one perceived it that way. It's let it bleed,
sticky fingers, but you know, this is what time does.
It's really interesting. It seemed through a different filter. No
one considered it their masterpiece. When it appeared, there were
respect Lenny Ka, lead guitarist for Patty's, a former record

(17:01):
counter clerk in Granwich Village, Okay, he reviewed it for
Rolling Stone because Lenny was a rock critic among all
the other things he did, and he gave it a
respectful review, but it confused people.

Speaker 2 (17:13):
Lenny's review of what he calls the Rolling Stones that
they're most dense and impenetrable, opens with a somewhat tepid endorsement.
There are songs that are better, there are songs that
are worse. There are songs that will become your favorites,
and others you'll probably lit the needle for when their
time is due. Will allowing that there's some quote fine
music on the four sides, he declared that the great

(17:33):
Stones album of their mature period is probably yet to come.
The British publication Melody Maker, on the other hand, proclaimed
that the Stones best album to date, and a reviewer
for the record, Mirrau, echoed the sentiment, writing that the
Stones have quote reached the definite peak and favorably framed
Exiles a sort of evil inverse of the Beatles' White
Album in terms of stylistic scope, and The New York Times,

(17:56):
who could scarcely be bothered to review a rock record
less than a decade before, had perhaps the most intriguing comment.
Exile on Main Street has enough rock music of all
shades and styles to make anyone happy, wrote Don Heckman.
The Stones are looking inward now, and if they help
you understand something about yourself, that just might be the
most revolutionary act of all. But a better review came

(18:18):
from a much harsher critic, Stone's Roady Ian Stewart, who
was never won for idle praise it's a.

Speaker 4 (18:25):
Bit I think it was. At the same time, I
quite like it.

Speaker 2 (18:35):
Nearly a year after the notorious recording sessions in the
sweltering basement of Keith Richard's villa in the French Riviera,
the Rolling Stones spent the spring of nineteen seventy two
in Los Angeles making final preparations for their North American tour.
For them, it was a long time coming. Given the
many privileges of being a Rolling Stone, playing live was

(18:57):
easily their favorite. It was their life flood, according to
Robert Greenfield, was what they were born to do.

Speaker 3 (19:04):
A Marshall Chess once said to Missa Marshall, why are
they still doing this?

Speaker 2 (19:09):
He said?

Speaker 3 (19:09):
The only time they feel live is when they're on stage.
You gotta like that.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
As far as Keith Richards was concerned, playing live was
the whole point.

Speaker 10 (19:20):
Without the road, I wouldn't enjoy it like I mean,
I enjoy record.

Speaker 6 (19:25):
I enjoy recording it, but to be in a studio
isn't the.

Speaker 10 (19:30):
End of it for me.

Speaker 7 (19:31):
You know.

Speaker 4 (19:31):
I dig to do it for a while, but.

Speaker 10 (19:37):
I wouldn't have any.

Speaker 4 (19:37):
Reason to go in a studio if I didn't go
on the road.

Speaker 10 (19:40):
Yeah, I wouldn't feel any necessity to go in a studio.

Speaker 4 (19:45):
If I hadn't been on the road the best that
work at me, you might not be include.

Speaker 10 (19:49):
I don't think any any of us could. They definitely can't.
They become the world's worst rock and roll band if
they don't.

Speaker 7 (19:56):
Go on the row.

Speaker 3 (19:57):
They're the last connection, you know. I mean, they started
playing in sixty three, Stu driving them in a Volkswagen bus,
I think, and they'd play Church Hall's and they'd go
from one village to another. And that's why they're different
from the Beatles. They began on the road, and they've

(20:18):
spent their lives and career on the road. It's kind
of like Dylan, he don't want to stay home. He
wants to play. And so this is what they do
and they're still doing it, but no one else is.
That's the point.

Speaker 2 (20:32):
Their upcoming kickoff in Vancouver would be the culmination of
months of around the clock work from a small army
of creative and technical experts, all hell bent on making
this the most all inspiring musical event of the year,
if not the decade. The chief architect of the tour
was one Edward Herbert Beresford, Monk, known as Chip to

(20:54):
his friends, Chipmunk get it, the grown worthy nickname Belize
is brilliance for ambling stages and theatrical environments. After cutting
his teeth in Greenwich Village folk clubs, where Bob Dylan
wrote the lyrics to A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall on
his IBM's galectic typewriter, he worked his way through Harlem's
Apollo Theater, the Newport Jazz and Folk festivals, and nineteen

(21:17):
sixty seven's Monterey Pop Festival, which launched the careers of
Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, and The Who. Chip's own career
when sky high. Thanks to his involvement in Woodstock, in
addition to building the stage and assembling the lighting, he
was drafted at the eleventh hour to serve as at
de facto MC of the event, introducing the acts and
occasionally warning people to lay off the brown acid gone around.

(21:41):
By the dawn of the seventies, his grand theatrical visions
had earned him a reputation as the Albert Spear of
Rock the Stones, naturally one of the best. When it
came to assembling their stage, Chipmunk was the obvious choice.

Speaker 3 (21:56):
We can't talk about this tour without Chipmunk Edward Herbert
Beresford Monk the Third, the third Chip Monk. Chip was
a technical and practical genius. There was nothing he could
not do with his hands. I mean he.

Speaker 9 (22:14):
Is a mad scientist.

