The making of the Rolling Stones' landmark 10th album, Exile on Main St., was turbulent at best. Despite Keith Richards' drug issues, disjointed sessions, gear theft and plenty of internal disharmony, however, the band emerged with a classic.
Much of the album was recorded at the Stones' French retreat, Nellcôte, using relatively modest recording equipment. That didn't stop it from making a huge impact on audiences in the US and UK. And Richards believes the recording technology that followed actually made it harder to capture the kind of performances that had made the album so special.
Writing in his 2010 autobiography, Life, the guitarist posed a pertinent question.
“Very soon after Exile…, so much technology came in that even the smartest engineer in the world didn’t know what was really going on,” he said. “How come I could get a drum sound back in Denmark Street with one microphone, and now with fifteen microphones I get a drum sound that’s like someone shitting on a tin roof?”
Eight years separate the Stones' self-titled debut, recorded at London's fabled Regent Sound Studios on Denmark Street, and the release of Exile. In the intervening years, the Beatles had helped push recording technology forward, with Rubber Soul marking a particularly revolutionary moment. The band employed clever studio tricks to expand the possibilities of recorded music, and as the record industry boomed, other artists and engineers followed suit.
But Richards wasn't convinced that more sophisticated technology necessarily meant better recordings. Much like guitarists who believe that no matter how advanced amp modeling technology becomes, it will never quite replicate the magic of a cranked tube amp, he felt that the recording industry had lost sight of what mattered.
“Everybody got carried away with technology and slowly they’re swimming back,” he said. “I always felt that I was actually fighting technology, that it was no help at all. And that’s why it would take so long to do things.”
He singles out the recording of Goats Head Soup, the Stones' follow-up to Exile, as an example. Engineer Rob Fraboni, Richards recalls, was caught up in the “notion that if you didn’t have fifteen microphones on a drum kit, you didn’t know what you were doing.” The album was a commercial success, but Richards wasn't sold on the approach to recording it.
“The bass player would be battened off, so they were all in their little pigeonholes and cubicles,” Richards recalled. “You’re playing in this enormous room and not using any of it. This idea of separation is the total antithesis of rock and roll, which is a bunch of guys in a room making a sound and just capturing it.”
Exile, by contrast, captured the Stones playing together in the basement at Nellcôte, with the musicians feeding off one another rather than being isolated in separate recording spaces.
“It’s the sound they make together, not separated,” Richards argued. “This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby, it’s just totally against the whole grain of what music should be.”
This mythical bullshit about stereo and high tech and Dolby is totally against the whole grain of what music should be.”
— Keith Richards
There's an interesting wrinkle to Richards' argument, though: Stones frontman Mick Jagger has also expressed reservations about Exile's sound, suggesting that the disarray surrounding the band at the time found its way onto the record.
The Stones' last two albums – 2023's Hackney Diamonds and this year's Foreign Tongues – were recorded with producer Andrew Watt, who has his own innovative ideas about making records sound their best. Whether Richards has warmed to the modern recording process is another question.
