Original subtitles

From the top, then, lads.

I think you can use the Stones as markers.

They certainly captured the times.

The hippy, peace, love, acid thing has long gone,

and they're different times.

There was something in the air, Coppola was making Apocalypse Now.

There was definitely the sense that the Sixies didn't work,

and that you either had to blow up the system or flee from it.

From the artwork to the music,

it was a Rolling Stones record that wasn't the big, popular album.

What year was it? '72?

I know the folklore, obviously.

They were getting away from, running away from England.

Why did they...? So they literally got booted out.

English tax exiles. Seemed to be a popular English rock'n'roll story.

They had to go and almost implode, in a way.

The sense of being exiled, the sense of being..."You can't go home."

I think this music reflects that.

He's going the wrong way. We used to go that way.

Let's go the way we used to go.

When I started talking about making this film,

I said, "We're never gonna do this.

"We're never gonna go to where we recorded it."

That was your booth. You lived in there.

I didn't, I wasn't always, I was out here a lot.

= That was my booth. = Only when we let him.

We used to try experimental things, cos it was a nice, big room.

One bloke could be there,

while I was here, doing something else.

We did a lot of versions of things. We did them over and over.

The thing about Exile On Main St. is that there wasn't a master plan,

we just accumulated material knowing that we would use it one day.

So we just came in and recorded.

This is really weird. You come back to something you did 40 years ago,

it doesn't really matter.

You've got to look back at the big picture,

you got really good things out of it.

= Where were we? Boring, really. = That's about as good as it gets.

That old fucking recording session... I mean, boring.

Who gives a shit?

The Lucifer of Rock, the Pied Piper,

the rebellious young millions, who, in the 1960s,

made rock music the official language of their unfocused,

but unmistakable affection, from tradition...

Middle America couldn't believe what was happening to their kids.

They were listening to this music, buying their albums,

album covers with pictures of the boys lying around in homes, making parents sick.

People across the country thought, "What can we expect nex from the Stones?"

American Top 40.

The second=biggest foreign act ever to hit the American charts

has had five number one singles and ten consecutive gold LPs.

The green stuff they gather isn't moss.

The Rolling Stones.

Are you any more satisfied now?

Financially, dissatisfied.

You know...

Sexually, satisfied. Philosophically, trying.

We'd been working hard, we were a very successful band,

we'd sold a lot of records but we weren't getting paid,

cos the record contracts were giving us such a low royalty.

We found out that we had a management company guy

who claimed that he owned everything we were doing

in the past and always would in the future.

Touring, records, publishing songs, everything, he said he owned it.

So we had to get rid of him

and try and get out of this ridiculous Byzantine mess

that you've created for yourself.

We were supposed to live this life,

limousines, you had to have, and this, that and the other.

The money just flew, so you were always in debt.

None of us had paid tax. We thought we had.

We thought that had been dealt with, and it hadn't.

Tax, under the Labour government of Wilson was 93%.

If you earned a million quid, which we didn't,

you'd end up with 70 grand.

So it was impossible to earn enough money

to pay back the Inland Revenue and stay here, in England.

It was a feeling that you're being edged out of your own country.

The British government were scared by the number of fans we had, I suppose.

They couldn't ignore that we were a force to be reckoned with,

and sometime in the end of the year we had to make the decision.

It was like, well, we all wanted to keep going, so let's just move.

We're not rooted in England, we'd been around the world half the time.

We do this farewell tour of England

which is quite short, and rather sort of sad.

I can remember it so vividly.

Everyone thought we were never going to come back.

We had this kind of settled way of life for a touring band.

We were all very kind of English in our ways,

with our semi=suburban studios, nice country places to live in,

and we were quite happy with that.

I mean, "sedate" is not really the right... It wasn't sedate,

but it was pretty centred.

This kind of lifestyle that we'd created for ourselves,

which was really pleasant, had to come to an end.

How do you feel about emigrating?

I don't know. Are we really going?

Well, so they tell me.

= Do you want to leave England or not? = No.

You're not keen on it?

= On what? = On going off to France.

You keen on England?

In those days, if a band was big in England and then left England,

that was the end of them, you didn't like them any more.

It's fucking curtains.

And then, when you leave for tax reasons, it's really not very cool.

I had to get out of the country to pay the tax incurred for me.

That's why I had to leave.

Let that be a warning to you.

I start taking pictures of the Stones in 1964.

I heard that the whole band was moving to the South of France,

so, a few weeks later, I was down in Nice.

I asked, "Do you think it's possible

"to take a few pictures of the Stones in the South of France?"

And they gave me the name of the place,

Villefranche=sur=Mer, Villa Nellcote.

I just went for an afternoon.

I didn't know Keith and Anita were living down there.

Of course, the house was beautiful

and the light is incredible in the South of France in spring.

At the end, I was thanking everybody for a beautiful afternoon and everything,

and they said to me, "You can stay."

How long were you there for?

Six months.

Admiral Byrd built it. He was an English admiral.

Steps down to his own private boating dock.

So I bought a speedboat.

"Splash out, I might be in jail..."

"Let's have some fun while I'm free."

That whole era, just before we moved to France, was all kind of jittery,

so in a way it was quite a relief to get to France

and have that off your back and start learning French.

Anita in Nellcote.

First off, it was her first year with the baby,

so she was being mother, as well,

and just, sort of, made sure the joint ran properly.

She was the only one that could argue with the cook, Fat Jacques.

Until I had Marlon we were just living in hotel rooms,

moving around constantly.

So, for me, going to the South of France was great.

It was a wonderful place. It was very romantic.

I lost, totally, my sense of time, down there.

It was like a kind of dream, you know.

Every morning, Keith would be up at 8:00, 8:30 in the morning,

and ready to jump in his car, looking after his kid, Marlon.

No one knew the Stones in the South of France,

so that they were able to act and live normally.

We'd go to the zoo, we would go to the beach.

In the afternoon, Anita would look after Marlon,

and Keith would play music.

Every morning it would be the same.

It was a normal way of life.

We've been seeing a lot in the music papers over here,

some pictures of you and a very beautiful lady called Bianca.

= I believe. = Yeah.

And all those rumours, that you must have read about,

anything to say about them?

= No. = In a word!

Not really.

What can I say, but rumours, rumours...

Mick Jagger came to St Tropez for a quiet wedding.

It's been chaotic and it's brought the town to a standstill.

We knew they was getting married, and we kind of knew the date,

we were thinking, "Well, it's on on Saturday,

"and Mick hasn't mentioned it.

"Maybe we'd better buy him a wedding present."

Then Mick called up the day before the wedding

and said, "Hi, Bill. I'd like to invite you to our wedding reception."

And I said, "OK. Thanks." So, it was a bit strange.

= You can stop taking photographs. = Shut up, man.

People came from all over the world for the wedding.

Some musician had to go back on tour or recording, or something like that,

and some other had nothing to do.

So, like usual, it ends up at Keith's house.

In the South of France, if you have money you can get anything.

On the right you've got Marseilles,

which is a very well=known place for illegal products,

and on the other side, you've got Italy, with the Mafia.

So, you join the two together, and you understand.

I had a non=verbal agreement with Keith.

This was very simple.

You get high on music and photography,

stick to it, I take care of the rest.

At the beginning, it was interesting and fun,

but the thing is, it was fantastically disruptive.

Of the band, of our lives, of our social life, everything.

I hated leaving England.

I did, because, when you got down there,

you had to try to replace everything you loved, cos it wasn't there.

You had to, sort of, buy... try to buy PG Tips to make your tea.

Then you had to deal with the French milk, which wasn't the same.

Then you bought Bird's Custard and Branston Pickle and piccalilli

and all the English things you were used to in your life,

you had to import them all because they weren't there.

I'm not a very good mover. And no, I didn't like...

And I was English and I couldn't see living in France, and that.

I mean, the mental thing was a bit, sort of... strange.

You were in exile, particularly me, I couldn't speak French or anything.

I joined the Stones May or June of '69,

and so, I hadn't earned enough money or done enough work on that level

to have any kind of tax problems.

But one of my most vivid memories

is being flown there in our own private jet.

I thought, "My God. This is the high life, this is wonderful."

We looked around for studios,

but, especially in the South of France in the early... in 197 1,

there was no good rooms to work in, and the equipment was shabby,

and nobody felt comfortable in anywhere we looked at.

We tried various cinemas

and public halls that one might rent,

and we just never found a suitable site.

In the end, we chose convenience, I suppose, over sound,

and went for the basement of Keith's house.

