How the Rolling Stones Recorded Exile on Main St. in a Damp Basement with Mattresses and a Mobile Truck

The basic tracks for Exile on Main St. were cut in the summer of 1971 at a rented French villa called Nellcôte. The Stones brought in the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio — a converted truck parked outside — and ran cables into the damp, cavernous basement. It was a monumentally bad idea acoustically. The room sounded like a swimming pool, so the band and engineer Andy Johns stuffed mattresses against the walls and hung rugs to kill the echo. They even draped blankets over Keith Richards’ amp to keep the bass from bleeding into everything.

Electricity was the real nightmare. The villa’s wiring couldn’t handle the mobile studio’s gear, so they’d blow fuses constantly. Johns had to run extension cords from the kitchen and jury-rig grounding rods into the garden. The dampness corroded connections, and tapes sometimes got sticky in the humidity. Between blown fuses and Keith’s erratic late-night schedule, they often only got two or three usable takes a night. That raw, claustrophobic sound you hear on the record? It’s partly the result of that basement fight.