Exile on Main St Page 4
All the different rooms and stalls in the Nellcote house and its huge cellar were potential recording spots, resulting in a good amount of natural ambience, the kinds of sounds that lend a recording "warmth." It also led to ad-hoc experimentation. "You'd sort of jam an acoustic guitar into the corner of one of these cubicles and just start playing and you'd hear it back you'd think, 'that doesn't sound anything like what I was playing, but it sounds great,'" noted Keith. "So you started to play around with the basement itself, aiming your amplifier up at the ceiling instead of like normal." Wyman notes that his amp would be on one floor of the basement, while he would be on a different level, and that often the musicians were not in the same room together, though when they were "it was even more hot and sticky."
"I think it was a bunch of stoned musicians cooped up in a basement, trying to make a record," explained Mick Taylor. "Definitely the situation contributed to the music on a technical level—the fact that it was in a dingy basement, badly equipped. We wouldn't dream of making an album like that these days."
The band had recorded in unconventional non-studio environments before, such as Mick's home Stargroves in Newbury, England, also using the Mobile Unit. So this was not a new idea for them. But there are many considerations in recording outside of a studio, amenities taken for granted, like means of communication between the control room and the live room. Andy Johns had to run back and forth between the truck and basement to relay messages. "We would be hollering down, 'Are you ready?'" recalled Bill Wyman. Mick McKenna, the engineer in charge of the truck, said, "there was ... a little CB microphone designed for the producer, but you could also record harmonica with it. There was also a black and white camera, but obviously these things weren't working too well then."
The Stones have always been known to record in an old school manner, with the band all in one room, even Mick singing in a hand-held mic, to record the basic tracks (drums, bass, rhythm guitar, scratch or "guide" vocal). This can be seen in such films as Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One, also known as Sympathy for the Devil, which documents the making (not just the recording) of the song of the same name. The band often writes and collaborates on arrangements in the studio, and pity the engineer who does not have the tape machine running at all times, lest a magical take, or even a reference point, fails to get captured.
After the mid-1960s, as recording techniques became more sophisticated, the idea of singing in the same room with the other instruments and amplifiers became increasingly discouraged by most engineers, as it inevitably results in the bleeding of one instrument's sound into the microphones set up to capture the sound of other instruments. Thus, the engineers lose the level of control they seek to maintain over the sound for the rest of the work, especially the mixing, of the track. To avoid such a scenario, modern day recording technique has engineers trying to isolate each sound into isolation booths, with the drums in a "live room." The players can all be in the same room, but the amplifiers and vocalist are usually in isolation booths, with glass to peer through. The ideal for many engineers is to push up a fader on a mixing console and hear only that intended instrument. But on the majority of Stones tracks, in addition to hearing Mick Jagger's intended main lead vocal (recorded once the final take is chosen from among a variety of recordings of the same song) you can also almost always hear "ghost" tracks of his guide vocal underneath the mix. On some tracks, it sounds almost as prominent as an actual vocal "take," difficult to distinguish from the backing vocals.
In an interview with Tape Op magazine's Philip Stevenson, Andy Johns spoke about his goal in recording rock & roll bands:
Stevenson: Your work has a very natural sound. It wears well. A lot of modern recordings don't. They are too fatiguing to listen to over and over. Did you set out with a specific sound in your head that you always tried to get, or is your style more an evolved product of the way you were taught to do things?
Johns: ... As far as the thing sounding natural I suppose it's because I've always liked rock and roll bands, so my idea, even if I've done a lot of overdubs and put a lot of things on the tracks, is really to integrate them so it sounds like you're at the best rehearsal the band ever did. Just like one big lovely noise.
Stevenson: Instruments sound like instruments and it sounds like people are playing them—
Johns: Yes! People playing as opposed to some fucking sample repeating itself over and over.
Stevenson: It's sad that some people will grow up never having heard that "people playing" sound.
