life

And an Excerpt from Life by Keith Richards


We’d be working all night in the studio, we’d be down in this bunker all night and suddenly the dawn comes up and we’ve got this boat. Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside, let’s take the boat—Mandrax— to Italy for breakfast. Most days we used to go down to Menton on the border, an Italian town just inside France by some quirk of treaty making, or just beyond it to Italy proper for breakfast. No passport, right past Monte Carlo, just as the sun’s coming up, with music ringing in our ears. Take a cassette player and play something we’ve done while we’re going there, play that second mix. Then we’d play it to the Italians, see what they thought while we’re having breakfast. Pick up some fresh fish. If you hit the fishermen at the right time, you could get red snapper straight off the boats and take it home for lunch.

We’d just jump in, Bobby Keys, me, Mick, whoever was up for it. We liked the way the Italians cooked their eggs, and the bread. And that you had actually crossed a border, there was a sort of an extra sense of freedom about it. Pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’ lot or Niarchos’, who had the big, big yachts there. You could almost see the guns pointed at each other. That’s why we called it Main Street. When we first came up with the title it worked in American terms because everybody’s got a main street. But our Main Street was that Riviera strip. And we were exiles, so it rung perfectly true and said everything we needed to say.