The 50(ish) greatest albums of all time…
Exile on Main Street, Practice on Hallam Street
Album #7 : The Rolling Stones — Exile on Main Street
Exile on Main Street is the result of The Rolling Stones moving to the south of France as tax exiles, staying in a big house together and playing music every day (and night) until they had an album — sounds like all anyone ever wants to do when they start a band.
The record itself sounds like a bunch of mates messing around and having fun. The truth is somewhat more difficult and the story of that summer is proper rock ’n’ roll (this is The Rolling Stones after all) and quite different to my experience playing in bands (we were not The Rolling Stones, after all).
For starters, I suspect that Keith Richard’s idyllic villa on the French Riviera did not stink like the Moolah Rouge on Hallam Street in Stockport, where my band practiced. Like all other rehearsal and recording studios, that place smelt of hot dust, like a warm church. It smelt like the threat of an electrical fire, and it stayed with you for days afterwards.
But you put up with it because there is a feeling you get from playing live music that you can’t really match anywhere else. I used to play in a band that had a brass section and (despite the fact that there were 9 of us, making organising practices a nightmare) the feeling that we got when they first joined was absolutely joyous. They were like the angelic, heraldic trumpets of heaven except played by spotty teenagers in the back room of Scout hut in Greater Manchester.
That was a watershed moment for us. It was that feeling of “we’re on to something here.” It is a feeling I often think about — do proper bands have the same moments? When the Stones wrote Tumbling Dice, did they know what they had on their hands? The same applies elsewhere — when Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars finished Uptown Funk did they think ‘that’s a banger’? Was it a eureka moment when PSY struck on the chorus for Gangnam Style? Something tells me it wasn’t. In the case of the Rolling Stones, too, the answer seems to be no. Happy was a result of Keith Richards turning up early for a recording session and messing about.
Whilst the record sounds like a group of mates having fun, the sessions at Nellcôte were more fragmented and disorganised than you could imagine. There was widespread heroin abuse, arguments between band members and various hangers-on causing distractions (which included setting up an actual underground casino — complete with full-size roulette wheel). Given the stories, it is pretty remarkable Exile on Main Street ever got made. But eventually it did and, this may be an understatement, it is pretty good. Then, they had to tour it.
Whilst (again) we weren’t The Rolling Stones, the difference between rehearsing in a band and playing live is obvious. As students, very few of our band could drive and that made getting to rehearsals a nightmare. One person would have to shuttle between everyone’s houses and the studio with carloads of equipment — usually several times, because the drummer had forgotten his sticks (AKA, the only thing he needs to remember). Funnily enough, all those problems disappear when it comes to gigs — lifts are generously offered, evenings are miraculously free, prior engagements cancelled much to the annoyance of college girlfriends. Nobody wants to practice; everybody wants to perform.
A perfect example of this is my dad’s band (coincidentally named Tumbling Dice), who are still enjoying playing live music into their late-50s. They do that even though it involves the exhausting process of setting up their own PA system in the corner of a pub and, even worse, taking it all down again at the end of the night. That might not sound so bad, but it is a task made much more difficult by the existence of the other ubiquitous feature of amateur bands: The Local Music Expert. The Local Music Expert is always male, usually at least 65 and, by definition, a bore.
The LME, usually ‘sold Keith Richards his first guitar’ and commonly ‘actually taught him all he knows’. Sometimes, they admit that ‘Keith’ (first name terms) ‘said he owes his success to me’ — did he mate? Is that why you’re still here in a pub in Stockport talking to me at 1am whilst I try to find the cable tie I dropped earlier? If you’re such an expert on these matters, maybe you could help us put stuff away.
Aside from the money and the fame, the main attraction to making it big in music has to be the possibility of having other people do the hard things for you (i.e. setting up PA systems, talking to weirdos). Without those, playing music is just having fun with your mates and showing that off to rooms full of people — it is little wonder that The Rolling Stones have kept going as long as they have done. The main surprise is that, after all their antics, they have survived this long to try.
Thanks for reading — over the course of 2021, I’ll be reviewing 50(ish) of the greatest albums ever recorded. You can see the list here.