We said, "We have this truck, our own mobile studio.

"Why don't we just forget about them and just bring in the truck

"and work around the problems?

"At least, this way, we don't have to ask our interpreter

"every time we want to turn it off or on."

Good afternoon!

Basically, I think that the Stones really felt like exiles.

"It's us against the world now. Fuck ya."

That was behind the attitude.

We said, "We're all gonna do this, boys.

"We're all just gonna move out and be a family and do it,

"and here's the place."

And, in a way, it was energising.

I ended up there because that's where everybody else went.

My boys that I play rock'n'roll with left the country.

We were invited to go and we went.

I didn't mind living between Nice and Monte Carlo.

Didn't mind that a bit.

Didn't mind all the pretty girls around the countryside.

Yes, sir, buddy.

South of France and a young man in his 20s,

a rock'n'roll musician, that's a mighty good combination.

I'm tellin' ya! That's when you're shitting in tall cotton.

Can you say that? I just said that.

The Stones, during that time, were quite spread out across the South of France,

so it was a little difficult to get everyone together

for long periods at a time.

They'd get together for a few days

and then everybody would want to go home and see their families.

Then there was the fact that Bianca was in her late stages of pregnancy

during that period, so Mick was constantly in Paris

where Bianca was.

So it wasn't the best conditions at all.

I remember, we just couldn't seem to get started.

= There. Come in again. = Charlie should...

Yeah, it would make it so...

Andy, could you turn the piano up just a bit?

...just have the off beat.

Charlie, did you get that? Do you want to try that?

It would be nice to change the drum sound when it comes back in again.

I'd just moved to France,

and I used to have to drive, a six=and=a=half, seven=hour drive

from where I lived, on these little roads.

I couldn't do it every night, play and go home,

so I lived with Keith.

I lived in a room upstairs and Keith lived in a huge bedroom above that.

We had... It was quite... I mean, it was pretty together, really.

In a mad sort of way.

We would work any time in 24 hours.

So, if it was 1 1 o'clock at night it would go for another 12 hours,

or if it was at 12 o'clock midday, it would go for 12...

You know, whatever time.

That's why you had to live there.

I'm 21 years old, and there I am in the South of France,

working with the best band on the planet,

getting paid good cash money.

Come on, it was pretty cool!

It was my initiation into how you can actually live rock'n'roll.

At that point in time, the Rolling Stones were the centre of the world.

I might have been somewhat delusional,

but music was very important back then.

It was the heyday of... "Music's going to change the world."

All that rubbish. And they were changing the world.

What a lot of people forget is, they were doing it, they really were.

The Rolling Stones, at the time, it's not a five=piece band any more.

It is an eight=piece band,

with the horns, Jim Price, Bobby Keys,

with Nicky Hopkins.

And, all those people, they have kids.

And it's like, the Rolling Stones, it's like a tribe.

During the night, all those musician and technicians,

during the day, all those kids.

So, it's impossible to separate the family life

from the professional activity downstairs.

The tribe grows bigger and bigger and bigger.

Running.

Which amps are you coming out of?

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 20 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 nex 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 mixure.

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.

We were there for, I guess, about three months,

as Keith and Anita's long=term guests.

There was a lot of down time in Nellcote.

The creative process happened gradually throughout the day,

as far as I could see. Remember, I was just a kid.

People would sit around and play guitars,

and start picking little bits of music,

and then, late at night they would get busy.

From the top then, lads.

The basement, at night, was the epicentre,

and as long as we could stay awake, we were down there.

It was kind of the adult area,

because there was a lot of drinking and smoking,

and there were bottles of Jack being passed around.

It was loud and a little bit scary, but it was also, before it got wild,

a place where we all wanted to be.

It was so loud. It was really, really loud.

I went to Villefranche sometimes, in the evening,

and I could hear the music from Villefranche.

And I'm amazed that the people there were so patient,

because it was always going, it was going all night.

It got really hot,

especially down in the basement where they were recording.

It was like a sauna. Dingy and dark.

I don't know how they did it, quite honestly.

It was really an exreme labour of love, I think.

No.

The same again. Leave it a whole other one before...

No. Charlie don't come in till later.

= You add just the guitar? = Later, on the C.

And Bill come in with him?

Yeah, and Mick, MT, where does Mick come in?

= When he feels it, not too... = When you feel it, Mick.

I'll give you a yell, something like middle eight...

What would really happen was this:

They would play very poorly for two or three days on whatever song,

and then, if Keith got up and started looking at Charlie,

then you knew that something was about to go down.

Then Bill would get up and put his bass at that sort of 84=degree angle,

and you went, "Ah, here it comes. They're going to go for it now."

Then it would turn into this wonderful, God=given music.

OK. Here it comes. Run up to the D and E.

= All right? = All right.

Got your lead sheets?

Once you're into the recording, everything else is a bit peripheral.

We'd be down in the basement, working, working,

but the odd time you come up to the surface,

oh, they'd be partying up there.

So you never knew quite what you were going to meet.

Nellcote was never empty. There was people all over the place.

Some people sprawled out, and say, "I can't make it home."

"Have the couch. Have the big couch."

Had a couple of mad French cooks that blew the kitchen up.

But, apart from that, there was no mayhem, particularly.

Fat Jacques. He said they blew it up.

He was a junkie too. He used to go to Marseilles.

"Where's Jacques?" "It's Thursday."

"Oh right. He's gone to score."

I was commuting back and forth to Nellcote from all over the world.

Dealing with Atlantic, seeing about a worldwide simultaneous release.

It became my life.

When you're at work with the Rolling Stones,

you won't last unless it becomes your life.

I remember, vividly, late afternoon, early evening, one meal a day.

We'd all sit at this long, long table.

We would all smoke joints and hash in between courses.

We had this big bowl, and everybody would be passing it around.

It was a whole new La Dolce Vita, Felliniesque kind of lifestyle.

I actually became, in my mind, like one of the Rolling Stones.

You'd be surprised what an eight=and=a=half=year=old kid sees.

They see everything. They're like little owls.

Obviously, there was cocaine, because Dad brought it.

I remember a lot of joints. We'd roll joints.

That was, I think, pretty much my function in life at that point,

was to be a joint roller.

If you're living a decadent life, there's darkness there.

This was decadent. Nothing was hidden.

Everything was out in the open.

But at this point, this was the moment of grace.

This was before the darkness.

This was, if anything, the sunrise before the sunset.

Hell, yeah, there was some pot laying around,

there was whisky bottles around, champagne bottles around,

there was scantily=clad women around.

Hell! It was rock'n'roll, son!

Without it, you ain't got rock'n'roll.

Everybody had a great time,

but it was very stressful, if you know what I mean.

You were having a good time, but ready to go back home.

The only one who wasn't like that was Keith,

who was being supplied in his mansion,

with the band working downstairs. Must have been heaven for him.

Late again, Richards.

I don't envy you when you grow up and have to go to work for a living.

Sometimes I would wake up

and I would just hear this weird rumbling from the basement.

And then realise that I'd slept for nearly a whole day,

and they were working on.

But sometimes if Jimmy Miller was there,

and enough people to operate the machinery,

I'd say, "Let's start." They'd say, "There's nobody here."

I said, "I'll do for now."

It was like, whoever's around, and you had an idea,

"OK, round 'em up and let's go."

I cut Happy with Jimmy Miller on drums,

and Bobby Keys on baritone sax, and me on guitar.

That was basically the take.

Everybody would go in and out of the place as they wished,

so I kind of got really paranoid, it was unbelievable.

I walked into the living room

and there was this guy sitting on the sofa,

he pulled out a bag full of smack.

The whole thing kind of disintegrated and we got heavily into drugs,

like breakfast, lunch and dinner.

At the end, especially, I thought I was cursed.

We're getting our souls back!

I wasn't that aware, at the time, cos I was so used to it being around me.

At the time it was just Keith, it was how we worked.

He's always led life his way,

and I don't think they cared what you thought or I thought.

I did it, basically, to hide.

Hide from fame and being this other person,

because all I wanted to do was play music and bring my family up.

With a hit of smack, I could walk through anything,

and not give a damn.

Middle of September, what happens?

Keith and all his entourage,

and all these guests and friends and hangers=on,

are all in, watching television,

and someone breaks in and steals eight guitars,

one bass and a saxophone, of Bobby Keys.

Just walks out the house and no one even knows.

That's how, like, loose and stupid it was out there.

It's a big group of people,

and they're dependent on the creative engine.

