(A reminder: four people died, one of whom was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel on camera and just feet from the stage.) Mick Taylor, the 23-year-old guitarist who replaced Brian Jones after the original Stone was found dead, floating in his London swimming pool, and who would leave the band bearing evidence of lingering psychic trauma acquired at least partly at Nellcote - once explained the formulating theory: “All (Keith) had to do was fall out of his bed, roll downstairs, and voilà, he was at work.”
#THE ROLLING STONES EXILE ON MAIN ST FREE#
But so apparently did the idea to have the Hells Angels provide some ‘security’ at the free concert a couple of years earlier at Altamont, California, and most remember how that turned out. After a certain scouring of the region had turned up nothing suitable for recording purposes, Richards made the suggestion: The villa was built over a labyrinth of (no doubt Gestapo-ideal) basements, so why not make the record there? Writes Greenfield in you-are-there present-tense: “Since Keith has already proven there is no knowing when, or if, he will ever arrive at any session on time, and getting him from one place to another, most especially when he has other things on his mind, can be a nightmare of major proportions, how better to solve this problem than by making his home into the Stones’ new recording studio?” The Rolling Stones’ guitarist and notoriously determined oblivion-seeker had -while tightroping between heroin dependencies-found a tax haven not only in the South of France, but in an isolated 19th century villa (once, as it was subsequently determined commandeered by Nazis during the Second World War) called Nellcote. Keith Richards, as unlikely a solution-man as humankind has ever evolved, nevertheless offered one. What can a poor boy do? Especially a freshly-exiled group of poor boys not famous for their adherence to schedules, structure or game-plan teamwork? But to tour they needed an album, and to record an album they needed a place to record.
After establishing their own record label and freeing themselves from the allegedly sticky-fingered management practices of Allen Klein, the Stones needed to get out and do what they not only did best, but more lucratively than any other act on the planet: tour.
#THE ROLLING STONES EXILE ON MAIN ST SERIES#
Following the release of Sticky Fingers in 1971, they were at both their commercial and creative peak, but a series of legal, managerial and personnel imbroglios had left the band, not unaccustomed to the lush life, strapped for cash. By 1971, The Rolling Stones had entered a tax bracket that made it fiscally unfeasible for them to remain in Great Britain. In Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With The Rolling Stones, his book-length account of the madness attending to the album’s production - a tale involving Corsican drug traffickers, assaults with deadly weapons, multiple vehicular misadventure, Caligulan sexual promiscuity and enough narcotic ingestion to send even the reader into rehab - Robert Greenfield suggests that no single factor accounts for the singular accidental greatness of The Rolling Stones’ only four-sided studio album than the fact that it was recorded in Keith Richards’ basement. A perfect album, that is, touched by some mystical alchemy of grace, grit and sheer cosmic fluke. It’s the one I’d take to that desert island equipped with a sound system, and the one that seems to live up to every ideal of what rock music was, is, or ought to be. There is no record I’ve owned in more formats – two vinyl versions, one cassette, and two (soon to be three) CD incarnations - and there’s nothing I’ve listened to more often or with more undiminishing, inexhaustible pleasure. Possibly the best evidence that the Stones’ self-designated “world’s greatest rock and roll band” brand is a simple statement of hard fact, and an album so good it begs forgiveness of everything else this maddeningly inconsistent, incomparably arrogant and at times, insufferably past-prime boomer institution has ever done, or not done since.
Insinuating, addictive and bloodstream-level propulsive.
It doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be.īut it’s electrifying. At times you wonder if you’re listening to jams caught by an unattended microphone. There are traces of blues, country, R&B and jukebox-era rock ’n’ roll. It veers in tone and influence from pre-punk assault to gospel-sanctified glory. Exile on Main St., the double album released in May 1972 by The Rolling Stones-to be re-released next week in several variously-priced “deluxe” editions-and which has since become enshrined as one of the key rock albums ever recorded, is a bit of a mess. I’m being supercritical, I know, but the record lacks a little focus.” “I think Exile lacked a bit of definition.