FEATURE:
Never Torn and Frayed…
The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. at Fifty
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EVEN though…
IN THIS PHOTO: Keith Richards and Mick Jagger on tour in America with The Rolling Stones in 1972
I have written about The Rolling Stones’ 10th studio album, Exile on Main St., before, it is fifty on 12th May. I wanted to look ahead to a huge anniversary. It is unusual for bands to hit a peak ten albums in. The Rolling Stones were on a very hot streak that sort of slowed on the following album, Goats Head Soup (1973). Before that, they put out a string of albums with their best material on. I feel Exile on Main St. is the band’s greatest album. I am not sure whether a fiftieth anniversary release is planned. I am going to source some articles and reviews for an album that took The Rolling Stones to a new peak in 1972. Exile on Main St. is seen as one of the most astonishing albums ever. Udiscovermusic.com told the story of the album in a feature back in 2020:
“The celebrated circumstances of the making of this storied double-album were so challenging, and its gestation so drawn-out, that few Stones diehards could have imagined how Exile would claim such an exalted place in their history. It took its name, with knowing irony, for the band’s own, enforced tax exile status from their own country. This started immediately after they finished a UK tour at London’s Roundhouse in March 1971.
“You were very resentful about having to leave your own country, because that’s really what it came to,” said Keith Richards to this writer, in a Sunday Times feature at the time of the deluxe reissue of Exile in 2010. “Yeah, you could have stayed and made tuppence out of every pound,” he joked, of the punishing tax laws that forced the Stones to relocate. “Thanks a lot, pals.”
“It was the only thing to do,” added Charlie Watts. “What do they call it, a break in earnings? It worked out, thank goodness.” Both he and Bill Wyman settled in France. “My family were very happy there, and I was.”
The Stones began sessions for songs that finished on the album at Mick Jagger’s Stargroves estate as early as 1969. They continued at Olympic Studios in London. But Exile was chiefly recorded, with considerable difficulty, at Richards’ Nellcote villa in the south of France. The challenges were myriad, from sheer audiophonic limitations to endless delays caused by the Stones’ lifestyle of the time.
‘It was magical’
The sessions were captured in their celebrated and much-used Rolling Stones mobile truck, but only after certain modifications. Wyman, describing the villa in the Sunday Times piece, said: “It was very Mediterranean, and very beautiful, on top of this point with its own boat. When Keith rented it, the garden was very overgrown, so it was magical.
“It was fantastically exotic, with palm trees. We had to saw a couple of them down to get the truck [the Rolling Stones Mobile] in to record. We ran the cables down into various rooms that we tried sound in.”
“The basement was the strangest place,” Richards said in the same article. “It was large, but it was broken up into cubicles, it kind of looked like Hitler’s bunker. You could hear the drums playing, for instance, but it would take you a while to find Charlie’s cubicle.”
Mick Jagger, remembering the coterie that surrounded the Stones, added: “Everyone’s life was full of hangers-on. Some of them were great fun, they’re all good for a bit, but when you really come down to it, you don’t want them around, because they just delay everything.
‘It’s a rock‘n’roll environment’
“But that was the lifestyle then. It was just another way of living. There’s a lot of people with a lot more hangers-on now than we ever had. There was lots of drugs and drinking and carrying on. But you know, it’s not a factory. It’s not a mill in the north of England. It’s a rock‘n’roll environment.”
But from such unpromising circumstances came a record that continued the Stones’ blinding run of form of the era. Released on May 12, 1972, it went to No.1 on both sides of the Atlantic — their sixth chart-topper in their own, temporarily estranged country —and in many other countries from Spain to Canada. It was certified platinum in the US by 2000, and the chart-topping deluxe reissue went platinum in the UK.
Lenny Kaye, reviewing Exile on its first release, admired its “tight focus on basic components of the Stones’ sound as we’ve always known it, knock-down rock and roll stemming from blues, backed with a pervading feeling of blackness that the Stones have seldom failed to handle well”.
I want to repeat myself a little regarding the chronology. A superb double album that is among the rawest and most electric The Rolling Stones released, it seemed to have this special meaning for Keith Richards. The Guardian nod to this in a 2010 piece (a year when Exile on Main St. was remastered):
“As summer turned to autumn, people started drifting away from Nellcôte and, in November 1971, Richards and Pallenberg followed suit. The album was eventually finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary, Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute, including the album's first single, "Tumbling Dice", which was composed "after I sat down with the housekeeper and talked about gambling". The words to another gambling song, the frenetic "Casino Boogie", were created by Jagger and Richards in the cut-up mode made famous by William Burroughs, which gives a lie to the notion that the line about "kissing cunt in Cannes" refers to an episode in Jagger's notoriously promiscuous sex life.
Jagger also denied recently that "Soul Survivor" was about his relationship with Keith Richards during the making of Exile. On it, he sings the line, "You're gonna be the death of me".