Speaker 3 (22:16):
Chip is thinking on a level that ordinary humans don't
get to. So Chip, this is like the fantasy of
his life. Actually, he has been given unbridled license to
spend as much money.

Speaker 9 (22:33):
On the staging of the show.

Speaker 8 (22:35):
On the physical stage physical staging of the show.

Speaker 2 (22:39):
Chip pulled out all the stops for the stones to
ensure good sounds, even for those in the cheap seats.
He commissioned ten thousand pounds hydraulic lifts for either side
of the stage, which hoisted gargantuan speaker cabinets some eighteen
feet to spread the music evenly across the arena. Above this,
straddling the stage, was a forty foot lawung metal lighting

(23:00):
bridge sporting fifty lamps with the whole rainbow of multicolored gels,
all controlled with enough cables to fill ten supermarket cards.
But Ship's crowning achievement was the sixteen by forty foot
mirror suspended over the stage, which bounced light from six
fifteen hundred watts spotlights flanking the stones from the sides
and behind the effects simultaneously backlit and front lit the

(23:24):
band in pale light, casting them in hyper real, dreamlike sharpness.
Chip was certain that this innovative approach would be the
future of rock concerts, but not so much. Many were
worried that the fragile mirror would shatter at some point
during the fifteen thousand mile journey, ensuring a seven thousand
dollars loss and possibly seven years of bad luck. Thankfully,

(23:47):
it survived, but proved so unwieldly that such an effect
was barely used again. And then there was the stage itself.
The surface on which Michael Phillip, Jagger and co conforted
and contorted themselves nightly was comprised of six massive plywood pieces.
These were struck after each gig and trucked from city

(24:07):
to city in two huge vans. When assembled, the flooring
depicted a pair of two fire breathing sea serpents and
twined on a sea of white. Because why not.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
The stage is that, I'm sure, to that point in time,
the largest stage. Now they're not going to play on
the stage of the arena. We bring in our own stage.
They assemble this stage with individual sections that were immense,
and they formed a dragon and you couldn't really see it.

(24:42):
I mean it was flat. Nobody in the house could
see it unless you're in the balcony the upper nobody's
in the good seats could see. The stage cost a fortune.

Speaker 2 (24:51):
While Chipmunk attended to the nuts and bolts matters of
rock tours, Gary Stromberg concerned himself with building something less
tangible but equally crucial, buzz. As a co founder of
Gibson and Stromberg, one of LA's most prominent PR firms,
he'd represented some of rock's biggest names, including Elton John,
the Doors, Crosby Stills, A Nash, and Three Dog Night.

(25:15):
As such, Gary and his partner Bob Gibson came just
as recommended as Chipmunk.

Speaker 8 (25:20):
We just were a very lucky little company that grew
significantly in the late sixties and early seventies, and we
were representing pretty much the who's who of rock and
roll at that time. Almost everybody from England that was
of note other than the Beatles, from Pink Floyd on down,
and we were sailing along.

Speaker 9 (25:39):
Our company was really doing good.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
The Gibson and Stromberg office on the Sunset Strip was
a hub for musical hopefuls just dying to one day
find their faces plastered on the oversized posters outside the
Tower Record Shop just across the street. Kids swarmed their
front door, and their phone lines were regularly clogged with
calls doobiously claiming the from John Lennon or some other

(26:01):
member of the rock elite. Once a guy in a
full wetsuit, flippers, weighted belt, rubber feet and goggles walked
into the front door and asked if they knew of
any bands looking for underwater drummers not this week, and
the reply desperate or drug induced. Either way. Gary had
no time for such shenanigans. He was busy strategizing for

(26:23):
the STP tour. His challenge was to not only sustain
the public's interest over a two month period, but make
it build and build with each passing tour date until
culminating in a full blown frenzy during the Stones final
four shows in New York City at the end of July.
The only way to achieve this was a full on
media blitz. This meant features or cover stories in all

(26:45):
the major magazines, rather than favoring the usual rock mags.
Priority was given to mainstream publications like Life, Time, Newsweek
and Esquire outlets who previously ignored bands like the Stones
other than the occasion snide remark about the length of
their hair. Their coverage told the world that the Stones
tour wasn't just music news, but a bonafide cultural moment.

(27:10):
Needless to say, this was a plumb assignment, and the
jockeying among writers was brutal. Big names are floated and
bid on like a livestock auction, and then unceremoniously dropped
by magazine editors. The Saturday Review considers sending beat scribe
William S. Burrows, but then the writer of Naked Lunches
subbed out for fellow iconoclass Terry Southern, author of the

(27:31):
scandalous comic novels Candy and The Magic Christian, both of
which had been recently made into films featuring Ringo Starr Truman.
Capote's name is being tossed around by Rolling Stone Magazine.
The fact that he's openly contemptuous of rock and rolls
of little concern. Truman is atmosphere theater, and perhaps most importantly, prestige. Heck,

(27:53):
even Teddy Kennedy's name was joked about within the halls
of Gibson and Stromberg. The more ludicrous the idea, the better.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
Probably more writers on that tour, oh yeah, than in
the history of rock and.

Speaker 9 (28:07):
Roll, name writers, big extraordinary. You're journalists.

Speaker 8 (28:11):
To try to understand the power of the Rolling Stones,
you just have to look at Capoti and Terry Southern,
and Warhol and Hefner, all these people that wanted to
just be close, to be in the reflected glory of
these guys was just insane.

