While teenage girls across the world were being sent into frenzies as The
British Invasion reached American soil, parents everywhere were biting their
nails, pondering the question – “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?

While Oldham was choreographing how the boys appeared in public, Bob Bonis
was also at work behind the scenes as U.S. Tour Manager for the Stones’ first
five trips stateside between 1964 and 1966. Bonis didn’t dictate their image,
rather he captured it on film.

With his Leica M3 camera ready-to-shoot, he documented the band at the height
of the British Invasion, capturing candid and historic moments in their
meteoric rise to fame. These never-before-released photographs are now
available from the Bob Bonis Archive as strictly limited edition fine art prints.



Bob Bonis Tour Manager



Due to a no-nonsense reputation earned from years of working in the jazz clubs in New York
that were mostly run by wise-guys, Bob Bonis was tapped to serve as U.S. Tour manager for
the Rolling Stones beginning with their very first tour of America in June, 1964 and con-
tinued in this role through 1966. He brought along his Leica M3 camera on the road and
recorded approximately 2,700 historic, intimate, extraordinary images of the Stones.




RCA Studio in Hollywood 1965



The Rolling Stones rehearsed and recorded the backing tracks for an
appearance on the popular TV show Shindig on May 18 and 19 at RCA
in Hollywood. The show was taped on May 20th and broadcast on May 26th.

On this show the Stones performed Down The Road Apiece, Little Red Rooster,
The Last Time, and what appears to be the worl premiere performance of
(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.

Bob Bonis captured Keith Richards striking a boyish grin while playing his
vintage 1959 Gibson Les Paul guitar with the flame top during these rehearsals.



RCA 1965 - Photo by tour manager Bob Bonis



Rolling Stones with Andrew Loog Oldham, RCA Studios May 12-13, 1965

After a long recording session at RCA Studios in Hollywood, California, May 12-
13, 1965, US tour manager, Bob Bonis, captured this striking group portrait of
the five Rolling Stones (Brian Jones, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie
Watts and Bill Wyman) with their manager / producer Andrew Loog Oldham.

Emotions run high as the shift in power from founder Brian Jones to Mick Jagger
and Keith Richards is clearly evident in this remarkable photograph. These
sessions produced the songs & (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction (the second version
they recorded that was actually released), Cry To Me, Good Times, I've Been
Loving You Too Long, My Girl, One More Try, and The Spider and the Fly.

Look closely at only Brian, Mick and Keith. The look at Bill assessing the situation.

Will Keith Richards Bury Us All?
In a freewheeling conversation, the Rolling Stones guitarist waxes about his bad habits,
Jagger's solo records and the possibility of retirement

BY DAVID FRICKE
OCTOBER 17, 2002



Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones performs in East Rutherford, New Jersey on September 28th, 2002.


Keith Richards bolts out of the dark and into the light, grips the neck of his guitar like a rifle barrel and fires the opening call to joy of the Rolling Stones‘ 2002-03 world tour: the fierce chords of “Street Fighting Man,” a blazing rush that for Richards is the sound of life itself. “My biggest addiction, more than heroin, is the stage and the audience,” he says with gravelly cheer the next day, after that first show in Boston. “That buzz — it calls you every time.”

Richards, Mick Jagger, Charlie Watts and Ron Wood will spend the next year on the road answering that call, celebrating forty years as a working band and the release of a two CD retrospective, Forty Licks.

“You’re fighting upstream against this preconception that you can’t do this at this age,” snaps Richards, who turns fifty-nine on December 18th. He has been through worse: a long dance with heroin in the 1970s; close calls with the law and death; his volatile lifelong relationship with Jagger. And Richards talks about all of it — as well as his ultimate jones, playing with the Stones — in this interview, conducted over vodka and cigarettes during two long nights in Boston and Chicago. “People should say, ‘Isn’t it amazing these guys can move like that? Here’s hope for you all,’ ” he says with a grin. “Just don’t use my diet.”




How do you deal with criticism about the Stones being too old to rock & roll? Do you get pissed off? Does it hurt?

People want to pull the rug out from under you, because they’re bald and fat and can’t move for shit. It’s pure physical envy — that we shouldn’t be here. “How dare they defy logic?”
If I didn’t think it would work, I would be the first to say, “Forget it.” But we’re fighting people’s misconceptions about what rock & roll is supposed to be. You’re supposed to do it when you’re twenty, twenty five — as if you’re a tennis player and you have three hip surgeries and you’re done. We play rock & roll because it’s what turned us on. Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf — the idea of retiring was ludicrous to them. You keep going — and why not?

You went right from being a teenager to being a Stone — no regular job, a little bit of art school. What would you be doing if the Stones had not lasted this long?

I went to art school and learned how to advertise, because you don’t learn much art there. I schlepped my portfolio to one agency, and they said — they love to put you down — “Can you make a good cup of tea?” I said, “Yeah, I can, but not for you.” I left my crap there and walked out. After I left school, I never said, “Yes, sir” to anybody.
If nothing had happened with the Stones and I was a plumber now, I’d still be playing guitar at home at night, or get the lads around the pub. I loved music; it didn’t occur to me that it would be my life. When I knew I could play something, it was an added bright thing to my life: “I’ve got that, if nothing else.”


Do you have nightmares that someday you’ll hit the stage and the place will be empty — nobody bothered to come?

That’s not a nightmare. I’ve been there: Omaha ’64, in a 15,000seat auditorium where there were 600 people. The city of Omaha, hearing these things about the Beatles — they thought they should treat us in the same way, with motorcycle outriders and everything. Nobody in town knew who we were. They didn’t give a shit. But it was a very good show. You give as much to a handful of people as you do to the others.


Do you have a pre-gig ritual — a particular drink or smoke?

I have them anyway [laughs]. I don’t go in for superstition. Ronnie and I might have a game of snooker. But it would be superfluous for the Stones to discuss strategy or have a hug. With the Winos [his late Eighties solo band], it was important. They were different guys; we only did a couple of tours. I didn’t mind. But with the Stones, it’s like, “Oh, do me a favor! I’m not going to @#$%& hug you!”


At the height of your heroin addiction, would you indulge before a show?

No. I always cleaned up for tours. I didn’t want to put myself in the position of going cold turkey in some little Midwestern town. By the end of the tour, I’m perfectly clean and should have stayed sober. But you go, “I’ll just give myself a treat.” Boom, there you are again.

Could you tell that you played better when you were clean?

I wonder about the songs I’ve written: I really like the ones I did when I was on the stuff. I wouldn’t have written “Coming Down Again” [on 1973’s Goat’s Head Soup] without that. I’m this millionaire rock star, but I’m in the gutter with these other sniveling people. It kept me in touch with the street, at the lowest level.


On this tour, you’re doing a lot of songs from Exile on Main Street — for most people, the band’s greatest album. Would you agree?

It’s a funny thing. We had tremendous trouble convincing Atlantic to put out a double album. And initially, sales were fairly low. For a year or two, it was considered a bomb. This was an era where the music industry was full of these pristine sounds. We were going the other way. That was the first grunge record.
Yes, it is one of the best. Beggars Banquet was also very important. That body of work, between those two albums: That was the most important time for the band. It was the first change the Stones had to make after the teenybopper phase. Until then, you went onstage fighting a losing battle. You want to play music? Don’t go up there. What’s important is hoping no one gets hurt and how are we getting out.

I remember a riot in Holland. I turned to look at Stu [Ian Stewart] at the piano. All I saw was a pool of blood and a broken chair. He’d been taken off by stagehands and sent to the hospital. A chair landed on his head.
To compensate for that, Mick and I developed the songwriting and records. We poured our music into that. Beggars Banquet was like coming out of puberty.


The Stones are reviving a lot of rare, older material on this tour, such as “Heart of Stone” and “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking.” Why did you stop playing those songs?

Maybe they were songs that we tried once or twice and went, “That didn’t work at all.” I think we tried “Knocking” once the whole way through. When the actual song finished and we were into the jam, it collapsed totally. The wheels fell off. We tried it one other time — “We’ll just do the front bit” — and neither satisfied us. Nobody wants to go near something that has a jinx on it. But you have to take the jinx off, take the voodoo away and have another look.


Are there Stones hits that you’re sick of playing?

No, they usually disappear of their own accord. That’s the thing about songs — you don’t have to be scared of them dying. They keep poking you in the face. The Stones have always believed in the present. But “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Brown Sugar” and “Start Me Up” are always fun to play. You gotta be a real sourpuss, mate, not to get up there and play “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” without feeling like, “C’mon, everybody, let’s go!” It’s like riding a wild horse.


The general assumption about the Stones’ classic songs is that Mick wrote the words and you wrote the music. Do you deserve more credit for the lyrics — and Mick for the music?

It’s been a progression from Mick and I sitting face to face with a guitar and a tape recorder, to after Exile, when everybody chose a different place to live and another way of working. Let me put it this way: I’d say, “Mick, it goes like this: ‘Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.’ ” Then it would be a division of labor, Mick filling in the verses. There’s instances like “Undercover of the Night” or “Rock and a Hard Place” where it’s totally Mick’s song. And there are times when I come in with “Happy” or “Before They Make Me Run.” I say, “It goes like this. In fact, Mick, you don’t even have to know about it, because you’re not singing” [laughs].

But I always thought songs written by two people are better than those written by one. You get another angle on it: “I didn’t know you thought like that.” The interesting thing is what you say to someone else, even to Mick, who knows me real well. And he takes it away. You get his take.


On Stones albums, you tend to sing ballads — “You Got the Silver,” “Slipping Away,” “The Worst” — rather than rockers.

I like ballads. Also, you learn about songwriting from slow songs. You get a better rock & roll song by writing it slow to start with, and seeing where it can go. Sometimes it’s obvious that it can’t go fast, whereas “Sympathy for the Devil” started out as a Bob Dylan song and ended up as a samba. I just throw songs out to the band.


Did “Happy” start out as a ballad?

No. That happened in one grand bash in France for Exile. I had the riff. The rest of the Stones were late for one reason or another. It was only Bobby Keys there and Jimmy Miller, who was producing. I said, “I’ve got this idea; let’s put it down for when the guys arrive.” I put down some guitar and vocal, Bobby was on baritone sax and Jimmy was on drums. We listened to it, and I said, “I can put another guitar there and a bass.” By the time the Stones arrived, we’d cut it. I love it when they drip off the end of the fingers. And I was pretty happy about it, which is why it ended up being called “Happy.”


How do you and Mick write now? Take “Don’t Stop,” for example, one of the four new songs on Forty Licks.

It’s basically all Mick. He had the song when we got to Paris to record. It was a matter of me finding the guitar licks to go behind the song, rather than it just chugging along. We don’t see a lot of each other — I live in America, he lives in England. So when we get together, we see what ideas each has got: “I’m stuck on the bridge.” “Well, I have this bit that might work.” A lot of what Mick and I do is fixing and touching up, writing the song in bits, assembling it on the spot. In “Don’t Stop,” my job was the fairy dust.


What would it take for the Stones to have hit singles now, the way you churned them out in the 1960s and 1970s?

I haven’t thought like that for years. “Start Me Up” surprised me, honestly — it was a fiveyearold rhythm track. Even then, in ’81, I wasn’t aiming for Number One. I was into making albums.
It was important, when we started, to have hits. And it taught you a lot of things quickly: what makes a good record, how to say things in two minutes thirty seconds. If it was four seconds longer, they chopped it off. It was good school, but it’s been so long since I’ve made records with the idea of having a hit single. I’m out of that game.


Charlie Watts gets an enormous ovation every night when Mick introduces him. But Charlie’s also quite an enigma — the quiet conscience of the Stones.

Charlie is a great English eccentric. I mean, how can you describe a guy who buys a 1936 Alfa Romeo just to look at the dashboard? Can’t drive — just sits there and looks at it. He’s an original, and he happens to be one of the best drummers in the world. Without a drummer as sharp as Charlie, playing would be a drag.

He’s very quiet — but persuasive. It’s very rare that Charlie offers an opinion. If he does, you listen. Mick and I fall back on Charlie more than would be apparent. Many times, if there’s something between Mick and I, it’s Charlie I’ve got to talk to.


For example?

It could be as simple as whether to play a certain song. Or I’ll say, “Charlie, should I go to Mick’s room and hang him?” And he’ll say no [laughs]. His opinion counts.

How has your relationship with Ron Wood changed since he gave up drinking?

I tell Ronnie, “I can’t tell the difference between if you’re pissed out of your brain or straight as an arrow.” He’s the same guy. But Ronnie never got off the last tour. He kept on after we finished the last show. On the road it’s all right, because you burn off a lot of the stuff you do onstage. But when you get home and you’re not in touch with your environment, your family — he didn’t stop. He realized he had to do it. It was his decision. When I found out about it, he was already in the spin dryer.

Ronnie has always had a light heart. That’s his front. But there is a deeper guy in there. I know the feeling. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into heroin if it hadn’t been a way for me to protect myself. I could walk into the middle of all the bullshit, softly surrounded by this cool, be my own man inside, and everybody had to deal with it. Mick does it his way. Ronnie does it his way.


Do you miss having a drinking partner?

Shit, I am my drinking partner. Intoxication? I’m polytoxic. Whatever drinking or drugs I do is never as big a deal to me as they have been to other people. It’s not a philosophy with me. The idea of taking something in order to be Keith Richards is bizarre to me.


Were there drugs you tried and didn’t like?

Loads. I was very selective. Speed — nah. Pure pharmaceutical cocaine — that’s great, but it ain’t there anymore. Heroin — the best is the best. But when it comes to Mexican shoe scrapings, ugh. Good weed is good weed.


What about acid?

I enjoyed it. Acid arrived just as we had worn ourselves out on the road, in 1966. It was kind of a vacation. I never went for the idea that this was some special club — the Acid Test and that bollocks.

I found it interesting that you were way out there but still functioning normally, doing things like driving; I’d stop off at the shops. Meanwhile, you were zooming off. Methedrine and bennies never did appeal to me. Downers — now and again: “I’ve got to get some sleep.” But if you don’t go to sleep, you have a great time [laughs].


How much did your drug use in the 1970s alienate Mick?

He wasn’t exactly Mr. Clean and I was Mr. Dirty. But I withdrew a lot from the basic day-to-day of the Stones. It usually only took one of us to deal with most things. But when I did come out of it and offered to shoulder the burden, I noticed that Mick was quite happy to keep the burden to himself. He got used to calling the shots.

I was naive — I should have thought about it. I have no doubt that here or there Mick used the fact that I was on the stuff, and everybody knew it: “You don’t want to talk to Keith, he’s out of it.” Hey, it was my own fault. I did what I did, and you just don’t walk back in again.


Describe the state of your friendship with Mick. Is friendship the right word?

Absolutely. It’s a very deep one. The fact that we squabble is proof of it. It goes back to the fact that I’m an only child. He’s one of the few people I know from my childhood. He is a brother. And you know what brothers are like, especially ones who work together. In a way, we need to provoke each other, to find out the gaps and see if we’re onboard together.



Does it bother you that your musical life together isn’t enough for him — that he wants to make solo records?

He’ll never lie about in a hammock, just hanging out. Mick has to dictate to life. He wants to control it. To me, life is a wild animal. You hope to deal with it when it leaps at you. That is the most marked difference between us. He can’t go to sleep without writing out what he’s going to do when he wakes up. I just hope to wake up, and it’s not a disaster.

My attitude was probably formed by what I went through as a junkie. You develop a fatalistic attitude toward life. He’s a bunch of nervous energy. He has to deal with it in his own way, to tell life what’s going to happen rather than life telling you.


Was he like that in 1965?

Not so much. He’s very shy, in his own way. It’s pretty funny to say that about one of the biggest extroverts in the world. Mick’s biggest fear is having his privacy. Mick sometimes treats the world as if it’s attacking him. It’s his defense, and that has molded his character to a point where sometimes you feel like you can’t get in yourself. Anybody in the band will tell you that. But it comes from being in that position for so long — being Mick Jagger.



What don’t you like about his solo albums?

Wimpy songs, wimpy performance, bad recording. That’s about enough. I’ve done solo things here and there, but the Stones are numero uno. The Stones are the reason I’m here. They are my whole working life. I never had a job. To me, it’s very important that there is a very close unity presented to everyone else: “Shields up.” Outside projects, I felt, were a detriment to the Stones. If what you did is fantastic, you’re going to want to carry it on. If it’s a bum, you’ve gotta run back to the Stones and say, “Protect me.” That’s not a good position for a fighting unit. “I’ve got deserters”: I used to think like that.

But you can’t keep everybody in that insular thing forever. I mean, Charlie takes his jazz band around the world. You’ve got to turn it into an asset. Whatever it was, we all went out there and tried it on. But we all come back to the Rolling Stones. There is an electromagnetic thing that goes on with it. It draws us back to the center.


What do you think of Mick’s knighthood?

I have to revert to a Stones point of view. These are the guys who tried to put us in jail in the Sixties, and then you’re taking a minor honor. Also, to get a phone call from Mick saying, “Tony Blair insists that I take it” — this is a way to present it to me?

It’s antirespect to the Stones — that was my initial opinion. I thought it would have been the smarter move to say thanks, but no thanks. After being abused by Her Majesty’s government for so many years, being hounded almost out of existence, I found it weird that he’d want to take a badge. But what the @#$%& does it matter? It doesn’t make any difference in the way we work. Within the Stones, it’s probably made him buckle down a bit more, because he knows he’s being disapproved of [laughs].


In the opening lines of “The Worst,” you sing, “I said from the first/I’m the worst.” Are you a hard man to love?

Ask those who love me. In any new relationship, I tell people, “Do you know what you’re dealing with? Don’t tell me that I didn’t say from the first, I’m the worst.” It’s my riot act. The last time I said it was to my old lady twentyodd years ago. I say, out front, take it on, or get out.



You and your wife, Patti, have two teenage daughters, Alexandra and Theodora. And as a dad, you have a unique perspective on the mischief kids get up to, because you’ve done most of it.

