The Rolling Stones -

Date: 1972
Release: Virgin #47864
Cover Art: view / download
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Rock & roll has been around for over a half a century; it’s now part of history. And as part of the historical record, it is open to interpretation and debate, especially among musicians. Mos Def, has his own opinion in Black on Both Sides. Now, I love that album, and Def is a great talent, but its narrowness leaves something to be desired. One particular song, entitled, “Rock N Roll,” argues that “the Rolling Stones didn’t come up with that sound on their own.” Black people started rock & roll; white people have simply appropriated–adulterated– the music, and Mos Def is going to take it back.

But white people didn’t steal rock & roll: it was an evolution in popular music. No individual can lay claim to an art form. Americans didn’t come up with the novel on their own, they imported it from the British. So what? The British took it from the Spanish, and the Chinese were the ones who came up with it first, anyway. Rock & roll was in the air with blues and jazz, and it crossed the Atlantic with ease because it was a great way to express universal anger, lust and weakness.

Of course, Mick and the Stones would be the first to admit that they didn’t come up with their sound on their own. People were angry at the British invasion for the same reason as Mos Def is, but you know what? Those lads could rock. And as the 60s turned into the 70s, and the cow was decidedly out of the barn as far as anger and lust, the Stones turned the sound they had adopted–out of love for the music–into Brit-filtered American down-home rock & roll. In 1972, they released Exile on Main Street, perhaps their best album.

Recorded in the south of France in Richards’s house, which had been the headquarters of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation, Exile on Main Street was the band’s second album on their own label, Rolling Stones Records (the first was 1971’s Sticky Fingers). When Exile came out, it was banned. Yet Exile expresses better than any other album of the early seventies the moral and emotional exhaustion that was the result of the end of the ’60s dream. Look what the boys themselves had been through: a dizzying rise to fame, the death of Brian Jones, the debacle of Altamont and the subsequent fallout. In Exile you hear an outpouring of hope; nevertheless it comes amid piles of shit. You’re knee-deep in it. This is a journey through the muck of overindulgence, right from the first Keith Richard’s riff and Mick Jaggers country-tinged lyric in “Rocks Off.”

It’s easy to read a narrative in Exile. We start off in the juke joints of “Hip Shake.” The party gets going with “Tumbling Dice,” “Sweet Black Angel,” boogies that encapsulate the best of Jagger and Richard’s self-destructive lifestyle. Jagger’s voice doesn’t sit on top of the mix as in later albums. Here he’s just in the band, and even plays it down sometimes. Yes, these are skinny white Brits, but they can play the blues. And the phalanx of female backup singers gives the music a spine-tingling richness and soul mixed in with the self-loathing.

After the exhausting all-nighter, the album takes a quieter turn toward dawn. The disgust of “Ventilator Blues” fades into the muted gospel of “I Just Want to See His Face,” and then we’re in new territory, hopeful territory where you are grateful to still be alive. The last songs of the album-songs of redemption like “Stop Breaking Down” and “Shine a Light” and of soul-zen resignation like “Let it Loose” (the only song on the CD over five minutes, and featuring a great horn section and a moonlighting Dr. John on organ)–depict the other side of the debauch, when the coke and booze and girls have stopped and it’s three in the morning, and having a future doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

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