Just A Shot Away
A new Anita Pallenberg documentary presents her libertine life and centrality to the Rolling Stones. Plus! Prince Stash.
“I’VE BEEN CALLED a witch, a slut and a murderer,” wrote Anita Pallenberg in the memoir composed during the sober years before her death at 75 in 2017. Now, that unpublished script – titled, with typical defiance, Black Magic – forms the basis of a two-hour documentary, Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg. It hits British cinemas this month.
Inevitably, as First Lady of The Rolling Stones, the doc weaves the personal with the musical. There’s her testy 18-month relationship with her doppelganger Stone, Brian Jones. Then the union with Keith Richards from 1967 to 1980. Raw testimony from the pair’s children, Marlon and Angela, off-screen contributions from Richards, plus Pallenberg’s own observations shed new light on these years.
Given the Richards’ family’s blessing, the documentary is rich in home movie footage including a cape-wearing Pallenberg dancing freely in a garden and film of the Mick’n’Marianne/ Keith’n’Anita getaway to South America at Christmas 1968. But it’s Pallenberg’s candid recollections, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, that form the spine of the film.
Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola – popularly known as Prince Stash – first met her in Paris in 1964 and appears in the film. “Anita could be ruthless and relentless when she wanted something or someone,” he tells MOJO. Once ‘rescued’ from Jones by Richards in spring 1967, Keith recounts that he was initially “bewildered [by] her absolute determination to be… free. Anita just wanted to kick it all over.”
During their earliest days together, Pallenberg says, “Keith was so shy.” It was her “Italian energy” and eye for Bohemian style that transformed him into “a lion”.
“I loved the feeling of culture exploding,” Pallenberg says as the film traces her pre-Stones years. She discovers that her great-grandfather was Symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin, who specialised in “bestial satyrs and sleeping nymphs”. Stash, a scion of master painter Balthus, tells MOJO that she and he, “shared this whole debauched, libertine lifestyle. The Stones were bourgeois by comparison! Anita brought all that to the Stones.”
She also inspired several songs, including Mick Jagger’s You Can’t Always Get What You Want and Richards’ You Got The Silver. As the film reveals, dynamics between Pallenberg and Richards, now parents, changed by the early ’70s, when she realised that his music came first. Heroin seemed “like a solution”, says the voiceover.
We also learn that, after the sudden death of Jones in 1969, Pallenberg found herself putting pictures of him all around the house. She also disliked the word ‘nice’ and wasn’t big on ‘help’ either. But after attending AA meetings and rehab in her mid-forties, she graduated from Saint Martins in textiles and fashion, made a return to acting and, feted by superfans like Kate Moss, to the catwalk. “She found her true self,” says Moss. Pallenberg even found herself portraying the Queen in Harmony Korine’s 2007 movie Mister Lonely, both convincingly and subversively.
“What I loved about Anita,” Richards concludes, “was how she operated. [There was] almost an innocence about it even in its most Machiavellian form!”
The final word, of course, is Anita’s. “Keith’s no angel. But neither am I.”
Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg, directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, is released by Dogwoof in UK and Irish cinemas on May 17. anita.film
“The Stones were bourgeois by comparison to Anita!” PRINCE STASH
THE NUMEROUS album tributes to the late Lou Reed have often taken The Velvet Underground route. Not for Bill Bentley, the Texas-based writer, one-time Sterling Morrison bandmate, Reed’s US publicist from 1988 to 2004 and producer of tributes to Roky Erickson, Skip Spence and Doug Sahm. Eleven of the 12 covers he’s assembled on are devoted to the great man’s solo years. “I was missing not having Lou in my life,” Bentley explains. “I missed his spirit. So, I started this record.”
Those paying tribute include Rickie Lee Jones, Joan Jett, Lucinda Williams, Rosanne Cash, The Afghan Whigs, Bobby Rush, Angel Olsen and – the last to be asked – Keith Richards, who donates a grizzled I’m Waiting For The Man, the sole VU cover. “You don’t say no to Keith!” says Bentley. “But it’s fitting, because they were contemporaries back in the day.”
The first to commit was Jones, turning Walk On The Wild Side into a sensual barfly vamp. “I didn’t think anyone could cover Walk On The Wild Side, but Rickie took it to another place,” says Bentley. “That’s what you want in a cover. Lucinda, too, blew my mind with her originality.”
Lucinda Williams, who swings, countr ystyle, through Legendar y Hearts, only met Reed once, backstage at one of his LA shows. “I was working up a version of [VU classic] Pale Blue Eyes at the time,” she says. “Lou wrote the chords down for me, which was a sweet moment.” Williams later invited Reed to join her on-stage in New York. “Lou couldn’t make it, but he said we would have sung Legendar y Hearts together, and I never forgot that.”
Of all the voices paying tribute, Rufus Wainwright – who breathes new life into Perfect Day – knew Reed best. After Reed appeared at 2008’s Wainwright-McGarrigle family Christmas shindig, the pair became close. “Lou could be a little cold, and ornery,” Wainwright reflects, “but the tr uth is, if he admired you and wanted you in his life, you were in for life.” Perfect
Day, he contends, “is Lou’s
“Perfect Day… it’s Lou’s Somewhere Over The Rainbow!” RUFUS WAINWRIGHT
most lyrical song – it’s his Somewhere Over The Rainbow!”
Bentley occasionally offered suggestions, such as pairing soul man Bobby Rush and Sally Can’t Dance, “because of its funky rhythm. Lou loved his soul and R&B, and if I hadn’t found someone from that world, he would have haunted me!” Bentley thinks Reed “would have been OK” with a tribute album, but wasn’t a fan of the format. When Bentley asked Reed to cover a Roky Erickson song, “He said, ‘Billy, I won’t, but you can have one of my songs to put on it.’ He just followed his own light. Even if it meant losing his audience. He’d tell me, ‘Don’t let anyone tell you what you can’t do.’”
Bentley is not finished yet either. He heard that Bob Dylan liked Reed’s Doin’ The Things That We Want To, but attempts to include him failed; David Byrne was game but ran out of time; and he’s desperate to include Reed’s wife Laurie Anderson. “That’s all for Volume Two,” Bentley promises.
The Power Of The Heart: A Tribute To Lou Reed is released by Light In The Attic on April 20.