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Exile On Main Street

Bill Janowitz
 2006

The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc

80 Maiden Lane, New York NY 10038

The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd

The Tower Building, 11 York Road London, SE1 7NX

www.continuumbooks.com

Copyright © 2005 Bill Janowitz

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written
permission of the publishers.
Contents

Acknowledgements
PART I

PART II
Rocks Off
Rip This Joint

Shake Your Hips

Casino Boogie
Tumbling Dice

Sweet Virginia
Torn and Frayed
Loving Cup

Happy
Turd on the Run

Ventilator Blues
I Just Want to See His Face

Let It Loose

All Down the Line

Stop Breaking Down

Shine a Light
Soul Survivor
Outro

Bibliography
Acknowledgements

Thanks to David Barker for giving me a shot, and to Chris Woodsta, Tom
Erlewine, and all the folks over at Allmusic.com, where I first contributed
some song reviews from Exile on Main St. I am very grateful for the
interviews that Al Perkins, Bobby Whitlock, Graham Parker, and John Van
Hamersveld granted me. Thanks also to Dominique Tarle, whose book of
photography and accompanying text, Exile, depicting and describing the
making of the album, was a uniquely valuable source for my research. Ian
McPherson's www.timeisonourside.com was also particularly helpful in
culling quotes and data. And of course, thanks to my wife Laura St. Clair
and daughter Lucy for allowing me the time and providing me the support
to take on the project. I also express my gratitude to Gary Smith, Joyce
Linehan, Tom Johnston, Paul Kolderie, Mike O'Malley, and Mike Gent, all
of whom helped this project along. And thanks to my parents, William P.
and Rosemarie E. Janovitz, for their gifts of Exile on Main St. and my first
guitar.

Also available in this series:

Dusty in Memphis, by Warren Zanes

Forever Changes, by Andrew Hultkrans

Harvest, by Sam Inglis

The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society, by Andy Miller

Meat Is Murder, by Joe Pernice

The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, by John Cavanagh

Abba Gold, by Elisabeth Vincentelli

Electric Ladyland, by John Perry

Unknown Pleasures, by Chris Ott

Sign '0' the Times, by Michaelangelo Matos

The Velvet Underground and Nico, by Joe Harvard
Let It Be, by Steve Matteo

Live at the Apollo, by Douglas Wolk

Aqualung, by Allan Moore

OK Computer, by Dai Griffiths
Let It Be, by Colin Meloy

Led Zeppelin IV, by Erik Davis

Armed Forces, by Franklin Bruno

Grace, by Daphne Brooks

Loveless, by Mike McGonigal
Murmur, by J. Niimi

Pet Sounds, by Jim Fusilli

Ramones, by Nicholas Rombes

Forthcoming in this series:

Born in the USA, by Geoff Himes

Endtroducing. . . , by Eliot Wilder

In the Aeroplane over the Sea, by Kim Cooper
London Calling, by David Ulin

Low, by Hugo Wilcken

Kick out the Jams, by Don McLeese

The Notorious Byrd Brothers, by Ric Menck

PART I

The single greatest rock & roll record of all time, okay? Don't send me any
letters, and hold your calls. I can almost see you holding up and waving
your Beatles records, your Pet Sounds, dusty old LPs in faded jackets,
worthy contenders all, I am sure. Brilliant pop records, masterpieces even.
But not the greatest, most soulful, rock & roll record ever made. That is
Exile on Main St, somehow even more glorious 30-odd years later, in its
faded and yellowed sleeve, worn-in like a baseball mitt or torn and frayed
like your favourite jeans. It is a seamless distillation of perhaps all the
essential elements of rock & roll up to 1971, if not beyond. Not a pastiche,
mind you, but a powerful cocktail that keeps you coming back.
What is it missing? Some electronic bleeps? Early Moog sounds? Some
dissonant metallic screeching, pretentious monotone vocals, and barely
audible "poetry"? Yeah, I know, there is a whole plethora of new ideas that
have brought rock & roll forward. Or is there? When my iPod randomly
shuffles from the Stones' "Ventilator Blues" to Radiohead's "The Gloaming
(Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold)" into the Band's "Yazoo Street
Scandal" (the Music From Big Pink out-take), and then into Howlin' Wolf’s
"Dorothy Mae," it all makes sense. All of these songs, spanning six
different decades of pop music and three different countries, are basically
blues numbers written and performed by masters. In lesser hands, the
postmodern electronic percussion and noise that Radiohead uses would
simply sound gratuitous. On "The Gloaming," the techniques are simply
tools to add a fresh perspective, the same way the Band used Garth
Hudson's otherworldly organ to haunting effect on "Yazoo Street Scandal"
or Wolfs dusty growl scares us to death with its implied desperation. All are
paranoid, urgent, and insistent numbers. As Mick Jagger said in 1972
regarding "electronic music," "The real experiment is what you want to say.
You can express a very freaky or experimental idea in a strict framework, or
you can express a very trite, boring, oft-repeated idea within an
experimental framework."

The most important growth spurts in rock & roll have largely come in form,
style, and presentation— shirting dynamics, instrumentation, packaging,
and of course, clothes and hair. The English music press in particular (the
weeklies, anyway) has always interpreted new hairstyles as indications of
exciting new musical forms, and young bands continue to buy into it
wholesale. Keith Richards' greatness has never resided, Samson-like, in his
self-styled hair, though it certainly adds to the allure. And the packaging of
Exile on Main St. was designed as brilliantly as most Stones projects. But it
is the music within that lasts decades later.
Don't get me wrong, I am a child of the punk rock era and many of those
bands are my heroes. I also love the elements of late-70s punk rock and
disco that informed the Stones' 1978 LP Some Girls and seemed to
reenergize the band. And I totally dig the elements of Philly-soul and even
the fake reggae that Jagger adopted for Black and Blue. Yet, though the
Stones had passed through various experimental phases, they've always had
songs—even when they were cover versions— that harnessed the pure
emotion and raw fury of the blues and early rock & roll. The Beatles were
amazingly polished and sounded like fully-hatched professionals by the
time they were unleashed on the American public. By comparison, the very
early Stones were amateurs— fresh, sexy, swaggering amateurs to be sure,
but amateurs nevertheless. It took Andrew Loog Oldham, their manager at
the time, locking Jagger and Richards in a room together to get them to
compose their first original song, "Tell Me," in 1964. Or so goes the legend.
But what the Stones did have, even back then, was an undeniable attitude
and an intrinsic understanding of American blues, soul, country, and rock &
roll idioms. Along with many of their British Invasion colleagues, they
exploded from the clubs of the 1960s with the zeal of converts. The Stones
had not only studied those American records, they got them. And they spit
them back out with authority and righteousness, adding their own flavour;
they sprayed them back out at the majority of American teenagers who had
not really heard these musical forms in their original, raw stages. They
became blues, soul, and R&B singers, not merely copyists or thieves
(unlike, say, Led Zeppelin). The Stones paid tribute to their influences
musically and literally, dragging Howlin' Wolf onto the sets of pop music
television shows, for example. But neither were they and their colleagues
simply ambassadors; they subsequently made the music their own—almost
immediately, as in the case of the Beatles. It seems to have been the
attitude, the swagger, and the braggadocio of blues as much as the songs
themselves that appealed to these young men. But it was the song writing
that made the Rolling Stones legends and gave them longevity, sustaining
them generations beyond their teen idol phase.

By the late 60s, the Velvet Underground had been making maverick stylistic
musical leaps and offering challenging lyrical conceit, and Iggy and the
Stooges were ramping up the volume and showmanship, and stripping away
anything else peripheral to the music. But these were just variations on what
the Stones had been spinning into hits for about a decade. Perhaps those
acts reminded the Stones that they were best at the primordial and that the
ambitious, the Kinksian, satirical asides of Between the Buttons and the
drugged-out, "we can do it too" of Their Satanic Majesty's Request LPs
were for the most part the sorts of experiments best left to others. The
Stones were never convincing at psychedelia. Even the psychedelic-era
"Jumpin' Jack Flash" is the sort of quintessential blues-riff-rocking that
defined the Stones. In 1972, the pre-punk energy of the Stones was still on
display in the full-throttle amphetamine rush of "Rip This Joint," about as
breakneck and primal as almost any version of "White Light White Heat" or
"Raw Power." It was a give and take. "I mean, even we've been influenced
by the Velvet Underground," Jagger told an interviewer in 1977. "I'll tell
you exactly what we pinched from (Lou Reed) too. You know 'Stray Cat
Blues?' The whole sound and the way it's paced, we pinched from the very
first Velvet Underground album. You know, the sound on 'Heroin.' Honest
to God, we did!"

Reed, Cale, and company were crafting epic 15-minute guitar drones and
singing reportage of drugs, S&M, etcetera as early as 1966 and '67. They
were all edge. This darkness—the unrefined, big repetitive guitar-riff, Bo
Diddley drone, and leering vocal bluster, this blues influence—is always
there in the Stones, even if it seems they have drifted at times. It might have
taken the Rolling Stones until 1969 to let loose with the long-form sturm-
und-drang of "Midnight Rambler," but the danger has always been present
in the blues. The bleak decadence of not just the African-American blues,
but also the traditional European sort explored by Brecht and Weil, Andre
Gide, Thomas Mann, and others, is very much on display on Exile.
So even though Joe Strummer declared in 1977 "no Beatles, no Stones, no
Elvis in 77," it was probably borne as much out of the frustration of a jaded
fan in the face of the borderline self-parody of his erstwhile heroes and their
increasing musical irrelevance as it was self-serving sloganeering for
publicity, an angry young man's way to distance himself from the previous
generation. In fact, an older, wiser Strummer told Uncut magazine in 2002,
"I like every period of the Stones, really..."
By the late 1970s, the Stones' collective exploits, their jet-setting, bed-
hopping, syringe-stabbing, powder-sniffing ways, were no longer
compelling enough for many of their fans as extraneous subject matter to
keep their records afloat for very long. The decadence of rock music's
aristocracy was bleeding ennui into what many fans felt were half-hearted
efforts. Let's not let them take the music down with them, right? Strummer's
sloganeering, or at least the sentiment behind it, seemed to have some
effect: the Stones fired back with their leanest and meanest record in years,
Some Girls. And the lyrics harkened back to the torn, frayed, and tattered
demon's life-sway that actually seemed inspired and, yes, urgent. It
reminded people of Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St., early 1970s
records in which the Stones were bearing witness to the promise of a
generation slipping away into irrelevance, casualties dropping off, "the
demon life" catching them in its sway. And then, even as they watched and
warned, from the point of view of many of their fans, they succumbed, as
helpless as Mick Jagger's protagonist in "Rocks Off": "I want to shout but I
can hardly speak."

Exile is not the most pristine recording, but that criticism is far overplayed.
If you were to talk to music producers or engineers (not that I would
recommend that), you would be hard-pressed to find many who even say it
sounds like a decent recording. "Soupy" and "swampy" are two well-used
adjectives one sees when reading about the album. This is more than an
exaggeration, though, and yet still such impressions of the record persist. It
is not a collection of virtuoso performances. Though there are some
continuous themes, it is not, as far as I can tell, a concept record. Aside
from, or even in spite of, its length, Exile does not seem to reflect any
extraordinary grandiose ambition to transcend rock and take it to another
level, man. On the contrary, it seems to revel in self-imposed limitations. In
fact, it sometimes sounds ancient. Other times, it sounds completely current
and modern. It sounds, at various points, underground and a little
experimental, and at others, classic, and even nostalgic.

Exile is exactly what rock & roll should sound like: a bunch of musicians
playing a bunch of great songs in a room together, playing off of each other;
musical communion, sounds bleeding into each other, snare drum rattling
away even while not being hit, amps humming, bottles falling, feet
shuffling, ghostly voices mumbling on- and off-mike, whoops of
excitement, shouts of encouragement, performances without a net, masks
off, urgency. It is the kind of record that goes beyond the songs themselves
to create a monolithic sense of atmosphere. It conveys a sense of time and
place and spirit, yet it is timeless. Its influence is still heard today. Keith
Richards has said, tongue in cheek, the record "was the first grunge record."
Here is the sound of not just the Stones, but of rock & roll as a whole
settling into the 1970s, as the music grew up. It's the sound of maturity, not
in the sense of grown-up hippies picking up acoustic guitars and gazing
inward soul-searchingly and all that, but in the sense of a once awkward
and rebellious adolescent finally becoming comfortable within himself. Oh
yeah, this is what I am, should have always been, and should forever be.
While Exile contains some undeniably classic song-writing and a genuine
hit or two, much of the record seems filled with happy accidents and
inspired spontaneity. Producer Paul Q. Kolderie (Belly; Radiohead; Pixies),
who I worked with on Buffalo Tom records, was fourteen at the time of
Exile's release. "It hit me: the look of it, the sprawling, it seemed like so
much, you could just get lost in it," he told me (I ignored my own caution
about talking to producers).
It just seemed so vibey and just groovy and weird, and no rock album, to
me, had sounded like that. . . . You know I was just getting a full blast of
this, like, "what the fuck, this ain't the Beatles." "Tumbling Dice" that
summer was coming out of every window and every car. It was so awesome
that they make a record up that was so ramshackle and so rucked up and
come up with a song like that, to nail it down with—I don't know if it was
number one but it was a huge hit—and such a good single and such a
classic, they still play it to this day.
Though Exile on Main St. ended up being the key that unlocked a whole
world for me, it was not my first Stones record. I had inherited from my
next door neighbours some old singles: a rope (literally) of 1960s, mostly
British Invasion 45s, with a few choice light-blue London label Stones
sides, the twine running through the wide holes on the discs, looped and
knotted and about to be put out for trash pickup. I did not have the
advantage of older siblings to pass down their music to me. But that made
the sense of personal discovery only more fulfilling. I also inherited a few
mono Stones LPs like Out of Our Heads from some other neighbours. And
then I went on to buy and build my own Stones collection. I think I had
Sticky Fingers, Let It Bleed, certainly Hot Rocks, and some others before I
finally attained the holy grail of Exile. I needed those more easily digestible
single-disc LPs and greatest hits collections—each rich with actual or
possible hits—before I could take on the sprawling, imposing, and
impenetrable Exile.
By the time I was thirteen, the Stones were seemingly ubiquitous in my life:
posters on my wall, popping up on my favourite show, Saturday Night Live,
in People magazine at my barber (who I visited far too often for my
preference). One essential cog I was missing was Exile on Main St., that
enigma of an album under a black and white collage, with the title and the
band's name barely legible, scrawled in shaky handwriting—a la Neil
Young, another hero of my early teens. The album was only a few years old
at that point, but it seemed ancient. Six years is a long time when they
stretch from kindergarten to sixth grade.

Somehow, on Christmas Day 1978, instead of me tearing open the gift

wrapping to reveal the coveted Exile, it was my younger brother, Paul, who
did. I was convinced this was a mistake, even though he was intent on
imitating my every move at the time and might well have asked for it
himself. I don't remember what kind of arguments ensued or what pleas I
made to my parents. I am certain that they were as dramatic and logical as
anything Oliver Wendell Holmes ever laid down ("Ladies and gentlemen of
the jury, I beseech you . . . "). My brother, though, was pleased with the gift.
He was fast becoming a rock & roll connoisseur as well. I was left to
wheeling and dealing directly with him. Almost immediately, I
manoeuvred, planning and executing a coup, a Manhattan-from-the-natives
style land grab from my younger brother that would make me look like a
record-collecting Donald Trump.

Unflinchingly, I traded seven or eight of my Zeppelin records to my brother

for that one Stones record. I did not think twice. At the time, it was a win-
win. To this day, we both feel it was like a good baseball trade in which
both sides get what they need at the time and walk away satisfied. Of
course, I've since gone back and purchased copies of all those lost Zeppelin
records on CD (I just listen to Plant's voice and try to ignore lines like "if
there's a bustle in your hedgerow don't be alarmed now / it's just a
sprinkling for the May Queen"); but all of them together will never hold a
candle to the single greatest rock & roll record of all time.

I held the reward in my hands, looked over the artwork, mesmerized by the
strange world it promised within. What seemed to be a chopped-up collage
of circus freaks was on one side, and on the other were film frames with the
faces of the Rolling Stones themselves—a none-too-subtle mirror-image
juxtaposition. After all, the Stones were freakish outsiders—as long-haired
threats to decency in their nascent period; as young Brits interpreting
American musical idioms; then off to France as tax exiles, weary from the
pressure of the English authorities. Inside, on the gatefold and individual
album sleeves within, the collage continued: still shots containing 1950s-era
scenes of strange Americana—dim jukeboxes, saluting veterans, more film
clips of the band eating, yawning, holding up violent tabloid headlines—
juxtaposed with shots of cryptic bits of lyrics, lines like "I gave you the
diamonds / you gave me disease," "got to scrape the shit right off your
shoes," and "I don't want to talk about Jesus / I just want to see his face."

If Exile on Main St. set the bar for what rock & roll should sound like, the
album packaging established a standard of what it might look like: raw,
enigmatic, spooky, black and white images of the band in various settings.
Here is a prime example of the tragic downsizing of artwork that became
inevitable as CDs edged out twelve-inch vinyl albums. Much of the concept
and the photography itself comes from Robert Frank, a Swiss-born emigre
to the United States whose groundbreaking collection The Americans got
right at the broken heart of America and its people—in urban and rural
settings both.
Look a little closer: The "collage" on the front of Exile is actually a single
shot, apparently from the wall of a New York tattoo parlour, a picture taken
by Frank. The photos—some of which are featured in the Exile on Main St.
layout—were taken on a cross-country drive in 1955 and '56 in a used car,
funded in part by a Guggenheim Fellowship. The resulting book was highly
influential in both form and content. If not the first, The Americans was one
of the earliest examples of a photography book that dedicated a whole page
to each photograph, with blank pages alternating opposite. The pictures are
ostensibly taken in a verité style, but the results are as subjective as the
most affecting works of art, particularly poetry. Frank has said, "When
people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they
want to reread a line of a poem." As Jack Kerouac wrote in his introduction
to the published collection, "Robert Frank, Swiss, unobtrusive, nice, with
that little camera he raises and snaps with one hand he sucked a sad poem
right out of America onto film, taking rank among the tragic poets of the
world."
Kerouac also writes in his introduction, that the pictures remind him of
"that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the
music comes out of a jukebox or a funeral," which dovetails nicely with
Exile on Main St. Frank met Kerouac at a party in New York soon after the
French publication of The Americans (an American publisher could not be
secured until a year after the French publication). In photographs such as
"Rooming House—Bunker Hill, Los Angeles," Frank was providing a
photographic parallel to the works not just of the Beats, but echoing back to
Beat predecessors like author John Fante (Wait Until Spring, Bandint).

It is perfect that the highly impressionistic author and poet Kerouac was
chosen to pen the introduction to Frank's groundbreaking work, just as it
seems so fitting that the Stones chose Frank to provide the album's artwork.
Frank's is a visual—and the Stones' an aural and musical—travelogue
across America and another "sad little poem right out of America." Frank's
photos are deeply moving, searing their image onto the mind's retina of the
viewer, particularly for an introspective suburban adolescent seeing them
for the first time, freshly exposed to that "other" America that it sometimes
takes an outsider's eye to see. Later, books by Diane Arbus and works by
Frank's mentor Walker Evans would find their way into my hands, but I was
a decidedly unworldly Long Island teenager hungry to discover what Greil
Marcus later called "that old, weird, America" in his book, Invisible
Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
Frank, another obvious exile, became known for his ability to virtually
disappear, to blend in with his surroundings, capturing with his small
camera the faces, the tiny dramas, and the surface Americana that he
observed. Small things taken for granted in America fascinated him: signs,
cars, clothes, attitudes. Of one incident with a sheriff who runs him out of
town, he says, "We think that only happens in films."

The pictures in The Americans tend to concentrate on small spaces. A shot

of an empty bar in Las Vegas where a boy in a loud printed shirt stares into
the glow of a jukebox—which the Stones used in the Exile artwork—looks
claustrophobic, as the daylight tries to seep in through the porthole
windows of the doors while the bar seems always nocturnal by nature,
fighting against the outside world. Almost everything is dimly lit, and
everything is in black and white. Even the exterior shots, the facades of
brick buildings, have that Edward Hopper-like melancholy light. There is an
insular feeling to the book as whole, a hemmed-in quality that flies in the
face of the romantic vision of an America "from sea to shining sea," with
wind-swept plains of "amber waves of grain." Instead we find these small
places, a gothic America of funerals, crosses, stormy moor-like hills; with
characters reminiscent of "Eleanor Rigby" grasping at fleeting moments of
simple happiness and human interaction, as the clock of the human
condition ticks on; "lives of quiet desperation," with only photographs
offering some measure of immortality to these anonymous souls. As
Kerouac notes in his introduction "you end up finally not knowing any
more whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin."

In Domique Tarle's indispensable book Exile — another collection of

stunning photographs, taken by Tarle while present at the Exile on Main St.
sessions— Rolling Stones Records honcho Marshall Chess, son of Chess
Records founder Leonard Chess, recalls: "Over the years with the Stones
we'd allow in writers and photographers—the right ones, those who would
fit in with our scene. People like Robert Frank, who Mick turned me on to
after seeing his book The Americans. Robert became known as the father of
realism because he'd become so invisible that people would do anything in
front of him. We chose him to do the Exile cover, which he shot in Super
8."
John Van Hamersveld was gracious in sharing with me of some of the
logistics in putting the Exile on Main St. package together. John had been a
graphic artist within the rock & roll counter-culture that blossomed in Los
Angeles in the mid-1960s. After designing concert posters for Pinnacle
Promoters and movie posters such as his classic for the surf film Endless
Summer, he moved into album cover art, designing the Magical Mystery
Tour LP for the Beatles. In 1970 he created the Johnny Deco (a.k.a. "Johnny
Face") poster, with a comic book-like smiling guy with prominent lips,
which he feels influenced the famous Stones' "Tongue-and-Lip" logo,
designed by John Pasche and Jagger, which debuted in the artwork for
Sticky Fingers (Jagger had been photographed wearing a "Johnny Face" T-
shirt earlier).
In 1971, beginning to focus more on building on his success in designing
album covers, Van Hamersveld met with photographer and art director for
United Artists Records, Norman Seeff, a "beatnik-like artist from
Johannesburg, South Africa." Seeff had a deal with the Stones for putting
together a songbook. The two got the call to come and meet with Jagger and
Richards at the Bel Air villa where the Stones were staying in Los Angeles
while they put the finishing touches on Exile at Sunset Sound. As Van
Hamersveld wrote in his "Imaging the Stones" postscript to Tarle's book:

As I was there sitting next to Jagger, Robert Frank walks into the room with
a small super eight millimetre Canon camera. I knew of him from a meeting
in New York from 1968. After I left he takes Jagger to downtown Los
Angeles to film him on the real seedy parts of Main Street.

Most fans know that the Rolling Stones romanticized 1950s America, much
in the same way people like me respond to the Stones heyday of the '60s
and 70s, and Exile in particular. Van Hamersveld told me that the band saw
themselves as carrying the torch of not just the blues artists they emulated,
but of all sorts of artists, including those associated with the Beats:
You must understand now, Robert Frank was 50 years old in 1972, there
standing in the living room of a Bel Air, Mediterranean villa, lush, and old
world, they, the Stones image, of wealth, success, as pop culture post
dandies, post hippies, now bluesmen looking back into the '50s, (Marshall)
Chess and his connections. Frank the photographer, holding the 8mm
camera, under his arm, is there now an old hipster from the '50s, as an artist
from NYC. At the villa were Keith and Mick, as they outwardly, loved
Frank for his connections to the beat attitude, and smoking pot then with
Ginsberg. They were the Beat! We seated there on the couches, we were in
our thirties, the new hip, he as a father figure . ..
Jagger knew how to sell it all. He has always been a student of American
pop culture in general, with a keen awareness of cutting edge artists. As
with Elvis Presley before them, the Stones had already shown a well-
developed ability to co-opt and make marketable the underground and raw
street culture. Unlike Presley, however, who was down in the trenches, born
poor in the South, Jagger was an effete upper-middle-class kid from the
London suburbs, who had spent his adolescence listening to blues, soul,
country, and rock & roll records. Somehow, with his earthier guitar-slinging
foil, Richards, as a catalyst, he has been able to capture the essence of
American roots musical forms, so much so that he transitioned quickly from
a fan mimicking his idols to a genuinely adroit and influential soul singer
himself. Forget the "blue-eyed" qualifier; Jagger is a great soul and blues
singer in his own right. Take, for example, his performances on "Let It
Loose" as a gospel-informed soul ballad, or "All Down the Line" as a flip
side, a rave-up where Jagger's all-out performance might compete with
similar up-tempo numbers from Otis Redding, Don Covay, or any of his
Southern soul influences.

