Ventilator
Blues
Composers:
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Mick Taylor
Recording date:
July 1971, October-November 1971 & January-March 1972
Recording locations: Rolling
Stones Mobile Unit, Keith Richards' home, Villefranche-sur-mer, France & Sunset Sound Studios,
Los Angeles, USA
Producer: Jimmy
Miller Chief
engineers: Glyn
Johns, Andy Johns & Joe
Zagarino
Performed onstage:
1972

Probable line-up:
Drums: Charlie
Watts
Bass: Bill Wyman
Electric guitars: Keith Richards
(incl. slide)
Lead electric guitar: Mick
Taylor
Acoustic guitar: Keith Richards
Vocals: Mick
Jagger
Piano: Nicky
Hopkins
Saxophone: Bobby
Keys
Trumpet: Jim
Price
When your spine is cracking and your hands
they shake
Heart is bursting and your butt's going to
break
Woman's cussing, you can hear her scream
Feel like murder in the first degree
Ain't nobody slowing down no way
Everybody's stepping on their accelerator - all right
Don't matter where you are
Everybody's going to need a ventilator
When you're trapped and circled with no second
chance
Code of living is your gun in hand, we can't
be
Browed by beating, we can't be cowed by words
Messed by cheating, ain't going to ever learn
Everybody walking around
Everybody's trying to step on their Creator - that's (...)
No matter where you are
Everybody, everybody's going to need
Some
kind of ventilator
Some kind of ventilator
Come down and get it
What you going to do about it? What you going
to do?
What you going to do about it? What you going
to do?
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
Going to fight it
TrackTalk
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.
-
Charlie Watts, 2003
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 tomorow and hope it had fixed itself. Or give it a good kick.
-
Keith Richards
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, Life (2010)
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