• Writers: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
• Producer: Jimmy Miller
• Recorded: Late 1971/early 1972 with the Rolling Stones Mobile Unit at Sunset Sound, Hollywood, California
• Released: April 1972
• Players:
  Mick Jagger — vocals, guitar
  Keith Richards — guitar, vocals
  Mick Taylor — bass
  Charlie Watts — drums
  Clyde King — background vocals
  Vanetta Fields — background vocals
  Bobby Keys — saxophone
  Jim Price — trumpet, trombone
  Nicky Hopkins — piano
• Album: Exile on Main Street (Rolling Stones, 1972)
• Also appears on:
  Made in the Shade (Rolling Stones, 1974)
  Love You Live (Rolling Stones, 1977)
  Rewind (1971-1984) (Rolling Stones, 1984)
  40 Licks (Virgin, 2002)
• Released prior to the Exile on Main Street album, “Tumbling Dice” hit Number Seven in the U.S. and Number Five in the U.K.
• The lyrics were drawn from another song called “Good Time Women.”
• Exile was the Stones first and only double-album studio recording.
• Exile was a Number One album on both sides of the Atlantic.
• Exile was packaged with a set of postcards, photographed and directed by Norman Seeff, telling the comical story of the arrival of Mick Jagger’s “Auntie,” the band’s fall from grace, and Mick Taylor suggesting an early retirement.
• Early titles for Exile On Main Street were Eat It and Tropical Diseases.
• In his memoir Stone Alone, Bill Wyman writes that the Exile period was a time of heavy drug use for the band: “Our sessions for the album… marked a very tense time to be around the Stones, and were eventually immensely damaging to the band and practically everyone around us. Practically everyone dabbled in drugs at that time.”
• Wyman writes that during the mixing of the album, Keith Richards had to be flown to Switzerland for a “drug cure” at a clinic there — the source of the continuing rumors about Richards going abroad to have his blood “changed” periodically.
• Many Stones fans and critics consider Exile to be one of the band’s best.
• Linda Ronstadt scored a Top 40 hit with her cover of “Tumbling Dice” in 1977. Jagger performed it with her at a concert the following year, leading to speculation that the two were having an affair.

FAST FORWARD:

• Mick Taylor left the Stones in 1974. Bill Wyman retired from the band in 1993.
• The Rolling Stones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.
• Guitarist Ron Wood recently published an autobiography. Richards is planning to publish his in 2009.