The Stones and the true story of Exile on Main St
It's nearly 40 years
since the Rolling Stones fled to the French Riviera and recorded their
masterpiece, Exile on Main St. On the eve of its relaunch, Sean O'Hagan
marvels that the album was made at all…
The Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons and Anita
Pallenberg at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971. One of a series of
evocative shots taken by photographer Dominique Tarle. Photograph:
Dominique Tarle
There is a great moment in Stones in Exile, a new
documentary about the making of Exile on Main St in 1971, when
Keith Richards defines the essential difference in temperament between
Mick Jagger and himself.
"Mick needs to know what he's going to do
tomorrow," says Richards, his voice slurring into a laugh. "Me, I'm
just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around. Mick's rock,
I'm roll."
On Exile on Main St, though, Jagger, for once,
rolled with Richards. So, too, did everyone else involved, from Jimmy
Miller, the producer, to Marshall Chess, the young Atlantic Records
executive, to the rest of the group and their extended retinue of
session players, studio technicians and hangers-on.
Once the
decision had been made to record the album in the basement of Villa
Nellcôte, Richards's rented house in the south of France, the working
schedule was dictated by the irregular hours kept by the group's wayward
guitarist, who also had a singularly dogged approach to composing
songs.
"A lot of Exile was done how Keith works,"
confirms Charlie Watts in the documentary, "which is, play it 20 times,
marinade, play it another 20 times. He knows what he likes, but he's
very loose." Without a trace of irony, Watts adds, "Keith's a very
bohemian and eccentric person, he really is."
Exile on Main St
is so emphatically stamped with Keith Richards's rock'n'roll signature
that it could just as easily have been called "Torn and Frayed" after
one of the two gloriously ragged songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The
title alone sums up his gypsy demeanour, his elegantly wasted look. Or
they could simply have called it "Happy", after another track that was
actually recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning –
or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake,
saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to
play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says
Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup".
Perhaps
because he was not the controlling presence on Exile on Main St,
which has often been voted the greatest rock'n'roll record ever by
music critics, it is not necessarily one of Mick Jagger's favourite
Rolling Stones albums. He once described it as sounding "lousy" with "no
concerted effort of intention", adding "at the time, Jimmy Miller was
not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself,
because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies."
Jagger
may have been miffed that his vocals are sometimes swallowed up in the
soupy mix but he sings with real passion throughout and seems galvanised
by the raw rock'n'roll the group are making. If anyone should need a
reminder that no one before or since has sounded as louche and limber,
so raggedly majestic, they should watch the Stones playing "Loving Cup"
live on their subsequent American tour. Footage of that performance is a
highlight of the documentary, produced by the Oscar -winning film-maker
John Battsek, which will be premiered at the Cannes film festival
before screening on the BBC later in May.
Despite his former
reservations, Jagger has gotten behind the planned reissue of the album,
too, which comes in a deluxe package containing 10 previously unheard
bonus tracks, some of which are alternative takes of familiar songs
while others sound suspiciously like they have only recently had new
vocals added. No one in the Stones' camp is coming clean as to whether
this is the case or not.
For the purists among us, though, the
original version of Exile on Main St, in all its ragged,
full-on, rock'n'roll swagger, is all we need. "This is just a tree of
life," said Tom Waits, when he selected it as one of his all-time
favourite records a few years back. "This record is a watering hole." On
the documentary, Caleb Followill from Kings of Leon is taken aback to
discover the album was recorded in France. "I literally thought they
were in Memphis, going out every night eating barbecue and partying."
Which is exactly what it sounds like.
The creation of Exile on
Main St, like so many early chapters in the Rolling Stones story, is
shrouded in myth and blurred by conflicting anecdotal evidence. The
American journalist Robert Greenfield, who was present briefly during
the recording, wrote an entire book about — and named after — the album.
Its subtitle is "A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones". The book
paints an often lurid portrait of Richards and his then partner, Anita
Pallenberg. Greenfield places the couple at the centre of a spiral of
sustained hard drug abuse and wilfully amoral behaviour. Among the
rumours he airs, but does not confirm or refute, is the one about
Pallenberg encouraging an employee's young daughter to inject heroin for
the first time. Another has Jagger bedding Pallenberg while Richards
has nodded out on heroin, thus reigniting an affair they were rumoured
to have had while filming Performance under the direction of
Nic Roeg in 1968.
