Looking at Exile, we are supposed to believe that these Riviera tax refugees spend their free time on seedy streets hanging with pimps in front of porn theatres rather than on Mediterranean beaches. And, in fact, we do buy it. We want to suspend our disbelief. And we can do so easily because the music alone is so convincing. But it is a combination of memory, fantasy, imagination, and the band's reality at the time that informs the record. As Bill Wyman details in his book Stone Alone, the Stones had lived and played in squalor in the early days. And Keith must still have been frequenting some shady places from time to time in the quest to feed his habit. In a Rolling Stone article documenting the Stones' "farewell tour" of England in 1971, Robert Greenfield describes the same sort of sleazy dressing rooms "filled with parasites" that Jagger sings about on "Torn and Frayed."
More than a decade later, when Van Hamersveld met with John (Johnny Rotten) Lydon to discuss providing the design for Public Image Limited's 1984 record This Is What You Want, Lydon admitted that the design of Exile was influential to the rough, black and white, cut-up graphic look of 1970s punk rock. It seems this influence was deeper than the mere look of the surface (scrawled writing, newspaper headlines, etc.). As Van Hamersveld recalled, Lydon also made the point that the Exile artwork taught the nascent punk rocker that the look of the cover art informs the overall band image and prepares the listener for what he or she is about to hear. So while the music certainly influences the decisions about how the record should look, it actually works the other way as well; the artwork informs the listener how to feel about the music it contains.
“Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new,” Van Hamersveld points out. And punk rock, especially early punk rock, was nothing really new at the base of it; it was all the same three chords and rock & roll vocals, albeit exaggerated in delivery and perhaps a bit more raw in form than most mainstream rock of the era. Lydon, and especially the Sex Pistols' manager, Malcom McClaren, had learned that it was all about packaging and marketing. John Hamersveld had learned that lesson years before as a commercial artist and through working with rock artists like the Stones. The latter were selling, or at least defining, a lifestyle for him and his peers. He recalls taking stock of the "cultural landscape" as 1970 rolled around:
Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll has made its way into the pop language. Pop Art's look of self-conscious innocence in the early sixties has changed by the end of the decade to a slick, crafted image as a marketing tool for the record companies. (Regarding) Keith: A lot of what I'd learned at art school came home to roost. About selling a look, an attitude, an image—like what kind of hair you wanted. By the seventies the Rolling Stones Tongue-and-Lip design is the most sexual image in the media culture. Jagger's mouth and words have become a symbol and registered trademark image to be merchandised by 1971.
Anyone familiar with Keith Richards' interviews over the years, but particularly and pointedly around the time of Mick Jagger's first solo record, will be aware of how important the concept of the band is to Keith. On Exile on Main St., the individual musical ego is sublimated for the good of the whole. The sum of the parts is greater. Whenever he was pitched the idea of doing a solo record, Andy Johns said Keith would brush it off. In Keith Richards, Life as a Rolling Stone, by Barbara Cherone, Johns recalled that he continued to pressure Keith with the idea, after all the sing-alongs at Villa Nellcote and then more urgently after recording "Happy":
Keith started singing these cowboy songs and his voice was incredible. So I said "Goddamn, Keith, when are you gonna make an album of your songs, 'cause it's so good." And Keith sorta went, "no, man." But I kept on at him and I usually get my own way.
For a month I kept on without pressuring him too much, and in the end he said, "Listen, if I made a fuckin' album of my own I'd only get all the boys to play on it anyway. So it would be a fuckin' Rolling Stones album wouldn't it? Why don't we get on with the Rolling Stones album we're doing now?" That sort of stunned me.