Speaker 2 (28:27):
Even guitarist Mick Taylor recognized that some unusual folks were
hopping on the bandwagon metaphorically and literally.

Speaker 11 (28:35):
Yeah, it was a bit like radical sheep.

Speaker 4 (28:37):
Really.

Speaker 11 (28:37):
I mean, on the sixty nine tour, you wouldn't have
had Truman Capoti on the plane, and when Terry Southern,
you know, writing journalistic documentaries on our tour.

Speaker 3 (28:50):
So obviously things have changed a lot. We were front
page news in every city. The story was Rolling Stones
in Detroit.

Speaker 9 (29:00):
Well, it was part of the plan.

Speaker 8 (29:01):
We were trying to do that, but it just gained
its own momentum. It took on a life of its own.
From a media standpoint, cover of Life magazine. I mean,
it doesn't get any bigger than that.

Speaker 3 (29:11):
And the acknowledgment was subtlely subtext. These are great artists,
these are important people. Mick Jagger is a figure of significance.

Speaker 2 (29:22):
John F.

Speaker 3 (29:23):
Kennedy was on the cover of a Life magazine. You
got my point. That's the level.

Speaker 2 (29:28):
Going on tour with the Stones was no ordinary assignment.
Lobbing a list of thoughtful questions that Micke and Keith
just wasn't going to cut it. Instead, it was more
like being embedded on a political campaign or in a
war zone. The ability to hang was paramount, and as such,
Robert Greenfield seemed like a no brainer to include. He

(29:48):
was a veteran of the Stone's English tour the previous year,
and had spent several weeks living with Keith Richards in
the French Riviera while profiling and for Rolling Stone Magazine,
which in less than five years had gone from being
a San Francisco startup to the international rock and roll bible.
Greenfield's entree to the Stones camp is both a testament
to his talent and also the tight knit music community

(30:09):
of the era.

Speaker 3 (30:10):
I mean the way I came to them. I was
in London working for Rolling Stone Magazine. My editor was
Andrew Bailey, who's a great friend of mine until this day.
The music business was so small in London then you
could have lunch with anybody and change your life. I
swear and Andrew set all this up. We had lunch

(30:30):
with Georgia Joe Bergman as she was called then. Andrew
and I were like, he was the music business guy
and I was the hippie. And so that worked for
Rolling Stone in London at that point. We covered the
waterfront together and I said to her, and this is
shocking in retrospect, you know, man, I just want to
hang out on the tour, and that's what I did.

(30:53):
I mean, no one ever saw me take notes, and
she was up for it. I mean I didn't understand
that they were using rolling Stone to sell themselves and
the a. I just it was all in adventure and
I wanted to write about them. And on that tour
we took public trains and it was just another world.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
Greenfield bonded with Keith through breaking and entering, you know,
the usual way.

Speaker 3 (31:17):
Anita and young baby Marlin and they're late for they
don't travel with the rest of us and needed to Mike.
But Keith was always late. But got there and they
were in another world and there was no talking to him.
It just didn't you knew, you could not say hey,
how you do it? It was not happening, you know.
And so we get to this awful disc disco. It
was a disco man and it was called the Big Apple,

(31:39):
another bad name in Brighton, England, which is you know,
incongruous to say the least. And we arrived there and
we're it's it's it's as cold as it could only
have been in England in March before central heating. I mean,

(32:00):
it just was wet and dank and cold. And we
get in there. It's on the ground floor. The basement
is where the dress the dressing rooms are locked. Okay,
well rolling stones. Time waits for no one. They're not
going to stand in the corridor. And Keith starts to
riff about Marlin, my baby's cold. He's coughing like in

(32:22):
two seconds, like this poor kid is gonna get pneumonia.
Keith just keeps building this melodrama. Everybody else probably would
have stood there, not Keith is like this is he's
taking this personally.

Speaker 2 (32:34):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
Next thing, I know, as always minding my own business,
just standing there. Keith is at the door, and I
don't know if it was the famous knife that he
always carried under his outfit, you know, the I don't
know if it was a scimitar of his knife. He's
famous for this, and he's doing his best to unscrew

(32:58):
the latchet.

Speaker 2 (32:59):
The top.

Speaker 3 (33:00):
Well, I don't know this is coming from Brooklyn or
just you know. It never was a juvenile. The link went.
But next thing I know, I think I probably have
a Swiss army knife because I was a hippie.

Speaker 2 (33:12):
You had to have one.

Speaker 3 (33:13):
And I'm working on the other latch, and we are
under and we're doing good. We're not talking. You don't
even look at me. It's like I think he still
thinks I'm a roadie. My job is to help him
take the door off.

Speaker 2 (33:23):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (33:24):
So Keith gets his latch off, you know, and a
door starting to go sideways, and I get my latch off,
and the two of us pick up the door and
throw it. It's a heavy English wooden door. We throw
and okay, everybody, nobody says a word. All the stones
women are there, Aster and you know, Bianca's watching and Anita.

(33:45):
Nobody says, hey, hey, you know what, this might not
be a great idea, you know. So we've thrown the
door in the carter and now we're inside the dressing room.
And about ten minutes later, here comes the quote unquote
promoter like, dude, you are ready. He have muddied your
name forever. His assistant comes running through the door with

(34:06):
a ring of keys in her hand, and she looks
around at the doors in the court and nobody makes
eye contact. It's like yeah, and everybody's talking to each
other all of a sudden, Yes, what do you think
was that you have? And she just turned around and
left and there was no There were no consequences.

