Dominique Tarle, Andy Johns and John Von Hamersvelt discuss the Rolling Stones' 'Exile On Main St.'
May 17, 11:46 AM
By Phyllis Pollack
© John Von Hamersveld/ Post-Future.com
At Sunset Sound.
The reissue of Rolling Stones'
Exile On Main St. will be released on May 18, 2010, in varying configurations by Universal Music Enterprises, with its most coveted version a $170.08 super deluxe edition that includes a vinyl version of the album, its ten bonus tracks, a hardbound book, replicated collectors' postcards, and a DVD including footage from
Stones in Exile, the upcoming Stephen Kijak documentary about the making of the epic album, which arrives in stores on June 22, 2010. Collectors' box sets, signed by the band, will be available for $2,000.00 to $2,500.00.
The DVD is a beautifully edited work that features commentary from Jagger, Richards, Taylor, Wyman, Watts and others, discussing the recording of
Exile. There are captivating photos and video of the band, both at work and at play. As the story of
Exile begins to unfold, how can one not hit rewind to once again get another look at Richards in his Chuck Berry T-shirt?
For those to whom it matters, the reissue of
Exile and the imminent release of the
Stones in Exile DVD have managed to become more of an event than an album release.
Once, all of this was just about the stunning original eighteen tracks on
Exile and its original artwork released on May 12, 1972. The late Jimmy Miller, who produced
Exile, worked on the album with studio wizard Andy Johns, compiling the landmark masterpiece.
Exile was not an easy record to record by any means, for dozens of reasons. Johns told me regarding
Exile, “I’m still really, really proud of it. Yet it was a real traumatic thing. I was just a kid. I was maybe 21. And it took eleven months. We spent six months working in France at Keith’s house there, at Nellcote.”
The band had left England to live in France, in tax exile. Jagger is among the band members that address the tax situation in the reissue package’s DVD
Stones in Exile, saying, “That’s why I had to leave. Simple.” No one in the band was thrilled about having to go to France. Additionally, there was no suitable recording studio there. The band would resort to recording in the basement of Keith’s house there.
Subsequently, The Stones enlisted a mobile studio in a truck parked outside, which was later immortalized in Deep Purple's track "Smoke On The Water." In the midst of various electrical problems, Stones crew members illegally wired the electricity, so that it would bypass the meter at the house, and instead of using their own electricity, the power that was generated and that was used in the house and in the truck's mobile studio came from a nearby railway, where the crew had hooked the line coming into the house.
The band worked relentlessly. In
Stones in Exile, Anita Pallenberg describes the recording of the album as “a labor of love.”
Perhaps Richards worded it best in the film, saying of the process, “I just want to make music, and see how sounds are made. How do you transmit that feeling, and it actually comes back out and touches people. It’s the mystery of my life, and I’m still following it.”
In an interview, Johns told me the process was grueling. “It was pretty bizarre. It was right on the Mediterranean. I had never seen anywhere else besides England. I was just a kid. We worked in the basement. It was a real struggle getting a sound. Everything took so long. Get there at six every day. We were supposed to start working at six.”
Johns recalled, “Keith would quite often show up playing, and everyone else would show up maybe at about ten, eleven or midnight. Sometimes we’d do a basic track for like a week. 300 or 400 takes.”
According to Johns, at one point, Richards spent six hours, just playing the reprise to “Tumbling Dice” for six hours.
Almost four decades later, Don Was would be given 300 hours of tape to sort through to assemble the reissue package.
With the band having left England for the south of France, the atmosphere was far from secluded. Says Johns of the upstairs at Villa Nellcote, “It was pretty bizarre stuff. Weird people hanging around. Very weird people hanging around,” he said, with his eyes getting bigger.
As Jagger indicates in
Stones in Exile, “The lifestyle starts to choose you, and that’s the problem.”
Johns explained, “Then we came over to America and finished it at Sunset Sound here in Los Angeles. I’d only been over here a couple times before. Then I moved to L.A. in ’75. Been here ever since.”
Listening to
Exile still brings memories back to Johns, via musical flashbacks. “I do remember one very specific circumstance,” says Johns. “My favorite song on the album is 'Rocks Off.' I’ll never forget. Keith would sort of
go to sleep ... Put it like that.”
Johns continues, “It was about six in the morning. Me and Jim Pierce had this huge villa in Monte Carlo, and Keith would just ... go to sleep. You know what it was like.”
Johns is quiet for a moment. “And it was like, I’m on the phone saying, ‘Where’s
Keith? Where the f*&^ are you?’ I’d say, ‘Keith, man, we’re with Mick. Come back here immediately.”
Sounding in awe, Johns continues, “After ten or twenty minutes, Keith came back and put this straight-ahead rhythm part, so the song went from working really well to ... being for
me, out of all the rock and roll songs I’ve ever done, just the time and the feeling is so comfortable, and I’ve always been searching for feel again, if it’s even possible. The way it came out just blew me away.”
