TURD ON THE RUN

IN THE LATE SIXTIES, THE ROLLING STONES BUILT A MOBILE RECORDING STUDIO ON THE BACK OF A FARM TRUCK AND CHANGED MUSIC FOREVER.

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ON A GREAT SET OF SPEAKERS or your best headphones, the Rolling Stones’ “Sweet Virginia” sounds like it’s being sung around a kitchen table. A raspy harmonica saws through the opening, while the jangle of guitars, sax, and a heartbeat snare seem to bounce around the room before fading inaudibly into the mix.

The song is on the album Exile on Main St., famously recorded at a rented French villa called Nellcôte. Drop the needle, close your eyes, and you can picture the intimacy. There’s a clarity and a closeness to the recording that put the listener in the audience, in the room, in the chair next to the singer. And that’s all thanks to a truck.

Stones tour manager Ian Stewart had a mobile recording studio built for the band in 1968. The exact reason is lost to conflicting memories, but there’s little doubt of two major factors: difficulty booking time in London’s popular Olympic Studios and the desire to dodge British taxes by living (and recording) in France.

Very quickly, the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio, or RSM, was making recordings by the Stones and others all over Europe. “It went to where music was already happening,” says Jason Tawkin of Canada’s National Music Centre in Calgary, where the RSM now resides at the Studio Bell museum.