Ventilator Blues — The Rolling Stones

#365Songs: January 10

If Exile on Main Street is the greatest rock and roll record ever (and it is), then “Ventilator Blues” is (at least arguably) the greatest rock and roll song ever.

Literally every single one of us in the rock and roll game wishes we could have written this:

Everybody walking around
Everybody trying to step on their Creator
Don’t matter where you are
Everybody, everybody going to need some kind of ventilator

And that groove! Good god, what a groove. The sleaze. The slide. It’s insidious. It’s so greasy, and druggy, and nasty, and drunken, and sexy, and dirty, and goddamn, it’s just so good.

And what a band! I mean, Keith Richards and Mick Taylor on guitars, Bill Wyman on bass and Charlie Watts on drums, Nicky Hopkins on piano, Bobby Keys and Jim Price on horns, I mean, damn …

The house itself is an instrument. You can hear it coming out of the speakers. Nellcôte. The mold in the walls. The ghosts in the hallways. The nicotine in the carpets. The heroin in the sheets. The wine in the drapes.

“Ventilator Blues” sounds like Howlin’ Wolf recording at the Overlook Hotel.

The singular mastery achieved by the track is oddly reinforced by its history—it’s purportedly only ever been performed by the Stones once live.

Charlie Watts has his theories on why this is the case:

“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 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.”

As to the whole ventilator thing, we can thank the house again for that one:

“The basement in Nellcôte was big enough, but it was divided into a series of bunkers. Not a great deal of ventilation — hence Ventilator Blues.” —Keith Richards

People love to bag on the Stones for continuing to play into their winter years, but those folks miss something critical about Jagger and Richards—you have to remember, their heroes weren’t pop stars, they were blues musicians. And blues musicians play ’til they drop. Muddy Waters? He have his final performance in 1982. He died less than a year later. Howlin’ Wolf? His final performance was in November 1975. He died the following January.

If the Stones never did anything after Exile on Main Street, their legacy would be secure. But over the next decade, they also produced—as just a sampling:

Heartbreaker
Angie
It’s Only Rock and Roll
Miss You
Beast of Burden
Shattered
Start Me Up
Hang Fire
Waiting on a Friend

Is any of that better than Ventilator Blues? Who knows. But it’s all world-class rock and roll, and if they want to keep playin’ it ’til they die, let ’em. They’ve earned it.

~

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