In places, Exile on Main St does indeed sound, in the best possible way, like an album made by a bunch of drunks and junkies who were somehow firing on all engines. Jim Price and Bobby Keys's horns are an integral part of the dirty sound, as is Nicky Hopkins's rolling piano. Songs such as the galloping opener, "Rocks Off", surely about the effects of a heroin hit, and "All Down the Line" are messily powerful, with vocals fading in and out of focus and the group kicking up a storm underneath. "Tumbling Dice" features one of the greatest opening gear changes in rock'n'roll and a swagger that carries all before it.
In one way, the double album, housed in Robert Frank's contact sheet-style cover, is Keith Richards's swan song of sorts, a final blast of rock'n'roll energy before he descended into a protracted heroin addiction that would often make him seem – and sound – disconnected from the rest of the group during live shows. After Exile, Jagger carried the weight and, despite some great moments on subsequent albums including Goat's Head Soup and Black and Blue, the Stones would never sound so sexy, so raucous and abandoned, so low-down and dirty. Neither, though, would anyone else. By the time punk came and went and indie rock had taken hold, the mix of sexiness and sassiness that the Stones at their best epitomised had disappeared entirely from rock music. So had the kind of survival instinct that the group drew on when the going got tough.
"The Stones really felt like exiles," Richards says. "It was us against the world now. So, fuck you! That was the attitude." You can still hear it, loud and clear, on this messy, inchoate, rock'n'roll masterpiece; the Rolling Stones in excelsis”.
A near-perfect album has, unsurprisingly, received nothing but acclaim since its release. I think Exile on Main St. has got five stars or near right across the board! One of the reasons why it remains so popular is that it keeps fresh and has not dated at all. With the band at the top of their game, you can feel and hear the excitement, energy and inspiration in every track. This is what AllMusic said in their review of a masterpiece:
“Greeted with decidedly mixed reviews upon its original release, Exile on Main St. has become generally regarded as the Rolling Stones' finest album. Part of the reason why the record was initially greeted with hesitant reviews is that it takes a while to assimilate. A sprawling, weary double album encompassing rock & roll, blues, soul, and country, Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new. Taking the bleakness that underpinned Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers to an extreme, Exile is a weary record, and not just lyrically. Jagger's vocals are buried in the mix, and the music is a series of dark, dense jams, with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor spinning off incredible riffs and solos. And the songs continue the breakthroughs of their three previous albums. No longer does their country sound forced or kitschy -- it's lived-in and complex, just like the group's forays into soul and gospel. While the songs, including the masterpieces "Rocks Off," "Tumbling Dice," "Torn and Frayed," "Happy," "Let It Loose," and "Shine a Light," are all terrific, they blend together, with only certain lyrics and guitar lines emerging from the murk. It's the kind of record that's gripping on the very first listen, but each subsequent listen reveals something new. Few other albums, let alone double albums, have been so rich and masterful as Exile on Main St., and it stands not only as one of the Stones' best records, but sets a remarkably high standard for all of hard rock”.
In finishing, I wanted to drop in Entertainment Weekly’s 2010 review of Exile on Main St. Even if you are not a devoted fan of The Rolling Stones, one has to respect and connect with the quality and importance of the music! It is an album that we will be discussing centuries from now:
“The greatest Rock & Roll Band in the World has not always shown the greatest skill when choosing which tunes to put on albums. After all, these are the folks who sat on ”Start Me Up” for years before sticking it on 1981’s Tattoo You.
So fans’ mouths were set a-watering by the news that the group would reissue its classic 1972 album, Exile on Main Street, with 10 previously unheard bonus tracks from the same era. And if the songs — which have been overhauled to varying degrees by producers Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Don Was — are of lesser quality than, say, Exile high point ”Tumbling Dice,” there are several that certainly deserve to be heard. ”Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren)” is an excellent piece of loose-limbed funk. ”I’m Not Signifying” boasts a nice bluesy swagger. And lament ”Following the River” is a genuine tearjerker, although its shiny presentation — which includes newly recorded Jagger vocals — is far removed from the atmospheric murkiness of the original collection.
Some other songs, including a Richards-sung version of Exile number ”Soul Survivor,” are of more archaeological interest. It also seems rich that the ”super deluxe edition” features a half-hour film containing footage from the forthcoming documentary Stones in Exile, rather than the doc itself. Literally rich, given that the deluxe version, which also includes the original Exile on vinyl, costs more than $100. But the basic package is an essential purchase that rescues a clutch of terrific tracks from their 38-year Exile exile. Original album: A+”.
Ahead of its fiftieth anniversary on 12th May, I wanted to spend some time with a very special album. It is one of those undeniably faultless albums that should be preserved for all time. Even though The Rolling Stones did not hit the same high on albums after 1972, that is not to say they did not get close before that (albums such as 1971’s Sticky Fingers is another masterpiece) are not worth exploring. Such a staggeringly strong and well-aged album, Exile on Main St. is…
NEVER going to feel torn or frayed.