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Greeted with decidedly mixed reviews upon its original release, Exile on Main St. has become generally regarded as the Rolling Stones' finest album. Part of the reason why the record was initially greeted with hesitant reviews is that it takes a while to assimilate. A sprawling, weary double album encompassing rock & roll, blues, soul, and country, Exile doesn't try anything new on the surface, but the substance is new. Taking the bleakness that underpinned Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers to an extreme, Exile is a weary record, and not just lyrically. Jagger's vocals are buried in the mix, and the music is a series of dark, dense jams, with Keith Richards and Mick Taylor spinning off incredible riffs and solos. And the songs continue the breakthroughs of their three previous albums.
No longer does their country sound forced or kitschy — it's lived-in and complex, just like the group's forays into soul and gospel. While the songs, including the masterpieces "Rocks Off," "Tumbling Dice," "Torn and Frayed," "Happy," "Let It Loose," and "Shine a Light," are all terrific, they blend together, with only certain lyrics and guitar lines emerging from the murk. It's the kind of record that's gripping on the very first listen, but each subsequent listen reveals something new. Few other albums, let alone double albums, have been so rich and masterful as Exile on Main St., and it stands not only as one of the Stones' best records, but sets a remarkably high standard for all of hard rock.
"Exile on Main St." is widely regarded as the Rolling Stones' masterpiece. It's also an album surrounded by so much dark myth and debauched legend that if the working conditions were really that out of control, it's a wonder it was even made.
Instead, it preserves the mystery by presenting the original album intact with liner notes and documentary footage that skims the surface of just what went on in Keith Richards' villa-turned-recording-studio in the summer of 1971. The 10 previously unreleased tracks shed little new light on the past; instead most of them feature freshly overdubbed vocals by Mick Jagger, a misguided attempt to update an album that needs no updating.
The good news is that the original album has never sounded better. Remastered in a way that amps up its clarity and power without sacrificing its hard-swinging griminess, "Exile on Main St." remains a towering achievement, the capstone to one of the great four-album runs in rock history (preceded by "Beggars Banquet" in 1968, "Let it Bleed" in 1969 and "Sticky Fingers" in 1971). The Stones were turning into a band divided, jaded rock stars who would never be as good again, but they had one final burst of brilliance in them.
The album arrived at a time when the group was the biggest rock band in the world, transformed from the Bad Boys of Swingin' '60s London ("Would you let your sister go with a Rolling Stone?") to jet-setting celebrities awash in drugs, sex and whatever else they craved.
The decadence had set in when the Stones headed to the south of France in summer 1971 in part to flee England and a mountain of unpaid taxes due to unscrupulous management. There they all rented villas and hunted for a studio. Nothing suited their fancy as much as Keith Richards' 16-room mansion, Nellcote, on the outskirts of the Mediterranean seaport of Nice. It had a huge basement that could be converted into a performance space and the advantage of having the band's least-controllable member on premises at all times. The Stones pulled their mobile recording studio onto the property and went to work at the start of a long, hot summer.
The working conditions were less than ideal: dark, grimy, hot and poorly ventilated (the inspiration for the "Exile" track "Ventilator Blues"). Instruments frequently went out of tune in the humidity, and songs were thrown together on the spot. Richards says he wrote and recorded "Happy" in the space of three hours, leaving Jagger with only a few vocals to sing on the chorus. The recording-bunker mentality suited Richards, who worked off feel and spontaneity, more so than Jagger, who preferred a more orderly approach.
As a result, "Exile" has the tone and texture of a quintessential Keith Richards-led Stones album — with the grit still intact — while Jagger serves as co-pilot, juggling the sessions with visits to his new bride, Bianca Péerez Morena de Macias, in Paris (the couple had married in May, 1971). For all the unruliness, the sessions were also highly productive, with the Stones cranking out several albums' worth of material. The setting in part lent itself to music that was less studied, less concerned about pop-chart appeal, and instead allowed an uninhibited exploration of all the music — specifically, the American music — that had inspired the Stones in the first place. "Exile" plays like a tour of the American South, with its deep bows toward blues, soul, country, early rock 'n' roll, even gospel. All the styles were united by the band's feel for rhythm, a loose swing fostered by Richards' guitar, Bill Wyman's bass and especially Charlie Watts' drums.
After closing up shop at Nellcote, the band finished the recording in Los Angeles, bringing in more guest musicians (Dr. John, Billy Preston) who only solidified the album's American-roots direction. With 18 tracks and more than 70 minutes of music, "Exile" was divided into a double album, each of the four sides of music working as a discrete whole: rock abandon on Side 1, a reflective country feel on Side 2, the spooky ambiance of Side 3, the drunken stagger of Side 4.
Lukewarm reviews greeted the album's arrival in May 1972. Rolling Stone magazine called it "the Rolling Stones at their most dense and impenetrable … a tangled jungle though which you have to move toward the meat of the material." But over subsequent decades, the album has been elevated to exalted status, and routinely is named one of the great rock albums of all time. Of all the rock albums from the early '70s, it best captured the transition from '60s idealism to the more inward-looking dystopia of the new decade. "Exile" is as dark and dank as the basement in which it was made, but there's a glimmer of hope, a longing for a drop of salvation embodied by tracks such as "Just Wanna See His Face" and "Shine a Light." In retrospect, it's the sound of a great band flexing its strengths one last time before slipping off into a world of glitter and drugs.
The wealth of unreleased material from the "Exile" sessions has been long sought by Stones aficionados, and a number of songs have surfaced over the decades in countless bootlegs. The box includes 10 previously unreleased tracks, including early versions of "Loving Cup," "Soul Survivor" and "Tumbling Dice" (presented in its first incarnation as "Good Time Women"). There are seven rarities, with Jagger adding new vocals and lyrics, as well as occasional harmonica and guitar, to most of them.
As strong as some of the hybrid tracks are, in particular "Plundered my Soul," it's bound to come as a disappointment to Stones fans that so little new material from the original sessions has been uncovered. Jagger acknowledges that the archive of outtakes is pretty extensive, but he wasn't interested in presenting alternate takes of well-known songs. As a result, we're no longer with the band in that sweaty bunker in Nellcote, but in an air-conditioned Los Angeles studio with Jagger and Don Was reassembling history to suit the needs of 2010.
What's really needed is a warts-and-all look at what went down in the south of France that summer 39 years ago, with outtakes, fragments and studio chatter that show us not just the finished product but the process. By all accounts, engineers Andy and Glyn Johns had the tapes in the mobile studio rolling pretty much continuously, and Jagger and Richards were writing songs on the spot trying to keep the band well-fed with new material. The real story of this album is not the party-out-of-bounds that swirled continuously around the Stones, but how they were able to create such a masterpiece in the midst of it. That story remains untold.
The Rolling Stones
exile on main st. outtakes
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01. get a line on you
02. good time woman
03. shake your hips
04. hillside blues
05. sweet virginia
06. bent green needles
07. loving cup
08. ventilator blues
09. i aint signifying
10. let it loose
11. all down the line
12. travelin man
13. stop breakiung down
14. shine a light
15. i'm going down
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