But the intra-band tension must also have played a part in the shared need to let off a little steam. An unhealthy dose of paranoia set in at Nellcote, brought on by very real events such as the theft of priceless guitars and the presence of seedy drug dealers ever ready to ply their wares. The drug use within the band itself was only likely to heighten the intensity of the mistrust. The arrangement of this song alone reflects the tension: the band hangs on a single chord for the bulk of the song until, as the lyric suggests, something must give, with an incredible release on the chorus, which nevertheless builds to a subsequent ascending horn-driven climax on the lines "no matter where you are / everybody's gonna need some kind of ventilator." Mick drags on that last line of the chorus well into the next section, as if finally discovering some kind of release for himself.
Mick's vocal, double-tracked in a unison part—a common recording technique, but one that was rarely used on Stones records—bulks up his testosterone-fuelled voice as he urgently spews such lines as "woman's cussin' you can hear her scream / sounds like murder in the first degree," and "when your trapped and circled and no second chance / code of livin' is your gun in hand." He pronounces "first" as "foist," "murder" as "moidah," and "learn" as "loin," for that bluesman twang. But once again, the authority of his performance nips in the bud any notion that Jagger is merely indulging in any mimicry. His improvised bits at the end of and between lines are inspired; an assortment of that's all rights and come down and get its. And at the end of the song, as the band roils away on the lick to take the song home, Mick spits out a challenge, a provocation as the ending refrain:
Whatcha gonna do about? Watch a gonna do? Gonna fight it?
On an album of career-defining moments for Nicky Hopkins, his performance on "Ventilator Blues" might be the most awe-inspiring. He is all over the keyboard, raging away like an intense, updated Otis Spann or Pinetop Perkins. After years of listening to this record, and hearing Jagger's vocals and Mick Taylor's slide guitar most prominently on the song, at some point the piano part hit me, grabbed me by the throat, and insisted that I hear it first and foremost on every subsequent listen. The song has never sounded the same to me since. Hopkins plays like a man possessed, slipping impossibly quick figures into the funky, complicated rhythm set by Keith and Charlie. As the arrangement builds, Nicky moves from a comparatively sedate part that sits comfortably in the spaces left by the guitar riff to a jittery, tense hammering style, rolling off triplets up the keyboard with his quick right hand in the higher octaves.
Hopkins adds to an already scary cabin fever tension. He manages this within a rhythm so tricky that Jimmy Miller apparently had to help Watts along as he skips snare beats, also adding to the nervousness of the arrangement. As ardent Stones fan Mike Gent of the bands the Figgs and the Gentlemen explained, "Jimmy Miller got the groove on that together and had to stand over Charlie and clap in time so he could get that fat backbeat down." The horns rise dynamically like a truck sounding its air horn as it barrels uncontrollably down a mountain highway. Bill Wyman plays a grounded bass part worthy of Willie Dixon, and Mick Taylor's slide part just sounds flat out fantastic.
"On 'Ventilator Blues' we got some weird sound of something that had gone wrong—some valve or tube that had gone," Keith said, explaining the happy accidents that sometimes occurred in the less than ideal conditions of the basement. "If something was wrong you just forgot about it. You'd leave it alone and come back tomorrow and hope it had fixed itself. Or give it a good kick." Buried under this entire storm is an acoustic guitar part, which helps to steady the rhythm—holds the fort down, as it were. Such telling details lift songs like "Ventilator Blues" way beyond straight-on hero worship to something more remarkable.
I Just Want to See His Face
In yet another winning transition, "Ventilator Blues" fades as "I Just Want to See His Face" rises from the smoke. Now we really sound like we're in a basement, but one in the deep south, a New Orleans church revival meeting perhaps, or a Creole voodoo chant. The two songs are utterly different in tone, but somehow they fit together. It's as if the same man with his back against the wall on "Ventilator Blues" can somehow be saved from himself on "I Just Want to See His Face": "sometimes you want no trouble, sometimes you feel so down / let this music relax you mind." The narrator doesn't sound convinced that he has found religion, but feels he can be saved by the sight of His mere visage. And you feel like his victim: he's cornered and beaten you to within an inch of your life on "Ventilator Blues," and now he's holding off from finishing the deed, as his unstable mind teeters back and forth between the sacred and the profane, the holy and the murderous. You're okay, though, as long as he keeps singing about Jesus.