Speaker 2 (34:25):
His method for bonding with Mick took a much different form.
Less to do with petty crime man, more to do
with emotional abuse.

Speaker 3 (34:32):
The thing I'll say about Mick and everybody who really
ever encountered him has gone through this. It was totally
civil all through the tour until the Roundhouse, which was
the final gig. Two shows, and between the shows came
over to me and said, uh, you have no idea
what's going on this tour? Do you? Man? So what

(34:55):
do you mean? He said, you've been stoned as all
of it you had, and he just slagged me off.
You know, well again I keep quoting my age. At
that point, I'm twenty four, you know, and I didn't
say anything, you know, I said, what am I going
to do? Argue with Mick Jagger between shows at the
end of the tour. And then I wrote this article,

(35:17):
Goodbye Great Britain. You know, they were leaving to go
into tax Exi House and the story came out and
the first time I ever had anything in the back
of the magazine, a feature, and it was you know,
people responded because I had access. I was with them,
they through public They flew British Air to come back
from Glasgow and Keith refused to let his dog be

(35:37):
taken off the plane. I mean, they just the drama
was constant. It's just they generated the drama. And so
by having written that article, you know, I kind of
established that I could be trusted, I guess, and that
I could write I think. And then I was at
the con Film Festival and I got word from Andrew

(35:59):
that Marshall Chess had arranged for me to do the
Rolling Stone interview with Keith Richards. That was a big
deal back then. Whoa cover of the Rolling Stone, you know,
And so that led to my living there for a
couple of weeks. And actually the next time I had
seen Mick after the slagging off, and there was no
conversation about it.

Speaker 2 (36:19):
I had passed the test.

Speaker 3 (36:21):
You had to stand up to him for him to
want you to be part of the Stone's storing party.
It's interesting, right, It's a very un English kind of attitude.
But he was so brilliant. He was a brilliant manipulator.
He just could get what he wanted from anybody.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
At first blush. This approach seems to border on sociopathic,
a tactic not terribly dissimilar to cult leaders who grind
their followers down as a twisted way to test their loyalty.
But the Stones were vulnerable. They learned this the hard
way throughout the sixties, when constant persecution by the press
and police nearly sent them to prison. As the poet

(36:59):
Laurie Keith Richards once said, I never had a problem
with drugs. I had a problem with cops. In order
to protect themselves on tour, trust in their handlers was
absolutely vital.

Speaker 3 (37:11):
So you know what's also interesting about them. They were
so accustomed to being taken care of in a way
different from the Beatles. See, the Beatles were separate early
living separately, that they had always been taken care of.
Here's the point. By nineteen seventy two, they had literally
been on the road since nineteen sixty four, maybe sixty three,

(37:35):
So this was they were happy to have. They knew
who was taking care of them. There wasn't inner circle,
It's no doubt about it. That's another part of their genius.
They knew how to insulate themselves. They knew who to trust,
and once you were of no use to them anymore,
they were pros.

Speaker 2 (37:53):
It was also necessary to guard against their less savory habits,
namely drugs.

Speaker 3 (37:58):
In order to know what they were doing, you had
to be in the room using with them. And that's
the way it always was. They had lived on the
road for so long, and this is part of their
persona that even in the public eye, even on a
public tour, they knew how to protect themselves and keep

(38:19):
things secret on the tour, which is such a small,
insidious village. Yeah, they were geniuses. To Mick and Keith
both this.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
Became clear to Gary from his first meeting with Mick
when he received his brief as the Stones new PR manager.

Speaker 8 (38:35):
We met at the house, the Maryon Davies House, and
a very clear image of what that was like. I
walked into this place and I was told to the
dining room was where we would beat And this dining
room had this long table that probably held twenty people
at the table.

Speaker 9 (38:54):
And I sat down at the head of the table.

Speaker 8 (38:57):
And after a few minutes in walk Jagger and he
sat didn't come close to where I was.

Speaker 9 (39:03):
He went to the other head of the table.

Speaker 8 (39:05):
Which I think was totally a power move, and he
sat at the head of the table twenty feet away
from me, or maybe more than that, and we had
this conversation and he.

Speaker 9 (39:15):
Was very, very reserved.

Speaker 8 (39:19):
It just surprised me of how calculated he seemed to be.
He knew exactly what he wanted. Most of all, he
was concerned about protecting him and his image. Would I
be good at doing protecting him and his image. Not
that I needed to protect anything, he was well in
control of that, but to protect it, to not let
harm come to them in the media. In other words,

(39:42):
you don't have to create anything. It's going to be there,
but just don't fuck it up, don't make any mistakes. Yeah,
I remember thinking, Wow, this is going to be fun.

Speaker 2 (39:51):
Indispensable though he became Gary. Actually missed the first few
dates of the STP tour.

Speaker 8 (39:56):
My partner and I our initials are GNS Company. We
were known as Guzzle and Snort. Gibson was a drinker
and I was a drug user. And so Gibson was
going to cover the first part of the tour and
I was going to cover the second.

Speaker 9 (40:11):
We done, we'd bite it up.

