Stones in Exile Page #3

Now he asks us.

That Fender...

The basement of Keith's house

was in fact a lot of separate rooms,

that made up a basement.

In the end,

the separation was so poor

that we would have to have

the piano in one room,

an acoustic guitar in the kitchen,

because it had tile,

so it had a nice ring.

There was another room for the horns.

And there was one,

probably, main studio,

where the drums were,

and Keith's amp,

and Bill would stand in there

but his amp would be out the hall.

The place was absolutely atrocious

and was very, very difficult to deal with.

It was so humid and the guitars would go

in and out of tune all the time.

And Mick kept complaining

about the sound and...

The gear wasn't working properly,

the lights would go off,

and there were fires,

and it was just insane.

It wasn't the best conditions at all.

It was difficult for all of us.

The wires would go out the door

and down the hall into a mobile truck.

Every time I wanted to communicate,

I would have to run around to all the

different rooms and give the message.

Should we listen to it?

Well, I broke the string on that one.

A lot of Exile

was done how Keith works,

which is:
Play it 2O times, marinate,

play it another 20.

Keith's very like a jazz player

in lots of ways.

I mean, he knows what he likes,

but he's very loose.

Keith's a very Bohemian and eccentric,

in the best terms, person.

He really is.

I never plan anything.

Which is probably the difference

between Mick and myself.

Mick needs to know

what he's gonna do tomorrow,

I'm just happy to wake up

and see who's hanging around.

Mick's Rock, I'm Roll.

I wanted to be a hotshot record executive,

and they were the Rolling Stones,

they had their own record label.

Atlantic distributed

Rolling Stones records,

we got a dollar an album

and a big budget to produce the records.

The whole deal was, "Can you get

the Rolling Stones to make an album

"every year or 18 months?

"Cos they're floating around,

they're flying around."

And I said, "Yeah. I can do that."

Then I started to watch

their creative process.

Watch how it worked.

I was amazed that Keith could fall asleep

while he was doing a vocal.

Mick wouldn't show up.

I was coming from...

You had to make three sides

in three hours.

These guys were taking two weeks

to get one track done.

Sometimes I didn't have an idea,

so I'd just throw it out

and just see what happens.

You get the best out of this band

when they think they're not working.

Where it's...

"This is just a free-for-all."

And, as long as the tape's rolling,

this is where you get it.

That whole period was incredibly creative

for all of us.

Once we got into a studio

and picked up our guitars,

we were in our own world.

Nothing else

could really get in the way.

Trying to make the songs up,

there's a riff, there's a groove,

and you're trying to make up

the words and a melody.

So the writing process

was very, very loose.

We started off just jamming.

Really casual. Hung together.

It always ended up great.

That was the great thing about it.

It was about as unrehearsed

as a hiccup.

It just was...

It wasn't exactly spontaneous combustion.

Placed a call to...

Give George Harrison my best wishes.

Not to mention his old lady.

This was a whole different approach

to music and recording

from what I'd been used to.

Usually you know the name of the song

you're playing.

This is a...

And then there should be a chord...

The one that's great on that

is Ventilator Blues.

You always rehearse it

and it's a great riff,

but we never do it as good as that,

something is not right.

Either Keith would play it a bit different,

which is not the same,

or I'll get it wrong.

That's because Bobby said,

"Why don't you do this?"

I said, "I can't play that."

He said, "Yeah. It's this."

And stood next to me, clapping.

I just followed his time.

Where I ever had the balls

to try to tell Charlie Watts

where two and four was,

is beyond me.

I have often thought to myself,

"Son, what were you smoking,

"or what were you drinking?"

God bless his heart and patience,

he listened to me.

There you go, you hear it right here,

I taught Charlie Watts

how to play the drums.

I don't think we've ever said,

"Let's make this kind of album

or that kind."

They take on their own character,

once you start to get into it,

since we'd left the country and were

recording in a totally different way.

I wanted to reduce it back to basics.

It's been said that the Stones gave

black music back to the Americans,

what were the first black musicians

that turned you on to black music?

Chuck Berry, Little Richard.

Little Richard was the first one

I heard that really knocked me out.

After that, Chuck Berry,

and later Bo Diddley,

Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed.

Slim Harpo.

The list gets endless but...

I guess the more you got into black music

the more you followed it back

to where it come from.

And so, eventually,

you were listening to Robert Johnson,

Blind Lemon Jefferson, et cetera,

everybody goes through that.

To me, even now, American players

and singers are always the best.

It is one of those sort of things

that you have going. It is for me.

But then I'm a black American freak,

cos that's the music I like, primarily.

That's the only...

That's really the music I love.

It was a super eclectic band.

I was brought up in the '50s.

I liked pop music,

I didn't just like blues.

I loved blues, but I loved Elvis,

but I loved crap pop music,

like acoustic blues music,

country music.

We liked everything,

plus you've got all these other people,

and you're kinda

throwing this whole mishmash in.

We'd absorbed so much

different kinds of music

since we'd become the Rolling Stones.

Maybe we missed America, I don't know.

Mick and I had always

loved country music anyway.

You're playing the Midwest in 1964, '65,

you ain't going to hear much else.

It's the other side of rock'n'roll.

Rock'n'roll, basically, is your blues

and they put under a little bit

of white hillbilly melody.

It's the coming together, it's that lovely...

which music's always about,

is one culture hitting another.

Hillbillies ideas of subject matter

are like really interesting,

and there's a lot of very...

In all of that music,

there's a lot of things

that just keen into your heart.

One of the things about Exile,

I think, was a lot of stuff

that we'd picked up on the road

and along the way came out.

You've drawn from whatever

you've listened to since you were a child.

Probably, some of the things

I write or play

are things that I listened to in 1947.

Rock'n'roll in its basic sense

is a mixture.

What I've always loved about it,

when I thought about it...

it's a beautiful synthesis

of white music and black music.

And it's just a beautiful cauldron

to mix things up.

My father was in that world.

He was a race car driver,

drug smuggler and adventurer.

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