If there was a gang mentality, an attitude of "we're all in this together" before their self-imposed "exile" in France, the relationship as a group was apparently cemented during the recording of Exile on Main St. Which is not to say they all became one big happy family—but they were a family, albeit a slightly dysfunctional one. After the heat of all the drug busts, the death of Brian Jones, and now the tightening of the financial screws that came with being in the top tax bracket, the band felt forced from their own country, run out by the authorities. They had been at the butt-end of breathtakingly poor business decisions and exploitative contracts—the most recent, with Allen Klein, was the bad deal to end bad deals. Now they needed the help of one of Jagger's society friends, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, to figure out the pros and cons of becoming tax exiles. He recommended two years in France.
"In a way it was a great thing for the band," Richards told Mojo magazine. "Everybody had to look each other in the eye and say, 'All right, we'll do it in exile, in France'... in a way I think it was when the Stones decided, we're in this for a longer haul than anybody thought. Even ourselves."
The band members actually ended up quite dispersed, with Charlie Watts near Avignon and the newly-weds Mick and Bianca Jagger in St. Tropez—which apparently suited Bianca, who wished to keep herself distanced from the project. Bill Wyman's longtime partner during these years, Astrid Lundstrom, has said that up until the recording of Exile , the Stones and their families rarely socialized outside of the band and related activities. "The Stones only got together to work," she recalled. "But here, we were suddenly all thrown together in a foreign country, having to see more of each other." Wyman himself notes that when they first got down there, the band did indeed socialize often and by choice. "On Saturday Keith would arrive [at Wyman's place] with Anita and the kids, and there would be a few hangers-on like Ahmet Ertegun who came over from America. And then Mick would come by on his motorbike, and it was all very social, people jumping in the pool with their clothes on, things like that."
Keith, his wife Anita Pallenberg, and their son Marlon ended up in the grand 1899 Belle Epoque mansion, Villa Nellcote, in Villefranche-Sur-Mer, down near Nice and Cannes. It was a tired old mansion, its glamour long ago faded, but there was a stunning view of Ville-franche Harbour from its wide tiered terrace. Long owned by the Bordes shipping family, it had been used during World War II by the occupying German forces. Remnants of this time were still evident: there were swastika grates over the vents and suicide-morphine vials in the cellar (which were disposed of before Keith could find them). The driveway led up to the house through a thick and lush "jungle," which served well for the needed privacy. There was plenty of space to spread out—sixteen rooms and a private beach. "It was one of those places where you could go 'Yeah, I could live here!'" said Keith. But important to our story are the three levels of cellar that would eventually be jury-rigged into a recording studio.
Keith, long-time "sixth Stone" Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman, and others made various excursions to scout out possible venues where they could record, with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio truck parked outside. The truck, with its state of the art studio control room built in, had been used already by the Stones for some of Sticky Fingers.
Dominique Tarle was a young French photographer who had befriended the Stones on previous occasions, and he ingratiated himself into the Stones scene full-time for the Exile on Main St. sessions, resulting in the masterpiece book Exile, which captures not only his jaw-dropping photos, but also a priceless oral history from various people on the scene at Nellcote during that summer. "Keith told me that he was looking for a place where he could store all the sound equipment and possibly somewhere they could use it as well. So they started to look for a kind of theatre," Tarle recalled. "He decided it was time to record an album and realized that maybe he was sitting on the studio, as there were three storeys of cellar underneath his house. So the Rolling Stones Mobile Unit was summoned down to Nellcote."
Jo Bergman, wh
o ran the band's office and acted as a liaison, says one of the reasons they ended up at Keith's house is that they feared they would never get him to some of the remote places they had been scouting. "At least we can get him down in the basement," she recalled was the dominant sentiment at the time. In his book Rolling with the Stones, Bill Wyman recalls, regarding the studio at Nellcote, "we could guarantee Keith would be there."