I’ve never had a problem with my kids, even though Marlon and Angela [two of his three children by former girlfriend Anita Pallenberg] grew up in rough times: cops busting in, me being nuts. [Another son, Tara, died in 1976; he was ten weeks old.] I feel akin to the old whaling captains: “We’re taking the boat out, see you in three years.” Dad disappearing for weeks and months — it’s never affected my kids’ sense of security. It’s just what Dad does.



What about serious talks? About drugs?

That’s something you see on TV ads. Alexandra and Theodora are my best friends. It’s not fingerwagging. I just keep an eye on them. If they got a problem, they come and talk to me. They’ve grown up with friends whose idea of me — who knows what they’ve been told at school? But they know who I am. And they always come to my defense [smiles]. Which is the way I like it.



Describe your life at home in Connecticut: When you get up, what do you do?

I made a determined effort after the last tour to get up with the family. Which for me is a pretty impressive goal. But I did it — I’d get up at seven in the morning. After a few months, I was allowed to drive the kids to school. Then I was allowed to take the garbage out. Before that, I didn’t even know where the recycling bin was.

I read a lot. I might have a little sail around Long Island Sound if the weather is all right. I do a lot of recording in my basement — writing songs, keeping up to speed. I have no fixed routine. I wander about the house, wait for the maids to clean the kitchen, then @#$%& it all up again and do some frying. Patti and I go out once a week, if there’s something on in town — take the old lady out for dinner with a bunch of flowers, get the rewards [smiles].



Have you listened to the new guitar bands — the Hives, the Vines, the White Stripes? The Strokes are opening for you on this tour.

I haven’t really. I’m looking forward to seeing them. I don’t want to listen to the records until I see them.



But is it encouraging to see new guitar music being made in your image?

That’s the whole point. What Muddy Waters did for us is what we should do for others. It’s the old thing, what you want written on your tombstone as a musician: “He Passed It On.” I can’t wait to see these guys — they’re like my babies, you know?

I’m not a champion of the guitar as an instrument. The guitar is just one of the most compact and sturdy. And the reason I still play it is that the more you do, the more you learn. I found a new chord the other day. I was like, “Shit, if I had known that years ago …” That’s what’s beautiful about the guitar. You think you know it all, but it keeps opening up new doors. I look at life as six strings and twelve frets. If I can’t figure out everything that’s in there, what chance do I have of figuring out anything else?



A lot of people who were a big part of your life with the Stones are no longer here. Who do you miss the most?

Ian Stewart was a body blow. I was waiting for him in a hotel in London. He was going to see a doctor and then come and see me. Charlie called about three in the morning: “You still waiting for Stu? He ain’t coming, Keith.”

Stu was the father figure. He was the stitch that pulled us together. He had a very large heart, above and beyond the call of duty. When other people would get mean and jealous, he could rise above it. He taught me a lot about taking a couple of breaths before you go off the handle. Mind you, it didn’t always work. But I got the message.

Gram Parsons — I figured we’d put things together for years, because there was so much promise there. I didn’t think he was walking on the broken eggshells so much. I was in the john at a gig in Innsbruck, Austria. I’m taking a leak, and Bobby Keys walks in. He says, “I got a bad one for you. Parsons is dead.” We were supposed to be staying in Innsbruck that night. I said @#$%& it. I rented a car, and Bobby and I drove to Munich and did the clubs — tried to forget about it for a day or two.

Have you contemplated your own death?

I let other people do that. They’ve been doing it for years. They’re experts, apparently. Hey, I’ve been there — the white light at the end of the tunnel — three or four times. But when it doesn’t happen, and you’re back in — that’s a shock.

The standard joke is that in spite of every drink and drug you’ve ever taken, you will outlive cockroaches and nuclear holocaust. You’ll be the last man standing.

It’s very funny, how that position has been reserved for me. It’s only because they’ve been wishing me to death for so many years, and it didn’t happen. So I get the reverse tip of the hat. All right, if you want to believe it — I will write all of your epitaphs.

But I don’t flaunt it. I never tried to stay up longer than anybody else just to announce to the media that I’m the toughest. It’s just the way I am. The only thing I can say is, you gotta know yourself.

After forty years, still doing two and a half hours onstage every night — that’s the biggest last laugh of all.

Maybe that’s the answer. If you want to live a long life, join the Rolling Stones.

Flashback: Rolling Stones, Stevie Wonder Mash Up ‘Uptight’ and ‘Satisfaction’
Superstars joined each other onstage for the thrilling encore on the last dates of their 1972 tour
BY KORY GROW



Mick Taylor (L) and Mick Jagger (C) of the Rolling Stones perform with Stevie Wonder (R) at Madison Square Garden.
The concert was the final performance of the group's 30-city, 3-month tour of the United States and Canada.


IN THE SPRING of 1972, Stevie Wonder released Music of My Mind and the Rolling Stones put out Exile on Main Street. Both albums were instant hits, with the former’s reaching Number 21 on the Billboard 200 and Exile reaching Number One. So when the Stones recruited Wonder, then just 22, to open up their summer tour that year, it was an unstoppable combo that became even more exciting when Wonder joined the Stones at four dates for a medley of his 1966 hit “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” and the Stones’ hit from the previous year, “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” as the encore.

On July 26th, the second of two nights at New York City’s Madison Square Garden, Mick Jagger helped Wonder to his piano and the horn section got loose. Eventually they kicked into “Uptight” with its trumpet flourishes and Wonder sang the song with his own band backing him up. Jagger snuck up behind Wonder and clapped his hands, and eventually helped him to center stage when the song transitioned into “Satisfaction,” which Jagger took the lead on. Wonder joined in on the “and I try” parts, and the two singers started dancing in one of the most jubilant onstage rave-ups of their respective careers, jumping and holding hands and throwing things around the stage.

Filmmakers Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour captured footage of the performance for their cinéma vérité documentary @#$%& Blues, but the film never got an official release, due to the Stones suing to keep it away from the public eye because of their misbehavior in it. The full thing is now available unofficially on YouTube.





Uptight/Satisfaction Live at Madison Square Garden

“ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS PLAY LIKE CHUCK BERRY”: KEITH RICHARDS
Guitar heroes don’t come any bigger than Keith Richards. We spoke to the
eternal riff machine that drives the greatest rock ’n’ roll band in the world about his solo
records, his recording process, his gear and his technique for corralling the Stones.

By Paul Trynka
20th August 2019



Keith Richards 1974
Image: Graham Wiltshire

This interview was originally published in 1997.

His own phrase is “five strings, two fingers, one @#$%&”. But everyone else has their own description of the Keith Richards phenomenon: from ‘the human riff’ through to ‘the world’s most elegantly wasted human being’. Sitting after-hours in his New York headquarters, Richards displays his own distinctive brand of fitness, born out of nervous energy rather than intensive exercise. The famous lines are etched as deeply in his face as the photographs suggest – and they match perfectly the rips in his favourite denim jacket or the dents in Micawber, his beloved Tele. Keef’s not knackered, he’s just nicely worn-in.

His new album, Main Offender, proves that Keith loves making music; whether it’s with the Stones, blues musicians like John Lee Hooker and Johnnie Johnson, or The X-Pensive Winos. “The main thing that’s struck me about this album is how lucky I am that I’ve managed to get the same bunch of guys together again, because great musicians don’t tend to hang around for three or four years. And they’re pretty hot!

“There’s not as many guest appearances as there are on the first one, but one of the things we figured from taking the Winos on the road is that you’ve got five guys there, but they all play three instruments, so you’ve got like 15 combinations. It rebounded on me, because I ended up playing bass again, something I haven’t done since Sympathy For The Devil or Let’s Spend The Night Together.”



Richards has frequently said that he’d have been a drummer if he could have coordinated all four limbs, and his partnership with Steve Jordan defines the sound of the new album, just as much as his partnership with Charlie Watts delineates the elegant chaos of the Stones. The album is bright and live, permeated by the airy snap of Jordan’s high-tuned snare drum, and on songs like Hate It When You Leave and Demon, Richards reminds us that he has a knack for classic, sensitive soul songs, as well as for vicious, simplistic guitar hooks like those of 999 or Wicked As It Seems.


Slave to the rhythm

Main Offender is miles away from the standard indulgence of a solo album. “In the Stones, if I stop playing, everything clatters to a halt. But these guys really push you. They’re confident and they know their stuff enough not to let me slouch around. So with the Stones, I’ll stop playing, go ‘I can’t remember the bridge’ and they stop, because with the Stones, there’s no point in going on. But the Winos will go: ‘Come on Keith, pick it up!’ And that’s what I needed, ’cause no-one’s gonna kick my arse in the Stones. I can fit in that bubble very comfortably, but maybe comfortable is not where it’s at. It’s one of the few times that a kick in the ass is real good!”

Richards’ ability to walk in a room, snap his fingers and work out if it will prove sympathetic to live recording is well known. So it’s no surprise that all the rhythm tracks for this album were laid down completely live: “We played in one room together. The drums were always in the same room. We put some amps in isolation booths, especially the bass amp, and usually slaved a small amp outside so we could still do it live. And we used a lot of ambient mics, so we had a lot of room sound.



Keith in a studio in 1966 with the 1962 Epiphone Casino ES-230TDV, with Tremotone unit, that he used in the mid 60s.
Michael Ochs Archives / Getty Images


“For studios, I’m more bothered about the room than the recording hardware, because we bring in a lot of our own equipment. Basically, I look for the room itself, how high it is, what shape it is and what kind of echo it’s got. And some of the time, rooms can fool you and you think it’s gonna be easy… and the first couple of days of the session, you’re moving the drums around.

“But when you find the right setup, it’s great. So, usually, when I start, I walk in the room and say ‘Are you going to be a friend or a foe?’. “I record without headphones as much as possible – usually, the drummer has to wear them. So usually, I compromise: one ear off, one ear on. Cans are a pain – you wish you could live without them, but you can’t quite.”

Richards is a master of recording guitars, and over the years has used compressed acoustics, Nashville and other tunings, and complex overdubs which always end up sounding simple. But those big guitar sounds almost invariably come from small amplifiers: “The stuff that sounds really big always comes out of a tiny amp! So the biggest amp I used on Main Offender was a Fender Twin, then down to Champs and Silvertones.

“Steve’s one of these collectors; his apartment’s a block away from where we were doing the overdubbing, so when we need an amp, we just go and raid the crypt, rummage around. We found this little Silvertone, this tiny little amp – and it sounds massive. We tended to do a lot of overdubs on different songs, so I can’t say exactly what songs we used that one on, but on tape, it sounds fantastic. The thing with old amps, though – they’re just like people! The older they get, the more opinionated they get about whether they’re going to perform for you or not.

“I love those old amps more than my life, but they can be bitches. Try three or four Fender Champs and they’re all different – one might have this extra zing on the high end, another’s got this dirty graunch on the bottom. But that’s the beauty of them, too.”




Keith playing his 1975 Tele Custom at the Oshawa Civic Auditorium in 1979.
Image: Richard E. Aaron / Redferns


The band master on Bandmasters

“For this album, I also used a Fender Bandmaster, which is halfway between a Bassman and a guitar amp. And I use a Fender Bassman, which is almost impossible to record, but now and then, when you get it in the right spot, it’s perfect.”

When you build up a recorded track, do you start off with a picture of the finished result in your head, or do you try parts out and see how they sound? “I don’t have a final idea in my head of how it will sound. When we start recording the song, it’s got the moves, the gut, the beat, all you can do is screw it up or make it better, so you start to put stuff on top. A lot of the time, you know what the first thing it needs is, you know you have to put one guitar on top, so one thing usually leads to another. Once the song’s out of the cage, you grab its tail and say: ‘Where you gonna take me?’

“I don’t tend to think I’ve created a song, I prefer to think that they were there, I was around and I picked it up. From there, I could make it into something good. It’s like being there and capturing it and hoping it will take me somewhere interesting.”


Thief in the night

Richards has compared his songwriting to being like a human radio, where he picks up songs out of the ether. Does he ever worry they might be someone else’s? “Yeah. Especially the good ones. I think it’s not mine. There was one Stones song, even after it was out, been a hit and had been around for years, I was convinced I’d stolen it. Nobody could tell me where it came from, but I was convinced it was a total steal – it was ages before I could put it out, I was so convinced it belonged to someone else.”

Do you ever find yourself at a loss about what to write next, we ask? “Loads of times. Very rarely does a song come all at once. Half a song, snatches of an idea, but where does it go from here? You can reach an impasse. But writing with other people, more times than you think possible, he’s got a piece of music he doesn’t know what to do with, either.

“Mick and I have done that so many times we can’t believe it. And a lot of the time, the songs will be in different keys, and I’m thinking, how the hell do we fit these together, I’m gonna have to change the key, and Mick might just say, ‘Just play it’ – you just stick them together – and it works!”


Keith takes a leaf out of Eddie Van Halen’s book at Madison Square Garden in 1979.
Michael Putland / Getty Images

With Jagger and Richards established as rock music’s most enduring songwriting team, it’s easy to forget that it was manager Andrew Loog Oldham who forced the two into a room together and told them to write. “We just wanted to be a blues band – and in 1962, blues was not a way to stardom. It was aimed at giving people a kick in the teeth and waving our blues flags – then suddenly you’re a pop star. When I started, all I wanted to do was play like Chuck [Berry]. I thought if I could do that, I’d be the happiest man in the world. Then, when I found out I could do it, I thought, well maybe there is another aim in life. But when I started I’d dream of playing with Muddy Waters, but the only way I’d imagine it happening would be ‘if I make it to heaven – and he makes it there – then we can play together’.”

It wasn’t long after the release of the Stones’ first album that Richards achieved his wish; the band went to Chess Studios in June 1964 in search of better recording quality than Britain’s comparatively backward studios. “The weirdest thing was that when we met Muddy he was painting Chess studios. You walk in and start recording, on your hands and knees in this mecca, and they say you might like to meet this guy who’s up on a stepladder in a white overall and you say: ‘Who’s that?’ That’s Muddy Waters.

“It was another of those slaps around the face. He wasn’t selling records. And at the same time, he was a real gentleman. I would have expected a ‘get out of here, white trash’ reaction. But those guys were gentlemen, they saw wider than the music business. They immediately nurtured us, and had no reason to know that in a year or two they’d be selling more records than they ever had in their lives.”

Although Keith’s playing is perhaps closer to the spirit of Chuck Berry and Jimmy Reed than any of his peers, the first few years of the Stones output saw him move light-years beyond his roots. Early Jagger/Richards compositions like 19th Nervous Breakdown saw him honing the art of the simple rock riff, an art which Richards raised to its apogee with (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction – a song which, incidentally, provoked an early Jagger/Richards argument, Richards believing his own song was a one-riff gimmick; Jagger, band and Loog Oldham convinced it was a surefire winner. “Yeah, I thought it was a Mickey Mouse song. It was one of those songs that just comes in a dream, real easy, but I thought the fuzztone was just a gimmick.”



No. 1 in Britain and the US, …Satisfaction set the seal on the writing partnership, and also confirmed the band’s movement away from the leadership of Brian Jones. Keith has commented before how Jones lost interest in the guitar, experimenting instead with the likes of the harpsichord and dulcimer. Jones’ loss of commitment – and later his death – left Richards with a void to fill that would inspire his greatest moments. A key point in this move was his discovery of open-G tuning.

“That all happened when the Stones had exhaustedly come to a halt in 1966 and I started listening to all my blues records again and reading the liner notes, and realised: ‘Right, he’s using a different tuning’. So in that period between ’66 and Beggars Banquet, I started getting into blues tunings, Fred McDowell, 12-string and slide shit. But still in D and E.”

At the same time, Richards had made friends with Gram Parsons, who provided a complete education in country music: “Gram taught me the difference between Nashville and Bakersfield – I’d loved the sound of that music, but Gram took me right into the background of it.” But although Parsons’ country feel would influence tracks like Country Honk and Love In Vain, the one-time Byrd was “strictly a standard tuning guy”.

It was Ry Cooder, who came in for the Sister Morphine sessions, who showed Richards the tuning he would make his own. “I met Ry in 1968, when he was hanging around with Taj Mahal and Jesse Ed Davis. There were people like Clarence White around, too, some good guitar players! So we’d all pick stuff up from each other. Ry was using open G for slide, I saw him and thought, that’s a really nice tuning. It restricts you so much; five strings, three notes, two fingers… one @#$%&!”



keith richards telecaster fender
Image: Michael Putland


Hot streak

“There’s something about being restricted that opens up the possibilities. With a synthesizer, you can do anything you like. I don’t want to do anything I like! I wanna do something that ties me down, where I can manoeuvre. So I started playing in G without the slide, and started to find other chords and realise this was a really good vehicle for me. Especially ’cause Brian had just… croaked, it was a period where there was no other guitar player and I was trying to figure out what the hell to do next. Then I started to work with Mick Taylor and we really hit our stride, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, then we had to move out; Exile On Main St. we worked together all in one joint.”

Throughout the course of those albums, Richards would find his own vision, defining and refining the Stones’ sound more and more. He was experimenting with Nashville tuning (in which the four ‘bass’ strings are tuned an octave higher – which, when doubled with a standard tuning, gives a 12-string effect), as well as using acoustics, preamped and compressed by a cheap tape recorder for rhythm parts on songs like Street Fighting Man. By the time of Exile…, the Stones were recording in the damp basement of Richards’ house in the French Riviera, and the chaotic conditions produced what many regarded as the Stones’ finest work.


[youtu.be]

“Especially making Exile…, I found this thing [the guitar] can do loads of things. It was there I really started appreciating the guitar. I thought: it’s got so many possibilities, and I’m just tinkering with it. And I still am. But it was there that I realised that this wasn’t a tool that I could master, it was something that I could spend my whole life doing.”

Richards has often commented that with Mick Taylor in the band “it became more like regular rhythm and lead guitar – it was much harder to get the Stones’ sound”. But there are many stories over how he was replaced. And was Ry Cooder, who helped Keith find his own sound, ever in the running for a place in the Stones?

