How Keith Richards' Cassette Player Became the Backbone of Exile on Main St.'s Basement Recordings

The most interesting thing about the Exile sessions at Villa Nellcôte isn’t the mansion’s decadence—it’s that the entire rhythm section was often built around Keith Richards’ portable Philips cassette player. Keith would rough out song ideas on a mono tape recorder, then play that cassette back through a tiny speaker while the band played along live in the basement. That scratch track—full of hiss, warble, and Keith’s guide vocals—became the reference point for the whole recording. There was no click track, no multitrack safety net.

For engineer Glyn Johns, this was a nightmare and a miracle in one. The basement’s acoustics were awful—damp stone, low ceilings, no isolation from the upstairs party noise. Johns had to move mics constantly to avoid the cassette player’s spill bleeding into the drum overheads. He couldn’t punch in or overdub easily because the scratch track’s pitch drifted as the cassette batteries died. So he learned to treat that wobbly mono tape as the glue: he’d roll tape on a 16-track Scully, let the band play along to Keith’s cassette, and then erase the cassette track from the final mix. The result was a lurching, alive sound that no polished studio could ever fake.