Speaker 8 (40:12):
So my job was when the tour opened, was to
do the planning, to you know, find the right writers
and to lay out the plan for the tour. While
he was going to go up and cover the first date.
And after that first Vancouver date he called me and said,
I can't do this. There's just everybody's high. They're all
getting using drugs and stuff. He said, you're much better
suited than this and me. So he came back home

(40:34):
and I went up to I think it was San
Francisco's where I first joined it.

Speaker 9 (40:37):
So I missed the opening of the tour.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
Music and drugs were inextricably linked in the early seventies.
It's an uncomfortable fact, but it would be dishonest to
suggest otherwise. Drugs simply were the currency of the community,
almost on par with songs. For Gary Stromberg, they played
a not insignificant role in making his reputation.

Speaker 8 (40:58):
Let me start by saying that that, unlike any other
business that I know of, it was kind of a
badge of honor to be a drug addict in my time,
you know.

Speaker 9 (41:07):
And I think my business was largely built on.

Speaker 8 (41:11):
My reputation as a drug addict and a guy who
could hang with my artists. I should describe what my
office looked like. It was set up like a living room.
There was a big sign over the front door that
said Mental Ward, and there were no desks. There were
only couches and a big coffee table. It was like
a big living room. And on the coffee table in

(41:33):
the center of the room was a crystal bowl, like
a fruit bowl, you know, they would hold fruit, only
it was filled with cocaine. And the rules in my
office were if you came to do business with me
in my company, you could help yourself. You could take
as much as you wanted, but there was no to
go orders you couldn't leave with anything, and my office became,

(41:56):
as you could imagine, very popular because people could hang
out there and get high, but they couldn't leave with anything.
So as a consequence, it led to a lot of
business for me. It was the rate of exchange in
the world of rock and roll in that era was drugs.

Speaker 9 (42:11):
It was just simply put in drugs.

Speaker 2 (42:14):
Discussing the substance abuse of the era is a tricky
thing because it doesn't translate in the twenty first century sensibilities.
Viewed from the vantage point of half a century, it's
easy to dismiss such wanton self destruction as remarkably irresponsible
or hopelessly naive. According to Gary Now, forty years sober

(42:34):
and the rock star in the recovery community, it was
simply a product of the time, a toxic blend of
ignorance and innocence.

Speaker 8 (42:42):
We were rebelling in my generation, and drugs were part
of the you know, sticking in the man's face. The
idea was that the you know that government was lying
to you. Drugs weren't dangerous, they were fun. So there's
an expression in my recovery program, you know that it
starts off with fun. And that it's fun with problems
and it's just problems. And that's what happened for me.

(43:03):
It just became real problematic in my life.

Speaker 3 (43:06):
It is really the context of the times, and it's
also ignorance. People didn't know what the consequence.

Speaker 9 (43:12):
You don't of course, there were no consequences.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
When you're twenty six. You don't know what you're going
to look like when you're sixty two.

Speaker 9 (43:18):
And they were lying to us about everything, and.

Speaker 3 (43:19):
It was another age. I'll say this over and over. Hey,
there was no Internet. You couldn't look it up. Man,
it wasn't on Wikipedia. What are the effects of heroin?
That's not find outable unless you were shooting up.

Speaker 8 (43:35):
The first exposure I had to drugs was a movie
called Reefer Madness. It told you would go insane and
murder people if you smoke pot.

Speaker 2 (43:44):
You could say this attitude towards substances extended to the
STP tour. Hedonism was very much in fashion, and to
borrow a phrase from Keith, being restrained was a no no.

Speaker 3 (43:55):
I mean the astonishing thing we haven't discussed this yet,
and Garret could talk about it, we could talk about
was the amazing level of drug use on the nineteen
seventy two So.

Speaker 9 (44:06):
Yes, is that your only comment?

Speaker 8 (44:10):
Yeah, well that's absolutely true. Yeah, I mean there was
an astonishing Monde. I mean, we had our own doctor
there who was maintaining these guys and abling it was
an enabler. It was the first time in my career
that getting high was is more important than the work
that I had to do. In that tour, I would
just staying high because they were, and I just fancied

(44:31):
myself being one of them, which was really not the
reason I was there. I was there to do the
pr stuff, which I was able to do and still
get as high as I wanted to be. So just
to be able to hang with guys who could consume
like I was consuming was very appealing to me. And
I loved Keith because of that. I mean he just
there was no boundaries, there was no limits. He would

(44:53):
go until you know, there was no more left, or
he was, you know, unconscious.

Speaker 9 (44:58):
What do you think fueled that?

Speaker 2 (45:00):
Do you just love it?

Speaker 8 (45:01):
Or oh yeah, just loved it. Being out of controlling.
That's part of who he was.

Speaker 9 (45:06):
He was the ball in a pinball machine. He would
just be knocked from flipper to flipper.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
So Gary Stromberg, who I've known for fifty years, said
to me once, Bob Keith has the greatest move to
a coke spoon I've ever seen. I said, what are
you talking about? He said, Bob, he can walk through
a crowded because he always had that a gold snorter,
no spoon, a spoon, a silver spoon, yes, hanging from
a chain on his neck, so he could walk across

(45:32):
a crowded room.

Speaker 7 (45:32):
That well.

Speaker 3 (45:33):
People would hold it up sometimes, he said, take a hit,
keep moving and not spill a draw.

Speaker 8 (45:38):
People would throw stuff on the stage and Keith would
consume hills and stuff that were in vials without ever
asking any questions.

