all we've got to do is persevere

 

"Tumbling Dice" is a song from the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. album.

        They recorded the songs in France.

        ---------------------------- [excerpt from Life, by Keith Richards] -------------------------------------------------------------------------- We looked at studios in Cannes and elsewhere, reckoned up how much money the French were going to suck out of us.  Nellcote had a large basement and we had our own mobile studio.  The Mighty Mobile, as we called it, was a truck with eight-track recording machines that Stu had helped to put together.  

We'd thought of it quite separately from any plan to move to France.  It was the only independent mobile recording unit around.  

We didn't realize when we put it together how rare it was----soon we were renting it out to the BBC and ITV because they only had one apiece....

        So one day in June it trundled through the gates and we parked it outside the front door and plugged in.  I've never done any different since.  When you've got the equipment and the right guys, you don't need anything else in terms of studios....

        The basement in Nellcote was big enough, but it was divided into a series of bunkers.  Not a great deal of ventilation----hence "Ventilator Blues."  The weirdest thing was trying to find out where you'd left the saxophone player.  Bobby Keys and Jim Price moved around to where they could get their sound right----mostly standing with their backs to the wall at the end of a narrow corridor, where Dominique Tarlé took one of his pictures of them with microphone cables snaking away around the corner.  

Eventually we ended up painting the microphone cable to the horn section yellow.  If you wanted to talk to the horns, you followed the yellow cable until you found them.  You wouldn't know where the hell you were.  It was an enormous house.  Sometimes Charlie would be in a room, and I'd have to tramp a quarter of a mile to find him.  But considering that it was basically a dungeon, it was fun to work there.

        All the characteristics of that basement were discovered by the other guys.  For the first week or so we didn't know where Charlie was set up because he'd be trying different cubicles every night.  Jimmy Miller encouraged him to try down the end of the corridor, but Charlie said, I'm half a mile down the damn road, it's too far away, I need to be closer.  

So we had to check out every little cubicle.  

You didn't want to add electronic echo unless you had to; you wanted natural echo, and down there you found some really weird ones.  I played guitar in a room with tiles, turning the amp round and pointing it at the corner of the room to see what got picked up on the microphone.  I remember doing that for "Rocks Off" and maybe "Rip This Joint."  

But as weird as it was to record there, especially at the beginning, by the time we were into it, within a week or two, it was totally natural.  There was no talk amongst the band or with Jimmy Miller or the engineer Andy Johns, "what a weird way to make a record."  No, we've got it.  All we've got to do is persevere.

        We would record from late in the afternoon until five or six in the morning, and suddenly the dawn comes up and I've got this boat.  Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside; let's take Mandrax to Italy for breakfast.  We'd just jump in, Bobby Keys, me, Mick, whoever was up for it.  

Most days we would go down to Menton, an Italian town just inside France by some quirk of treaty making, or just beyond it to Italy proper.  

No passport, right past Monte Carlo as the sun's coming up with music ringing in our ears.  

Take a cassette player and play something we've done, play that second mix.  

Just pull up at the wharf and have a nice Italian breakfast.  

We liked the way the Italians cooked their eggs, and the bread.  And with the fact that you had actually crossed a border and nobody knew shit or did shit about it, there was an extra sense of freedom.  We'd play the mix to the Italians, see what they thought.  If we hit the fishermen at the right time, we could get red snapper straight off the boats and take it home for lunch. // end - excerpt.  

{Life   

Back Bay Books - 2010}

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On You Tube type in

tumbling dice, linda ronstadt

and listen to her excellent cover of this Rolling Stones song.

(The one uploaded by "Linda Ronstadt" has good sound.)

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