Fans of the Stones should be thankful for Tarle's pictures, which capture the decadence of the house, the lifestyle, if not the grand scope of the place. Like Robert Frank's photos, Tarle's tend toward the shadowy, the insular, the intimate. He, too, is a fly on the wall in the dimly lit rooms, bottles and bongs lined up on sound baffles as players lounge and play—music and otherwise. In his foreword to the book Exile, Keith Richards wrote, "I realize, looking at these moments he captured, that he was part of the family, the band, in fact. He was also an exile in his own country. The quality of blending into the furniture and the fittings, I was rarely aware that he was working (WHICH IS RARE!)." Anita Pallenberg has claimed that the book is "like our family album."
Many of the photos have shown up before in various publications and, along with Robert Frank's photography and the overall album packaging, they add to the listener's image of the record, and aid us in envisioning the time and place so central to this legendary recording. We can see the decrepit basement, the damp on the walls. The summer heat is palpable in the shots of shirtless and barefoot musicians as they collaborate, guitars in hand, sitting at a piano, lying down on the floor with headphones on, listening to other musicians record parts right in front of them. We are with them sitting at the dining room table littered with the remnants of a meal, ashtrays full, Campari and wine bottles empty, strumming cover songs with guests like Graham Parsons and John Lennon. We see dogs, rabbits, kids, records, motorcycles, boats, chandeliers, and guitars, lots of guitars.
How could a kid not get wrapped up in these images? I am thirty-eight at the time of this writing, most of my "professional career" as a musician is behind me, and this record and these accompanying photos still make me want to pick up a guitar, call up some friends, bust open a bottle, and sing all night in the basement or at the kitchen table. This is the essence of playing music: joy, the sort of unbridled fun that makes up most of childhood and so precious little of adulthood. It is also an unfortunately small percentage of playing (and especially touring) in a professional band. As Paul Kolderie said to me, such pictures ruined our lives; on some level, we succumbed to the fantasy. Sure, there are moments of glory even for a club and theatre level band like mine—we may not have always been playing to huge audiences, but man, we were touring around the world! Drinking, singing, laughing, making new friends, we went from basements and pizza to limos and digestifs at the Odeon (and back to basements and pizza). Believe me, we never bought into it, realizing it was all a fleeting farce, as we consciously tallied up the expenses that would be coming out of our recoupable balance at the label. But there was a part of me that always just wanted to relax and go with it, enjoy it, live like rock stars and have fun. Countless bands have been willing accomplices to ridiculously one-sided contracts for shots at this fantasy. It's how the record industry has survived for so long: the rock star myth.
Such photographs are clearly inspired snapshots taken over a long period of time—time that was doubtless also filled with tedium, frustration, fatigue, downtime, boredom, bitterness, insecurities, jealousy, and other adult-sized emotions that come with a bunch of artists and hangers-on living and working right on top of each other for months on end, with no clear schedule and dysfunctional or non-existent communication. Even the pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject. They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than it is!
All accounts of Exile are heavy on the dark side, not just the relatively minor inconveniences that came with the recording. In a 1995 interview, Jagger looked back, not too fondly:
(We were) just winging it. Staying up all night . . . Stoned on something; one thing or another. So I don't think it was particularly pleasant. I didn't have a very good time. It was this communal thing where you don't know whether you're recording or living or having dinner; you don't know when you're gonna play, when you're gonna sing—very difficult. Too many hangers-on. I went with the flow, and the album got made. These things have a certain energy, and there's a certain flow to it, and it got impossible. Everyone was so out of it. And the engineers, the producers—all the people that were supposed to be organized—were more disorganized than anybody.
And Bill Wyman explained:
... We worked every night, from 8pm to 3 am, until the end of June (1971), although not everyone turned up each night. This was, for me, one of the major frustrations of this whole period. For our previous two albums we had worked well, been pretty disciplined and listened to producer Jimmy Miller. At Nellcote things were different and it took me a while to understand why.
