Stones in Exile

Stones in Exile

2008. USA. Directed by Stephen Kijak. The 1971 recording sessions of Exile on Main Street have become the stuff of legend—mythic stories of tax dodging and debauchery at a villa in the south of France—but the real revelations of this documentary lie in the laying of the music tracks in the basement bunkers, from “Tumbling Dice,” which began as a conversation about gambling with the housekeeper, to “Casino Boogie,” an exquisite corpse of a song that was composed, William Burroughs-style, with torn-and-frayed scraps of paper. With never-before-seen archival footage, outtakes from Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues, and still photographs by Dominique Tarlé, Stones in Exile makes vividly clear why the album is routinely immortalized as one of the greatest ever made, the one that Tom Waits has called “a tree of life. This record is a watering hole.” As Charlie Watts confirms in the documentary, “A lot of Exile was done how Keith [Richards] works, which is, play it twenty times, marinade, play it another twenty times. He knows what he likes, but he's very loose." 61 min.