This fits the themes of Exile on Main St. as a whole: the violence and the chaos are soothed by the music. This song is so necessary to the whole vibe of Exile; it would be hard to imagine the record without it. Mick knows what we need better than we do; here is a breather, a meditative moment, a reward for those who listen enough and a gift for those ready to accept. Never mind accepting Jesus, can you accept this little piece of musical salvation into your heart? It articulates my appreciation for—and likely sums up Mick's feeling's about—gospel music; feeling soothed and lifted by the spirit of the songs without necessarily subscribing to the specific religious doctrine behind the lyrics. And there is a long and deep tradition of gospel songs with lyrics reflecting such satisfaction in the mere image or presence of Jesus, as a salve. Take, for example, the Soul Stirrers' song "He's My Friend Until the End":
Then one day you'll see God's face
After you'd won this Christian race
He'll be your friend
The murky basement sound fits into the whole myth of the record. Most accounts of the recording of this haunting song, including Jagger's own, have Mick and Keith sitting around and jamming for a test recording, with Keith at the electric piano. Mick apparently improvised the lines while singing to Keith's hypnotic part. Mick Taylor played bass. The beautiful gospel backing vocals and Bill Plummer's astonishing stand-up bass part were overdubbed later in Los Angeles, after it became apparent that this mesmerizing track could not be rejected.
Yet, contrary to the legend, it might be Bobby Whitlock playing electric piano, appearing on the album uncredited. I talked to Whitlock and mentioned that I saw this mentioned only once—in all the various books, databases, Internet sources, and articles—and offhandedly he confirmed this:
That's right. Those things happened ... back then. Because they took so long to do it. There were two songs I was playing on, one of them was about: (starts singing) "I don't want to talk about Jesus / I Just wanna see his face." I'm playing electric piano on that. And on something else, about a mule or something, I'm not sure ... or that was that Dr. John thing ... But back then, there was so much going down in the, um, the drug department. When Jimmy Miller finally found out, when I told him about, "Hey man, you guys didn't bother to give me credit for that ..." He and I were in business together in my solo career, at the time, all right? So I mean years, a couple or three years had lapsed and I'm telling you man, he went "oh man, I knew there was something missing." But it took so long. You know, it took them over a year to do the recording, it was like a year and a half. You know, they go to France, and then they're in England, someplace else, you know, some studio here and there. So it's a little bit of everywhere and a lot of different people floating in and out of there.
I mentioned that Keith Richards is usually given credit for the electric piano on "I Just Want to See His Face," so I asked Bobby if he overdubbed it over Keith's part, the way Bill Plummer overdubbed bass parts later in Los Angeles. (I thought Bobby was part of the coterie in LA.) "Well, no, that is not when it went down," he answered. "No, that happened in Olympic Studios ... I was in England." He explained that Dr. John had been there working on his record The Sun, Moon & Herbs (1971), which features contributions from Mick, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, and many others. That greasy record has a song c
alled "Where Ya at Mule," which, no doubt, is the other song to which Whitlock referred. Dr. John's influence is clear on "I Just Want to See His Face."
I asked Whitlock, "So, that's just you on electric piano?" Bobby answered quickly, "That would be me on electric piano." This is contrary to every other account I have seen of the recording. One might assume that maybe there was another take of the song, but every version of the legend describes it as a spontaneous burst of inspiration.
