Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones [Hardcover]

Robert Greenfield (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2006

Recorded during the blazing summer of 1971 at Villa Nellcote, Keith Richards’ seaside mansion in the south of France, Exile on Main St. has been hailed as one of the Rolling Stones’ best albums-and one of the greatest rock records of all time. Yet its improbable creation was difficult, torturous...and at times nothing short of dangerous.In self-imposed exile, the Stones-along with wives, girlfriends, and a crew of hangers-on unrivaled in the history of rock-spent their days smoking, snorting, and drinking whatever they could get their hands on. At night, the band descended like miners into the villa’s dank basement to lay down tracks. Out of those grueling sessions came the familiar riffs and rhythms of “Rocks Off,” “Tumbling Dice,” “Happy,” and “Sweet Virginia.”All the while, a variety of celebrities-John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Gram Parsons among them-stumbled through the villa’s neverending party, as did the local drug dealers, known to one and all as “les cowboys.” Villa Nellcote became the crucible in which creative strife, outsize egos, and all the usual byproducts of the Stones’ legendary hedonistic excess fused into something potent, volatile, and enduring.Here, for the first time, is the season in hell that produced Exile on Main St.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

By 1971, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones and Janis Joplin were dead and Jim Morrison soon would be. Equally troubled, the Rolling Stones, those bad boy icons of the era, took their decadent circus to the French Riviera to escape British taxes and record an album. In a slang-filled present tense, Greenfield (Dark Star: An Oral Biography of Jerry Garcia) gives good gossip about the mayhem that ensued at the Villa Nellcote, the palatial mansion—and supposed former Gestapo headquarters—that Keith Richards rented as his getaway. Greenfield tells of who slept with whom, Keith's outlaw antics and the massive amounts of drugs consumed. The central story, however, is the struggle between Keith and Mick Jagger, who was increasingly drawn to high society, typified by his marriage to Bianca Perez-Mora. A who's who of celebs passed through Nellcote that summer, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono and Gram Parsons. In the last analysis, it's amazing that the Stones managed to record an album at all, but Exile on Main Street may well be their greatest. Greenberg's writing is cliched at times, but his account is energetic. In the end, he takes sides (Keith's mostly) and settles scores, but that only ups the entertainment value. (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* Greenfield focuses on the early post-Jones era, when Jagger and Richards were esteemed songwriters, and the band was starting to make money in piles. Picking up approximately where his S.T.P.: A Journey through America with the Rolling Stones (1974) left off, he recounts happenings at Richards' French villa, where the album Exile on Main Street was recorded in summer 1971. Jagger, having recently dumped Marianne Faithfull, was married to jet-setting Bianca, whose antipathy for Richards and cohorts was reciprocated. Richards was in the middle of a long liaison with dissolute actress, scenester, and Faithfull-friend Anita Pallenberg. The Stones had extricated themselves from manager Allen Klein and, thanks to Jagger's banker buddy Prince Rupert Lowenstein, were about to begin self-marketing. Complicating things were Richards', Pallenberg's, and assorted resident playmates' heroin addiction, which brought Corsican drug dealers, local scumbags, and sleazoid Richards factotum Spanish Tony Sanchez into the mix, so to speak. Greenfield merrily corrects Sanchez's and others' published misstatements and serves up such treats as Richards' description of Jagger as several of the nicest guys one could hope to meet. Rough, raw, and ironic by turns, he lays down the facts of how heroin enslaved and immobilized the band at a time when everything seemed within its grasp. So doing, this wry depiction of a dark, decadent moment in rock history inspires a certain demented nostalgia. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press; First edition. edition (November 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306814331
• ISBN-13: 978-0306814334
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 2.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #935,592 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

46 of 47 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Massive Disappointment August 15, 2008

By Mark Hayward

Format:Hardcover

I was excited to discover this, as like several others, I thought his previous Stones book was fantastic. But in the intervening years the author has become insufferably pompous, egotistical and cliché-ridden. He also appears to have fired his editor.

The author's habit of continually inserting song titles/lyrics and even bits of Shakespeare (without quotation marks,just to prove how effortless it all is) is as annoying as listening to some teenager say "like" every other word. For example: "Clowns to the left of him, jokers to the right, there he is, stuck in the middle with Keith", and as for the last line in the book, it deserves throwing against a wall. The constant uses of "Philip Michael Jagger" and also of the present tense are both increasingly irritating to the point of distraction. And the bit where he breaks off to slag off other Stones book authors is hilariously crass and at the same time pahetic.

Please allow me to quote a paragraph as a perfect illustration of the author's style; if you can get to the end of it without choking, this book is for you!

"Before any of this happens, Keith and Anita pull a Houdini. No pun intended, they take a powder. Like Bonnie & Clyde, they go on the lam. They skedaddle. They do the cow-cow boogie out the big front door of Nellcote...and then head as fast as they can for the airport in Nice where they board a plane and fly to safety. Like Elvis, Keith and Anita have now left the building. They have flown the coop."

Hey, Greenfield, you forgot "They are ex-residents, they have ceased to be..."

68 of 72 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Gets to be irritating. November 13, 2006

By Terry

Format:Hardcover

This book is generally a fast read, and I picked up some information about the Stones I didn't know. However, it is seriously flawed for two reasons. First, the author has a ceaseless set of cliches that abound through this whole book. A couple well spaced phrases would have been clever. Consistently starting paragraphs with sentences referring to someone being like a "crossfire hurricane", among many more, really starts to grate on the reader. My major complaint, however, is one page after seriously criticizing two other authors' books (this includes a long winded paragraph on how one author was wrong, and should contact this author if he ever needed help with accuracy, and another book reference stating he liked the other author's salad dressing, but hated his book), the books states that "Jumpin' Jack Flash" was on the Sticky Fingers album, which it certainly was not. For me, the credibility, and likeability, of the author was ruined a third of the was through the book. High handed arrogance doesn't work so well when the critic is carelessly wrong himself. His writing style lost me before that, but after I invested that much time, I waded through to the end.

38 of 41 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Ugh. A Festival of Cliches November 2, 2006

By Kenneth G. Schmidt

Format:Hardcover

Any time I crack open a book and find it to be double-spaced, I know I'm in trouble. You know what I mean: Not enough material for a "real" book. I've not been more disappointed in a book in a very long time. It's one sad, very predictable cliche after another coupled with horribly useless and overly long descriptions of characters that add nothing to what should have -- and could have -- been a very good story. The photos are just awful; they're outrageously dull and very poorly printed. Please, please don't buy this book expecting any real insight or anything even marginally interesting about life with The Stones while Exile was being recorded. How could something so potentially interesting be so pitifully dull? Sigh.