The Rolling Stones return to Exile
In 1971, the Stones decamped to France as tax exiles. The result? One heck of a house party and their greatest LP. Paul Sexton hears the inside story of the reissued Exile on Main St from Mick, Keith and Charlie
Torn and frayed: Jagger and Richards at Nellcote villa in the summer of 1971
May 9, 2010
Paul Sexton
Most of us, if we were given some random reminder of a personal, far-off temps perdu, would wax nostalgic about the loss of innocence, love, youth or hair. Keith Richards is not most of us. Reflecting on the making of Exile on Main St, the newly reissued album that has come to represent the Rolling Stones at their bacchanalian pinnacle in the early 1970s, the unrepentant buccaneer is telling me how odd it is to be reliving his twenties. “It is a bit weird,” he says. Then he adds, with that familiar, conspiratorial smile: “I feel like taking up the stuff again.”
Exile, the rambling, rocking, substance-soaked double album made primarily when the Stones decamped to Nellcôte, Richards’s villa in the south of France, is back. Thus, the record that confirmed them as rock’s first tax exiles is passed down to the latest generation to observe the band’s triumph over the purely shambolic circumstances in which it was created.
Now here’s Mick Jagger, in what, for him, is an almost unheard-of retrospective mood. “Everyone’s life was full of hangers-on,” he says, more like a sociological observer of the era than its most famous rock god. “Some of them were great fun, they’re all good for a bit, but when you really come down to it, you don’t want them around, because they just delay everything.
“But that was the lifestyle then,” he goes on. “It was just another way of living. There’s a lot of people with a lot more hangers-on now than we ever had. There was lots of drugs and drinking and carrying on. But, you know,” — now with mock indignation — “it’s not a factory. It’s not a mill in the north of England. It’s a rock’n’roll environment.”
As it re-emerges, now with an optional second disc of unreleased collectibles and newly reclaimed scraps from the Nellcôte basement, the story of how Exile on Main St was conceived — and how it was almost stillborn, as the French summer of 1971 turned colder and even those hangers-on and drug-dealers moved out — seems more improbable than ever.
Tellingly, over my 15 years of countless interview encounters with the Rolling Stones, the re-release affords the first extensive opportunity to talk to them about something they’ve sometimes acknowledged only reluctantly: their own history.
Every previous meeting has been about now and next, the latest album, the upcoming tour. That remains admirable, underlining an appetite for discovery that would shame some bands a third of their ages. Not to mention that it trashes the idea that their only motivation has a minimum seven-figure fee next to it.
At these latest long-form meetings with Richards, Jagger and Charlie Watts, however, I’m finally feeling a greater willingness to acknowledge their collective achievements and to realise that the past doesn’t have to be an uncool country. Especially in the case of an 18-track album rightly regarded as a luminous coalition of everything the Stones had represented in their first decade of success and much more besides, returning them to their blues roots and adding toothsome slivers of country, R&B and gospel.
That spontaneous mixture was at the root of Jagger and Richards’s friendship in the first place. “Mick and I, as much as we loved blues and R&B and black music, we were colour-blind,” Richards says. “We both loved Appalachian music, bluegrass, and we didn’t ever really see that much difference, you just found out this guy was white and this guy was black.”
Exile stands as a distillation of all those American influences. “I wouldn’t disagree with that,” Richards says, “although it wasn’t intentional. We always considered ourselves an American band. In fact, we used to be exclusively Chicago. We were very arrogant at the time, making no money, but we were R&B, we were Chicago bluesmen, all of 18 years old and white. That’s the way music speaks to everybody, it can transport you and transform you.”
We’re speaking at his hotel of choice in New York, where he wears one of Ronnie Wood’s latest art creations on a long-sleeved T-shirt. Like Jagger, five months his senior, Richards is 66, and perhaps it’s only the wisps of grey poking out from under his hat that make him seem a touch older than when last I saw him. “Talk about déjŕ vu,” he cackles. “Here I am trying to sell Exile again.”
Jagger, holding court at the Dorchester, is as chatty as I’ve known him, chuckling as he tries to remember the minutiae of the album sessions. “I had to go into all these logs,” he says, ever in the unofficial role of the Stones’ player-manager, mindful that the sessions for the album started as early as 1969. “I had to make up my version of when Exile started and when it finished.”
Watts, soon to be 69, is waiting politely at my suggested studio location, nursing a cup of coffee, as delightfully downbeat and absent-minded as always. “It’s 40 years, some of the tracks,” he says. “No wonder I can’t remember a lot of it. It’s like, ‘You had red socks on.’ ‘No, I had blue socks on.’”
