#The Rolling Stones #Kieth Richards #Mick Jagger #blues rock #hard rock #classic rock #British blues rock #rock & roll #British R&B #1970s
In May of 1972 the Rolling Stones released their 10th British studio album and first double LP, Exile on Main St. Although initial critical response was lukewarm, it is now considered a contemporary music landmark, the best work from a band who rock critic Simon Frith once referred to as “the poets of lonely leisure.” Exile on Main St. was both the culmination of a five-year productive frenzy and bleary-eyed comedown from the darkest period in the Stones’ history.
By 1969 the storm clouds of dread building around the group had become a full-blown typhoon. First, recently sacked member Brian Jones was found dead, drowned in his swimming pool. Then, as the decade ended in a rush of bleak portents, they played host to the chaos of the Altamont Speedway Free Concert, a poorly organised, massive free concert, which ended with four dead including a murder captured live on film.
Yet amidst all this the Stones produced Let It Bleed (1969) and Sticky Fingers (1971), two devastating albums that wrapped up the era like a parcel bomb addressed to the 1970s.
Songs like Gimme Shelter, the harrowing Sister Morphine, and Sway, which broods on Nietzche’s notion of circular time, exuded the kind of weary grandeur that would define Exile.
The story behind Exile on Main St. has become rock folklore. Fleeing from England’s punitive tax laws, the Stones lobbed in a Côte d'Azur mansion that was a Gestapo HQ during World War II. Mick Jagger was largely sidelined, spending much of the time in Paris with pregnant wife Bianca. The musicians were jammed into an ad-hoc basement studio, a cross between steam-bath and opium den, powered by electricity hijacked from the French railway system. The house was beset by hangers-on, including the obligatory posse of drug-dealers. Yet with control ceded to the nonchalant, disaster-prone Keith Richards – the kind of person a crisis would want around in a crisis – they somehow harnessed the power of pandemonium.
The result was a singular amalgam of barbed soul, mutant gospel, tombstone blues and shambolic country, as thrilling in its blend of familiar sources as works by contemporaries Roxy Music and David Bowie were in the use of alien ones. Jagger shuffles his deck of personas from song to song like a demented croupier, the late, great drummer Charlie Watts supplies his customary subtle adornments, and a cast of miscreants – most crucially, pianist Nicky Hopkins and producer Jimmy Miller – function as supplementary band members.
All 18 tracks contribute to the ragged perfection of the document as a whole. Tumbling Dice and Happy are textbook rock propelled by a strange union of virtuosity and indolence. And there is an undeniable beauty to the likes of Torn and Frayed and Let it Loose, albeit a beauty that is tentative, hard-earned. The package is completed by its distinctive sleeve art, juxtaposing a collage of circus performers photographed by Robert Frank circa 1950 with grainy stills from a Super-8 film of the band and a mural dedicated to Joan Crawford.
Exile confused audiences at first: Writer John Perry describes its 1972 reception as mixing “puzzlement with qualified praise”. The response of critic Lester Bangs was typical. After an initial negative review, Bangs came to regard it as the group’s strongest work. Critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine confirms that the record over time has become a touchstone, calling it a masterful album that takes “the bleakness that underpinned Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers to an extreme.” From: https://theconversation.com/exile-on-main-st-turns-50-how-the-rolling-stones-critically-divisive-album-became-rock-folklore-181704
