0:00 The Rolling Stones recorded at least thirty tracks for Exile on Main St.0:05 in a French villa, but for many of them, they had no lyrics and no actual songs written yet.0:11 Just rhythm.0:12 Just vibes.0:13 And, uh, a lot of humidity.0:15 It's so different from what we talked about last week, right?0:19 With Pink Floyd on Dark Side of the Moon—that was all about studio precision, this almost architectural approach to sound.0:28 This...0:28 this was the opposite.0:30 This was survival.0:31 This was chaos.0:32 They decamped to the South of France in 1971, basically as tax exiles.0:37 Keith Richards rents this sixteen-room mansion, Villa Nellcôte, and they park the sixty-five-thousand-pound Rolling Stones Mobile Studio outside.0:47 And the "studio" is the basement.0:50 Which sounds cool, but it was basically a dungeon.0:53 It was hot, it was damp.0:55 The engineer, Andy Johns, said the guitars would just NOT stay in tune.1:00 That swampy, thick sound of the album?1:03 That wasn't entirely a choice.1:05 That was the sound of the environment fighting them.1:09 Yeah, and the electricity would go out constantly.1:12 Bill Wyman, the bassist, called the sessions "nightly endurance tests." They'd start around 8 p.m.1:19 and just go until three or four in the morning.1:22 If they showed up at all!1:24 That's the other part of the story.1:27 Mick Jagger was barely there.1:29 He was expecting his first kid with Bianca and was always off in Paris.1:34 So you have Keith Richards, whose heroin addiction is really escalating at this point, basically running the show.1:42 He's the one laying down riff after riff.1:45 The producer, Jimmy Miller, said they had all these rhythm tracks just piling up.1:50 It was all groove, no song.1:52 And the band itself was rarely all in the same room.1:56 They were scattered all over this huge house, with cables running down hallways and out of windows.2:03 It sounds like a complete disaster.2:06 Honestly, it sounds like it should have failed.2:09 It absolutely should have.2:11 I mean, you have this revolving door of people.2:14 William S.2:15 Burroughs, Gram Parsons, John Lennon… the French police are watching the villa because of all the drug activity.2:23 It's a party, not a recording session.2:26 But then...2:26 the magic happens.2:28 And it's so unpredictable.2:29 Andy Johns had this amazing quote about it.2:32 He said the band would play a song SO badly for two or three days straight.2:38 Just awful.2:39 Right.2:39 And then, suddenly, Keith would get up and look at Charlie Watts, the drummer.2:45 And that was the sign.2:46 That was the moment something was about to happen, and it would just turn into this… this "God-given music," as he put it.2:55 That's the whole album right there.2:57 It's the sound of a band on the verge of collapse, finding moments of pure, unplanned genius.3:04 They're not even all playing together half the time.3:08 If someone was missing, the producer Jimmy Miller would just jump on drums or percussion himself.3:14 It's a pattern you see sometimes, though.3:17 Not just in music.3:19 You put brilliant people under immense pressure, in a flawed environment, and you either get total failure or you get something completely new.3:29 The limitations become the aesthetic.3:31 That basement didn't have proper ventilation, and the one tiny fan in the window literally inspired the title for "Ventilator Blues." Oh, wow.3:41 I didn't know that.3:43 Yeah.3:43 The misery became the muse.3:45 Eventually, the police pressure got to be too much.3:49 They had to get out of France and finish the album with overdubs in Los Angeles.3:54 And when it came out in May 1972, a lot of critics… didn't get it.3:59 They called it messy, disorganized, murky.4:02 Mmm.4:02 They weren't wrong, but they were missing the point.4:06 The mess IS the point.4:08 It's a raw, sprawling, 18-track double album that sounds like it was recorded in a swamp because it basically was.4:16 And now it's considered one of the greatest rock albums of all time.4:21 It even went back to number one on the charts almost thirty-eight years later when it was reissued in 2010.4:28 You just can't manufacture that kind of legacy.4:31 You can't plan an album like Exile.4:34 You have to live it.4:35 That chaos, that tension, the heat… it’s all baked into the vinyl itself.4:41 It’s a document, not just a record.4:43 A document of a band falling apart and creating a masterpiece at the exact same time.4:49 You could never, ever do it again.