“You ask any of us, we’ll all tell you something different,” Jagger smiles. “Charlie and I had a really good josh around the other day, because we were trying to remember. He says, ‘Oh, that was recorded at Olympic.’ I said, ‘No it wasn’t, it was the south of France.’ ‘No it wasn’t.’” Maurice Chevalier singing “Aah remember eet well” has nothing on this.
Each time word arrives that one is about to receive a temporary guest pass into the world of the Rolling Stones, the chief reaction is not nervousness, but renewed anticipation. No group of musicians I’ve met come close to their collective weightiness or individual charisma, even if it’s a given that the meetings will take place separately.
Stones time may be something of a parallel universe, but not as journalists tailing, say, Stevie Wonder have reported, where entire weeks of their lives have evaporated just waiting. The band are surprisingly good timekeepers — Jagger sometimes too consciously so, in that an interview can be over the second he says it is. Not this time, though, as we small-talk improbably about recording devices and memory sticks.
Richards probably doesn’t know what one of those newfangled things is: “I don’t do mice,” he once told me about computers. His modus operandi, as usual, is to shred the day’s carefully planned itinerary with his sheer, good-natured love of a long natter about music. So we fall easily into talking about those earliest Exile sessions, which began at Jagger’s Stargroves estate, in Berkshire, then moved to Olympic, their southwest London haunt.
At the time, the Stones were still in thrall to Decca Records and beginning to doubt that their business manager, Allen Klein, had their best interests at heart. “Klein and his various cohorts claimed they owned a lot of [our] stuff,” Jagger explains. “So we wanted to get out of that contract with him. Also, we didn’t have any money, because Klein had basically taken it all. Or you could say we mismanaged it. So we had to get ourselves into a position that we could keep alive.
“It was a difficult period for the band to get different management, get financially on [our] feet, and we had to get out of England, because taxes were very, very high. Even though we were pretty crazy, we had a settled lifestyle, in our own way. We went to Olympic, it was a nice little drive, you knew where you were, we all had houses in Chelsea, it was all nice and cosy. Everyone was settled, lots of friends. To be transported to France, it was a bit of a wrench.”
“We [had] stupidly signed with Allen,” Watts recalls. “He waved dollar signs at everyone, particularly at Mick and Keith. He had a tough, American manager way of looking at things, and, in a way, it was not right for us, but it taught you a lot.”
Richards is more blunt. “You were very resentful about having to leave your own country, because that’s really what it came to. Yeah, you could have stayed and made tuppence out of every pound. Thanks a lot, pals.
“At that time, they wanted us in jail. They couldn’t manage that, so the next best thing was put the economic pressure on. In order to leave, you had to rent out all of your property and promise never to go through your own front door. You’d immediately broken the rules if you’d done that. I always imagined hordes of IRS men in the trees — ‘He’s opening the gate!’ ‘Has he walked inside yet?’ They would go that far.
“It was bizarre. I rented my house out and [for] about 14 years I didn’t go back. Talk about an Englishman’s home is his castle, forget that one. It turned into the Sheriff of Nottingham.”
So an Englishman’s home became his French castle, with his bandmates along for the ride. “Suddenly,” says Watts, managing to sound as outraged as he would have done four decades ago, “you have to sell the house you live in and leave the country. ‘Bye-bye, Mum, bye-bye, Dad.’ And you think, ‘I’m not doing that.’ It went on another six months, and it was the only thing to do — what do they call it, a break in earnings? It worked out, thank goodness. My family were very happy there, and I was.”
When the Stones finished a UK tour in March 1971 with a gig at the Roundhouse, the press reported on it as if the Stones would never be seen in Britain again. “What we will miss particularly, if they do not tour here again,” wrote the Financial Times, “is their showmanship. The Stones are a piece of social history.”
They made their break as the tax year ended. “It was like ‘Farewell, Albion,’” Richards says. “‘Okay, where to, Bulgaria?’ ‘France’ll do, it’s just across the Channel.’ And it was just the determination of the boys at the time to say, ‘Hey, whatever it takes, we’ll do it on the lam.’ Hence Exile.”