Presley, an early hero of Jagger's, was able to pull off similar feats a decade
or so prior, integrating and owning his influences and thus producing
something new. Yet while Presley grew up surrounded by African-
American culture, Jagger had to make due with hard-to-find, second-hand
sources. But like Presley, James Brown, and others, Jagger convincingly
concocted a beguiling mix of simmering macho bluesman sexuality cut
with a dose of androgyny—a heavier dose for Jagger than Elvis, but
perhaps not as much as, say, Little Richard, another key influence on the
Rolling Stones.

Is it any wonder, then, that Jagger not only understood how to sell the band
musically but visually as well? He had taken the baton from ex-manager
Andrew Loog Oldham, who had helped craft the Stones' early image as the
Beatles' dark-horse cousins. Keith recalls being attracted to Oldham in part
because, working under Brian Epstein, "he got together those very moody
pictures of (the Beatles) that sold them in the first place." In taking up the
reins from Oldham, Jagger was able to finesse the one-trick-pony, bad-boy
image into a somewhat more mature and multi-layered "bad young jet-
setting men" image—decadent rock & roll aristocrats. You know, the kind
of thing he sang about on their later return to roots, "Some Girls":

Well now we're respected in society

We don't worry about the things that we used to be

We're talking heroin with the President

Yes there's a problem, sir, but it can't be bent

"Royalty's having a baby," was a refrain often heard from a sneering Keith
Richards down in Nellcote, while Mick was off with Bianca during her
pregnancy, concurrent with the recording of Exile on Main St.

The Stones could still transmit the dirty feel of the underground outsider,
even as they were becoming the biggest band in the world. They weren't
Iggy and the Stooges or Lou and the Velvets; they had just outlasted the
Beatles and had to prove that they were not overstaying their welcome. But
the punters were dying for someone to carry it all on, to offer even a shred
of meaning to all the death and darkness that accompanied the end of the
1960s and the cynical blankness that was staring down at them from the
barrel of the 1970s. Van Hamersveld recalled Jagger's reaction to their
layout for the cover for the record when he brought it by Sunset Sound to
show to the band:
"They'll love it!" I clearly understand what he means: "They'll" is a clear
understanding of what the artist knows about his audience. This is pop
visual language, the assumption, and the reflection of the sideshow of the
inner business environment. The Crazy Business on display!
Frank took the Super 8 film of the band slumming down on Main Street in
seedy downtown Los Angeles, the city's version of Manhattan's Bowery.
Jagger told Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone while they were still out in
LA, Main Street is "real inner city," where "you can see pimps, knives
flashing." As Frank might have done decades prior, Jagger took Frank and
his movie camera and went out seeking a certain side of America: the
dangerous authentic street down on Main St. Remember: Jagger told
Marshall Chess that Frank was "the father of realism." The Stones were
after something: an early 1970s Zeitgeist.
So there, on the back cover and inner sleeves, is the band in various shots:
walking down the street, under porn arcade awnings, laughing.
Accompanying these shots are scrawled bits of lyrics, lines that don't even
necessarily correspond with the recorded versions, and more band shots, in
the repetition of the Super 8 film frames, adding an even more surreal tint, a
druggy trail. Central to the back cover is a shot of Jagger, yawning. Is it
weariness? Ennui? It enhances the hangover-sleepy languor of the record.
But we also see "buddies" Jagger and Richards practically arm-in-arm at the
microphone in the studio, warm light shining from underneath, a bottle of
Old Grand Dad whiskey clutched in Jagger's hands, a can of beer in Keith's.

If there is one photograph that was singularly responsible for my rock

fantasies, that made me know from an early age what I wanted to do and be,
eventually leading to my tenure in a band, it was that one. Just as in all the
live shots of the two of them in the classic pose, both singing at the same
microphone, there seems to be a relaxed camaraderie between the two
musicians. They look to be having a great time singing together. I wanted
nothing more than such simple pleasure. It seems many rock & rollers feel
the same. At times it seems like Aerosmith has modelled their whole image
on such photos of Jagger and Richards. And in my conversation with the
producer Paul Q. Kolderie, he brought the photo up as well, pointing out
that the way they looked distinguished the Stones from their rootsy rock &
roll peers, particularly from American bands. "The Stones seemed to be
cooking up their own English brew with it all and it had to do more with the
way they looked: the shaggy hair," explained Kolderie, recalling his
perspective as an impressionable fourteen-year-old. "And that picture on
Exile with Mick and Keith singing backup vocals—which is a picture taken
in L.A., right?— with the Old Grand Dad, and you think okay, this is the
life for me, pal. That and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas ruined my life
because they made it seem like the coolest thing you could do was just get
as wasted as possible." While the Stones were subscribing to a certain
tradition, a variation on that trekked by Frank and Kerouac and the like, the
band was also promoting their own rock & roll myth: A band of young
friends in their prime, living in a big mansion on the beach in France,
recording all night in the basement, chicks, drugs, and booze flowing,
having a blast every night. Well, perhaps the only part mythological was the
last bit. We all know about the love/hate relationship between the Glimmer
Twins. When you're an adolescent, though—as I was when I was having
these dreams of Exile rock grandeur— all you want to do is spend time with
your friends. How could spending every night with them jamming be
anything but a blast?
Well, all it took for me, when I finally got to taste a little bit of the rock &
roll fantasy, was maybe one year recording and touring before that romantic
notion of "a good time, all the time," as character Viv Savage so eloquently
put it in This is Spinal Tap, was thoroughly debunked. Six or twelve weeks
together, and your buddies and musical soulmates become your annoying
brothers, or your college dorm roommate and his girlfriend in for the
weekend: you just can't seem to escape them. And according to all accounts
of the making of Exile on Main St., that huge villa did start to feel awfully
claustrophobic and dysfunctional at times, particularly near the end of the
sessions.
And no one, no one, can look as "elegantly wasted" as Keith Richards,
captured by the right photographer. The cheesy snapshot photos that exist
from my time on the road show mostly bloated guys with eyes red not just
from booze, but also bad camera flashes, sitting in front of slimy deli trays
and German phallic graffiti in closets-cum-dressing rooms; not how I had
imagined it.
After Frank clipped up frames from his Super 8 film, Van Hamersveld was
in charge of putting all the pieces together. As he told me, "It seemed as if I
had become the artisan arranger, a design mystic that had dropped by to
give my blessing. This was the making, in a classic printmaking style of an
artful image for graphic history, as myth. All the parts and pieces made
sense." The postcards that came in the original album and subsequent CD
re-releases were from an ill-fated photo session with Seeff (Keith was late
and stumbled in the shots) that was considered for the album cover. "Make
postcards," is what an unapologetic Richards told Van Hamersveld and
Seeff, making an accordion-like movement with his hands. Some pens were
rounded up from the Flax art store and Jagger scrawled out the incomplete
credits—mistakes, oversights, and all.

The record changed from its previous working title of Tropical Disease to
its now famous name. "We were exiles and there was a certain spirit on that
album—you can throw us out but you can't get rid of us," recalled Keith
Richards in a 2002 interview for Mojo Magazine. "Who would understand
if we called it Exile on the Rue Des Bosches ? And since 1964 or '5 we'd
been spending nine months of every year in America, and a lot of the songs,
the things that come out, are things you've thought about on the road. It's all
American music basically—or if you want to take it all the way, it's all
African." Perhaps it is obvious to point out, but Frank himself was
essentially an exile on Main St., USA during his cross-country trip. The
Stones clearly identified with this, though they could never be flies on the
wall, not with all their fame. We can see this on display in the documentary
film that Frank made of the subsequent American tour in support of Exile.
The musicians stick out like exotic gypsies or extraterrestrials in hotel
lobbies, Southern juke joints, and the like.
Looking at Exile, we are supposed to believe that these Riviera tax refugees
spend their free time on seedy streets hanging with pimps in front of porn
theatres rather than on Mediterranean beaches. And, in fact, we do buy it.
We want to suspend our disbelief. And we can do so easily because the
music alone is so convincing. But it is a combination of memory, fantasy,
imagination, and the band's reality at the time that informs the record. As
Bill Wyman details in his book Stone Alone, the Stones had lived and
played in squalor in the early days. And Keith must still have been
frequenting some shady places from time to time in the quest to feed his
habit. In a Rolling Stone article documenting the Stones' "farewell tour" of
England in 1971, Robert Greenfield describes the same sort of sleazy
dressing rooms "filled with parasites" that Jagger sings about on "Torn and
Frayed."
More than a decade later, when Van Hamersveld met with John (Johnny
Rotten) Lydon to discuss providing the design for Public Image Limited's
1984 record This Is What You Want, Lydon admitted that the design of
Exile was influential to the rough, black and white, cut-up graphic look of
1970s punk rock. It seems this influence was deeper than the mere look of
the surface (scrawled writing, newspaper headlines, etc.). As Van
Hamersveld recalled, Lydon also made the point that the Exile artwork
taught the nascent punk rocker that the look of the cover art informs the
overall band image and prepares the listener for what he or she is about to
hear. So while the music certainly influences the decisions about how the
record should look, it actually works the other way as well; the artwork
informs the listener how to feel about the music it contains.
“Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new,”
Van Hamersveld points out. And punk rock, especially early punk rock, was
nothing really new at the base of it; it was all the same three chords and
rock & roll vocals, albeit exaggerated in delivery and perhaps a bit more
raw in form than most mainstream rock of the era. Lydon, and especially
the Sex Pistols' manager, Malcom McClaren, had learned that it was all
about packaging and marketing. John Hamersveld had learned that lesson
years before as a commercial artist and through working with rock artists
like the Stones. The latter were selling, or at least defining, a lifestyle for
him and his peers. He recalls taking stock of the "cultural landscape" as
1970 rolled around:

Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll has made its way into the pop language. Pop
Art's look of self-conscious innocence in the early sixties has changed by
the end of the decade to a slick, crafted image as a marketing tool for the
record companies. (Regarding) Keith: A lot of what I'd learned at art school
came home to roost. About selling a look, an attitude, an image—like what
kind of hair you wanted. By the seventies the Rolling Stones Tongue-and-
Lip design is the most sexual image in the media culture. Jagger's mouth
and words have become a symbol and registered trademark image to be
merchandised by 1971.
Anyone familiar with Keith Richards' interviews over the years, but
particularly and pointedly around the time of Mick Jagger's first solo
record, will be aware of how important the concept of the band is to Keith.
On Exile on Main St., the individual musical ego is sublimated for the good
of the whole. The sum of the parts is greater. Whenever he was pitched the
idea of doing a solo record, Andy Johns said Keith would brush it off. In
Keith Richards, Life as a Rolling Stone, by Barbara Cherone, Johns recalled
that he continued to pressure Keith with the idea, after all the sing-alongs at
Villa Nellcote and then more urgently after recording "Happy":
Keith started singing these cowboy songs and his voice was incredible. So I
said "Goddamn, Keith, when are you gonna make an album of your songs,
'cause it's so good." And Keith sorta went, "no, man." But I kept on at him
and I usually get my own way.
For a month I kept on without pressuring him too much, and in the end he
said, "Listen, if I made a fuckin' album of my own I'd only get all the boys
to play on it anyway. So it would be a fuckin' Rolling Stones album
wouldn't it? Why don't we get on with the Rolling Stones album we're
doing now?" That sort of stunned me.

If there was a gang mentality, an attitude of "we're all in this together"

before their self-imposed "exile" in France, the relationship as a group was
apparently cemented during the recording of Exile on Main St. Which is not
to say they all became one big happy family—but they were a family, albeit
a slightly dysfunctional one. After the heat of all the drug busts, the death of
Brian Jones, and now the tightening of the financial screws that came with
being in the top tax bracket, the band felt forced from their own country,
run out by the authorities. They had been at the butt-end of breathtakingly
poor business decisions and exploitative contracts—the most recent, with
Allen Klein, was the bad deal to end bad deals. Now they needed the help
of one of Jagger's society friends, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, to figure out
the pros and cons of becoming tax exiles. He recommended two years in
France.
"In a way it was a great thing for the band," Richards told Mojo magazine.
"Everybody had to look each other in the eye and say, 'All right, we'll do it
in exile, in France'... in a way I think it was when the Stones decided, we're
in this for a longer haul than anybody thought. Even ourselves."
The band members actually ended up quite dispersed, with Charlie Watts
near Avignon and the newly-weds Mick and Bianca Jagger in St. Tropez—
which apparently suited Bianca, who wished to keep herself distanced from
the project. Bill Wyman's longtime partner during these years, Astrid
Lundstrom, has said that up until the recording of Exile , the Stones and
their families rarely socialized outside of the band and related activities.
"The Stones only got together to work," she recalled. "But here, we were
suddenly all thrown together in a foreign country, having to see more of
each other." Wyman himself notes that when they first got down there, the
band did indeed socialize often and by choice. "On Saturday Keith would
arrive [at Wyman's place] with Anita and the kids, and there would be a few
hangers-on like Ahmet Ertegun who came over from America. And then
Mick would come by on his motorbike, and it was all very social, people
jumping in the pool with their clothes on, things like that."
Keith, his wife Anita Pallenberg, and their son Marlon ended up in the
grand 1899 Belle Epoque mansion, Villa Nellcote, in Villefranche-Sur-Mer,
down near Nice and Cannes. It was a tired old mansion, its glamour long
ago faded, but there was a stunning view of Ville-franche Harbour from its
wide tiered terrace. Long owned by the Bordes shipping family, it had been
used during World War II by the occupying German forces. Remnants of
this time were still evident: there were swastika grates over the vents and
suicide-morphine vials in the cellar (which were disposed of before Keith
could find them). The driveway led up to the house through a thick and lush
"jungle," which served well for the needed privacy. There was plenty of
space to spread out—sixteen rooms and a private beach. "It was one of
those places where you could go 'Yeah, I could live here!'" said Keith. But
important to our story are the three levels of cellar that would eventually be
jury-rigged into a recording studio.
Keith, long-time "sixth Stone" Ian Stewart, Bill Wyman, and others made
various excursions to scout out possible venues where they could record,
with the Rolling Stones Mobile Studio truck parked outside. The truck, with
its state of the art studio control room built in, had been used already by the
Stones for some of Sticky Fingers.

Dominique Tarle was a young French photographer who had befriended the
Stones on previous occasions, and he ingratiated himself into the Stones
scene full-time for the Exile on Main St. sessions, resulting in the
masterpiece book Exile, which captures not only his jaw-dropping photos,
but also a priceless oral history from various people on the scene at Nellcote
during that summer. "Keith told me that he was looking for a place where
he could store all the sound equipment and possibly somewhere they could
use it as well. So they started to look for a kind of theatre," Tarle recalled.
"He decided it was time to record an album and realized that maybe he was
sitting on the studio, as there were three storeys of cellar underneath his
house. So the Rolling Stones Mobile Unit was summoned down to
Nellcote."
Jo Bergman, who ran the band's office and acted as a liaison, says one of
the reasons they ended up at Keith's house is that they feared they would
never get him to some of the remote places they had been scouting. "At
least we can get him down in the basement," she recalled was the dominant
sentiment at the time. In his book Rolling with the Stones, Bill Wyman
recalls, regarding the studio at Nellcote, "we could guarantee Keith would
be there."
Fans of the Stones should be thankful for Tarle's pictures, which capture the
decadence of the house, the lifestyle, if not the grand scope of the place.
Like Robert Frank's photos, Tarle's tend toward the shadowy, the insular,
the intimate. He, too, is a fly on the wall in the dimly lit rooms, bottles and
bongs lined up on sound baffles as players lounge and play—music and
otherwise. In his foreword to the book Exile, Keith Richards wrote, "I
realize, looking at these moments he captured, that he was part of the
family, the band, in fact. He was also an exile in his own country. The
quality of blending into the furniture and the fittings, I was rarely aware that
he was working (WHICH IS RARE!)." Anita Pallenberg has claimed that
the book is "like our family album."
Many of the photos have shown up before in various publications and,
along with Robert Frank's photography and the overall album packaging,
they add to the listener's image of the record, and aid us in envisioning the
time and place so central to this legendary recording. We can see the
decrepit basement, the damp on the walls. The summer heat is palpable in
the shots of shirtless and barefoot musicians as they collaborate, guitars in
hand, sitting at a piano, lying down on the floor with headphones on,
listening to other musicians record parts right in front of them. We are with
them sitting at the dining room table littered with the remnants of a meal,
ashtrays full, Campari and wine bottles empty, strumming cover songs with
guests like Graham Parsons and John Lennon. We see dogs, rabbits, kids,
records, motorcycles, boats, chandeliers, and guitars, lots of guitars.
How could a kid not get wrapped up in these images? I am thirty-eight at
the time of this writing, most of my "professional career" as a musician is
behind me, and this record and these accompanying photos still make me
want to pick up a guitar, call up some friends, bust open a bottle, and sing
all night in the basement or at the kitchen table. This is the essence of
playing music: joy, the sort of unbridled fun that makes up most of
childhood and so precious little of adulthood. It is also an unfortunately
small percentage of playing (and especially touring) in a professional band.
As Paul Kolderie said to me, such pictures ruined our lives; on some level,
we succumbed to the fantasy. Sure, there are moments of glory even for a
club and theatre level band like mine—we may not have always been
playing to huge audiences, but man, we were touring around the world!
Drinking, singing, laughing, making new friends, we went from basements
and pizza to limos and digestifs at the Odeon (and back to basements and
pizza). Believe me, we never bought into it, realizing it was all a fleeting
farce, as we consciously tallied up the expenses that would be coming out
of our recoupable balance at the label. But there was a part of me that
always just wanted to relax and go with it, enjoy it, live like rock stars and
have fun. Countless bands have been willing accomplices to ridiculously
one-sided contracts for shots at this fantasy. It's how the record industry has
survived for so long: the rock star myth.
Such photographs are clearly inspired snapshots taken over a long period of
time—time that was doubtless also filled with tedium, frustration, fatigue,
downtime, boredom, bitterness, insecurities, jealousy, and other adult-sized
emotions that come with a bunch of artists and hangers-on living and
working right on top of each other for months on end, with no clear
schedule and dysfunctional or non-existent communication. Even the
pictures that show the downtime, by the very virtue of being photos, inject a
sense of import, or at least worthiness, by drawing attention to the subject.
They fail to capture the outright depression and malevolence that can settle
in on a homesick and hungover band stranded, for example, at a truck stop
buffet on an interstate somewhere in the middle of Iowa. I mean, look at
what I just wrote: even those words make it seem way more romantic than
it is!
All accounts of Exile are heavy on the dark side, not just the relatively
minor inconveniences that came with the recording. In a 1995 interview,
Jagger looked back, not too fondly:
(We were) just winging it. Staying up all night . . . Stoned on something;
one thing or another. So I don't think it was particularly pleasant. I didn't
have a very good time. It was this communal thing where you don't know
whether you're recording or living or having dinner; you don't know when
you're gonna play, when you're gonna sing—very difficult. Too many
hangers-on. I went with the flow, and the album got made. These things
have a certain energy, and there's a certain flow to it, and it got impossible.
Everyone was so out of it. And the engineers, the producers—all the people
that were supposed to be organized—were more disorganized than anybody.
And Bill Wyman explained:

... We worked every night, from 8pm to 3 am, until the end of June (1971),
although not everyone turned up each night. This was, for me, one of the
major frustrations of this whole period. For our previous two albums we
had worked well, been pretty disciplined and listened to producer Jimmy
Miller. At Nellcote things were different and it took me a while to
understand why.
Wyman recounts that further distractions came when "recording in Keith's
basement had not turned out to be a guarantee of his presence. Sometimes
he wouldn't come downstairs at all." And he didn't enjoy the "dull and
boring" jam sessions that constituted most of the initial nights of recording.
Keith and Anita's lifestyle "was becoming increasingly chaotic" and drugs
were taking their toll on Keith and subsequently on the recording process.
Possibly in retaliation, Mick would often not show up; perhaps being a
newlywed was a further distraction, his and Bianca's wedding having just
taken place on May 12. Then there was their announcement, a month later,
that Bianca was expecting a baby. The two lovebirds were often jetting off
for holidays in the middle of the time period set aside for recording. The tit-
for-tat kept on escalating.
And even when the recording was going well, it was disorganized. Bill
Wyman recalled, negatively, that Andy Johns would often be trying to
record overdubs in the basement kitchen while people, dogs, and children,
ate and made noise in the same room: "I remember Gram Parsons sitting in
the kitchen in France one day, while we were overdubbing vocals or
something. It was crazy. Someone is sitting in the kitchen overdubbing
guitar and people are sitting at the table, talking, knives, forks, plates
clanking. ... It was like one of those 1960s party records in which everyone
felt they should be involved."

But the main negative that he points to in the making of Exile was the
increasing reliance on hard drugs. "Whatever people tell you about the
creative relationship between hard drugs and making of rock & roll records,
forget it," he writes. "They are much more a hindrance than a help." Wyman
notes that Mick was very concerned about Keith and that the hard drugs
were dividing the Exile personnel into camps—those who abused, and those
who enjoyed in relative moderation or abstained altogether. The latter were
often not included in the recording process and were made to feel alienated.
Wyman showed up on one occasion to discover two of his bass parts re-
recorded by Keith. And the new parts, Bill felt, were inferior to those he'd
recorded.
But for all the problems and obstacles, the Stones could ultimately sell the
rock & roll myth because they lived it. The lived all of it, the positives and
the negatives. They even succeed at transforming the awful side of the
lifestyle into a myth of decadent glamour. Not that Keith set out to, but is it
any wonder his image influenced so many musicians to spike up their hair,
take up smack, and cultivate their skin-and-bones physiques? I never even
tried to pull it off, but always secretly wished I could. Others looked lame
and ultimately died trying, including Johnny Thunders, never mind third-
and fourth-generation wannabes like Guns N' Roses or the Black Crowes.
That's why Elvis Costello's rise was such a pivotal moment for dweebs like
me. (To paraphrase the quote attributed to David Lee Roth: most critics love
Elvis Costello because most critics look like Elvis Costello.) But I still had
a poster of Jagger and Richards up on my wall, at which my father would
shake his head and mumble out of the corner of his mouth, "your heroes,
eh?" The Glimmer Twins knew the attraction of the down and dirty street,
the drugged and dangerous. "I gave you the diamonds /you gave me
disease," Jagger scrawled in the album jacket. Coinciding with a famous
Rolling Stone cover shot and interview with Keith Richards, the whole of
Exile on Main St. offers up the sleazy glamour referred to now as junkie
chic. The Stones were cementing their image and in turn, defining the
prototypical image of a 1970s rock & roll band.
And much of that impression hinged around Keith's increasing prominence
in the band's public image, a trend that had started gradually back around
Brian Jones' death in 1969. In many ways, Exile is considered Keith's
record: recorded at his house, more or less on his schedule, vocals down in
the mix, guitars up. All accounts talk about long leisurely dinners set for
double-digit guests, lasting until roughly midnight, when a vampiric Keith
would beckon the musicians and crew to work. He would often disappear
again for hours while, according to him, he put son Marlon to bed. Finally,
he would re-emerge in the wee hours ready to work again, by which point
the others had usually drifted off or disappeared. But the sessions would
usually last until dawn, players emerging out of the dank, dark, hot cellar
into the morning daylight of the Riviera. "The days just ran into days and
we didn't get any sleep," remembered Mick Taylor in Mojo. "I remember
staggering out of the basement at six in the morning and the sunlight hitting
my eyes and driving home." They were ghoulish outsiders, nocturnal
vampires, exiles from the daylight.
All the different rooms and stalls in the Nellcote house and its huge cellar
were potential recording spots, resulting in a good amount of natural
ambience, the kinds of sounds that lend a recording "warmth." It also led to
ad-hoc experimentation. "You'd sort of jam an acoustic guitar into the
corner of one of these cubicles and just start playing and you'd hear it back
you'd think, 'that doesn't sound anything like what I was playing, but it
sounds great,'" noted Keith. "So you started to play around with the
basement itself, aiming your amplifier up at the ceiling instead of like
normal." Wyman notes that his amp would be on one floor of the basement,
while he would be on a different level, and that often the musicians were
not in the same room together, though when they were "it was even more
hot and sticky."
"I think it was a bunch of stoned musicians cooped up in a basement, trying
to make a record," explained Mick Taylor. "Definitely the situation
contributed to the music on a technical level—the fact that it was in a dingy
basement, badly equipped. We wouldn't dream of making an album like that
these days."
The band had recorded in unconventional non-studio environments before,
such as Mick's home Stargroves in Newbury, England, also using the
Mobile Unit. So this was not a new idea for them. But there are many
considerations in recording outside of a studio, amenities taken for granted,
like means of communication between the control room and the live room.
Andy Johns had to run back and forth between the truck and basement to
relay messages. "We would be hollering down, 'Are you ready?'" recalled
Bill Wyman. Mick McKenna, the engineer in charge of the truck, said,
"there was ... a little CB microphone designed for the producer, but you
could also record harmonica with it. There was also a black and white
camera, but obviously these things weren't working too well then."

