I stopped working, but then other issues began to raise their ugly heads. The Devil, as we know, makes work for idle hands. I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian’s headlong plunge, but I didn’t realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me. It’s easy enough, after all, to rationalise how other people’s problems are different from our own, and honestly there was no logical reason why I would’ve compared my fate to Brian’s.
Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. I always thought that I came through that with no damage, but I know that when I had my biopsy last year the results showed very old scarring on my liver – apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days’ unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.
I’m always amazed at how scenes from the past get congealed into rabid set pieces. There’s the whole Redlands business. It’s so complicated and has an endless life of its own. Almost immediately it became an emblematic part of Stones history, but my position was much dodgier – my role was ambivalent and eventually had disastrous effects on me and on my relationship with Mick. It was a horrible ordeal, but initially it created a bizarre bond between us. I took the poison-pen letters and all those dreadful things in the papers too hard. I was too young and insecure to have all that hatred directed at me and didn’t know how to deal with it. I turned it all on myself. Mick’s attitude was much, much healthier. Like, ‘Well, they’re just idiots. I’m not gonna let this get in my way!’ Which should have really been mine, too, but I wasn’t grown up or secure enough to do that. Also I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug, while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.
The 1969 festival at Altamont, the Stones’ infamous free concert outside San Francisco, is now seen as a rock’n’roll Black Mass. So many things about Altamont that now seem inevitable just weren’t at the time. Mick may have sung his pantomime songs about the Devil and the Midnight Rambler, but he was in a total hippie mood when he went out there to do that concert. He wanted more than anything to be part of the counterculture utopia. ‘Brothers and sisters, we are creating the blueprint for a new society’ and so on. That’s how it was, actually. People imagine the Stones came to Altamont to incite murder, to summon up Beelzebub and his satanic crew from the bowels of the earth. Not at all! It was meant to be a Hippie Love Fest. It’s one of the saddest things that it turned into its opposite.
Mick must have realised when ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ started that it was a mistake. Every time they’d play it on that tour, he’d say: ‘Something funny happens when we start this.’ He got off on it – as if something might happen if he said it. And then suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. It’s the same old thing: wanting to have power over people. And often they don’t think about whether it’s good power, whether it’s positive or negative – it’s part of being young and stupid. Something happened to him out there on that tour. He’d always been so sweet and gentle – he began to get harder after that. The fact that I’d gone off to Rome with the painter Mario Schifano while he was gone didn’t exactly help his mood when he returned.
All these things eroded our relationship, but there were other more fundamental problems. As much as I loved Mick, the actual life, the big rock star life, wasn’t really for me. Mick, however, couldn’t live any other way, and I wouldn’t expect him to, it’s just part of his nature.
I love Bob Dylan’s attitude to the sixties. ‘I am the sixties. You want ’em? You can have ’em!’ Oh, God, that made me laugh so much! But, you must know by now he’s a sly dog and as slippery as an eel. He’s like some sort of creature that, as soon as you identify what it is, it turns into something else – a chameleon! Bob has a clever, oblique way of talking about himself. And because he’s so mentally agile he can see-saw about the sixties as much as he likes. He knows you can never take him out of the sixties, however much he grumbles, so his ambivalence about his decade is just a prank. If you take him out of the house of cards it would collapse. He just wants to be the Joker in the pack.
Bob’s old records are so embedded in our lives everybody gets nervous when a new Dylan record comes out. There’s so much expectation. When Modern Times was released, I talked to Polly Harvey and I told her how wonderful it was and she said, ‘But, oh, I’m scared! I’m scared!’ And I said, ‘Don’t be! It’s all right! It’s more than all right!’ We always hope it’s going to be this great thing – and there have been some clunkers, haven’t there? Some real downers, too. Time Out of Mind was very negative, but, as always, there were a couple of great tracks I loved, like ‘I’m Sick of Love’. I know that feeling – you want it but you get so sick of that old roller coaster.
Bob’s been competing with himself since 1966, trying to outdistance his own mythology. I was listening the other day to his radio show. He was talking about fathers and there was this bit where Bob says, ‘Well, you know, manic depression and depression and bipolar disorder, these are really all just the blues.’ He sees everything in a mythical context. The contemporary world is ersatz, a fallen model. And then he played Lightning Hopkins. It was a wonderful moment. I thought, ‘Yeah, man, that’s exactly what these people are doing, taking away the lightning, taking away the blues.’ The blues have that wonderful irony. I’ve naturally got them, I’m never going to be able to be rid of them – I couldn’t bear it, I wouldn’t be me.
On his show, Bob does his radio voice, the smooth, soft-talking deejay. Old possum Bob. That’s what I like so much about the Dylan radio show, that he’s playing a character – I love that he’s gone to the trouble to create a new persona. Of course, he’s always been good at manufacturing personae – brilliant. I love to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. I keep thinking that I want to send him an e-mail from Marianne in Paris saying: ‘Love the radio show, love the character. Don’t change a thing!’ But what Bob really likes to hear is young people criticising him. Because he loves saying what he really thinks. They’ll say: ‘Why don’t you play more new music, Bob?’ And he says things like: ‘Well, Scott from Arlington, the thing is, there’s a lot more old music than there is new music.’ That’s an argument I wouldn’t have thought of, and so very typical of him. He basically thinks modern music is crap, but he does play it occasionally. He played a Blur track the other day called ‘Coffee & TV’, but most of what he plays is stuff you’ll only hear on some old hipster like Hal Willner’s answering machine, the wildest, oldest stuff you can imagine.
Bob still thinks of me as the angelic Marianne of the mid-sixties and whenever he sees me drinking and smoking he gets a bit cross. I’d like to say I’ve reformed – I have actually, I hope that doesn’t disappoint – but unlike Bob I haven’t found God in the process. Bob is very religious but when it gets to God and all that, I feel I have to say to him: ‘You know, Bob, I’m really not religious actually.’ I know I shouldn’t say those things, but I feel I have to. I’m not a pagan or a witch or anything dark or satanic, I’m just a humanist like my dad. But it’s all over the place. Religion, God, Christ on the cross. And if they’re not Christians, they’re Scientologists. Look at Bono, too, with his big cross and everything. I understand that people have to do what they have to do to get through, but I don’t think you have to impose your thing on other people. But I do know that when you make that kind of statement to Bono, you’re kind of left out, they cut you out of their plan. ‘Oh, well, if she’s not Christian …’ They look askance. ‘Must be something wrong there.’ That’s such nonsense. Christians have always done that. If you’re not part of them, then you’re against them, and I’m not