If it starts to get out of whack and doesn't work efficiently,

everyone's going to suffer in some way.

You think you're in control of this wonderful, enjoyable lifestyle,

and there's a moment where you are,

but then, what happens is, the lifestyle starts to choose you.

That's the problem.

Suddenly, it was getting cold and autumn,

and we'd got all of this stuff

that we'd recorded in a truck, in a basement.

Mick and I were looking at each other, saying,

"I think we've drained it. And we've drained everybody else."

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 Nellcote, 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.

Exra 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 fuck 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 nex 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 texures 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.

And this is almost saying,

"This is who we were and this is where we're going.

"And we're not going back."

When it comes to rock'n'roll music it's like...

It's like... "How good does it get?"

Often when you go back to places, like where I was brought up,

it doesn't look anything like that any more, it's completely and utterly different.

There's like a motorway underneath this and now that's a mall and you can't recognise it,

whereas this, it's completely, exactly the same.

I had this house from 1970 to 1975.

It does have a lot of memories = one reason is that we recorded here =

but it has other memories for me, too. Children, my parents and that sort of thing.

My brother lived here a lot.

= Did he? = Yeah.

He liked it very much, having this very large house.

= Who wouldn't have liked it? = I don't blame him!

I'll follow you.

Here we go.

The beginning of the recordings of Exile On Main St. Were done in this house

so the earliest recordings for Exile On Main St. Were done here.

And they were what? Do you remember?

Sweet Black Angel was done here.

= Oh, is that here? = Yeah.

We recorded the percussion out on the lawn on a very nice day.

And some of the other tracks that we've found

that were exras on Exile that we've been recording,

they also were done here.

So the earliest recordings of Exile were done in this house.

We built this...

We built this mobile truck.

= Oh, that's right! = We built the mobile truck

so that we could go anywhere we wanted in the world and record.

Yes, it was in those heady days.

And so we bought this mobile truck which was actually, really, a good piece...

quite a good piece of machinery, I mean, efficient and good sound and all that.

And so, we...

This, I think, was one of the first places we brought it.

It was always freezing cold when you went to go and listen to the playback.

It was always freezing cold, you had to cross the garden and put it out.

So we just set it up and everyone lived here.

We would all put our amps up in here

and I remember that we had quite a lot of brass on the recordings we did in here

and I remember them being up there.

Bobby Keys and Jim Price were up there.

Yeah, I remember them being up there.

And they, you know... I remember being down here directing them.

"Hey, do it again! Come on, you can do better than that."

Where would you have been set up?

In there, with the baffles coming round the screen.

= And them lot leaning over. = Yeah, saying,

"No, it shouldn't go 'kah, boom, boom', it should go 'boom, boom, kah'."

Were you pleased with the sound you'd get in here?

Yeah, it was a great sound.

In a small little box, you get a very bad drum sound

so you have to trick the drum sound out with all kinds of echoes.

In a big, ambient room like this, you get a very big drum sound

which, in those days, was...

You can move things in big rooms, that's what's so good.

Like the brass didn't have very good ears, so you go up there, or you go...

We used all the rooms to record in.

So we would put amps in all these different rooms to get different sounds

and... I don't think you moved the drums, did you, Charlie?

Oh, I don't think so.

And you weren't allowed to, so no.

This was like a, kind of like, hanging out room.

= It still is, innit? = And this one...

= I mean, different sort of hanging out. = I can't remember what we did in here.

= Nor can I. = We used to put amps in all these rooms.

But they were all done up, but slightly more hippyish.

We had a pretty... I mean, sedate lifestyle is not really the right...

It wasn't sedate but it was pretty centred

and it was pretty grounded in its own way.

Geographically, it was very grounded.

And we're all very kind of English in our ways.

And then we recorded in various locations,

but we did record a lot in Barnes in Olympic.

So, we had to come to this crunch period

where this kind of lifestyle that we'd created for ourselves,

which was really pleasant, had to come to an end.

Including being in these kind of houses, for me anyway,

living in them for long periods of time and working in them,

sort of came to an end.

And that is the beginning of Exile On Main St.

Shall I tell you what was recorded here?

Shake Your Hips, Sweet Virginia. Loving Cup.

I Just Want To See His Face. I think that was done here.

= Are you sure? = That was done in Nellcote.

= I don't think it was. = I think it was.

I'll ask the question.

Stop Breaking Down, that was done here.

= Could well have been. = I remember doing that here.

Casino Boogie was done here.

= You think so? = Sure!

We have a lot of disagreements about this.

With the... He's going the wrong way!

I can't remember.

We used to go that way. Let's go the way we used to go.

You're being led along purely by instinct now, it's like a...

When I started talking about making this film,

= I said, "We're never gonna do this." = That used to be a studio.

"We're never gonna go to where we recorded it."

That was your booth there, you lived in there.

= Did I? = You used to get through the other...

No! I wasn't always. I was out here a lot. That was my booth.

= Only when we let him. = I was quite often here.

Playing the bongos with a bell around my neck.

That's always a good look.

I don't know what happened to... I forgot it today. Fuck!

= What was the bell doing round your neck? = It was a fashion accessory of the time.

= You had a bell, didn't you? = No, I didn't.

= I remember you with a bell! = No. I had a very colourful scarf.

We used to try experimental things, because it was a nice big room.

You could like sit in a circle and all play,

or one bloke could be over there doing something

while I was here doing something else.

Or I could be in that booth, or there was another studio you could go in,

or you could be completely isolated, doing that kind of recording.

So there was a lot of... That's why recording in a big room's good.

We didn't just book a three=hour session, did we?

We used to book a three=week session.

What we really did is we'd just accumulate the material,

knowing that we would use it one day. So we just came in and recorded.

So, Charlie and I are sort of disagreeing about what was recorded where,

but it is written down on some list which I think is relatively accurate.

= Two blind people reading a book. = Yeah.

Loving Cup.

There was a Loving Cup version done at Nellcote,

but I'm pretty certain that one was done here, but... I don't know.

Charlie and I are arguing about I Just Want To See His Face.

Stop Breaking Down, Robert Johnson blues, that was recorded here.

= Shine A Light was recorded here. = Yeah.

I heard that the other day on the telly and it's fantastic, so loud.

= Yeah, your drums you mean? = No, no, you singing.

Really? Oh, yeah.

So we did a lot of versions of things, we did them over and over.

= We still do. = Yeah.

A lot of the good things were recorded here.

Rip This Joint. That was recorded in Nellcote, wasn't it?

= I think so. = Shake Your Hips. That was recorded here.

I mean... I'm not sure...

You said that was recorded at Stargroves when we were there.

We did a version of it there but we didn't use it.

What else did we used to do in here? Take loads of drugs!

But we worked very hard during the drug=fuelled sessions.

The problem is, with recording,

and if you take drugs, but even if you don't,

that people will become in love with the process.

At Nellcote, we were there recording nine months.

And then we did one, two... three...

...four...

five, six...

seven, eight. Maybe nine tracks in that nine months. Maybe.

That's good going, one a month.

I mean, you should be able to do one a day, really.

I mean, you know, and come back to it... One every two days.

= OK, where were we? = That's about as good as it gets.

That old fucking recording session... I mean, boring.

Who gives a shit?

I remember buying it, the day I bought it.

At home, I had two big speakers on either side of my bed.

I was in college and got in the right frame of mind and blasted it.

And it scared me.

That was my first reaction, was that... There's something...

These guys have maybe gone off the deep end,

there's something going on under this thing that's...

I wanna go there but I don't know if I'll survive it.

My friend Angelo, he's a massive Stones fan.

He's like, "Have you ever heard Exile?"

And I was like, "No". I hadn't heard it.

And the first thing he did was show me the artwork

and I was like, "Oh, wow! This is nasty!" You know?

And then he played it for me and every song was just...

To me... I mean, they were writing songs that were anti=religion at times

or questioning their faith,

and every one of the songs sounded like a church song to me.

I mean every song had the boogie...

That kind of stuff or just really bluesy slow.

Just kind of interpretation, you know. Beautiful.

And when I heard this, it changed everything I thought about the Rolling Stones.

I would go to, like, old record stores

and shop and just pile up my catalogue.

And this was one of them, you know? From the artwork to the music.

And it was a Rolling Stones record that wasn't...

you know, the big popular album.

So, if I had this in my collection,

it symbolised that, you know, I was ultra... I was mega=cool, right?

And, you know, when you're 18, 19 years old,

and you have your little backpack of records...

