The Rolling Stones Mobile Studio

Awesome

Rolling Stones Mobile is legendary, made famous in Deep Purple's "Smoke On The Water."  Glad it still exists.

BOC did a lot of our live recording with the NY Record Plant Mobile, then commanded by Dave Hewitt, father of record producer Ryan Hewitt. 

I worked on an 8 trk M79 at Elektra's studio then located on La Cienega Blvd. in LA. in 1970. The transport was unique. The engineer (Brian Ross-Myring) said it was hard to edit on.  

I just realized I did a recording with this truck. My band The Demons were part of the original Punk music scene at CBGB and Max's. We broke up for a year, the came back together. During that time, Punk blew up, and the new crowds didn't know who we were. We would have been on the historic Live at CBGB album, but that happened when we had disbanded.

Hilly Crystal then had producer Craig Leon bring the mobil truck to CB's to record a second Live at CBGB album. We were invited to play on that, as were Mink DeVille, Blondie and other now famous bands. Unfortunately since those bands had a record deal, their respective labels would not let Hilly release the album. Tape was expensive then, and since the master tapes were busy doing nothing, Hilly reused them for a different recording. It was a great loss.

I remember the sound inside that truck. I swear, I'd never heard anything sound so good, even in the best studios in New York. I have no idea why. Oh how I wish I had a copy of those tapes now.

The initial Manor Mobile Helios console outfitted the world's first purpose-designed 24-track mobile recording studio, its 24 inputs later expanded to 40 inputs with the use of additional Helios submixers
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Led Zeppelin, IV (1971)
Robert Plant tracking outside the Rolling Stones Mobile.
You could toss a coin over whether Led Zeppelin's III or IV was the more significant album, but it doesn't really matter for our purposes—both made very extensive use of the Rolling Stones Mobile (RSM) and were released before two other other landmark RSM recordings, the Stones' Exile On Main St. and Deep Purple's Machine Head.

A former 18th-century poorhouse, Headley Grange in Hampshire was the chosen venue, as it had been for much of Zeppelin III. The majestic sound of John Bonham's drums—sampled a thousand times and still used today—was created in wood-paneled Headley Grange with a pair of distant Neumann condenser mics. It has probably never been equalled.
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The Rolling Stones, Exile On Main St. (1972)

Just as The Who's Live At Leeds is regarded by some as their finest hour, so the Stones' Exile On Main St. stands as a testament to the band at its peak—even if a wobbly one at times.

In 1970, Mick Jagger bought Stargroves, a country house in Hampshire. The band's pianist and tour manager, Ian Stewart, suggested that in order to make full use of it, they needed their own mobile studio. This saw the birth of the most famous truck of them all, the Rolling Stones Mobile. It is one of the few things you can use the word legendary about without risk of exaggeration.

Unlike earlier trucks, the Stones Mobile had a control room inside the vehicle, so it really could go anywhere and do almost anything. The band used it to record most of the Sticky Fingers album, and a year later, beset with taxation problems, they decamped to the Villa Nellcôte in the South of France, with the RSM following.

The sessions that followed have become the stuff of rock legend and lore. Beside the technical problems imposed by an unsuitable recording environment—a cramped, damp basement—and compounded by an erratic power supply, the band's "personal issues" should have made the resulting album a shambles. Indeed, engineer Andy Johns described them as "the worst band in the world" for much of the time. But somehow, in true Stones fashion, what emerged from the chaos was one of rock's most memorable and charismatic albums. It just reeks of authenticity thanks, at least in part, to the location and the way in which most of it was recorded.
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If Exile On Main St. really put the Stones Mobile on the map, it was Deep Purple who immortalized it in "Smoke On The Water." The song recalls the night in 1971 when the Casino in Montreux, Switzerland burned down following a gig by Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention.

The plan had been to record the next Deep Purple album in the Casino, but the fire put paid to that. A couple of other venues in the town were hastily found for the recording sessions, which produced, among others, "Smoke On The Water," the lyrics of which refer to the RSM as "the Rolling truck Stones thing."

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Ronnie Lane in his mobile studio
On the face of it, this seems an unlikely album to have emerged from a mobile studio, and in fact it was made at an unlikely location, too. Ronnie Lane's Mobile (known as the LMS) was parked in Battersea, south-west London for much of the recording of Quadrophenia, in an urban jungle outside a still uncompleted Ramport Studios, which The Who were in the process of building.

Ronnie Lane, the ex-Faces bass player, had chosen an American Airstream trailer for his mobile studio, and Bad Company, Led Zeppelin (notably on Physical Graffiti), Rick Wakeman, and Eric Clapton were just some of the musicians who would make excellent use of it. Of all the British golden-era mobiles, Lane's was one of the most successful.
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There were many impressive albums recorded using mobile studios outfitted with Helios consoles, and there were more mobiles than we have space to include here, among them Jethro Tull's Maison Rouge, Virgin's Manor Mobile, and Mickie Most's RAK.

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By the late '90s, however, the era of the truck was coming to an end. Relatively inexpensive and highly portable digital equipment and computers meant that the need for a large studio on wheels was passing.

That's why I put this together, basically to have a no excuses, go anywhere tracking, and mixing, system....based on my love of all those British Mobile trucks and the GREAT RECORDS recorded thru those WONDERFUL Helios consoles!

I owned one of these, briefly, in the early eighties. It was hard to cut on because of the iso-loop transport. Hard to describe in words. On an Ampex or Studer, the relatively linear tape path made it easy to release the tape tension, pull the tape off the heads and place it in the splice block to cut. On a 3M, even though it handled tape well and was as easy to mark as any other brand, getting the tape out of the path and down on the block was more tricky, with a lot of slack tape hanging around. The entrance/exit idler wheels got in the way, among other things. Also, on an Ampex, you could mount the block on top of the head stack cover. There was no convenient place to put the block on a 3M. Search for pics of an M79 and you’ll see what I mean.