Wyman recounts that further distractions came when "recording in Keith's basement had not turned out to be a guarantee of his presence. Sometimes he wouldn't come downstairs at all." And he didn't enjoy the "dull and boring" jam sessions that constituted most of the initial nights of recording. Keith and Anita's lifestyle "was becoming increasingly chaotic" and drugs were taking their toll on Keith and subsequently on the recording process. Possibly in retaliation, Mick would often not show up; perhaps being a newlywed was a further distraction, his and Bianca's wedding having just taken place on May 12. Then there was their announcement, a month later, that Bianca was expecting a baby. The two lovebirds were often jetting off for holidays in the middle of the time period set aside for recording. The tit-for-tat kept on escalating.
And even when the recording was going well, it was disorganized. Bill Wyman recalled, negatively, that Andy Johns would often be trying to record overdubs in the basement kitchen while people, dogs, and children, ate and made noise in the same room: "I remember Gram Parsons sitting in the kitchen in France one day, while we were overdubbing vocals or something. It was crazy. Someone is sitting in the kitchen overdubbing guitar and people are sitting at the table, talking, knives, forks, plates clanking. ... It was like one of those 1960s party records in which everyone felt they should be involved."
But the main negative that he points to in the making of Exile was the increasing reliance on hard drugs. "Whatever people tell you about the creative relationship between hard drugs and making of rock & roll records, forget it," he writes. "They are much more a hindrance than a help." Wyman notes that Mick was very concerned about Keith and that the hard drugs were dividing the Exile personnel into camps—those who abused, and those who enjoyed in relative moderation or abstained altogether. The latter were often not included in the recording process and were made to feel alienated. Wyman showed up on one occasion to discover two of his bass parts re-recorded by Keith. And the new parts, Bill felt, were inferior to those he'd recorded.
But for all the problems and obstacles, the Stones could ultimately sell the rock & roll myth because they lived it. The lived all of it, the positives and the negatives. They even succeed at transforming the awful side of the lifestyle into a myth of decadent glamour. Not that Keith set out to, but is it any wonder his image influenced so many musicians to spike up their hair, take up smack, and cultivate their skin-and-bones physiques? I never even tried to pull it off, but always secretly wished I could. Others looked lame and ultimately died trying, including Johnny Thunders, never mind third- and fourth-generation wannabes like Guns N' Roses or the Black Crowes. That's why Elvis Costello's rise was such a pivotal moment for dweebs like me. (To paraphrase the quote attributed to David Lee Roth: mo
st critics love Elvis Costello because most critics look like Elvis Costello.) But I still had a poster of Jagger and Richards up on my wall, at which my father would shake his head and mumble out of the corner of his mouth, "your heroes, eh?" The Glimmer Twins knew the attraction of the down and dirty street, the drugged and dangerous. "I gave you the diamonds /you gave me disease," Jagger scrawled in the album jacket. Coinciding with a famous Rolling Stone cover shot and interview with Keith Richards, the whole of Exile on Main St. offers up the sleazy glamour referred to now as junkie chic. The Stones were cementing their image and in turn, defining the prototypical image of a 1970s rock & roll band.
And much of that impression hinged around Keith's increasing prominence in the band's public image, a trend that had started gradually back around Brian Jones' death in 1969. In many ways, Exile is considered Keith's record: recorded at his house, more or less on his schedule, vocals down in the mix, guitars up. All accounts talk about long leisurely dinners set for double-digit guests, lasting until roughly midnight, when a vampiric Keith would beckon the musicians and crew to work. He would often disappear again for hours while, according to him, he put son Marlon to bed. Finally, he would re-emerge in the wee hours ready to work again, by which point the others had usually drifted off or disappeared. But the sessions would usually last until dawn, players emerging out of the dank, dark, hot cellar into the morning daylight of the Riviera. "The days just ran into days and we didn't get any sleep," remembered Mick Taylor in Mojo. "I remember staggering out of the basement at six in the morning and the sunlight hitting my eyes and driving home." They were ghoulish outsiders, nocturnal vampires, exiles from the daylight.
Exile on Main St Page 3