“Ry? Musically, yes, I would have had him in the band. Personality-wise, no way. Ry wouldn’t have fitted – and he was always his own man. I only found out lately that Eric wanted to jump in after Mick Taylor, but never did say so. But he expected us to call! It’s like: ‘Why didn’t you call me?’ – ‘Because you’re too damn good – and you’re your own man!’. There’s certain guys that are band players and there’s certain guys that ain’t. That’s not a reflection on anybody. Eric’s a great leader, but he’s not a good bandleader. Eric’s a chameleon – I love him dearly and he knows that… he’s changed his hair again. And those suits! But if there’s anybody lazier than me, it’s Eric. He’s got it all, but Eric’s like Mick Taylor in a way, he needs to hire guys to play with him to kick him up the arse.

“The best playing I’ve heard from Eric in over 10 years was that thing with Chuck Berry, Wee Wee Hours, when he had a band kicking him up the arse, and he had to come through. And when he has to come through, Eric will come through like dynamite, but a lot of the time, he’s cruising. You can be good, but you’re not gonna be good with a bunch of Yes Men. They might be fantastic musicians, but he’s avoiding guys who say ‘Eric, you’re wrong’. You need a team.”



Keith on the Pyramid Stage at the 2013 Glastonbury Festival.
Ian Gavan


Putting the band back together

Richards’ obsession with keeping his team together has also caused its frustrations. “The 70s were a hard time. Especially when they kicked us out of London, it’s very hard to keep a tight unit together once you’ve been displaced from your own turf. So our main battle then was to keep the band together and write songs when you’re several thousand miles apart, rather than ‘I’ve written a song, I’ll be round in five minutes’. But then you realise that this is all a challenge… Nobody’s taken music this far – and it’s a voyage of discovery.

“I’m looking forward more because now we’ve got over that stopping and starting thing. There’s no way the Stones would have made Steel Wheels, starting it in February and ending it in June, if we hadn’t done separate stuff. You would’ve spent two months getting the band into shape. For musicians, it’s practice. You can’t take two years off. So early in the New Year, Mick and I will get together and see what we’ve got. Bill’s another subject, though.”

Doubts about whether Wyman will return to the Stones camp after the current hiatus in the band’s activity have been circulating for some time now. At one point, it was even rumoured Jagger’s solo sidekick, Doug Wimbish, would be stepping in. Richards doesn’t want to see any change.

“Bill, I’ve got to see eyeball to eyeball to get this thing sorted out once and for all. I don’t want to say too much. My basic attitude is the Stones are getting together and I expect him to be there, I don’t want to see this line-up change now. My basic attitude is the Stones are getting together and I expect him to be there, but at the same time I know I can’t leave it that long. I don’t wanna hear any more rumours and bullshit. It won’t stop the Stones going on. I don’t know what we’d do. Maybe he’s happy running his restaurants… I don’t know.

“Bill’s a very noncommital guy, which is why I can’t talk to him on the phone. Charlie says maybe we could threaten to replace him with a chick – maybe that will do the trick! It’s a drag when your family squabbles are in the papers and everything you do is a potential headline. My view of life is totally distorted.”


[youtu.be]


Wild horses

But whatever happens, Keith will find a way of keeping his band going. And whatever mistakes they might make along the way – well, that’s all part of the grand design.

“It could fall apart. It’s a balancing act. But you can fall down and get up. I guess I got over my embarrassment over falling down in public a long time ago. That, to me, is what makes it interesting. You set yourself up for a fall, you don’t wanna fall but you know you can get up.

“I really feel for new bands that are coming up because these days, you need a quarter of a million dollars before you can start. And with that big money, the marketing men want to play it safe. And when you play safe, the best you’re gonna come up with is something that’s not bad. And we’re not here talking because music is not bad. We’re here because it’s @#$%& great! Playing safe is not what it’s about. This music is all about beautiful @#$%&-ups. And beautiful recoveries.”

Scout’s Dishonor (1950s)
Keith Richards

As a teenager, Keith spent two years in the Boy Scouts. But this brief flirtation with public service ended after he smuggled a couple of bottles of whiskey into a jamboree and found himself engaging in fisticuffs with fellow members of what he called the "Beaver Patrol." "Soon afterwards there were a couple of fights that went down between us and some Yorkshire guys, and so I was under suspicion," he once recalled, according to Victor Bockris' Keith Richards: The Biography. "All the fighting was found out after I went to slug one guy but hit the tent pole instead, and broke a bone in my hand!" A few weeks later, he punched out "some dummo recruit" and was expelled.









A Near-Death Shocker (1965)

Richards has almost died many times, but there's one close call he says is his "most spectacular": On December 3rd, 1965, while playing "The Last Time" in front of 5,000 fans at the Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento, California, his guitar touched his microphone stand, a flame shot out, and Richards dropped to the ground, unconscious. Promoter Jeff Hughson thought Richards had been shot. Said attendee Mick Martin, "I literally saw Keith fly into the air backward. I thought he was dead. I was horrified. We all were." It turns out Richards had been shocked by the electrical surge from the mic. He was carried out with oxygen tubes and rushed to the hospital. Richards later laughed as he recalled hearing a doctor in the hospital say, "Well, they either wake up or they don't." Richards may have survived because of the thick soles of his suede Hush Puppies shoes, which halted the electrical charge. He was back onstage the next night.

MORE: [www.rollingstone.com]

Newcastle City Hall and a night of mayhem when the Rolling Stones appeared
by David Morton
2020


In October, 1965 one hysterical fan halted the Rolling Stones show at Newcastle City Hall when she tried to get to grips with Mick Jagger
(Image: Newcastle Chronicle)


The 1960s were starting to swing 55 years ago.

In the burgeoning world of pop music, the two major acts were the clean-cut working-class Beatles from Liverpool; and the scruffy middle-class blues wannabes from London, the Rolling Stones.

It was the latter band who were appearing at Newcastle City Hall, this week 55 years ago - on what would be a chaotic evening at the Northumberland Road venue.

The Stones, fronted by 22-year-old lead singer Mick Jagger and 21-year-old guitarist Keith Richards, arrived on Tyneside with five consecutive number-one hit singles under their belt: It's All Over Now; Little Red Rooster; The Last Time; Satisfaction; and Get Off My Cloud.

Jagger and Richards, alongside guitarist Brian Jones, drummer Charlie Watts, and bassist Bill Wyman had also returned from their successful first tour of the United States a few months earlier in a year when they also toured the UK and Europe almost constantly.

The band had hit the big time, but the pace was grueling.

Each date - the Newcastle date was sandwiched between shows in Glasgow and Stockton - required the Stones to put on two performances, one at 6.15 pm, and another at 8.45 pm.

Ticket for the City Hall shows was 8s 6d (43p in today's money) and 6s (30p) for a bill that featured the Rolling Stones, and a support roster of acts who would achieve varying degrees of success - Unit Four Plus Two, the Spencer Davis Group, Ray Cameron, The Habits and The End.

The night would not be without incident.

'Mick Jagger attacked by wild fans' was our headline in the following day's paper, accompanied by a picture of City Hall stewards dragging a female fan off the stage.

The Rolling Stones: I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys (1965)
Graham Reid




Right at the end of the recently released Rolling Stones doco
Charlie is My Darling -- which captures extraordinary footage of a brief tour
in Ireland in '65 with a stage invasion and general mayhem -- we see the
Stones goofing off and playing a song that was a rarity.

This one.

And it's rarity value is two-fold. First it was credited to Keith Richards and
their manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and second that although they did a demo of
it they never actually recorded the song but but gave it away to the much
forgotten Toggery Five (who changed it substantially, to no avail, see clip below).

It is widely hailed however as one of the better originals which the Stones
never intended for release and its lyrics are interesting. They are about
valuing the gang more than some girl and, coming from Richards who was always
fiercely loyal to the Stones, that makes them rather telling and prescient.


It's still not a lost classic, but in its nods to the Four Seasons, its
Spector-lite production from Oldham and its Fifties referencing it does have a
certain something.

Despite them not wanting it released, this came out anyway on the
cobbled-together Metamorphosis album of '75 which their new manager Allen Klein
thought might spark interest in cover versions.

And if you do your homework on the minor songs included on that album, that
actually proved to be the case. Although one of the covers would have been
major money-spiners as Klein hoped.

So Metamorphosis is still what it looks like, cobbled-together and done for the money.

I'd Much Rather Be With The Boys however is the one that got away.

The Rolling Stones’ ‘Out of Time’: The Backstory
by Harvey Kubernik

During 2016, Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones invited this writer to a band rehearsal in a North Hollywood, Calif., soundstage as they prepared for their two-night Desert Trip booking in Southern California.

I chatted with Watts, Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards during a break. Wood asked me about the setlist. I kidded about my fantasy inclusion of “Out of Time,” a song the Stones had recorded in Hollywood and first released on the U.K. version of 1966’s Aftermath album. The song showed up a year later on an American Stones compilation LP called Flowers but was probably best known by the cover version cut by British singer Chris Farlowe, who took it to #1 in the U.K.

During a 2004 interview with Bill Wyman, the Stones’ longtime bassist, I asked about the Stones’ Hollywood recording sessions.

“We had recorded at Chess [Records in Chicago] a few times,” Wyman said. “When we came into L.A., we went to RCA [Studios]. We walked into the studio and it was too big. We were really worried. We were intimidated. We were used to recording in little places like [London’s] Regent Sound. The studio was like a hotel room. And Chess wasn’t very big either. Suddenly we’re at RCA and it’s enormous. It was like Olympic [in England] later. We thought, ‘God, we can’t record in here. We’re gonna get the wrong sound.’

“But Andrew [Loog Oldham, the Stones’ manager/producer] had this brain wave and he put us all in the corner of one room, turned all the lights down, and just tucked us all around in a small circle. We forgot about the rest of the room and the height of the ceiling, and we just did it in this little corner. It personalizes it much more, and as soon as the Stones did that, and got into this little area and started playing, it worked.

“Dave Hassinger, the engineer, got all the sounds we wanted. Brian [Jones] picked up all the instruments in the studio: the dulcimers, the glockenspiel, the marimbas. I played some of that stuff as well.


Brian Jones

“We just experimented in there. Brian brought in electric dulcimers, marimbas, autoharps. He just did so much to those songs from 1964-1966 in RCA. Brian created so many new sounds. Then he got the sitar together, just so he could play a riff. He wasn’t as good as George Harrison on it. George really learned the sitar and studied it. Brian didn’t, he just picked it up and worked out a little riff for one song. He did it with flutes. And he was brilliant at that. Dave Hassinger helped us do those things. We never had one bad word with Dave. At the time we didn’t know the heritage of the RCA studios. Andrew did.”

“There’s incredible clarity to what they were doing,” Oldham explained to me in a 2004 interview conducted for my book Hollywood Shack Job: Rock Music In Film and on Your Screen.

“It was like a linear thing. Filmic. They were vivid, and the key to that vividness was Brian Jones. The organ on ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ by Brian is just amazing. I like ‘She Smiled Sweetly’ more than ‘Lady Jane and ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ ‘Sweetly’ was boy/girl, living on the same floor, whereas both those other songs have a ‘To the Manner Born’ quality to them, trying to write and evoke. And Mick’s vocals…‘Out of Time’ I love. On the initial recording it’s Mick Jagger pulling off [Motown singer] Jimmy Ruffin. [The albums] Between the Buttons and Aftermath, without a doubt, quite a few harried moments. And we did it in Hollywood at RCA Studios.

“In 1964 I first walked into RCA with [arranger/producer] Jack Nitzsche in studio B. Jack introduced me to Dave Hassinger, the engineer. It only took a minute. I knew I’d found the band their next home.”

The actual take of “Out of Time” used in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is different from the Stones’ Aftermath/Flowers recording. This one is from the Rolling Stones’ Metamorphosis compilation album of 1964-1970 outtakes, demos and alternate versions, produced by Oldham and Jimmy Miller and issued in June 1975 by ABKCO Records.

This version was done in England at Pye Studios on April 27-30, 1966, produced by Jagger for Oldham; Jagger had recorded a reference vocal for Chris Farlowe, an artist he was producing, on a backing track comprising English session musicians, including guitarists Jimmy Page and Big Jim Sullivan and an overdubbed horn section assembled from the Ronnie Scott jazz club bandstand. The chart-topping result featuring Farlowe was released on Oldham’s Immediate Records label.

“The Chris Farlowe record produced by Mick was something else, a real piece of work,” emphasized Oldham in our 2004 conversation.

In a later interview in July 2019, for my book Docs That Rock, Music That Matters, Oldham detailed his “Out of Time” studio endeavors. “In one of my dreams that did not come true, Mick and Keith and I were gonna be [Motown songwriters] Holland-Dozier-Holland for Immediate. That was the original idea. But it didn’t work out. Everybody got extra busy, whatever. But that was one of the original thoughts behind it. Mick did a wonderful job on Chris Farlowe’s ‘Out of Time’ and his album. It was expensive, 12, 000 pounds, a lot of money then, the price of a Rolls Royce Phantom V. It was also Mick’s first production with me for Immediate. The only reason Mick, Keith and I started to produce together was that we liked to do things the Beatles hadn’t done.

“There came a settlement between the Rolling Stones and [ABKCO Records owner] Allen Klein in the early ’70s that I didn’t know much about,” Oldham continued. “I was living in Paris with my wife Esther. We got together with Mick and [his then-wife] Bianca. Mick and I were supposed to get together in New York to mix the album that would become Metamorphosis.

“I was not privy to what was going on, but Mick obviously changed his mind and delivered a bunch of lesser stuff to Allen Klein. It was just abysmal. In an attempt to not only rescue the album but make it complete, a full album, [at the time] I was doing elaborate demos of songs [with my Andrew Loog Oldham Orchestra] that Mick and Keith had written, with just Mick and Keith doing some vocals. The Rolling Stones are not playing on them.

“I remembered that Mick had done a reference vocal for Chris Farlowe for ‘Out of Time.’ So, I let Allen have it for Metamorphosis ’cause we needed a decent song. I mixed that and added a lot of people from Connecticut, bass players and background vocals that I used on a Donovan session. That went onto the album [along with] stuff they’d worked on and not bothered to finish: for example, the version of Stevie Wonder’s ‘I Don’t Know Why,’ which was recorded on the night Brian Jones died.



“When I was putting together Metamorphosis in New York at the Record Plant in 1975, John Lennon was next door. I borrowed the horn people from [Lennon’s backup band] Elephant’s Memory. [It was about a minute and a half but] if you listen to it, Mick repeats the same verse and chorus three times. I made it 3:40 with the addition of the horn section and the Connecticut musicians.

In June 2022 Andrew Loog Oldham, now based in Bogota, Colombia, was surely smiling sweetly with the inclusion of “Out of Time” in the Stones’ ’22 setlist.

Article on Spanish Tony Sanchez in this December issue of Classic Rock Magazine

I'm only posting one sample from this great Rolling Stones website. For more
visit: [stonescave.ning.com]

The Secrets Behind the Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main Street” Reissue
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards reevaluate their classic 1972 double album

BY ANDY GREENE
MARCH 9, 2010



photo Robert Knight


Mick Jagger:

Tell me how this new edition of Exile on Main Street came together.

Universal wanted to rerelease Exile, and they asked me if there were any tracks that we didn’t use when we released it originally. And I said, “Well, I doubt it very much.” One, ’cause I thought we probably used most of the tracks anyway, ’cause it was a double album. And secondly, ’cause I couldn’t really be bothered. But then they said, “Please, will you look?” I was quite surprised to find the tapes in such a good state. They all had to be baked in ovens [to] last forever. I added bits and pieces here and there.





What sort of bits and pieces did you add?

I added some percussion. I added some vocals. Keith put guitar on one or two. I added some acoustic guitar and some other things. Charlie [Watts] didn’t need to come in. The drums were all perfect. “Pass the Wine,” for example, was very, very long, so I edited it down. In the spirit of Exile we added some girl background vocals on “Tumbling Dice” and “Shine a Light.” We had some nice background vocals on the originals. But I think in the end it’s very much sounding like it was in those days, so to speak.




Tell me the process of sorting through all this old material.

Keith and I listened to it. We picked things that we rather liked. And then I started doing research on my own and I found out that quite a lot of these pieces were really not from the Exile period at all. They were either earlier or later. Some of them much later. There was one moment where Keith said to me, “God, I think Mick Taylor sounds really good on that one” and I said, “Yeah, it sounds fantastic.” Then I went online and found out that it’s actually B.B. King playing on it and it was done like 10 years ago.

Exile was recorded over quite a long period. Some of it was recorded in Olympic Studios in England, some was recorded in France, and then there was stuff done in L.A. So I set myself a sort of time frame for it. The first recording was “Loving Cup” in 1969, and then the last sessions for Exile were done in 1972. So that was my time period.



Are there songs on the set that you just couldn’t recall making in the first place?

I recall making it all. It was just where and when and with who was another matter. Who’s playing what? It wasn’t always put down who’s playing guitar and who’s playing keyboard and that sort of thing. There are still a few mysteries. Most of it was recorded on an eight-track, some of it was recorded on a 16-track. We kind of figured it out because of that.



Tell me about “Following the River.” That’s a brand new vocal, right?

I just started from nothing on that. The core tape of it was the piano and the drums, bass, and guitar. There was no top line or lyric. I started from scratch — I mean, that’s what I do, and I’ve done it many times before. And it’s daunting in the beginning, but after a while you get into it.



So how do you go about writing lyrics?

You just sit down and write it as you would anything else, you know? Sometimes you write the lyrics while you’re sitting down playing the piano or guitar, and the lyrics come to you while you’re writing the song. And sometimes you write the melody first and you have to write all the lyrics. And sometimes you get half the lyrics. And sometimes there’s a track that you didn’t turn up on the session. And they say, “Mick, we’ve done this great track. Will you write the words?” And that was this one.



I’ve heard you say in the past that you thought Exile is a bit overrated. Do you still feel that way?

Well, that was like maybe when people started saying, “Is this your favorite album?” I was one to say, “Well, I don’t think it really is. I’m a great fan of Sticky Fingers.” This is very different album ’cause it’s so sprawling. It doesn’t contain a lot of hit singles for instance. Over the years a lot of the songs have been played onstage and they’ve acquired another life. So it’s a very different kind of album than Sticky Fingers or Let It Bleed in that way. The production value is a different. It’s just a different vibe. But, I mean, there are really great things on it. And I spent the last six months living with it, so I know it pretty much inside out now.


Do you have more respect for it after those six months?

