Exile on Main Street - "All Four Sides of It"

Mark is back with a review of 'Exile' 

'Exile on Main Street - All Four Sides of It'
by Mark Saxby 20/09/10

I was on a plane a while back, flicking through the entertainment thingy on theback of the seat----Die Hard 3, Antz, England World Cup win 1966---and there she was : Exile On Main Street. Here we go. So I put the headphones on and listened and I was staggered. This was the best music I'd ever heard. 

Mind you I'd known that since Christmas 1975. This was when my mum, giving up any hope of me listening to Mozart, gave me Exile On Main Street. I didn't fall in love with it straight away---there was no Brown Sugar on it, no Paint It Black---but in those olden times you didn't have many records so you had to play the ones you had. 


A couple of weeks later and I was smitten. [  I'm looking at my original vinyl copy now-----I never saw it as a double album but four sides. The Tumbling Dice side, the acoustic second side and so on. The cd version loses that and that's a shame. Maybe they should re-release it on four discs.] The first thing I really liked about the Stones was Jagger's snarly voice----I loved the way he twisted the vowels and how he sang full throttle. You'd spend hours trying to work out what he was saying---"Yaeigh, Stray that froolin rynow"?"” No, that can't be right." [They made a big mistake when they started printing the lyrics on Stones records].This album has some of Jagger's best screaming contortions----listen to the scream on Rip This Joint that crashes into Bobby Keys's sax solo, or the outro to All Down The Line. His voice could also  be  tender, as in the highly affecting Shine A Light----”So you stretched out in room ten o nine”. Exile came towards the end of an era for Jagger ----after the next album [Goat's Head Soup] he changed the way he sang, no longer opening the throat to howl in that way. If he hadn't changed he probably wouldn't be able to sing today.   


Then there's the guitar playing. "Five strings, two fingers and one asshole" is how Keith Richards described his technique. He'd taken what he could lift from Ry Cooder in 1969 and developed it and made it his own. The open-G tuning was the key to his sound, sometimes played on custom-made five string guitar, often played with a capo. Of course I knew nothing of this in 1975---I just thought he was magic. He is, after all, the human riff.  


Mick Taylor was also a wonderful guitar player, elegantly bluesy and with his own thing, especially on slide. I don't think he got the credit  for how much he contributed to the Stones' reputation as the best rock'n'roll band. They were never the same force without him.But back in 1975 I just studied the sleeve photos for weeks and thought ,"Mick Taylor, he's  magic.". If you listen on headphones you can hear how lovely the guitars play off each other.    


Marianne Faithfull said of the Stones that in 1972 the music was dripping from their fingers. Exile On Main Street is a  mixture of  blues [Chicago and delta], rock'n'roll,country,and gospel, and you have to say it's extraordinary that an English band can pull it off so totally convincingly.  Maybe someone should remind them they're the best Country band in the world. The best band ever to play American music is English. [Looking at my copy again I notice I've still got the Exile on Main St. postcards. How did they survive? And for some reason I'm reminded of when one of my speakers died and I spent a week listening to the right side of Exile, then swapped the speaker over to hear the left. Maybe I should have got out a little bit more.] 


Bill Wyman  wasn’t keen on this record----because it didn’t make any money he said.[Probably a bit miffed about everyone else  seemingly getting in on the bass playing.] Mick Jagger didn’t think it was all that great saying there was nothing off it that was any good live. [Apart from Tumbling Dice, All Down The Line, Happy, Shine A Light and Sweet Virginia I suppose.] But now, nearly forty years after it first came out, the album’s been re-released and it’s gone to number one. No other record has achieved that. It’s  successful because it hasn’t dated. Bobby Gillespie, Jack White, Kings of Leon, all would bite your hand off to make it now. 


The record was slagged off when it first came out for sounding muddy. But it’s just the sound of a  band with a great feel playing in a sweaty basement. If it had been cleaned up and soaked in studio effects it would have been rooted  to a certain era-----you can’t hear, for example, Sergeant Pepper without thinking Sixties, Carnaby St., funny paint job on an otherwise perfectly useable Rolls Royce. When you hear Exile On Main Street you hear American road movies, the desert, sex and Jack Daniels. You’d never get tired of that.    


Back on the plane I sat smiling and gurning through sixty five minutes and forty five seconds [not including the gaps] of my favourite record. Then I munched on a Geruda Airlines Pot Noodle and  watched a bit of Die Hard. And then I thought "You know----I’m going to have to listen to it again. Get me a nice big vodka and tonic. Here we go. All four sides.”