Exile on Main St Read online

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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 St
ones 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.