Needless to say, the documentary, which has
Jagger's controlling presence written all over it, does not dwell on
such unsavoury and unsubstantiated matters. The French photographer
Dominique Tarle, who chronicled the making of the album in a series of
wonderfully evocative shots, and who was Greenfield's entrée into the
Stones' milieu, had this to say about the book when I spoke to him in
Paris last week: "I read only eight pages and I really felt sick. First
of all, how can he not write about the music? And all this stuff about a
season in hell with the Rolling Stones? No, no, it was anything but
that. We were all young and it was a time of great freedom and energy
and creativity. For me, it was a kind of rock'n'roll heaven."
Perhaps,
though, it was both. Tommy Weber, who is described as "a racing driver,
drug runner and adventurer" in the documentary, and as "a fabulous
character straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night"
by Greenfield, was one of Richards's inner circle at Nellcôte. His son,
Jake, now a Hollywood actor, was just eight when he witnessed the
decadence around the Rolling Stones first-hand. In Stones in Exile,
he says, "There was cocaine, a lot of joints. If you're living a
decadent life, there is always darkness there. But, at this point, this
was the moment of grace. This was before the darkness, the sunrise
before the sunset."
Bobby Keys, as ever, is more blunt. "Hell,
yeah, there was some pot around, there was some whiskey bottles around,
there was scantily clad women. Hell, it was rock'n'roll!"
Others
experienced more mundane but no less pressing problems. Both Charlie
Watts and Bill Wyman missed home and some of their own creature
comforts. "I hated leaving England," Wyman reminisces. "You had to
import Bird's custard, Branston pickle and piccalilli... you had to buy
PG Tips and then deal with the French milk."
The Rolling Stones
pitched up in the south of France in the spring of 1971 as reluctant tax
exiles fleeing the Labour government's punitive 93% tax on high
earners. The group had just extricated themselves, at some cost, from a
misguided management deal with the infamous Allen Klein, who was still
claiming he owned their publishing rights. In the public eye, though,
the Stones were still the rock group that most defined the outlaw
rock'n'roll lifestyle, their bad reputation built on an already
colourful past that included high-profile drug busts, the death by
drowning of Brian Jones, one of their founding members, the near death
by overdose of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's former girlfriend, and
the murder of a fan by Hell's Angels, who had been hired by the group's
management to provide security at 1969's ill-fated Altamont festival.
Altamont
was viewed by many contemporary observers as the symbolic death of the
60s dream of a burgeoning counterculture; by others as an inevitable
result of the Stones' hubris and arrogance. Through it all, though, the
Stones' music had echoed their turbulent lifestyle and soundtracked the
tumultuous times, from the upfront sexual bravado of "(I Can't Get No)
Satisfaction" in 1965, through the apocalyptic swirl of "Gimme Shelter"
in 1969, to the swagger of "Brown Sugar" in 1971.
Sticky
Fingers, the group's ninth album, nestled at the top of the British
and US pop charts as the Stones, their families and extended entourage
decamped to France to begin their exile. Richards sensed that the reason
for their flight from Britain was not just to do with their dire
financial predicament.
"There was a feeling you were being edged
out of your own country by the British government," he remembers. "They
couldn't ignore that we were a force to be reckoned with."
Having
searched the coastline and hills around the town of
Villefranche-sur-Mer for a suitable recording space, the Stones then
opted to start working in the cavernous, multi-roomed basement of
Nellcôte, with their mobile recording studio parked outside in the
driveway. The house had once been occupied by the Nazis, and in a recent
interview Richards describes working there as "like trying to make a
record in the Führerbunker. It was that sort of feeling… very Germanic
down there – swastikas on the staircase… Upstairs, it was fantastic.
Like Versailles. But down there… it was Dante's Inferno."