Speaker 9 (45:47):
He would just do it.

Speaker 8 (45:48):
The guy could live spontaneously and just roll with whatever
you threw, like pick up on something on stage and
take it and just see where it took you. And
that I don't think I've ever seen anybody that was
willing to risk it on that level.

Speaker 2 (46:03):
Suffice it to say, Mick and Keith had there are
different views on drug use. During the nineteen seventy two tour,
this added to the growing schism between the two. Keith
aspoused excess.

Speaker 6 (46:14):
But the only way to do it too, like that
is to be as well as you can be and
think about anything else so you can think, you know.

Speaker 2 (46:23):
I mean, well, Mick preached moderation, at least publicly.

Speaker 4 (46:28):
I think that's completely wrong.

Speaker 5 (46:29):
I mean I disagree fundamentally, and I think the thing
is to be as straight as possible, really absolutely.

Speaker 4 (46:36):
I think to get to get as high as possible
play is completely wrong for me.

Speaker 5 (46:41):
I'm not saying I stayed completely straight all throughout the
two but I did make a certain When I say straight,
I mean not fucked up in my head?

Speaker 4 (46:49):
Why not say that I was. I mean I wouldn't
take a beer, you know, or I wouldn't, you know,
get a bit drunk some nights, you know, a little bit,
you know.

Speaker 5 (46:57):
But I never went on the stage, so I never
want to stage loaded once.

Speaker 4 (47:02):
Which means doctor out of control app control impossible. How
that I don't control.

Speaker 8 (47:09):
Tour couldn't have happened if it wasn't for the chemicals
that supported them. I mean that large part was responsible
for the overall group energy that took place at a
tour like that. I don't think it exists if there
wasn't pharmaceutical intervention of some sort.

Speaker 3 (47:24):
I mean, Gary's got a great point about that chemicals
may have helped enable it, but if you snort blow,
you don't become Mick Jagger, you know, like he had
the energy of an insane person.

Speaker 2 (47:38):
It became clear after days or even just hours of
hanging around with the stones that they were made of
stronger stuff. It's a shame that Darwin never had a
chance to meet Keith Richards.

Speaker 8 (47:48):
One of the things that I was very impressed was
with their physical prowess, how strong these guys were, that
they were able to endure what they especially Keith, what
he subjected his body to, and yet was always, like
Bob said, he was always he never missed a show.
And how strong they were. And one night we were
on the plane, the private plane, and and Mick and

(48:09):
Keith were both standing in the aisle talking to somebody.
And you know where the the the luggage racks are
above the thing. Both of them were holding on to
the luggage rack and they were like hanging like they
were just by one arm, and they were hanging there.
And the doctor who was accompanied us on the tour's
talking and I'm pointing out that look at look at

(48:30):
the way they're they're thinking. He says, you know what
that is and I said no, He said, they are simians.
They He said, you know, they're basic body types. And
one of the types is am. I forgot what he
called it, but it's a long torso no ass, long arms.

Speaker 9 (48:48):
And he said, they're like the apes, brilliant.

Speaker 8 (48:51):
And he said, and they are the strongest of the
human species.

Speaker 9 (48:55):
Are these these body types? And he was absolutely right on.

Speaker 8 (49:00):
And if you'll notice a lot of the English rock
stars have that same kind of body type brought through it.

Speaker 9 (49:06):
His point was.

Speaker 8 (49:06):
That these are very simian like animals, right, they are
capable of enduring a lot more than their normal human is.

Speaker 2 (49:15):
Bob is a similar story of witnessing Keith's superhuman consumption
habits while on the road.

Speaker 3 (49:20):
So we're in Denver. The party goes on till three
am because it's after the show. Party doesn't start till midnight,
three am whatever. And as I said, your only responsibility
in the morning was to bring your luggage to the lobby.
So I'm down early. I don't know why drop off
the luggage and I don't know what behooved me. I

(49:43):
stick my head in the bar. It's eleven am two
guys in the bar, Keith and Bobby Keith. Now I
know how loaded everybody was the night before I come in.
They're sitting at the bar at eleven o'clock and I said,
the fuck are you doing here? Keith is drinking that

(50:03):
was invented on the tour and saw Solito at the
Trident drinking at tequila sunrise and Keith holds up the
glass because the grenadine rises. You know, it's orange juice
and tequila and grenadine on ice for those who haven't
had one. Very nice and very pretty, very beautiful, very visual.
Keith holds up the glascense Vitamin C mad like, oh,

(50:29):
you're doing something good.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
This is your breakfast.

Speaker 3 (50:32):
And then they got on a plane and I never
saw Keith sleep on a plane. I never saw Keith sleep.
He also and I have to say this, and Keith
never missed a show in his entire career.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
For Mere Mortals to compete with the band's intake was
a fool's.

Speaker 3 (50:49):
Errand it's been a moment of insight for me for
Gary to say that, you know, he became a rolling
stone on the tour. See, that was Gary's first time around,
first hit, but living at Nell Cutt, I really saw
that if you got too close, you caught fire. You
could not be keith, you could not be mad. So

(51:09):
I never I'm alive today in talking because I never
tried to be one of the boys or girls or
boys and girls. I was always working.

Speaker 2 (51:22):
For those seduced by the romantic visions of sex, drugs
and rock and roll while flying high with the world's
greatest group. Consider the story of Danny Seymour, a twenty
eight year old cinematographer and sound man who served as
part of the documentary crew accompanying the STP tour.

