“I remember Bill Wyman had this bass that he’d made himself. Hand made bass that used to be under Stew’s bed. And there was a copy of ‘Satisfaction’ in 1965, and it hadn’t come out in England yet. So, here I am this teenager with a copy of the latest Stones’ single, which just happens to be ‘Satisfaction.’ And I started banging around on Bill’s bass and that’s when I really got interested in playing bass. And then at Christmas time, Glyn said, ‘What do you want for Christmas?” And I said, ‘Well, there’s that bass underneath Stew’s bed, you know. I wouldn’t mind that.’ And he said, ‘Oh, Bill is not gonna get rid of that ‘cause he made it himself.’ And I didn’t think anymore about it. And then Christmas day came and I didn’t get very much for Christmas ‘cause I’d already weaseled my stuff before Christmas. Everyone else is opening gifts and they’re getting watches, Christmas stuff. And I’m not getting anything. So, I was a bit downhearted, you know.
“And at the end, Glyn says, ‘Guess what? I forgot I’ve got something for you.’ And he went out and came back and I could see it was a bass guitar. And I opened it up and it’s this gorgeous little bass that Bill used to use on Top Of The Pops programme. So that knocked me for six…And I couldn’t believe it. ‘This is for me. What are you, fuckin’ crazy?’ So, obviously, I never looked back.
“In fact, I named my first son William in Bill’s honour. I remember we were working at Olympic just after my son had been born, and Bill was doing an overdub sittin’ next to me. ‘So, you had a son.’ ‘I said Yes.’ ‘Well, what you call him?’ ‘I call him William.’ He said ‘What?’ ‘You heard.’ ‘Oh really…’ he got the point.
Q: I heard many years ago some tale where you were actually being considered to replace Bill as bassist one moment for the Rolling Stones.
A: I mean, during Exile in France one night Mick went, “you know maybe we should get someone else.’ And I’m sitting in the recording truck, and said, ‘Look, you know, this probably wouldn’t mean that much to you, wouldn’t change anything, but if you get rid of Bill Wyman I’m going home.’ Bill is one of my heroes.
Q: Bill suggested to me in a 2002 interview, “I always thought…As long as me and Charlie could got it together, then the rest of the band could do what they’d like and it worked. And that’s what happened in the studio, and that’s what happened live. It wasn’t how many notes you played, it’s where you left nice holes and I learned that from Duck Dunn and people like that.”
What are your memories of Exile and how did you get on to the Exile recording project? I know you were involved a tad earlier on Sticky Fingers and with producer Jimmy Miller. I know you worked with producer Guy Stevens on Mott the Hoople’s classic Brain Capers album.
A: Guy and were very close, best man at my first wedding, first real friend I made in the record business,
“I got to work with The Rolling Stones because of Jimmy Miller. I’d worked with him as an assistant engineer at Olympic, and then moved over to Morgan Studios. And they made me a full time engineer almost instantly.
“I was the only guy there. I did all the sessions that came in and got a lot of experience quickly. I did Traffic’s ‘Shanghai Noodle Factory’ with Jimmy. And then we worked on Blind Faith. He came in about halfway through on that. Mott the Hoople. Sky, Free’s live album. There was a Stones’ session that he brought into Morgan, the first session on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want.’ And it went very badly. Just horrible. They did not want to be there and there were too many of them for that little place. Al Kooper was there, I think. That was my first opportunity of working with them. And Mick was in a foul mood telling me to turn Brian (Jones) off.
“I didn’t do that many sessions on Satantic Majesties. Just a few. It was bizarre. And I thought it was pretty silly stuff. You got Bill Wyman out there playing vibraphone? And some other bizarre instrument that Charlie (Watts) was playing. It was just a very poor attempt to compete with Sgt. Pepper’s.
“Andrew Loog Oldham was still around but not very much. The last time he was present was during the ‘We Love You’ and ‘Dandelion’ recording sessions at Olympic when the cops showed up at the door and Mick was smokin’ a big joint.
“These are a couple of Bobbies in uniform. And Mick was so brilliant. He puts this joint behind his back and says, ‘Andrew, what we need on this are two pieces of wood bein’ hit together in unison. Like claves.”
“‘What about these,’ offered the Bobbys, as they voluntarily pulled out their truncheons.
“So he escaped by puttin’ them on the record. And Andrew was spraying the control room to cover up the smell. At the time the Stones were having vast hassles with the cops and another bust would have been the end for them. So, it was a very narrow squeeze. And Jimmy gets me in on Sticky Fingers, which was about half done.
