exile on main street

The Rolling Stones muddled through addiction and self-imposed exile to create the raw and raucous country, blues, soul, and gospel ruminations of this sprawling, murky masterpiece. 'Exile on Main Street' was produced with Jimmy Miller doing overdubs on some leftover tracks from earlier sessions in London and Mick Jagger's Stargroves country house and recording impromptu sessions in the basement at the French villa Keith Richards had rented at Nellcôte, in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice utilizing the band's mobile recording studio.  The sessions took place over several months while a rotating cast of characters came to visit, take drugs, and occasionally take part in the proceedings.  In addition to the regular band members of 
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts; the album includes contributions from Gram Parsons, Nicky Hopkins, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, Ian Stewart, Jimmy Miller, Bill Plummer, Billy Preston,  Al Perkins, Richard Washington, Joe Green, Jerry Kirkland,  Mac Rebennack, Shirley Goodman, Tami Lynn, Kathi McDonald, Clydie King, and Vanetta Fields.

Richards:  "The vibe was very good. It was a long, hot summer. Not recording in a studio was unique for us, as it was for anybody at the time. Once things got going, it had its own rhythm. With every album you make you go in with that feeling. But maybe that we really were exiles put some extra bite into it."

Mick Taylor:  "By the time we got around to making 'Exile on Main Street', it was a bit too loose and spontaneous. It took us ages to make that record. But that’s the record that everybody – well, not everybody – but that’s the Stones album that everybody seems to highlight as being one of their best. "

Charlie Watts: "The recording at Nellcôte is what I really remember about 'Exile On Main Street', because the other tracks on the album were off-cuts, which we took down there and overdubbed. The drums were recorded down in the wine cellar. I had just moved to France and I used to have to drive from where I lived, through Nïmes and Aix-en-Provence to where Keith was. In those days they didn't have the autoroute; you can do the journey in four hours or so now, but in those days it was a six-and-a-half or seven-hour drive along these little raods. I couldn't do it every day, playing and then going home, so I used to have to live at Keith's but he was always upstairs and I'd be out in the day."

Taylor: "Sometimes when the power would go, we’d all be sitting by candlelight strumming acoustic guitars."

Richards:  "There were all these little subdivisions in the basement, almost like booths. So what would happen was that, for a certain sound, we'd schlep an amp from one space to another until we found one that had the right sound. Sometimes the guitar cord wasn't long enough! That was in the beginning, anyway. But once we started to work there, my little cubicle became my cubicle, and we didn't change places much. But at first, it was just a matter of exploring this enormous basement, saying, What other sound is hiding 'round the corner? 'Cause you'd have weird echoes going on. Sometimes we wouldn't be able to see each other even, which is very rare for us. We usually like to eyeball one another when we're recording."



Bill Wyman:  "I supposed we had the band there, the WHOLE band there, probably 30%, 40% of the time. The rest of the time it's just bits. Bobby, me and Charlie, and Mick hadn't come, Mick Taylor didn't come. And me, Charlie and Keith, so we'd work on something. Next day, Keith wouldn't come because Mick wasn't there, so then Mick'd come and he'd see Keith wasn't there, so next day HE wouldn't come. And sometimes we'd all get there to do a session and Keith wouldn't even come, he was upstairs sleeping. Charlie had come five hours, you know, me and Mick Taylor had come two hours, Mick had come an hour, and Keith's upstairs, he didn't come down to the session. And it was like madness."

Watts:   “They had very large cellars. We used to just move from one place to another with the drums...Sometimes you’ll all go home at four in the morning, and Keith will suddenly want to do something.” 

Richards: "A lot of those tracks came about with only two or three guys around, as we waited for everyone to show. It would be just me and Mick, or me and Charlie. An idea would start and you worked on it. It was haphazard. The first few weeks especially, no one quite knew their asses from their assholes. But once we got into the swing of things, it was like a bunker down there, and a lot of hard work got done."

Wyman:  "There was this stairway that came down from upstairs, and it turned - at the bottom of the stairwell it turned and there was a room. It was probably nine foot square, maybe ten. That was where we recorded. And it used to get so hot in there that the condensation used to run down the walls and all that. My bass amp used to be under the bloody stairs, out round there. The horn players used to be down the corridor, in the kitchen, when they were doing things, or vocals. And it was all, like, spread, we couldn't see the engineer and he couldn't see us - Andy Johns, and Jim Miller the producer, they couldn't see us... And it was just like an oven. Add it was not very conducive to making music really. And it's a bloody miracle we did."

Taylor:  When you try and make a record in somebody’s house, albeit in the basement of their house, and you’ve got people flying in from all over the world to have a holiday and, you know, everybody’s holiday time and your work time and Keith’s own personal, domestic life all get sort of mixed into one surrealistic portrait, don’t they? I mean, Exile on Main St. is a little bit like the artwork, really.  A bit like a circus. A bit freaky, you know? But it was just the band being themselves and trying to write some songs and, more often than not, coming up with a great song like, for example, “Shine a Light”… and some of the other ones. And then, coming up with – not all the time – some fairly ordinary songs, like “Ventilator Blues.” I mean, it was the Stones making blues music their own music.

