Jan
15
2015
‘Exile on Main Street,’ released 50 years ago after they’d left Britain for financial reasons, marked a more eclectic, edgier turn in the famous band’s music
The Rolling Stones in the spring of 1971 were a band on the run. Victims of bad business advice and Britain’s steep, punitive tax rates, the Stones had brought in a new business manager, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who urged them in early ’71 to become tax exiles in Southern France.
By June, the band was recording in the dank, partitioned basement of Keith Richards’s rented French villa near Nice, their 16-track “Mighty Mobile” studio truck parked outside. The Stones were under pressure to complete an album for their new Stones-owned label in advance of a planned American tour the following June and July.