The Stones have always been known to record in an old school manner,
with the band all in one room, even Mick singing in a hand-held mic, to
record the basic tracks (drums, bass, rhythm guitar, scratch or "guide"
vocal). This can be seen in such films as Jean-Luc Godard's One Plus One,
also known as Sympathy for the Devil, which documents the making (not
just the recording) of the song of the same name. The band often writes and
collaborates on arrangements in the studio, and pity the engineer who does
not have the tape machine running at all times, lest a magical take, or even a
reference point, fails to get captured.
After the mid-1960s, as recording techniques became more sophisticated,
the idea of singing in the same room with the other instruments and
amplifiers became increasingly discouraged by most engineers, as it
inevitably results in the bleeding of one instrument's sound into the
microphones set up to capture the sound of other instruments. Thus, the
engineers lose the level of control they seek to maintain over the sound for
the rest of the work, especially the mixing, of the track. To avoid such a
scenario, modern day recording technique has engineers trying to isolate
each sound into isolation booths, with the drums in a "live room." The
players can all be in the same room, but the amplifiers and vocalist are
usually in isolation booths, with glass to peer through. The ideal for many
engineers is to push up a fader on a mixing console and hear only that
intended instrument. But on the majority of Stones tracks, in addition to
hearing Mick Jagger's intended main lead vocal (recorded once the final
take is chosen from among a variety of recordings of the same song) you
can also almost always hear "ghost" tracks of his guide vocal underneath
the mix. On some tracks, it sounds almost as prominent as an actual vocal
"take," difficult to distinguish from the backing vocals.
In an interview with Tape Op magazine's Philip Stevenson, Andy Johns
spoke about his goal in recording rock & roll bands:
Stevenson: Your work has a very natural sound. It wears well. A lot of
modern recordings don't. They are too fatiguing to listen to over and over.
Did you set out with a specific sound in your head that you always tried to
get, or is your style more an evolved product of the way you were taught to
do things?
Johns: ... As far as the thing sounding natural I suppose it's because I've
always liked rock and roll bands, so my idea, even if I've done a lot of
overdubs and put a lot of things on the tracks, is really to integrate them so
it sounds like you're at the best rehearsal the band ever did. Just like one big
lovely noise.
Stevenson: Instruments sound like instruments and it sounds like people are
playing them—
Johns: Yes! People playing as opposed to some fucking sample repeating
itself over and over.

Stevenson: It's sad that some people will grow up never having heard that
"people playing" sound.

Johns: Yeah, it's good for me though. It means the competition's thinning
out! [laughs]
"Exile changed the way I thought about things," explained Johns further.
"Up until that point I was extremely fast—that was one of the qualities
people admired. If they could do a run through with 5 or 6 or 8 pieces and
you had your sound by the end of their run through, because you never
know—'they-may-never-get-it-the-same-again-and-they're-artists, and all
that'—so, I was very quick, BUT Exile . . . actually took a year. I grew up as
a person and was less intimidated by the musicians and all that, and I started
taking my own sweet time a bit more after Exile"
Almost everything on Exile absolutely swings, due in large part to producer
Jimmy Miller, a drummer/percussionist by training, who is widely credited
with helping the Stones find their famous grooves. By the time he started
work with the Stones, Miller already had some very groovy productions to
his credit like "Gimme Some Lovin'" and "I'm a Man," by the Spencer
Davis Group, and a whole string of classic Traffic albums. He came on
board after Their Satanic Majesty's Request, the first record the Stones
produced themselves (after Andrew Loog Oldham had been jettisoned).
Miller's first production was the muscular "Jumping Jack Flash" single in
1968, which was heavy on sixteenth-note shaker percussion and unique,
hard-to-identify textures wheezing in the background. This bold track
heralded in a new sound for the Stones, the basis of the sound for which
they are most famous: the "Stonesy" sound, with a prominent Keith
Richards riff and crunchy electric guitars that almost always blend together
with a percussive acoustic guitar track at varying levels of prominence.
Piano tracks usually add yet another percussive element in addition to extra
melodic support, and organs add at least some steady padding (filling out
the empty spaces at the "bottom" of a recording)—if not outright and
glorious hooks, as in the coda of "You Can’t Always Get What You Want"
or "I Got the Blues."
Perhaps as important as the guitars in a Miller production, shakers and
tambourines add movement and groove to the relatively straightforward
crisp backbeats played by Charlie Watts. In turn, with the steady beat and
underlying groove being driven by the percussion, Watts is free to play
inventive fills. There is a Motown influence, clearly. And there is looseness,
a human element that makes the sound funky. This production template
clearly influenced other groups—both those who hired Miller and those not
necessarily employing him, like the Kinks' 1970 single "Lola," or the Faces
on any number of tracks.
Glyn Johns, who had been an early supporter of the Stones, and their main
English recording engineer since day one, recalled:
Jagger came to me after Satanic Majesties and said, "We're going to get a
new producer," so I said, "OK, fine." He said, "We're going to get an
American." I thought, "Oh my God, that's all I need. I don't think my ego
can stand having some bloody Yankee coming in here and start telling me
what sort of sound to get with the Rolling Stones." So I said, "I know
somebody! I know there's one in England already and he's fantastic, and
he's just done the Traffic album: Jimmy Miller." And it was a remarkably
good record he made, the first record he made with Traffic. I said, "He's a
really nice guy." I'd met him, he'd been in the next studio room and I said,
"I'm sure he'd be fantastic." Anything but some strange, lunatic, drug addict
from Los Angeles. So, Jagger actually took the bait and off he went, met
Jimmy Miller and gave him the job.

Bill Wyman explained it, "I think that everybody knew that we had to get
back to our roots, you know, and start over. That's why we got Jimmy
Miller as a producer and came out with Beggars Banquet and those kinds of
albums after, which was reverting back and getting more guts—which is
what the Stones are all about."
This was a time that found many rock & rollers giving up the excesses of
mid-to-late-1960s psychedelia and finding inspiration in the roots of rock &
roll and beyond. In 1967, Bob Dylan and the group which soon became
known as the Band, had retreated to the Woodstock, New York area to
spend days on end recording in the basement of the Big Pink house,
resulting in the much-bootlegged and eventually released Basement Tapes.
These tracks were murky home recordings, primitive but authentic-feeling
soulful takes on amalgams of public domain folk, gospel, country tunes,
and archaic musical forms—coupled with lyrics influenced by old myths
and folklore. This was mixed with the sound that the Band became famous
for, both with and without Dylan: two keyboards, an organ and an upright
piano, a guitar or two (electric and acoustic), a solid, funky, Muscle Shoals-
like rhythm section, and raw layered harmonies, rarely tight, often loose.
Such a sound had more to do with what the Rolling Stones had been
playing earlier in their career than with what they were doing immediately
before hooking up with Jimmy Miller.
The Band's leader, Robbie Robertson, articulated the formulation of the
Band's sound in the liner notes to the reissue of Music From Big Pink:
[With the Band] the song is becoming the thing, the mood is becoming the
thing . . . there's a vibe to certain records, whether it's a Motown thing or a
Sun Records thing or a Phil Spector thing. I wanted to discover the sound of
The Band. So I thought, "I'm not gonna play a guitar solo on the whole
record. I'm only going to play riffs." I wanted the drums to have their own
character. I wanted the piano not to sound like a big Yamaha grand. I
wanted it to sound like an upright piano ... I didn't want screaming vocals. I
wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and the voices
coming in ... I like the voices coming in one at a time like the Staple Singers
did ... All these ideas came to the surface and what becomes the clear
picture is that this isn't just clever. This is emotional and this is story telling.
You can see this mythology.

From 1968 on, many groups and artists followed these paths back to the
folk, blues, soul, and country roots of rock & roll: the Grateful Dead, the
Beatles, the Byrds, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Eric Clapton, Van
Morrison, and the Flying Burrito Brothers, with Gram Parsons and Chris
Hillman, who melded southern soul, country, and rock into what Parsons
described as "cosmic American music."
By the release of Exile, the Stones had long been established as a blues- and
roots-based group, but Jagger—perhaps viewing the glam rock of Bowie
and T. Rex (whose leader, Marc Bolan, stopped by the final sessions for
Exile in Los Angeles), and underground sounds of the Velvets et al, as more
exciting and artistically relevant—was distancing himself from the record
even as the Stones were finishing up Exile on Main St. "This new album is
fucking mad," he recalled in 1971.
There's so many different tracks. It's very rock & roll, you know. I didn't
want it to be like that. I'm the more experimental person in the group, you
see I like to experiment. Not go over the same thing over and over. Since
I've left England, I've had this thing I've wanted to do. I'm not against rock
& roll, but I really want to experiment... The new album's very rock & roll
and it's good. I think rock & roll is getting a bit ... I mean, I'm very bored
with rock & roll. The revival. Everyone knows what their roots are, but
you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky too.
Anita Pallenberg says, "It was also the period where Mick thought 'God
what are we going to do next and how long is it going to last?' All of that
was still going on."
Nevertheless, at least under the sway of Keith Richards, the Stones saw
themselves as part of these traditions, getting back to their blues roots
(mostly country-blues and folk) on the raw-sounding Beggars Banquet in
1968. Is it any wonder then that trad-blues purist Mick Taylor was installed
as a replacement for the Elmore James-inspired Brian Jones?
The Stones recorded "Country Honk" in a Jimmie Rodgers style for the
1969 LP Let it Bleed. Their next record, Sticky Fingers, contained the
country song "Dead Flowers," the traditional Mississippi Fred McDowell
country blues "You Gotta Move," and the churchy gospel-soul of "I Got the
Blues." This was the direction of the band. Country and soul melded with
blues and the heavy rock & roll riffing the Stones were known for—all
intensified by Jagger's self-conscious experimental leanings—leading up to
Exile on Main St., perhaps the finest realization of what Gram Parsons was
getting at when he coined the term "cosmic American Music." And when
they got to France, it seems the band was able to process such influences
more consciously. Keith explained, "But by being in Europe and having had
time to think about it, all of us had been picked up by working in the south
of America and the people we'd met and musicians. After all, Gram Parsons
was down there with us and there were loads of other musicians popping in
and out."
Richards and the Stones met and hung out with Parsons and the Byrds in
Los Angeles beginning in the late 1960s, while mixing Beggar's Banquet,
and then later again when the Americans stopped in London. "Gram
Parsons blew into town with the Byrds, who were playing Biases," recalled
Richards. Parsons was present for much of the summer at Nellcote. It
appears he was mainly there for inspiration and for the hang, as it seems
that no one is able to place him directly on any track on Exile. "The reason
Gram and I were together more than other musicians is because I really
wanted to learn what Gram had to offer," Keith told an interviewer. "Gram
was really intrigued by me and the band. Although we came from England,
Gram and I shared this instinctive affinity for the real South." Parsons
ended up travelling along with the Stones during their 1971 "farewell tour"
of the United Kingdom and stayed at Nellcote for most of the Exile
sessions.
Hiring the American Jimmy Miller, then, was consistent with the Stones
wanting to get back, to find the real heart of American roots music, "the real
South." Miller was at the helm during what many regard as the
Stones at their untouchable peak, and Keith Richards has said that Jimmy
Miller was "at the height of his talents" during Exile on Main St. "Nobody
has really stated how important Jimmy Miller's contributions to Exile
were," Mick Taylor told Mojo. "... A good drummer, a talented producer
and our guide." Taylor pointed out how the band would often hit creative
roadblocks, with songs just not coming together, and Miller often offered
the solution. "I remember he actually got behind the drum kit to show
Charlie how to play a particular beat." Indeed, Miller did the same on "You
Can't Always Get What You Want," from Let it Bleed. That is Miller
playing the song's shuffling beat, which Charlie never latched on to. It's a
beat I don't believe Watts has ever played on subsequent live versions. And
that is Jimmy Miller on the drums on Exile's "Happy."

"The Rolling Stones were never great musicians," continued Taylor. "When
I first joined them I couldn't believe how bad they were. I thought 'How do
they make such great records?' When I met Jimmy it all fell into place. It is
not about being great musicians but about a certain kind of chemistry the
band has." Andy Johns has said on many occasions that when the Stones
were not clicking, they were dreadful, "they could sound like the worst
band on the planet. Just awful, like anti-music. But when it finally came
together, it was like magic."
PART II

One of the records I Owned when I was a child was a 45 I inherited from
my mother, who was a big Elvis Presley fan. It was "Teddy Bear" backed
with "Loving You." Since I was a kid, "Teddy Bear" obviously received a
lot of spins on my portable record player. But it was really "Loving You"
with which I became infatuated. Looking back, I realize how odd a song
that is for a young child to focus on. Written by Brill Building legends
Leiber and Stoller, it is an extremely intimate song in content, sound, and
performance. It's highly charged and romantic, with a traditional Tin Pan
Alley ballad structure and melody. But, in the hands of Elvis, it's a slow-
burning, ultra-sexy, slow dance number. What captured me early and often,
however, was the vibe of the record; the heavy, haunting sense of
atmosphere. It feels like it was recorded at 3:30 am. Presley sounds like he
is slow dancing with a girl after all the guests have left a party or a club, the
lights are low, overturned drinks and empty glasses and full ashtrays cover
every surface. The piano is impossibly behind the beat. An upright bass
pulses slowly, quietly, but insistently. The Jordanaires coo softly in the
background. Elvis seems like he can barely raise his voice above a mumble
and when he does, the results are striking and highly charged, spine-
chilling. There is little evident studio compression to mess with the
dramatic vocal dynamics. He sounds as if he is tipsy, drunk even, but totally
in control. Presley is within the song and it is more romantic than sexual,
but it could comfortably sit next to Marvin Gaye's "Sexual Healing" on a
compilation disc. While I could have had little comprehension of the
content of the song at such a young age, I had an instinctive awareness of
the power, the undeniable force of the feeling simmering there.
There is a similarly heavy sense of atmosphere pervading Exile on Main St.
This is no accident: Keith Richards told Stanley Booth that "the first record
that really turned me on out of the rock & roll thing was 'Heartbreak
Hotel,'" another song with an intrinsic sense of space. The essence of the
Exile sound has made an everlasting impact on rock & roll production.
Daniel Lanois (producer of U2, Bob Dylan, and Emmylou Harris, among
others) has seemingly embraced the whole romantic idea of Exile for his
recording philosophy. His famous studio, Kingsway, is an old house in New
Orleans, and Lanois' records are deeply steeped in interesting atmospherics.
Such attention to room sounds and organic textures is perhaps more
appreciated in this current era and can be heard on such records as Solomon
Burke's Don't Give Up on Me, his 2002 Joe Henry-produced comeback.
Even Mick Jagger, although he feels Exile is "a bit overrated" and has said
he feels there are only a handful of good songs on the record, told Mojo that
"somehow, as an album, it has a great mood."
Rocks Off

What drew me in as a kid was the sound of Exile as a whole. The tone of
the record is set within the opening seconds of the first song on side one,
disc one, "Rocks Off." It begins with one of Keith Richards' trademark open
G-tuned riffs. But precisely one second into it, we hear a stray bit of
percussion. It sounds like someone hit a cowbell too early. Someone
jumped the gun. It also sounds like a vocal microphone was left open
during the mix, with some shuffling sounds before the band kicks in. This is
the sort of extraneous noise that has traditionally been masked out during
the mixing process, even back before computer programs like Pro Tools
made automated mixing "moves" a cinch. Jagger (or whoever it is) seems
all right with it, as after the first snare drum hit, we hear him growl
comically "oh, yeeeeeeahhhh."
"Rocks Off" is a classic opening salvo, a shot across the bow, statement of
intent—though it is by no means the only song that would be great kicking
off the record; "Happy" and "All Down the Line" would work, too. But
"Rocks Off" is one of the best hard-rocking songs on the record, and also
one of the best of the band's deep catalog of numbers titled with a variation
on the word "rock" or "rocking."

To those listening to the album upon its initial release, the buried lead
vocals must have seemed a mistake. But Marshall Chess recalled, in the
book Exile, a trick the band had learned early on from working with
producer Jimmy Miller and engineers like Glynn and Andy Johns. Back in
the days when am radio was the vehicle for pop records, the mono and
heavily compressed signal often exaggerated the lead vocals in a stereo
mix, and they would seem like they were mixed louder than they actually
were. The band found that mixing the vocals down to be a little bit more in
line with the guitar tracks often resulted in an edgier and more exciting mix.
For mainstream pop/rock music, Exile on Main St. takes that idea to the
extreme, which is one element that makes the record so punk rock. The
mumbles and half-heard lyrics give the album a sense of dangerous
mystery, and force the listener to decipher words without the benefit of lyric
sheets or explanations. Jagger obviously understood the power of this when
he told NME, "I never like to print the lyrics. I always think that the lyrics
should be listened to in the actual context of the song, rather than read as a
separate piece of poetry."

Who knows what is going on lyrically in "Rocks Off'? It's another deviation
on the theme of sexual frustration that started back around "Satisfaction."
As with most of the songs on Exile, it takes repeated listenings to make out
most of the words in the mix. But the ones that do jump out have that much
more power, as with the famous, oh-so-Stones lyric "the sunshine bores the
daylights out of me," as the song springs back to life from the helpless
quicksand of the bridge. Jagger injects the line with extra punch and it's
heightened by the raw harmony of Richards, yowling, warbling—my
favourite kind of Keith backing track. This throat-stretching harmony is a
technique he exaggerated to great effect on the band's cover of "Ain't Too
Proud to Beg" on It's Only Rock & Roll. On Exile, it feels as natural as
anything Keith has recorded, adding a pitch-bending twang as he slurs into
the right note on the last word of the line, "me." If there is one major
component missing from the Stones armoury in their most recent era as
rock & roll's reigning elder statesmen, it's the usurping of Keith's raw
backing harmonies by polished backing singers—at least in live settings—
followed, at a close second, by the replacement of Bill Wyman with jazz
fusion studio bassist Darryl Jones. Not to disparage Jones, an extremely
accomplished musician, but Wyman's playing is dearly missed.

Mick's narrator in "Rocks Off' might as well be one of the subjects in a dark
bar in Frank's The Americans. He's got such playful puns throughout the
record: "I'm zippin' through [or, as Jagger sings it, "zippin' chroo"] the days
at lightning speed," a play on the word "speed." Keith Richards explained,
"we started to reflect on what we'd seen and heard. You know, a lot of
times, you're zooming through places and it takes a while for the impact to
sort of settle in on you, you can't quite tell how it's going to come out on
you. But, probably, what we'd done in the previous years, working through
America, came out on that album."
The first lines, "I hear you talking when I'm on the street / your mouth don't
move but I can hear you speak," would be spooky if they weren't sung with
such playful irreverence. They are arresting, nevertheless. These are the
lines that open the album, and Jagger purrs them as if he's just waking up.
"Kick me like you kicked before / I can't even feel the pain no more," he
yowls later, finally roused. We are not sure if we are awake or dreaming,
stoned or sober. Here is Mick, in his street-wise opium dreams, a burlesque
neo-Oscar Wilde, tossing off lines like "I was making love last night / to a
dancer friend of mine / I can't seem to stay in step / 'cause she come every
time she pirouettes for me." He awakes as if into some sort of hangover
from a sexual ennui cocktail. Perhaps with the "sunshine" and not feeling
"the pain no more" lines, Jagger is also giving voice to a Keith Richards
character, as he so often does on the album. Maybe Keith even fed in these
lines during the collaboration. The lyrics of Exile on Main St. are as
essential in painting the picture of this being "Keith's record" as any other
component of this guitar-driven, back-to-basics rock album recorded in his
house. We have the guitar player of "Torn and Frayed"; we have the "Berber
jewellery jangling down the street" in "Shine a Light"; we have the Keith
signature anthem of "Happy."
On "Rocks Off," the main riff almost instantly becomes two parts, one on
each stereo side, both played by Richards, the second keeping a more
straightforward eighth-note chugging pattern. One of the guitar tracks adds
a Henry Mancini "Peter Gunn" (or "Brand New Cadillac," or "Planet
Claire") kind of rhythm. But then we notice some other odd/happy-
sounding third guitar part, most likely played by Mick Taylor, also rather
Latinesque, warbling as if through a Leslie organ speaker rotating at high
speed. This part is set way in the background and up the centre of the stereo
spread. It's almost like a piano or organ in its texture.

The making of "Rocks Off' was typical of many of Exile's tracks, as it

hinged upon the rhythms—circadian and musical—of the band, and of
Keith's muse in particular. The basic tracks were apparently laid down
quickly in an all-night session, everyone heading off to bed around dawn,
including engineer Andy Johns. Johns told Steve Appleford, in Rolling
Stones Rip This Joint: The Stories Behind Every Song, that he took this as a
sign of the session's end:
But once he arrived at the villa he shared with trumpet-player Jim Price a
half-hour drive away, the telephone was ringing. It was Keith. "Where the
fuck are you?" Well, you were asleep," Johns replied . . . Normally,
Richards would have been inclined to wait until the next night's session.
What was the hurry? But Keith was ready . . . and wasn't about to let this
moment to pass. "Oh, man, I've got to do this guitar part," he said. "Come
Back!"
So after Johns returned, sure enough Richards recorded the second guitar
part, "and the whole thing just came to light, and really started grooving,"
recalled Johns.
Repeated plays offer continued revelations from Exile. As you become
more familiar with the record, the immediate surface elements start to give
way, so that "buried" parts jump out like new discoveries, as if they were
recently overdubbed on a record you've listened to for decades. This
phenomenon is especially acute for recording musicians, whose ears
continue to develop with studio experience. Musicians become more adept
at distinguishing sonic textures—specific tracks and recording techniques.
Keith's subtle duelling rhythm guitar parts on "Rocks Off" are a perfect
example of this.
In his original review of the album for Rolling Stone magazine, Lenny
Kaye (later of the legendary Patti Smith Group) bemoaned the relative
dearth of classic Keith riffs, the sort he had been pumping out with
regularity. And yet the album has some textbook examples, like "Happy"
and "Tumbling Dice." Nevertheless, the beauty of Exile on Main St. has
proven to be in the ensemble approach of the record, with very few actual
spotlight solo moments for anyone in particular.
As John Perry points out in Classic Rock Albums: Exile on Main St.
(Schirmer Books, 1999), his informative book about the record, the horn
section had "become regular members of the touring band in 1970 . . . What
the Stones were approaching at this point was something new, an approach
to hard rock that was entirely modern yet rooted in 1950s rock & roll and
1930s-1940s swing."
The Stones were at their peak as a live band in the early 1970s, and when
they got off the road from the 1971 tour, Perry notes, "that energy carried
over into the summer when work began on the new album." According to
Dominique Tarle, Richards stated, going into the recording of Exile, "we're
really an eight piece band now."