Early searches for recording locations came to nought. The answer, albeit rife with technical challenges, lay close to home: Richards’s newly rented one. Watts, — who would spend his weeks at Nellcôte and weekends at the farm he and his wife had bought six hours away, while Bill Wyman commuted from a mere hour’s distance — remembers that part clearly. “It was very Mediterranean, and very beautiful, on top of this point with its own boat. When Keith rented it, the garden was overgrown, so it was magical. It was fantastically exotic, with palm trees. We had to saw a couple down to get the truck [the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio] in to record. We ran the cables down into various rooms that we tried sound in.”
“The basement was the strangest place,” Richards says. “It was large, but it was broken up into cubicles. It kind of looked like Hitler’s bunker. You could hear the drums playing, for instance, but it would take you a while to find Charlie’s cubicle.”
“The engineers found it very difficult,” Jagger continues. “Also, Keith was living over the shop all the time, so all his friends were there, and all our friends were there, so it was all a bit of a madhouse. It was a big lifestyle thing going on in the house. When you see all the photos of it, it was full of people. It was fun and crazy.
“But it’s a very steady band.You’ve got Mick Taylor on guitar, you’ve got Bill and you’ve got Nicky Hopkins on piano, and you’ve got a horn section [Bobby Keys and Jim Price], who were sort of permanently hanging around, so they were very much an integral part of it.”
As the detail of the ramshackle sessions unfolds, the album itself provides the perfect soundtrack, with the hell-for-leather Rocks Off and Rip This Joint, the swagger of Tumbling Dice and Happy (“The jolliest song I ever wrote,” as Richards calls it), bluesy tips of the hat to his heroes Slim Harpo and Robert Johnson, the nouveau-country of Sweet Virginia, strung-out but seductive grooves like I Just Want to See His Face and the gospel power of Shine a Light.
Yet listening to Watts describe a typical “schedule” only makes you marvel all the more that anything came of the entire adventure at all. “A day would become a week, or a week would be all in a day. That’s why you had to be there to play. It used to drive Bill mad.
“He’d drive down at 10 o’clock in the morning, and nobody, including me, would be up till about three in the afternoon, because we didn’t go to bed until nine that morning, an hour before Bill arrived. So Bill would go home at six, and Keith would be getting up,” he laughs. “That was the kind of timetable. We used to work like that a lot in those days. We don’t now so much.”
Richards refutes the idea that he was ever the cause of missed sessions. “I was the first one in the studio and the last one to leave, I was no more notoriously reliable or unreliable than anybody else. I hate to disabuse people, but I was never unreliable about recording or making sessions. I’m always there at showtime, always will be. I had too many songs I wanted to record, dammit.
“Nobody gave a damn who was doing what. People were dabbling, everybody was. Mick is not the squeaky-clean little mother you think he is or he likes to portray himself as. The fact is that Mick doesn’t hold stuff as well. Sometimes, I wish I could have a drink or two, or a hit of this or that, and I’d be out of it, but it doesn’t affect me that way. I’ve always looked upon drugs as a bit of a tool, actually, and I’m the laboratory.
“Probably the most out-of-it record I can think of was Satanic Majesties, which was already like three or four years in the past. That was the one where nobody was straight. Artistic temperament came into Exile to a certain point, but no more than any other record. The fact is, at that time, Charlie Watts was a hell of a lush, he did a good dent in the cognac industry.
“So I don’t think anybody really considered who was taking what to any great degree, as long as you came up with the results. You can take everything you want, as long as something good comes out on tape, it was basically that. It still is.”
Many Stones fans cherish the idea of Richards stumbling about his estate with his friend and fellow chemistry student Gram Parsons, like a couple of Romantic poets hitting the laudanum. Ironically, he says it wasn’t until the album was completed that he willingly reintroduced himself to heroin. “I was squeaky-clean when I got to France. It was after it was over that I went back on the stuff again, as a present to myself. But the work was first.”
If the modern-day “Keef” image was being nurtured around this time, he regards that largely as a media creation, if one made with a little inside help. “A lot of that is impressions, and they’re outside impressions. Not to say that I didn’t occasionally play up to it. If that’s the kind of Keith Richards you want, you made him, you got him.
“But I was a very conservative junkie. I was far more discerning. Some guys that get on the stuff, they’ll take it, sight unseen, and you find out later it’s whacked with strychnine or something. Once you’ve been on the inside of it, it’s not that fascinating. I wouldn’t recommend it. If you want to find out what’s real, there’s other ways to do it. But that was my way.”
“Keith’s a bit of a one-off,” Watts says. “He virtually got himself off it, that’s not an easy thing to do. He’s a tough guy in that way. You couldn’t hold him up as an example, because the person who copied that example would die, I should think.
