The cocaine and cognac breakfast that fueled Exile on Main St.

During the chaotic 1971 sessions for Exile on Main St. at Keith Richards’s rented villa in the South of France, the band’s daily routine was famously lubricated by a “breakfast” of cocaine and cognac. Richards later described how he’d wake up, pour himself a tall glass of cognac, and line up a few rails of coke just to get the motor running. Guitarist Mick Taylor recalled that Keith would start the day with a bottle of Remy Martin and a mirror, and that was considered normal.

The story captures the legendary excess of those sessions—a loose, round-the-clock party where recording started whenever anyone was coherent enough to play. The hedonism seeped into the album’s sound: raw, slurred, and unnervingly alive. Richards has since admitted it was “a ridiculous way to live,” but he’s never denied that it helped produce some of the band’s grittiest music.