Johns: Yeah, it's good for me though. It means the competition's thinning out! [laughs]
"Exile changed the way I thought about things," explained Johns further. "Up until that point I was extremely fast—that was one of the qualities people admired. If they could do a run through with 5 or 6 or 8 pieces and you had your sound by the end of their run through, because you never know—'they-may-never-get-it-the-same-again-and-they're-artists, and all that'—so, I was very quick, BUT Exile . . . actually took a year. I grew up as a person and was less intimidated by the musicians and all that, and I started taking my own sweet time a bit more after Exile"
Almost everything on Exile absolutely swings, due in large part to producer Jimmy Miller, a drummer/percussionist by training, who is widely credited with helping the Stones find their famous grooves. By the time he started work with the Stones, Miller already had some very groovy productions to his credit like "Gimme Some Lovin'" and "I'm a Man," by the Spencer Davis Group, and a whole string of classic Traffic albums. He came on board after Their Satanic Majesty's Request, the first record the Stones produced themselves (after Andrew Loog Oldham had been jettisoned). Miller's first production was the muscular "Jumping Jack Flash" single in 1968, which was heavy on sixteenth-note shaker percussion and unique, hard-to-identify textures wheezing in the background. This bold track heralded in a new sound for the Stones, the basis of the sound for which they are most famous: the "Stonesy" sound, with a prominent Keith Richards riff and crunchy electric guitars that almost always blend together with a percussive acoustic guitar track at varying levels of prominence. Piano tracks usually add yet another percussive element in addition to extra melodic support, and organs add at least some steady padding (filling out the empty spaces at the "bottom" of a recording)—if not outright and glorious hooks, as in the coda of "You Can’t Always Get What You Want" or "I Got the Blues."
Perhaps as important as the guitars in a Miller production, shakers and tambourines add movement and groove to the relatively straightforward crisp backbeats played by Charlie Watts. In turn, with the steady beat and underlying groove being driven by the percussion, Watts is free to play inventive fills. There is a Motown influence, clearly. And there is looseness, a human element that makes the sound funky. This production template clearly influenced other groups—both those who hired Miller and those not necessarily employing him, like the Kinks' 1970 single "Lola," or the Faces on any number of tracks.
Glyn Johns, who had been an early supporter of the Stones, and their main English recording engineer since day one, recalled:
Jagger came to me after Satanic Majesties and said, "We're going to get a new producer," so I said, "OK, fine." He said, "We're going to get an American." I thought, "Oh my God, that's all I need. I don't think my ego can stand having some bloody Yankee coming in here and start telling me what sort of sound to get with the Rolling Stones." So I said, "I know somebody! I know there's one in England already and he's fantastic, and he's just done the Traffic album: Jimmy Miller." And it was a remarkably good record he made, the first record he made with Traffic. I said, "He's a really nice guy." I'd met him, he'd been in the next studio room and I said, "I'm sure he'd be fantastic." Anything but some strange, lunatic, drug addict from Los Angeles. So, Jagger actually took the bait and off he went, met Jimmy Miller and gave him the job.
Bill Wyman explained it, "I think that everybody knew that we had to get back to our roots, you know, and start over. That's why we got Jimmy Mil
ler as a producer and came out with Beggars Banquet and those kinds of albums after, which was reverting back and getting more guts—which is what the Stones are all about."
This was a time that found many rock & rollers giving up the excesses of mid-to-late-1960s psychedelia and finding inspiration in the roots of rock & roll and beyond. In 1967, Bob Dylan and the group which soon became known as the Band, had retreated to the Woodstock, New York area to spend days on end recording in the basement of the Big Pink house, resulting in the much-bootlegged and eventually released Basement Tapes. These tracks were murky home recordings, primitive but authentic-feeling soulful takes on amalgams of public domain folk, gospel, country tunes, and archaic musical forms—coupled with lyrics influenced by old myths and folklore. This was mixed with the sound that the Band became famous for, both with and without Dylan: two keyboards, an organ and an upright piano, a guitar or two (electric and acoustic), a solid, funky, Muscle Shoals-like rhythm section, and raw layered harmonies, rarely tight, often loose. Such a sound had more to do with what the Rolling Stones had been playing earlier in their career than with what they were doing immediately before hooking up with Jimmy Miller.