Jagger: "It took a while to pull the place together. Even a studio that’s brilliant is like that. It takes a while to make it work. There were a lot of teething problems with the studio. We had some experience doing that already. It was a few different rooms. It wasn’t perfect acoustically. We had to work at getting a really good drum sound, which is always the most difficult thing. An acoustic instrument only, that is always the challenge in these places. You want to get a great drum sound, and that was difficult. There were a lot of breakdowns of power. Once it got going. You get used to these surroundings. I think in the end it wasn’t that difficult."

Richards:   "I didn’t mind living in the south of France, actually. But it was more of a collective feeling. “Hey, none of us are going home tonight.” That attitude  pervaded the mood, and made us get down to work...There were very late nights, for sure. I heard loads of stories too, but that was upstairs, baby, because where I was I didn’t see much debauchery. Yeah, it’s true: There was a continual party going on in the house. But I couldn’t write songs, make a record and debauch at the same time, man."



Jagger:  "We were separate from all that down in the basement. We were cut off from the rest of the house, and people didn’t come down and do a lot of gawking. There wasn’t a peanut gallery, like a regular studio where you could stand in the control room behind glass. There was nowhere to watch from. Once we went to the basement, we were working. They didn’t bother us in the basement much. People get very bored watching people record."

Richards: "The record company wanted a single album, but the damn thing had a life of its own. We probably could’ve made it a triple. We tried to make a single, but it became impossible, like cutting babies in half."

Jagger: "It is a great record. What’s interesting about it is that it has so many sides to it, so many different musical styles, very bluesy, and it has soul, gospel, and the other quirky little bits that perhaps you wouldn’t have put on a record with only 12 songs. You would’ve thrown out stuff maybe like “Just Wanna See his Face,” but on a more sprawling record like this you could afford to let those things go. Which perhaps explain why it wasn’t immediately reviewed as stunningly wonderful. But after a while people get to appreciate the breadth of it."

'Exile on Main Street' went to number one in the UK and the US and marks the end of the band's classic period.  When the album came out, Jagger said "This new album is fucking mad. There's so many different tracks. It's very rock & roll, you know. I didn't want it to be like that. I'm the more experimental person in the group, you see I like to experiment. Not go over the same thing over and over. Since I've left England, I've had this thing I've wanted to do. I'm not against rock & roll, but I really want to experiment. The new album's very rock & roll and it's good. I mean, I'm very bored with rock & roll. The revival. Everyone knows what their roots are, but you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky too."










http://www.rollingstones.com/









"Happy"



"Tumbling Dice"



"Sweet Virginia"






'Exile On Main Street'

full album:

All songs written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, except where noted.

Side one
1. "Rocks Off" 4:31
2. "Rip This Joint" 2:22
3. "Shake Your Hips" Slim Harpo 2:59
4. "Casino Boogie" 3:33
5. "Tumbling Dice" 3:45

Side two
6. "Sweet Virginia" 4:27
7. "Torn and Frayed" 4:17
8. "Sweet Black Angel" 2:54
9. "Loving Cup" 4:25

Side three
10. "Happy" 3:04
11. "Turd on the Run" 2:36
12. "Ventilator Blues" Jagger, Richards, Mick Taylor 3:24
13. "I Just Want to See His Face" 2:52
14. "Let It Loose" 5:16

Side four
15. "All Down the Line" 3:49
16. "Stop Breaking Down" Robert Johnson 4:34
17. "Shine a Light" 4:14

18. "Soul Survivor" 3:49



















live 1972






All songs that have been played during the American 1972 Tour (Stones Touring Party):


1. 0:00 Intro Keith Richards; 
2. 0:18 Brown Sugar; 
3. 3:42 Bitch; 
4. 8:10 Rocks Off; 
5. 11:55 Gimme Shelter; 
6. 16:58 Dead Flowers; 
7. 20:50 Sweet Black Angel; 
8. 23:55 Happy; 
9. 26:46 Honky Tonk Women; 
10. 29:43 Tumbling Dice; 
11. 34:15 Loving Cup; 
12. 38:42 Torn and Frayed; 
13. 43:34 Ventilator Blues; 
14. 46:54 Love In Vain; 
15. 52:50 Sweet Virginia; 
16. 57:30 You Can't Always Get What You Want; 
17. 1:05:00 All Down The Line; 
18. 1:08:58 Midnight Rambler; 
19. 1:21:10 Band Introduction; 
20. 1:21:59 Bye Bye Johnny; 
21. 1:25:06 Don't Lie To Me; 
22. 1:27:25 Rip This Joint; 
23. 1:29:38 Jumpin' Jack Flash; 
24. 1:33:11 Street Fighting Man; 
25. 1:37:38 Uptight Satisfaction