By MATT WAKE - L.A. Weekly Musically, the Stones and producer Jimmy Miller finished up the album at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound, doing vocals, overdubs and mixing.
Wearing mirrored shades, red shirt and leather jacket while puffing a joint and standing inside a Bel-Air Spanish revival home, Keith Richards put his hands together to form a folded shape. “We can make some postcards,” he said. Then he fell to the floor, zonked.
In fact, Van Hamersveld says now, before those back-cover photos, “The album was just Exile.” After the photos, and Los Angeles, the album became Exile on Main St.
Venetta Fields got the phone call to come do Exile backing vocal sessions at Sunset Sound around midnight one evening in November 1971. She got the call after another singer had passed on the session because it was starting so late.Along with Clydie King and Sherlie Matthews, Fields contributed sanctified backing vocals on four tracks, she says: "Shine a Light,” "I Just Want to See His Face,” "Let It Loose" and the hit “Tumbling Dice,” which became a signature Stones tune.
Fields drove from her Malibu condo to the Stones session in her green Corvette. When she arrived, Jagger was the only Stone who stayed following their own overdubsMick told us what he wanted but basically he let us do what we did.” Was that adding an authentic gospel vibe to the tracks? “It was more than that,” she says. “It was black soul.
Al Perkins recorded his lovely, lyrical pedal-steel parts for countryfied Exile track “Torn and Frayed” at Sunset Sound, too.
Perkins parked his Pontiac LeMans in the parking lot behind Sunset Sound and took his steel out of the trunk. Inside Studio 1’s control room, Perkins didn’t use an amp on the session, instead going through a tube limiter, then directly into the console — which is surprising, as his “Torn and Frayed” tone is so rich and warm.
“When they started running it down, I asked for a vocal and they said, ‘Well, we don’t have a vocal right now, so Mick’s going to sing a vocal.’ They gave Mick a hand mic and he literally sang the song each time I did a pass.
Producer Miller and recording engineer Andy Johns were at the other end of the console, as were Richards and his girlfriend, model-actress Anita Pallenberg. "It seemed to me like Keith and Anita had just come from a costume party of some kind,” Perkins says.
“Keith was dressed in that swashbuckler, pirate kind of look and Anita was dressed in stretchy material for exercising, with yellow and black stripes around her body, and it was accentuated because she was expecting.”
It was Jagger who hand-lettered Exile’s titles and credits, using pens and paper Van Hamersveld had sent him. “And then those pieces of paper I pasted down, with tape, so that’s how you get that rough look. It doesn’t come from a typographer — it comes from Mick Jagger, with a pen in his hand.”
Exile recordings at Sunset Sound included guitar and bass overdubs and keyboard parts. Around 200 reels or so of 2-inch, 16-track tape from the Nellcôte Exile sessions were shipped back to the States for completion in L.A.
