Exile on Main Street by The Rolling Stones

"About as unrehearsed as a hiccup" Bobby Keys

"'Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretence.'"

Despite being a quote about one of his own albums, Neil Young captures what, by many accounts, were the circumstances surrounding the recording of Exile on Main Street (or at least the tracks they laid down in France before doing some polishing in Sunset Sound, LA). Take "Happy", a Keith Richards track, "recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup"." (The Guardian)

Dark, haphazard, ragged, the recording of Exile was a play with large cast of actors, an "extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on." and with the drug-use, a "retinue of shady characters and criminals". This feeling is echoed on the front and back covers of the album, with the back cover being inspired by the front.

The front cover image is from Robert Frank's photo documentary “The Americans”, taken of a wall in a tattoo parlour in New York City (although another account has it taken on Route 66, colloquially, and perhaps coincidentally, known as the Main Street of America). The wall is covered with photos of strange and unusual people, displaying neat symmetry with the recording sessions.

Frank also filmed the Stones with a Super 8 camera. The stills of individual frames were used to compose the back cover to match his original wall picture. The back cover also features a "mystery woman" pictured in the lower left side, who turns out to be Chris O'Dell, their personal assistant.

Layout and design was by John Van Hamersveld and Norman Seeff. Describing his contribution, Van Hamersveld was very clear on its impact: "my arrangement of materials...would go beyond Frank’s photo style, creating an identity that would become the basis of the PUNK FASHION MOVEMENT. To the spectators, critics, and others in the Establishment, I had made a package that was not glamorous. It was not a friendly image to put on display in the record stores, but it was THAT image that established the anti-establishment look of PUNK."

Immediacy and Impulse: The Vibration of the Take

Reflecting on my continuing fascination with recorded music in the After The Goldrush feature,  I couldn't articulate it better than that fascination being rooted in the recording process' ability to "capture a real performance, and in so doing, document a moment that can move you." It's what M C Taylor called the 'vibration of the take'. Below we collect some of our favourite thoughts on the topic:

“I got the chance to go back after hours and tried to improve some things and I realised it wasn’t possible. It was part of something that happened at the moment and you just couldn’t change it. It might have been more perfect, but it wasn’t as good. So I just said, That’s it. He knew what he was doing and this is how the baby came out. Honour the moment….I wish there was more of that stuff in music because as grateful as we are for the technology to do things we couldn’t do early on, sometimes we get seduced trying to get things perfect when actually I don’t think there is such a thing. Desire just has a feel to it. It’s visual. Bob was like a painter who was throwing paint on a canvas, but he knew what he was doing.” 

 

Emmylou Harris on recording Desire (as told to Mojo Magazine)
 

The ethos is to keep-it-simple so that what the bands leave behind is "four absolutely collectible songs that often impart on whomever listens to them the true intensity that these musicians put into their art, sometimes with more clarity than they do when they have months to tinker with overdubs and experiments. These songs are them as they are on that particular day, on that particular tour – dirty and alive."

Daytrotter

"Cinema verite? I got into audio verite..... Hey, I've made records where you analyze everything you do 3,000 times and it's perfect. I'm sick of it. I want to make a record that's totally stark naked. Raw. I don't wanna fix any of it. I don't care if it's totally out of tune, man, let's play. Fuck it.... I like the idea of capturing something. Record something that happened. I'm a musician. I don't wanna sit there and build a record. I built a couple of records. Big deal. Tonight's the Night doesn't care. And that makes you feel good about it. There's no pretense."

 Neil Young

"Don't spend too much time or too many takes on each song, try to capture the vibration of the first couple of takes even if it means leaving mistakes in. Keep overdubs to a minimum unless the song is begging for something special. Immediacy and impulse."

 M C Taylor (Hiss Golden Messenger)

"At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

 Otis Redding

“[On Mirage Rock] a less-is-more approach freed up a lot of mental space just to enjoy the moment, I'd also say it stopped us from worrying too much about what we sounded like or what we can program into a computer to make it sound more cohesive. It was more organic, haphazard even, and I think that is so important when making a record. Because of modern technology, it's so easy to over think the process and lose focus on the actual songs. That was the most enjoyable part of the whole experience for me, and hopefully it's something I'll take away and use in the future.”

Ben Bridwell (Band of Horses)

The Band by The Band

"I'll be down to get you in a taxi honey

You'd better be ready around half past eight
Ah baby don't be late I want to be there when the band starts honey"

I had always been intrigued by the quote on the back cover. Was it from a film, was it made up...if I had looked closer, I would have seen from the footnote that it was actually a lyric taken from "Darktown Strutters' Ball", a song published over 50 years before The Band appropriated it. A jazz standard written by Shelton Brooks, it had been recorded many times, and by a wide variety of artsists including Fats Domino (his version seems to be the lyrics used by The Band), Fats Waller, Ella Fitzgerald, Dean Martin and the Beach Boys.

 The back cover continues the theme from the front; rustic, straightforward, not of its time. A reaction to the psychedelic and explicitly multicoloured music that preceded it; the quote from the early part of the century fits. No surprise that The Band's eponymous album was also dubbed the 'Brown Album'. The subjects and styles all looked backwards, but as Pitchfork put it, both The Band, and its predecessor Music From Big Pink, managed to "sound simultaneously experimental and traditional, irreverent and respectful...blues, folk, jazz, rock, funk, soul, r&b;, and country and western all synthesized into twin monuments to the American music they'd been playing for nearly a decade in clubs, roadhouses, and honkytonks."