As soon as Jagger has gotten out the second line of lyrics, that third guitar
part has all but been commandeered by the first appearance of the
formidable right hand of pianist Nicky Hopkins—who, on Exile, offers the
finest performances of his tenure with the Stones, if not his career—and
then the rest of the ensemble falls in with a dense yet still somehow lean
rock arrangement. Hopkins hammers away eighth-note figures with his
right hand, to help keep the train chugging, while also adding some
amazing runs and fills.
Hopkins, who died in 1994, is an absolute animal on Exile, a stone virtuoso.
He went back with the Stones almost to the beginning. In Rolling with the
Stones, Bill Wyman notes that the Stones had in fact opened up for Nicky,
as a keyboardist with Cyril's [Davies] All Stars in 1963. In many ways,
Exile is the album on which Hopkins shines the most. At any given time,
his piano tracks are as prominent as any instrument or vocal track on the
record—and they're one of the best rewards that come from repeat listens.

Glyn Johns has said, "Nicky Hopkins was an absolute genius. I have never
heard anyone play like him before or since . . . He was a sweetheart of a
guy." Glyn brought him in to play on some Stones sessions after employing
him for recordings by the Who and the Kinks. The Stones needed someone
other than Ian Stewart, after he refused to play anything but the blues and
boogie-woogie. Anything else was, to him, "Chinese chords."

I have always wondered what Hopkins was like to work with, and would
have loved to have him add something to records of which I've been a part.
Over the years, I've been lucky enough to meet and play with a few heroes
of mine. It has been perhaps one of the best parts of being in a
"professional" band on a major label. I got to make a record and tour with
Graham Parker, a tour that also included Kate Pierson of the B-52s, which
was like rock & roll fantasy camp. Graham made a record called Up
Escalator (1980) and enlisted Nicky for it, as well as for the album Another
Grey Area (1982).
"Nicky was a nice, down to earth guy, and got into the material quickly,"
Graham told me.

Unlike the Rumour, who seemed always to be trying to re-arrange my songs

before they'd got to know them, Nicky only had to hear a tune once or twice
to memorize it. He'd listen to my suggestions and incorporate his ideas
seamlessly. He had a surprisingly gentle touch on the piano; I expected a
more thumping approach, which Exile seemed—at least in my memory of it
at the time—to suggest. But he never played anything at all with a hard
attack. At one point, I even asked him if he'd play a certain number with
more aggression. He kind of agreed but kept on playing exactly the same
way!

Nicky said it was pretty chaotic making Exile. People were all over the
place, in different rooms, recording bits and pieces. And of course,
everyone was out of their heads from morning till morning. From what I
can gather, a Stones album is not exactly put together like military
operation. Nothing happens for days, then they start on something at 3 in
the morning! Sounds like a nightmare to me.
On "Rocks Off," Hopkins helps to build tension at just the right times with
runs up the scales. He plays the Professor Longhair and Jerry Lee Lewis
boogie, jumping octaves, jabbing and weaving, fitting in between horn
lines, guitar parts, vocal ad-libs. His playing is never gratuitous, and is as
driving as the guitars. The piano adds that Jimmy Johnson/Chuck Berry
vibe, a good old rock & roll feel. His playing is urgent but never in the way.
Hopkins' piano, as with much of the instrumentation on "Rocks Off," gives
way to a concise and blistering blues lead from Mick Taylor just as the song
begins its fade out. It is not so much that the horns, piano, guitars, etcetera,
drift away individually; the whole song fades together, except for this
amazing little lead run that seems to stay at the same level—the record
revealing one of its interesting textures. It's a result of the mixing process.
In the sound of the lead guitar run, you can hear an example of the room-
sound atmospherics of the record. It doesn't sound close-miked at all, which
would result in a more direct and cutting guitar sound; it sounds more
natural than that, as if we are simply in the room listening to Taylor play his
inspired run.
This small glimmer of a solo is an example of how the album's mix works.
The philosophy is consistent with the great bluegrass groups, jazz combos,
and gospel quartets like the aforementioned Staple Singers and the Soul
Stirrers (the group that launched the career of the teenage Sam Cooke).
Many of those groups recorded with only one or a few microphones in the
pre-1960s recording situations. We hear blended ensembles in all those
cases, with a soloist featured at times, coming more into prominence in the
call-and-response tradition of the church.
And have horns ever sounded better than this on a recording? Jim Price
(trumpet) and Bobby Keys (sax)— the "Texas Horns"—like Hopkins, also
make the case that they are a big part of the "greatest rock & roll band in the
world," not mere session men. Too often, songs have been written,
arranged, and recorded by the time session musicians are hired to overdub
specific parts on specific songs. Much of the time, they are handed charts
and arrangements to follow. They come in, play their parts, are paid (or
submit invoices), and split. And the Stones used plenty of traditional
session musicians, even on Exile, when they went to Los Angeles for over-
dubbing and mixing. In the case of Price and Keys, however, they were—at
least during this era—essential cogs in the Stones machine.
Keys and Price were at Nellcote virtually the whole time. They had their
young families with them. As this record was recorded piecemeal, in spurts
of inspiration, they had to be ready every night, which translated into a lot
of downtime. There were many gambling excursions up to Monte Carlo, as
well as simple trips to the beach and to village bars. But when the red light
went on, and someone yelled down to them, the horn players would lay
down celebrated parts while recording in some of the most inspired and
improvised spaces imaginable: long basement corridors with high ceilings,
taking advantage of that natural reverb; the cellar kitchen; lying on their
backs—whichever new experiment was chosen for that night. And like all
the other players in the Stones' orbit, the horn players seemed to be given
leeway to come up with their own ideas for parts—often, in fact, steering
the track in new directions as result— though rarely, if ever, receiving
writing or arranging credit.

Price and Keys, both of whom featured heavily in the sound of Sticky
Fingers, also played on some of those specific aforementioned generation-
defining records— with Delaney and Bonnie, George Harrison, Joe Cocker,
and Dr. John. The Stones first met Bobby Keys on one of their early tour
stops at a state fair in Texas. Keys was a young, hell-raising Texas teen
playing behind legends like Buddy Holly and—at the time the Stones met
him—Bobby Vee. Keys' lifestyle choices made him a perfect buddy for
Keith: "It's a gas not to be so insulated and play with some more people,
especially people like Bobby, man, who sort of on top of being born at the
same time of day and the same everything as me has been playing on the
road, man, since '56, '57," Richards told Robert Greenfield in Rolling Stone
in 1971, during the Exile sessions. "He was on Buddy Holly's first record. I
mean he's a fantastic cat to know for someone who is into playing rock &
roll because it's been an unending chain for him. The first few years he was
playing around, man, I was just the same as anyone, I was just listening to it
and digging it, and wondering where it came from. And there he was, man.
Bobby's like one of those things that goes all the way through that whole
thing, sails right through it."

This desire to be as close as possible to the source has always been

important to the Stones, and to Keith in particular. Whether it was going to
Chess Studios in Chicago on their earliest tours through America, jamming
with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, tracking down Chuck Berry,
bringing in Keys, Billy Preston, or inviting Gram Parsons for an extended
stay at Nellcote, these moves were all part of the musical education of Keith
Richards, and added to the depth of authenticity of the Stones' take on
American musical idioms.

And, as we saw in the film Gimme Shelter, the Stax Records-/Memphis

soul-loving Stones made a pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in
Florence, Alabama (the outgrowth of Rick Hall's Fame Studio in Muscle
Shoals), to capture some of that Southern soul sound, at the very source
where white musicians and black musicians collaborated on so many soul
classics by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Arthur
Alexander, with producers like Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd. The Stones
had already covered "You Better Move On," one of the earliest Muscle
Shoals-identified hits, by the now-legendary Alexander. This is where they
recorded "Wild Horses," and they also apparently ran through an
unrecorded version of "Loving Cup."

The musicians who made up the Muscle Shoals house band are legends
among other musicians. They included Chips Moman on guitar, Tommy
Cogbill on bass, Spooner Oldham on electric piano and organ, and Roger
Hawkins, who Atlantic honcho and producer Wexler called "the greatest
drummer in the world— still." Hawkins' style is certainly echoed in the
elegant and sublime simplicity of Charlie Watts' own drumming. Prior to
the success of the Allman Brothers, Duane Allman played some solos on
sessions by Aretha and Wilson Pickett in Muscle Shoals. Importantly,
however, Peter Guralnick points out, "much like Stax, Fame had no flashy
lead guitarist in their studio group; rhythm was the key component."

This was an underappreciated attribute when I was first learning the guitar
as a young adolescent. I remember arguing on the school bus for the Keith
Richards and Pete Townsend rhythm-first philosophy over the noodly
wanking of those musicians primarily labelled as "lead" guitarists. The
notion of there being a "lead" anything in a good band always seemed to
miss the point for me. A great band fires on all cylinders, meshing,
weaving, collaborating like a team, as the Stones do on Exile on Main St.
Even a lyrical soloist such as Mick Taylor is best showcased in a song-
oriented, rhythm-centred band like the Stones, far more than in a combo
that spends inordinate amounts of time tediously trading solos, like some of
the more traditionalist blues-based groups that featured Taylor.

On "Rocks Off," the arrangement Keys and Price play is an authoritative

blast, supporting the rock & roll rhythm section, never in the way, though
not shying away from leaving their mark. The horn chart is another hook,
rocking as hard as any guitar. The band members all seem to feed off one
another. Whether or not the horns were there for the basic tracking, or
overdubbed soon after a take was in the can, they are right in the thick of it
all, moving with the band in a common direction, particularly at the vamp at
the end of the song. Everyone seems to be hammering away with purpose.
Listen to the section between 3:34 and 3:40 for some of the most glorious
give and take, an ecstatic climax to the song.
Coming in at 2:12, the minor-key bridge of "Rocks Off' incorporates
elements of the psychedelic era, specifically in the backward tracking of
vocals, as Jagger's and Richards' vocals swirl in upward vortexes, like
ghouls sweeping up from the graves in a Halloween cartoon. The rest of the
musical backing track comes out of a chorus and to a puttering halt. Charlie
taps out time on the high-hat cymbals, hitting snare drum shots in a sparse
new pattern, while Mick hits the tambourine. The guitars are no longer
straight forward and chugging, but rather awash in a slow Leslie-speaker or
phase shifter modulating effect. The dream imagery continues, musically
and lyrically, as if the singer has been drawn back into sleep, fighting
against the helplessness he finds in a dream: "feel so hypnotized, can't
describe the scene / feel so mesmerized, all that inside ..."

Charlie dives in full bore on the vamp/coda (end) of "Rocks Off," with a
number of staggering fills. Listen to the four bar-long fill around 3:33-3:40
for an example. Charlie sounds like he is answering the horn stabs and
right-hand piano of Hopkins. The guitars, drums, and percussion hold the
fort down while horns slur, Jagger drawls, and a bunch of backing vocal
tracks from Richards and Jagger slip and slide all over the place, rarely
crisp or on the beat. But closer listening reveals a tight pattern in the chorus
backing vocals, punctuating and moving the chorus along with yet another
percussive element: "only get 'em off, only get 'em off, get 'em off." All the
vocal parts sound spontaneous and inspired, passionate, as if this is their
last chance to sing them. And this, amazingly, is still the first track on the
record.
Rip This Joint

Though Exile on Main St. eventually sprawls out stylistically over the
course of its four vinyl sides, it begins with a mean one-two punch. We
barely have any time to recover from the leading track before we're hit with
the blistering assault of "Rip This Joint." With the boys springing from the
musty basement as if with mouthfuls of trucker speed, riding shotgun in this
punk-paced song that almost serves as an overture for the whole runaway
train of a record—announcing stops in "Alabam'," Santa Fe, Dallas, Texas,
New Orleans, even Washington, stopping to see "Dick and Pat down in old
D.C."—the song takes off at a breakneck pace and never looks back. Keith
Richards claimed it "was the fastest song [tempo] we ever cut."

If the sound of suburban hardcore punk ten or fifteen years later had not
gotten so rhythmically rigid and straight (and straight-edge) as to all but
abandon the swinging roots of rock & roll, it might have sounded
something like "Rip This Joint." The Stones achieve a pre-punk energy,
coupled with a sexy 1950s groove, years before punk-informed neo-
rockabilly artists had any baby curls to grease down with Royal Crown. The
song has the early, regional underground rockabilly flare of 1950s West
Virginia wildman Hasil Adkins, who Cub Koda called "a true rock & roll
primitive." And it is this sort of spirit, ripped from the raw, minimalist
source, that the Stones channel explosively on "Rip This Joint."
Jagger's amphetamine rush of words is most obviously an homage to early
rock & roll travelogue numbers like "Route 66" and Chuck Berry's "Back in
the U.S.A." and "Sweet Little 16," though updated with the jet-set
cheekiness that would later be on full display in "Respectable." Over the
walking bass line (actually, it doesn't walk, it runs) of upright bassist Bill
Plummer, in place of Bill Wyman (surprising, since Wyman loves this sort
of rock & roll-purist number), Richards' relentless hammering guitar, and
the pounding drumming of Charlie Watts, Jagger starts off the song with
"Momma says 'yes,' poppa says 'no' / make up your mind 'cause I gotta go /
gonna raise hell at the union hall / drive myself right over the wall." After a
couple of throaty rebel yells, his more urbane and audacious self returns,
with "Dick and Pat in old D.C. / well, they're gonna hold some shit for me."
Jagger has the cheek to insert this latter insolent aside after a couple of lines
in which he sarcastically humbles himself, the artist in exile, to ask "Mister
President, Mister immigration man / let me in, sweetie, to your fair land."
Such lines should have made "Rip This Joint" the perfect opening song for
the 1972 Stones Touring Party and/or the films documenting it. Jagger gives
calls out to New Orleans, with "Dixie Dean" and "Dallas, Texas, with the
Butter Queen," while warning "Little Rock, and I'm fit to pop," and
"Alabam' don't give a damn." Dixie Dean sounds like a New Orleans figure,
and that was probably the reason he slipped into the lyrics, but it's most
likely a reference to the legendary 1920s English footballer. Barbara, the
Butter Queen was apparently the same sort of creative groupie as Cynthia
Plaster Caster, for, according to Keith (who recalls more than one Butter
Queen) "they did loads of wonderful things with butter, apparently. I used to
see them around all the time, but they never buttered me up. I used to avoid
them like the plague. Anything that smacked of professionalism." In notes
for the Gimme Shelter DVD, Stones assistant Jo Bergman recalled
answering a motel door in Texas during the 1969 tour, when "a blonde with
straggly hair announced 'I've got a pound of butter in my purse. Where's
Mick?' She was the Dallas Butter Queen. Groupies had titles then."
Little Richard is the primary influence for "Rip This Joint." The song more
or less quotes Richard's "Rip It Up," and not just its title. In the song,
written by Robert A. Blackwell and John S. Marascaico, Richard sings,
"I've got me a date and I won't be late / Pick her up in my 88 / trek on down
to the union hall / when the joint starts jumpin' I'll have a ball." Charlie
Watts says, "Richard, for me, is a very underrated person in that he really is
a wonderful singer and piano player. He's fabulous. But because he's
entertaining, which is what people loved about him, his playing is
overshadowed by all that." Indeed, the Stones' generation might have been
the last to understand the significance of Little Richard's contributions to
the foundation of rock & roll—and even then, it was only the musicians
who cared enough to be aware. Little Richard was in and out of retirement
(to the Cloth) at this point, and in subsequent years, he slipped further into
caricature and self-parody.
While "Rip This Joint" swings like the boogie-woogie piano-driven music
of Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the Stones amp up the Chuck Berry
guitar and piano boogie to hard-rock level. Charlie Watts tosses off efficient
tom-tom rolls like Berry drummers Ebby Hardy and Odie Payne, and Nicky
Hopkins channels Johnny Johnson in his piano figures. Additionally, they
quote one of the lesser-known Berry titles, "Let it Rock." Jagger seems to
be pushed by the band and also to be goading them on. It would be hard to
picture the musicians swirling up such a storm without the vocal
encouragement of Jagger, most likely in a guide vocal. His final take sounds
unrestrained, as if he's whooping it up between swigs from a bottle of Wild
Turkey. His singing here is like Little Richard at his most raw.
Everyone in the octet plays his heart out, trying to keep up with the others.
In a caption for a picture of a wiped-out Richards lying on a mattress,
Dominique Tarle notes, "Keith played it all night long, for days. He was
exhausted. It was very difficult to keep the perfect rhythm, and Jimmy
Miller wanted it to be spot on. Keith gave it everything he had," trying to
nail down the rapid-fire guitar part. Bobby Keys plays baritone and tenor
sax, with a couple of squealing solos on the tenor, while Jim Price, on the
trumpet and trombone, punctuates lines along with Keys. Mick Taylor slips
in some slide parts. Plummer, a jazz player brought in by Jim Keltner,
overdubbed his parts in Los Angeles during the final mixing sessions, and
his slapping-style upright adds an authentic 1950s flavour. Nicky Hopkins
plays the sort of boogie-woogie part normally reserved for Stones stalwart
traditionalist Ian Stewart. And Hopkins is a force to be reckoned with,
playing the high octaves almost exclusively in seventh chord triplets. The
song is over, as if in a blur, in a little over two minutes.
Mirroring many of the subjects in Robert Frank's The Americans, Exile on
Main St. often betrays a sense of weariness. This was, after all, a band that
had been through an awful lot in the years leading up to Exile: births,
deaths, arrests, marriages, break-ups, drug abuse, financial turmoil, and the
constant pressure of maintaining a successful band and business. And
America was beaten down by the end of the 1960s as well. But as with
Frank's book, there are glimmers of not just optimism, but also the sort of
outright exuberance that led Kerouac to describe Frank's work as akin to
"that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the
music comes out of a jukebox or a funeral." If we were in New Orleans—
mythical New Orleans—it would not matter which source it came from; it
would be party time nevertheless. Like Frank, Tarle captures the weariness
and joy, as well as all the emotional shades of gray in between, of the Exile
sessions. Criticism of Exile as overly sprawling misses the point. Certainly
the album is ambitious in its attempt to capture the breadth and scope of
American music, at least the strains that appealed to the band. Though the
Rolling Stones most likely did not sit down and preconceive it as such, the
record seems to set out to cover nothing less than the wide-open spaces and
shadowy corners of America itself via the nation's music— from urban soul
to down-home country to New Orleans jazz: a musical accompaniment for
Frank's photos. "Rip This Joint" sets the tone for this journey, as a modern-
day "Route 66" travelogue from Birmingham to San Diego. It's as if the
band had reached a tipping point, where the collective intake of influences
—via the eyes and ears of all the individual members—gushed forth in a
torrent, laying out a roadmap of where American popular music had been,
and also where it was going: all captured on two pieces of vinyl.

Shake Your Hips

If so inclined, you can break down the songs on Exile into a few categories:
full-tilt rockers, gospel-informed torch ballads, acoustic folk and country
numbers, or bluesy grinders like "Ventilator Blues," "Casino Boogie," "Turd
on the Run," and Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips." The latter songs find
droning grooves, churning away in the middle register, and build in
intensity mostly by sheer virtue of performance over arrangement—
particularly via vocal inflection and emotional resonance.
Louisiana's Slim Harpo—born James Isaac Moore— was already known to
Stones fans, as he was to followers of the Kinks and Van Morrison, both of
whom had covered his songs. He wrote the early Stones favourite "I'm a
King Bee." Though Harpo might have taken some cues from Jimmy Reed
in the lazy, leering vocal department, Slim had a more distinct country-
western twang to his inflections. And he seemed to be less beholden to a
twelve-bar structure in his songwriting than some other modern blues
writers. He was more country than city-blues. His songs are encompassed
by a distinctive mood and sound: a swampy drone that worms into your
consciousness and attacks you from a different angle than a straight-on
song.

Jagger affects a particular Slim-style southern accent on "Shake Your Hips,"

nice and loose on the behind-the-beat falsetto "now ain't that easy?"—sung
as "eeeeeeeeeasy," in a slippery howl almost as haunting as Robert
Johnson's. It is the sort of howl that Jeffery Lee Pierce found so eerily
effective as he moaned on the classic blues-punk Gun Club records in the
early-to-mid-1980s.
After the dual sax and blues harp solo in the middle of the "Shake Your
Hips," Jagger comes back in, his voice quivering on the verse with "met a
girl in a country town," and then breaking on the refrain "SHAKE your
hips, baby! SHAKE your hips, baby!" The intensity gets ratcheted up in the
last chorus. Charlie plays mostly rolls on the side of a drum, while pedalling
his high-hat and adding an inspired rim shot here and there. This is one of
the few songs that feature Ian Stewart on piano, and it sounds like Keith
takes the guitar solo here. Bobby Keys plays during the whole song,
doubling the main guitar riff, which plays call-and-response with Jagger's
entreaties in the chorus.

Mood and overall feel is important to the pacing and tone of Exile. This
album is not concerned with serving up an endless parade of singles, but
rather it is a collection that offers the opportunity to throw in a well-
executed cover like this one to establish the vibe. Indeed, had many of these
songs been buried in the middle of a later record like Goats Head Soup,
they might have been lost and forgotten. And while they may not exactly
stand out much here either, songs like "Shake Your Hips," "Casino Boogie,"
and "Stop Breaking Down" do find a home in the context of Exile, an
album that works as a piece, wherein such songs are appropriated the
attention they deserve, as pieces of a whole. Many fans, along with the
Stones themselves, see Sticky Fingers and Exile as almost a continuous
project. But with songs like "Shake Your Hips" and "Sweet Virginia," the
band seems to leapfrog back a bit to Beggar's Banquet and pick up on some
ideas started there. They take some of that record's stark country and blues
bleakness and give it a bit more ground to spread out, even adding almost
pure mood/sound pieces like "Just Want to See His Face."
If nothing else, on such cover versions the Stones solidify their roots and
their musicianship, displaying an authoritative air of authenticity and a
comfort in the blues vernacular. "You don't want to touch other people's
stuff unless you've got something different to add to it, which I think we've
got," noted Keith.

Casino Boogie

Has anybody been as good at making an entrance as Charlie Watts?

Fashionably late, but steady throughout, Charlie tumbles in for real on the
toms after slapping a creative beat on the high hat to keep time. And Keith
makes it all possible by crawling out on a limb, with extreme confidence
that his rhythmic riffing will be picked up and made exponentially more
effective once
Charlie joins in and sets the pace for the rest of the band. This is the
reciprocal energy of a band at the peak of its game—Keith sets down the
groove, but can crawl as far out on the limb as he likes, because Charlie is
going to be there with the footing he needs.

Continuing the drone of "Shake Your Hips," "Casino Boogie" is all mid-
range: the melody is sung with just a few choice notes, with the harmony
not spreading out much either; open-tuned slide and hammering guitars are
added by Mick Taylor and Keith; and an electric piano from Nicky Hopkins
is a part which hints at the Clavinet sounds the band would later use on
songs like "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)." Before you even
realize he's soloing, Bobby Keys emerges from a full eight bars hanging on
the same two notes (mostly just one, really, with the other coming every
three or four notes), busting out into more melodic phrasing for the last four
bars. Keys takes a cue from jazz players like Miles Davis, or from the
simple rhythmic figures that Chuck Berry would play. Melodic range is
eschewed for almost pure rhythm. The tension is almost overwhelming. The
band does not give in behind Bobby; they just stay in the same steady
groove. You hang there with Keys on his one-note samba, waiting for
release. The sexual undertone is palpable. And when Taylor takes over on
the next break, he offers only a note or two more, along with Hopkins
hammering on the same two-fingered chords as the arrangement fades out
on the same chord. The blues of John Lee Hooker and the Chess guys are
touch-points here. The music buzzes on and threatens to take the sort of
malevolent turn in tone and (double) time that "Midnight Rambler" does.
Instead it simply stays put, increasing in intensity, Charlie switching to the
ride cymbal, as someone clanks on a bottle or can in the background.

The lyrics are an impressionistic mix of dreamy film noir:

Wounded lover, got no time on hand Dietrich movies, close up boogies . . .
Watch that hat in black . . .
And casual disdain for authority, drug-bust martyrdom, and the band's
pressure to "exile" themselves:
Thrill freak, Uncle Sam

All for business, no, you understand?