Now, kids are walking around with, you know...

It's weightless, you know? You're just flipping through things.

But if you had a backpack with just all the cool mega=stuff, you didn't care...

Now, these kids are walking around with a whole record store. Full of content.

But if you had the mega=ness in your backpack...

"What? You got that Rolling Stones record?" "Yeah, yeah."

And this record in particular, was the first one

that I felt like they finally had 100% confidence to just say, "Fuck you".

And they had the songs, they had the hits, so...

I mean, the record label couldn't say anything to them.

They had the songs but if you listen,

intertwined in every song there is a big "fuck you" in some way.

I must have been 24, 23, and I was...

I had no television, you know, I had no phone. I was living in this apartment

and all I did was listen to Exile On Main St. over and over again, obsessively.

And it was so satisfying. It was such a...

As a work, it's still my absolute favourite album of all time, ever.

It's my, you know, desert island, deathbed album.

Because it's just so satisfying in every... Musically, emotionally, lyrically.

The stories that are told, the grandeur, the ruination.

You know? It's all there.

For me, Exile On Main St. is the rock and roll bible.

I think it's a perfect marriage of...

electric blues with a tinge of country and soul music.

I think it's the height of the Rolling Stones for me,

because I love Mick Taylor.

You can just feel kind of what was going on in their lives and in that atmosphere,

while they were making that record.

There is an undercurrent to this thing that I can't put my finger on,

even as someone who makes records. I have no idea where this comes from.

And that's that foreboding, evil undercurrent.

I don't know that they intended that,

I don't even know that that's what was going on with them,

but there's something. From the photos on the cover, right?

You know, the minute you have a tactile connection to that record,

there is a dark message to it.

Yeah... It's a mystery. I don't know what that's about.

You know, hit the cover and you'll get to hear like, you know...

= Like a sample of it. = A sample of the songs.

You were going off of the art, you know?

When the art of a record, you know,

gave you a vision of what it might sound like.

Nobody knows what that means but it offends everyone for some reason.

Everything, like, has this vulgar and sleazy...

in like a great way, made every...

In my opinion, made me a guy who was, you know,

for a part of my life I was scared of rock and roll

cos I thought it was the opposite of what was real and what was right.

And when I heard this record, it made you feel good about it.

I miss the hair. They had great hair back then.

If you had that hairdo and you were from England, it was a good hairdo.

If you were from America, it was a mullet. Never understood that.

It's all about the freaks. It's all freaks and that's how they felt.

They were the freaks. They were these huge rock stars but they were freaks.

And that's how they felt and that's how they walked through, like a freak show.

I mean, I know a little bit about fame and you do feel like a freak.

To me, that's that point of view, as you said, the narrative in the entire album.

It's like being... It's like looking through the eyes of a freak

as they're looked at by everyone else.

I just... God! The stories just crush me!

My impressions of what's going on in the stories of that record

are all about being both sort of king of the hill

and completely alienated from mainstream.

That's what Exile On Main St. Means to me.

That they are sort of rock stars so they're grand,

they're above everything, so they're in it but they're not of it.

And so they're walking around,

Iooking at everything through the lens of alienation and, you know...

There's a lot of Ioneliness and there's a lot of heartbreak.

There's a lot of soul in the record.

It's a great thing... It's an inspiring thing to see

how hated it was when it came out and how revered it is now.

That's inspiring to know, you know, when you're releasing records yourself.

But... Yeah, it's just not accessible. It's not poppy and accessible at all.

Like, it didn't have any poppy hits on it

and I think that was confusing to people at the time, coming from the Stones.

But it was them at their best. I mean, the Stones, when they're at their best,

are an incredible blues band and this is them doing that.

So... it's a perfect portrait of them.

When I heard this, it was 1994.

And I already knew, you know, the logo of the Rolling Stones.

It was imprinted in my brain. When I thought of the Rolling Stones, I thought of the logo.

I thought of Mick, you know.

You know, I thought... The band, you know?

And this was, you know...

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, you know.

There's education. Cos it is '93 now, right?

This is an old record. As well as all their other ones, you know?

But what it showed me was...

to be an artist isn't just about, you know, popular songs,

it's about a body of work, you know?

Eclectic, odd, avant=garde,

straightforward, you know,

on topic, off topic. That's what groups are supposed to do.

Yeah, man, this whole record is just...

From the artwork to everything about it,

you could tell they were just kind of at a point where they were going for it

and didn't care if they were going to offend the masses.

It sounds like they had fun when they made the record.

You rarely hear a record that the people actually sound like they're having fun.

I don't talk to anyone about this record and I don't want to talk to people about it.

Like, it's my record. It's my special, personal, private record.

With my boyfriend, he'd be like, "Let's put it on!"

I'm like, "No! I can't do that with you."

He probably wanted to have sex to it or something and I'm like, "No!"

You know what I mean? Like that just can't be done for me.

Like I wouldn't put it on while... I wouldn't be able to eat dinner with this record on.

It would feel sacrilegious to me. It would feel wrong.

That's a record that I can come to when I'm feeling like king of the world,

or when I've just had my heart broken, or when someone just died,

or when I need to, you know, find my musical bearings again.

It's a journey of sound.

Nowadays, we can go on and just click, you know, like a smorgasbord.

"I just want corn today."

And the chefs like, "Really, try this fish. It goes great with the corn."

"No, no, no, I'm just gonna get the corn."

"But I prepared this wonderful fish that just... Taste=wise...

"The spice and the fish goes great with the sweet corn."

"No, no, keep your motherfucking fish, I just want the goddamn corn." Right?

And they have the opportunity to do that

and they're missing out on a great meal, a great body of work, you know?

And this is one of them,

where you put it on through the whole way and have it colour your time.

I love that record because it's something that could really confuse a journalist,

sort of 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 just love when they're befuddled like that.

They'd moved past the blues

and gone into other areas of southern American music, gospel and country.

I think they listened to the best of what American music had to offer.

They managed to combine, as I said,

this sort of R&B and this electric blues with country music

and with real deep southern soul music.

And even Mick's ability to portray an old black bluesman

in the way he delivered his singing was kind of amazing, you know,

for a scrawny little English guy.

I listen to it and I think it's the best of where I came from, you know,

right along Route 66 and growing up on the Mississippi.

They managed to really draw from that and bring it into their English soul music.

I was born in Memphis and so I used to go down to Beale Street.

You'd hear guys on the corner just playing and you'd think,

"Man, those guys are better than anyone you could ever hear on the radio."

But you'll never hear them on the radio.

And then you have a band like this that just, you know,

they worked really really hard and then just started to get where they could play.

They had the world at their fingertips

and they could just play whatever kind of music they wanted.

In a lot of ways, with their music, they were trying to represent

the people that were never going to make it on the radio.

America just, you know, didn't care about its true musicians,

its true home=grown musicians. They never cared.

They had some white guy redo it, which I guess this is the same thing,

and then it was OK and it was fabulous.

But those, you know, early blues, the Deep South, those musicians,

they never made the money they should have nor got the credit,

nor got the accolades...

till they were 90 or dead, you know what I mean?

That's kind of a depressing thought,

that it took Englishmen to come in and kind of say,

"Hey, I think you might be onto something here", you know?

And there's something beautiful about the way they saw America

and what parts of America they cherished, which was the... you know,

Deep South, African=American, I like to call black, but, you know,

music that just was truly American.

You can see the impact of blues through other genres and through other cultures,

and then siphoned through and filtered through the Stones' sort of camera.

It's interesting to learn about yourself through somebody else's viewpoint

and I think America was probably doing that

but it just took a long time to allow that to take root, you know, with this record.

When people say devil music, that's devil music right there.

Damn fucking devil!

Sounds so good.

I Just Want See His Face is like... The first time I heard it, I was scared to death.

I was like, "Oh, no. I'm gonna get struck dead", you know?

"I don't want to talk about Jesus, I just wanna see his face."

Then they all talk about dropping to those knees and thanking God and it's like...

They pretty much covered everything.

And you know those black girls singing, "I just wanna see his face"?

They do not agree with that. They believe in Jesus, very much so.

There was a couple of things that took me by surprise

and I thought were maybe done wrong

but then they came back and they sounded incredible to me.

One was at the beginning of the track Ventilator Blues,

after the first guitar licks happen, there should be a kick drum.

It should be..."When your...

"Spine is cracking..."

There should be a kick drum right there and there's not.

And that pissed me off when I first heard it

and the drum start on the up, on the snare...

But now I love that, that's my favourite part about that.

