Ventilator Blues
| "Ventilator Blues" | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Song by The Rolling Stones from the album Exile on Main St. | ||||
| Released | 12 May 1972 | |||
| Recorded | October–November 1971 & January–March 1972 | |||
| Genre | Blues rock | |||
| Length | 3:24 | |||
| Label | Rolling Stones/Virgin | |||
| Writer(s) | Jagger/Richards/Mick Taylor | |||
| Producer(s) | Jimmy Miller | |||
| Exile on Main St. track listing | ||||
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| 18 tracks |
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“Ventilator Blues” is a song by English rock and roll band the Rolling Stones featured on their 1972 release Exile on Main St.
“Ventilator Blues” marks the only time guitarist Mick Taylor was given credit alongside regular Stones scribes Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, even though the exact amount of Taylor’s input remains unknown. The song features Keith Richards on electric slide guitar, electric and acoustic guitar, Taylor on lead guitar during the outro, Mick Jagger on vocals, Bill Wyman on bass, Charlie Watts on drums, Nicky Hopkins on piano, and Bobby Keys and Jim Price on saxophone and trumpet respectively.
The song itself is a low and lumbering blues number, with Bill Janovitz saying in his review, “the instrumental arrangement clearly aims for the Chess Studios approach.” Notable is Jagger's double tracked lead vocal, double tracking being rarely used in the Rolling Stones discography. Janovitz concludes, “Jagger takes the Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf inspiration of the song's origins and does his best to betray the fact that he is a skinny middle-class English kid, convincingly delivering the time-bomb lyric with appropriate swagger...”
On pianist Nicky Hopkins notable contribution, Janovitz says, “[Hopkins plays] a rhythmically complex piano part on the verses, weaving in and out of the swooping guitar lick on the first verse and then building as the arrangement continues, playing nervous, jittery right-handed upper-register trills. The pianist creates scary tension on an already claustrophobic and malevolent-sounding song.” The song is noted for its rising and falling chord progression, punctuated by the saxophone of Bobby Keys and the trumpet and trombone of Jim Price. Keeping beat is Charlie Watts on drums and Bill Wyman on bass who, although frequently absent during the recording sessions for Exile, made it on this occasion.
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