Judge and jury walk out hand in hand . . .
Sinking in the sand

Fade out freedom, stand that heat on

And then with two simple lines, Jagger captures the essence of Exile on
Main St: surreal rock & roll jet-set sexuality, decadence, and boredom with
the tired themes of the 1960s.
Kissing cunt in Cannes
Protest music, million dollar sad . . .
Even when adding their own contribution to 1960s protest music, the
Stones' lyrics made less of a statement than did their music. Perhaps this is a
truth of all great "protest" music. Like Guthrie, Dylan, the Clash, or Elvis
Costello with a song like "Oliver's Army," you need to hook me first with
the music and then let me figure out the message. "Gimme Shelter" is
another good example, its message writ broadly, wisely. "War, children, is
just a shot away" is, after all, not quite Dylan. And as with that song, it is
usually the tense and/or ominous music that makes the impact.
On "Casino Boogie" the Stones are playing almost straight-up American
blues, but rather than trying to hide it, they embrace the themes most
relevant to their "million dollar sad" lifestyle: an almost new aristocratic
decadence that would seem antithetical to what rock & roll was supposed to
be—street, rebellious, dangerous. Nevertheless, they obviously felt the need
to push the porn-rock envelope in order to nurture their "dangerous" image.
So, this being the era when Jagger came up with the Hubert Selby-like
hustler-raunch of the song "Cocksucker Blues" to satisfy a record contract,
the Stones figured they should just keep testing the limits of obscenity laws
—a path they continued on with "Star Star" (or its previous title "Star
Fucker") and "Some Girls." Here on "Casino Boogie" they sing about living
as oversexed high rollers who pass the time at the casinos at Monte Carlo,
just up the coast from Villefranche, not far from the villa that Andy Johns
shared with Jim Price.

Speaking about Exile on Main St., Jagger has said, "there's a lot of songs
that are really, like, not songs at all. Like 'Casino Boogie.' They're really
nicely played, but there's no hooks in them and there's no memorable
lyrics." Jagger continues to show a befuddlement with why so many fans
are taken by the record. It's as if he needs epigrammatic lyrics like "you
can't always get what you want" and "I can't get no satisfaction" in order to
consider a song "memorable." But such lines as "million dollar sad" and
"judge and jury walk out hand in hand" are indeed memorable, as is the deft
irony contained therein. No one is going to mistake "Casino Boogie" for a
hit song, never mind give it a place among the classic Stones pantheon. But
even with an ostensibly tossed-off number like this, they don't need to do
much selling at all. Jagger sings the words with power, and Keith's backing
harmony is sung with equal force, giving the song an undeniable authority
that transcends any question of them being white-blues-band copyists.
Compare it to something like the mediocre "Silver Train" or "Luxury" of
their releases in the years immediately following Exile. "Casino Boogie" is
authoritative and muscular. The recording sounds effortless.

Tumbling Dice

A lot of pop music is inherently nostalgic, but the Stones had been around
long enough to tap into the specific wistfulness of their listeners—some
having come of age during the Stones' arc into superstardom. The 1972
Melody Maker review of "Tumbling Dice" articulated the significance of
the song's release, via the band itself, noting, "It is impossible to see their
names on the label and not undergo inner convulsions in which joy, mirth,
tears, nostalgia and deep emotion are inevitably interwoven."

And this is more or less my reaction to the whole record. But "Tumbling
Dice" is a particularly bruised and aching anthem. If it's not the
quintessential Stones song, it is at least the quintessential Exile song. It
presents itself as a swaggering mid- or up-tempo rock & roll number, but
seems satisfied to shuffle out with the setting sun, with one of the most
mournful codas this side of "Layla." The effect is intensely melancholy,
Jagger fading off as if with his tail between his legs, lonely despite all his "I
don't need no jewels in my crown" bluster. His words say one thing, but his
performance seems to cry, Fm taking my toys and going home.
The lyrics provide yet another twist on the "ramblin', gamblin' man" song of
American popular music. "I don't really know what people like about it,"
Jagger has said of the song. "I don't think it's our best stuff. I don't think it
has good lyrics. But people seem to really like it, so good for them." Well,
again, maybe the lyrics are nothing special, but it barely matters because the
performance of the song as a whole is so arresting. Jagger's underestimation
of the song for the lyrics is missing the forest for the trees. "You're no good,
heart-breaker, you're a liar and you're a cheat" doesn't seem like much if
taken out of context (or worse, in the wrong hands musically) but in Aretha
Franklin's "I Never Loved a Man the Way that I Love You," it might be one
of pop music's all time greatest opening lines. Soul lyrics can often be trite
when simply read on the page, but in the right arrangement, with a great
band and a top singer, the lyrics barely matter. And Jagger is a top singer at
the top of his game on "Tumbling Dice."

I talked to Graham Parker about his recollection as a fan upon the release of
the single. He told me:

They had a competition, I reckon in the NME, to see who could get the
lyrics for "Tumblin' Dice" right. Someone did, but some joker wrote
something like: "Fibby flibby flabby, yibby yibby yabby, make me burna
camel right down-wow wow wown," which I thought was a great crack, too
...
I do recall there was a bit of controversy in the press at the time (at least in
either the Melody Maker or the NME) about the vocal mix. There was an
interview with Jagger in one of those rags and they commented on it. He
said, rather vaguely, something like: "I don't think they put out the right
mixes," which I thought was hilarious!
Soon after the release of the record, Jagger did indeed tell the Melody
Maker, "I think they used the wrong mix on that one. I'm sure they did."
Robert Greenfield of Rolling Stone was present during some of the final
mixing sessions for Exile. He describes Jagger listening back to the mixes
of "Tumbling Dice" and saying "They're both good, you know, Jimmy
(Miller)." Greenfield notes that it more or less came down to a toss-up when
Jimmy Miller noted one mix sounded slightly more "commercial."
The lyrics also barely matter because, as Parker noted, most of us have our
own versions in our heads. Mine persist even years after being corrected
and seeing the written lyrics, and I enjoy them more than the real ones.
Jagger never liked printing lyrics. This is a lesson taken to heart by REM on
their early records: write some enigmatic phrases that sound good
musically, mix them low, and let the listeners bring their own perceptions to
the table. It's a nice formula that produces great results in the right hands.

"We'll get the track when it's hot and write the verses later," Richards
explained to Mojo. "I'm like, 'The beat goes like this, this is the chorus, um-
um-um Tumbling Dice,' and Mick would take it away, because he knows
what I'm talking about."

But though the lyrics might have been cobbled together, they put forth that
same Exile weariness, coloured even more by Jagger's warmly worn voice.
Even as he offers the variation on typical macho bluesman clichés like
"women think I'm tasty," he follows it right up with the next lines: "they're
always trying to waste me / make me burn the candlelight down," deflating
his own macho arrogance. And we do get some lines key to the record,
including "say now baby, I'm the rank outsider / you can be my partner in
crime," fitting in with the theme of the exile and artist-outsider. We also see
one of the first signs on the record that in songs ostensibly about women,
Jagger's lyrics might actually be inspired by his relationship with Richards,
who has been his "partner in crime" for longer than any woman in his life.
("He knows what I'm talking about," said Keith; a significant line.) It is just
a small example, one that seems more apparent on such songs as "Let It
Loose" and "Shine a Light."

Arguably the most effortless sounding, archetypal Rolling Stones song,

"Tumbling Dice" was actually one of the hardest to capture. The song
sounds so loose that countless other acts tried to capture the same loosey-
goose feel, including Rod Stewart, who reportedly brought a tape into the
studio for his Footloose and Fancy Free LP to try and steer his band in the
right direction on "Hot Legs." Andy Johns recalls that the Stones "had a
hundred reels of tape on the basic track. That was a good song, but it was
really like pulling teeth. It just went on and on."

To hear a few samples of what Johns described as the worst-sounding band

clicking into the best in the world, all one has to do is track down bootleg
copies of the song's previous incarnations, including "Good Time Women,"
a throw-away right down to its working title. There have been a few
recorded incarnations of the song in circulation. I am aware of a more
straightforward blues version, and this "Good Time Women," which is in
the "Jiving Sister Fanny" (from Metamorphosis) vein, though not as
compelling. Certainly, it doesn't much resemble "Tumbling Dice." There is
another version closer to the final one, with most of the words and musical
characteristics, though it's even slower, lazier, and sloppier. Some collectors
note versions stretching back as early as the spring of 1970, during the
sessions for Sticky Fingers. Bill Wyman's book notes that "Tumbling Dice"
was among seven tracks that had been started before the Stones got to
France, either at Star-groves or Olympic Studios in London. But Keith
recalls writing the riff at Villefranche: "I remember writing the riff upstairs
in the very elegant front room, and we took it downstairs the same evening
and we cut it. A lot of time when ideas come that quick, we don't put down
lyrics, we do what we call vowel movement. You just bellow over the top of
it, to get the right sounds for the track." But Johns claims that the particular
track went on "for a couple of weeks at least, just the basic track."

The guitars chug along with that trademark Richards ease, right in the
pocket. Jagger's battered voice is impossibly low in the mix, drawling,
singing like a gospel singer, calling and responding to the background
singers, Clydie King and Venetta Field, who make their appearance
prominently in third bar of the song and remain featured throughout. Keith's
and Mick Taylor's guitars are also far up in the mix, and behind it all, like
everywhere on the record, is Nicky Hopkins' piano, sounding like a slightly
out-of-tune upright, teasing boogie-woogie triplets everywhere. His high-
octave figures during the coda are particularly affecting. Bobby Keys and
Jim Price are here as well, of course. Jagger stakes his claim, yet again, as
one of the best white vamp singers around. As Lenny Kaye noted in his
mixed Rolling Stone review at the time, "As the guitar figure slowly falls
into Charlie's inevitable smack, the song builds to the kind of majesty the
Stones at their best have always provided. Nothing is out of place here.
Keith's simple guitar figure providing the nicest of bridges, the chorus
touching the upper levels of heaven and spurring on Jagger, set up by an
arrangement that is both unique and imaginative."
Jimmy Miller shares drum duty, most likely in the coda, where someone
keeps the African-style tom-toms steady. As Joe "No Beatles, No Stones"
Strummer pointed out, "it surges forward, but it's not a straightforward
tempo. It's halfway between a slow and a straightforward rocker. It has a
mystical beat." The singers King and Field might be joined by Merry
Clayton, known to Stones fans for her chilling performance on "Gimme
Shelter." But in one of many cases of failing to providing the proper credits
on the record, the Stones failed to identify the singers correctly, even on the
subsequent Virgin CD reissue of Exile on Main St., listing the singers as
"clydie king, vanetta, plus friend." Bill Wyman's book Rolling with the
Stones sets out to correct the oversight, but does not list Clayton. Mick
Taylor is on the bass, as Wyman notes blankly: "On 3 August we worked on
'Good Time Woman' and when I arrived the following day I found Mick
Taylor playing bass. I hung around until 3am, then left."
Under the black, white, and gray cover of Exile on Main St., we can hear
the shades of gray, the in-betweens, the pain, the ennui, and the fallout.
"Exile is about casualties, and partying in the face of them. The party is
obvious. The casualties are inevitable," wrote Lester Bangs. "It is the search
for alternatives, something to do (something worthwhile even) that unites us
with the Stones, continuously." And this is how the band manages to click
with listeners on Exile on Main St. and other records, even as they distance
themselves in other ways. They are exiles in that respect as well, moving
farther away from their public—a gulf which, in subsequent years, became
unbridgeable and led to increasingly banal music with out-of-touch lyrics,
in the opinions of many fans. But on Exile, maybe especially on Exile, the
Stones still offered "a strange kind of humility and love emerging from a
dazed frenzy."

Though not in the context of "Tumbling Dice" specifically, in The True

Adventures of the Rolling Stones, Stanley Booth also quotes Willie
McTell's "The Dying Crapshooter's Blues."

Folks, don’t be standin ' around little Jesse cryin '

He wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he's dyin
This "partying in the face of it" can be heard on "Tumbling Dice." It is
funky and slinky, sexy, though not as convincing at the "partying" aspect as
"Rip This Joint" or "All Down the Line." What we hear on "Tumbling
Dice" is mostly the other half: "in the face of it." A drained and vulnerable
Jagger spins a protagonist moving on, though he sounds like his years are
starting to weigh on him, even as his words try to tell us "oh my, my, my,
I'm the lone crap shooter / playing the field every night." Even here he is the
"lone" gambler, perhaps under the McTell influence. And where Richards,
Jagger's real "partner in crime," might have provided a beefy guitar riff and
a torrid tempo as a counterpoint, the music is instead loose and easy going,
relaxed, perhaps signalling the end of the party; uptempo, but certainly not
offering the self-assured maelstrom of "Rip This Joint" or the raging
musical counterpoint Keith provides to Jagger's expressed numbness in
"Rocks Off."
"Tumbling Dice" was the perfect song for 1972; moving forward
reluctantly, alone even, the party continuing even as the "casualties" fell.
But Exile on Main St. would not finish before sounding off dire lament on
such songs as "Soul Survivor," "Let It Loose," and "Shine a Light."
"I really loved 'Tumbling Dice,'" said Keith. "Beautifully played by
everybody. When everybody hits it, that's those moments of triumph."

Sweet Virginia

"Mick and Keith liked a few of my songs and we gotta lotta kicks outta just
sitting around playing together. All I did was sing and pick with the
Stones."—Gram Parsons, Melody Maker, May 12, 1973

"Gram (Parsons) is on Exile in spirit, but playing? No, not that I can
remember."—Keith Richards, Mojo magazine, January 2002
It has often been said that the four sides of Exile on Main St. represent four
distinct records. "Tumbling Dice" closes side one of the original two-record
vinyl set, ambling off in a melancholic reverie. How do the Stones answer
this as side two begins?
"Sweet Virginia" is wholly different in feel, a simple acoustic campfire
sing-along; a country ditty that combines the lyrical influence of honky-
tonk man Faron Young, the reedy harmonica of Roy Acuff, and a brassy
rock & roll sax; the perfect beginning to an acoustic-based, country and
folk-tinged side of songs. The Stones were, for the moment, easy in the
niche they carved out of country-rock, which was pervading the airwaves
and the album collections of rock & roll fans.
If we want to mark 1968 as a beginning for what seemed to be the general
return-to-roots movement in mainstream rock & roll, with albums like
Music From Big Pink and Beggars Banquet as standing examples, then
Exile on Main St. was recorded during the full bloom of the trend, and the
Stones were at the vanguard. Since the establishment of the band, the
Stones had been aficionados of not just blues, but also of country, rock, and
soul. All of these elements were evident in even the earliest Stones
recordings. Keith noted, "The first time I got on stage and played was with
this C&W band."
But it took them until the late 60s to try more straight-up country songs—
mainly due to a lack of confidence on Jagger's part. "I love country music,
but I find it very hard to take it seriously," Jagger has said. "I also think a lot
of country music is sung with the tongue in cheek, so I do it tongue in
cheek. The harmonic thing is very different from the blues. It doesn't bend
notes in the same way, so I suppose it's very English, really. Even though
it's been very Americanized, it feels very close to me, to my roots, so to
speak."
You wish Jagger would just keep his mask off. He can sing such music
convincingly: witness "Wild Horses" and "Sweet Virginia." Still, Mick can't
resist acknowledging the well-worn insult of country as "shit-kicking"
music in the latter song. He sings these, and other ostensibly country songs,
more or less as himself, with no fake accents aside from his usual, well-
honed American twang. And the effect actually takes the songs away from
the sound of English guys imitating country music; it becomes something
else altogether: the Rolling Stones. We don't necessarily think "country
music" when we hear "Wild Horses." We do when we hear "Far Away
Eyes," as fun as it might be. And we don't let the awareness that the band is
under the influence of country effect our reaction to the song.
The influences are evident on "Sweet Virginia." It starts out with the
wheezing part Mick plays on the harmonica, bringing back that Jimmie
Rodgers vibe and reminding fans of classic C&W of the country fiddle
parts heard on numbers by such country legends as Roy Acuff and Faron
Young. Those two artists, in particular, come to mind when I hear this song.
As with a classic Acuff song like "Wreck on the Highway," or any number
of Louvin Brothers tunes, "Sweet Virginia" is more of a country-gospel than
a Jimmie Rodgers kind of country-blues in inspiration and form, especially
in the chorus refrain device. But while the Louvins were often overtly
religious in content, the Stones take the sacred inspiration and secularize the
lyric. Meanwhile, they adapt the country-gospel framework and hang on it
other influences.
"Sweet Virginia" apparently started at Jagger's Stargroves mansion in the
summer of 1970, while songs were still being recorded for Sticky Fingers,
and was finished at the final Los Angeles sessions. But Dominique Tarle
remembers them recording "Sweet Virginia" and "Sweet Black Angel" in
the basement kitchen of Nellcote, a notion more agreeable to the myth of
Exile. Nevertheless, it was a similar vibe at Stargroves, what with the big
old house and the mobile unit.
"The house that we used, Stargroves, was ideally suited because it was a big
mansion and a kind of grand hall with a gallery around with bedroom doors
and a staircase," Andy Johns explained. "Big fireplace, big bay window—
you could put Charlie in the bay window. And, off the main hall there were
other rooms you could put people in. We did stuff like 'Bitch' there, and you
can hear on 'Moonlight Mile' when Mick is singing with the acoustic, it
sounds very live, because it was! 4 or 5 in the morning, with the sun about
to come up, getting takes. It was all very heady stuff for a young chap!"
The band did not tour (aside from a few dates in England) between the two
albums, further bonding the records in the minds of many, including Keith
Richards.
"Some songs—'Sweet Virginia'—were held over from Sticky Fingers,'" he
explained. "It was the same line-up and I've always felt those two albums
kind of fold into each other . . . there was not much time between them and
I think it was all flying out of the same kind of energy."

"Sweet Virginia" does feel like one of the most off-the-cuff tracks on Exile
on Main St. Certainly, the same murky atmosphere is present. As Keith
starts his opening strum on the acoustic (left side of your stereo), someone
bumps a microphone or the guitar within the first bar, only adding to the
charm and spontaneous feel. This is a rough-shod production, even looser in
feel than "Tumbling Dice." The mastering of the vinyl copy sounds like it
might have been botched, because for all my years of listening it sounded as
if a compressor or dynamic limiter kicked in too forcefully and quickly on
the first chorus' "so come on, come on down ..." Even listening to it on CD,
I still hear the dramatic volume downshift, like those skips and snaps from
your original vinyl records that persist as phantoms in your head long after
you have replaced the worn-out versions.

The arrangement builds perfectly, as if musicians are just wandering into

the room, picking up an instrument, and joining in, clapping hands. The
beginning echoes "Country Honk" from Let it Bleed. Mick Taylor is off to
the right, doubling Jagger's harmonica melody with a fast-picked fake
"mandolin" part, and picking seventh chords and major-scale and country-
blues runs throughout. Charlie keeps it simple, with just a big double-
headed kick (hollow sounding) and a snare drum, no cymbals or tom-toms.
Bill Wyman is credited with bass, but it sounds suspiciously like a stand-up
bass, which would most likely have been overdubbed by Bill Plummer in
Los Angeles. If not, Wyman either plays a bass fiddle himself, or does a
convincing job making his electric bass sound like one. And in fact, in
outtake versions, the bass does sound like an electric, perhaps a hollow
body, mimicking an upright. On Wyman's final take, he simplifies his part,
and on both versions, he swings.

Ian Stewart joins in on the second verse with a rollicking boogie-woogie

part straight out of the songbook of his primary influence, Albert Ammons.
Impossibly behind the beat, Stewart effortlessly reels off inspired riffs, the
sort for which he was best known. It is counterintuitive that Stu is on here
to begin with; as the most "country" of the songs, "Sweet Virginia" would
seem at first glance to beg for the Floyd Cramer style of "slip-note" country
frills that Nicky Hopkins adopted. Yet it's just that tension of the straight-up
country elements coupled with the boogie-woogie texture that makes the
song so compelling. The rhythmic movement of Stu's piano part propels the
song. Bobby Keys adds a few sax licks off in the background, waiting his
turn to solo, wrenching the song from the Chicago boogie-woogie pull of
Stu down toward the New Orleans or East Texas juke-joint R&B of
someone like Professor Longhair or King Curtis.
Meanwhile, Jagger does his best to bring us to a country church somewhere
in the deep South, in a performance that begins with him sounding like he's
picking up where he left off on "Tumbling Dice," or even a bit wearier, and
ends in an incredibly spirited call-and-response with the backing vocalists.
One of the best moments seems to be an inspired bit of spontaneity as one
of the female backing singers (uncredited, of course) suddenly takes the
lead part, while Jagger recedes and wilfully joins the chorus (heard at
around 3:46). His vocal part sounds almost mush-mouthed, as if he is out of
breath from his harmonica part, a bit drunk, his voice cracking on the words
"winter" and "friend."
The title likely comes—perhaps unconsciously— from Mamie Smith's 1926
"Sweet Virginia Blues," but Jagger's lyric appears to be inspired by a
variety of sources. In some lines, it sounds like he's expressing concern for
a friend. The first verse of "Sweet Virginia" is more of a sympathy bit, with
sentiments that would be heard again on such songs as "Winter" and
"Coming Down Again" on the next album, Goats Head Soup. "Sweet
Virginia" begins:

Wading through the waste, stormy winter

And there's not a friend to help you through
Trying to stop the waves behind your eyeballs
Drop your reds, drop your greens and blues
The next verse gets really interesting. Jagger seems to take direct
inspiration from honky-tonk legend Faron Young's "Wine Me Up," which
has the verse:
I’d like to thank the men that raise the grapes way out in California
And I’m hoping this will be their biggest year
'Cause scarlet water's all that's left to keep me hanging on
From Shreveport, Louisiana, Faron Young had been a Grand Ole Opry star
since the 1950s. But "Wine Me Up" was a comeback hit single on the
country charts in 1969, and the Stones might have heard it while they were
recording at Muscle Shoals in Alabama. Mick sings:
Thank you for your wine, California
Thank you for your sweet and bitter fruits

Yes, I’ve got the desert in my toenail

And I hid the speed inside my shoe
Still mired in the fallout of Altamont, California would indeed have been a
bitter taste in Jagger's mouth.
The desert he sings of might be an allusion to the desert-like Altamont—
located just outside Livermore, California, which was known for its wine-
producing vineyards until the prominence of Napa Valley overshadowed it.
And most accounts of the Stones' show at Altamont feature people sharing
big jugs of wine. The allusion to Altamont resonates throughout the song,
with Jagger continuing the Exile on Main St. theme of moving on, leaving
those bad tastes from the 60s behind. The fistfuls of colour-coded pills he
sings about also reference the lifestyle in the Stones' orbit circa 1971. The
lyric is one of wilful alienation, the continued outsider perspective; drugs
taking you out of one shared reality for another, trying to "help you
through." Jagger yearns for salvation of some kind here, whether the
"Virginia" he beckons is a woman, a friend, a place, a state of mind, or all
of the above.
That state of mind was almost certainly inspired in part by the ever-present
Gram Parsons, a man closely and forever identified with the Joshua Tree
area of the Mojave desert, though he himself may or may not be on the
track. Mick Taylor claimed, "I know it's rumoured that he sang backing
vocals on 'Sweet Virginia' but that is me singing, not him." And I asked Al
Perkins, a friend and collaborator of Gram's, and the pedal steel guitarist
who plays on "Torn and Frayed," if he recalls Gram being anywhere on
Exile and he gave me an unequivocal "no," mentioning that Gram was not
even at the session in Los Angeles during which Perkins recorded his part.
Of course, Perkins was not present in France, so who knows for sure? Bill
Wyman lists Parsons as "additional personnel" in his Rolling with the
Stones. All of this just adds to the "mystery" of Exile on Main St.
Since I was a child, my favourite records have always had moments that
make me wish I had been part of the action when the recording went down,
like I missed out on the party. This is one reason I wanted to become a
musician and a member in a band. "Sweet Virginia" might be the best
example of this sort of song. The lyrics knowingly nudge the listener,
drawing you in with the sense that you're in on the sentiment, if not the
actual party; in lieu of a "friend to help you through," you've got your
sympathetic friends in the Stones to do so. Mick might not be the same sort
of "bridge over troubled water" that Simon and Garfunkel offered, but he's
there to hear you and perhaps provide some medicinal support with "reds . .
. greens and blues." The sing-along makes you want to be a part of the
group. And the three-chord structure of the song made it an easy one to play
at parties from junior high school to college and beyond. If it's possible to
pinpoint specific moments in my path toward becoming a rock & roller,
hearing "Sweet Virginia" is chief among them. I would play this song over
and over again when I first got Exile on Main St. It's a song that begs for
continued spins, and the famous DJ Wolfman Jack went out on a limb and
heavily promoted this non-single album track on his radio show on kday in
Los Angeles.
Torn and Frayed

An autumnal, melancholy song, "Torn and Frayed" has, like "Sweet

Virginia," been called "country," though it seems this is just for lack of a
better term. But with its strong rock & roll backbeat, the song is closer to
the "southern rock" of the Allman Brothers ("Sweet Melissa") than the
country rock of Parsons, the Eagles, and others. Bill Wyman is clearly not
playing bass, as only a guitar player—scratch that, only a lead guitar player
— would play a part as busy as the bass maelstrom Mick Taylor works up
by the second verse of the song.