Nah, I always had a lot of respect for it. It was difficult, because people didn’t like it when it came out. I think they just found it quite difficult because of the length of it. People didn’t access it quite so easily at the time. It got kind of mixed reviews. People found it a bit impenetrable and a bit difficult. Everyone said, “It’s my favorite, it’s my favorite, I love it!” and I said, “Well, it’s not mine.” It was just sort of toss-off remark and it’s come back to haunt me, really.



Keith Richards:

How did this new Exile set come together?

Well, basically it’s the record and a few tracks we found when we were plundering the vaults. Listening back to everything we said, “Well, this would be an interesting addition.”




Are these songs you had forgotten about?

I must say yes, it’s been quite awhile. That’s what longevity does to you. “Start Me Up” we’d forgotten about for five years before we put it out.



And you and Mick added new parts to some of them?

There wasn’t much to be done and I really didn’t want to get in the way of what was there. It was missing a bit of body here and there, and I stroked something on acoustic here and there. But otherwise, I really wanted to leave them pretty much as they were. Mick wanted to sort of fix some vocal things, but otherwise, basically they are as we left them 39 years ago.



Do you think the basement cuts from France sound different than the songs you recorded in the States or in England?

Oh, definitely. That was pretty unique way of recording. We did a lot of work on the stuff when we took it to L.A., ’cause we did a lot of overdubs and stuff on it there, but there was something about the rhythm section sound down there — maybe it’s the concrete, or maybe it’s the dirt, but it has a certain sound to it that you couldn’t replicate if you tried.



Exile was initially greeted with mixed reviews.

Oh, at first, yeah. We kind of expected that just from the fact that it was a double album. First of all, the record company wanted to cut it in half. So we said, “Oh, this is not looking good.” But also we insisted, “No, this is what we did. This is Exile on Main Street, and we insist that it’s a double album.” So it kind of got a slow take-off, but ever since then, it’s been up there. Also, it’s the first album with no particular single on it, you know? There was no “Brown Sugar” or whatever. We made it as an album, rather than looking for a hit single.



Many now consider it your best album. Do you agree?

I would put it up there with ’em. It’s very difficult for me to pick my babies apart, you know? But, Beggar’s Banquet, Exile, Sticky Fingers, Let it Bleed — I mean, it was part of that period where we were really hitting it, you know?



As you and Mick started work on these old songs, did you start thinking about new songs?

Oh yes. You’re always thinking of new songs. Or rather, the new songs are thinking of you. I never sit down and say, “Oh, it’s songwriting time.” But every now and again, a certain note or a certain chord sort of rings a bell, and you sort of grab a guitar and go, “I must remember that.”







Don Was:

How did the process of sorting through the Exile outtakes begin?

They just sent me hundreds of hours of multitracks to go through, which was the best gig ever. It was all mixed up. It was labeled by number code and it wasn’t an accurate directory of what it was. You’d be listening to some blues jam and then all of a sudden there’s a version of “Wild Horses” with a string quartet, then another reel with all the takes of “Honky Tonk Woman” leading up to the final one. It was mind-blowing for a Stones fanatic such as myself.

I also got very involved with the guys who bootlegged the stuff. I wanted them to have some surprises too, not just better mixes of stuff that they were very familiar with. We found songs that had vocals, for example, where only instrumental tracks had ever surfaced.



Why did you have to bake the master tapes?

It’s not really like a solid piece of tape, like you think of Scotch tape. It’s more like sandpaper. You have all these oxide particles and they get moved over the magnetic recording heads and rearranged into patterns that when it passes over the playback head — the playback head recognizes those patterns and transduces it into sound waves. Tapes from the ’50s and ’60s are OK. But I guess they started saving money, and tapes from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s — the particles tended to coagulate together and fall off the surface. So baking somehow makes them adhere to the surface without altering the pattern. It holds the particles in place at least for one time through so you can transfer it to something digital.



How much new overdubbing did the band do?

The essence of these things never got changed from 1969 to 1971. Beyond finding the best stuff to put out, the second responsibility was really to make sure nothing happened to alter the spirit of Exile. On “Following the River,” the vocal was there but he knew what he wanted to do with the words — he just never got around to it. So he sang it again. And in one case there is a great ballad that never had lyrics. He wrote it and finished it.




I heard a rumor somewhere that you guys brought in Mick Taylor to overdub some things. Is that true at all?

I’m not saying it’s not true. I’m simply not going to deny.



What else can you tell me about the unheard songs?

Well, as a bass player, I can tell you that Bill Wyman is a genius. He blew my mind, the stuff I heard him play here. He really doesn’t get enough credit. The drums were amazing, but everyone knows that Charlie’s the greatest.



How do you pick one alternate version of “Tumbling Dice” when they spent hours and hours working on that song?

It’s hard to do. That version of “Tumbling Dice” was chosen because it’s got the other lyric. The actual version that’s on Exile, it’s got to be one of the top five all-time great rock & roll singles. There’s so much wrong with it. Now a lot of the things that happened somewhat randomly, like the vocals being mixed down low, people have imitated. It’s become part of the vocabulary of rock & roll record-making. But it’s wrong, by all standards. But it’s absolutely perfect. It’s a perfect record.

The Rolling Stones - Vol. 5, Aftermath (JAPANESE Edition UK 1966)


"THE ROLLING STONES - AFTERMATH" (JAPANESE EDITION UK 1966)

Aftermath, first released in April 1966, was the fourth UK and sixth US studio album by "The Rolling Stones".

The album proved to be a major artistic breakthrough for "The Rolling Stones", being the first full-length release by the band to consist exclusively of "Mick Jagger"/"Keith Richards" compositions.

Aftermath was also the first "The Rolling Stones" album to be recorded entirely in the United States, at the legendary RCA Studios in Los Angeles, California at 6363 Sunset Boulevard, and the first album the band released in Stereo.
The album is also notable for its musical experimentation, with "Brian Jones" playing a variety of instruments which feature prominently in each track, including the sitar on "Paint It, Black", and the Appalachian dulcimer on "Lady Jane" and "I Am Waiting", marimba (African xylophone) on "Under My Thumb", and "Out of Time", harmonica on "High and Dry" and "Goin' Home" as well as guitar and keyboards.

To this day Aftermath remains a big fan favorite from the "Brian Jones" era.



The Rolling Stones: "Paint It, Black"/"Flight 505"/"Goin' Home", London Records LS 70, EP Japan 1966

As with all the "The Rolling Stones" pre-1967 LPs, different editions were released in the UK and the USA.

This was a common feature of British Pop albums at that time because UK albums typically did not include tracks that had already been released as singles.




The Rolling Stones: "19th Nervous Breakdown" / "The Spider And The Fly", London TOP-1020, Japan 1966

The UK version of Aftermath was issued in April 1966 as a fourteen-track LP, and this is generally considered to be the definitive version. Issued between the non-LP single releases of "19th Nervous Breakdown" and "Paint It, Black", Aftermath was a major hit in the UK, spending eight weeks at #1 on the UK album chart.



The Rolling Stones: "Paint It, Black" / "Long Long While", London TOP-1053, Japan 1966

The British version of Aftermath was released earlier than its American counterpart and had several differences beyond its cover design: it runs more than ten minutes longer, despite not having "Paint It, Black" on it (singles were usually kept separate from LPs in England in those days), and it has four additional songs — "Mother's Little Helper", which was left off the US album for release as a single; "Out of Time" in its full-length five-minute-36-second version, two minutes longer than the version of the song issued in America; "Take It Or Leave It", which eventually turned up on Flowers in the US; and "What To Do", which didn't surface in America until the release of "More Hot Rocks" more than six years later.


Additionally, the song lineup is different, "Goin' Home" closing side one instead of side two.

And the mixes used are different from the tracks that the two versions of the album do have in common — the UK album and CD used a much cleaner, quieter master that had a more discreet stereo sound, with wide separation in the two channels and the bass not centered as it in the US version.

Thus, one gets a more vivid impression of the instruments. It's also louder yet curiously, because of the cleaner sound, slightly less visceral in its overall impact, though the details in the playing revealed in the mixes may fascinate even casual listeners.




The Rolling Stones: "Mother's Little Helper" / "Lady Jane", London TOP-1069, Japan 1966

It's still a great album, though the difference in song lineup makes it a different record; "Mother's Little Helper" is one of the more in-your-face drug songs of the period, as well as being a potent statement about middle-class hypocrisy and political inconsistency, and "Out Of Time", "Take It Or Leave It" (which had been a hit for "The Searchers"), and "What To Do", if anything, add to the misogyny already on display in "Stupid Girl" and "Think", and "Out Of Time" adds to the florid sound of the album's Psychedelic component (and there's no good reason except for a plain oversight by the powers that be for the complete version of "Out Of Time" never having been released in America).
"The Rolling Stones" released "19th Nervous Breakdown" several months earlier as a non album song. This classic, frenetic rocker was terrific with a dense and layered sound supporting "Mick Jagger"'s vocal. It reached number two on the American charts and could have easily been included on Aftermath. Also the double sided single "Lady Jane" / "Mother's Little Helper" was released in the United States.

Most of the tunes are strong and this has to go down as containing "Brian Jones"' best work.
He plays several different instruments on this LP besides guitar. Most interesting is his heavy metal sounding sitar on "Paint It, Black".



Brian Jones with sitar at Ready Steady Go, London 1966

Nobody up to this time had ever played a sitar as the lead instrument for a Hard Rock song, yet it turned out sounding so great that the song is still today considered one of "The Rolling Stones" all time best ever.

Aftermath was an instant commercial success in the United States, rising to number 2 on the Billboard chats and selling over one million copies. It would remain on the charts for 50 weeks.




The critical consensus on Aftermath seems to be that it marked the point where "The Rolling Stones" really started to come into their own from a creative standpoint.

All the songs were original and the band began to deviate from its Blues Rock roots both instrumentally and stylistically.




John Lennon with an Aftermath copy during Revolver sessions, 1966

Most people also accept that these changes were instigated by the activities of other artists, primarily "The Beatles" as well as "Bob Dylan" and possibly "The Beach Boys".

To a certain extent, "The Rolling Stones" outdid "The Beatles" (but not "The Beach Boys") in terms of the sheer diversity of non-standard instrumentation. The only thing "Rubber Soul" had on it was the first appearance of "George Harrison"'s sitar and some maracas.

This time period saw "The Rolling Stones" use the marimba, sitar and dulcimer, as well as various pianos and keyboards. The result? Well we all know that "Under My Thumb" and "Paint It, Black" are great, and it's no surprise that "The Rolling Stones" could put together some hit singles.




Brian Jones with dulcimer, 1966

And that's exactly what makes Aftermath so unique. It's a bunch of non-professionals that happen to have a good nose for Pop hooks, but are way too soaked in the Blues to adorn them with sitar and dulcimer, and have to resort to the good ol' Fuzzbox, the trusty old Blues harmonica and crappy guitar tuning instead.

The hooks on Aftermath are, indeed, exceedingly strong, but it is their combination with the regular stonesy grittiness that gives the album its outstanding flavour.

At least, that's how I view it. Too many people have complained that from 1966 to 1967 "The Rolling Stones" were nothing but a pallid imitation of "The Beatles"; I certainly prefer the 'original evil twin' description instead.

Granted, "Brian Jones" seemed to be aware of these limitations. His transformation on this record - even though he's never credited for any of the songs - is perhaps even more stunning, as it was he who'd been the original Blues purist in the band. Keith was the rocker, Mick the PR guy, and Brian the spiritual guru.

On Aftermath, though, it is "Brian Jones" who's responsible for dragging in both the sitar and the dulcimer (probably while the others weren't looking), in addition to marimbas and whatever else he's having out there - as if he just woke up one morning with the idea of 'blues just won't cut it anymore' stuck in his head and proceeded from there.

Unfortunately, "Brian Jones" seems to have been working in gusts and torrents: his presence ranges from essential to barely felt, and by the time Side 2 of the album rolls along, he's barely there, although, of course, this isn't quite the same 'barely there' as it'd be in a matter of just two years' time.




The Rolling Stones 1966, photo courtesy Jerry Schatzberg(?)

Still, it's a shame "Brian Jones" has never been given credit for "Paint It, Black" at least.

You only have to listen once to any of the live versions of the song available and compare it with the studio original to understand just how much it loses without the sitar.

Because it's a very simple song, isn't it? It's essentially just one line, over and over again. The sitar is what gives it meaning: it's a mantra, and what is a mantra but a trance-inducing repetition? But then at the very heart of it is lodged a stunning hook, when they change keys midway through each verse and oops! the mantra suddenly becomes a furious Pop-Rocker.
And then, oops, a mantra once again.

And so on and on, until, towards the coda, it is finally and firmly stabilized as a mantra.

Omit the sitar - never mind that the playing is amateurish and sloppy, "Brian Jones" could never hope to get to be an instantaneous "Ravi Shankar" - and you just have the Rocker.

A pretty awesome Rocker, but no subtlety involved. "Brian Jones", for one, knew this, which is why he probably insisted upon bringing the sitar to the Ed Sullivan Show.

++++




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WINTERLAND 1972


Fans waiting outside the Downtown Center Box office on Mason Street on May 16, 1972 to buy tickets to the Rolling Stones concert.
Art Frisch / Art Frisch / The Chronicle



Fans waiting outside to get into Winterland for the Rolling Stones concert on June 6, 1972.
Dave Randolph / Dave Randolph / The Chronicle

Tickets were $5.00. Winterland had no reserved seating, so if
patrons wanted to get a great spot near the front of the stage, they had to
get there early. Fans began lining up along the auditorium’s wall 48 hours
before the doors were scheduled to open. The first folks in line were Richard
Green, 21, and Mark Jeppeson, 19, of Graton in Sonoma County. Each had a
shaggy sheepskin blanket covering them for warmth. “We’ve also got pillows in
my car,” Green said, “along with 3 gallons of water, a bag of nuts, and 10
pounds of oranges."

Stones Fans Thwarted by Ticketron Failure in San Francisco
Don't blame the Stones


The Rolling Stones performs at Winterland Arena on June 6, 1972 in San Francisco, California.
Larry Hulst


SAN FRANCISCO — It used to be when you wanted to go to a Rolling Stones concert you had to stand in line for hours to get tickets. Now, through the miracle of computerized ticket sales, you can wait in line for hours and not get tickets.

That’s what happened May 15th to thousands who crowded to 54 Ticketron outlets in Northern California to purchase seats at four Stones concerts at Winterland on June 6th and 8th.

“It was a madhouse,” said a middle-aged saleslady at Sears. “There were people sleeping outside the door waiting to get in. When the store opened at 9:30 they came through those doors like animals.”

Even after the tickets went on sale at 10 AM, the lines barely moved. Simultaneous ticket requests from Northern California outlets, plus outlets in the L.A. area and Chicago all ordering tickets at the same time, were too much for the one dinky central computer that serves all Ticketron outlets west of Chicago.

The computer jammed. It took each outlet 12 minutes to process one order. One computer in L.A. fizzled out completely.

There were 18,000 tickets available at Winterland. Had there been equal distribution of tickets at the outlets, as customers assumed (about 300 per outlet), with a maximum four tickets allowed to a person, only the first 75-100 people in lines of up to 700 would get theirs.

But some centers got less tickets out of the computer than others. It wasn’t luck, or foul play, as many disgruntled customers complained afterwards. It was just that non-computerized human factor.

Some Ticketron operators were simply more efficient than others. They ordered tickets at the maximum rate – nine requests per order – and kept ordering without waiting for specific requests. They knew whatever they got their hands on would be sold.

There were no reported incidents of violence at the ticket sales, except, perhaps in the emotions of those who were disappointed. At 3 o’clock when it was announced that tickets were sold out at the downtown San Francisco Ticketron Agency, one 19-year-old girl who’d waited eight hours in line said “people felt like just tearing the place down.”

Complaints about the system were forwarded to Barry Imhoff, head of FM Productions, which handled ticket operation for the tour. Victims of L.A.’s collapsed computer were somewhat appeased with first crack at a fourth L.A. concert added to the tour.

He received some angry letters from people who stood and slept in line only to have some bully cut in front of them.

With all its faults, Imhoff felt that Ticketron was the best system available. It spread out the numbers of empty-handed ticket-seekers over a large area. “If we had them line up at Winterland for tickets,” Imhoff said, “they’d level the place.

“You can’t satisfy everybody. We never get complaints about the system from the people who got tickets. It’s only the unlucky ones who complain.”






Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones in concert in the Bay Area, June 1972.
Dave Randolph




Dave Rudolph




Dave Rudolph



The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972


The ’72 tour was known by other names—the Cocaine and Tequila Sunrise tour or the STP, Stones Touring Party. It was mythologized along the lines of Stanley Booth’s list of excesses, above. Personally I never saw anything like this. Stanley must have been exaggerating or he was a very innocent boy. It was the case nevertheless that by this time we couldn’t get a reservation in any hotel above a Holiday Inn. It was the beginning of the booking of whole hotel floors, with no one else allowed up, so that some of us—like me—could get privacy and security. It was the only way we could have a degree of certainty that when we decided to party, we could control the situation or at least get some warning if there was trouble.

- Keith Richards (Life: Keith Richards)


The Rolling Stones American Tour 1972, also known as the "Stones Touring Party", shortened to S.T.P., was a much-publicized and much-written-about concert tour of the United States and Canada in June and July 1972 by The Rolling Stones. Constituting the band's first performances in the United States following the Altamont Free Concert in December 1969, critic Dave Marsh would later write that the tour was "part of rock and roll legend" and one of the "benchmarks of an era."

The tour in part supported the group's Exile on Main St. album, which was released a few weeks earlier on 12 May. It was also part of a tour-America-every-three-years rotation that the group established in 1969 and maintained through 1981.

On the first show of the tour, 3 June in Vancouver, British Columbia, 31 policemen were treated for injuries when more than 2,000 fans attempted to crash the Pacific Coliseum.

In San Diego on 13 June, there were 60 arrests and 15 injured during disturbances. In Tucson, Arizona on 14 June, an attempt by 300 youths to storm the gates led to police using tear gas. While in Chicago for three appearances on 19 and 20 June, the group stayed at Hugh Hefner's original Playboy Mansion in the Gold Coast district. Eighty-one people were arrested at the two sellout Houston shows on 25 June, mostly for marijuana possession and other minor drug offences. There were 61 arrests in the large crowd at RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C. on the Fourth of July.

