Exile on Main St Page 5
Rocks Off
What drew me in as a kid was the sound of Exile as a whole. The tone of the record is set within the opening seconds of the first song on side one, disc one, "Rocks Off." It begins with one of Keith Richards' trademark open G-tuned riffs. But precisely one second into it, we hear a stray bit of percussion. It sounds like someone hit a cowbell too early. Someone jumped the gun. It also sounds like a vocal microphone was left open during the mix, with some shuffling sounds before the band kicks in. This is the sort of extraneous noise that has traditionally been masked out during the mixing process, even back before computer programs like Pro Tools made automated mixing "moves" a cinch. Jagger (or whoever it is) seems all right with it, as after the first snare drum hit, we hear him growl comically "oh, yeeeeeeahhhh."
"Rocks Off" is a classic opening salvo, a shot across the bow, statement of intent—though it is by no means the only song that would be great kicking off the record; "Happy" and "All Down the Line" would work, too. But "Rocks Off" is one of the best hard-rocking songs on the record, and also one of the best of the band's deep catalog of numbers titled with a variation on the word "rock" or "rocking."
To those listening to the album upon its initial release, the buried lead vocals must have seemed a mistake. But Marshall Chess recalled, in the book Exile, a trick the band had learned early on from working with producer Jimmy Miller and engineers like Glynn and Andy Johns. Back in the days when am radio was the vehicle for pop records, the mono and heavily compressed signal often exaggerated the lead vocals in a stereo mix, and they would seem like they were mixed louder than they actually were. The band found that mixing the vocals down to be a little bit more in line with the guitar tracks often resulted in an edgier and more exciting mix. For mainstream pop/rock music, Exile on Main St. takes that idea to the extreme, which is one element that makes the record so punk rock. The mumbles and half-heard lyrics give the album a sense of dangerous mystery, and force the listener to decipher words without the benefit of lyric sheets or explanations. Jagger obviously understood the power of this when he told NME, "I never like to print the lyrics. I always think that the lyrics should be listened to in the actual context of the song, rather than read as a separate piece of poetry."
Who knows what is going on lyrically in "Rocks Off'? It's another deviation on the theme of sexual frustration that started back around "Satisfaction." As with most of the songs on Exile, it takes repeated listenings to make out most of the words in the mix. But the ones that do jump out have that much more power, as with the famous, oh-so-Stones lyric "the sunshine bores the daylights out of me," as the song springs back to life from the helpless quicksand of the bridge. Jagger injects the line with extra punch and it's heightened by the raw harmony of Richards, yowling, warbling—my favourite kind of Keith backing track. This throat-stretching harmony is a technique he exaggerated to great effect on the band's cover of "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" on It's Only Rock & Roll. On Exile, it feels as natural as anything Keith has recorded, adding a pitch-bending twang as he slurs into the right note on the last word of the line, "me." If there is one major component missing from the Stones armoury in their most recent era as rock & roll's reigning elder statesmen, it's the usurping of Keith's raw backing harmonies by polished backing singers—at least in live settings—followed, at a close second, by the replacement of Bill Wyman with jazz fusion studio bassist Darryl Jones. Not to disparage Jones, an extremely accomplished musician, but Wyman's playing is dearly missed.
Mick's narrator in "Rocks Off' might as well be one of the subjects in a dark bar in Frank's The Americans. He's got such playful puns throughout the record: "I'm zippin' through [or, as Jagger sings it, "zippin' chroo"] the days at lightning speed," a play on the word "speed." Keith Richards explained, "we started to reflect on what we'd seen and heard. You know, a lot of times, you're zooming through places and it takes a while for the impact to sort of settle in on you, you can't quite tell how it's going to come out on you. But, probably, what we'd done in the previous years, working through America, came out on that album."
