Making "Exile on Main Street"

On June 7th, 1971, after a four-day drive from London, the Rolling Stones' recording truck, also known as the mobile, finally arrives at Nellcote. For a solid month before Mick left on his honeymoon, he and Keith had scoured the French countryside for places where the band might record. "Of course," road manager Jerry Pompili would later say, "no one liked anything. We wasted a month, and then in the end they decided to do it in Keith's house. Typical Stones."

In large part, the truck exists not just because the Stones have wasted so much money over the years by booking expensive studio time by the hour only to then show up late or not at all for sessions but also because of the residual guilt Mick and Keith still feel about allowing Andrew Oldham, the Stones' first manager, to boot original pianist Ian Stewart out of the band in 1963 because he neither looked nor acted like a pop star. "I think by way of making it up to him," recording engineer Andy Johns will later say, "they built the truck and said, 'Here ya go, Stu. You run this.' " The Stones have also pumped an astronomical 65,000 pounds into building what Johns will later call "the first proper mobile in Europe." It has already been used at Stargroves, Mick's country estate in England, to record tracks that appear on Sticky Fingers as well as "Sweet Black Angel," which eventually makes it way onto Exile on Main Street.

Shortly after the mobile arrives, what in retrospect will prove to be the most significant event of the entire summer occurs. Keith and Tommy decide to spend the day driving go-carts around a local track. Based on Keith's driving record in England, it should come as no surprise to anyone that calamity results. Deciding to have a go at Tommy, who in any vehicle is by far the better driver, Keith takes a running shot at him with his go-cart. "It definitely felt like murder," Tommy recalls. "He was trying to knock into me. He drove straight at me and the thing flipped. . . . I was still trying to slow the cars down and I had him with his head in my lap, the go-cart on top of him, and his back was scraping along the tarmac. His back was like raw steak. A little later, he was looking at me and he said, 'OK, Tommy, I think it's about time you went to the doctor and get him to get us some you-know-what,' which everyone had been staying away from. And that was the beginning of it. The go-cart accident instigated the opiates."