Again, we have a predominantly three-chord structure that has as many

roots in gospel as it does in country, with more similarities to the southern
soul of Memphis and Muscle Shoals than to Nashville country. The main
difference lies in Mick's vocals, slurring notes like an R&B singer rather
than a straight country singer. Such singers as Ray Charles, on one side, and
George Jones, on the other, could also blur the distinctions between soul
and country. Country, after all, has been defined as white man's blues.
Jagger is another who successfully melds the two approaches.
Though driven by Keith's acoustic guitar, there is a deep layered sound that
builds from this gentle strumming to a provocative mix of steel guitar,
wheezing organ, piano, country-clean electric Telecaster guitar picking, and
densely-packed lead and backing vocals. The most spirit-lifting of all these
sounds is the chiming combination of Jim Price's organ and Al Perkins'
pedal steel.
Trumpet player Price was apparently just listening to the band as they did
the basic tracks and started to fool around on the organ, not realizing he was
being heard and recorded. "All the different instruments were set up in
different rooms," he recalls in Appleford's book. "I went into that room,
picked up the headphones and started listening and just started playing the
organ. It was just for fun. They did a bunch of takes on it, and I never knew
that they had used it until I saw it on the record."
Perkins was brought in at the Los Angeles sessions at Sunset Sound with
Mick, Keith, and Anita Pallenberg. He told me he had just gotten a new
pedal steel guitar, "from an eight-string Fender to an eleven-string ZB
Custom of Tom Brumley's, with loads of levers and pedals." I asked him if
he did many takes, perhaps still getting used to the quirks of the new
instrument. "Not very many," he replied. "But Mick sang and did his stage
action each time to give me some live feeling." Noting that the sound of the
steel blends so well with the organ, I asked him if recalled playing off of
Price's part in particular. "Frankly, I think it was presented a bit sparse, if
memory serves me correctly, but I also think it would have been one of the
last overdubs."
The character of the song's protagonist seems to blend elements of Keith
and Gram Parsons, though it could be any one of a number of characters
familiar to Jagger, including many of the parasitic hangers-on in Keith's
orbit: "Just a dead beat right off the street / bound to follow you down." It is
a picture of a ragged, vagabond guitar player named Joe, who we follow
from "smelly bordellos" though "dressing rooms filled with parasites." As
Robert Greenfield, who followed the Stones on their 1971 tour of England,
noted in Rolling Stone, the Stones were no strangers to less-than-luxurious
dressing rooms, even as late as that very tour, as the world's most successful
rock & roll band: "In Glasgow, one of life's cheap plastic dramas. Green's
Playhouse. Paint peeling off the walls. Six inches of soot in the air vents.
Bare bulbs backstage and fluorescent tubes for house lights. The third
balcony is closed 'to keep the raytes doon.'"
Jagger keeps spinning the yarn of ragged glory with an ease of language,
words rolling off his tongue like the lyrics of Chuck Berry and Hank
Williams—the sound and rhythm as important as the words themselves:
Joe's got a cough, sounds kind of rough Yeah, and the codeine to fix it
Doctor prescribes, drugstore supplies Who's going to help him to kick it?
I used to hear that last verse line as "who's gonna help in the kitchen?"
which to me was symbolic of the whole myth of Exile on Main St. as a
bunch of friends living communally in the torn and frayed Nellcote
mansion, recording and fixing meals all in the same kitchen, a myth that
holds a certain degree of truth, as it turns out. Who needs lyric sheets?
Jagger is sympathetic to the character of Joe, who probably reflects Gram
Parsons more than Keith Richards. Stanley Booth details a few jaunts the
Stones' entourage took out to seedy Los Angeles-area clubs to see Gram
and the Flying Burrito Brothers play, with Gram stealing their hearts away.
Al Perkins points out that, while other groups in the late 1960s might have
been consciously going back to the roots of rock & roll for newfound
inspiration and rejuvenation, guys like Parsons were really just playing
what was most natural for them. "I also believe people like Chris Hillman,
Gram, and even Ricky Nelson were at last able to perform, their way, a
style of music they'd grown up with," he observed.
Gram, a trust-fund kid, was as restless a searcher and wanderer as Keith,
one also interested in the mythology/ reality dichotomy of America. Stanley
Booth, a Georgian who felt an attachment to Parsons, recalls a 1969
conversation he had with Gram high in a hotel tower on Sunset Boulevard
while waiting for the Stones to commence their American tour:

"Look at it, man," he said, as if he had read my thoughts. "They call it

America, and they call it civilization, and they call it television, and they
believe in it and salute it and sing songs to it and eat and sleep and die still
believing in it, and—and—I don't know," he said, taking another drag, "then
sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."
Sweet Black Angel

Three little Injuns out in a canoe,

One tumbled overboard and then there were two.
Two little Injuns foolin' with a gun,
One shot t'other and then there was one;
One little Injuns livin ' all alone,
He got married and then there were none

Ten Little Indians —Septimus Winner, 1868

Seven little nigger boys chopping up sticks;
One chopped himself in half and then there were six.
Six little nigger boys playing with a hive;

A bumble-bee stung one, and then there were five.

Five little nigger boys going in for law;
One got in chancery, and then there were four.
Ten Little Niggers —Frank Green, 1869
Mick Jagger is certain to have been familiar with some variation of "Ten
Little Niggers," Frank Green's English music-hall adaptation of Septimus
Winner's "Ten Little Indians." Winner wrote many "comic" songs for the
American minstrel circuit and was once jailed for treason for penning "Give
Us Back Our Old Commander," a song critical of President Abraham
Lincoln. On "Sweet Black Angel," Jagger, in a sort of blackface of his own,
takes his inspiration from the travails of Angela Davis, an African-
American UCLA professor who some parties also accused of treason—a
piece of symmetry that was likely coincidental.
In 1969, Governor Ronald Reagan had exerted pressure on the California
Regents Board to dismiss Davis from her teaching post, due to her Marxist
views and membership in the communist party. After a judge ruled that this
was not legal grounds for such a dismissal, "the Regents again voted to
remove her, this time for 'inflammatory' speeches she had made that were
critical of University policy," according to a New York Times report at the
time.
In August of 1970, Davis was arrested and went to trial for conspiracy in
the murder of four people, including a judge, at a Marin County courthouse.
The crimes occurred during a botched escape attempt by self-proclaimed
revolutionary prisoners the "Soledad Brothers." (Davis had championed the
cause of one of them.) The weapons used during the crimes were allegedly
registered in her name. She evaded capture until October of that same year
and was finally arrested in a motel in New York. Her trial began in the
summer of 1972; Davis was ultimately acquitted of all charges by an all-
white jury. In the meantime, hers became a cause celebre. Her image
became iconic: a strikingly beautiful woman with a large natural afro,
saluting black power with her fist held high. In a June 1971 New York
Times article, Sol Stern wrote:

At the hearings, she walks in briskly, trailing her matrons behind her, and
turns, very tall and regal, to give spectators the clenched-fist salute. She
wears bright mini-dresses, and in the soft lights reflecting off the hand-
rubbed walnut furniture (made by state prison inmates), she glows with a
tawny, imperious beauty. At her table she sits upright and attentive,
conferring animatedly with her lawyers, her dignity hardly bruised by six
months in jail.
Dignity is an essential undercurrent of Exile. There is a nagging suggestion
underpinning the album's lyrics that perhaps the guys in the Stones are
getting too old for all the ridiculousness that surrounds them. But equally as
important, there is another prong suggesting that their generation got a lot
of things right, and Davis was symbolic of the legitimate struggle against
the status quo and the old guard. And they likely identified with her as
another lightning rod for controversy, as someone who had experienced
steady pressure from the authorities. "I think we put the picture of her up on
the wall after the song, but Angela was all over that album," recalled Keith
Richards. "She was on T-shirts. She was real big at the time." Mick Taylor
noted, "I think Mick (Jagger) wrote the song first, then thought it could be
about Angela Davis afterwards. Everybody was fairly politicized because in
1972 the Vietnam War was coming to an end. We didn't have a TV at
Nellcote so we never saw the news, we used to read the English papers."
The song began its recorded life in 1970 as the instrumental "Bent Green
Needles," up at Stargroves. Jagger started adding the topical lyrics as the
tenor of the times crept in to Nellcote. The intent is one of clear support for
Davis, referenced specifically in lines like "she's a sweet back angel, not a
gun-toting teacher." Mick is daringly ironic in his lyric, adopting a voice in
full minstrel mode, unflinchingly quoting the highly charged word "nigger"
from the politically incorrect early Frank Green song, which he had
probably heard at least in the nursery rhyme version (which was also taken
as a title for an Agatha Christie novel and subsequent play and film
adaptations). In placing the trial of Davis within that context, via a
Caribbean-flavoured folk song, Jagger celebrates Davis as a full-fledged
folk hero and legend.
Ten little niggers sitting on the wall Her brothers been falling, falling one by
one For a judge's murder in a judge's court Now the judge he going to judge
her for all that he's worth
Jagger cleverly twists the old racist song into a metaphor for the trial and
the militant arm of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, rightly
positing it as a life-and-death struggle. In less capable hands, the lyric might
come off as minstrelsy of the worst sort: mockery for the sake of
entertainment. But Mick co-opts the lines in support of a cause that neither
Winner nor Green would likely have anticipated. In doing so, he aims to
diffuse the sting of that original bigotry, and turns it in on itself, making it
look ridiculous. Moreover, the alliterative words sound simply great within
the rhythm and melody of the song. And Mick never breaks out of that
character/narrator, singing lines like, "not a Red-loving school marm,"
which smoothly fit a current subject into the framework and language of an
old Jamaican sort of folk song. The Stones bring that same air of
authenticity and timelessness to the song that the Band and Dylan captured
back in the late 1960s.
The narrative voice operates on multiple levels. Some critics might have
considered the Rolling Stones' history of copping African-American music
as a kind of cultural exploitation, similar to that practiced by all-white
minstrel companies. But Jagger is in on the joke; the Stones themselves
could be misconstrued as an updated minstrel show. While arguments have
been made that— buried under the exploitation and mockery—minstrelsy
had the positive by-product of allowing give-and-take between European-
American and African-American musical forms, especially as African-
Americans themselves started to integrate the minstrel troupes, Jagger
would certainly have been sensitive to such matters. He does not let any
self-consciousness impede on "Sweet Black Angel," though; rather, he
displays a solid confidence in his own motives.
Musically, the transition of "Torn and Frayed" into "Sweet Black Angel" is
one of Exile's most pleasing. The music and lyrics approximate Jamaican
mento: a mix of mostly West African and Spanish influences that served as
a precursor to ska and reggae. Keith starts it with a complicated rhythm on
rich acoustic guitar and is joined by Jimmy Miller playing percussion on a
guiro (the ridged instrument you drag a stick across) and woodblock. The
marimbas are another distinguishing characteristic, played by Richard
"Didymus" Washington, credited as "Amyl Nitrate." A New Orleans
musician, he had been brought into the Los Angeles sessions by Dr. John.
Bill Wyman fits a slippery bass part into the acoustic rhythm.
Jagger plays a compelling harmonica part and sings a gorgeous melody in a
faux-Jamaican accent, the sort of affectation he would employ throughout
the 1970s and 80s, with mixed results. He is clearly performing here, in
character. Intertwined are compelling harmonies from Keith and Mick
himself. As with "Sweet Virginia," there is a campfire feel to the song.
"That was done all of them in a room in a circle at the same time, because
there was this one room away from the main hall that had no furniture in it,
with a wooden floor, quite high ceilings and plaster walls," said Andy
Johns, recalling the set-up at Stargroves (though Dominque Tarle recalls it
being recorded in the same kitchen at Nellcote as "Sweet Virginia"). "We
wanted to get the sound of the room." "Sweet Black Angel" made for an
inspired and infectious choice as the b-side of the "Tumbling Dice" single.

Loving Cup

We get another of Exile's most satisfying segues as "Sweet Black Angel"

fades and up comes one of Nicky Hopkins' shining moments, introducing
"Loving Cup" with a booming gospel piano part. He's out there all alone
without a net for the first thirteen seconds of the song, a deserved solo
moment for this brilliant player. The vocals chime in—Mick's melody and
Keith's tight, reedy harmony—a defining texture.
"Loving Cup" sounds like a microcosmic representation of what I, in my
idealized version of the Exile myth, would picture as the perfect day down
at Villefranche-Sur-Mer, the sunny piano part brimming with the optimism
that can only come on a summer morning. Jagger joins in as if inspired by
it, beaming with a happy-go-lucky, self-deprecating lyric that reflects the
ramshackle vibe down in Villefranche:
I’m the man on the mountain, come on up
I’m the ploughman in the valley with a face full of mud

Yes I’m fumbling and I know my car don't start

Yes I’m stumbling and I know I play a bad guitar
Though it's hard to picture Mick with mud on his face, his body aching with
tired satisfaction after a day's honest labour, here he is as a humble, salt-of-
the-earth guy with simple needs, with all made well again by his woman:
Give me a little drink from your loving cup
Just one drink and I’ll fall down drunk
These all sound like images from the surroundings in which the Stones
found themselves. We see them in pictures from those days walking "the
hillside in the sweet summer sun." We have the sort of uplift that comes
from the sensuousness the words express, visceral and earthy images like
"face full of mud," "run and jump and fish," and "nitty, gritty, and my shirt's
all torn." We have Jagger's narrator kissing "in front of the fire." We can
hear the Stones embracing these elements of an agrarian ideal.
The morning of the lyric extends into afternoon, as the band joins in bit by
bit; shakers and acoustic guitar riffing at about 0:18, Keith and Nicky
interweaving, playing off of each other. The rest of the band—Bill Wyman
on bass (agile, as always) and what sounds like Keith on electric guitar—
tumble in, driven by Charlie Watts' authoritative drum fill at about fifty
seconds into the song. The activity of the day begins picking up: "well I can
run and jump and fish but I won't fight / you if you want to push and pull
with me all night," a particularly satisfying poetic line break. This all leads
to one of my favourite middle-eight bridges in pop music, the group just
about dropping out, screeching to a halt with bits of stray vocal
improvisations carrying over as the arrangement strips down to just the
percussive elements holding it all together. The section opens up for the
regal horns of Jim Price and Bobby Keys ("I feel so humble with you
tonight just sitting in front of the fire"). It is an intricate, lush horn
arrangement, a cross between a New Orleans funeral and a sublime martial
ceremony; a soaring, uplifting, almost holy moment, like a fanfare for a
king (albeit, one in exile). Then the band picks up again, Hopkins begins to
hammer the keyboard as Charlie counts time with increasing volume,
leading to the fills that spill onto one of the record's most memorable
couplets, voiced forcefully by Jagger and Richards in harmony: "well I am
nitty, gritty, and my shirt's all torn / but I would love to spill the beans with
you 'til dawn."
These lines, as with the lyrics of "Happy," suggest a clever update to Tin
Pan Alley-era turns of phrase, but the whole song breezes along with an
ease of language that betrays such cleverness, with Mick singing an
uncomplicated lyric in natural vernacular. Listen carefully and you can hear
Jagger singing the "spill the beans" line as an overlap to a previous line on
one of his unison parts. Earlier versions of the song (they ran through it at
Muscle Shoals in 1969 and a facsimile of it was played at the Hyde Park
concert as "Give Me a Drink") have the bridge occurring twice; one time
Mick sings "dirt, gritty..." and "I would love to push and pull with you 'til
dawn," which is probably what remains under there on the final mix. But
previous recordings sound plodding and overly loose. The final version, as
with "Tumbling Dice" and so many others, rides one of those perfect Stones
grooves.
The horns return for the coda ending section, with a far more raucous chart
than the bridge, adding a trombone in the low register. Nicky plays high-
octave triplets, while the backing singers (Gram Parsons again rumoured to
be among them) do a call-and-response with an improvising Mick. And as I
write this, wearing headphones, I experience one of those moments of
discovery, finding yet another texture. I could swear I hear a subtle steel
drum part, or something that sounds a lot like one, down in the mix, from
3:38 until the end of the song, playing a rhythmic and melodic counterpoint
to both the "gimme little drink" chorus and the horn part. Listen for
yourself; it's on the left side.
Ultimately, the day cycle of the song empties onto the dawn of the next.
While Exile on Main St. has the image of a bleak and dark record, there are
plenty of moments when the sun is allowed to seep in, with "All Down the
Line" and "Happy" also representing the light alongside "Loving Cup."
Nick Hornby, discussing
pop music in general, wrote in 2004, "there is still a part of me that persists
in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play
in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive," which is
exactly how I feel about "Loving Cup." My newest convert is my daughter,
who has insisted since age three that we listen to the song daily on our drive
to her preschool. I gladly oblige. The cycle continues.

Happy

On "Happy," the Human Riff unleashes one of his absolute classics. Keith
opens with that sort of tension-filled guitar figure that bops and weaves all
around the beat, making the listener wonder how he is finally ever going to
make it into the beat itself. He has a way of swinging guitar riffs so severely
that they sound like false starts, paying as much mind to the upbeat as the
down, small aural tricks that dip and rise dynamically. Taking his sweet
time to introduce the song, his open-G-tuned guitar ringing that identifiable
four-note lick on one side, doubled by a slide part off on the other, the song
is all Keith, almost literally:

That happened in one grand bash in France for Exile. I had the riff. The rest
of the Stones were late for one reason or another. It was only Bobby Keys
there and Jimmy Miller, who was producing. I said, I've got this idea; let's
put it down for when the guys arrive. I put down some guitar and vocal,
Bobby was on baritone sax and Jimmy was on drums. We listened to it, and
I said, I can put another guitar there and a bass. By the time the Stones
arrived, we'd cut it. I love it when they drip off the end of the fingers. And I
was pretty happy about it, which is why it ended up being called "Happy."
We all know it as the signature Keith Richards tune, a declaration of self,
his calling card. And if Keith is "Happy," then the band is happy. This is
where the rock star myth collects some validity, and it is ground zero for
Keith wannabes. Here is the joie de vivre that rock & roll is supposed to
reflect.
Keith mixes old blues themes in lines like "didn't want to be like Poppa /
working for the boss every night and day" with a more nuanced update on
Cole Porter:
Get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all

Some they may go for cocaine

I’m sure that if, I took even one signature sniff
It would bore me terrifically too
But I get a kick out of you
—Cole Porter, "I Get a Kick Out of You"

Never got a flash out of cocktails

When I can get some flesh off the bone

—Keith Richards, "Happy'

/ get no kick in a plane

Flying too high with some guy [gal] in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do
Yet I get a kick out of you

-Cole Porter

Never got a lift out of Lear jets

When I can fly way back home
I need a love to keep me happy
—Keith Richards

These thematic parallels may be coincidence, but Keith has always claimed
to have his "antenna" up, ready to soak up whatever was in the air. And he
has been known to play "I Get a Kick Out of You" later in his career, and
bootleg recordings exist of a performance or two of the Porter song.
In addition to a funky, inspired bass part, Richards gives a highly spirited
vocal performance on "Happy," supported by prominent backing vocals
overdubbed by Jagger, who takes over the ad-lib section at the end, which
Keith seems to accede gladly. The song benefits from yet another dazzling
mix of many layered components, including dual slide guitar parts, split in
stereo.
Jimmy Miller's drums and percussion drive the back-beat. In addition to
Bobby Keys' baritone sax, it sounds like he added a tenor horn as well. He
had actually just been playing percussion during the basic tracking. Jim
Price added trumpet and trombone lines and the arrangement builds to a
real horn-heavy drone as the song ends, with interweaving and overlapping
horn parts. It all results in a raging hard-rock, maximum R&B attack. Nicky
Hopkins hammers away on Wurlitzer electric piano, creating the sort of part
that Ian McLagan became known for with the Faces.
As I noted earlier, the sessions for Exile on Main St. saw the actors in the
drama drifting in and out of Nell-cote at various times throughout the
project, and it was often difficult to get the Stones all in one place at one
time. But even with this in mind, "Happy" is an extreme case, with one
member alone taking hold of the reigns. (Though this was not unheard of:
Jagger and Mick Taylor pretty much recorded all of "Moonlight Mile" on
Sticky Fingers while Keith was away from the studio, or, in his words, "out
of it.")
But the way "Happy" went down points to a difference between Keith and
Mick in preferred working methods. According to her various accounts,
Anita Pallenberg reckons that, not long after the band and their respective
families were pulled closer together by their mutual exile from their
homeland, a widening gulf started developing between the band members
as the time recording Exile went on, especially between Mick and Keith. "I
never really saw Mick and Keith sitting together and working like they used
to in the old days, when they used to rely on each other," she told Mojo,
further dispelling my closely guarded myth of the sessions. Mick seemed to
have the most trouble with the situation, as there was little for him to do
when the band was still in the nascent stages of a song, developing from a
riff that might have come to Keith in a midnight or morning burst of
inspiration. Only as an idea started to gel and it became apparent it would
grow into a real song would Jagger start to concentrate on writing proper
lyrics, otherwise he was wasting precious resources and inspiration. Mick
preferred hatching ideas first with Keith before bringing it to the band at the
next stage. Keith, however, liked to catch inspiration as it struck, doing all
in his power to capture and exploit whatever magic might happen.

Turd on the Run

"Turd on the Run" takes its place next to "Ventilator Blues" and "Casino
Boogie" as one of the churning-urn blues numbers on Exile, the songs that
seem to have risen out of the torrid basement jam sessions, sweat dripping
from the musicians in the middle of the humid Riviera nights. It would
really surprise and impress me if Jagger overdubbed his lead vocal part in
Los Angeles later, because I want to believe that he was just down there
howling his way through it while the rest of the band ground out the mostly
one-chord drone. Jagger offers the kind of hooting, screaming, growling
vocal— the essence of raw blues—that punk blues artists like the Cramps
and White Stripes worked decades later. Here are the Stones near their most
primordial.
This song could never have had any commercial potential, and it might
have never even occurred to the Stones that such a raw, decidedly non-pop
"song" would even make it onto an album—and if it were any other album,
it might not have. But this is Exile on Main St., so the band sounds like they
are playing for the sheer exhilaration of it, playing as if the music just
needed to come out. Thankfully, it was documented and mixed properly on
an official recording, not just tucked away on some murky bootleg. And
here is precisely what makes the album so special, and why talk of cutting it
down to one record is misguided; where else, aside from bootlegs and in
rare live situations, do we get to hear a mainstream, massively successful
band stretching out and having fun? And yet, this is no insufferable prog-
rock or jam-band experimentation that you will never play again; no, "Turd
on the Run" would sit well on a compilation next to Howlin' Wolf, the
Clash, or even some faster hardcore punk rock. In fact, the song gets my
vote over "Rip This Joint" for the record's most punk rock song. The
narrator on "Rip This Joint" sounds like he is just out to have a good time
raising hell at the union hall. On "Turd on the Run," Jagger sounds
desperate, in pain, driven over the edge, menacingly so. And he sounds like
he is going to make someone pay:
Begged, promised anything if only you would stay

Well I lost a lot of love on you YEAH! THATS RIGHT!