Whitlock did not seem particularly concerned with his lack of credit on the record, nor was he eager to reminisce about the era. Responding to farther inquiries as to what might be the other song that he played on, Bobby more or less dismissed it, saying, "yeah, but I don't even know. Because I haven't listened to that record since we did it. I don't sit around and listen to records, especially the ones I played on. I couldn't tell you what the name of it is. Those were some pretty hazy days, all right?"
I asked Bobby to talk a bit about Nicky Hopkins. "We were all friends. There was an opportunity for me to join the Stones but me and Eric (Clapton) were putting our band together . . . There was always a give and take (between English and American musicians)."
Al Perkins also downplayed any significance regarding the fact that British musicians were so adept at translating American music forms. After all, such music had its sources in Europe as well as Africa and other places. "I've personally enjoyed the re-wrapping process whereby American music is digested in England and presented back to America very effectively, the Stones and the Beatles being two very good examples," he said. "The Stones were great students of American blues," Perkins noted. "But along with blues must come the other forms of music from the heartland; country and gospel were major elements also."
And gospel is obviously what is on the table with "I Just Want to See His Face." The approach here starts with the raw, small-combo sound of the Staples Singers. Jimmy Miller's percussion and Charlie Watts' malleted drums sounding like a cross between African drumming and tympani, a rumble of distant thunder, provide all the atmosphere the song needs (again, Dr. John's record being a particularly good reference point). But Miller adds a tambourine for the real church feel and somehow the backing vocals from Clydie King, Jesse ("Jerry" on the record sleeve) Kirkland, and Vanetta Field (simply "Vanetta" on the credits) slip around Jagger's part as if he had charted out the whole thing beforehand. He either left the space for them intuitively, or Jimmy Miller and Los Angeles engineer Joe Zagano adeptly played around with the mute button during the mix to allow them space for a real call-and-response part.
Jagger was wise to surround himself with bona fide gospel singers to help him achieve his authentic flavour. These singers were brought in by Billy Preston. Bill Plummer overdubbed his acoustic bass part over Mick Taylor's electric bass. When he isn't playing a swinging blues part, Plummer's approach is extremely percussive, rushing high-octave runs that start and stop abruptly, adding to the atmosphere of the track. It sounds like someone is banging on an upright piano, kicking the bench, opening and shutting the keyboard cover, wood knocking and echoing in the dark. It sounds ancient or otherworldly, as if consciously made to sound like an Alan Lomax field recording, a folk relic off of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music, in the tradition explored on the Basement Tapes.
It's easy to see why Tom Waits—another fan of Dr. John—has called "I Just Want to See His Face" his favourite Stones song. The experimental spontaneity and atmospherics of the song foreshadow work by Waits, Sonic Youth, and other musicians who used room sounds and other vibe-filled textures as essential components of their recordings. "That song had a big impact on me," Waits has said of "I Just Want to See His Face." "Particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does ... But this is just a tree of life. This record (Exile on Main St.) is the watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard Lounge all over it."
Let It Loose
"Let It Loose" is one of the most beautiful songs on Exile, and in the Rolling Stones' canon in general. Like many great songs, it seems to take its lyrical inspiration from more than one source. After opening with a stunning Keith Richards guitar lick, an arpeggio-picked riff that warbles through a Leslie organ speaker, Mick Jagger starts in with what seems to be a dialogue: "Who's that woman on your arm .. . and I'm hip to what she'll do / give her just about a month or two." As with a few songs on Exile, Mick is offering caution and concern for a friend, a friend who seems suspiciously like Keith. After those opening lines, the narrator seems to switch to the other person. Perhaps it's an internal dialogue: "Bit off more than I can chew / and I knew, yeah I knew what it was leading to," and "she delivered right on time /1 can't resist a corny line." It might even be Mick giving voice to Keith, perhaps a line that Keith wrote, concerned about Jagger flying off to be with Bianca and disrupting the creative flow.
