Keith Richards, Corsican drug dealers and the Rolling Stones' stolen guitar

Telegraph

3 days ago

It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a guitar case. A 1959 Gibson Les Paul guitar that former Rolling Stone guitarist Mick Taylor claims was once his has turned up at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art some 54 years after it may have been stolen from a villa in the South of France.
The vintage guitar has a distinctive orange-an-gold 'sunburst' maple face and is often referred to in guitar circles as the 'Keithburst', as it was once also owned by fellow Stone Keith Richards. The instrument forms part of a collection of 500 classic guitars recently gifted to the Manhattan museum by billionaire collector Dirk Ziff, who bought the guitar in 2016.
But Taylor, 76, has expressed surprise that the Les Paul has ended up on Fifth Avenue, as he hasn't seen it since it went missing. Taylor has said that he bought the guitar in 1968 from a Rolling Stones road manager prior to joining the band. According to some accounts, the guitar was then one of between eight and 11 instruments half-inched by sticky fingered burglars from Villa Nellcôte on the Côte d'Azur while the Stones were recording their sprawling Exile on Main St album in 1971. 'There are numerous photos of Mick Taylor playing this Les Paul, as it was his main guitar until it disappeared,' his manager, Marlies Damming, told Page Six.
However, the Met has refuted that the Les Paul ever belonged to Taylor. 'The guitar has a long and well-documented history of ownership,' a Met spokesperson tells me. The museum's own research claims that Richards bought the guitar some time prior to August 1964 – he played it on The Ed Sullivan Show that year – and owned it until 1971, after which it passed on to owners who were not Taylor. The Met also doubts that the guitar was ever at Nellcôte.
Further, the Met says that that far from being 'long lost', the guitar has a long public history. It featured in a US 2019 exhibition called Play It Loud and appeared in a 2013 book about the Rolling Stones' equipment.
The twisted tale of the Stones' 'pinched' Gibson is a head-scratcher, indeed. Instruments owned by the famous musicians have often been stolen. In 1972 Paul McCartney had his beloved Höfner bass guitar taken from a van in Notting Hill. And Eric Clapton's Les Paul, nicknamed Beano, went missing from a church hall practice room in 1996. But this affair is far less clear-cut. And it pitches one of the world's most venerable arts institutions against one of rock's finest guitarists.
Key to the riddle is the burglary that took place in France in the autumn of 1971. That instruments were stolen from Nellcôte is not in doubt. But what precisely happened is surrounded by conjecture and haziness, which is unsurprising given the volume of narcotics that were floating around the decadent chateau that year.
An account of the Nellcôte theft in Guitar Player magazine says the instruments were filched 'in broad daylight while the villa's occupants were watching TV'. Tony Sanchez, who worked for Richards over this period, remembers things differently. 'We had two bad burglaries, and in one of them thieves stole Keith's entire collection of guitars – Gibsons, Mustangs, Les Pauls, Hummingbirds were all carried out the front door while we slept,' Sanchez wrote in his scabrous book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, adding that Richards 'notified the police and filled in his £22,000 insurance claim the next day'. Some reports have it that bass guitars and a saxophone were also taken. Others say that Corsican drug dealers, angry for not being paid, took them.
Richards, for his part, says the theft happened in October 1971. 'We were burgled and my guitars, a great many of them, were stolen,' he wrote in his 2010 autobiography Life. The guitarist's biographer Victor Bockris wrote in 1992 that Richards's 'entire collection of 11 guitars was stolen' from the villa on October 1, reducing Richards to tears. Bockris claimed that the guitars were insured for $44,000 (around £20,000 then) and that Richards telephoned Ted Newman Jones, the Stones guitar tech, and asked him to replace them.
Note that all these accounts talk of Richards's guitar collection with no mention of Taylor's guitar. Does this mean that Taylor never owned the 1959 Les Paul (as the Met claims)? Or that Taylor did own it but it wasn't actually stolen? Or that he did own it and it was stolen but the theft has always rather lazily been lumped in with Richards's larger missing cache in the retelling? Or that the guitar was never in Nellcôte in the first place?
Evidence suggests that Taylor did own it, despite what the Met says. There's a picture of him playing the guitar with his pre-Stones band, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, at the Gladsaxe Teen Club in Copenhagen in 1968. The guitarist has said that he bought the guitar from Stones road manager Ian Stewart. 'I met Ian Stewart… and I told him I was looking for a Les Paul, because the other one had been stolen. And he said: 'Well, I've got one for sale. Come to the studio and have a look at it.'' A year later, in 1969, Taylor joined the Stones as Brian Jones's replacement.