Johns’ reverence of Richards permeates the room as he reflects, “I think of all the people I’ve worked with, all the heroes, you know, they’re all just people. But Keith, he’s still f*******
Keith. Keith is still like ... Keith Richards.”
Awestruck, sounding as if he has been blown away by a feather, Johns says, “It’s weird.”
Dominique Tarle was the official photographer for The Stones during the recording of
Exile On Main St. With camera in hand, he documented the band’s life while they lived at Nellcote, both upstairs, where the band was housed, the living room, kitchen, the outside property, and the infamous basement where the album was recorded.
Many of Tarle’s shots taken at the Villa Nellcote can be seen in the reissue package’s documentary film,
Stones in Exile.
In a rare interview, Tarle stated to me that when the band finished recording the album, the hype surrounding The Stones was just all the gossip, and the fascination people had with the trappings that come with The Stones, rather than what had even been recorded from
Exile.
Music critics of the day would even simply dismiss
Exile. Much of the public, as well as many of the fans, were solely interested in or entranced by whatever sort of scandal might have surrounded the band.
Tarle confirmed this when he told me, “When I came back from Nellcote, when I got all the negatives and the pictures together, since I didn’t work for a magazine or an agency, I started getting in touch with the French press. I found myself very quickly at the time in the mid seventies, I found myself illustrating articles that were the opposite of my pictures. Do you know what I mean? The articles were about sex, drugs, rock and roll and violence. None of it was about the family life, the children and everything. I thought it was completely ridiculous for me to use this kind of pictures to illustrate this kind of bullshit. So I just put the pictures in a box, down in the cellar. I felt I could do something better with my time than illustrating this kind of bulls*&%.”
Tarle became an insider, as well as a witness to history, holed up with the band for an extended period of time. He explained to me, “I stayed at Ville Nellcote for something like six months, as simple as that.”
Tarle was acutely aware that his pictures were something far more than just publicity shots of a rock and roll band. Tarle described his feelings to me succinctly, saying, “It was stronger; maybe it was a little a piece of history.”
Part of Tarle’s documented history includes his photos of Richards with the late Gram Parsons, who came to France to hang out with Keith. Tarle told me, “Gram Parsons was around, and he was playing and singing with Keith all day long, and a journalist asked Keith, ‘Did Gram play on
Exile?’ and Keith’s answer was, ‘Gram is on
Exile in spirit.’ And that’s what I feel about everybody around the band at the time, Anita Pallenberg, and all the technicians, and the friends. I think it’s a very peculiar album, because for once in their lifetime, The Stones were all staying in the same neighborhood. They didn’t know anybody. The only people they knew were also members of the band.”
That said, a few friends did come to visit, including John Lennon and Eric Clapton.
Mick Taylor was the perfect fit for
Exile. Tarle commented to me, “I think it was a very strange period of time, because for many years, The Stones could not play in America because of Brian Jones, because Brian could not get a green card, or something like that. So they fired Brian, who died a few weeks later, while they were working with a new guitar player, and then they left the record company to create their own record company to work with new people, with a different target. They had to start from nothing again. And at this time, Keith and Gram were so close, that on one side, Mick was trying to get the band as efficient as possible, so that they could be able to go back on tour in the U.S. And each time Mick came down to Ville Nellcote, he saw Keith and Gram singing and playing together, and they were really, really ready to record. It was perfect, you know? I never heard anything like it before or after.” No known tapes exist of these musical exchanges.
Jagger explains in
Stones in Exile that the entire band was fascinated by so many genres of music. Tarle remembers Charlie Watts playing jazz, and Richards playing standards on piano.
Richards and Parsons related musically on different levels. Said Tarle, “Yeah, yeah. A mix of some very old country songs, but they were approaching so many different kinds of music. But I think that Mick was a little bit afraid that if those two guys decided to record an album together, then they would have to promote the album, to go on tour, you know. The Stones who had just recovered from the fact that they could not play in The States, and all this work trying to get the band efficient again after all those years, all this work would go down the drain. And if those two did record what they were playing, and went to promote it, too, The Stones would be waiting for another couple of years or two, and of course, Mick knew The Stones could not afford it.”
A Richards/Parsons collaboration would never happen. Parsons would die of a drug overdose on September 19, 1973, setting off the highly publicized body-snatching and torching incident, at the hand of Parson’s friend Michael Kaufman and manager Phil Kaufman. The two enacted their plan in an effort to grant Parsons his wish of not being buried in Louisiana.
Photos of Parsons and Richards taken by Tarle at Nellcote are seen in the
Stones in Exile DVD. If what comes in the box set is not enough, some of Tarle’s
Exile period photos shot at Villa Nellcote are available for purchase from the
San Francisco Art Exchange.
The 19th century mansion Villa Nellcote, located in Villefranche-sur-Mer in the Côte d'Azur area, had a history that was not always graced by the likes of the “Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World” recording one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time. According to Richards, the house had served as "the Gestapo headquarters during the war," explaining why the floor vents in the basement were decorated with swastikas. In one passage of the book about the basement, titled
Exile On Main St., published by Genesis, Tarle remembers, "I found a box down there with a big swastika on it, full of injection phials. They all contained morphine. It was very old, of course, and our first reaction was, ‘If Keith had found this box ...’ So one night we carried it to the end of the garden, and threw it into the sea."