Speaker 3 (51:39):
Danny was a lovely guy. Danny bought himself a thirty
eight foot boat and went off sailing. I believed to
kick to get clean. They found the boat, they never
found Danny. Nobody knows. I mean the repercussions of this tour,

(52:02):
the level of damage that people did to themselves.

Speaker 8 (52:05):
Yeah, it took a long time for me to personally
recover from the amount of drugs that I had taken
on that tour, and I think that was pretty much
case for a lot of those guys.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
So the album was done and plans were well underway
for the biggest rock tour the world had ever seen.
There was, however, one small problem. Keith Riches was in
no shape to do much of anything, much less sweat
his way through two hours of rock and roll each
night for six weeks. He was to use the most
evolved phrase of the time, not doing well with fixes

(52:54):
administered every three to four hours as heroin habit was
costing him one hundred dollars daily are about seven hundred
and twenty five dollars today. The band's ability to generate
vast amounts of money by touring the world was contingent
on Keith's health. They can't start without him, and a
drug bust would jeopardize the tour, leaving them even deeper
in the hole, So he and Anita are both sent

(53:16):
to a detox clinic in Switzerland. Expectations were not high.
The Stones lawyer advises Keith that this might be a
good time to work out his will. He's twenty nine
years old. Rehab as we know it today didn't exist.
The only real intervention was death. Keith and Anita arrive
in Switzerland that spring with so much luggage that arrangements

(53:38):
must be made for a truck to deliver it to
their hotel. It's decided that the couple will take turns detoxing,
with Keith going first, while Anita, heavily pregnant and weeks
away from giving birth, we'll look after their two year
old son, Marlon. As Keith's withdrawal symptoms begin to kick in,
he becomes nauseated and limp, his skin turning cold and

(53:59):
aade of green. He's in no shape to make it
down the stairs, much less get into a car for
a lengthy ride to the clinic. An ambulance has quickly summoned.
Anita asks the drivers to be discreet. She doesn't want
Marlon to see his corpse like Daddy being carried out
on a stretcher and panic. So the attendants put Keith

(54:19):
on a chair and drape a blanket over him and
carry him down the stairs like a sultan through some
imperial palace. It's probably for the best that Keith is
barely conscious, his head lulling from side to side. Against
all odds, Keith has somehow made it from his house
in Los Angeles to a clinic of Avey's Switzerland. Somehow
he's managed to survive yet another serious bout of heroin use.

(54:43):
This one began at Nelcote, but became far worse in
la Someone made of lesser stuff might have fallen by
the wayside, not Keith. The good news is that Keith
Richards is still alive. The bad news is when he
wakes up tomorrow morning, his detok will begin. At the clinic,
Keith finds himself playing the Jack Nicholson role and one

(55:05):
flew over the cuckoo's nest. A wounded rebel in confinement
against doctor's orders. He lights a cigarette in his room,
but his fingers are shaky and he immediately drops it
on the bed. He beats out the flames with his
bare hands. After this, he walks out into the hallway
to smoke like everyone else. One day, he finds himself

(55:26):
seated next to a catatonic patient. He sticks a cigarette
in the frozen man's mouth and lights it, joking to
an assistant that guy goes through two packs a day.
Though a sense of humors returned, he's still weak. He
once falls asleep in the middle of signing travelers checks
in a touching display of interband loyalty. Stone's bassist Bill

(55:47):
Wyman calls to offer support in any way he can
though deeply appreciated, He's immediately talked out of flying the
Switzerland for a visit, chiefly because no one at the
facility has yet realized that mister Keith, as he's known,
is actually a rock star. The sight of two Stones
together might tip someone off, and a media circus would
surely ensue. When Keith is finally recognized out in the

(56:10):
hallway for a smoke, it's by a seventeen year old
kid who's absolutely delighted Keith, where's Mick, He asks, Uh,
He's not here, man. Keith replies, I'm trying to get
my act together. I'm trying to get it straight. The
kid tells Keith he also plays guitar and runs to
get his instrument. Soon enough, the two of them are

(56:31):
playing together, with Keith doing his best to teach him
a Stone song through shaky, if not sticky fingers. Anita's
detox was more difficult due to the fact that she
was heavily pregnant. A visit to an obstetrician beforehand got

(56:52):
slightly awkward when it became clear that the doctor had
no idea who he was dealing with. He took notes
and asked all the usual quest quessians do you drink?
Do you have much coffee? Are you taking any prescription medication?
Anita replied in her German accented English, It's a little
more complicated than that, you see, I'm on heroin. The

(57:13):
doctor dropped his pen. She went into premature labor after
just a day and a half of detoxification. There were
great fears that the baby would be born addicted to heroin.
According to most of the medical literature on the subject,
these infants go through withdrawal as soon as they're separated
from their mothers. They shake, twitch, fuss, and sweat, some

(57:35):
of problems eating. In severe cases, they even suffer seizures.
The traditional form of treatment for reducing these symptoms is
to administer a tinture of opium so the newborn can
slowly be weaned off the drug through some miracle that
no one can explain. On April seventeenth, nineteen seventy two,
two days after Tumbling Dice is released as the first

(57:57):
single off of Exile on Main Street, Anita Pallenberg gives
birth to a baby girl who's not addicted and so
does not have to suffer through the agony of neonatal
abstinence syndrome. She does, however, have Anita's large dark eyes.
They call her Dandelion. To Keith, she's perfect and so

(58:23):
for not the first nor the last time, Keith Richards
found himself on the brink of death and survived as
he's wont to do. Everyone knows the old joke. We
have to start worrying about what kind of world we're
going to leave for Keith Richards. He flies back to
Los Angeles at the end of May to rehearse for
the STP tour do to kick off in just a
matter of days. Robert Greenfield was there.