The first lines, "I hear you talking when I'm on the street / your mouth don't move but I can hear you speak," would be spooky if they weren't sung with such playful irreverence. They are arresting, nevertheless. These are the lines that open the album, and Jagger purrs them as if he's just waking up. "Kick me like you kicked before / I can't even feel the pain no more," he yowls later, finally roused. We are not sure if we are awake or dreaming, stoned or sober. Here is Mick, in his street-wise opium dreams, a burlesque neo-Oscar Wilde, tossing off lines like "I was making love last night / to a dancer friend of mine / I can't seem to stay in step / 'cause she come every time she pirouettes for me." He awakes as if into some sort of hangover from a sexual ennui cocktail. Perhaps with the "sunshine" and not feeling "the pain no more" lines, Jagger is also giving voice to a Keith Richards character, as he so often does on the album. Maybe Keith even fed in these lines during the collaboration. The lyrics of Exile on Main St. are as essential in painting the picture of this being "Keith's record" as any other component of this guitar-driven, back-to-basics rock album recorded in his house. We have the guitar player of "Torn and Frayed"; we have the "Berber jewellery jangling down the street" in "Shine a Light"; we have the Keith signature anthem of "Happy."
On "Rocks Off," the main riff almost instantly becomes two parts, one on each stereo side, both played by Richards, the second keeping a more straightforward eighth-note chugging pattern. One of the guitar tracks adds a Henry Mancini "Peter Gunn" (or "Brand New Cadillac," or "Planet Claire") kind of rhythm. But then we notice some other odd/happy-sounding third guitar part, most likely played by Mick Taylor, also rather Latinesque, warbling as if through a Leslie organ speaker rotating at high speed. This part is set way in the background and up the centre of the stereo spread. It's almost like a piano or organ in its texture.
The making of "Rocks Off' was typical of many of Exile's tracks, as it hinged upon the rhythms—circadian and musical—of the band, and of Keith's muse in particular. The basic tracks were apparently laid down quickly in an all-night session, everyone heading off to bed around dawn, including engineer Andy Johns. Johns told Steve Appleford, in Rolling Stones Rip This Joint: The Stories Behind Every Song, that he took this as a sign of the session's end:
But once he arrived at the villa he shared with trumpet-player Jim Price a half-hour drive away, the telephone was ringing. It was Keith. "Where the fuck are you?" Well, you were asleep," Johns replied . . . Normally, Richards would have been inclined to wait until the next night's session. What was the hurry? But Keith was ready . . . and wasn't about to let this moment to pass. "Oh, man, I've got to do this guitar part," he said. "Come Back!"
So after Johns returned, sure enough Richards recorded the second guitar part, "and the whole thing just came to light, and really started grooving," recalled Johns.
Repeated plays offer continued revelations from Exile. As you become more familiar with the record, the immediate surface elements start to give way, so that "buried" parts jump out like new discoveries, as if they were recently overdubbed on a record you've listened to for decades. This phenomenon is especially acute for recording musicians, whose ears continue to develop with studio experience. Musicians become more adept at distinguishing sonic textures—specific tracks and recording techniques. Keith's subtle duelling rhythm guitar parts on "Rocks Off" are a perfect example of this.
In his original review of the album for Rolling Stone magazine, Lenny Kaye (later of the legendary Patti Smith Group) bemoaned the relative dearth of classic Keith riffs, the sort he had been pumping out with regularity. And yet the album has some textbook examples, like "Happy" and "Tumbling Dice." Nevertheless, the beauty of Exile on Main St. has proven to be in the ensemble approach of the record, with very few actual spotlight solo moments for anyone in particular.
As John Perry points out in Classic Rock Albums: Exile on Main St. (Schirmer Books, 1999), his informative
book about the record, the horn section had "become regular members of the touring band in 1970 . . . What the Stones were approaching at this point was something new, an approach to hard rock that was entirely modern yet rooted in 1950s rock & roll and 1930s-1940s swing."
The Stones were at their peak as a live band in the early 1970s, and when they got off the road from the 1971 tour, Perry notes, "that energy carried over into the summer when work began on the new album." According to Dominique Tarle, Richards stated, going into the recording of Exile, "we're really an eight piece band now."
As soon as Jagger has gotten out the second line of lyrics, that third guitar part has all but been commandeered by the first appearance of the formidable right hand of pianist Nicky Hopkins—who, on Exile, offers the finest performances of his tenure with the Stones, if not his career—and then the rest of the ensemble falls in with a dense yet still somehow lean rock arrangement. Hopkins hammers away eighth-note figures with his right hand, to help keep the train chugging, while also adding some amazing runs and fills.