. . . Diamond rings, Vaseline, you gave me disease
Well I lost a lot of love on you!
Mick blasts away some harp fills right out of the Junior Wells playbook,
when he's not yowling like a banshee. Keith is right there with him in a
close harmony on choice lines. Stray bits of reverberating vocal, guitar, and
harmonica parts drift in and out between the lines. One such spare part that
jumped out at me recently is heard at around 0:32 to 0:34: a guitar sound
that comes out of nowhere to make a teetering three-note figure repeats,
then disappears until the instrumental break, from about 1:01 to 1:35, just
droning on with a slight variation on the main riff that Keith is chugging
down. Nicky Hopkins bangs away at the piano, boogie-woogie style.
Charlie keeps it austerely simple, just swishing away at the snare drum with
a steam train beat, allowing the others to rage away on their jam. The
ensemble includes Bill Plummer on an overdubbed upright bass, who hides
the fact that he overdubbed in LA; he sounds like he might well have been
there in the basement, furiously slapping away at the strings, clacking them
against the fretboard. But Plummer adds far more than any sort of
rockabilly cliché; his part is more like an amphetamine-blues bass. The
band sounds possessed by a mutual spirit. As the instrumental parts swirl up
into a frenzy, like it's the end of a Baptist church gospel vamp—all they are
missing is someone speaking in tongues. But then Mick ups the ante near
the end, covering his mouth in rapid taps as he howls a bone-chilling
falsetto like a Comanche warrior heading into battle, bringing the song into
a haunting fade. You can almost hear the Cramps' Lux Interior presaged
here.

Ventilator Blues

Now, deep within the bowels of the album, we find the most malevolent
sounding song on Exile. "Ventilator Blues" takes a Chess Records template,
a hard electric blues worthy of Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, or Muddy
Waters. And for one of the few times in his tenure with the Stones, Mick
Taylor gets a songwriting credit next to Jagger/Richards. He created the
insistent slide guitar lick that runs in an almost nightmarish loop through
this claustrophobic song, relentlessly cornering the listener as if in one of
the windowless rooms in the mouldy basement of Nellcote—which was, in
fact, the inspiration for the immediate lyrical theme. Pointing out some
typically small basement windows in a photo in Exile, Andy Johns
explained, "See these windows here? That was the only air that would come
in, so everything would get so hot. The guitars would go out of tune
constantly because of the heat. That's why they played 'Ventilator Blues.'"
But the intra-band tension must also have played a part in the shared need
to let off a little steam. An unhealthy dose of paranoia set in at Nellcote,
brought on by very real events such as the theft of priceless guitars and the
presence of seedy drug dealers ever ready to ply their wares. The drug use
within the band itself was only likely to heighten the intensity of the
mistrust. The arrangement of this song alone reflects the tension: the band
hangs on a single chord for the bulk of the song until, as the lyric suggests,
something must give, with an incredible release on the chorus, which
nevertheless builds to a subsequent ascending horn-driven climax on the
lines "no matter where you are / everybody's gonna need some kind of
ventilator." Mick drags on that last line of the chorus well into the next
section, as if finally discovering some kind of release for himself.
Mick's vocal, double-tracked in a unison part—a common recording
technique, but one that was rarely used on Stones records—bulks up his
testosterone-fuelled voice as he urgently spews such lines as "woman's
cussin' you can hear her scream / sounds like murder in the first degree,"
and "when your trapped and circled and no second chance / code of livin' is
your gun in hand." He pronounces "first" as "foist," "murder" as "moidah,"
and "learn" as "loin," for that bluesman twang. But once again, the authority
of his performance nips in the bud any notion that Jagger is merely
indulging in any mimicry. His improvised bits at the end of and between
lines are inspired; an assortment of that's all rights and come down and get
its. And at the end of the song, as the band roils away on the lick to take the
song home, Mick spits out a challenge, a provocation as the ending refrain:

Whatcha gonna do about? Watch a gonna do? Gonna fight it?

On an album of career-defining moments for Nicky Hopkins, his
performance on "Ventilator Blues" might be the most awe-inspiring. He is
all over the keyboard, raging away like an intense, updated Otis Spann or
Pinetop Perkins. After years of listening to this record, and hearing Jagger's
vocals and Mick Taylor's slide guitar most prominently on the song, at some
point the piano part hit me, grabbed me by the throat, and insisted that I
hear it first and foremost on every subsequent listen. The song has never
sounded the same to me since. Hopkins plays like a man possessed, slipping
impossibly quick figures into the funky, complicated rhythm set by Keith
and Charlie. As the arrangement builds, Nicky moves from a comparatively
sedate part that sits comfortably in the spaces left by the guitar riff to a
jittery, tense hammering style, rolling off triplets up the keyboard with his
quick right hand in the higher octaves.
Hopkins adds to an already scary cabin fever tension. He manages this
within a rhythm so tricky that Jimmy Miller apparently had to help Watts
along as he skips snare beats, also adding to the nervousness of the
arrangement. As ardent Stones fan Mike Gent of the bands the Figgs and
the Gentlemen explained, "Jimmy Miller got the groove on that together
and had to stand over Charlie and clap in time so he could get that fat
backbeat down." The horns rise dynamically like a truck sounding its air
horn as it barrels uncontrollably down a mountain highway. Bill Wyman
plays a grounded bass part worthy of Willie Dixon, and Mick Taylor's slide
part just sounds flat out fantastic.
"On 'Ventilator Blues' we got some weird sound of something that had gone
wrong—some valve or tube that had gone," Keith said, explaining the
happy accidents that sometimes occurred in the less than ideal conditions of
the basement. "If something was wrong you just forgot about it. You'd leave
it alone and come back tomorrow and hope it had fixed itself. Or give it a
good kick." Buried under this entire storm is an acoustic guitar part, which
helps to steady the rhythm—holds the fort down, as it were. Such telling
details lift songs like "Ventilator Blues" way beyond straight-on hero
worship to something more remarkable.
I Just Want to See His Face

In yet another winning transition, "Ventilator Blues" fades as "I Just Want to
See His Face" rises from the smoke. Now we really sound like we're in a
basement, but one in the deep south, a New Orleans church revival meeting
perhaps, or a Creole voodoo chant. The two songs are utterly different in
tone, but somehow they fit together. It's as if the same man with his back
against the wall on "Ventilator Blues" can somehow be saved from himself
on "I Just Want to See His Face": "sometimes you want no trouble,
sometimes you feel so down / let this music relax you mind." The narrator
doesn't sound convinced that he has found religion, but feels he can be
saved by the sight of His mere visage. And you feel like his victim: he's
cornered and beaten you to within an inch of your life on "Ventilator
Blues," and now he's holding off from finishing the deed, as his unstable
mind teeters back and forth between the sacred and the profane, the holy
and the murderous. You're okay, though, as long as he keeps singing about
Jesus.

This fits the themes of Exile on Main St. as a whole: the violence and the
chaos are soothed by the music. This song is so necessary to the whole vibe
of Exile; it would be hard to imagine the record without it. Mick knows
what we need better than we do; here is a breather, a meditative moment, a
reward for those who listen enough and a gift for those ready to accept.
Never mind accepting Jesus, can you accept this little piece of musical
salvation into your heart? It articulates my appreciation for—and likely
sums up Mick's feeling's about—gospel music; feeling soothed and lifted by
the spirit of the songs without necessarily subscribing to the specific
religious doctrine behind the lyrics. And there is a long and deep tradition
of gospel songs with lyrics reflecting such satisfaction in the mere image or
presence of Jesus, as a salve. Take, for example, the Soul Stirrers' song
"He's My Friend Until the End":
Then one day you'll see God's face
After you'd won this Christian race
He'll be your friend
The murky basement sound fits into the whole myth of the record. Most
accounts of the recording of this haunting song, including Jagger's own,
have Mick and Keith sitting around and jamming for a test recording, with
Keith at the electric piano. Mick apparently improvised the lines while
singing to Keith's hypnotic part. Mick Taylor played bass. The beautiful
gospel backing vocals and Bill Plummer's astonishing stand-up bass part
were overdubbed later in Los Angeles, after it became apparent that this
mesmerizing track could not be rejected.
Yet, contrary to the legend, it might be Bobby Whitlock playing electric
piano, appearing on the album uncredited. I talked to Whitlock and
mentioned that I saw this mentioned only once—in all the various books,
databases, Internet sources, and articles—and offhandedly he confirmed
this:
That's right. Those things happened ... back then. Because they took so long
to do it. There were two songs I was playing on, one of them was about:
(starts singing) "I don't want to talk about Jesus / I Just wanna see his face."
I'm playing electric piano on that. And on something else, about a mule or
something, I'm not sure ... or that was that Dr. John thing ... But back then,
there was so much going down in the, um, the drug department. When
Jimmy Miller finally found out, when I told him about, "Hey man, you guys
didn't bother to give me credit for that ..." He and I were in business
together in my solo career, at the time, all right? So I mean years, a couple
or three years had lapsed and I'm telling you man, he went "oh man, I knew
there was something missing." But it took so long. You know, it took them
over a year to do the recording, it was like a year and a half. You know, they
go to France, and then they're in England, someplace else, you know, some
studio here and there. So it's a little bit of everywhere and a lot of different
people floating in and out of there.

I mentioned that Keith Richards is usually given credit for the electric piano
on "I Just Want to See His Face," so I asked Bobby if he overdubbed it over
Keith's part, the way Bill Plummer overdubbed bass parts later in Los
Angeles. (I thought Bobby was part of the coterie in LA.) "Well, no, that is
not when it went down," he answered. "No, that happened in Olympic
Studios ... I was in England." He explained that Dr. John had been there
working on his record The Sun, Moon & Herbs (1971), which features
contributions from Mick, Bobby Keys, Jim Price, and many others. That
greasy record has a song called "Where Ya at Mule," which, no doubt, is the
other song to which Whitlock referred. Dr. John's influence is clear on "I
Just Want to See His Face."
I asked Whitlock, "So, that's just you on electric piano?" Bobby answered
quickly, "That would be me on electric piano." This is contrary to every
other account I have seen of the recording. One might assume that maybe
there was another take of the song, but every version of the legend
describes it as a spontaneous burst of inspiration.
Whitlock did not seem particularly concerned with his lack of credit on the
record, nor was he eager to reminisce about the era. Responding to farther
inquiries as to what might be the other song that he played on, Bobby more
or less dismissed it, saying, "yeah, but I don't even know. Because I haven't
listened to that record since we did it. I don't sit around and listen to
records, especially the ones I played on. I couldn't tell you what the name of
it is. Those were some pretty hazy days, all right?"

I asked Bobby to talk a bit about Nicky Hopkins. "We were all friends.
There was an opportunity for me to join the Stones but me and Eric
(Clapton) were putting our band together . . . There was always a give and
take (between English and American musicians)."
Al Perkins also downplayed any significance regarding the fact that British
musicians were so adept at translating American music forms. After all,
such music had its sources in Europe as well as Africa and other places.
"I've personally enjoyed the re-wrapping process whereby American music
is digested in England and presented back to America very effectively, the
Stones and the Beatles being two very good examples," he said. "The
Stones were great students of American blues," Perkins noted. "But along
with blues must come the other forms of music from the heartland; country
and gospel were major elements also."
And gospel is obviously what is on the table with "I Just Want to See His
Face." The approach here starts with the raw, small-combo sound of the
Staples Singers. Jimmy Miller's percussion and Charlie Watts' malleted
drums sounding like a cross between African drumming and tympani, a
rumble of distant thunder, provide all the atmosphere the song needs (again,
Dr. John's record being a particularly good reference point). But Miller adds
a tambourine for the real church feel and somehow the backing vocals from
Clydie King, Jesse ("Jerry" on the record sleeve) Kirkland, and Vanetta
Field (simply "Vanetta" on the credits) slip around Jagger's part as if he had
charted out the whole thing beforehand. He either left the space for them
intuitively, or Jimmy Miller and Los Angeles engineer Joe Zagano adeptly
played around with the mute button during the mix to allow them space for
a real call-and-response part.
Jagger was wise to surround himself with bona fide gospel singers to help
him achieve his authentic flavour. These singers were brought in by Billy
Preston. Bill Plummer overdubbed his acoustic bass part over Mick Taylor's
electric bass. When he isn't playing a swinging blues part, Plummer's
approach is extremely percussive, rushing high-octave runs that start and
stop abruptly, adding to the atmosphere of the track. It sounds like someone
is banging on an upright piano, kicking the bench, opening and shutting the
keyboard cover, wood knocking and echoing in the dark. It sounds ancient
or otherworldly, as if consciously made to sound like an Alan Lomax field
recording, a folk relic off of Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk
Music, in the tradition explored on the Basement Tapes.
It's easy to see why Tom Waits—another fan of Dr. John—has called "I Just
Want to See His Face" his favourite Stones song. The experimental
spontaneity and atmospherics of the song foreshadow work by Waits, Sonic
Youth, and other musicians who used room sounds and other vibe-filled
textures as essential components of their recordings. "That song had a big
impact on me," Waits has said of "I Just Want to See His Face."
"Particularly learning how to sing in that high falsetto, the way Jagger does
... But this is just a tree of life. This record (Exile on Main St.) is the
watering hole. Keith Richards plays his ass off. This has the Checkerboard
Lounge all over it."

Let It Loose

"Let It Loose" is one of the most beautiful songs on Exile, and in the
Rolling Stones' canon in general. Like many great songs, it seems to take its
lyrical inspiration from more than one source. After opening with a
stunning Keith Richards guitar lick, an arpeggio-picked riff that warbles
through a Leslie organ speaker, Mick Jagger starts in with what seems to be
a dialogue: "Who's that woman on your arm .. . and I'm hip to what she'll do
/ give her just about a month or two." As with a few songs on Exile, Mick is
offering caution and concern for a friend, a friend who seems suspiciously
like Keith. After those opening lines, the narrator seems to switch to the
other person. Perhaps it's an internal dialogue: "Bit off more than I can
chew / and I knew, yeah I knew what it was leading to," and "she delivered
right on time /1 can't resist a corny line." It might even be Mick giving
voice to Keith, perhaps a line that Keith wrote, concerned about Jagger
flying off to be with Bianca and disrupting the creative flow.
Mick offers one of his most stunning performances on this song. His vocal
is remarkably heartfelt, dragging out words as if each line is unloading
more weight off his shoulders. On a record that features some of his most
honest performances, he sounds completely guileless here, without any
semblance of a mask or character, as if singing a confessional lyric from
personal experience.

The "dysfunctional family" vibe that Mick Taylor and Anita Pallenberg
have remarked upon was in full effect during the sessions at Nellcote, with
jealousies and concerns about the effect of outsiders—women included—on
the relationships within the "gang" that was the Stones. On "Let It Loose"
we seem to be privy to a brotherly conversation between Mick and Keith—
though it's unlikely such words were ever actually uttered between the two
Glimmer Twins. It has often been said a band is like a marriage, but in my
experiences it is closer to that of siblings—rivalry very much included.
Marriages and "love" relationships can, in fact, be the stabilizing forces that
the individuals need to buttress them from the tempestuousness of intra-
band tensions.
It is interesting that this song is somewhat buried in the middle of Exile; the
only extra attention it receives is its placement closer to the murkiest and
most enigmatic side (side three) of the album's vinyl incarnation. The
production again sounds like the basement recording of Exile, with ghostly
vocal tracks left over from the tracking, as well as off-mike whistles and
hollers bleeding into open microphones, as if from other rooms, adding to
the dense, layered atmosphere and live feel of the track. But it was
apparently tracked at Olympic Studio in London.
The arrangement allows the ensemble to build and breathe on the 5:18
minute track. Jagger steps aside for a full minute in the middle of the song
to allow for a lush and intimately quiet breakdown, featuring the backing
gospel singers, a group of professional studio veterans assembled by and
including Dr. John, and Tamiya Lynn (misspelled "Tammi" on the record).
"What [Mick] wanted was this funk feeling, this real honest church feel,"
Lynn told Appleford. "He had an appreciation for black music, and he said
it openly, so that was out of the way. We knew he had this affinity for the
blues and where it came from. Wilson Pickett came clearly out of a church,
out of a black experience. Mick came out of a respect for black experience,
or black music. The greatness comes out of the spirit." The backing
ensemble also includes Shirley Goodman, who had hits in the 1950s with
"Let the Good Times Roll" and in the 1970s with the disco tune "Shame,
Shame, Shame."
Keith's guitar lick is offered the spotlight, with Nicky Hopkins (who also
has a few Mellotron "strings" lines that can be heard in the introduction)
coming back in with some well-chosen country/gospel trills. Charlie slams
out an elongated tom-tom fill and a typically magnificent horn chart takes it
from there, building the arrangement back up to a climax. We can tell it is
Bill Wyman on bass, as the part is effectively simple, made up almost
completely of half-notes; no busy runs, with one note at about 2:33 that
seems like a half-corrected mistake that was left in, a slur into the intended
note. Aside from some sotto vocce mumbling and a few shouts of
encouragement, Jagger returns in earnest at the three-minute mark and
seems fired up and pushed on by the ensemble. "Hide the switch and shut
the light, won't you shut it?" he asks, in opposition to the album's other
great gospel opus, "Shine a Light." In one of Mick's most arresting lines, he
sounds deeply wounded on the impossibly drawn out "may—be your
friends think I'm just a stranger / your face I'll never see no more." He
vamps off the backing singers, but eventually cedes to the chorus
completely, as if completely broken, letting them offer chance at salvation.
It is a moment that feels divine, as the voices fade out. Listening to the
vinyl edition, one is thankful for the break that is afforded with the end of
the side. The listener almost needs a moment of meditation to gather one's
self before the onslaught of the album's home stretch that begins with the
next track, "All Down the Line."

All Down the Line

Just in case you started to get lost in the murky depths of side three and
beaten down by the heavy emotion conveyed by the band on "Let It Loose,"
"All Down the Line" is there to slap you in the face and straighten you up,
leading off side four with the same blistering hard rock assault of "Rocks
Off" and "Happy," two of the other side openers. It is amazing that "All
Down the Line" sounds as forceful as it does. Outtakes suggest this was a
song the band really struggled with, in fits and starts, from sessions as far
back as 1969, before finally reaching the state of glory it attains here on
Exile.
The whole band is here, and it's satisfaction for the soul to hear the stellar
rhythm section of Bill Wyman playing a steady bass-line groove of eighth
notes inside of Charlie Watts' hard and typically crisp backbeat. The intro—
played without bass—has a bit of that "Honky Tonk Women" vibe, with just
a little of the tension that accompanies the wait for the rest of the band to
drop in. (The album sleeve and some sources list Bill Plummer as playing
acoustic bass on the track as well, but I just don't hear it anywhere.) Wyman
is fiercely powerful here, content to stay pumping on the root notes until the
chorus, when he slips into a James Jamerson-like Motown funk pocket with
Charlie, slipping out of the choruses with very slick R&B runs (listen, for
example, at 2:07-2:10). Additionally, we have that relentless early-70s-
Stones percussion from Jimmy Miller, shaking it so hard that you have to
shake it as well. Mick Jagger said his wish was for people to dance, not
think, when listening to Exile.
The real star here, though, is Mick Taylor, who contributes the most
distinctive instrumentation with his rapid-fire slide part. He rightfully gets
one of the precious few actual guitar solos on this expansive record. The
guitar tracks are very prominent in the mix, Keith leading the band with his
characteristic five-string, open G-tuned chug, playing hammered
suspensions slightly behind the beat. The horns again punctuate the
proceedings with a Memphis punch, revving it up for all it's worth with a
flurry of notes during the "oh won't you be my little baby for a while" coda.
The song sports one of the most inventive horn charts of the album. Nicky
Hopkins pounds away in one of his typical rock & roll barrelhouse parts,
though with everything else at full-blast here, he struggles to be heard.
Jagger, also doing all he can do to be heard, has rebounded and fully
recovered from the depths he plumbed on "Let It Loose." He is back to the
madman yowls of side one, sounding like the wild hillbilly character of
"Rip This Joint," screeching rebel yells as he barrels down country roads
toward the next roadhouse. Though he needs a "sanctified girl with a
sanctified mind," he is finding salvation this time as he "busts another
bottle," again offering the beguiling mix of the sacred and profane that only
good rock & roll can provide.
Mick sings and shouts through most of the song, as if to be heard over the
mix. Here, he is just another instrument in the band, slightly above the
horns and indeed almost part of the horn section, especially at the end,
where his improvisations might as well be a Bobby Keys sax solo. The
urgency is palpable in the timbre of his strained vocal chords, especially on
lines like "keep the motor running, yeah!" (many of his lines are punctuated
with similar extraneous ad-libs). He screams out of the Mick Taylor slide
solo, sounding like a distorted guitar or guttural sax, rising in volume until
he spits out the line "well, open up and swallow, yeah, yeah! / bust, bust,
bust another bottle, yeah!" The chorus is a gratifying call-and-response
between Jagger and the backing singers, including Kathi McDonald, who
had been brought to the attention of the Stones by Leon Russell. She is
almost an equal presence to Mick, especially on the coda. That's her solo at
about 1:49. Together, they sound like the Ike and Tina Turner Revue at mil
speed.

Stop Breaking Down

A slinky Robert Johnson blues with Jagger on guitar and a wicked

harmonica, "Stop Breaking Down" is the one of the two or three songs on
Exile that doesn't feature Keith Richards (depending on who is playing
piano on "I Just Want to See His Face"). "Keith was in charge and pulled all
the strings," explained Mick Taylor. "He was always the prime mover
behind the recording of Exile . . . Having said that, the hierarchy of power
was never that clear cut—it was Mick's idea to cover Slim Harpo's 'Shake
Your Hips' and Robert Johnson's 'Stop Breaking Down.'"
The track is left over from the Olympic Studios sessions, and Mick "I know
I play a bad guitar" Jagger does a nice chunka-chunk rhythm on the electric,
while Taylor shines on the slide guitar. One of the few other distinguishing
elements of "Stop Breaking Down" is the rare presence of Ian Stewart, who
sits in with a bluesier version of his boogie-woogie oeuvre. His rhythmic
timing swings impeccably.
As with many such twelve-bar blues tracks that might otherwise be
throwaway bar-band versions of the real thing, it is Jagger's commanding
vocal performance that makes the song worthy of more than one or two
listens. Jagger is singing live, at least for some of the track, directing the
band through the same microphone (via an amplifier) he uses for his harp—
thus, somewhat muddied and distorted. We can hear him shout "one more
time" over the penultimate twelve bars, with hoots and howls reverberating
through the old-time sounding tape echo.
If nothing else, the track further establishes the Stones' mastery of the genre
that launched their career back in the suburbs of London a decade prior.
And it is well placed as a filler track that gives some breathing room
between the ferocious "All Down the Line" and the deep soul of "Shine a
Light." Still, to my ears, "Stop Breaking Down" sounds like a rare moment
when the band went back to an older track to help flesh out the record.

Shine a Light

When I first started spinning Exile on Main St. as a kid, "Shine a Light"
was one of the first songs to hit me deeply, even though it was near the end
of this long record. It made me fully aware of the influence gospel music
had on not just my favourite band, the Rolling Stones, but on much of the
music I loved. The first album I bought for myself (as opposed to inherited)
was Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life, another double record with
heavy gospel roots. (I guess I had a thing for sprawling records; the latter
even included a four-song 45!) By the time I was out of high school, I was
buying Andre Crouch records and tuning into Sunday morning broadcasts
of real big-choir gospel services, the kind that made me feel something
significantly more spiritual than the elaborate Catholic masses of my
upbringing. Eventually, I made the pilgrimage to Memphis to see the
Reverend Al Green lead a marathon Sunday morning service in his own
church, an event that has brought me as close to something God-like as
anything else I have experienced. Such is the power of great music.
The Jagger/Richards track "Shine a Light" dates back to 1969 at least, when
Leon Russell cut a version of it called "Get a Line on You." However, it is
recorded on Exile as an almost solo Jagger track, with Taylor— who also
plays a very groovy bass part—the only other Rolling Stones band member
on the recording. It is perhaps telling that Keith makes no appearance on the
track. "Shine a Light" begins with an ethereal sort of sound, a guitar being
fingered, through a tape echo machine. It is the lead guitar of Mick Taylor
that comes in for real at the one-minute mark. Again, we have a little
extraneous noise that adds an enigmatic sense of atmosphere and texture to
the multi-layered production.
Jimmy Miller is on the drums, and Billy Preston is the main man, with both
an organ and a piano track. Preston, who played the awe-inspiring organ
solo on "I Got the Blues" on Sticky Fingers, "had that gospel feel, you
know, which Nicky did not have," said Andy Johns. While there is no doubt
that, between the two, Preston was the more authentic gospel player, Nicky
Hopkins did hone some impressive gospel chops and had made remarkable
strides from his earliest days with the Stones, as is evidenced on Exile.
The Stones had taken stabs at the gospel form on Beggar's Banquet with
"Salt of the Earth," and with "You Can't Always Get What You Want" on
Let It Bleed. But both of those were bastardizations of the genre, each
working on its own level, but neither would be considered close to
authentic.