“The Stones has just finished putting together their recording truck. It was the first time they ever had anything. I don’t know where the money came from. The truck, it was done for Stew, if anything, because he had been so hard done by them. So they said, ‘OK Stew. You run this.’ And we went to Stargroves (Mick Jagger’s Berkshire mansion) and they played for a couple of days not very well. And then the first playback comes. And they have all these fucking hanger-ons. It was just ghastly.
“So I do this first playback and Mick is leaning over the mixer at me and he says, ‘What the fuckin’ hell is that? I could do better than that on my Sony cassette machine. What are you doin’ here?’ I thought, ‘Christ, what a nightmare.’ I said, ‘We’ll, if you got rid of these bloody people, it’s a small space, and they’re soaking up all the sound and God knows what else. And then we’ll listen again.’ And Mick says, ‘Oh, all right then. You’re worse than your brother.’ I said, ‘No I’m not.’
“And I waited up to speak to him the next morning and I said, ‘Look, obviously the Rolling Stones are far more important than my feelings. If I should go I will go right now.’ He went, ‘No. You’re in. You’ve passed the test.’
Q: Tell me about the Stones’ mobile recording truck?
A: Well, the gear in there was made by this fellow Dick Swettenham
who really made the first mixes that you would recognize as a modern mixer. He had things that we now accept as normal. A pan pot on every channel and the ability to add and take away mid range. Insert points. More than one echo send. And they look great, too. They were wrap around things. He was an extremely clever fellow. But he also built this tape machine that didn’t work. It was a fucking joke. Dick didn’t know about tape machines. He knew about electronics. Not transport.
“So we were always going through hell with that. In the end I got it kicked out and we got a 3 M machine. Dick put the truck together. It was his very cool stuff with four speakers in Lockwood cabinets. It could sound very nice in there but it could also be very difficult. The confined space. The camera never worked. The talk back never worked. So you couldn’t see or talk to people. You had to keep runnin´out of the truck. ‘Stop!’ Jimmy and I went to France with that truck.
“Stew was supposed to find a house that we could all go to everyday to work. And he couldn’t find one. So we ended up in Keith’s basement. Which of course meant the center of activity is Keith’s house. I don’t know whether Anita (Pallenberg) or Keith really liked that. ‘Cause there were a lot of people involved. They were horn players, technical people, Jimmy Miller, Nicky Hopkins, and were all there every day. And the band…Charlie is living there and Nicky is living there, so a lot of stuff for them to deal with.
Q: Did you have to make some overt adjustments about recording in a Villa, a home, from what you learned at Stargroves, Olympic or Morgan studios?
A: I don’t know about adjustments…You just go with what is there. And you try and make it sound as good as you can. The first room I put them in was this basement which was a disaster. It just was too dead. So I moved them to another room that had stone walls. And I had Charlie and Keith in there and Mick Taylor and Bill had his bass underneath the stairs. Nicky Hopkins was in a separate room. And it was tough but some of the things came out rather well. Bianca was very pregnant at the time and I think she showed up once or twice. She had the baby during the record. Mick was back and forth to Paris a few times.
“As far as microphones on hand I had the normal standard stuff. Some Neumanns, Shures, Beyers, The mikes were OK. It was just these rooms were a bit weird. Plus it had been a torture chamber during World War II. The villa was a local Gestapo headquarters when the Nazis occupied France.
“I didn’t notice that until we’d been there for a while and the floor heating vents in the hallway were shaped like Swastikas, gold Swastikas. And I said to Keith, ‘What the fuck is that?’ ‘Oh…I never told you. This was the headquarters.’ So I guess downstairs they used to do all this dreadful shit. That’s where fires would start. The electricity would go on and off. There was just a very strange vibe down there. There were a lot of people always drifting around.
Q: Tell me about Jimmy Miller as a producer and a mate. Spencer Davis once said, "Jimmy Miller was the first genius producer I ever worked with."
A: Well that’s easy. Jimmy was an extremely talented man. His main gift I think was his ability to get grooves, which for a band like the Stones is very important. Look at the difference between Beggar’s Banquet and Satanic Majesties. He put them right back on the rail. So he was quote influential then and came up with all sorts of lovely ideas for them. In fact that’s him playing the cowbell at the beginning of ‘Honky Tonk Woman.’ He sets it up.