In
the often intense heat of the dank basement, the group struggled to get
started. Musicians set up their instruments in adjoining rooms, with
Bill Wyman having to play his bass in one space while his amplifiers
stood in a hallway. Initially, they were hampered by guitars going out
of tune due to the humidity. Basic communication, too, was a problem,
with Jimmy Miller continually having to run from the mobile studio to
the basement to deliver his instructions.
Then, a few weeks in,
Mick Jagger announced that he was going to marry Bianca Pérez Morena de
Macias, a Nicaraguan-born model, in nearby St Tropez. The international
press and a clutch of the world's most famous pop stars jetted in for
the very public wedding ceremony. As Jagger and his bride departed on
honeymoon, the celebrations continued for a week at Villa Nellcôte. A
week after they stopped, Gram Parsons, the country-rock singer who had
bonded with Richards in Los Angeles a few years before over their shared
love for Merle Haggard and heroin, arrived with his wife, Gretchen. The
couple stayed for a month before they were diplomatically asked to
leave by a Stones minion. "The atmosphere kept changing but the party
kept going," says Tarle, laughing.
Interestingly, the Stones
in Exile documentary does not even mention Parsons, whose closeness
to Richards rattled the possessive Jagger. "Keith and Gram were
intimate like brothers," says Tarle, "especially musically. The idea was
floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the
newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid
because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to
promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for
the Rolling Stones. So, yes, there was tension. You could feel it and I
captured it on Mick's face in some of my pictures."
The music the
Stones made in Nellcôte reflected those tensions, as well as the sense
of exile and uncertainty that hung heavily over the group, and the
continuing encroachment of heroin on the lives of Richards and
Pallenberg, and on the lives of some of those who entered their orbit.
Speaking recently, Richards protested that he was not the only drug user
in the group. "At the time, Mick was taking everything. Charlie was
hitting the brandy like a motherfucker. The least of our concerns was
what we ingested. These sorts of questions [about drugs] are predicated
on what came a few years later when… I would play the game. 'Oh, you
want that Keith Richards? I'll give you the baddest mother you've ever
seen.'"
By October, though, heroin use seems to have been a
constant in the lives of Richards and Pallenberg. "I walked into the
living room one day and this guy had a big bag of smack," Pallenberg
remembers, "and everything just disintegrated." Perhaps it was telling
that when Richards bought himself a speedboat, he called it Mandrax.
Heroin
brought with it the usual problems of supply and demand, and the usual
retinue of shady characters and criminals, both local and from nearby
Marseille. Villa Nellcôte was such an open house that, one day in
September, burglars walked out of the front gate with nine of Richards's
guitars, Bobby Keys's saxophone and Bill Wyman's bass in broad daylight
while the occupants were watching television in the living room.
"That's how loose and stupid it was out there," says Wyman. The crime
was reputedly carried out by dealers from Marseille who were owed money
by Richards. The nocturnal goings-on at Nellcôte were also starting to
attract the attention of the local populace and the increasingly
suspicious police force. "The music was so loud, really, really loud,"
Pallenberg remembers. "Sometimes I went to Villefranche during the day
and you could hear the music there. And it went on all night."
Whatever
the truth of the rumour about Pallenberg encouraging the teenage
daughter of the resident chef to try heroin, the police eventually
raided Nellcôte and, in 1973, both she and Richards were charged with
possession of heroin and intent to traffic. The resulting guilty verdict
meant that Richards was banned from entering France for two years, and
thus the Stones could not play concerts there.
As summer turned to
autumn, people started drifting away from Nellcôte and, in November
1971, Richards and Pallenberg followed suit. The album was eventually
finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary,
Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute,
including the album's first single, "Tumbling Dice", which was composed
"after I sat down with the housekeeper and talked about gambling". The
words to another gambling song, the frenetic "Casino Boogie", were
created by Jagger and Richards in the cut-up mode made famous by William
Burroughs, which gives a lie to the notion that the line about "kissing
cunt in Cannes" refers to an episode in Jagger's notoriously
promiscuous sex life.
Jagger also denied recently that "Soul
Survivor" was about his relationship with Keith Richards during the
making of Exile. On it, he sings the line, "You're gonna be the
death of me".