Let's briefly trace the development of the Stones' gospel influence. "Salt of
the Earth's" vamp is gospel-like, but even the Watts St. Gospel Choir from
Los Angeles can't save it from relative amateurism. But the Stones, with not
only Billy Preston but also their longtime pianist Nicky Hopkins, pretty
much nail a more authentic gospel sound on Exile, even while making it
sound like something of their own. Listen, for example, to Hopkins' piano
part on "Salt of the Earth," and compare it to his work on Exile. On the
former, he seems to be locked in a jittery pattern, seemingly afraid to go out
on a limb and take some chances. This is, however, symptomatic of the feel
of the whole band. It is a nice try, and the song is good, but it absolutely
pales in comparison to similar tracks on Exile. The artistic growth of the
band, Hopkins included, is obvious.
"You Can't Always Get What You Want," on the next record, Let it Bleed,
has the Jimmy Miller groove really settling in. Keith has started to play the
five-string open-G-style guitar that would forever dominate the Stones
sound. The rhythm is established right from the get-go, on Keith's acoustic
guitar, soon after the London Bach Choir's introduction. Although the
clearly no southern gospel chorus, the sound of the classical boys choir
serves as an interesting combination, creating tension between the choir's
straight on-the-beat phrasing and the loose gospel rhythms of Jimmy Miller
on drums, leading the band through an otherwise convincing approximation
of a gospel vamp. Jagger seems to sing far more freely, ad-libbing against
(and seemingly spurred on by) the backing of true gospel-trained vocalists
Madeline Bell, Nanette Newman, and Doris Troy (who had some hits of her
own). Indeed, Jagger is screaming as the band reaches one of the most
inspired climaxes in recorded pop music. Interestingly, the loose piano feel
here is accomplished by Al Kooper at the keyboard, not Hopkins. And
likewise, the feel of the drums is attributed to Jimmy Miller himself, who
played the part after trying to demonstrate it to Charlie Watts, who
ultimately deferred to Miller. Watts does the same again on "Shine a Light."
On Exile's gospel-inspired tracks, Hopkins sounds as loose as he was stiff
on "Salt of the Earth." He now sounds at least as good as the Al Kooper part
on "You Can't Always Get What You Want." However, you would be hard-
pressed to surpass Preston's playing— who at age ten was already playing
with Mahalia Jackson, the superstar Queen of Gospel.
Preston lays the bedrock piano chords on the introduction of "Shine a
Light," and Jagger begins his lament: "saw you stretched out in room ten-
oh-nine with a smile on your face and a tear right in your eye." If there was
any doubt about the subject of Jagger's lyrics on some of the album's earlier
tracks, it is crystal clear on "Shine a Light." At first glance, the song is
ostensibly about a party girl, but upon deeper examination and within the
context of the record, this seems to be the most overt of Mick's "worried
about you" Exile songs for Keith. As implied, these songs didn't start or end
with Exile on Main St. : "Worried About You," "Waiting on a Friend,"
"Sway," "Live With Me"—there is a litany of songs that make either
explicit or passing references to Keith and his relationship with Jagger.
Songwriters find inspiration in emotional strife, and little causes more
emotional upheaval than a creative partnership replete with continuous
"sibling" rivalry. And these images on "Shine a Light" are obvious, from the
blissed-out nod in the high-rise hotel room, to the "Berber jewellery," to the
"drunk in the alley, baby, with your clothes all torn." There had been a
certain degree of factionalism in the Stones almost from day one, but a new
era was ushered in with the making of Exile on Main St., one that found
Jagger and Richards most often in separate courts. "Mick was always
jumping off to Paris 'cause Bianca was pregnant and having labour pains,"
recalled Jimmy Miller in 1977. "I remember many mornings after great
nights of recording, I'd come over to Keith's for lunch. And within a few
minutes of seeing him I could tell something was wrong. He'd say, 'Mick's
pissed off to Paris again.' I sensed resentment in his voice because he felt
we were starting to get something, and when Mick returned the magic
might be gone."
Seemingly bemoaning the often seedy hangers-on in Keith's orbit, Mick
sings "your late night friends will leave you in the cold gray dawn," and
"just seen too many flies on you / I just can't brush 'em off," with a little
Elvis Presley flourish. The record's theme of decay is in full bloom on the
song, and not merely the aristocratic European decadence of Huysmans, but
the downtown desolation of Lou Reed. Here is a dynamic in which the
principals could simultaneously be jetting off to Paris and drunk in some
alley with torn threads.
Mick offers a bleak perspective of his friend's future:
Angels beating all their wings in time
With smiles on their faces and a gleam right in their eye
Oh, thought I heard one sigh for you
Come on up, come on up now, come on up now
The flies have now transformed into angels. For Mick, or at least his
protagonist, the sentiment is nothing less than a matter of life and death. Yet
there is no urgency in his voice; the performance is one of weary
acceptance and, for the most part, hopelessness. That is, until the chorus,
when Mick seems to pray for (and find) the light of a higher power. The
song is very much a study of dark and light, with the slow, soulful, and
mournful verses and the chorus that borders on jaunty. Preston's staccato
piano part and Jagger's shift in tone on the vocals are most responsible for
the change in the song's mood from verse into chorus. Jimmy Miller shifts
from a sparse and inventive verse beat to a steady backbeat on the chorus.
The oddball rhythm section of Miller and Mick Taylor on bass shifts into an
R&B groove for the chorus.
Aiding the cause significantly are the stellar backing singers, assembled in
part by Preston: Clydie King, Jesse Kirkland, Joe Green, and Venetta Field.
At the end of the chorus, in a section that could be labelled the re-
introduction, the backing choir's vocals are also filtered through a Leslie
speaker, which has the effect of blending them in with the organ. Such
attention to textural detail—also illustrated in the prominence of the ghost
vocals from leftover Jagger takes—adds to the haunting spacey-ness of the
record.

The Stones struck a rich vein on Exile —adopting a sincere and authentic
gospel aesthetic with ease—one that they had been after for at least four or
five years. In fact, you can date the first signs of the American gospel music
influence even earlier, with the guitar line from "The Last Time," which, as
Keith Richards notes, "had a strong Staple Singers influence in that it came
out of an old gospel song that we revamped and re-worked ..." But until
they hit the target with the Exile songs, the Stones had merely incorporated
passing elements of gospel into their overall sound, as if either too timid or
too amateur to tackle the genre more directly.
There seems to be no such inhibition on Exile. In fact, lack of inhibition of
almost any kind might be the single most winning trait of the album. On
later records, however, the gospel influence seems to have dissipated faster
than it took to gather. By the late 1970s records it has all but vanished.
Perhaps it's this gospel component more than any other musical root that
makes Exile on Main St. such a special record, a standout in their catalogue.
Though the Stones always retained soul music— which has gospel as its
primary source—as a continuous and direct inspiration, it is a mystery as to
why the band seemingly abandoned this true gospel sound. Their gospel
exploits certainly didn't compromise their status as a rock & roll band.
Indeed, it might have been the best style with which to soothe the frayed
nerves of a generation. Whatever the reason, it was not likely a conscious
move, but rather a natural, albeit regrettable, transition.

Soul Survivor

Lester Bangs points out that Exile on Main St. is largely about surviving
casualties. As we have seen, these themes are easily heard on the record,
which is why "Soul Survivor" might actually be the perfect way to end the
whole album. I have never given much thought to this song. It is catchy
enough, sure. But it almost seems to be boilerplate Stones, indicative of the
formula they would exhaust for the next few records. The open-G riffing,
especially as a coda over which Jagger improvises, has become prototypical
Keith Richards, an mo he seems to have gotten stuck in at times. At first
glance, the song seems like an anti-climatic way to end the record. But then
you take a look at the lyrics, and you have to wonder if, despite the image
of this record as a big sprawl, there is not some grand design behind it all,
right down to the song sequencing—I mean, beyond the obvious groupings
like the mostly acoustic side two, or "the country side." No, there seems to
be a certain degree of lyrical organization, from the lead-off salvo of
"Rocks Off" ("heading for the overload / splattered on the dusty [dirty] road
/ kick me like you've kicked before / I can't even feel the pain no more") to
this album closer. Coming on the heels of what seem to be Mick's pointed
lyrics in "Shine a Light," he sings:

You've got a cut-throat crew, yeah

I’m going to sink under you . . . . . . Yeah, yeah, it's the graveyard watch
Running right on the rocks I've taken all of the knocks. . .
. . . Yeah, when you're flying your flags All my confidence sags You I’ve
got me packing my bags
I’ll stow away at sea
Yeah, you make me mutiny
Where you are I won’t be
You're going to be the death of me, yeah
"Cut-throat crew?" "Graveyard watch?" "Mutiny?" Never mind what I said
about "Shine a Light," every line in "Soul Survivor" seems to be tailor-
made to articulate Jagger's feelings of alienation under the Keith regime. It
is a stunning admission of humility ("my confidence sags" and "you're
gonna be the death of me") until Jagger declares that he will be the "soul
survivor," a clever pun for this particular strain of the sole survivor: a
survivor in a soul band. Jagger's narrative voice veers sharply from that of a
sainted compassionate presence to the winner of a micro-Darwinian
struggle.
For all its nautical imagery, "Soul Survivor" sounds like a shot across the
bow of the Good Ship Stones, with Jagger "packing [his] bags." Mick
sounds like he has gone from worrying about Keith to worrying about
himself. The sequencing of the album, now that we have reached the end of
it, seems calculated with a perfect sense of balance and structure, at least
from a lyrical standpoint. Musically, it would help if "Soul Survivor" was a
rocker on par with "Happy," but its "Street Fighting Man" sort of coda is a
fine way to end the record.
The pirate-movie theme is a silly, beat-through metaphor by the end of the
song, but it falls in line with some of Exile's other cinema references
—"Dietrich movies" and the pictures in the album sleeve of a screaming
Joan Crawford and movie houses. Rolling Stone wrote in 1977, "Aural film
noir, the richly textured Exile is to most records what The Big Sleep and
Casablanca are to made-for-TV movies." The film noir comparison is
suitable; as with noir, the hero throughout much of the album is an
untrustable blur between good and evil, dark and light, happy and sad. We
rarely know if Mick is singing songs about himself, others in the band,
women, or no one in particular.

Outro

Like some noir, the record seeps into our waking consciousness like a
dream. And like a dream that we can't shake, it is free from wakeful logic.
Yet its raggedness and randomness strike upon raw ephemeral truths, the
kind of deep emotional revelations that can come from both dreams and
nights of insomnia, resonating throughout our daylight hours. Surviving in a
troubled world is perhaps the overarching lyrical concern on Exile. "The
Stones don't have a home anymore—hence the exile," Keith said. "But they
can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck,
improvise, overcome."
In addition to political assassinations, the mess in Vietnam, and the
increasing level of violence in society, the Stones had their own personal
tragedies and demons to contend with. Stanley Booth writes in True
Adventures of the Rolling Stones "of mad Keith, and knowing that what the
Stones had already done had killed one of them." He writes as if steeled
against terror, an abyss he stared into at Altamont.

I have always had a hard time buying into the notion that the band's lifestyle
is what killed Brian Jones, a fragile soul who by all accounts clung
tenuously to life. Many people out of the public eye share similar struggles
and eventually succumb. We just don't hear about them. Truth is, we all
struggle. We all know friends, lovers, and family members for whom life is
a fight against the shadows. Exile on Main St. is a masterpiece in part
because, as with many classic rock & roll records, it makes us feel that
we're not so alone. With the aid of Exile, we feel we can survive with
dignity and no little style. Most of us, after all, have felt like exiles on our
hometown's Main Street.
During the writing of this book, the deaths of Ronald Reagan and Ray
Charles happened in quick succession. Reagan's death, in particular,
unleashed a wave of sepia-stained nostalgia in America. The quick
succession of their deaths resulted in strange pairings of the two men—
radio stations playing sound bites of the former president's speeches over
Brother Ray's genius interpretation of what should be the American national
anthem, "America the Beautiful," for example. I found the coincidental
pairing of these two men to be illustrative of the myth/reality dichotomy
and competing worldviews that Gram Parsons pointed out wistfully to
Stanley Booth in his 1969 reverie. To be sure, nostalgia, mythology, and
truth often wash together and become virtually indistinguishable, but
Ronald Reagan successfully sold a version of America that never really
was. Ray Charles, though—blind and on his own from his early teens—was
the truly self-reliant, self-made man of the American Dream. Like Parsons
said, "sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."
When asked by Time magazine in 1968 to define "soul," Charles, the man
generally credited with inventing soul music, answered: "It's a force that
can light up a room. The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of
knowing where you've been and what it means. Soul is a way of life—but
it's always the hard way."
That "knowing where you've been" and radiating "selfhood" is the best
description of soul music I have ever come across. Indeed, it can explain the
deep emotional pull of any great music or art. But there is something about
soul music in particular that digs deep into .. . well, the soul. It is not head
music. It does not take multiple listens to understand. The music speaks
directly to the heart. As Mick Jagger told Roy Carr, Exile on Main St. "is
not really a thinking man's record." And the Stones have always been,
above all else, a soul and R&B band.
Soul music was ubiquitous by the time I was a kid. It has always been a
given, even if a lot of rock & roll deviates too far from that source for the
music to matter to me anymore. With minimal fuss, soul gets to the Zen
essence of what it is to be human. It's "That Feeling" that Keith Richards
and Tom Waits sang about in their collaboration on the song of the same
name. And the emotion comes from some deep place within, as Ray
Charles notes. The first time I heard it, I knew on some base level that the
songs on Exile on Main St. spoke to me, pulled me, tugged at me. The
chord changes alone held some deeply understood truth.

In soul music, it is truly about "the singer, not the song." Listen to Aretha
Franklin's stunning vocal performances on "Ain't No Way" or "I Never
Loved a Man the Way That I Love You." Listen to the pauses in the
phrasing. Or recall how Ray Charles waits almost three full beats before
coming in with the first word of the song "Georgia on My Mind." The ache,
the shivers that arise when hearing singers like this work, is found in these
spaces, in these pauses, and in the dramatically slow tempos that Ray
Charles would insist on, to the bemusement of his backing musicians.
Like Robert Frank's photographs, Raymond Carver's novels, or Edward
Hopper's paintings, there is a sublime beauty captured in those in-between
moments. Such is the stuff of "the basic nature of our lives." If Frank's
pictures are the "sad poems" Kerouac describes, then they are haikus,
capturing in the specifics a more universal condition, the Buddhist
acceptance that all of life is suffering. And that is precisely the same
assumption of the blues, and of soul.
For fans of such performances, an inexplicable bond is formed between the
listener, the performance, the song, and the singer. Waves of emotion—
nostalgia, melancholy, memory—tumble over me when I hear songs like
Charles' "What Would I Do?" There is nostalgia—defined as a "wistful. ..
yearning"—in every pause in the singing, in certain major to minor chord
changes, in manipulative Tin Pan Alley arrangements.
By way of nostalgia, we are temporal exiles. Robert Frank was criticized at
the time his book was published. Many Americans first looking at his
photos mistook Frank for a surrealist, presumed to be presenting Americans
with irony (despite his similar work internationally), in seemingly ordinary
situations, with no apparent reason for photographic documentation. It was
assumed that Frank was out to tweak noses with a vague, absurdist
statement. But the Swiss photographer, as a geographic "exile," was simply
looking at images Americans took for granted and seeing that much deeper
and finding something profound.
In viewing visual art and listening to recorded music, we have the benefit of
being exiled in time, looking back with new eyes on something captured in
the past. We judge it via that lens. For those of us born after Frank's photos
were published, their settings in a bygone era allow us to see both the
surface and the substance as equally worthy of examination, if not as one
and the same. Though much of the subject matter in Frank's work reflects
lost relics of mid-century Americana, surely we can look at the photos
without pining for the long-lost fake innocence of 50s greaser sock-hops.
The notion that the 1950s was an era of shiny, positive idealism persists
even after artists such as Frank have exposed another plane of subtleties,
and, at times, the underbelly of the era.
In choosing Robert Frank, the Stones were cognizant of this as well; the
music of the 1950s—so much of which is represented as influence on Exile
on Main St. —was not all cartoon-like; early rock & roll music was often
malevolent, raunchy, loud, raw, sexy, and sad. It was dangerous by
definition: the music of the marginalized, a threat to the establishment. On
Exile, the Stones kept that facet alive during a time when music was
slipping into self-parody, big business, and bloated cultural irrelevance.
And the Stones were simultaneously mining other varied forms of
mythology: the commonplace, agreed-upon notions of America, the cultural
currency; the other America, that rural agrarian myth, that mythical
America explored by Dylan and the Band; the streetwise urban hipster
("flashing knives"), and blustery swagger of Chicago bluesmen. All the
while, they tapped into that musical nostalgia, ranging from older folk and
country forms, to urban soul and blues, to modern hard rock—and many
points in between. We are seduced by it, willingly; these are our shared
myths, not lies. We want to subscribe to it all, because myths have always
helped us make sense of the world, appealing to some universal, ephemeral
sensation that is present in us.
Meanwhile the Stones were also selling their own press-fed mythology, as
glorious, "elegantly wasted" jet-setting rock stars—the triumphs as well as
the tragedies. On Exile, the Stones can be heard struggling with the now-
cliché 60s hangover. As Lester Bangs noted: "The Stones never bought all
that brothers and sisters crap ... when Qagger] tried to reverse the
manipulative thrust of his presence at Altamont he made himself suddenly
and completely pathetic for the very first time because he was a total failure
..."
The blank, stunned look on Jagger's face at the end of Gimme Shelter, after
he has just viewed the footage from Altamont, testifies to the impotence and
ambiguous responsibility he must have felt, implicated in the dark fallout of
the late 60s. Even as he was exploiting the Zeitgeist commercially, Jagger
most likely never bought into the flower power ethos, and Keith certainly
never did. Witness his rage, which stands in stark opposition to Jagger's
weak entreaties, as Richards yells into the microphone at Altamont, "Look!
Either you guys stop that shit, or you get no more music," and calls out
specific perpetrators, "THAT cat, right there!" In those few moments, in
which the walking dead of Keith circa '69 awakens and lets loose, we can
see that he was always aware of the fact that humanity's dark side never
fully abates, and he is on guard against the violent tide. The Stones had
been prescient enough to warn, "a storm is threatening" in "Gimme
Shelter," but were seemingly taken off guard and left powerless when the
shit really did come down. As Al Maysles, along with his brother, David,
co-director of Gimme Shelter, said in Rolling Stone in 1970, "Peter Fonda
went looking for America. The Stones found it."
Bangs continues: "Death of Innocence in Woodstock Nation my ass,
Altamont was about facing up. And the Stones were stuck in the middle of
it, partly at fault, partly confused patsies from out of town who'd tried in
their own mallet-handed way to do something nice for a group of people
toward whom, nevertheless, they almost certainly felt more contempt than
anything else."
Much of Exile on Main St. is about coming to terms with it all. As John
Perry put it, the record "has a strong claim as the first rock album to make a
full tour horizon, once the dust and debris of the 1960s had settled . .. Mick
and Keith were sufficiently intelligent to spot a new source of subject
matter and articulate enough to set it down straight." "Kick me like you've
kicked before," sings a helpless Jagger on "Rocks Off," even while his foil
plays some of the most raging guitar parts of the band's history, as if it is
Keith himself doing the kicking. "I can't even feel the pain no more."
And Exile on Main St. is a masterpiece musically because it manages to
encompass a seemingly infinite amount of subtle (and not so subtle)
variations on rock & roll—a form that had seemed to be severely limited to
basic, guitar-driven music. Ironically, the Stones here are not aiming outside
themselves, as they did with mediocre results on Their Satanic Majesty's
Request. That record sent them scurrying home to their roots on Beggars'
Banquet. But on Exile they are reaching deep within themselves, as men
and as musicians. And, thankfully for us, a sizeable portion of who they
were at the time was based on their impressive record collections: blues,
gospel, folk, country, rock & roll, rockabilly, New Orleans jazz, Memphis
soul, hard rock, even vocal standards all finding their way onto the album.
This is not just a band at the top of its game. It is the world's best rock &
roll band on top of everything, singing and playing their hearts out.
Bibliography

Books
Appleford, Steve. Rolling Stones Rip This Joint: The Stories Behind Every
Song. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000.
Booth, Stanley. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. New York:
Vintage Books, 1985.

Charone, Barbara. Keith Richards Life as a Rolling Stone. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1982.
Elliot, Martin. The Rolling Stones Complete Recording Sessions 1963-
1989. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1990.
Frank, Robert. The Americans. 2nd ed. New York, Zurich, and Berlin:
Salco Publishers, 1994.
Frank, Robert. Robert Frank. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.
Guaralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern
Dream of Freedom. New York: Harp-erPerennial, 1986.
Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Ed. John
Morthland. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.
Perry, John. Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones. New York: Schirmer
Books, 1999.
Sandford, Christopher. Keith Richards: Satisfaction. New York: Carroll &
Graf Publishers, 2004 (excerpted from www.theage.com.au).
Tarle, Dominique. Exile: The Making of Exile on Main St. Guildford,
England: Genesis Publications Limited, 2001.
Wyman, Bill, and Richard Havers. Rolling with the Stones. New York: DK
Publishing, 2002.
Wyman, Bill, and Ray Coleman. Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock W Roll
Band. New York: Signet, 1991.

Magazine Articles
Cook, Jno. "Robert Frank: Dissecting the American Image." Exposure
magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1986), excerpted from
www.jnocook.net/frank/
frank.htm. Hodenfield, Chris. "Table Talk with Mick in Paris."
Rolling Stone, October 28, 1971, excerpted from
www.rollingstone.com. Jones, Allan. "The Rolling Stones." Uncut, January
2002, pp. 45-80. Johnstone, Nick. "Let the Tiger Out!" Uncut, January

2002, pp. 86-94. Kaye, Lenny. "The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St."
Rolling Stone, 1972, excerpted from www.
rollingstone.com. Nelson, Paul. Rolling Stone, December 15, 1972,
excerpted from www.superseventies.com. Rolling Stone, December 11,
2003, excerpted from
www.superseventies.com. Simmons, Sylvie. "The Aristocats." Mojo,
January
2002, pp. 48-62.

Newspaper Articles
"Politics Against Freedom." New York Times, June 5, 1970.

"California Regents Drop Communist From Faculty." Wallace Turner, New

York Times, June 20, 1970.
"Angela Davis Is Sought in Shooting That Killed Judge on Coast."
Associated Press, New York Times, August 16, 1970.

"F.B.I. Seizes Angela Davis in Motel Here." Linda Charlton, New York
Times, October 14, 1970.
"The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee." Sol Stern, New
York Times, June 27, 1971.
"Angela Davis Acquitted on All Charges." Earl Caldwell, New York Times,
June 5, 1972.
(All New York Times articles taken from www. nytimes.com)
Web Sites
www.timeisonourside.com Time Is on Our Side, Ian McPherson.
www.amazon.com "Tom Waits: His Favorite Things."
www.criterionco.com "Snapshots From the Road," Georgia Bergman's
commentary from DVD release of Gimme Shelter film for The Criterion
Collection.
www.starbucks.com "Various Artists: The Rolling Stones Artist's Choice"
CD.
http://www.beafifer.com/winner.htm 2003 "Song-writing and Treason," E.
W. Boyle.
www.mentomusic.com

www.musicals 101 .com/minstrel.htm "A History of the Musical Minstrel

Shows," John Kenrick.
www.theage.com.au
www.nzentgraf.de The Complete Works Website: The Rolling Stones
Database, Nico Zentgraf.
www.barryrudolph.com "Rod Stewart," Barry Rudolph.
www.allmusic.com
Films

Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour, 1972)

Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin,
1970)
 Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
PART I
PART II
Rocks Off
Rip This Joint
Shake Your Hips
Casino Boogie
Tumbling Dice
Sweet Virginia
Torn and Frayed
Loving Cup
Happy
Turd on the Run
Ventilator Blues
I Just Want to See His Face
Let It Loose
All Down the Line
Stop Breaking Down
Shine a Light
Soul Survivor
Outro
Bibliography