Exile on Main St Page 12

  Outro

  Like some noir, the record seeps into our waking consciousness like a dream. And like a dream that we can't shake, it is free from wakeful logic. Yet its raggedness and randomness strike upon raw ephemeral truths, the kind of deep emotional revelations that can come from both dreams and nights of insomnia, resonating throughout our daylight hours. Surviving in a troubled world is perhaps the overarching lyrical concern on Exile. "The Stones don't have a home anymore—hence the exile," Keith said. "But they can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck, improvise, overcome."

  In addition to political assassinations, the mess in Vietnam, and the increasing level of violence in society, the Stones had their own personal tragedies and demons to contend with. Stanley Booth writes in True Adventures of the Rolling Stones "of mad Keith, and knowing that what the Stones had already done had killed one of them." He writes as if steeled against terror, an abyss he stared into at Altamont.

  I have always had a hard time buying into the notion that the band's lifestyle is what killed Brian Jones, a fragile soul who by all accounts clung tenuously to life. Many people out of the public eye share similar struggles and eventually succumb. We just don't hear about them. Truth is, we all struggle. We all know friends, lovers, and family members for whom life is a fight against the shadows. Exile on Main St. is a masterpiece in part because, as with many classic rock & roll records, it makes us feel that we're not so alone. With the aid of Exile, we feel we can survive with dignity and no little style. Most of us, after all, have felt like exiles on our hometown's Main Street.

  During the writing of this book, the deaths of Ronald Reagan and Ray Charles happened in quick succession. Reagan's death, in particular, unleashed a wave of sepia-stained nostalgia in America. The quick succession of their deaths resulted in strange pairings of the two men—radio stations playing sound bites of the former president's speeches over Brother Ray's genius interpretation of what should be the American national anthem, "America the Beautiful," for example. I found the coincidental pairing of these two men to be illustrative of the myth/reality dichotomy and competing worldviews that Gram Parsons pointed out wistfully to Stanley Booth in his 1969 reverie. To be sure, nostalgia, mythology, and truth often wash together and become virtually indistinguishable, but Ronald Reagan successfully sold a version of America that never really was. Ray Charles, though—blind and on his own from his early teens—was the truly self-reliant, self-made man of the American Dream. Like Parsons said, "sometimes the Mets come along and win the World Series."

  When asked by Time magazine in 1968 to define "soul," Charles, the man generally credited with inventing soul music, answered: "It's a force that can light up a room. The force radiates from a sense of selfhood, a sense of knowing where you've been and what it means. Soul is a way of life—but it's always the hard way."

  That "knowing where you've been" and radiating "selfhood" is the best description of soul music I have ever come across. Indeed, it can explain the deep emotional pull of any great music or art. But there is something about soul music in particular that digs deep into .. . well, the soul. It is not head music. It does not take multiple listens to understand. The music speaks directly to the heart. As Mick Jagger told Roy Carr, Exile on Main St. "is not really a thinking man's record." And the Stones have always been, above all else, a soul and R&B band.

  Soul music was ubiquitous by the time I was a kid. It has always been a given, even if a lot of rock & roll deviates too far from that source for the music to matter to me anymore. With minimal fuss, soul gets to the Zen essence of what it is to be human. It's "That Feeling" that Keith Richards and Tom Waits sang about in their collaboration on the song of the same name. And the emotion comes from some deep place within, as Ray Charles notes. The first time I heard it, I knew on some base level that the songs on Exile on Main St. spoke to me, pulled me, tugged at me. The chord changes alone held some deeply understood truth.

  In soul music, it is truly about "the singer, not the song." Listen to Aretha Franklin's stunning vocal performances on "Ain't No Way" or "I Never Loved a Man the Way That I Love You." Listen to the pauses in the phrasing. Or recall how Ray Charles waits almost three full beats before coming in with the first word of the song "Georgia on My Mind." The ache, the shivers that arise when hearing singers like this work, is found in these spaces, in these pauses, and in the dramatically slow tempos that Ray Charles would insist on, to the bemusement of his backing musicians.

  Like Robert Frank's photographs, Raymond Carver's novels, or Edward Hopper's paintings, there is a sublime beauty captured in those in-between moments. Such is the stuff of "the basic nature of our lives." If Frank's pictures are the "sad poems" Kerouac describes, then they are haikus, capturing in the specifics a more universal condition, the Buddhist acceptance that all of life is suffering. And that is precisely the same assumption of the blues, and of soul.

  For fans of such performances, an inexplicable bond is formed between the listener, the performance, the song, and the singer. Waves of emotion—nostalgia, melancholy, memory—tumble over me when I hear songs like Charles' "What Would I Do?" There is nostalgia—defined as a "wistful. .. yearning"—in every pause in the singing, in certain major to minor chord changes, in manipulative Tin Pan Alley arrangements.