Hopkins, who died in 1994, is an absolute animal on Exile, a stone virtuoso. He went back with the Stones almost to the beginning. In Rolling with the Stones, Bill Wyman notes that the Stones had in fact opened up for Nicky, as a keyboardist with Cyril's [Davies] All Stars in 1963. In many ways, Exile is the album on which Hopkins shines the most. At any given time, his piano tracks are as prominent as any instrument or vocal track on the record—and they're one of the best rewards that come from repeat listens.
Glyn Johns has said, "Nicky Hopkins was an absolute genius. I have never heard anyone play like him before or since . . . He was a sweetheart of a guy." Glyn brought him in to play on some Stones sessions after employing him for recordings by the Who and the Kinks. The Stones needed someone other than Ian Stewart, after he refused to play anything but the blues and boogie-woogie. Anything else was, to him, "Chinese chords."
I have always wondered what Hopkins was like to work with, and would have loved to have him add something to records of which I've been a part. Over the years, I've been lucky enough to meet and play with a few heroes of mine. It has been perhaps one of the best parts of being in a "professional" band on a major label. I got to make a record and tour with Graham Parker, a tour that also included Kate Pierson of the B-52s, which was like rock & roll fantasy camp. Graham made a record called Up Escalator (1980) and enlisted Nicky for it, as well as for the album Another Grey Area (1982).
"Nicky was a nice, down to earth guy, and got into the material quickly," Graham told me.
Unlike the Rumour, who seemed always to be trying to re-arrange my songs before they'd got to know them, Nicky only had to hear a tune once or twice to memorize it. He'd listen to my suggestions and incorporate his ideas seamlessly. He had a surprisingly gentle touch on the piano; I expected a more thumping approach, which Exile seemed—at least in my memory of it at the time—to suggest. But he never played anything at all with a hard attack. At one point, I even asked him if he'd play a certain number with more aggression. He kind of agreed but kept on playing exactly the same way!
Nicky said it was pretty chaotic making Exile. People were all over the place, in different rooms, recording bits and pieces. And of course, everyone was out of their heads from morning till morning. From what I can gather, a Stones album is not exactly put together like military operation. Nothing happens for days, then they start on something at 3 in the morning! Sounds like a nightmare to me.
On "Rocks Off," Hopkins helps to build tension at just the right times with runs up the scales. He plays the Professor Longhair and Jerry Lee Lewis boogie, jumping octaves, jabbing and weaving, fitting in between horn lines, guitar parts, vocal ad-libs. His playing is never gratuitous, and is as driving as the guitars. The piano adds that Jimmy Johnson/Chuck Berry vibe, a good old rock & roll feel. His playing is urgent but never in the way.
Hopkins' piano, as with much of the instrumentation on "Rocks Off," gives way to a concise and blistering blues lead from Mick Taylor just as the song begins its fade out. It is not so much that the horns, piano, guitars, etcetera, drift away individually; the whole song fades together, except for this amazing little lead run that seems to stay at the same level—the record revealing one of its interesting textures. It's a result of the mixing process. In the sound of the lead guitar run, you can hear an example of the room-sound atmospherics of the record. It doesn't sound close-miked at all, which would result in a more direct and cutting guitar sound; it sounds more natural than that, as if we are simply in the room listening to Taylor play his inspired run.
This small glimmer of a solo is an example of how the album's mix works. The philosophy is consistent with the great bluegrass groups, jazz combos, and gospel quartets like the aforementioned Staple Singers and the Soul Stirrers (the group that launched the career of the teenage Sam Cooke). Many of those groups recorded with only one or a few microphones in the pre-1960s recording situations. We hear blended ensembles in all those cases, with a soloist featured at times, coming more into prominence in the call-and-response tradition of the church.
