Ventilator Blues - Recording and Aftermath

Recording and Aftermath

Recording on "Ventilator Blues" began in late 1971. The Stones chose to record the majority of the song deep in the poorly ventilated basement of Richards' home in the south of France, Villa Nellcôte. A well-known feature of the songs recorded in that basement for Exile was the tendency of the heat to distort the guitar's strings and the close atmosphere lending the songs a distinct, albeit undefined, sound. Richards said, "On 'Ventilator Blues' we got some weird sound of something that had gone wrong - some valve or tube that had gone. If something was wrong you just forgot about it. You'd leave it alone and come back tomorrow and hope it had fixed itself. Or give it a good kick." Recording concluded in the early months of 1972 at Los Angeles' Sunset Sound Studios.

On the song, Watts said in 2003, "We always rehearse 'Ventilator Blues' . It's a great track, but we never play it as well as the original. Something will not be quite right; either Keith will play it a bit differently or I'll do it wrong. It's a fabulous number, but a bit of a tricky one. Bobby Keys wrote the rhythm part, which is the clever part of the song. Bobby said, 'Why don't you do this?' and I said, 'I can't play that,' so Bobby stood next me to clapping the thing and I just followed his timing. In the world of Take Five, it's nothing, but it threw me completely and Bobby just stood there and clapped while we were doing the track - and we've never quite got it together as well as that."

The Rolling Stones have only performed the song live once, at Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, B.C on opening night of the 1972 North American Tour in support of Exile on Main Street.