You know, I always cock my head when that part comes in.

I think I'm gonna do Loving Cup. I think that's one I like a whole lot.

That always made me wanna be... Like I wanna, you know...

I remember, I would feel that... Are you really gonna play it?

= Yeah! = Hilarious! This is awesome.

Doesn't it just remind you of late nights and like...

You guys must have gone through the bar phase of your life,

where you have no pride, you know? I just love that.

Been through? I could still be there, I don't know...

Listen to his vocals.

There's so much abandon in the vocal performances and in the guitar.

There's so much abandon. They're so unself=conscious, they're just letting it out.

It just feels like something folding out, like an elephant's trunk...

It wasn't, you know, just a joke that it might change the world.

It might actually sweep a youth culture into a new state of mind,

like you actually had the potential to do that.

Don't you miss bands that actually disturb the social fabric?

Don't you miss that there was a social fabric to disturb?

What disturbs our fabric any more? Nothing. Nobody does anything like that any more.

There aren't any rock stars any more.

I love Rip This Joint just cos it's so raucous

but I would say that Sweet Virginia is probably the jam song of all time.

Like, if you don't know Sweet Virginia, then you need to go home.

And it is probably the one song that whenever you're sitting with a band,

you can all play that song because it is part of our genetic history,

as far as music is concerned.

Right. Now, is everyone settled?

I don't want anyone moving around. I am a very nervous person.

What happened with Exile On Main St. was totally different.

And I think that the...

There's no doubt that they had this mantle of...

representing the entire culture of rock and roll.

And they had to change, I think.

Or they felt they had to or wanted to change

or felt they were searching for some other way to become...

How were they going to develop? Where was their music gonna go?

How was it gonna develop into anything new?

And it was retaliation against everything that had come before, I think.

Not that they were repudiating any of their work,

but they had to think differently and it seemed like a terrible struggle.

I was aware of the mythology

surrounding the making of Exile On Main St.

really from the time it came out.

And over the years, especially once I started recording with them,

you know, I asked a lot of questions, I got a little clearer picture about it but...

The mythology had a huge impact on me in 1972.

Just the little bit of information that came out was kind of life=changing.

The drugs had changed...

That's a major factor in this, OK?

It went from this happy giggle stuff to something else.

And the politics had changed, man. Nixon was levelling Cambodia and Laos...

It was a weird time.

In '72, I'd just written a paper about Joseph Conrad for class at school.

And then these guys put this album out.

And I'd always looked to them as leaders, you know?

And the message I got was...

"Follow us, we're going the wrong way, against the current, up the river

"and we're gonna be hanging out with Captain Kurtz."

And that was... And the pictures that filtered through

of them recording the album bore that out there, like...

I'd have to go back and see them but my image of it is...

It looked like the prisoners of the POWs in Hanoi, you know?

These real stark black and white things.

And they'd gone off to some distant place, maybe it's like Lord Of The Flies, you know?

Just this... They were not gonna abide by the laws and they were saying,

"Get out while you still can. The ship's going down."

It was apocalyptic.

It's dark and foreboding

but at the same time, it was quite alluring, man.

They were having fun. And it was totally cool.

It was a scary record.

It was an exraordinary decade, there's no doubting it, and it had to end.

It had to come to an end. Why should we put it on the Rolling Stones that it ended?

It was coming to an end anyway.

I don't mean just because it was changing from 1969 to 1970.

The 60's really ended, I think, in about '73 or '7 4, really.

And so they had to strike out for something new.

And also I guess to search for other ways of telling a story with music,

which means all the different influences that they had over the years, right?

I mean, blues, rock, gospel, everything together.

It's a touchstone for a lot of musicians, I think.

Because there's a unity between how you play and how you live your life

in that record, man, you know? And that's different from other things.

The looseness, the lack of self=consciousness, the confidence...

The confidence towards the world and also in your own playing.

"I'm not gonna get lost,

"don't worry about whether we're speeding up or slowing down."

It's about feel, it's about being in the moment.

It's a Zen record like that, man.

It's all about being in the moment and enjoying the moment.

There's probably not a better example of that out there.

And so, for musicians, it's not just, "I wanna make music that sounds like that."

It's, "I wanna live my life like that."

Main St. Is downtown LA.

You can't get more main than that, it's real down and out.

I had moved to LA in the early 70's, by '72, I was living in LA.

By '73, I was shooting Mean Streets,

some of it in New York, the rest in LA, on Main St.

And it was the down=and=out area.

It was like being on skid row on the Bowery where I grew up, actually,

on the Lower East Side, in the old Italian area.

It's a sense of being the outcast, of being on the edge of society,

on the fringes I should say, not the edge. People that don't count.

Supposedly don't count, yet they're still there.

Look at this. I mean, you know... The incredible photography of Robert Frank.

Also taking in the side show.

The desperation of the side show performer, you know?

And all these elements, I think, come to play.

And Main Street, you had to know it a little bit.

And also the fact that Main Street is a term that's used for...

How should I put it?

...the white picket fence, small=town Americana,

but Main Street in Los Angeles and New York, you know, different place.

They were, I guess...

Maybe they fostered the image of

the outcast to a certain exent, and the rebel, obviously.

They all did in rock and roll, all rebels, but these guys were something else.

This was some other existence that led the way.

I think this album was kind of a turning point,

kind of a letting go of everything before this record.

And this and Let It Bleed, for me, and Sticky Fingers...

It certainly set me on a course as an artist.

I would say that they probably are the most influential rock artists in my life.

And the record really represents a freedom

and a stepping away from the conventional and from the norm.

A freedom in letting go of your surroundings

and, as I said, that has a lot to do with...

What happens in your art is leaving all the familiarity behind

and bringing your circus on the road with you.

Another thing about this record is that I have never googled the lyrics.

I don't really want to know the actual lyrics.

I am very attached to what I think the songs are about

and there are so many words in these songs

that I've caught obviously many snippets.

I know basically what's being said

but I do not want to know actually what's being said.

Cos it's very powerful.

This is a special record that way and I bet a lot of people feel that way.

They think they know what it's about

and they're gonna go to their grave believing that.

I mean, what does it really mean?

It really means...

It really means what's at the core of all the rock stardom, that whole...

Let's face it, at the bottom of a lot of bravado is just basic insecurity

and I feel like this record...

is a perfect portrait of, like, the essence

of what made them rock stars in the first place.

As a kid, growing up,

I imagined the Stones as being absolutely intimidating and raucous

and it all being about sex and drugs. And when you listen to the record,

although that may be the environment of the record

or the sonic environment of the record,

the musicianship on it is seminal, you know?

You had some of the greatest drumming in rock history with Charlie.

And although we think of the Rolling Stones as being...

the recordings being steeped in looseness

and sort of being a rock and roll shambles, if you will, it's really not.

I mean, it's some of the great, I think, pop craftsmanship

and some of the great rock recording,

just as far as the arrangements are concerned, of all time.

And I think that, you know, you get into music now,

you listen to some of what's happening

and in almost every great rock band, you hear the influence of the Stones.

Exile was the record that really made me go,

"All right, these guys are going to be around forever.

"They're gonna be 95, on the stage, wearing Nikes..."

I've seen you, Mick. He wears Nikes, that's awesome.

When I came to this... But I was a freak at that time.

And when I made my record off of their record...

By the way, I met Mick once in LA.

They were, I don't know, doing some record release party

which is nex level record release party,

like everyone, journalists flew in, you know what I mean?

And he looked at me...

The guy, the producer I was working with, introduced me and said,

"Oh, she made Exile In Guyville."

And he looked at me like he actually forgave me

for doing something so awful as to make my record.

And, like, had he known how much I loved this record

and that really it became symbolic of a male persona for me.

Like, I actually had a relationship with the guy who is singing all these stories.

And that was my boyfriend and I was either saying, "Oh, please love me",

or "You dick!" or whatever I was saying to this guy,

this imaginary guy, was what this record meant to me.

It was all the men that I had loved and thought were flamboyant

and stood out from the crowd in our rock and roll scene in Chicago,

and didn't give me the time of day, or they did,

or they toyed with me or whatever it was,

I was deep in a personal relationship with this record.

And I was not critiquing it. I was yelling at my imaginary boyfriend.

Nobody really ever asked me about Exile On Main St.

when I was making or when I came out with Exile In Guyville,

except to say, "Is it really a song by song response? Because I don't hear it."

And, frankly, I think that's just sexism

because you'd have to be a girl to understand what I was doing.