The Band's leader, Robbie Robertson, articulated the formulation of the Band's sound in the liner notes to the reissue of Music From Big Pink:
[With the Band] the song is becoming the thing, the mood is becoming the thing . . . there's a vibe to certain records, whether it's a Motown thing or a Sun Records thing or a Phil Spector thing. I wanted to discover the sound of The Band. So I thought, "I'm not gonna play a guitar solo on the whole record. I'm only going to play riffs." I wanted the drums to have their own character. I wanted the piano not to sound like a big Yamaha grand. I wanted it to sound like an upright piano ... I didn't want screaming vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and the voices coming in ... I like the voices coming in one at a time like the Staple Singers did ... All these ideas came to the surface and what becomes the clear picture is that this isn't just clever. This is emotional and this is story telling. You can see this mythology.
From 1968 on, many groups and artists followed these paths back to the folk, blues, soul, and country roots of rock & roll: the Grateful Dead, the Beatles, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, with Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, who melded southern soul, country, and rock into what Parsons described as "cosmic American music."
By the release of Exile, the Stones had long been established as a blues- and roots-based group, but Jagger—perhaps viewing the glam rock of Bowie and T. Rex (whose leader, Marc Bolan, stopped by the final sessions for Exile in Los Angeles), and underground sounds of the Velvets et al, as more exciting and artistically relevant—was distancing himself from the record even as the Stones were finishing up Exile on Main St. "This new album is fucking mad," he recalled in 1971.
There's so many different tracks. It's very rock & roll, you know. I didn't want it to be like that. I'm the more experimental person in the group, you see I like to experiment. Not go over the same thing over and over. Since I've left England, I've had this thing I've wanted to do. I'm not against rock & roll, but I really want to experiment... The new album's very rock & roll and it's good. I think rock & roll is getting a bit ... I mean, I'm very bored with rock & roll. The revival. Everyone knows what their roots are, but you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky too.
Anita Pallenberg says, "It was also the period where Mick thought 'God what are we going to do next and how long is it going to last?' All of that was still going on."
Nevertheless, at least under the sway of Keith Richards, the Stones saw themselves as part of these traditions, getting back to their blues roots (mostly country-blues and folk) on the raw-sounding Beggars Banquet in 1968. Is it any wonder then that trad-blues purist Mick Taylor was installed as a replacement for the Elmore James-inspired Brian Jones?
The Stones recorded "Country Honk" in a Jimmie Rodgers style for the 1969 LP Let it Bleed. Their next record, Sticky Fingers, contained the country song "Dead Flowers," the traditional Mississippi Fred McDowell country blues "You Gotta Move," and the churchy gospel-soul of "I Got the Blues." This was the direction of the band. Country and soul melded with blues and the heavy rock & roll riffing the Stones were known for—all intensified by Jagger's self-conscious experimental leanings—leading up to Exile on Main St., perhaps the finest realization of what Gram Parsons was getting at when he coined the term "cosmic American Music." And when they got to France, it seems the band was able to process such influences more consciously. Keith explained, "But by being in Europe and having had time to think about it, all of us had been picked up by working in the south of America and the people we'd met and musicians. After all, Gram Parsons was down there with us and there were loads of other musicians popping in and out."
Richards and the Stones met and hung out with Parsons and the Byrds in Los Angeles beginning in the late 1960s, while mixing Beggar's Banquet, and then later again when the Americans stopped in London. "Gram Parsons blew into town with the Byrds, who were playing Biases," recalled Richards. Parsons was present for much of the summer at Nellcote. It appears he was mainly there for inspiration and for the hang, as it seems that no one is able to place him directly on any track on Exile. "The reason Gram and I were together more than other musicians is because I really wanted to learn what Gram had to offer," Keith told an interviewer. "Gram was really intrigued by me and the band. Although we came from England, Gram and I shared this instinctive affinity for the real South." Parsons ended up travelling along with the Stones during their 1971 "farewell tour" of the United Kingdom and stayed at Nellcote for most of the Exile sessions.