On 13 July police had to block 2,000 ticket-less fans from trying to gain access to the show in Detroit. On 17 July at the Montreal Forum a bomb blew up in the Stones' equipment van, and replacement gear had to be flown in; then it was discovered that 3,000 forged tickets had been sold, causing a fan riot and a late start to the concert. The next day, 18 July, the Stones' entourage got into a fight with photographer Andy Dickerman in Rhode Island, and Jagger and Richards landed in jail, imperilling that night's show at the Boston Garden. Boston Mayor Kevin White, fearful of a riot if the show were cancelled, intervened to bail them out; the show went on, albeit with another late start. Dickerman would later file a £22,230 lawsuit against the band.

On 16 June, after the Denver shows, in a hotel suite, Stephen Stills and Keith Richards drew knives in an argument.

The tour ended with four shows over three consecutive nights at New York City's Madison Square Garden, the first night of which saw 10 arrests and two policemen injured, and the last leading to confrontations between the crowd outside Madison Square Garden and the police. The last show on 26 July, Jagger's 29th birthday, had balloons and confetti falling from Madison Square Garden's ceiling and Jagger blowing the candles off a huge cake. Pies were also wheeled in, leading to a pie fight between the Rolling Stones and the audience.

Following the final performance, a party was held in Jagger's honor by Ahmet Ertegun at the St. Regis New York. Guests included Bob Dylan, Woody Allen, Andy Warhol, the Capote entourage, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, while the Count Basie Orchestra provided musical entertainment. At the event, Dylan characterized the tour as "encompassing" and "the beginning of cosmic consciousness."

Rock critic Robert Christgau reported that the mood of the shows was friendly, with Jagger "undercut[ting] his fabled demonism by playing the clown, the village idiot, the marionette."
MTD

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Municipal Auditorium June 29, 1972
Jimmy Ellis

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2023-11-04 12:09 by exilestones.

Sorry if this has actually been requested elsewhere but I'm trying to find the interview with Keef, in the latest Guitar Player magazine.

Can anybody upload it on to here?

I'm finding it hard to keep up with all the random interviews Keef has been conducting recently. Not that I'm complaining!

Thanks, in advance.

.... Keith Guitar Player interview ....

Scroll down ... just after Andrew Watt interview

[iorr.org]



ROCKMAN

Heyyy Rockman, thank you ever so much. I thought I'd missed out on that one. Love the musings of Keef. He's such an interesting barrel of tricks.

Anyone with anymore, by chance?!?

Thanks again.

I'm not as think as you stoned I am.

Shine a Light: Rockers on the Genius of ‘Exile on Main Street’
Phish, Pearl Jam, Elvis Costello and more open up about the Rolling Stones' epic 1972 album

BY ROLLING STONE

MICK JAGGER AND Keith Richards revisit the making of the Rolling Stones‘ gritty masterpiece Exile on Main Street in the new issue of Rolling Stone.
As the band prepares for the May 18th (2010) reissue of its classic 1972 album, artists from Trey Anastasio to ?uestlove share their favorite epic Exile moments.

Phish‘s Trey Anastasio:
“The song I really related to is ‘Torn and Frayed.’ ‘The ballrooms and smelly bordellos/And dressing rooms filled with parasites’: We really had a problem with that for awhile. Yet it’s so beautifully stated in that song. And then, “Joe’s got a cough, sounds kinda rough/And the codeine to fix it” [laughs]. We had one of those — the rock doctor. Every band’s got one of those.

It’s pretty affirming at the end. You pick up so much when you go through this process of playing every song on a record [like Phish did at Festival 8]. But one of the first things I noticed, even after having listened to this record over and over my entire life, is that half of the lyrics I thought Mick Jagger was singing were wrong. And the ones he was actually singing were much better than the ones I had made up in my mind.” (For the rest of Anastasio’s thoughts on Exile, visit our full story on David Fricke’s Alternate Take.)



Pearl Jam‘s Mike McCready:
“I love that record like you wouldn’t believe. That one and Sticky Fingers, I always go back and forth on which one is the greatest record of all time. And I mean of all time of any band. I love ‘Loving Cup’ because I love the harmonies in the beginning. I love how the piano starts off the song. I love how he describes this beautiful buzz when he’s making out with that chick. I sound like @#$%& Frank Sinatra now. What a beautiful buzz, what a beautiful buzz. The soul to that song is impeccable. It’s so beautiful and it always takes me somewhere when I listen to it. I love the piano. I love Nicky Hopkins. I love Mick’s voice. I love the guitars. I love the harmonies. Specifically, when Mick does his own harmonies.”



Elvis Costello:
“I know every track. ‘Shake Your Hips.’ I also like ‘All Down the Line,’ I like ‘Rip This Joint.’ ‘Tumbling Dice,’ one of the great guitar parts. ‘Loving Cup’ is great. See, I can’t even choose, that’s how great this record is! ‘Shake Your Hips,’ it’s Slim Harpo. The Rolling Stones always loved rhythm & blues, and what’s not to love about that song? I remember the Rolling Stones came to Liverpool in 1972 when that record came out, and my entire school queued up to get tickets. And you know what I said? I said, ‘Rolling Stones, they’re over. You go on, I’ll go use the money to buy a record.’ And I bought a Jefferson Airplane record instead, so that shows you how much I knew! I didn’t buy Exile on Main Street back then, I discovered it about a year later. I couldn’t have afforded it at first because it was a double album.”



Beastie Boys’ Mike Diamond:
” ‘Sweet Black Angel’ is one of those cuts that are in the flow of the album. I’m sure for most people, the first songs that appeal to them are ‘Tumbling Dice’ or ‘It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll,’ I know those are the more accessible songs. But the thing about that album is that it’s very dense, and it obviously stands the test of time. ‘Sweet Black Angel’ is a cut you only get to after a while. Those are the cuts for me — for the heads!”



The Roots’ ?uestlove:
“I used that album as a template for Game Theory, despite people thinking Kid A was our sonic reference. ‘Loving Cup’ is probably my favorite on the album. It’s just them meshing as a group, meshing and falling apart at the same time. I tend to see the highlight of any musician’s career as sort of the beginning of the end, and I’m not saying it’s the decline. I remember one of my favorite scathing reviews for Exile actually came from Rolling Stone, from Lenny Kaye. I hung that up on my wall, because I love that record. It could have been Thriller, it could have been Purple Rain, it seems as though it’s the pinnacle. People see it as the beginning, but I see it as the end of an era.”



Brendan Benson:
“Oh my God, it’s like the Bible. That record is so instilled in me. That was like a gold mine. I don’t even know where to start. When it came out I was maybe seven years old, but I discovered it later — really truly discovered it. I was heavily into the Rolling Stones, I went chronologically. Beggars Banquet blew my mind. And then Let It Bleed, that remains my favorite. But Exile is a masterpiece. People are surprised to hear that I like the Rolling Stones. I don’t write music like that, but that’s the music that motivates me. I try to keep up with new music and there’s a ton of great new bands and stuff that I like, but you know, you put that on and you’re like, ‘@#$%& yeah! This is genius! What the hell? These guys were out of their minds.’ They’re like aliens — it’s completely out of this world.”

MGMT’s Ben Goldwasser:
“It’s one of those albums that I’ve heard so many times in different settings that it’s more about like associating songs on it with experiences. It’s kind of a life experience. The album reminds me the most of the summer I spent in Athens, Georgia. It was a summer of alternating between listening to records and swimming in a pool. The band was a couple of years old. We weren’t really playing out that much. That was the summer that we kinda started writing.”



The Dead’s Phil Lesh:
“My favorite song on that album was ‘Tumbling Dice.’ We did it a few times with Phil Lesh and Friends. It’s a gas to play live. I really love the flow of it — it rolls like a river.”

1972: The year that rocked the Rubber Bowl
Mark J. Price
Akron Beacon Journal



Fifty years ago, Akron rocked.

Belkin Productions of Cleveland scheduled a major series of concerts at the Rubber Bowl in 1972.

It was the greatest summer in Akron rock history — unless you happened to be an Akron cop working security or a neighbor trying to sleep. The concerts featured many acts destined for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

It’s still hard to believe that The Rolling Stones played in Akron with Stevie Wonder as the opening act.

Jules and Mike Belkin leased the 35,000-seat arena from the University of Akron, which received a $2,000 rental fee plus rights to concessions and parking.

Here are some of the 1972 concerts that Belkin Productions scheduled at the Rubber Bowl in Akron. Black Sabbath was added to the Humble Pie show and the concert date was delayed to July 17.
The nine concerts averaged about 20,000 people and created massive traffic jams. In many cases, fans camped overnight for the general-admission shows.

It was a groovy scene. Shaggy-haired concertgoers filled the stands and boogied past midnight. Loud music wafted through the air along with the sweet smell of cannabis.

Instead of a private security force, the promoters hired more than 100 off-duty Akron police. The officers weren’t fans of rock music. Or cannabis. Tensions boiled over.

Neighbors complained about the noise. Akron officials threatened to ban rock shows.

For those in the stadium, though, it was a summer to remember.




July 11, 1972: The Rolling Stones and Stevie Wonder
Tickets: $5.50 in advance, $6.50 at door. Estimated crowd: 50,000.

Arguably, it was the greatest concert ever held in Akron. The sold-out concert stretched the stadium’s capacity. Thousands of people had camped overnight in the woods or slept in cars.

Anticipation built all day for the 8:30 p.m. show. Fans lined up for hours in the hot sun.

As the music started, a 10-minute melee erupted. Concertgoers threw bottles at police as they tried to arrest a youth on drug charges. Seven cops were hurt. Nearly 30 fans were arrested.


Some concert-goers hurl objects at police while others try to keep peace.

As calm was restored, Wonder, 22, delivered an energetic opening set with such songs as “For Once in My Life,” “If You Really Love Me,” “My Cherie Amour,” “Signed, Sealed, Delivered,” “Superstition” and “Uptight.”

The Rolling Stones — Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Mick Taylor, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts — took the stage to thunderous applause.

Clad in a blue jacket, purple pants, neck scarf and floor-length sash, Jagger, 28, bowed to the audience and thanked fans for “coming all the way to ‘Ack-RON.’ ”

The Rolling Stones played such hits as “Jumping Jack Flash,” “Gimme Shelter,” You Can’t Always Get Way You Want,” “Brown Sugar” and “Satisfaction.”

“The Stones' Akron appearance was probably not the most transcendent, electrifying performance on their tour — the Rubber Bowl’s enormous scale tends to dissipate the nervous energy and the sense of intimacy that the group generates,” Beacon Journal reviewer William Bierman wrote.

“But the audience clearly got its money’s worth in a smooth production.”

How Ron Wood’s New Barbarians Saved the Stones
Ear-to-Ear Violence
Michael Dregni



Reelin’ and rockin’: Wood and Richards share the spotlight at the Barbarians’ three-mic stand.

The Rolling Stones have a history like no other rock-and-roll band, replete with the sort of peaks and valleys that spelled doom for virtually all others who first gathered in garages or introduced their music to basement bars in the 1960s. The early ’70s were particularly pivotal, as the band was on the verge of collapse thanks to drug busts, dwindling inspiration (and album sales), and the very real threat of Keith Richards serving time in jail. A turnaround, though, came in part thanks to an unsung side project – Ron Wood’s New Barbarians tour. As the Stones continue to perform live more than 54 years after their first gig, we offer a look at how Wood’s effort helped keep them rolling.


Wood slides a ’50s Stratocaster.

410 AD: The Barbarian hordes – led by Alaric, king of the Visigoths – sweep out of the Germanic lands and through the Holy Roman Empire, pillaging the civilized world, sacking Rome.

1979 AD: The New Barbarians – fronted by Ronnie Wood and Keith Richards – open for the Rolling Stones on April 22 in Oshawa, Ontario, before partying across the United States from Ann Arbor to San Diego, with outbreaks and riots at concerts along the way. The band then charges on to England, opening for Led Zeppelin at Knebworth Festival.

It began innocently enough. The Stones opted not to tour in 1979, leaving members with time on their side. Wood had just released his third solo album, Gimme Some Neck, and was rounding up a “pickup band” to play his songs plus some blues and rock covers on a tour. Knowing Keith Richards had nothing going, Wood signed him on for a tour of America.

From there, it all got out of hand.

Richards was still smarting from his February ’77 bust in Toronto for possession of heroin “for the purpose of trafficking.” His sentence after 18 months of legal hassles? Addiction treatment, plus play a benefit for the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNI.

Keen to get on the road again, Richards was on the run from the powers of the poppy seed and his éminence blonde, Anita Pallenberg; it may have been hard to fathom, but he was ready to turn over that proverbial new leaf. Wood, an unlikely poster boy for AA, paradoxically aided and abetted Richard’s recovery by providing a venue to revive himself – and issue the de facto “Get Out of Jail Free” card as the New Barbarians played the CNIB show.

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The Faces With Keith Richards -"Sweet Little Rock and Roller"

“Having been in trouble with the law and everything, going out on the road was Keith’s safe place,” said Gary Schultz, one of Richards’ crew and a loyal confidant. “Keith is more himself when he’s on the road and in front of an audience than when he’s doing anything else.”

The Stones with the most insatiable appetites for gigging, jamming, and having fun then added sometime-Stone and Texan native son Bobby Keys, who added the raucous sax solo to “Brown Sugar” and played on the ’71, ’72, and ’73 tours before being thrown out as a bad influence. Despite Stones politics, Wood held no grudge.

Next was Wood’s ex-Faces mate, Ian McLagan. From his natty shoes to his Beatles-esque mop, the ex-mod was always onboard for a good time.

With the frontline in place, Wood looked to the bottom-end. He asked Charlie Watts to revive his drumming role from the Neck LP, but Watts was busy with his own band and recommended Joseph “Zigaboo” Modeliste. Ziggy had been the propulsion for the Meters, the band that practically defined New Orleans R&B.



Stanley Clarke’s solo was a high point of every show.

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“I’d never actually played rock,” he recalled. “I was just an R&B-type of drummer. I loved the feel of rock and roll, so that was right up my alley, but it was a big learning curve because I had to listen in a different way. It was a little over my head, I gotta admit.”


Let there be blood: A stage swathed in red lights was the Barbarians’ trademark. New Barbarians live: Henry Diltz.





Ziggy made the switch thanks largely to the influence of one man – his fellow on the bottom end, bassist Stanley Clarke.

When recruiting for the Barbarians, Wood’s first question to Stanley was, “Know any Chuck Berry?” It was a fair query coming from a rocker to a jazzer.

Clarke laughed, and replied, “Yeah, I know Chuck Berry songs.” In fact, Stanley had played with Chuck.

Learning curve, jazz, whatever: Wood had faith.

“I knew they would adapt naturally – and put a new slant on their approach,” he remembers.

And with that plus a seasoned crew largely made up of ex-Faces roadies, the New Barbarians were born.


Blind Date


The Barbarians debuted April 22, 1979, playing the two CNIB charity shows – opening for the Stones.

Since management was worried about Richards setting foot again on Canadian soil – returning to the scene of the crime – tour chief Richard Fernandez had the musicians stay in the U.S., fly in for the shows, then jump back on their leased Boeing 727. They set up house at the Playboy Club in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, which served as a headquarters, rehearsal space, and base for the tour’s Midwest shows.

“Going to Canada, Keith’s visa was a concern, so we just went in and out,” Fernandez says. “I wasn’t sure what could or couldn’t happen when we got there, so we figured this would be the best way to get in, without any luggage, without anything, you know – just people. Get in and get out, spic and span.”


Richards picks Micawber.


Or, as the official itinerary stated, “Toronto bound: Please take the time to assure that you will be clean upon arrival. Skip the soap and go right for the vacuum.”

Introduced by an obviously amped-up John Belushi, who admonished the crowd to “Go nuts!” the Barbarians roared through their set. The Stones then took over before the bands joined to play an encore of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then they did the whole show a second time before the Barbarians hightailed it back to the Playboy Club.

From there, the band played shows across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Madison Square Garden before swinging through Texas and on to finales in California.

They opened each night with Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Rock & Roller,” Wood hitting the classic double-stops on his disc-front Zemaitis. They then rolled straight into two of Wood’s own rockers from Gimme Some Neck – “Buried Alive” and “F.U.C. Her” before playing his beautiful earlier ballad, “Mystifies Me.”

Covering Sam Cooke’s “Let’s Go Steady Again,” Richards sang while Wood played sax alongside Bobby Keys. “Variety you want? Variety you get!” Wood announced to the crowd. Richards would then take a seat at the piano for the country tearjerker “Apartment #9,” which had been Tammy Wynette’s first hit, back in ’67. Wood added pedal-steel fills.

On a cover of Freddie Scott’s R&B hit “Am I Grooving You,” most of the band retreated from stage, leaving Clarke and Ziggy to step out. Afterward, the shows were blown wide open, diving into the R&B they both loved, syncopating each other’s riffs and often surprising themselves. Stanley’s funk-inspired slaps and pops brought the crowd to frenzy each time. He was part Bootsy Collins, part Jimi Hendrix – 100,000 watts of pure Stanley Clarke.




The New Barbarians - Stanley Clarke - Bass Solo - Live 1979


Recharged, the full band then launched into Bob Dylan’s “Seven Days,” before Keith’s “Before They Make Me Run,” followed by a full-throttle “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

Then, they disappeared into the comforts of the 727, back to the Playboy Club.



“After the gig, there was no messing around,” Stanley remembers. “We’d go right to a limousine, to the plane, back to our hotel – and we’d be up all night, groovin’.”

Wood worked to refine the modern rock tour; home base in a luxury hotel, travel by charter jet, fine meals instead of cold cuts. It all helped reduce stress and frustration, instead lending a stately, low-key atmosphere.

“I wanted to do this in style,” Wood said.

No One Here But Us Chickens

At many Barbarians shows, the band was at moments almost drowned out by chants from the crowds, demanding “Where’s Jagger?” “Where’s Dylan?”