  By way of nostalgia, we are temporal exiles. Robert Frank was criticized at the time his book was published. Many Americans first looking at his photos mistook Frank for a surrealist, presumed to be presenting Americans with irony (despite his similar work internationally), in seemingly ordinary situations, with no apparent reason for photographic documentation. It was assumed that Frank was out to tweak noses with a vague, absurdist statement. But the Swiss photographer, as a geographic "exile," was simply looking at images Americans took for granted and seeing that much deeper and finding something profound.

  In viewing visual art and listening to recorded music, we have the benefit of being exiled in time, looking back with new eyes on something captured in the past. We judge it via that lens. For those of us born after Frank's photos were published, their settings in a bygone era allow us to see both the surface and the substance as equally worthy of examination, if not as one and the same. Though much of the subject matter in Frank's work reflects lost relics of mid-century Americana, surely we can look at the photos without pining for the long-lost fake innocence of 50s greaser sock-hops. The notion that the 1950s was an era of shiny, positive idealism persists even after artists such as Frank have exposed another plane of subtleties, and, at times, the underbelly of the era.

  In choosing Robert Frank, the Stones were cognizant of this as well; the music of the 1950s—so much of which is represented as influence on Exile on Main St. —was not all cartoon-like; early rock & roll music was often malevolent, raunchy, loud, raw, sexy, and sad. It was dangerous by definition: the music of the marginalized, a threat to the establishment. On Exile, the Stones kept that facet alive during a time when music was slipping into self-parody, big business, and bloated cultural irrelevance.

  And the Stones were simultaneously mining other varied forms of mythology: the commonplace, agreed-upon notions of America, the cultural currency; the other America, that rural agrarian myth, that mythical America explored by Dylan and the Band; the streetwise urban hipster ("flashing knives"), and blustery swagger of Chicago bluesmen. All the while, they tapped into that musical nostalgia, ranging from older folk and country forms, to urban soul and blues, to modern hard rock—and many points in between. We are seduced by it, willingly; these are our shared myths, not lies. We want to subscribe to it all, because myths have always helped us make sense of the world, appealing to some universal, ephemeral sensation that is present in us.

  Meanwhile the Stones were also selling their own press-fed mythology, as glorious, "elegantly wasted" jet-setting rock stars—the triumphs as well as the tragedies. On Exile, the Stones can be heard struggling with the now-cliché 60s hangover. As Lester Bangs no
ted: "The Stones never bought all that brothers and sisters crap ... when Qagger] tried to reverse the manipulative thrust of his presence at Altamont he made himself suddenly and completely pathetic for the very first time because he was a total failure ..."

  The blank, stunned look on Jagger's face at the end of Gimme Shelter, after he has just viewed the footage from Altamont, testifies to the impotence and ambiguous responsibility he must have felt, implicated in the dark fallout of the late 60s. Even as he was exploiting the Zeitgeist commercially, Jagger most likely never bought into the flower power ethos, and Keith certainly never did. Witness his rage, which stands in stark opposition to Jagger's weak entreaties, as Richards yells into the microphone at Altamont, "Look! Either you guys stop that shit, or you get no more music," and calls out specific perpetrators, "THAT cat, right there!" In those few moments, in which the walking dead of Keith circa '69 awakens and lets loose, we can see that he was always aware of the fact that humanity's dark side never fully abates, and he is on guard against the violent tide. The Stones had been prescient enough to warn, "a storm is threatening" in "Gimme Shelter," but were seemingly taken off guard and left powerless when the shit really did come down. As Al Maysles, along with his brother, David, co-director of Gimme Shelter, said in Rolling Stone in 1970, "Peter Fonda went looking for America. The Stones found it."

  Bangs continues: "Death of Innocence in Woodstock Nation my ass, Altamont was about facing up. And the Stones were stuck in the middle of it, partly at fault, partly confused patsies from out of town who'd tried in their own mallet-handed way to do something nice for a group of people toward whom, nevertheless, they almost certainly felt more contempt than anything else."

  Much of Exile on Main St. is about coming to terms with it all. As John Perry put it, the record "has a strong claim as the first rock album to make a full tour horizon, once the dust and debris of the 1960s had settled . .. Mick and Keith were sufficiently intelligent to spot a new source of subject matter and articulate enough to set it down straight." "Kick me like you've kicked before," sings a helpless Jagger on "Rocks Off," even while his foil plays some of the most raging guitar parts of the band's history, as if it is Keith himself doing the kicking. "I can't even feel the pain no more."