Men would be like, "Well, you have no horns."

You know? "There's no brass." You know? They just didn't get it.

See, I'm not sure what prompted the decision.

But I just got a call from Mick, early in 2009,

saying, "We're thinking of reissuing Exile

"with a few exra previously unreleased tracks.

"Would you be interested?"

"Yeah, OK."

So, nex thing I know...

I got the equivalent of 200 boxes of tape, maybe more.

It was all on hard drives at this point.

When I first started on the thing, I got a fax from Keith. A stern one.

Saying, "Don't try to make it sound like Exile. It already is Exile."

And that was very wise and he was absolutely right.

The task was to not get in the way of it.

Don't fix it up.

You know, it really is archival, as much as anything.

Part of the consideration was...

Don't just put out the same stuff that's been bootlegged to death

if you're gonna add something new to it.

And let's try to find those gems, like Sophia Loren, that no one has heard.

Like, no one's heard, that's never been bootlegged. That was a joy.

Aladdin Story, which has been heard and covered by Death In Vegas.

I don't know if you ever... It's amazing...

They did a recording of it, and very faithful, too.

But no one's ever heard it with the vocal. So that's something that's cool.

It was really... to try to make something interesting for people,

something that would hold together.

We were really just looking for three or four tracks.

We ended up finishing 1 1,

and to be honest with you, there's more there.

And it'd already been pillaged, too, for Tattoo You and for Goats Head Soup.

And there's a lot of great stuff to be left off because it didn't fall into that period.

The lines between when Exile begins

and where Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers end, it's a little grey.

So some of the reels

that might have had something relevant to Exile also had other stuff.

The first thing I put on, it said Honky Tonk Women and I was, "What"?

So, I put that reel on first and...

It was the nine takes leading up to the final take of Honky Tonk Women.

And they should just put that out. You can chart the thing...

It starts with Country Honk and they took that as far as they could

and that wasn't where it was supposed to go,

and I think nex day they start over

and lan Stewart's playing honky=tonk piano.

And Keith's playing in the holes of this thing that's filling up all the air.

And somewhere around take nine, they pull the piano out

and you got this angular rhythmic thing that he's doing,

which makes total sense if you hear the piano,

but when you first heard that, it was like, "Wow!"

How does anyone...

I've never heard anything like that, like the beginning of Honky Tonk Women.

From that tuning just to the angular rhythm of it.

So, it's a very interesting trip. But there was all kinds of stuff.

Although I do believe that the take of Loving Cup

that's on the bonus tracks is...

That's my favourite thing, to be honest with you. It's...

It represents...

When we talk about having loose rock and roll without it being sloppy,

how far from the centre of gravity can each individual pull the thing

and still keep the centrifugal force going...

This version of Loving Cup absolutely takes it to the limits

and it's fantastic, man.

It's just... And Mick's vocal on it.

It's just such an attitude, you know?

Like it just requires a guy of that age

who does whatever he wants to do to sing with that attitude.

And it's so... I think that really captures the spirit of this.

I love that track. And it's different.

It's guitarcentric as opposed to being pianocentric.

It's not a gospel song, which it is on this.

But outside of the choice of takes on that, they did the right thing here.

I think it's just fun. Fun to listen to.

You've heard all the Beatles stuff

and you've heard a whole lot of the Dylan stuff.

And, you know,

I don't think there are too many people that mean that much to you,

where the sound has emotional triggers that transcend the notes.

That's the thing about the Stones.

When you hear that five=string tuning when Keith plays that,

or when you hear Mick's voice,

or even when you hear Charlie lifting up off the high hat

on the two and the four like nobody else does... When you hear those things,

whether the Rolling Stones like it or not,

it's got all sorts of emotional triggers for people that transcend the records.

So that's an essential component of this.

It took years and, ultimately,

it took playing music with the Rolling Stones,

actually playing bass with them

just during sessions and between songs and everything like that,

to understand what goes on in that band.

The Rolling Stones really listen to each other.

They're quick to react, as they are in conversation.

It's a highly conversational band.

The exchange, musically, between the players is...

...it's jocular

and it's loose and it's quick.

And just as their conversational repartee is like that, so is their playing.

And whatever goes on interpersonally between any of them,

I believe it evaporates when they start playing.

And they're loose. It reminds me so much of Miles Davis.

Miles Davis was the jazz example.

That band that he had around that same time, that had Herbie Hancock

and Wayne Shorter and Ron Carter and Tony Williams,

was loose, was floating on this incredible drum thing that's happening,

and confident and a little cocky.

It's the way you should play rock and roll.

Without self=consciousness, without being stiff, without showing off.

It's not a show=off record. It's not filled with "look how fast I can play".

It's a really soulful record.

You can't overstate the importance of Mick Taylor.

That's something else I learned from listening to this stuff.

He's a great foil for Keith's playing.

It's different from what he's got going with Ronnie,

where they talk about the weaving of the guitarists.

This is two very separate approaches

that bounce off each other in a really unique way.

It's a real strong characteristic of the Stones' recordings from that period.

Something else that I really got hip to

was just how great a bass player Bill Wyman is.

He's a crazy, genius bass player.

I'm a bass player, I can learn his parts note for note,

but I could never come up with them.

He sort of thinks like a guitar player

and he's playing in holes where a guitar player might play

with a very melodic kind of thing

and the tone of the bass doesn't have a big low register,

it's almost nasally sounding,

it's almost like it's the seventh string of the guitar.

But then, he'll throw in some James Jameson kind of thing,

some totally funky fill that's just like...

It's quite sophisticated.

He's an enigmatic musician...

but such an important component in this stuff.

If there's one thing, one big overall thing,

that I learned about Exile from listening to all this stuff...

it's that maybe everything that you heard about actually happened,

but when they were recording...

they were on their game.

You couldn't possibly write all these songs

and record all these songs and play them as well as they did,

and not be at the top of your game.

So, the mythology's got to include some superhuman strength

and has got to acknowledge

that they're really professional, they're really a great band.

There's nothing shitty about Exile On Main St.

When you really get into it,

there's a looseness but that should not be mistaken for sloppiness.

There's nothing sloppy about Exile. And there's a lot of really good stuff.

Plus, in the things that weren't included on the album,

you can see the link, you can see the link to...

Like Aladdin Story, for example, which is called something else now...

That's the link to Between The Buttons and Exile. But there is one.

So, a lot of these things...

In fact, if you just listen to these 18 songs,

it's like "Wow, where did that spring from?"

But there actually is some lineage and connection.

Mick and l, sometimes, just before we start making an album,

say, "What kind of album do we want to make?"

And I say, "Make a Rolling Stones album."

That's about as far as I can narrow it down.

It's really a matter of surprising yourself,

it's about what's coming out.

If I knew everything that was to be played

it would probably sound as dead as a doornail, you know.

You kind of tend to write songs no matter what else you're doing.

It's not one of those things where you sit down and say,

"Songwriting time."

It's just something that happens during the day.

You might pick up a guitar to tune it, and before you know it you've got a song.

If you're lucky.

I never pushed songwriting.

It's a... Idea comes in.

Like an antenna. You know, "Incoming, transmit."

Albums, what you get, you say, "That's that album,"

a lot of albums roll over into the nex one.

Some of the stuff that you do...

And, say, Sticky Fingers, towards the end you've got more stuff than you can use,

you say, "We'll just save it."

So you kind of roll over material that way,

and the album becomes what gets on there,

but to us the process is continual, usually.

But it's, "Let's use these 12 songs, and what do we call it?"

"I know, Beggars Banquet. I know, Let It Bleed, Exile On Main St."

So you kind of take snippets of something that's going on all the time.

Still is. On a good day I can still write a song.

It interested me, and I think probably the other guys,

of actually not recording in a recording studio =

that was a novelty.

Because before then, you always thought...

"To make a record you've got to go in the studio."

This kind of if you've broken a leg you've got to go to hospital.

We found out you could break legs just as simply and easily without bothering,

that you could actually make an environment that you could work with.

I think we first thought it would be a bit of an experiment

and then we'd move on to another studio.

But by the time we'd got settled in and things were starting to happen,

it was just, "Why bother? We've got what we want here."

So it was a matter of experiments, a lot of that.

I mean, getting lost in those damn basements... It was enormous.

So you could say, "Let's try the drums in that one for this song

"because it's got more echo, more snap."

Or you put the bass in another room.

You could experiment with the place like that,

find the best spot for each instrument.

It's got a kind of very dense sound,

that you can pretty much tell that it was recorded there.

