The Rolling Stones album Bill Wyman called a “complete miracle”
While The Rolling Stones have remained eternally relevant as one of the longest-lived and most successful rock bands of all time, their heyday is around half a century behind them. Some fans of the Stones’ first chapter as hit-making blues fanatics under the leadership of Brian Jones turned their backs in 1969. Still, a greater majority will argue that the band’s finest albums arrived just after Jones’ departure with Mick Taylor on board.
It is truly remarkable that The Rolling Stones remain active today, releasing albums and touring the world more than 60 years after formation. As the core of the band throughout these long, often fractious years, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards constituted the main songwriting pair. Thus, the band name looks set to endure as long as Jagger can hop around on stage and Richards can strum his guitar. However, along the way, the band lost crucial protagonists, namely, with the departure of Taylor in 1974 and the death of Charlie Watts in 2021.
This gradual disintegration also encountered a significant blow in 1992 when bassist Bill Wyman made tracks. For a while, the Stones didn’t quite believe that their bassist was going for good, but he sought a change of pace as he approached his 60s. “I just had enough. It was half my life, and I thought, ‘I have got other things I want to do,'” Wyman reflected in an interview with The Mirror. “I wanted to do archaeology, write books, have photo exhibitions and play charity cricket.”
Since Wyman’s departure, the Stones have released five albums but failed to hit the same peaks of critical acclaim as 1981’s Tattoo You, arguably the band’s final masterpiece. The album was a well-balanced update on the Stones’ sound, receiving praise for its progressive textures. Three years before, Some Girls met similar plaudits for its highly accessible embrace of disco.
While the Stones flourished through some alluring albums in the late 1970s and ’80s, it was always going to be difficult to push the bar higher than the albums between Beggars Banquet and Exile on Main St. Wyman seems to concur with this popular assertion. “I think the best music was done between ’68 and ’72,” he said in a 2020 interview with Guitar World. “Never mind about when I left in ’92.”
Wyman was particularly impressed with the group’s work on Exile on Main St. but recalls the sessions as markedly chaotic. “That the album ever came out at all was a complete miracle,” he said. As the title suggests, the Stones recorded much of the sprawling double album while living in France on tax exile. Compounding poor recording conditions was some of the entourage’s spiralling relationship with drugs and alcohol.
Casting his memory back to the Exile sessions, Wyman remembered that, despite the ebbs and flows of Richards’ hedonism, they stuck to the structure of a five-day working week. “In the studio, we just worked weekdays, and we broke on Saturdays and Sundays,” he said. “So, on the weekends, if Keith was alive, he would mess about with the guys that were staying in the area.”
Wyman continued to point out that his only issues with Exile on Main St. pertain to the sound mix and erroneous credits on the sleeve. He remembered that his bass lines often got lost “deep” in the mix. “I used to get fairly disappointed when you couldn’t bloody well hear my bass,” Wyman recalled. “I also didn’t always get the proper credits I deserved, either. When you read the back of the Exile album, it says someone else is playing bass on songs when it was actually me. Mick would always get the credits wrong, and it was too late to change them. So that was annoying, as well.”
The bassist was surprised by Richards’ productivity throughout the endeavour, especially on one Monday morning when he arrived to discover the guitarist had written and recorded ‘Happy’ over the weekend. “It turned out quite nice, actually,” Wyman said. “It was quite a pleasant surprise coming in on Monday morning and hearing it being played back.” Listen to the classic track below.