Mick offers one of his most stunning performances on this song. His vocal is remarkably heartfelt, dragging out words as if each line is unloading more weight off his shoulders. On a record that features some of his most honest performances, he sounds completely guileless here, without any semblance of a mask or character, as if singing a confessional lyric from personal experience.
The "dysfunctional family" vibe that Mick Taylor and Anita Pallenberg have remarked upon was in full effect during the sessions at Nellcote, with jealousies and concerns about the effect of outsiders—women included—on the relationships within the "gang" that was the Stones. On "Let It Loose" we seem to be privy to a brotherly conversation between Mick and Keith— though it's unlikely such words were ever actually uttered between the two Glimmer Twins. It has often been said a band is like a marriage, but in my experiences it is closer to that of siblings—rivalry very much included. Marriages and "love" relationships can, in fact, be the stabilizing forces that the individuals need to buttress them from the tempestuousness of intra-band tensions.
It is interesting that this song is somewhat buried in the middle of Exile; the only extra attention it receives is its placement closer to the murkiest and most enigmatic side (side three) of the album's vinyl incarnation. The production again sounds like the basement recording of Exile, with ghostly vocal tracks left over from the tracking, as well as off-mike whistles and hollers bleeding into open microphones, as if from other rooms, adding to the dense, layered atmosphere and live feel of the track. But it was apparently tracked at Olympic Studio in London.
The arrangement allows the ensemble to build and breathe on the 5:18 minute track. Jagger steps aside for a full minute in the middle of the song to allow for a lush and intimately quiet breakdown, featuring the backing gospel singers, a group of professional studio veterans assembled by and including Dr. John, and Tamiya Lynn (misspelled "Tammi" on the record). "What [Mick] wanted was this funk feeling, this real honest church feel," Lynn told Appleford. "He had an appreciation for black music, and he said it openly, so that was out of the way. We knew he had this affinity for the blues and where it came from. Wilson Pickett came clearly out of a church, out of a black experience. Mick came out of a respect for black experience, or black music. The greatness comes out of the spirit." The backing ensemble also includes Shirley Goodman, who had hits in the 1950s with "Let the Good Times Roll" and in the 1970s with the disco tune "Shame, Shame, Shame."
Keith's guitar lick is offered the spotlight, with Nicky Hopkins (who also has a few Mellotron "strings" lines that can be heard in the introduction) coming back in with some well-chosen country/gospel trills. Charlie slams out an elongated tom-tom fill and a typically magnificent horn chart takes it from there, building the arrangement back up to a climax. We can tell it is Bill Wyman on bass, as the part is effectively simple, made up almost completely of half-notes; no busy runs, with one note at about 2:33 that seems like a half-corrected mistake that was left in, a slur into the intended note. Aside from some sotto vocce mumbling and a few shouts of encouragement, Jagger returns in earnest at the three-minute mark and seems
fired up and pushed on by the ensemble. "Hide the switch and shut the light, won't you shut it?" he asks, in opposition to the album's other great gospel opus, "Shine a Light." In one of Mick's most arresting lines, he sounds deeply wounded on the impossibly drawn out "may—be your friends think I'm just a stranger / your face I'll never see no more." He vamps off the backing singers, but eventually cedes to the chorus completely, as if completely broken, letting them offer chance at salvation. It is a moment that feels divine, as the voices fade out. Listening to the vinyl edition, one is thankful for the break that is afforded with the end of the side. The listener almost needs a moment of meditation to gather one's self before the onslaught of the album's home stretch that begins with the next track, "All Down the Line."
All Down the Line
Just in case you started to get lost in the murky depths of side three and beaten down by the heavy emotion conveyed by the band on "Let It Loose," "All Down the Line" is there to slap you in the face and straighten you up, leading off side four with the same blistering hard rock assault of "Rocks Off" and "Happy," two of the other side openers. It is amazing that "All Down the Line" sounds as forceful as it does. Outtakes suggest this was a song the band really struggled with, in fits and starts, from sessions as far back as 1969, before finally reaching the state of glory it attains here on Exile.
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