But was the guitar at Nellcôte? I've seen no proof. I own a fantastic signed book of photographs by Dominique Tarlé of the Stones in Nellcôte that summer. In Tarlé's book there are dozens of beautiful guitars pictured as the Stones record Exile in louche surroundings. But there's no picture of this guitar, which was also known as the Bigsby Burst due to its vibrato arm produced by the Bigsby company. Of course, this doesn't mean that the instrument wasn't there. But researchers at the Met agree with me on this; their findings suggest that it 'does not seem plausible' that the guitar was ever at Nellcôte.
A goldmine for Stones information is the It's Only Rock 'n' Roll website, or iorr.org. The folk who run the site are Stones sleuths extraordinaire. And according to posts on IORR, a definitive list of guitars stolen in France has never been agreed upon. Some say the Keithburst was one of them, others not. One IORR fan believes the guitar may have actually stolen during the Stones' brief March 1971 tour of England and Scotland, just before they quit Britain and went to France as tax exiles in April 1971.
The Met's doubts that the guitar was ever in France are based on an extensive chain of provenance it has unearthed. According to the museum, a guitarist called Cosmo Verrico from British rock band Heavy Metal Kids acquired the guitar in 1971 from a record producer called Adrian Miller, who died in 2006. It is not known how Miller came into possession of the guitar. But the museum has a granular level of detail. Verrico's deal with Miller involved £125 cash and part-exchange for another guitar that was sourced for Verrico by a chap called Sid Bishop on Denmark Street in London. The museum says that Bishop has confirmed the timing of the sale.
I tried to track down Verrico to confirm this, to no avail. Could Miller have somehow indirectly received the guitar from the thieves in France or, indeed, thieves in England as per the IORR theory? Was a fence involved? We'll likely never know.
The post-1971 chain of ownership then goes like this, according to the Met. In 1974, Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden bought the guitar from Verrico for £400, before selling it on in the same year to Mike Jopp, from Brighton band Affinity, for £450. Jopp sold it to a memorabilia company in New York in 2003, and the guitar then appeared for auction at Christie's in New York in 2004 but was unsold. The next owner was a Swedish man called Peter Svensson, in 2006, before Dirk Ziff acquired it in 2016. Ziff then donated it to the museum this year.
Hmm. An alarm bell rang for me as soon as I read this. I knew Marsden, who died in 2023, and as well as being one of the nicest men in rock, he was also an utter guitar aficionado. I doubt that he'd have flipped a guitar of that quality for £50 in the same year that he bought it. Marsden played his first professional gig in 1972, with UFO, before joining Wild Turkey and Cozy Powell's Hammer. In other words, his career was taking off just as he'd bought the guitar. Why sell it? I consulted his autobiography, the appropriately-titled Where's My Guitar? Well, well, well. Marsden did indeed buy a 1959 Gibson Les Paul Burst in 1974.
He bought it off a geezer in the Marquee club in London, having haggled him down from £600 and offering two of his own guitars in exchange. But Marsden never sold it on. In the book he refers to it as 'my treasured' guitar. It came to be known as 'The Beast' and stayed with Marsden throughout his career. He wrote and recorded Whitesnake's Here I Go Again on it. It's understood that the guitar has remained with his family. Is this, then, the final resting place of Taylor's long-lost guitar rather than the Met?
Er, no. Alas, Marsden's Beast isn't the Taylor guitar. Comparing and contrasting photos of The Beast with the Keithburst shows that they are two different instruments (Marsden's doesn't have the Bigsby vibrato arm). Which means that, if the Met is correct, then Marsden bought two 1959 Gibson Les Paul Burst guitars in 1974. This seems highly unlikely. However, according to an online Les Paul forum, it's true. What are the chances? Affinity's Jopp told a guitar expert called Dave Brewis that Marsden only owned the Taylor guitar for about a week in 1974, having bought it from Verrico, before selling it on to him. Which suggests that the Met's chain of ownership is correct all along.
All of which means, frankly, that we're none the wiser about whether the Met's Les Paul was stolen from Taylor 54 years ago or not. There's one way to sort this out. Let Taylor inspect the guitar, as his management say he has requested, and ask him for some – any – kind of proof of ownership or evidence that it was once at Nellcôte. The Met, meanwhile, says it has not heard from Taylor.
And so, one of the great guitar mysteries continues. Last year, Paul McCartney was reunited with his long-lost Höfner bass after it was found in the attic of a terraced house on England's south coast. Eric Clapton, meanwhile, has never found Beano. Whether Taylor will be reunited with his guitar, if indeed it ever was his, will keep the Stones sleuths guessing for a while yet.