And have horns ever sounded better than this on a recording? Jim Price (trumpet) and Bobby Keys (sax)— the "Texas Horns"—like Hopkins, also make the case that they are a big part of the "greatest rock & roll band in the world," not mere session men. Too often, songs have been written, arranged, and recorded by the time session musicians are hired to overdub specific parts on specific songs. Much of the time, they are handed charts and arrangements to follow. They come in, play their parts, are paid (or submit invoices), and split. And the Stones used plenty of traditional session musicians, even on Exile, when they went to Los Angeles for over-dubbing and mixing. In the case of Price and Keys, however, they were—at least during this era—essential cogs in the Stones machine.
Keys and Price were at Nellcote virtually the whole time. They had their young families with them. As this record was recorded piecemeal, in spurts of inspiration, they had to be ready every night, which translated into a lot of downtime. There were many gambling excursions up to Monte Carlo, as well as simple trips to the beach and to village bars. But when the red light went on, and someone yelled down to them, the horn players would lay down celebrated parts while recording in some of the most inspired and improvised spaces imaginable: long basement corridors with high ceilings, taking advantage of that natural reverb; the cellar kitchen; lying on their backs—whichever new experiment was chosen for that night. And like all the other players in the Stones' orbit, the horn players seemed to be given leeway to come up with their own ideas for parts—often, in fact, steering the track in new directions as result— though rarely, if ever, receiving writing or arranging credit.
Price and Keys, both of whom featured heavily in the sound of Sticky Fingers, also played on some of those specific aforementioned generation-defining records— with Delaney and Bonnie, George Harrison, Joe Cocker, and Dr. John. The Stones first met Bobby Keys on one of their early tour stops at a state fair in Texas. Keys was a young, hell-raising Texas teen playing behind legends like Buddy Holly and—at the time the Stones met him—Bobby Vee. Keys' lifestyle choices made him a perfect buddy for Keith: "It's a gas not to be so insulated and play with some more people, especially people like Bobby, man, who sort of on top of being born at the same time of day and the same everything as me has been playing on the road, man, since '56, '57," Richards told Robert Greenfield in Rolling Stone in 1971, during the Exile sessions. "He was on Buddy Holly's first record. I mean he's a fantastic cat to know for someone who is into playing rock & roll because it's been an unending chain for him. The first few years he was playing around, man, I was just the same as anyone, I was just listening to it and digging it, and wondering where it came from. And there he was, man. Bobby's like one of those things that goes all the way through that whole thing, sails right through it."
This desire to be as close as possible to the source has always been important to the Stones, and to Keith in part
icular. Whether it was going to Chess Studios in Chicago on their earliest tours through America, jamming with Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters, tracking down Chuck Berry, bringing in Keys, Billy Preston, or inviting Gram Parsons for an extended stay at Nellcote, these moves were all part of the musical education of Keith Richards, and added to the depth of authenticity of the Stones' take on American musical idioms.
And, as we saw in the film Gimme Shelter, the Stax Records-/Memphis soul-loving Stones made a pilgrimage to Muscle Shoals Sound Studios in Florence, Alabama (the outgrowth of Rick Hall's Fame Studio in Muscle Shoals), to capture some of that Southern soul sound, at the very source where white musicians and black musicians collaborated on so many soul classics by the likes of Aretha Franklin, Wilson Pickett, and Arthur Alexander, with producers like Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd. The Stones had already covered "You Better Move On," one of the earliest Muscle Shoals-identified hits, by the now-legendary Alexander. This is where they recorded "Wild Horses," and they also apparently ran through an unrecorded version of "Loving Cup."
The musicians who made up the Muscle Shoals house band are legends among other musicians. They included Chips Moman on guitar, Tommy Cogbill on bass, Spooner Oldham on electric piano and organ, and Roger Hawkins, who Atlantic honcho and producer Wexler called "the greatest drummer in the world— still." Hawkins' style is certainly echoed in the elegant and sublime simplicity of Charlie Watts' own drumming. Prior to the success of the Allman Brothers, Duane Allman played some solos on sessions by Aretha and Wilson Pickett in Muscle Shoals. Importantly, however, Peter Guralnick points out, "much like Stax, Fame had no flashy lead guitarist in their studio group; rhythm was the key component."