I'd say the beginning, the first month, was probably a little bit touch and go

whether we'd actually pull it off,

but then it started to flow,

and as I say, we said, "We don't need to go anywhere else, we can do it all here."

And I said, "Great. In that case, I'll stay. I'll unpack."

I think we always wanted to be a bit of a soul band as well,

and horns...

they were...

I wouldn't have said...

Maybe it was because it was Bobby and Jim Price,

it was just the two cats,

it wasn't like a whole full horn section

which can be a lot to take care of.

With just the two guys, they fit into the size of the band real well.

It just gave us that exra texure that we'd been looking for.

So we basically just were a bit of a soul band, in a way, at that time.

Bobby and I were working together for a couple of years

before we realized that... actually born on the same day, same everything,

within hours of each other.

I said, "The only problem with Bobby is that he's a Texan.

"Otherwise he's great."

We'd never even intended it to be a double album

until finally we'd sort of run out of songs

and said, "Wow, there's too much for one album

"but there's too much good stuff.

"We can't cut this baby up."

So we decided to go for the double.

Sometimes it's the hardest part of making albums =

what order do the songs come in?

And you kind of get used to listening to them, jumbling them up,

and saying, "That one works nice off of that,"

and you kind of work it like that.

It's a bit like a jigsaw puzzle.

Sometimes you have a good track

but it doesn't somehow work

coming out of that track or going into that.

And of course there's always the thing

that somebody else has a different feeling about it,

and so you've got to... "Well, do we flip a coin or what?"

But it's quite a process.

We were successful, I suppose,

in that respect,

that it hangs together well.

That's an important thing with a record.

You can have the same record, the same songs,

but if they're in a sort of order

that sometimes can jar and not quite hang together.

And that's the difficult thing =

you've made a great record and you know it's good stuff,

but will it hang together?

With Exile I think we did it.

It's just having, I think, maybe the exra amount of space to play with.

You know, more songs, more time.

Firstly it was received

with a little bit of doubt and scepticism,

but then it just started to pick up

and then it kept going and going and going

until some people now say, "It's the best album you've ever done."

I don't know about that, but I'm still very proud of it.

I can never pick... I mean, what do I think's the best?

I could never think in those terms.

It's just, "Well, that was what was the best of what I did then."

You're kind of used to seeing us chopping and changing in this life,

but yeah, we'd also been off the road for quite a while,

and quite honestly we had to get used to how things had changed

in the about two years that we were off.

Technology had changed immensely.

I mean, they actually... You had PAs, which sounds weird now,

but when we used to work in the '60s...

most PAs were a couple of little speakers

hung on a side of a wall,

one of which usually worked, and that was just for the vocal.

So we had to get into learning miking up, monitors,

so we had to do a lot of catch=up to start with.

It didn't take long, but it's a lot more to consider.

Before, you just went on stage and hoped they heard you. That was it.

It was kind of exciting to go to Cannes and walk along the beach

and see all the topless girls, which you didn't see in England,

and naked girls and all that.

That was a bit of fun.

And just getting into that,

and then, much later, meeting...

famous artists, painters.

I did, anyway. I don't know about the others, they left earlier.

It was...

And living in a really nice house.

I lived in a place called the Bastide de Saint Antoine

which was near Grasse where they do the perfume.

And... I had these beautiful gardens

with high wild flowers and all that,

and they had their own vineyards

and they used to have their own wine.

Used to have about 400 or 600 bottles of wine every year from their grapes,

which you drank, it was the house wine.

And I would go in the gardens and I could just take photos of nature

and see massive great grass snakes about seven foot long.

And it was really, really interesting.

I've always loved nature anyway.

And I did a lot of movie films

of a praying mantis eating insects and things.

I just enjoyed all that. But then, when it came to recording,

when they finally got the Stones' mobile studio over to Keith's house,

very convenient for Keith, wasn't it?

There was this stairway that came down from upstairs,

and it turned, at the bottom of the stairway it turned,

and there was a room.

It was probably nine foot square, maybe ten.

That was where we recorded.

And it used to get so hot in there

that condensation used to run down the walls and all that.

My bass amp used to be under the bloody stairs,

out round there.

The horn players used to be down the corridor in the kitchen,

when they were doing things, or vocals.

It was all spread.

We couldn't see the engineer

and he couldn't see us = Andy Johns, and Jimmy Miller the producer.

They couldn't see us, we didn't have a contact with them.

So it was always speaking.

And it was just like an oven.

It was not very conducive to making music, really,

and it was a bloody miracle we did.

I suppose we had the band there, the whole band there,

probably 30%, 40% of the time.

The rest of the time it was just bits.

Me and Charlie, and... Mick hadn't come, Mick Taylor didn't come,

me, Charlie and Keith, so we'd work on something.

Nex day Keith wouldn't come because Mick wasn't there

so then Mick'd come and then he'd see Keith wasn't there

so the nex day he wouldn't come.

And sometimes we'd all get there to do a session

and Keith wouldn't even come, he was upstairs sleeping,

and we'd... Charlie had come five hours,

me and Mick Taylor had come two hours, Mick had come an hour,

and Keith's upstairs,

and he didn't come down to the session.

It was like madness.

Musically, he was a better musician

than any of us in the band, definitely.

He was young, he was...

God, some of the things he did were...

just amazing.

He was incredibly boring on the stage.

He'd just stand there and look at his guitar

and just do these most amazing licks and riffs

and solos,

but he'd just... like that, you know.

God, the audience would see the top of his head all the time.

And I always thought he could have been a bit more... to the public...

But then I'm not a good one to talk, am I?

I don't leap about much.

In 30 years with the Stones I've probably made three steps on the stage.

By the time it gets to that stage

it's quite different from the way it starts,

and you've got names of songs, and you think...

and you think, "Tumbling Dice? Which one's that?"

And then you hear it and you say, "Oh, yeah,

"that's the track we called so=and=so, that had a different name."

And Keith used to think of funny names.

He'd call one, like...

General Election or something, you know.

And it'd turn out to be All Down The Line or...

So when you saw the list of the tracks on the album, what were going on,

you didn't know which one was which, cos you didn't know them by those titles.

Cos Mick wrote the lyrics much later, often,

we did the tracks, and then he did the lyrics later and put them on.

You'd heard them so many times

that they were just like...

you didn't really want to listen to them for a while.

And Charlie's the same.

He says, "I don't listen to it. Once you get the album, I don't listen to it."

I'll say, "I don't either." I don't put the record on.

When you get the record, I don't put it on my turntable and listen to it.

Keith does. Keith'd put it on and play it for the nex three weeks solid,

every night, morning, noon and night, at full volume.

And he does that, bless him, that's what he does.

We went back to our roots with Beggars Banquet

and then we just continued in that way.

I don't see a lot different on Exile On Main St.

from the two albums before it or the one after it, actually, Let It Bleed.

They're all my favourite albums, those four albums are my favourites,

of all the career.

I think that's when we were at our peak

musically, inventively, creatively,

and on stage we were dynamite.

No one could come near us on stage, no one.

That whole period was incredibly intense and creative for all of us

because it was a new beginning for the band

and they'd signed a new contract with Atlantic Records

and we had to, in theory at least,

we had to come up with at least six albums in six years.

If we weren't hanging out together or recording...

we were touring.

I just remember most of the time we were either in the studio

or we were socialising together

or we were on the road.

The enduring thing about being with the Stones,

right from the very beginning, actually,

I mean, right from when I first joined them,

I'd be going over to Mick's house in Cheyne Walk

and he'd be playing old blues records.

Same with Keith. It always had this underlying...

sort of rootsy blues feel,

which was what really...

you know,

made it so special.

I think it was a real struggle for Keith and Anita

once we started the recording process,

because you're mixing domesticity, in a way, with...

not to put too grand a term, art.

Domesticity and art don't necessarily mix.

Although we were recording down in a basement

that was separate from what was going on above...

There were constant power failures, and...

Compared to the way records are made today, it was quite primitive

and quite basic.

You know, I remember Mick having to sing using...

having to use a different part of the basement,

maybe a disused toilet, or something, to do his vocal overdubs in.

They basically had to turn it into their home,

and of course...

it ended up being like a holiday resort for all their friends

and everybody else's friends.

And in the midst of all this holidaying and partying

we were trying to make an album.

In those days all the other girls were, like, very kind of...

not middle class, but kind of very quiet and wanted to have a baby

and wanted to get married and all of that, and I...

For me it was not on the agenda.

I just wanted to live out the dream.