  And Exile on Main St. is a masterpiece musically because it manages to encompass a seemingly infinite amount of subtle (and not so subtle) variations on rock & roll—a form that had seemed to be severely limited to basic, guitar-driven music. Ironically, the Stones here are not aiming outside themselves, as they did with mediocre results on Their Satanic Majesty's Request. That record sent them scurrying home to their roots on Beggars' Banquet. But on Exile they are reaching deep within themselves, as men and as musicians. And, thankfully for us, a sizeable portion of who they were at the time was based on their impressive record collections: blues, gospel, folk, country, rock & roll, rockabilly, New Orleans jazz, Memphis soul, hard rock, even vocal standards all finding their way onto the album. This is not just a band at the top of its game. It is the world's best rock & roll band on top of everything, singing and playing their hearts out.

  Bibliography

  Books

  Appleford, Steve. Rolling Stones Rip This Joint: The Stories Behind Every Song. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000.

  Booth, Stanley. The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. New York: Vintage Books, 1985.

  Charone, Barbara. Keith Richards Life as a Rolling Stone. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982.

  Elliot, Martin. The Rolling Stones Complete Recording Sessions 1963-1989. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1990.

  Frank, Robert. The Americans. 2nd ed. New York, Zurich, and Berlin: Salco Publishers, 1994.

  Frank, Robert. Robert Frank. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

  Guaralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom. New York: Harp-erPerennial, 1986.

  Mainlines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste: A Lester Bangs Reader. Ed. John Morthland. New York: Anchor Books, 2003.

  Perry, John. Exile on Main St., The Rolling Stones. New York: Schirmer Books, 1999.

  Sandford, Christopher. Keith Richards: Satisfaction. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004 (excerpted from www.theage.com.au).

  Tarle, Dominique. Exile: The Making of Exile on Main St. Guildford, England: Genesis Publications Limited, 2001.

  Wyman, Bill, and Richard Havers. Rolling with the Stones. New York: DK Publishing, 2002.

  Wyman, Bill, and Ray Coleman. Stone Alone: The Story of a Rock W Roll Band. New York: Signet, 1991.

  Magazine Articles

  Cook, Jno. "Robert Frank: Dissecting the American Image." Exposure magazine, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1986), excerpted from www.jnocook.net/frank/

  frank.htm. Hodenfield, Chris. "Table Talk with Mick in Paris."

  Rolling Stone, October 28, 1971, excerpted from

  www.rollingstone.com. Jones, Allan. "The Rolling Stones." Uncut, January

  2002, pp. 45-80. Johnstone, Nick. "Let the Tiger Out!" Uncut, January

  2002, pp. 86-94. Kaye, Lenny. "The Rolling Stones: Exile on Main St."

  Rolling Stone, 1972, excerpted from www.

  rollingstone.com. Nelson, Paul. Rolling Stone, December 15, 1972, excerpted from www.superseventies.com. Rolling Stone, December 11, 2003, excerpted from

  www.superseventies.com. Simmons, Sylvie. "The Aristocats." Mojo, January

  2002, pp. 48-62.

  Newspaper Articles

  "Politics Against Freedom." New York Times, June 5, 1970.

  "California Regents Drop Communist From Faculty." Wallace Turner, New York Times, June 20, 1970.

  "Angela Davis Is Sought in Shooting That Killed Judge on Coast." Associated Press, New York Times, August 16, 1970.

  "F.B.I. Seizes Angela Davis in Motel Here." Linda Charlton, New York Times, October 14, 1970.

  "The Campaign to Free Angela Davis and Ruchell Magee." Sol Stern, New York Times, June 27, 1971.

  "Angela Davis Acquitted on All Charges." Earl Caldwell, New York Times, June 5, 1972.

  (All New York Times articles taken from www. nytimes.com)

  Web Sites

  www.timeisonourside.com Time Is on Our Side, Ian McPherson.

  www.amazon.com "Tom Waits: His Favorite Things."

  www.criterionco.com "Snapshots From the Road," Georgia Bergman's commentary from DVD release of Gimme Shelter film for The Criterion Collection.

  www.starbucks.com "Various Artists: The Rolling Stones Artist's Choice" CD.

  http://www.beafifer.com/winner.htm 2003 "Song-writing and Treason," E. W. Boyle.

  www.mentomusic.com

  www.musicals 101 .com/minstrel.htm "A History of the Musical Minstrel Shows," John Kenrick.

  www.theage.com.au

  www.nzentgraf.de The Complete Works Website: The Rolling Stones Database, Nico Zentgraf.

  www.barryrudolph.com "Rod Stewart," Barry Rudolph.

  www.allmusic.com

  Films

  Cocksucker Blues (Robert Frank and Daniel Seymour, 1972)

  Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970)

  Table of 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

 

 

  From.Net