The first few times, Wood was bemused. Later, though, he expressed confusion, and ultimately began to respond, “Contrary to what you’ve heard, there ain’t no one here but us chickens.”

Turned out, though, in an effort to ensure venues were sold out, Wood’s manager and the promoters had spread rumors via the press that the Barbarians would be joined by “special guests.” Everyone from Mick Jaggar to Bob Dylan, Rod Stewart, Jimmy Page, Peter Frampton, and others were promised. When the big names didn’t show, crowds responded with catcalls and, eventually, riots.

Such frenzy reached a peak in Milwaukee in April of ’79, when angered fans charged the stage at the end of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Forced back by police, the scuffle turned into a melée (as described by Billboard) as fans smashed chairs and broke windows. The police arrested 81 people.

Things turned ugly again at Madison Square Garden, where production manager Ken Graham remembers using his body to block the mixing board from flying furniture. “It was like where the villagers rioted in an old Frankenstein movie,” he said. The actual Barbarians, however, had already left the building.



Guitars and basses backstage, including three Zemaitis models, Richards’ Tele known as “Micawber,” the ’58 Les Paul TV Junior nicknamed “Dice,” a couple of early-’50s Strats, and Stanley’s Alembic basses.

Rip This Joint

Wood and Richards went together like drunk and disorderly.

“Without Mick Jagger or a hard-nosed tour manager cracking the whip, it was one long party,” remembers crewman Johnny Starbuck. “The inmates were in charge of the asylum. Technically, it was Ronnie’s band, but Keith was pretty much the leader. And when you’re following his lead… Well, you can imagine. There were no rules.”

“There was a lot of X-rated stuff going on,” added Stanley Clarke. “It was a complete rock-and-roll tour – the kind you read about in magazines. Just what you think a rock tour should be. Everything was there – bells and whistles, perks, the extras… all the ups and downs.”

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The Barbarians disembark their 727 to unseasonably cold weather in Los Angeles.

Onstage, the Barbarians were a band of brothers. Away from stage, the fun only got louder – which is saying a lot, considering their stage volume. It began with Clarke’s low-end sound.

“I had an Alembic and had been using Electro-Voice cabinets,” Clarke said. “But Ronnie had four [Ampeg] SVTs for me because he liked a strong stage sound. It was just pounding – would kill a bird if it flew across the stage. It was nice to hear the sound so big.”

Wood had two Zemaitis guitars as mainstays, but also played a ’55 Strat as well as other assorted guitars. Richards primarily used his five-string ’54 Telecaster, “Micawber,” and his black ’75 Tele Custom. During the California swing, they met luthier Travis Bean, who gifted them with red and natural-finish guitars.


Luthier Travis Bean presented guitars to Richards and Wood during a tour stop in California.


The guitars weren’t the showstoppers, though. Rather, stacks of amps served that purpose. Wood spray-painted the grillecloths of all the amps in red. “I want to see blood,” he told Graham.

And while no hotel rooms were trashed, that didn’t mean rooms didn’t suffer. Tour manager Fernandez remembers one incident in Wood’s suite at Manhattan’s Mayfair Hotel.

“Ronnie calls me, and he and Keith were in Ronnie’s room. He says, ‘I need more spray paint.’ They were painting one of Woody’s guitars – in the bathroom of one of a grand hotel in New York City. My only thought was, ‘Oh, no! How much is this going to cost us?’ But they were deep into it and having a great time. It just cracked me up.”

For Clarke, coming from the world of jazz, it was a little rambunctious. He’d seen a lot prior to the tour, but hadn’t seen it all.

“I was a bit of a health nut at that point, and one day Keith came onto the plane looking pretty grim,” he said. “I don’t know what was going on, but he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, this is going to clear up in a couple of days.’ When we talking a bit later, I said, ‘Hey, I’m gonna make a health shake. You want one?’ Keith started laughing, shaking his head and saying, ‘Stanley, Stanley…’”

Finale

The Barbarians’ music wasn’t rocket science, just moneymaker-shaking, unapologetic rock and roll. Some critics at the time challenged the band’s merits, mostly missing its simple brilliance while pondering what could have been if only Rod or Mick were there, too. But there was more to it; something deeper. Wood’s little pick-up band played an under-recognized role in the history of the Stones – that of deliverance.



Here, Keith picks the natural-finish model. Jamming was part of the Barbarians’ pre-show routine.

Richards’ bust for heroin possession in ’77 had been the Stones’ nadir. In the years that followed, though, he kicked heroin, launched the band’s revival with Some Girls in ’78, and in March of ’79 met a young model named Patti Hansen, who would eventually become his wife. As part of the New Barbarians, he seemed to find true joy again in playing.

“The Barbarians, in a weird way, saved my life,” he said.

Some band members thought they were making history, others simply great music. Fernandez still gushes, decades later.

“Maybe it didn’t sell 85 million records and make a ton of money, but the vibe – seeing these cats and who they were and how they treated each other – was really special,” he said.

Fittingly, bandleader Wood offered definitive last word in his autobiography.

“I booked the tour, I was paying for it… got us a Boeing 727, took care of everybody, and wound up £200,000 in debt. But you know what? In the name of great music, I’d do it again and wouldn’t change a thing.”

This article originally appeared in Vintage Guitar magazine November 2016 issue.


To learn more, check out The New Barbarians: Outlaws, Gunslingers, and Guitars, by Rob Chapman and Michael Dregni, available in November from Quarto Publishing.


A Barbarian family portrait, taken backstage in Chicago in April 1979.
Photo by Robert Matheu, courtesy of Voyageur Press

Ronnie Wood at Knebworth Pop Festival for a special
appearance with The New Barbarians.
12th August 1979

The New Barbarians - Stanley, Bobby Keys, Ron Wood, Ian Mclagan, Keith Richards, Ziggy Modeliste

Ron & Junior Wells Chicago 1979                                                              Keith Richards in International Ampitheather, Chicago April 28, 1979.

photos by Paul Natkin

Oshawa Civic Auditorium, benefit concert after Keith Richards' drug bust.             The New Barbarians at The Omni Coliseum on May 10, 1979 in Atlanta, Georgia. 
Photo by Tom Hill

(Photo by Richard E. Aaron/Redferns)

Quote
exilestones

I'm only posting one sample from this great Rolling Stones website. For more
visit: [stonescave.ning.com]

That's my scans but no trouble when it's mentioned and for crediting The Cave

HMN

Quote
Honestman

Quote
exilestones

I'm only posting one sample from this great Rolling Stones website. For more
visit: [stonescave.ning.com]

That's my scans but no trouble when it's mentioned and for crediting The Cave

Can you post high-quality scans of the '72 Concert Handbill Flyer? Very cool!

Thanks for a nice Christmas present!

[rollingstonesvaults.blogspot.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-25 18:16 by exilestones.

"Everybody was going flat out": Keith Richards on the trials and tribulations that formed The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St.
By Alan di Perna published May 12, 2022


In this classic GW interview, Keef tells all about the Stones' pioneering double-album masterpiece. From the recording setup to the debauchery to the stories behind classics like Happy and Tumbling Dice



(Image credit: Robert Knight Archive/Redferns)


The following interview was featured in the June 2010 issue of Guitar World.

"To me, Exile on Main St. was probably the best Rolling Stones album as far as the connection between the band members,” Keith Richards says. “We were coming up with song ideas like crazy. And the ideas were catching on. Everybody was going flat out.”

The anniversary reissue of the Rolling Stones’ landmark double album this May will provide a heavy blast of nostalgia to those who were around when Exile was first released, in 1972. The newly remastered tracks, as well as the session outtakes, will also be a revelation even to those who know the album inside and out.

But perhaps no one feels the nostalgia, or the revelations, as profoundly as Keith Richards. There’s no denying that the album is quintessentially Keef in its swagger and the cocky sprawling grandeur of its musical scope.

Hedged all about by rough edges, Exile’s elegantly wasted, slightly messy nonchalance is what imparts a frisson of raw truth to the overall beauty of the thing. Perhaps it’s not coincidence that Exile was recorded, amid scenes of legendary rock star decadence, in the vast, dank cellars beneath Richards’ home at the time, a palatial villa called Nellcôte, on the sunny French Riviera.

“I’m listening to these tracks, and suddenly I’m back in that old basement in the south of France,” marvels Richards, phoning in from another tropical paradise, a small island in the West Indies. “It’s amazing, especially for me, that ability to transport myself back in time.”



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The Stones guitarist played a key role in preparing the Exile reissue, which will be released in three formats. The basic package is a CD containing newly remastered versions of the 18 tracks from the original album.

The Deluxe version includes a bonus disc with 10 previously unreleased tracks from the album’s era, while the Super Deluxe release adds on two 30-gram vinyl albums containing the original album and bonus tracks, a DVD on the making of Exile and a 50-page collector’s book with photos.

The Exile reissue project reunited Richards and his lifelong Glimmer Twin Mick Jagger with Jimmy Miller, the Rolling Stones’ late-Sixties/early Seventies producer who recorded and mixed the original album and many other great Stones records.

A rock-solid drummer in his own right, Miller has always had some kind of primordial connection with the Stones’ profoundly rhythmic essence. Richards says, “I look back on it all, and I’ve got to say Jimmy Miller was the perfect producer for the Rolling Stones.”

Also onboard for the reissue project was the band’s present-day producer, Don Was, who sorted through hours of tapes to resurrect the bonus tracks. These include alternate takes of Loving Cup and Soul Survivor, plus an early version of Tumbling Dice titled Good Time Women.

There’s also a cache of previously unreleased tracks, including Dancing in the Light, Plundered My Soul, Following the River, So Divine (Aladdin Story) and Pass the Wine, which has appeared on bootlegs under the working title Sophia Loren.




For the Exile reissue, every effort was made to unearth fresh material from the vaults. In some cases, Jagger wrote and recorded brand-new vocals for what had previously been instrumental tracks. Richards overdubbed some guitar on a few tracks, but he stresses that he did as little as possible to the original recordings.


“I brushed a little acoustic guitar,” he says. “I can’t even remember on which song now. The original guitar track sort of stuttered and fell apart halfway through, so Don said, ‘Well, we better replace that.’ But that’s all I did really.

"As I said to Don, these tracks already are Exile, because they come out of that dusty basement. You can’t really screw around with them that much. Just tack them on. They are what they are, right from the same place.”

For Richards, the project triggered fond memories of those who have since departed the Stones, including original bassist Bill Wyman, and those who have since departed this life, such as session piano great Nicky Hopkins.

“To hear Nicky Hopkins’ piano on Sophia Loren was a treasure,” he says quietly. “And Bill’s solid as a rock, man. What a bass player! I’m actually more and more impressed with him, listening to this. You can get used to a guy, but listening back, going over this stuff to make this record, I’d say, ‘Jesus Christ, he’s better than I thought!’”

Richards also speaks fondly of his former Stones co-guitarist Mick Taylor, who joined in 1969 as a replacement for founding member Brian Jones. But Richards denies murmurings that Taylor, who left the band in late 1974, contributed overdubs to the reissue package. “That’s a rumor, babe,” he says. “If he was on there, I would know. We’ve had no contact with Mick for a long time.”

Hearsay seems to be dogging Richards’ footsteps these days. There’s another story going around that he has completely forsworn alcohol and all other intoxicants.

“That’ll be the day, honey,” he says. The remark is punctuated by one of those long, slow Keef laughs, a groundswell that starts as a faint rumble in the nicotine-coated larynx and terminates in a rheumy expulsion of breath. “Let me put it this way: the rumors of my sobriety are greatly exaggerated. Hey, I cut down a little.”

Perhaps these suspicions of temperance are fueled by the disciplined rigor of the guitarist’s schedule these days. Along with preparations for the Exile reissue and DVD, Richards has been the subject of a new film biography directed by his longtime friend – and most dead-on impersonator – Johnny Depp.

Keef is also completing a book-length autobiography, due out in October, with co-writer James Fox. “It’s the story so far, so to speak,” he says. “James has really put me down memory lane. It’s weird, man, trying to remember everything, and then reliving it as the memory comes back. Like, ‘Oh God, I gotta go through this thing twice!’”

But one life experience that Richards doesn’t seem to mind reliving is the making of Exile on Main St.



It would be difficult to overstate the album’s importance in the great scheme of rock music. It is the climax of the Stones’ four-album winning streak that began with 1968’s Beggars Banquet and continued to gain momentum through the superb Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers, as the Sixties gave way to the Seventies.

On Exile, the Stones attained a perfect balance between the American roots genres that had inspired them all along: blues, country, R&B, early rock and roll, and gospel. In this regard, Exile is almost like an Olympian athletic feat, one of those rare moments when nature, human effort, and sheer random happenstance all come into graceful cosmic alignment.

“All those musical styles were part of what we’d been picking up while touring America,” Richards explains. “To us English boys, hanging out watching guys in America play music was like a dream come true, man. We were soaking stuff up like sponges wherever we could find it – south side of Chicago, those downtown juke joints…anywhere. New Orleans… Shit, man.”

Exile on Main St. is also one of rock and roll’s archetypal double albums. Although it was released a few years after the Beatles’ White Album, the Who’s Tommy and Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland, Exile nonetheless had an immense role in establishing the double-vinyl album as a distinctive and unique art form.

It’s an eloquent lesson in how open-ended jams like I Just Want to See His Face, can slot in amid well-wrought rockers like Rocks Off and calypso-tinged acoustic ballads like Sweet Black Angel.

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Like all of rock’s great double albums, Exile takes the listener on an epic journey, one that commences with a sheer blast of energy on side one, moves into acoustic mode on side two and glides languidly to a stirring gospel conclusion over the course of sides three and four.

In this regard, Exile represents the apotheosis of album rock – the move away from hit singles and into longer formats that had begun circa 1966.

“I think this is the first album where we didn’t have a 45 [rpm single] hit on it,” says Richards. “We picked some singles off it, but it was made for what it was. It was an album album. Of course, when it first came out, sales were not up to par to start with. But after six or nine months, they started to pick up as people got into it.”

Created with sublime indifference to the pop market, Exile on Main St. is one of the first DIY rock albums, recorded at the guitar player’s house at a time when that sort of thing simply wasn’t done.

While Exile is not exactly lo-fi, there’s a delicious murkiness to the sound, a sense of mystery shrouded in messiness. It’s a sure bet that the New York Dolls were listening to Exile when they were getting started in the early Seventies. The roots of punk are right there in the snarling, brittle mesh of Keith Richards and Mick Taylor’s guitars.



You can’t quite tell who’s doing what. It’s not too far a leap from that to the intertwined double-guitar approach of Television’s Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, which in turn gave rise to thousands of latter-day punk bands. And, of course, Exile also set the pattern for the dual-guitar dynamic that Richards and Ronnie Wood have pursued ever since Mick Taylor’s departure, a guitar style that Richards often describes as “an ancient form of weaving.”

So, many roads lead back to Exile on Main St. “The thing about recording Exile was it was the first time we weren’t in a studio to make a record,” Richards says. “It all sort of happened by circumstance, really. We all decided we were going to move out of England, due to great pressure from H.M. Government.

"So we said, ‘Let’s keep going. We’ll do it somewhere else.’ And we figured, Oh, the south of France sounds good. I mean what’s wrong with that?”

The “great pressure” he refers to came from Britain’s graduated tax laws, which required big earners like the Stones to pay some 90 percent of their income. That, combined with the band’s frequent drug busts and harassment from the police, forced them out of England. But the early Seventies were a time of heavy change for the Stones in many regards.

They’d moved away from their manager, the notoriously belligerent Allen Klein, and launched their own label, Rolling Stones Records. Mick Jagger married Bianca Pérez-Mora Macías and settled down to a life of quiet domesticity in France, with the other Stones living nearby.

ichards had been together with Anita Pallenberg since 1969, after he’d won the German/Italian fashion model away from Brian Jones. But, unlike Mick and Bianca, Keith and Anita had never felt the need to sanctify their union via anything as bourgeois as marriage.

Their son, Marlon, was about a year and a half when they settled into Villa Nellcôte, a grand maison with stately neoclassical columns, capacious salons and a killer view of the Bay of Villefranche.

Built in 1899, Nellcôte had been inhabited by a succession of financiers and diplomats before it became the domicile of Keith Richards and his bizarre ménage. “Anita and I went looking at a couple of places, but Nellcôte kind of chose us immediately,” he says. “It was just an incredible joint. It was like a mini Versailles, and it didn’t cost a lot.”

While the other Stones lived fairly quiet lives at home, Nellcôte quickly became Party Central, with an endless stream of friends, friends of friends, drug dealers, celebrities and gangsters passing through the villa’s grand portals. Guitars, amps, records, stereo gear, empty bottles, books, discarded foodstuffs, and assorted pets were soon all over the floor and furnishings beneath Nellcôte’s magnificent crystal chandeliers.

Richards says that Marlon, now in his early forties, has no memories of the place. “He was too young, probably around two years old,” the guitarist says. “He was running around bare-assed. Although he probably remembers the smell.”



Keith Richards (left) and his son Marlon at his home, Villa Nellcôte (Image credit: Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

Nellcôte’s basement became the Stones’ recording studio by default. The original plan was to find a commercial facility nearby.

“We figured there’s gotta be some decent studios in Cannes or Nice or somewhere around there, even if it was Marseilles,” Richards says. “But we checked them all out, and it was pathetic. This was 1971. No doubt they’ve got great joints there now, but then, no. It was, like, forget about it. So then it became, ‘Let’s rent a house and see if we can do it there.’ Which is where the idea of bringing our mobile truck came in.”

That would be the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio. Though mobile recording facilities are now commonplace, they were in their infancy in the early Seventies. The innovative Stones had put their own recording truck together more as an income source than for their own use.

The unit had been loaned out to Led Zeppelin for their third and fourth albums, and the Stones had used it when recording tracks for Sticky Fingers at Jagger’s home, Stargroves.

It had also been used for “location recordings for TV and the BBC, and stuff like that,” Richards explains. “But suddenly we realized, We got a truck, man – a mobile control room. But then we couldn’t find a house to record in. So we ended up using my basement.”

