Holiday reading reveals a Rolling Stones Merc mystery
Blue Lena his well loved S3 Flying Spur is very fondly recalled as a great car for ‘fast night driving’. It had a secret compartment for drug stashing (drugs figure a lot in the book as you might guess and if you are considering taking them up as a serious hobby a quick flick through it might put you off) and it is important in Keith’s life not least for the fact that its back seat was the spot he and future long-term partner Anita Pallenberg, on drive to Morocco, first had a coming together.
Must have been quite a trip that because Keith tells how at one point the poor Bentley got stoned by a mob and he ended up in front of a Moroccan judge. At the time Anita was still with Brian Jones who, the way Keith tells it was a major pain in the bum. He was also very short and needed to sit on a cushion to see over the steering wheel of his Humber Super Snipe.
The famous late-night meeting with the scenery on the way back from a gig at Knebworth sometime in the 1970s is written of, but what damage the car sustained is not related; only that his son – who was in the car Bentley at the time – left a bloody hand print on the dashboard.
One mystery is the Mercedes convertible Keith talks about rolling sometime in the late '60s. Apparently he lost control when all the power to the brakes and steering disappeared, which, if you think about it, must mean it was a 300 W111 cabriolet although I'm not certain brakes and steering ran off the same circuit as they did on the 600. In any case Mr Richards insists the car was built in 1947 'probably out of scrap panzers'. Anyone got any ideas what it was?