Stones in Exile Page #5

There was a sort of a group feeling,

I think, "That's it, we've done it."

I can't even remember people leaving,

but they certainly left,

all very quickly.

Me and Keith and a couple of other people

were still down there

and eventually we got the word

that we had to leave,

because we were gonna get arrested.

We never got busted

and we never got thrown out.

Now, did it become somewhere

where we shouldn't stay?

Yeah, but we never got thrown out.

I felt like an outlaw,

I kind of quite liked that,

the feeling of,

"We can't go anywhere."

You didn't have any choice,

you can't get high any more,

so get another buzz.

We always went to LA to finish our records.

That was a sort of...

our modus operandi.

So we went off to LA.

It was kind of fun playing it to

lots of musicians and friends in LA,

interesting to get their input,

cos everything that went on at Nellcte,

it was in a bubble really.

We'd never made a double album before,

so we didn't quite...

I think we were a bit naive about it.

It was just a bit too much work,

considering that we'd

had all these pressures,

plus we were just a bit burned on it.

I remember Keith even saying,

"I'm so burnt out on this record."

But we still got loads of unfinished songs.

Some of them had fragmentary lyrics

and some had none at all.

So we had a big mountain to climb.

It's weird,

where your lyric things come from.

Tumbling Dice,

I sat with the housekeeper

and talked to her about gambling.

She liked to play dice

and I didn't know much about it,

but I got it off her

and I made the song out of that.

Casino Boogie would have been

a song with no lyrics,

so Keith and I did this William Burroughs

thing, where we did cut-ups.

I just wrote phrases and chucked them into

a pile and picked them out.

"Anything goes!

We've got to get this done."

We went to Sunset Sound

to finish the record off.

My vocals had to be done,

the harmony vocals and Keith's vocals.

We did pedal steel guitars,

upright bass.

Extra musicians of some kind

that we hadn't already thought of.

A lot of background vocal stuff.

The first part was good,

but you've got to keep it up.

Those overdubs,

they give the songs a complete twist.

So this LA experience

is a lot about that.

A little bit of those girls

goes a tremendous long way.

All these little jams, like

I Just Want To See His Face,

that I'm going off

on some religious bent,

suddenly come alive and you see,

"That's what I meant

when I was singing it."

There was a lot of material

and I kept throwing new things on it.

That's always slightly bewildering.

We had to choose the songs we liked,

choose the takes,

and to sit in this room for...

I don't know how long,

and sort everything out.

They'd mix forever. Keith would

do mixes and Mick would do mixes

and then they'd argue

which one was the best.

It used to go on and on and on.

We needed a cover, so as you were mixing

the record that you'd done,

Mick and I

would be looking through books

just to see styles and things like that.

Charlie and I

went to loads of book shops in LA,

bought loads of photography books.

And Charlie came up with this idea

of Robert Frank.

Robert was perfect for that period,

very American, of the '50s and '60s,

very iconic.

We imagined it would be a photograph

of the Rolling Stones,

you know,

stark Robert Frank imagery.

Then Robert said,

no, he didn't see it like that,

he saw doing photography

with Super 8.

I said, "We'll give it a whirl."

He can see something that you wonder

what the hell he's looking at.

When it's done with him and finished,

it will look fantastic.

I have always thought,

somewhere in the back of my mind,

that what we were doing

wasn't just for now.

So you're making the record

even when you're asleep.

So I was dreaming the damn thing.

There might have been a feeling that,

"Right, since we've decided

to move out of England,

"well, we better make this bloody work."

Finally, it's not that thing,

you're stuck in a basement,

trying to work out

what the f*** is going on.

Now, we've finished this record.

All we have to do is wrap it up

in this gritty little package.

The billboards. Fantastic.

It's up there.

It's going to be out and

then you're on the road playing it,

and it's exciting.

Mick doesn't like the finished thing.

He won't like this when it's finished.

He won't let you finish this.

That's what he's like.

Mick doesn't like anything

you did yesterday.

Let's do tomorrow.

Which, in one way, is very good,

cos it keeps you going forward.

It is a different kind of record.

It's a very sprawling, gutsy piece of work.

Criticism of Exile,

it didn't have a direction.

But then, that's also something

very laudable about it,

that it exhibits all these styles,

and even multiple styles, in one song.

Does it have tons of hit singles in it?

No. This isn't that kind of record.

Over the years it's just acquired

a kind of magical glow.

Probably because of the way

it was recorded,

the rawness of it, the edginess of it.

I loved the tracks, obviously,

but I don't think we had hardly

any good reviews on that album.

By anybody.

They were all boo-hooing it

and saying it was a load of crap,

and it wasn't like the Stones.

And they all did amazing U-turns

in the next few years,

saying it was one of the greatest albums

we'd ever done.

I just wanted to make music

and see how sounds are made.

How do you transmit that feeling

and it actually comes back out

and touches people?

It's been the mystery of my life

and I'm still following it.

The Rolling Stones.

Rolling Stones. Crazy Mick. Crazy Mick.

Lay a couple of tickets on your friend.

It's the highest debuting song of the week,

it's called Tumbling Dice

by the phenomenal rock group

that Time magazine

says some far-out things about:

"The fan allegiance is

not to rock as music,

"it's to the Stones as

a socio-sexual event."

KROQ, Los Angeles, a rock revolution,

is happening with the Rolling Stones!

Get down!

Exile On Main St. dramatically altered

the vocabulary of record making.

There are textures on there

that no one ever laid down before.

That's so crazy, this was in France,

cos it sound...

Literally, I thought, every night,

they were in Memphis and they

were going out and eating barbecue,

and partying and getting with women.

If it wasn't for this record,

I would have thought

the Stones just did this.

But this is like peaks and valleys

of creativity and expression.

I love that record because

it's sort of like something

that could really confuse a journalist.

Make him rethink his whole career,

because he can't

box the Stones in any more.

I mean,

there's 15 directions going on at once.

I think that anybody who was cool

wanted to be there

while it was all happening.

I would have been there.

I'm sure of it.

This is almost as if you were there

while they were in a room

trying to pull together a song.

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