Below Nellcôte’s ground floor lay three levels of basement, subdivided into chambers of various sizes and shapes. Together with pianist/road manager/de facto sixth Stone Ian Stewart, Richards set about hanging microphones and carpets to control acoustic reflections.

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Home recording was virtually unheard of in 1971. The equipment was bulky and expensive and, thus, strictly the province of rock royalty like the Beatles and Stones. People didn’t really know much about recording in spaces that weren’t acoustically designed for that purpose. The Stones were moving into uncharted territory when they ventured below stairs at Nellcôte.

“There were all these little subdivisions in the basement, almost like booths,” Richards recalls. “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.”

Summer came to the French Riviera as sessions got underway. The basement was very hot and humid, and keeping guitars in tune was sometimes a challenge. The environment no doubt inspired the album’s working title: 'Tropical Disease.' But it’s the dust that Keef recalls most vividly.

“It was a dirt floor,” he says. “You could see somebody had walked by, even after they disappeared ’round the corner, because there’d be a residue of dust in the air. It was a pretty thick atmosphere. But maybe that had something to do with the sound – a thick layer of dust over the microphones.”

Despite the challenging environment, the songs came fairly quickly. Before leaving England, the Stones had started some tracks at Olympic Studios in London and at Stargroves.

Down in France, they picked up these threads. Keith remembers the acoustic-driven country number Sweet Virginia as one of the first they worked on.

“I can’t remember if that was the actual first,” he says. “That would be beyond even my phenomenal memory. But I recall that Mick had Sweet Virginia prepared and ready to go. I have a feeling that we’d been playing around with that one on the last sessions. Maybe on Sticky Fingers, or whatever. So it was a work in progress.”

Another work in progress was the aforementioned Good Time Women which soon became Exile’s one big single, Tumbling Dice. “I know we did that one fairly early on in France because I remember the weather,” Richards says.

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“The basic idea, as you can hear from Good Time Women, was already there. But it took a while for it to turn into Tumbling Dice. We were stuck for a good lyrical hook to go with this really great riff, so we left it in abeyance for a bit. And then I think Mick came up with the title Tumbling Dice, although he may have got it from someone else," Richards says.

The evolution from Good Time Women to Tumbling Dice is a classic example of the Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership at work. It also exemplifies the way the Stones will often allow a track to develop over time, re-recording it repeatedly and often in many different locales. “If you chase a song far enough, you’re gonna corner it – like a rat!” Richards says with a laugh.

But the pace was generally brisk. “Sometimes we’d get two tracks in a night down there,” he says. “And then there’d be other times when we’d be three days on one song.”

The work schedule was fairly regular, the guitarist recalls. “Charlie Watts was living a long way away, a six- or seven-hour drive, for some reason. But then drummers are quirky, you know. So we’d generally work for four days a week, five at a push. But the weekends would be off.”

Various Stones would sleep over at Nellcôte from time to time, but occasionally inspiration struck when some of the members were away. Such was the case when Richards’ signature track, Happy, came into being.


(Image credit: Robert Knight Archive/Redferns)

“It was pretty early in the afternoon,” he recalls. “Jimmy Miller was there checking on the previous night’s session tapes. I said, ‘Oh shit, I’ve got an idea, Jimmy.’ He said, ‘Well, just lay it down with the guitar.’ So I start laying it down, and suddenly Jimmy’s behind me playing the drums. He’d come down from the truck, and I hadn’t even noticed. I’m just hammering away, figuring this thing out. Suddenly I hear these great drums behind me, and now it’s starting to rock.

"It’s one of these ‘three feet off the ground’ feelings. And then, suddenly, I hear this baritone sax, and there’s Bobby Keys honking away. Suddenly it’s becoming very happy.”

Even the song’s lyrics sprang from that initial inspiration. “Most of ’em anyway, in some garbled form,” Richards says. “The whole idea was there. ‘I never kept a dollar past sunset…’ That was all there.”

The preeminence of Happy, at the top of the album’s third side, coupled with the preponderance of great Keef guitar hooks on Exile, has led some observers to describe the disc as “Keith’s album.” But the guitarist is having none of that.

“I don’t really get that,” he says. “Mick was incredibly involved. Look how many songs there are. And he wrote the bulk of the lyrics. He was very involved. I don’t think I was putting in more than anybody else. Charlie was amazing. Everybody was in great form.”

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Exile does contain some of the most sympathetic guitar teamwork that Richards and Mick Taylor ever committed to disc. They mesh seamlessly, almost telepathically, on track after track.

With the exception of Happy and possibly Ventilator Blues, Richards left the bulk of the slide guitar work to Taylor. But where Taylor’s leads can stand out a little too assertively on some earlier Stones recordings – particularly the live Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out album – here he’s dug in deep, roiling along with Keef and fully integrated into the guitar juggernaut.

Perhaps this is in part due to the album’s ad hoc recording circumstances, combined with the fact that Taylor had been a Stone for about two years at this point and was well settled in. And maybe by living close by and actually sleeping over at Nellcôte on many occasions, Taylor had fallen into sync with Richards on some elemental level.

“I also think it was because we were writing songs on the spot,” Richards says. “So I automatically fell into doing the chording and figuring out the whole thing, which gave Mick Taylor a freedom. He just came up with line after beautiful line. What a player, man.”

Exile is also awash in great guitar hooks based around Richards’ signature five-string open G tuning (omitting the low E string and tuned, low to high, G D G B D).



(Image credit: FilmPublicityArchive/United Archives via Getty Images)

He’d first used this tuning on Honky Tonk Women in 1969 and had integrated it into his approach more and more thoroughly on Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers. But it really explodes on Exile and is the secret behind riff-mad classics like Rocks Off, Tumbling Dice and Happy.

“I was really bathing in that stuff at the time, finding out more and more about the tuning as I was going along,” Richards acknowledges. “In a way, with a lot of the five-string stuff on Exile, I’d just found that space. You’re listening to me in school!”

For a few magic months at Nellcôte, everything seemed to fall into place. With sax player Bobby Keys and trumpeter Jim Price right on the premises, the horn charts on Exile are a deeply organic part of the music, rather than an overdubbed afterthought, as horn parts all too often tend to be.

“I think that’s another one of the beauties of the album,” Richards says. “The fact that the horns are actually playing with the band. There is something to be said for having it all in one room. Bobby and Jim were amazing, ’cause they had to make up their parts virtually on the spot. The songs were coming out two or three a night.

"Sometimes I’d lay an idea for a song on them at the end of a session, early in the morning, so they’d have it in their heads by the time they got back the next day. There were only two of them, a sax and a trumpet, but Jimmy played great trombone as well, so we’d double them up until they became a section.”

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Many extraordinary musicians passed through Nellcôte during the Exile sessions. The list of those who were there but didn’t play on the album is as impressive as the roster of gifted players who did.

John Lennon stopped by at one point, drank a bottle of red wine and vomited. Country rock pioneer Gram Parsons and his girlfriend Gretchen were long-term houseguests. The American musician and tunesmith was a major factor behind the Stones’ pronounced country influence in the early Seventies; he was also a close friend and drug buddy of Keith’s.

There has been much speculation about Parsons’ uncredited, behind-the-scenes role in writing many of the Stones’ country-tinged classics. But if he was hanging around Nellcôte for so long, how come he didn’t end up playing on Exile? Or did he?

“No, he didn’t,” Richards replies. “But why he didn’t play is a good question. Gram and I would play around a lot upstairs in the living area, and he would play with Mick [Taylor] a lot up there. So I don’t know… Gram was a little shy, and we were too busy to say, ‘Hey, Gram, come down here. We need another guitar.’ He would distance himself from us when we were working.

"He’d come and listen a bit, but that was it. But you know, if I have a friend – and Gram was my friend – Mick sometimes gives off a vibe like, ‘You can’t be my friend if you’re his.’ It could be a bit to do with why Gram’s not playing on the record.”

The basement sessions were a separate world from the ’round-the-clock party taking place upstairs and in a small adjacent guesthouse, where the roadies were residing. “Upstairs was a continual ball, if you know what I mean,” Richards says. “Unfortunately the Stones were rarely involved, ’cause we were busy working.”

But every party has its price and painful morning-after hangover. And on October 1, 1971, burglars got into Nellcôte and made off with somewhere between 11 and 17 guitars (accounts vary), purportedly in retribution for money not paid to dope dealers who had been supplying guests at the villa. For Richards, the memory is especially unpleasant.

“When they put the documentary together for Exile, they showed me some footage, and there I am, holding my favorite stolen guitar, a 1964 Telecaster. It was like, ‘Oh baby, don’t rub it in.’ There she was. Had a lovely sound. I just got used to that one, you know? I can play almost any Telecaster, but the more you play just the one, the more it becomes attached to you.

"I almost went into a blank after the guitars were stolen. I didn’t want to think about it. But I slowly started to build up a new collection since then. I haven’t lost one since. I learned my lesson: don’t leave them hanging around on a Saturday night!”

Just about every notable rock and roll junkie has a tale of guitars going missing, and Richards is no exception. It’s well known that he and Pallenberg were heavily into heroin during their tenure at Nellcôte.

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In one famous incident, the couple were so out of it that they accidentally set fire to their bed. Observers have marveled at Richards’ ability to be as creative and prolific as he was during the making of Exile while seriously strung out on dope.

“Well, I’m not going to get into those questions.” He laughs and then assumes a thick Northern English accent. “‘Did Charlie Parker play better because he was on the stuff?’ I found that [heroin] didn’t inhibit whatever it was I wanted to do. If I thought it was diminishing me or that I wasn’t putting my fair share into the music, then I’d have been off the stuff right away. And that’s a fact. I’m a funny kind of guy. I’ve got a metabolism you wouldn’t believe.”

Still, as the glorious Mediterranean summer gave way to winter’s chill, the idyll at Nellcôte was clearly drawing to a close. The local police were starting to get ugly, and the Stones’ phenomenal creative streak was wending toward a natural conclusion. Richards remembers Casino Boogie as one of the last Exile songs to fall into place.

“I think when we got to Casino Boogie, Mick and I looked at each other and just couldn’t think of another lyrical concept or idea for the song.” At that point Richards recalled the novelist William Burroughs.

“I said to Mick, ‘You know how Bill Burroughs did that cut-up thing – where he would randomly chop words out of a book or newspaper and then try to sort them up?’ That’s how we did the lyrics for Casino Boogie, and that was Bill Burroughs’ biggest influence on the Rolling Stones.”

At the end of November, barely one step ahead of the police, the Stones decamped for Los Angeles. Working at the historic Sunset Sound studio, they began laying overdubs onto the tracks they’d cut at Nellcôte.

Billy Preston, who just a couple of years before had worked with the Beatles on Let It Be, lent his formidable piano and organ talents to Shine a Light. Pedal steel ace Al Perkins imparted a tearful country lilt to Torn and Frayed, and upright bass player Bill Plummer left his mark on no fewer than four tracks: Rip This Joint, Turd on the Run, I Just Want To See His Face and All Down the Line.

A phalanx of backing vocalists added loads of soul and gospel grandeur. Among their ranks, on Let It Loose, was none other than Mac Rebennack, better known as the celebrated New Orleans pianist and singer Dr. John. “He just walked in,” Richards recalls. “Mac Rebennack’s like that. If there’s music going on, in one way or another, he’s gonna get his ass in there. I love the guy.”

By the time overdubs were completed, there were too many tracks in the can to do a single album. And so the Rolling Stones joined the Beatles, the Who, Jimi Hendrix and other classic rockers who have left the world with a monumental double-album statement.

“The fact that the Beatles had done it probably gave us a sense of, ‘Oh, there is a precedent,’ ” Richards says. “But our point was that we’d put down this body of work and when it came to chopping it down to one album, nobody could agree on which songs to cut.

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"After a while, Mick and I looked at each other and said, ‘This is impossible. How about a double? This is all one piece. It’s gonna be unique just because of where it was recorded and the way it was recorded.’ We sort of nodded at one another and said, ‘Let’s go for it.’ Which gave us hell from the record company: ‘Aw, the public hates double albums,’ and all of that. But we insisted.”

Richards adds that mixing the album was daunting, “only from the point of view that there was so much of it. Mixing a double album was different than mixing a single album. So we were going into uncharted territory. Mick and I would look at one another and say, ‘How many more songs to go?’ mopping our brow, so to speak. But I can’t remember it being that difficult.

"I think we were so intimate with the tracks by then that, listening to the overdubs and mixing, it just put the icing on the cake. I remember it as being a very joyous couple of weeks. We were all on top of it. Jimmy Miller, all of us – we all knew what we were doing. It was just a matter of watching it fall into place. It was one of those rare things: a perfect mixing session.”

Sequencing the album, however, was more of a chore. As mentioned previously, much of Exile’s magic lies in the way the songs flow from one to the next. But that magic didn’t just happen spontaneously.

“Trying to get the track order down was murder, actually,” Richards says, laughing. “I’d be sending cassettes to Mick in the middle of the night – putting my version of what the order should be under his door. I’d come back to my room and there’d already be a cassette under my door with his version of what it should be.

"‘Hey, Mick, that’s pretty good, but you’ve got four songs in a row in the same key. We can’t do that!’ You’d come across all these weird little problems that you never thought of. It was like making a jigsaw puzzle. By the time I got the final version, I didn’t give a shit anymore!”

While the music on Exile is a product of that summer in the south of France, the album’s packaging and conceptual framework were largely inspired by L.A.’s late-Seventies aura of faded Hollywood decadence.

The “Main Street” referenced in the title was a seedy thoroughfare in downtown Los Angeles, which harbored a Chinese restaurant that the Stones liked to frequent at the time. The black-and-white cover images – a bizarre and vaguely disquieting assortment of showbiz freaks and geeks from days gone by – were snapped from the walls of an L.A. tattoo parlor by photographer Robert Frank.

All these elements contributed to a wistful fin-de-siècle mood that permeates the album packaging and perfectly reflects the mood at the time of the album’s creation.

It was indeed the end of an era. The Sixties were dead and long gone by the time Exile was released on May 12, 1972; so were Brian Jones, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison, as well as the Beatles, a band with which the Rolling Stones had long been associated. The hippie dream had failed to materialize.

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And so on Exile, the Stones seemed to be enshrining themselves among the yellowing photos of yesteryear’s forgotten entertainers. A series of 12 postcards included with the original album – and faithfully reproduced in the Deluxe reissue – offered a comedic depiction, also in blurry black and white, like an old movie, of the Stones arrival “in exile.” The caption for the final card reads:

“Taylor realizes the fall is complete, ‘they’ll be Forever Exiles on Main Street.’ He suggests early retirement. ‘No better not, it’s getting quite late and we’ll be fogged in forever quite soon.’”

The reference to “early retirement” is especially rich 40 years on. But what was it that enabled the Stones to not only endure but also triumph when so many of their Sixties contemporaries had either dropped dead, split up or become woefully irrelevant?

“I’m probably the worst person in the world to answer that question,” Richards replies.

“I suppose at that particular period, the early Seventies, everything else had run out of steam – the Beatles and whatever. And I think maybe it’s just the fact that we kept going that did it. At the same time, what was picking up then was stuff like Zeppelin. A whole new energy came in from another generation. There was a lot going on. As I think about it, we didn’t see any reason to stop, and we were on a roll. So we just followed it. And suddenly, you find you’re 66 years old.”

As for the possibility of the Rolling Stones or some younger band making a modern-day equivalent of Exile on Main St. today, Richards demurs. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he says. “But, hey, it’s probably highly unlikely.”






[garyrocks.wordpress.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-25 18:30 by exilestones.

[www.youtube.com]
Greatest Book on The Rolling Stones You've Never Seen - Tourbook '72

Erwin J. Hoetjes has spent 23 years of his life researching every detail about the
Rolling Stones 1972 STP Tour of America. He has put all that research into his
incredible book STP Tourbook '72. 332 pages. 32 chapters. Every concert with
incredible photos, details, analysis, photos, clippings, ticket stubs, bootlegs,
setlists. It's all here in this incredible new book that he's trying to get
published. I also tell the story of how my son reached out to him to purchase the
book for me. Erwin's email is erwin.hoetjes@gmail.com. I don't know if he's
still offering it and what the cost is, but you can email him to find out. This
is an incredible accomplishment and essential if you love The Stones.

Quote
ErwinH
Erwin... nice to talk with you at the pre-party in Amsterdam a few weeks ago.

Today I received your tourbook '72...
I just scrolled through it, it looks really impressive.

This summer I have something to read :-)

Erwin

[iorr.org]
Reviews, Contact Info & More



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2023-12-25 18:17 by exilestones.

Tourbook '72
by Ervin J Hoetjes
Review by Bjornulf Vik, IORR Edit
[iorr.org]

Bill Wyman at Home in the South of France, 1971


photo Dominique Tarlé

When the Stones moved to France as tax exiles in 1971, each member
lived in their own home, spread out over a fairly large area of France. They
would meet at Keith Richard's house - the now legendary Nellcôte- where their
mobile sound unit was parked to work on their album Exile on Main St, but then
each could retreat back to relative "normalcy" in their own spaces during
breaks in recording.

“We were living all over the place. Keith went to Cap Ferrat, up the coast
towards Monte Carlo. Mick was in Biot, which is near Antibes. Charlie had a
farm in Arles, while I was in a rented house, the Bastide St Antoine, which was
near Grasse, where they make the perfume, a few miles away from Pablo
Picasso’s house in Mougins. Mick Taylor was up north behind me. So we were
quite spread out, but we liked that. Well, I did." - Bill Wyman

How the Rolling Stones Finally Got It Together and Made a Great New Album

Mick, Keith, Ronnie, and Stevie (Wonder, that is) break down the star-packed Hackney Diamonds, an album the Stones only could have made now

BY Kory Grow

SEPTEMBER 14, 2023



MARK SELIGER


LAST YEAR, MICK Jagger started feeling restless. Seventeen years had passed since the Rolling Stones had released an album of original material, and though they’d toured regularly — and made the difficult choice to soldier on after the devastating 2021 death of drummer Charlie Watts — the on-and-off sessions they’d held for a potential new LP over the past decade hadn’t produced much they could use. When the Stones’ tour ended in Berlin last August, Jagger decided he’d had enough. So he pulled Keith Richards aside.

