Ventilator Blues

Composers: Mick Jagger, Keith Richards & Mick Taylor
Recording date: July & 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: Mick Taylor & Keith Richards (incl. slide)
Acoustic guitar: Keith Richards
Vocals: Mick Jagger
Piano: Nicky Hopkins
Saxophone: Bobby Keys
Trumpet and/or trombone: 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
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 'round
Everybody's trying to step on their Creator
No matter where you are
Everybody, everybody's going to need somme kind of ventilator

Come down and get it

What you going to do about it? What you going to do?
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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