Q: The guitar contributions of guitarist Mick Taylor were apparent to you over your working relationship with the Stones in the studio. And he received a co-write on the track ‘Ventilator Blues.’ You have said it got quite steamy in Keith’s basement ‘cause there was one small window and an electric fan blowing in the summer. So you all had the “Ventilator Blues.”
A: Mick Taylor in the studio in France or Sunset Sound was just a shinning light as a person somewhat tasaturn. When he plays his guitar and we’d do 100 takes on something he would come up with something slightly different every time. Faultless. Every once in a while he’d drop a note. I mean, that’s expected. His slide playing. He’s put a bottle on his little finger and then he’d do chords with the rest of his hand. So he could do both at once. Usually it’s a separate deal but that was part of his style. His sense of melody was unbelievable.
“Every time I knew it was Mick Taylor I’d be sitting at the edge of my seat. He was wonderful but became discontent with his situation. On the 1973 tour of Europe I spent quite a lot of time with him and he would say ‘They won’t let me any songs. Anytime I have an idea I’m blocked out.’
“Later I put Mick on to Jack Bruce who was a good friend of mine and still a huge admirer of him, then and still now. They formed The Jack Bruce Band and Mick Taylor Band with drummer Bruce Gary, who would be a good friend for years in Los Angeles before he was in the Knack and afterward.
Q: What was the food like at Keith villa?
A: This French chef would put out these lavish spreads s for lunch and you’d walk out to a big table of artichokes, stuffed tomatoes, sauteed asparagus, salads and lobsters. Wonderful stuff. Big luncheon on the terrace overlooking the Mediterranean and these big yachts. It’s France. Keith would come down the steps and go, ‘I wanna a cheeseburger.’ I used to kid Nicky, ‘Guess what? We’re having liver and onions, steak and pie.’ He had a hole in his stomach. Very frail. After two or three months the chef just fucked off. He left and Keith got these cowboys who hung around town. A big guy who became the cook who then proceded to set fire to the basement kitchen.
“We then had a long weekend and Mick went off to Paris. And these cowboys stole and nicked most of the equipment, Keith’s guitars, Bobby Key’s saxophone. Another wise friendship that Keith had going. Keith then had Selmer who made the saxophones make another set brass engraved. He felt rotten about these bastards, paid Selmer and took care of Bobby, who was then better of then when he started.
Q: Bill Wyman mentioned to me “Hollywood and Los Angeles, [were] very important” to the band. You had been in Sunset Sound in Hollywood before working on some early Led Zeppelin albums.
A: Yes. I had been in Sunset Sound and was very enamoured of the tapes that I would get from Sunset Sound that I would get. I really liked the way Let It Bleed sounded that was mixed at Sunset Sound. And I really liked some other stuff that my brother had mixed at Sunset. That’s why when I took Led Zeppelin there and they changed the room, and I mixed all of Zeppelin IV and it sounded like shit when I got it home. But I still knew that had to be me and not the place.
“So, I remember talkin’ to Keith in his basement in France. Just Keith and I and I said, ‘Look, the next step is that we’ve got to go and finish the overdubs and mix. Why don’t we go to Sunset?’ And they worked there before. So, ‘Yeah, all right.’ And of course, I loved L.A. 21 year old English guy, and I had done a couple or three projects there. So I knew people and chicks eventually. ‘Yeah. Let’s do that then.’
“We got to Hollywood. It was taking pretty slowly and I was taking a lot of time to get mixes. But they were coming out quite well. We were doing overdubs at the same time. And the Musicians Union guy came by to try and bust us.
“The Union said if you were foreign musicians you had to give one per cent of the record to the Union. So they warned me at the front desk, ‘He’s here again!’ So, we’d scrabble around and put everything away and then he’d walk in. I’d pretend I’m just mixing. And in those days, I mean, nobody took four or five months to mix a record. (laughs). You did it in a week. So he was very suspicious.
“I remember we did go over to Wally Heider studio down the street, and he came in to try and bust us again. And Bobby Keys was actually playing tenor saxophone. And he knew what this guy was. And he comes runnin’ out of the studio into the control room and the door on that control room opened right onto the street in Hollywood. And Bobby has got his sax over his head and he’s gonna smash his brains in. And the guy is running up towards Hollywood Blvd. with Bobby shouting and screaming at him with the sax still raised above his head. And I saw them go round the corner and I didn’t see Bobby again for a couple of weeks. (laughs). I think he went to a bar and just forgot what we were there for. (laughs). So we never saw this guy again. Bobby put the fear of Texas into him.