A 1971 profile of the band in Melody Maker made a similar point: "Their second album was titled simply The Band, and was a masterpiece, shooting Robbie straight up into the forefront of contemporary composers. 'King Harvest' and 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' reflect sure grasp of the feeling and scope of pan-American music, and the voices of Helm, Danko, and Manuel sounded as old as the hills. The instrumentation was more idiosyncratic than ever; accordion, mandolin, wheezing saxes and grunting tuba made telling appearances."

It was recorded in the pool house of a rented house in the Hollywood Hills once owned by Sammy Davies Jr. The equipment for recording therefore had to be shipped in. As John Simon, who co-engineered the album, recalled in an interview with Sound-on-Sound, "When we finally got all the equipment from Capitol together, we decided to hear what it sounded like. This was in the middle of the night, so we put on the most recent record that we liked, which was a Dr. John album that had a song with snatches of 'My Country Tis Of Thee' and 'America The Beautiful' in the chorus. Our wives were with us, and suddenly one of them ran in, saying, 'The cops are here! The cops are here!' We immediately went outside to see what was going on and it turned out that we'd also hooked the sound up to the outdoor pool speakers, so this patriotic song was just blasting through the Hollywood canyons."

The overlapping voices and the fact the most of band members regularly swapped instruments, gives the album a great feel and despite some overdubs, the basic tracks were indeed laid down as an ensemble. The organic way the voices and instruments intertwine, it can't help but qualify as a great 'feel' album.

Photography was by Elliott Landy (see also Allman Brothers feature), with the design by Bob Cato. The New York Times described Cato, art director and the vice president of creative services for CBS-Columbia Records, as "a ground-breaking graphic designer who helped turn the record album cover into an important form of contemporary art". It goes on to note that he "created or supervised some of the most memorable record-album covers of the 1960's. It was his idea to put the work of the underground illustrator R. Crumb on Janis Joplin's Cheap Thrills.'' He also designed the cover for Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits.

Complete & Unbelievable: The Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul

For our second 'feel' album we could probably have chosen any Stax album. As Otis himself put it in a Rolling Stone interview: "At Stax the rule is: whatever you feel, play it. We cut everything together - horns, rhythm, and vocal. We'll do it three or four times, go back and listen to the results and pick the best one. If somebody doesn't like a line in a song, we'll go back and cut the whole song over. Until last year, we didn't even have a four-track tape recorder. You can't overdub on a one-track machine."

In the end we chose what Keith Richards called, "The album that soothes a broken heart".



It wasn't uncommon for the back cover to act as advertising, imploring the idle browser to buy and take an album home. Back covers weren't shy (because they had the space) to advertise more explicitly, promoting other albums by the artist too. Here they did both, showing covers of his three previous albums; The Great Otis Redding Sings Soul Ballads (1965), Otis Blue: Otis Redding Sings Soul (1965) and The Soul Album (1966).

As was typical, they tried to talk directly to the potential listener..."This dictionary, created especially for you, is the undeviating vocabulary of its author OTIS REDDING. Searching for something interesting to enjoy? Here...put this album on your turntable and listen to OTIS. If you should hear a word you don't understand, get your OTIS REDDING DICTIONARY OF SOUL and look it up!"

This was no doubt aimed the white audience Otis Redding had started to tap into. Released in October 1966, Dictionary of Soul was his fifth album and the last to be released before his death in December the following year. After the success of Otis Blue, Redding was increasingly attracting a crossover audience and in early 1966 he performed at the famous Whiskey A Go Go club on West Hollywood's Sunset Strip in front of a predominantly white audience, becoming one of the first soul artists to play in the western United States.

It certainly did its job on at least one member of the Stones.

Loaded by The Velvet Underground

"Loaded has always been my favourite VU record. This song [Rock and Roll] is just one of the many reasons why." Jeff Tweedy (Wilco)

 

The Rolling Stone review of the time noted that "the Velvet Underground on Loaded are more loose and straightforward than we've yet seen them". As such it is the first to feature in what I hope to be a series of 'feel' albums. Loose sounding records that really sound like a band in a room playing together. Limited overdubs and no metronome in sight. And ideally, with this mood reflected on the back cover.

Choosing Loaded belies that fact that it was recorded amid growing tension within the band. It is the last album to feature Lou Reed, who quit shortly after it had been recorded. The back cover provides a peak into the recording process, or at least the recording studio. It shows the studio setup for the band, but perhaps tellingly only features Doug Yule (John Cale's replacement after White Light/Whiter Heat), who had taken a more prominent role.

According to the Wikipedia entry: "Reed also felt snubbed by being listed third in the credits on the album; and by the large photo of Yule playing piano; and by all the songwriting credits improperly going to the band, rather than Reed himself."

The photograph used for the back cover was taken by Henri Ter Hall. As the Lost Loaded Shots notes: "In 1970 Dutch photographer Henri ter Hall, then living in New York City, shot The Velvet Underground during the recording sessions for Loaded. His image of the almost-empty recording studio appeared on the back cover of the album."