Speaker 3 (58:49):
So the most amazing I ever saw that band, And
I guess I saw him a lot. I saw him
all through England, you know, saw him a lot before
the tour began. In La I went to see them
at Sir and that studio.

Speaker 9 (59:03):
Instrumental right the street.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
Right on the Sunset strip, And there are two, in
my memory, very long and narrow rehearsal studios, one on
the left, one on the right, So the one on
the left, Little Feet was in and the one on
the right was the Stones And basically they were playing
through pig nose apps and Charlie was not. I don't
think he had a drum kit. I think it was

(59:26):
playing on a pad or something. You know, it was
like seeing the rolling Stones in a finished basement. They
were so incredible and I don't know somehow that gets
lost in the mixed.

Speaker 2 (59:43):
Even Keith, indestructible yet momentarily fragile, was bolstered by what
he heard.

Speaker 6 (59:49):
Yeah, the band is still getting better, you know, which
is an amazing thing really after that lung of playing together,
because it isn't It's never just a length of time
that you play together and makes a bang that usually
a dang gets sort of fed up. You know, you
get to stay over somewhere and on that, which the
role says did at one point, but they managed to

(01:00:10):
overcome it. And you know, when we've been turned for
four years, three four years and non stuff, you know,
you know, you can push so hard for so long
that you can get absolutely pissed up. But I think
we've done just the right amount of work and the

(01:00:31):
right amount.

Speaker 4 (01:00:32):
Of recording to keep ourselves.

Speaker 6 (01:00:35):
Interested in what we're doing.

Speaker 1 (01:00:37):
You know.

Speaker 3 (01:00:39):
It's also the dynamic between Mick and Keith that you
see on stage. Nick and Keith working off one another,
with Charlie in the middle, and the dynamic of that
on stage, especially in small arenas without all the fruit
through no scenery, no big lighting, no nothing. Whoa you know,
it's too into these the Glimmer Twins, these two brothers

(01:01:05):
who love and hate one another. That's real theater.

Speaker 2 (01:01:11):
The trials and tribulations of Nolka would play themselves out
on stage every night of the STP tour in the
summer of nineteen seventy five to the joy and yes
satisfaction of thousands of fans. This should be the happy ending,
the greatest rock band in the world, happy and healthy.
Working through the setlist for their American victory lap, but

(01:01:32):
a larger problem lingered. There was a subtle hint in
their list of tunes. Sympathy for the Devil was conspicuously absent.
They were playing the song on Altamo when a scuffle
broke out between the Hell's Angels, extensively acting as security
on the stones behalf and nineteen year old Meredith Hunter
from the stage. Makes sense the disturbance. We always have

(01:01:54):
something very funny happening when we start that number, he
arreily told the crowd. A few songs later, the gang
stabbed Hunter to death. To play the song this time
around almost felt like tempting fate with an evil incantation.
Best to avoid for the audience sake and the band's own.
The Angels were not happy about taking the fall for

(01:02:16):
the crime. Hey, they were just doing the job the
Stones hired them to do. Word on the street was
they wanted retribution in the form of Jagger's head. No
one was sure if the Angels had really put a
hit out on him, but he moved like a mark man.
The fear colored the entire tour. Would Jagger be killed?

(01:02:36):
The Stones insisted that the tour go on as scheduled.
Jagger he didn't have much of a choice.

Speaker 4 (01:02:42):
I mean, either I stopped her. Oh I didn't, you know,
I mean it was as simple as that.

Speaker 2 (01:02:49):
Rumors of the Hell's Angels murderous plot spread far and wide.
Cruel reminders turned up when Jagger least expected like the
devil in disguise, people said.

Speaker 4 (01:03:01):
Well, you know, aren't you worried? You know, Wabsite has
really got me one.

Speaker 5 (01:03:05):
And we decided to do the tour run out and
we were driving and we were parting a parking lot
and these four girls came.

Speaker 4 (01:03:12):
Up, you know, young girls, and these chicks came up and see,
just heard you're going on tour. Great.

Speaker 5 (01:03:18):
So then they said aren't you afraid of being shut
So that really freaked me out, you know, at least.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
Like fifteen year old girls when say that, you know,
so I said, yeah.

Speaker 7 (01:03:28):
I am.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Stone.

Speaker 1 (01:03:56):
Story Party has written in Hosted by Jordan Runt Up Kids,
is produced by Noel Brown and Jordan Brunton, edited in
the sound design by Noel Brown and Michael Alder June.
Original music composed and performed by Michael Alder June and
Noel Brown, with additional instruments performed by Chris Suarez, Nick
Johns Cooper, and Josh The Vintage Rolling Stones audio courtesy
of the Robert Greenfield Archive at the Charles Darring McCormick

(01:04:18):
Library of Special Collections in Northwestern University Libraries. Stone's Touring
Party is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts
from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you get your favorite shows.