In places, Exile on Main St does indeed
sound, in the best possible way, like an album made by a bunch of drunks
and junkies who were somehow firing on all engines. Jim Price and Bobby
Keys's horns are an integral part of the dirty sound, as is Nicky
Hopkins's rolling piano. Songs such as the galloping opener, "Rocks
Off", surely about the effects of a heroin hit, and "All Down the Line"
are messily powerful, with vocals fading in and out of focus and the
group kicking up a storm underneath. "Tumbling Dice" features one of the
greatest opening gear changes in rock'n'roll and a swagger that carries
all before it.
In one way, the double album, housed in Robert
Frank's contact sheet-style cover, is Keith Richards's swan song of
sorts, a final blast of rock'n'roll energy before he descended into a
protracted heroin addiction that would often make him seem – and sound –
disconnected from the rest of the group during live shows. After Exile,
Jagger carried the weight and, despite some great moments on subsequent
albums including Goat's Head Soup and Black and Blue,
the Stones would never sound so sexy, so raucous and abandoned, so
low-down and dirty. Neither, though, would anyone else. By the time punk
came and went and indie rock had taken hold, the mix of sexiness and
sassiness that the Stones at their best epitomised had disappeared
entirely from rock music. So had the kind of survival instinct that the
group drew on when the going got tough.
"The Stones really felt
like exiles," Richards says. "It was us against the world now. So, fuck
you! That was the attitude." You can still hear it, loud and clear, on
this messy, inchoate, rock'n'roll masterpiece; the Rolling Stones in
excelsis.
Stones in Exile will air on BBC2 on 23 May as
part of the Imagine series
COMING TO A RECORD SHOP NEAR YOU SOON – THE NEWLY
AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE ROLLING STONES' BIBLE
You don't remain one of the music industry's most lucrative
concerns after nearly 50 years in the business by being wasteful and the
Rolling Stones are rarely profligate as far as recorded material is
concerned. So while a quick internet search will reveal the usual array
of bootleg out-takes and alternative versions, thus far, repeated
reissues of the band's back catalogue have rarely offered more than
remastering existing material and adding fancy artwork.
This is
one of the reasons this month's version of 1972's Exile on Main St,
released on 17 May, is news and probably why it was held back from last
year's unremarkable repackaging of their 70s output. Most of the fresh
songs contained among its 10 extra tracks are genuinely unheard,
lost-to-the-mists-of-time rarities.
There's been some tinkering,
though, with Jagger finishing the lyrics and lead vocals to "Following
the River", as well as adding the odd vocal flourish to other tunes.
"Keith put guitar on one or two," Jagger told Rolling Stone
magazine recently, although Richards himself declared: "I really wanted
to leave them pretty much as they were. I didn't want to interfere with
the Bible."
The impressively slouchy blues of "Plundered my Soul"
has already been aired, gaining a limited release last weekend in
support of international Record Store Day. "Good Time Women" is an
excellent early incarnation of "Tumbling Dice" that has been knocking
about online for a while, albeit in less polished form.
Like much
of Exile, it dates from the sessions for 1971's Sticky
Fingers, although another new track "I'm Not Signifying" originates
from the notoriously drug-addled sessions at Nellcôte in the south of
France.
There's a further treat included in the £99.99 deluxe box
set version, something that adds to the sense that the Exile
reissue is a sign that the Stones may be catching up with their peers
and beginning to direct their own mythology more firmly, in the manner
of, say, Bob Dylan with his recent flurry of official bootlegs and
documentaries.
Among the commemorative hardback book and postcards
is 10 minutes of footage from the infamous Cocksucker Blues documentary,
shot on the band's particularly debauched 1972 US tour in support of Exile.
Inevitably, the edit features Keith hurling a television off a hotel
balcony and Mick ordering room service, rather than the infamous sex and
drugs scenes that prompted the band to halt the film's full release.
(The entire 93-minute version can still only be shown in the presence of
the now 85-year-old director Robert Frank.)
Frank's film is named
after another lost Stones track, their final single for Decca, rejected
by the label because of its title. It made one brief appearance on a
German compilation and hasn't been heard since. Apart from on the web,
of course.