“I met most of the drug-dealers around at the time, but only through association. I knew them, but I never bought a thing off them. That’s one of the problems of being like that. It’s never-ending, and you have to do all this buying off dodgy people, or sending people out. It’s a bit like having the off-licence down on the corner.”
“Maybe when we were in France, it just went a bit too far,” Jagger reflects. “Keith and I looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’ve done it here, this is it, we’ve had enough.’ Then we went to Los Angeles to do the mixing, and we did a lot of overdubbing, a lot of the things that make the album sound slightly gospelly, like girl background vocals.
“I felt a bit out on my own at some points, then it all started to come back together again, and then you’re doing the album cover with Robert Frank, and before you know where you are, we’re rehearsing for the tour.”
Whatever the distractions, Watts sees the completed album as a creative zenith. “I think it’s a peak period for our band. We had everything covered. We had a wonderful producer, Jimmy Miller, and you were playing with Nicky Hopkins, who could play blues as well as the prettiest piano. We had Mick Taylor, who for me was the most lyrical player we had, and we had Mick and Keith writing.”
“It’s a great piece of period music that’s stood the test of time,” Jagger says, almost reluctantly.
Richards is quicker to acknowledge that, nearly 40 years on, Exile on Main St still kicks like a drunken mule. “I was always proud of it. It showed the boys at their best, not just the music, which is obviously very important, but the way the band itself hunkered down and circled the wagons.
“All negative thoughts were put aside, not that the Stones have many negative thoughts. If there are, they’re usually all over in a flare-up. ‘I hate you, I’ll never see you again.’ ‘Okay, but tomorrow we’ll be in the studio.’”
Ripping the joint
The bonus tracks on the rarities disc in the Exile on Main St reissue are a mixture of unreleased outtakes and incomplete tracks to which Mick Jagger has added new vocals and lyrics, with the latter-day Stones producer Don Was.
“I automatically assumed,” Keith Richards says, “that anything good would automatically roll over to, what was the next one, Goats Head Soup? I hadn’t realised there were still some interesting tracks left over. I thought we’d drained the barrel, actually.”
“I knew there was loads of stuff lying around,” Jagger explains. “I tried to take things that I didn’t think people had bootlegged very much, or perhaps not at all. Some of it’s stuff that’s never been out. There’s a couple that would compete with anything on Exile, I think.”
Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren)Mid-tempo and slinky, with sultry horns by Bobby Keys and Jim Price, and funky detail by Jagger on maracas and harmonica. “You think of Mick Jagger as Mick Jagger, the stereotype image that you’re bound to get as you go along,” Richards says. “But his harp playing has always stood out to me. That’s what makes him a musician.”
Plundered My SoulAlready being played on radio worldwide, another newly completed piece, one of several with new backing vocals by Lisa Fischer and Cindy Mizelle. It features both the original Richards guitar and new lines added by Mick Taylor.
I’m Not SignifyingBar-room piano by Nicky Hopkins introduces period Jagger vocals on a rolling blues tune.
Following the RiverPerhaps the strongest of the “new” songs, a break-up ballad freshly vocalised by Mick, with real passion, over an evocative original track by Hopkins. “I’ve always liked it, but I never quite knew what was going to happen to it,” Jagger says.
Dancing in the LightSlightly countrified and mid-paced, with percussion by Jagger and the producer Jimmy Miller, and keyboards by the “sixth Stone”, Ian Stewart.
So Divine (Aladdin Story)For the first three seconds, you swear it’s Paint It Black, then it develops its own groove and a nice Middle Eastern sax motif by Keys.
Loving Cup (alternate take)A sparser version, with Richards much more to the fore on guitar than on the finished Exile take.
Soul Survivor (alternate take)
An interesting flip side to the version that closes the original album. Keith takes lead vocals instead of Mick and, ultimately, messes with the lyrics in true demo style.
Good Time WomenThe fascinating origin of what became Exile’s big hit single. “Suddenly, I realised it was Tumbling Dice,” Richards says. “Some songs, you have the basics, but it’s not really formed yet. You just wait for that day where suddenly it’s like it’s been there for ever.”
Title 5A fun, fast-paced minute-and-a-half instrumental that throws back to the Stones’ R&B roots, featuring only Keith, Charlie and Bill. They could almost be back at the Crawdaddy Club.
Exile on Main St is reissued by Polydor on May 17. Paul Sexton’s documentary Exile of the Stones is on BBC Radio 2 at 10pm on May 19The Sunday Times
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