All Down The Line

Zoo Freaks, the Crew just dropped the needle on "All Down The Line," and if that doesn't put a little grease under your tires, nothing will. This is The Rolling Stones, off the 1972 double album Exile On Main Street, the one Keith Richards still calls a messy rock and roll masterpiece. It opens side four of that record, a straight-ahead electric rocker written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and for a minute there Mick was sure it was going to be the lead single. Engineer Andy Johns had to talk him down. It ended up the flip side of "Happy" instead, which is a pretty good problem to have.

Here's the story the band still tells. They were finishing the album in Los Angeles, and Andy Johns could not hear the mix in the studio. He told Mick he needed to hear it on the radio. So they hired a limousine, piled in Mick, Keith, Charlie Watts, and Andy, and sent pianist Ian Stewart down Sunset Strip with the tape. Stewart walked into an FM station and said the Stones would like to hear their new song. The DJ came on and told the city they were the first to play it. Mick had the radio cranked in the back seat. Andy still was not sure, so they had the station play it again. Picture that. The new Stones record leaking out over Los Angeles while the band is riding around listening to their own mix, trying to decide if it was finished. An acoustic take of the song had already been cut back in 1969 during the early Sticky Fingers sessions, so this thing had been rattling around the band for a while before it found its legs in the basement of Keith's rented villa, Nellcôte, down on the French Riviera, and then got the final overdubs at Sunset Sound.

Andy Johns later said "All Down The Line" was one of the easier guitar tracks to get. Mick Taylor laid down the slide live, no overdubs, bottleneck on his little finger and chords with the other three, and Keith came up with those rhythm parts the whole song sits on. Kathi McDonald is in there on the background vocals with Keith, Bill Wyman on electric bass, Bill Plummer on upright bass, Charlie on the drums, and producer Jimmy Miller shaking the maracas. Record World called it the Stones at their best. That about covers it.

The Stones themselves started the way a lot of the best bands do, which is a couple of kids who could not leave the blues alone. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards grew up in Dartford, lost touch, then ran into each other again on a train with a stack of Chuck Berry and Muddy Waters records under their arms. They fell in with guitarist Dick Taylor and started a little outfit called Little Boy Blue and the Blue Boys. In 1962 they went down to the Ealing Club to see Alexis Korner's Blues Incorporated and got stopped cold by a slide player calling himself Elmo Lewis. That was Brian Jones. Jones pulled them into his own band, Ian Stewart came in on piano, and when they needed a name for their first proper gig, Brian borrowed one from a Muddy Waters tune, "Rollin' Stone." On July 12, 1962, they played the Marquee Club in London as the Rolling Stones. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts settled in not long after, and the rest is the longest second act in rock and roll.

If you want the band straight from the source, the official home is rollingstones.com. They are on Facebook at The Rolling Stones, on Instagram at @therollingstones, and on X at @RollingStones. For the folks who have been keeping the scrapbooks since before the internet had a name, the fan club It's Only Rock 'n Roll lives at iorr.org, and there is a big public gathering over on Facebook called the Rolling Stones Fan Club. Turn it up, Zoo Freaks. This one was built for the open road.