“I told Keith, ‘I think some of the tracks are good, but most of them are not as good as they should be'” Jagger recalls on a phone call from Italy. “‘I think we should give ourselves a deadline [to finish the album], and then we should go out and tour the album.’ And then he looked at me, and he said, ‘Yeah, OK. That sounds like what we used to do.'” Jagger pauses and laughs. “I’m sure Keith would tell a completely different story.”

“The thing started with Mick saying, ‘It’s important now that we make a record,'” Richards says on a call from New York. “I’ve always thought that, but I said, ‘Well done, Mick.'” Richards laughs. “So he said, ‘We should blitz this thing and go for it.’ I said, ‘If you think you have enough material that you want to sing, then I’m right there behind you.’ If the singer likes to sing what he’s singing, that’s 90 percent of the game.”

Jagger suggested a deadline of Valentine’s Day 2023, a finish line Richards told him was “a bit optimistic.”
“I said, ‘I know it’s optimistic, but we’ve got to give it a date,'” Jagger says.

The sense of urgency made the difference. Hackney Diamonds, due on Oct. 20, spans the many styles the Stones have mastered in their six decades, from hard rockers (“Angry”) to four-on-the-floor disco rockers (“Mess It Up”) to country honks (“Dreamy Skies”). The band included two tracks recorded with Watts before his death, and the rest feature Steve Jordan, a drummer who’s toured with the Stones and played with Richards since the Eighties.

“We weren’t trying to re-create some retro record or retro sound or even retro playing,” Jagger says. “It’s supposed to sound like it’s recorded this year, which it more or less was.”

The record’s guest list reads like popular music’s Hall of Presidents: Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Elton John, Lady Gaga, and even self-exiled Stones bassist Bill Wyman, who returned for one of Watts’ final recordings. The album ends, however, with only Jagger and Richards performing Muddy Waters’ “Rollin’ Stone,” the blues staple that inspired the band’s name. Somehow in their 61 years, they’d never recorded the song. The way they tell the story, it’s an album that could only have happened now.

Moving forward without Charlie Watts, one of rock & roll’s all-time great drummers, was far from easy. “Anything I do is a tribute to Charlie Watts,” Richards says. “It’s impossible for me to lay anything down without automatically thinking that Mr. Watts is laying the backbeat down.” Watts’ presence on the album was important to the Stones. “If you’ve got Charlie Watts on it, man, that’s it,” Richards exclaims. “I so miss that, man.” But working with Jordan, whom Watts introduced Richards to, felt natural. “Steve actually moves the stage when he plays the drums,” guitarist Ron Wood says on a call from Barcelona. “He’s very earthquake-y.”

Sometime last year, before they’d given themselves a deadline, the Glimmer Twins decamped to Jamaica with Jordan and pianist Matt Clifford to work on some new songs. Jagger, who was already familiar with Jordan’s style from the tours, found an easy collaborator in the drummer. “I’m a very groove-orientated person, so [when I write] I got an idea of what I think the groove is,” Jagger says. “It’s a band, so you can’t really lay the law down completely, but I kind of know what groove I’m going for.”

The session produced an early version of “Angry,” which Jagger fleshed out with Jordan, singing along solo to the drumbeat. “I would just whap out the song’s lyrics to get the tempo,” Jagger says. “What accents can we put in? You want the chorus to be a different, slightly different feel from the verse. It’s a lot to do with danceability and spitting the lyrics out in the right tempo.” Jagger and Jordan also used this method for “Whole Wide World,” a rollicking song with lyrics about escaping London’s “dreary streets,” and the gospel raveup “Sweet Sounds of Heaven,” which Jagger had written at home on piano.
“I tend to overwrite, and then I take syllables out,” Jagger says. “You don’t want the vocals all the time there. You’ve got to leave space. I’m very aware of that.”

Meanwhile, they realized that their go-to producer since the early Nineties, Don Was, might not be available within their timeframe. “The whole thing was getting a little bit out of hand, and I said, ‘We need a referee,'” Wood says. “I was at dinner with Paul McCartney, and he was saying, ‘How’s it all going?’ And I said we need someone to boss us around. And he said, ‘Well, there’s this young New York boy, Andrew Watt. Give him a try.'”

Unbeknownst to Wood, Jagger was already in touch with Watt, a Grammy-winning producer whose credits range from Miley Cyrus to Ozzy Osbourne. Don Was had introduced them a few years earlier when the Stones were remixing some singles. Shortly after the band’s concert in London’s Hyde Park last June, Jagger asked Watt if he’d be interested in producing the album. Since the Stones are one of the 32-year-old’s favorite bands, Watt says he blurted out an emphatic “Does a bear shit in the woods?”

“Andy seemed very enthusiastic,” Jagger says matter-of-factly.
The band convened at New York’s Electric Lady Studios not long after and invited Watt. “You gotta understand, I’m a @#$%& fan,” Watt says. “If I told them how many Rolling Stones concerts I’d seen, I don’t think they’d ever talk to me again. When we were in the studio, I’d tell them, ‘You let a freak from behind the barricade produce the album.’ I wore a different Stones T-shirt in the studio every day.” With Watt on board, they recorded variously in New York, London, Paris, and Los Angeles over the next few months — and they met their deadline.

Watt began his work by sifting through demos of more than 100 songs. “[Andrew] came in, bossed us around, listened to the stuff, shuffled the pack, and chose the royal flush of the songs,” Wood says. “The pick of the bunch is amazing.”
“We’d worked before like this,” Jagger says. “We learned and rehearsed some songs … and bang, bang, bang. So, yeah, we did a lot of songs like that, 20-something songs. And then we started overdubbing them, prioritizing them.”
“We had only been off the road for a few weeks or months,” Richards says, “so we were all wired up, playing-wise.”

Watt remembers Richards putting in hours of overdub sessions and instances where, after a night out, he’d tell Jagger that he was going back to the studio. Jagger would insist on coming with him. “Keith worked very hard,” Jagger says. “He worked a lot of days consecutively. And then I came in and did some vocals, and Ronnie did the same. And then I went to Nassau, or Bahamas, and did my vocals in January.”



As they worked, they also started welcoming guests into the studio — including an old friend and fellow legend: Stevie Wonder, who helped to summon a vibe on the gospel-ish “Sweet Sounds of Heaven.” Watt has a tattoo of Wonder on his finger, and thought the artist, who’d toured with the Stones in 1972, would be the perfect fit for the song. “How cool, as a fan, for Stevie Wonder to be playing on a Rolling Stones song?” he says, pride still in his voice.

Before they started recording, Wonder and the Stones talked a little about the old days (Wonder says he took the energy from the road then into the studio when he recorded “Superstition”), and they jammed on a jazzy version of “Satisfaction,” and then on a reggae version. Then they got down to business. Wonder played traditional piano, Fender Rhodes, and Moog bass on “Heaven.” The band transposed his bass line into a rousing horn section à la Sticky Fingers’ “I Got the Blues.”

“I felt that the song needed a place of celebration, a celebration of the spirit of the rhythms and the spirit of just everybody coming together for that event,” Wonder says, adding how he was moved by the way in which the song paid tribute to Watts. “It’s not saying, ‘Goodbye,’ to me, it’s saying, ‘Hello.'”
“It just was so moving to be in the studio with Stevie,” Wood says. “Watching Stevie play his array of keyboards: a little bit of synthesizer, a little bit of Moog here, and a bit of clavinet there, and a grand piano here, and the lovely moods that he invoked. It was lots of great inspiration in the whole band.”

“To get Stevie to play it with all those gospel chords, it makes it come alive and takes it to another level,” Jagger says. “And you feel, ‘Oh, wow.'”
Lady Gaga was recording in the same studio at the time and asked Jagger if she could stop by to say hello. “She just walked in, in front of me, and she just curled up in a ball in front of me on the floor,” Jagger recalls of the “Sweet Sounds” session. “And then someone gave her a mic, and she started singing oohs and ahs.”

It was off-the-cuff, but he liked it. “She was sitting there on the floor just digging it and singing along,” Wood says, “and Mick said, ‘Well, come on in. Stand up. Let’s make a thing of this then. Let’s do it properly.'” They did another session to tighten it up, singing while facing each other. “It just showed me how versatile she is,” Wonder says. “It was great to hear her sing [with] sort of a soulful feeling.”

At one point, when the song started to end, they all picked it back up again with Wonder playing a solo. The vibes were excellent. “It’s just a great thing we were able to come together again to think about Charlie and think about his consistent kindness,” Wonder says. “

It was as consistent as the driving beats of the songs when they played.”
The Stones culled Charlie Watts’ two Hackney Diamonds tracks, “Mess It Up” and “Live by the Sword” — both recorded around 2019 — from their massive stockpile of recordings. “We have so much stuff in the can … nobody could figure out how to make an album out of it,” Richards says. Watt suggested they bring in Wyman for “Sword,” so Jagger phoned him up. “I said, ‘Are you still playing? Can you come and do this one track with Charlie on it?'” Jagger recalls. The bassist, who left the band in the early Nineties, agreed. “It’s really sweet,” Wood says of having a reunion of sorts of the Some Girls lineup of the band. “You have a kind of unique rhythm section there, a slightly different feel to the other songs,” Jagger says.

“Mick got in touch and asked if I would play on one of the new album tracks featuring Charlie on drums, which I was happy to agree to,” Wyman tells Rolling Stone in a statement. “It was a great opportunity to play alongside the late Charlie, my much missed and closest friend, once again.”

“I’ll never forget, Mick and I listened to just the bass and drums soloed up and it was so emotional,” Watt says. “Charlie playing straight, and Bill swinging so hard — that’s, like, the most ‘Sixties’ song on the album.”

Wyman cameo aside, low-end duties were mostly handled by Richards, Wood, and Watt; the producer says that the band’s longtime bassist, Darryl Jones, was unavailable because he was on tour during the sessions. Until, that is, another legendary old friend, who just happens to be pretty good at playing bass, got involved. Watt was already working with McCartney on another project in Los Angeles when Jagger got wind and asked his old friend to join the Stones in the studio. “I’d sung with Paul before and I’d hung out with Paul a lot, but I’ve never played with him,” Jagger says. “I didn’t know what song to do. Should we do ‘Depending on You,’ like a ballad? Or something else? And Andy said, ‘Well, let’s try him on your punk song, on “Bite My Head Off.”‘ Paul seemed very happy to play in a band where he didn’t have all the responsibility; he was just the bass player. And he really rocked out. He fitted straight in. It was like we’d been playing with him for years. It was a really good feeling.”

“Paul said to me, ‘Can you believe, here we are in the studio together?'” Wood says. “He said, ‘I have a dream come true: I’m playing with the Rolling Stones. And guess who is producing? Andrew, like we said.’ He was loving it, like a kid in a toy shop.” Wood says McCartney also played on another track they plan to use for another release.



Lady Gaga, Andrew Watt, and Stevie Wonder. CHRIS POLK/VARIETY/PENSKE MEDIA/GETTY IMAGES; JEFF KRAVITZ/FILMMAGIC; LESTER COHEN


Elton John wound up becoming something of a session player, commanding boogie-woogie piano (and not even singing) on “Get Close” and “Live by the Sword,” to Jagger’s surprise, since the Stone suspected John would have wanted a larger role on the songs. John decided to do it for fun. “Elton loves to play, and he started as a session musician,” Watt says. “Everyone’s a fan of the Rolling Stones. Just like Paul, Elton was like, ‘I just @#$%& played with the Rolling Stones.'”

The thing that makes Hackney Diamonds special, though, is that despite its guest list, it’s thoroughly a Rolling Stones album, with Jagger sounding particularly emotional and in your face. “Sometimes he’d do a take and he’d say, ‘I’m singing too good,'” Watt says. “‘I gotta do that again and “throw it away” more.’ I’m like, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Throw it away more — feeling.’ And he’d go back out there and do the most effortless shit that you’ve ever heard in your life that was so much better and catchier.”

“You need time to really get into it to be able to sing [a song] as if you know it really well,” Jagger says. “Because how many times have I done [something new] compared to how many times I’ve done ‘Paint It, Black’? You don’t have to do it 2,000 times, but you can’t just do it on take three, because you don’t really know your own song. You have to learn the song, how it would be if you’ve done it onstage a few times.”

Jagger and Richards wrote the lyrics, drawing on personal moments and digging deep. “It is an album about a lot of personal relationships, though there are other things,” Jagger says. “‘Dreamy Skies’ is kind of introspective. ‘Sweet Sounds of Heaven’ is kind of like a gospel song, but it’s got personal things in it. ‘Whole Wide World’ is supposed to be sort of tongue-in-cheek, uplifting, so that whatever happens to you, you can always get over it. I threw in a few things from my youth in London to throw into some of those verses about living in Fulham and all that.” He pauses. “I never really lived in Fulham, but it alliterates with ‘filthy,’ so it’s better than ‘Chelsea.'” Jagger laughs.

Wood says “Whole Wide World” is his favorite on the album, but he felt inspired by many of the songs. “I like Keith’s guitar on ‘Angry,’ ‘Tell Me Straight,’ and ‘Driving Me Too Hard,'” he says. “There’s a different kind of feel on ‘Driving Me Too Hard’; it’s almost country. And ‘Dreamy Skies’ is very sweet. It has a ‘Sweet Virginia’-type feel. You’ve got the dance track, ‘Mess It Up,’ which has also got Charlie on drums. There’s so many different genres on it that I love.”

Watt suggested they do an acoustic blues, but Jagger wasn’t interested in writing an original. “He’s like, ‘Andy, I don’t have time to write @#$%& blues lyrics; I’m writing 28 lyrics that I have to make sure I have finished,'” Watt recalls. So they decided instead that Jagger and Richards should take it way back with “Rollin’ Stone.” “That was a fun thing to do with Keith,” Jagger says. “We’ve never done that song, so we had to get it down. There’s so many Muddy Waters songs. That one, the song that we named the band after, we’d never done. I don’t know why.”

“I love the fact that Andrew kicked everyone out of the studio and said, ‘Mick and Keith, you are going to play the song when you first met, inspired by the album you had under your arm on the station when you were kids: Muddy Waters’ ‘Rolling Stone Blues,'” Wood says. “I thought that was very sweet.”

Getting in the Muddy Waters mindset was no problem for the twosome. “Mick and I can toss that off in a barroom to pay for a drink,” Richards says, adding he was impressed how Watt got the right sound and guitars for the recording. “It was beautiful to be able to do it, because it wouldn’t have occurred to me to do that. And Andrew had to force us both to say, ‘Come on.’

“I mean, the song is, in a way, the most obvious thing to do,” Richards continues. “After all, the band is named after that track. When we did it, Mick and I were just together face to face and going, ‘We got to do the shit here and lay it out.’ And so that’s what we did.”

“With each take, they moved closer and closer together,” Watt says. “I believe what you hear is take four. And in the beginning, the timing is wobbly and cool — it’s two people playing against each other. By the end of the song, they’re literally playing the same licks at the same time on the harp [harmonica] and the guitar. It’s the same inversions, the same notes, the same rhythms. They become one another. That to me encapsulates that these two guys @#$%& need each other.”

Jagger and Richards — and Wood, too — all need one another. It’s hardwired into them. Jagger and Richards have now known each other for approximately 75 years. Sometimes when Richards thinks about his age, he questions everything. “What the @#$%& am I doing? I’m 80 years old and playing rock & roll,” he says, punctuating his thoughts with a belly laugh. But he says those thoughts are usually fleeting. “I don’t think about age or anything at all,” he says jovially. (For the record, Richards is 79 and Jagger is 80.)

With a final track like “Rollin’ Stone,” does that mean this might be the last time the Rolling Stones record? “People have been saying that for 40 years,” Richards says, laughing. “That is one of the weird things like, ‘What the hell are you doing here at this age?’ And the only answer is ‘This is what I do.'”


One of the most difficult parts of making the album was choosing a title. “We’d been throwing out a lot of ideas, but no one could agree on anything,” Jagger says, tension building in his voice. “I was at the end of my tether.” Then a friend of his, painter and sculptor Marc Quinn, showed him photos of what he called “Hackney diamonds.” “Hackney’s a part of London, so ‘Hackney diamonds’ is when you go out Saturday night, and you feel rough and ready to destroy things,” Jagger says. “You smash the windshield of a car, and it all splinters out and the glass falls on the ground, and you call that ‘Hackney diamonds.’ I sent it ’round to Ronnie and Keith, and Keith said, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I said, ‘Thank God for that. We’ve got one.'” The relief still echoes in his voice.

Although Hackney Diamonds has 12 songs, the band worked on between 23 and 29 tracks in their blitz, depending on who’s telling it, meaning they have plenty to work with if they want to make another record. Jagger says some of the other songs that they’re holding onto for now had messages of social commentary. “It’s all within the Stones’ orbit of music,” Jagger says. “I don’t think we’re really breaking out. There’s a few tracks that we didn’t release that perhaps were a little bit more … [sounds and styles] that you’ve never heard the Stones do before.” Watt says he hopes one day to finish the rest of the songs. “It’s like Batman,” he says. “They put the tongue up in the air, and I will @#$%& be there. It would be amazing.”

So what does Jagger hope the record says about the band that previous LPs haven’t? “I think this album is the Stones, but now,” Jagger says. “I just think it’s the Stones this year…. I wanted it to be great. I didn’t want it to be just an album that was OK. And I think the album delivered what I wanted.”

“I think this record is halfway a tribute to Charlie Watts and the Stones’ history,” Richards says, “and [half] an attempt at the future and how much there is left.” That said, the guitarist is still making sense of it, since the recording process was a blur. It’s been so long since the Stones put out new music, he says, it’s almost like a new feeling for him. “I’m as fresh as anybody else on this,” he says, laughing. “I’m growing into it.… It’s like, ‘Here’s a new Stones record.’ And I’ve heard it for the first time, and I’m still trying to decide.”

Richards nevertheless looks forward to developing the songs on the road. “Without anybody croaking or breaking a leg in the next year, I wouldn’t be surprised at all [if we toured],” he says.

At the end of the day, he knows why the Stones still play rock & roll. “Who else can do it?” he says when asked what keeps him going. “If the Stones can’t do it, nobody else can.”