In an interview for
Goldmine Magazine, Johns had told noted Rolling Stones scholar and author of
Laurel Canyon of Dreams: The Magic and the Music of Laurel Canyon Harvey Kubernik, “As far as microphones on hand I had the normal standard stuff. Some Neumanns, Shures, Beyers. The mikes were OK. It was just these rooms were a bit weird. Plus it had been a torture chamber during World War II. The villa was a local Gestapo headquarters when the Nazis occupied France. I didn’t notice that until we’d been there for a while and the floor heating vents in the hallway were shaped like swastikas. Gold swastikas. And I said to Keith, ‘What the f*** is that?’ ‘Oh, I never told you. This was the headquarters.’ So I guess downstairs they used to do all this dreadful shit. That’s where fires would start, the electricity would go on and off. There was just a very strange vibe down there. There were a lot of people always drifting around.”
Among the adventures memorialized in Tarle’s book, Richards buried his Tuinals to hide them from the police when he crashed his car. "I spun a yarn about this mysterious Ferrari with Yugoslavian plates," Richards would later explain in 1990, when describing that encounter with law enforcement.
Despite such accounts, two of those who had visited Nellcote and were interviewed in his book credit Richards with intentionally dissuading them from ever using heroin.
For the mainstream media, tales of heroin chic were a centerpiece of its fascination with the band.
John Von Hamersveld, who designed the original
Exile On Main St. album cover artwork and the album’s inside fold-out, made an unglamorous fashion statement when creating the look for the esteemed album. It was unglamorous, yet strikingly hip.
As Kubernik noted in
Goldmine, the artwork was punk before punk existed, in a not entirely post-pyschedelic era, no less.
The album cover exudes kind of a freak show, and perhaps in a way, it was quite appropriate, given the circus atmosphere that sometimes surrounded The Stones.
In his book
My Art, My Life, Von Hamersvelt wrote, "The cover is covered with a collage of Frank's (Robert Frank) photos, the most memorable of which are of sideshow freaks and the wall of a tattoo parlor. These black and white images, along with blurry, gritty current photos of the band, also shot by Frank, represented the underbelly of society and The Stones themselves. The title of the album, rather than being typeset, was hand scrawled by Mick Jagger. It was a call to arms to all "freaks;" collectively they were reclaiming the packaging of rock and roll, and in so doing had set the stage for visual mayhem.”
So striking was the image of
Exile that former Sex Pistol John Lydon gave his tip of the hat to Von Hamersveld in 1984. Said Lydon, "The Stones'
Exile package set the image of punk. We used the graphic feel to communicate our message." Even the Sex Pistols were not without their own cover and poster designer.
Things would eventually lead to the entree of Jamie Reed, an unknown with a situations background. It is noted that when asked by Sex Pistols' manager Malcolm McLaren to provide some artwork for the band's recordings, he would provide a punch with "ransom note" lettering (referring to the cut and paste mixing of type styles typically used for ransom notes). The cover of the Sex Pistols' debut album, with its combination of day-glo colors and ransom note lettering, is to punk rock what Von Hamersveld's 1966
Endless Summer movie poster had been to surfing.
A large billboard promoting the album was placed at in Los Angeles the top of La Cienega and Sunset. In an exchange with me, Von Hamersvelt elaborated, “I changed the measurement of the billboard to make it larger. Pacific Outdoor took my design detail and created this huge image. Once it was painted and installed it seems that Robert Frank and Danny Seymour came by took a shot of it with their cinema camera and later added it to
Cocks*cker Blues.”
The Stones gave Von Hamersveld the license to do whatever he wanted when it came to the design of the album. He noted, “Marshall (Chess) and I made our deal and I just did my thing, I was free to do what I want with the photo and ad color and do my
Endless Summer treatment. I was doing a lot of handwriting on album covers. But I let Jagger write the type in his hand rather then setting in mechanical type.”
Who were all these people in the images, in addition to the likes of Joan Crawford? He commented, “Between Robert Frank pics from the Americans photo book, and taking The Stones down to L.A.’s Main Street, shooting with his movie camera, I took a few pics and added them to fill out and credit area to balance the collage.” He adds, “Chris Odell, Jagger's secretary I knew from London, and Marshall were on the back cover.”
Von Hamersvelt remembers, “The package cost $1.35 per unit. A single cover at the time would cost 92 cents.”
Seeing Von Hamersveld’s artwork, the way it was originally created for
Exile, is one of the advantages of purchasing the upcoming reissue on vinyl, for those who do not already own
Exile's original incarnation.
Not surprisingly, when it comes to sound, Keith Richards, who cites
Exile On Main St. and
Beggars Banquet as his favorite album covers, prefers vinyl to CD.
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