Hiring the American Jimmy Miller, then, was consistent with the Stones wanting to get back, to find the real heart of American roots music, "the real South." Miller was at the helm during what many regard as the
Stones at their untouchable peak, and Keith Richards has said that Jimmy Miller was "at the height of his talents" during Exile on Main St. "Nobody has really stated how important Jimmy Miller's contributions to Exile were," Mick Taylor told Mojo. "... A good drummer, a talented producer and our guide." Taylor pointed out how the band would often hit creative roadblocks, with songs just not coming together, and Miller often offered the solution. "I remember he actually got behind the drum kit to show Charlie how to play a particular beat." Indeed, Miller did the same on "You Can't Always Get What You Want," from Let it Bleed. That is Miller playing the song's shuffling beat, which Charlie never latched on to. It's a beat I don't believe Watts has ever played on subsequent live versions. And that is Jimmy Miller on the drums on Exile's "Happy."
"The Rolling Stones were never great musicians," continued Taylor. "When I first joined them I couldn't believe how bad they were. I thought 'How do they make such great records?' When I met Jimmy it all fell into place. It is not about being great musicians but about a certain kind of chemistry the band has." Andy Johns has said on many occasions that when the Stones were not clicking, they were dreadful, "they could sound like the worst band on the planet. Just awful, like anti-music. But when it finally came together, it was like magic."
PART II
One of the records I Owned when I was a child was a 45 I inherited from my mother, who was a big Elvis Presley fan. It was "Teddy Bear" backed with "Loving You." Since I was a kid, "Teddy Bear" obviously received a lot of spins on my portable record player. But it was really "Loving You" with which I became infatuated. Looking back, I realize how odd a song that is for a young child to focus on. Written by Brill Building legends Leiber and Stoller, it is an extremely intimate song in content, sound, and performance. It's highly charged and romantic, with a traditional Tin Pan Alley ballad structure and melody. But, in the hands of Elvis, it's a slow-burning, ultra-sexy, slow dance number. What captured me early and often, however, was the vibe of the record; the heavy, haunting sense of atmosphere. It f
eels like it was recorded at 3:30 am. Presley sounds like he is slow dancing with a girl after all the guests have left a party or a club, the lights are low, overturned drinks and empty glasses and full ashtrays cover every surface. The piano is impossibly behind the beat. An upright bass pulses slowly, quietly, but insistently. The Jordanaires coo softly in the background. Elvis seems like he can barely raise his voice above a mumble and when he does, the results are striking and highly charged, spine-chilling. There is little evident studio compression to mess with the dramatic vocal dynamics. He sounds as if he is tipsy, drunk even, but totally in control. Presley is within the song and it is more romantic than sexual, but it could comfortably sit next to Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" on a compilation disc. While I could have had little comprehension of the content of the song at such a young age, I had an instinctive awareness of the power, the undeniable force of the feeling simmering there.
There is a similarly heavy sense of atmosphere pervading Exile on Main St. This is no accident: Keith Richards told Stanley Booth that "the first record that really turned me on out of the rock & roll thing was 'Heartbreak Hotel,'" another song with an intrinsic sense of space. The essence of the Exile sound has made an everlasting impact on rock & roll production. Daniel Lanois (producer of U2, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, among others) has seemingly embraced the whole romantic idea of Exile for his recording philosophy. His famous studio, Kingsway, is an old house in New Orleans, and Lanois' records are deeply steeped in interesting atmospherics. Such attention to room sounds and organic textures is perhaps more appreciated in this current era and can be heard on such records as Solomon Burke's Don't Give Up on Me, his 2002 Joe Henry-produced comeback. Even Mick Jagger, although he feels Exile is "a bit overrated" and has said he feels there are only a handful of good songs on the record, told Mojo that "somehow, as an album, it has a great mood."