That place was just amazing,

it was just exraordinary, it was very decadent.

And it belonged to an admiral called Alexandre Bardes or Bordes,

and he was an admiral, an English admiral,

and he collected exotic plants.

And so from every trip that he went he brought these plants home

and he just filled up the garden with all these monkey trees, baobab,

I mean, it was like a jungle.

There were places where I wouldn't even go.

And the whole house was like... it was majestic

and very big, very, very kind of decaying.

No furniture = I remember bringing some rugs.

They're in all the photographs of Dominique Tarle.

I say, "Oh, that rug..."

We brought along the rugs. So we kind of lived in that kind of style anyway,

rock'n'roll, hippy, whatever, all on the floor basically.

Everybody that came there, they were shocked.

You know, they said, "How can a beautiful place

"have all these toys on the floor and silly guitars..."

The best places were for the guitars =

all the nice couches and everything, all guitars.

You always had to sit somewhere...

I mean, Keith still does that,

he's always got the guitar in the best place, his best seat.

It was great. They all took part.

I don't know, in the evening we put them to sleep, and that's it.

I don't know how you could sleep with all that noise,

but kids are kids, so...

And then they had a great attitude towards the grown=ups as well,

and the grown=ups had to deal with them as well,

especially Jake and Charley who were older than Marlon,

Marlon was still a toddler, two years old.

But the other ones were always very demanding

and kind of confronting them and playing with them.

No, it was really good, a good vibe.

Lunch was always outside, and dinner was always...

I remember running in the kitchen, like, all the time.

"We need more of that, more of that..."

It was really... I don't know who paid for it,

but I'm sure it cost a bomb.

And all the wines and all of that,

and we always had liquor in the house.

It was like a freeloading kind of brigade, basically.

And some of them were really annoying,

and I got more and more bored with all these people

and I became a bouncer.

I kind of remember standing at the top of the stairs

and just throwing... emptying a room out that somebody had slept in

and just throwing all these clothes down.

And everybody was like, "She's a monster!"

That's what I ended up doing, just throwing everybody out.

Then I started to move around rooms,

and for a period I moved into a room just above the truck.

But that was also part of our escape route in case we got busted.

We had this escape route that we planned

so you could jump out the window where I was sleeping,

and then jump on the bus and get out really quickly,

because otherwise it was all these corridors and staircases.

So we had it all sussed, we had it pretty sussed.

It was really incredible, yachts...

it was, like, the deepest harbour in the Mediterranean,

and then there was the Sixh Fleet,

the Germans were there, all the navy people were there.

The Sixh Fleet would come in, they'd have LSD,

and all the village would open

and all these people would ravage the village,

and shoot=outs, and it was like a...

Yeah, it was like a frontier, like being in the Far West.

All these sailors, like, running around.

That was more interesting than what was going on in the house for us.

So we used to go up and drive up to them

and pretend to be pirates and do all kinds of nonsense.

A couple of them had skull and bones flags as well,

so there was, like, this element of bonding with these people,

but they didn't think so.

And then, I mean, Keith, he drove out with his motorboat,

and then he ran out of gasoline

so then he sent flares and we had to go to Villefranche and pick him up.

But that happened a lot.

When you live with them, that's what you see. You don't see...

all the other people from the outside see...

It's a kind of reality that you live with.

And I've always found it really sad

that people always say, "It was all sex and drugs and rock'n'roll."

It was rock'n'roll and drugs and sex, in that order.

When it came out, yes, I was really proud of them.

I was really proud of Keith as well.

I loved it right away, from Rip This Joint all the way down.

It's amazing, it really is special.

I actually went to France and bought a house

and set up home there.

Everybody else rented a place or something.

And I chose somewhere, typically me,

right in the middle of sort of North Wales, the equivalent thereof.

So it was miles from anywhere, right in the mountains, so...

But I still have it.

It was an old = well, old = it was an Edwardian villa, beautiful thing.

Keith had this fabulous balcony that he overlooked the end of the thing...

Where was it, Nellcote? At the Cap Ferrat or something.

Good sound in the cellar, it was a huge cellar.

It wasn't a little place.

I think I was in the sort of coal bunker bit,

but it was a good sound for the drums, the drums were great.

Time to Keith was a very loose thing.

It was a very small T=l=M=E because it meant...

He's like it even now he's straight.

Keith's time is...

I don't mean his playing time but his time of getting up and going...

It's quite normal for Keith to work from sort of eight in the evening

till three o'clock the nex afternoon.

And Mick works from eight at night till twelve at night,

and goes home.

So as a drummer you're in the middle of doing it all.

That's why it was good at Nellcote, cos you could do that.

Didn't matter when I went to bed.

No, I'm serious. Keith works like that.

Anyway, and with various other things going on,

you might not work for two days

and then do a whole two days without sleep the nex.

Keith likes to do a good track, keep it,

and play it over and over again,

for at least a year.

He likes that.

Mick and I tend to do it and hear it back

and never play it again ever.

And Mick will just hear it when he mixes it and that's it.

Keith will play them endlessly.

That's why Keith's a good one to...

if you ask him about a track you did two years ago,

he'll have it on his thing and know...

If it's a good one he'll know it and play it.

It's very good...

What I meant about him being a jazz player is he plays like that,

his playing is... it's very easy playing with Keith.

Very easy.

Your only critic is yourself, really.

He doesn't say, "Ooh, that's horrible."

And he doesn't stop playing if whatever.

It's like, "If that's how you want to do it, see what happens.

"I didn't like it, but you liked it."

He's very easy like that, very easy to play with.

And if it's good he's very complimentary about it.

So he's very easy to play with.

Well, it's a long time I've played with him.

Very comfortable to play with.

What I think happened with Exile is that we had all these odd things going,

and the songs that were done for the albums that we used...

so we had these other things that were actually...

like Casino Boogie and all those things,

normally they're pushed, not used,

but they'd slowly come to the surface

and we needed them to do this thing and they...

That's how...

And sometimes you miss the best things.

You do, no matter who you are.

Mick won't like using something from two days ago, so you'll miss it.

Not his fault, it's just how it evolves.

And sometimes you have an idea of an album, that it should all be this,

and so you dismiss the other stuff.

And that's kind of what happened with Exile.

We picked up a lot of stuff that was dismissed off the albums before,

couple of albums.

They always say that about great writers.

"All great writers are alcoholics." And you go, "No, they're not."

And you look at them and you think, "Bloody hell, the great ones actually were!"

Mostly.

Fitzgerald, all that lot. It's like, "Whoa, wait a minute."

So maybe that's true. I don't know.

That's been said about jazz musicians for years.

I was going to ask that as well...

Now, you could be right. How many people copied Charlie Parker

cos he was so great and so fucked up at the same time?

Many people.

But I don't think it made him greater than he actually was.

It may have made him spend more time on it, I don't know,

cos that's what it does, it messes your...

I don't know, actually, about that one.

And also when you're younger you can cope with it.

It's when you're older you can't.

And it doesn't hang on you so well either.

I remember hanging out with the Stones in the Olympic,

when I first met them with the Faces, the Small Faces,

when I used to hang out with them.

They sang...

...the background vocals to Get Off My Cloud, things like that.

Many good memories of parties,

cos Olympic used to have three different studios.

You'd have the Faces in one,

the Stones in another, David Bowie in another.

Everyone would meet in the canteen, like, "How's it going? All right?"

I remember, yeah, it was a really big moment in my life.

Like, "The Stones have to leave England!" Yeah.

And then I got hit by the taxman as well.

So was the government starting to come after the big rich rock stars?

I got hit for 80 grand or something, which meant me having to leave England,

and I went, "Now I understand what Exile was all about."

Because, just like the general public,

it took them years to find out how good the album was.

When it first came out as a double album,

it was great to me,

but really...

not understandable by the general public.

It was like, "Double album?

"These guys really think they can do a double album?"

I mean, it's twice as many songs. They were all fantastic.

I was born with those songs in my mouth, anyway.

You can name any song off of there and I was with it.

I didn't have to learn it.

When I joined the band, back in '7 4 or whenever,

when I had to learn 160 songs or something,

that was my initiation down in Woodstock...

I ended up teaching them to the band.

I knew the songs. I'd never played them before but I just knew them.

Well, Mick will be a fusspot because he always is, to today.

He's mixing, he's remixing Exile now.

So that shows you.

It's never quite... perfect enough.

In his view.

But to my view...

it's different.

It hits the nail on the head whether the tracks are mixed or not.

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