"Exile on Main Street": A Season in Hell with the "Rolling Stones" - Hardcover

Greenfield, Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0306814331 ISBN 13: 9780306814334

Publisher: Da Capo Press Inc, 2006

Synopsis

Recorded during the blazing summer of 1971 at Villa Nellcote, Keith Richards' seaside mansion in the south of France, Exile on Main St. has been hailed as one of the Rolling Stones' best albums-and one of the greatest rock records of all time. Yet its improbable creation was difficult, torturous...and at times nothing short of dangerous.In self-imposed exile, the Stones-along with wives, girlfriends, and a crew of hangers-on unrivaled in the history of rock-spent their days smoking, snorting, and drinking whatever they could get their hands on. At night, the band descended like miners into the villa's dank basement to lay down tracks. Out of those grueling sessions came the familiar riffs and rhythms of "Rocks Off," "Tumbling Dice," "Happy," and "Sweet Virginia."All the while, a variety of celebrities-John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Gram Parsons among them-stumbled through the villa's neverending party, as did the local drug dealers, known to one and all as "les cowboys." Villa Nellcote became the crucible in which creative strife, outsize egos, and all the usual byproducts of the Stones' legendary hedonistic excess fused into something potent, volatile, and enduring.Here, for the first time, is the season in hell that produced Exile on Main St.

About this title

Review:

"an engrossing read which imparts the flavour of a curiously intense period of activity." --The Evening Standard

"God alone knows why Greenfield waited 35 years to write this book, but the feeling you get from reading it is that it was an itch he never got round to scratching, one that has bothered him ever since, the more so as time has gone by. It is fortunate indeed, then, that it's a book quite a lot of people might want to read." --The Independent on Sunday

(G)oing into the fine detail of those months in France was a great idea, and (Robert Greenfield) does a good job of conveying how ghastly they were - with Richards lolling on the bathroom floor, a needle in his arm; and a coked-up Jagger hanging round the basement, fuming. --Sunday Telegraph

Synopsis:

This book presents the shocking, decadent, true story behind the making of the Rolling Stones' seminal double album "Exile on Main Street". Recorded during the blazing-hot summer of 1971 in the basement of Keith Richards' palatial mansion by the sea in the south of France, "Exile on Main Street" freezes forever in time a moment when the Stones and their counterculture audience found themselves at a crossroads. Groundbreaking music journalist Robert Greenfield was there. Night after night for weeks on end while their wives, girlfriends and a crew of assorted hangers-on smoked marijuana and hashish, snorted cocaine and injected themselves with heroin upstairs, the Stones descended like coal miners into a dank, humid basement to lay down tracks. As Mick and Keith were writing the songs that eventually comprised "Exile", a variety of celebrities, among them John and Yoko Ono and Gram Parsons, descended on the villa, and so did a sinister band of local drug dealers known to one and all as "les cowboys".

While the work of recording any album is rarely joyful and the Stones themselves were already known to be perfectionists in the studio, the process that brought "Exile on Main Street" into the world became a display of extreme group dynamics unparalleled even in their own tortured history. Literally and figuratively, this was a record made in hell.

About this edition

• Publisher: Da Capo Press Inc
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0306814331
• ISBN 13: 9780306814334
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272