Exile on Main St Page 9
The narrative voice operates on multiple levels. Some critics might have considered the Rolling Stones' history of copping African-American music as a kind of cultural exploitation, similar to that practiced by all-white minstrel companies. But Jagger is in on the joke; the Stones themselves could be misconstrued as an updated minstrel show. While arguments have been made that— buried under the exploitation and mockery—minstrelsy had the positive by-product of allowing give-and-take between European-American and African-American musical forms, especially as African-Americans themselves started to integrate the minstrel troupes, Jagger would certainly have been sensitive to such matters. He does not let any self-consciousness impede on "Sweet Black Angel," though; rather, he displays a solid confidence in his own motives.
Musically, the transition of "Torn and Frayed" into "Sweet Black Angel" is one of Exile's most pleasing. The music and lyrics approximate Jamaican mento: a mix of mostly West African and Spanish influences that served as a precursor to ska and reggae. Keith starts it with a complicated rhythm on rich acoustic guitar and is joined by Jimmy Miller playing percussion on a guiro (the ridged instrument you drag a stick across) and woodblock. The marimbas are another distinguishing characteristic, played by Richard "Didymus" Washington, credited as "Amyl Nitrate." A New Orleans musician, he had been brought into the Los Angeles sessions by Dr. John. Bill Wyman fits a slippery bass part into the acoustic rhythm.
Jagger plays a compelling harmonica part and sings a gorgeous melody in a faux-Jamaican accent, the sort of affectation he would employ throughout the 1970s and 80s, with mixed results. He is clearly performing here, in character. Intertwined are compelling harmonies from Keith and Mick himself. As with "Sweet Virginia," there is a campfire feel to the song. "That was done all of them in a room in a circle at the same time, because there was this one room away from the main hall that had no furniture in it, with a wooden floor, quite high ceilings and plaster walls," said Andy Johns, recalling the set-up at Stargroves (though Dominque Tarle recalls it being recorded in the same kitchen at Nellcote as "Sweet Virginia"). "We wanted to get the sound of the room." "Sweet Black Angel" made for an inspired and infectious choice as the b-side of the "Tumbling Dice" single.
Loving Cup
We get another of Exile's most satisfying segues as "Sweet Black Angel" fades and up comes one of Nicky Hopkins' shining moments, introducing "Loving Cup" with a booming gospel piano part. He's out there all alone without a net for the first thirteen seconds of the song, a deserved solo moment for this brilliant player. The vocals chime in—Mick's melody and Keith's tight, reedy harmony—a defining texture.
"Loving Cup" sounds like a microcosmic representation of what I, in my idealized version of the Exile myth, would picture as the perfect day down at Villefranche-Sur-Mer, the sunny piano part brimming with the optimism that can only come on a summer morning. Jagger joins in as if inspired by it, beaming with a happy-go-lucky, self-deprecating lyric that reflects the ramshackle vibe down in Villefranche:
I’m the man on the mountain, come on up
I’m the ploughman in the valley with a face full of mud
Yes I’m fumbling and I know my car don't start
Yes I’m stumbling and I know I play a bad guitar
Though it's hard to picture Mick with mud on his face, his body aching with tired satisfaction after a day's honest labour, here he is as a humble, salt-of-the-earth guy with simple needs, with all made well again by his woman:
Give me a little drink from your loving cup
Just one drink and I’ll fall down drunk
These all sound like images from the surroundings in which the Stones found themselves. We see them in pictures from those days walking "the hillside in the sweet summer sun." We have the sort of uplift that comes from the sensuousness the words express, visceral and earthy images like "face full of mud," "run and jump and fish," and "nitty, gritty, and my shirt's all torn." We have Jagger's narrator kissing "in front of the fire." We can hear the Stones embracing these elements of an agrarian ideal.
The morning of the lyric extends into afternoon, as the band joins in bit by bit; shakers and acoustic guitar riffing at about 0:18, Keith and Nicky interweaving, playing off of each other. The rest of the band—Bill Wyman on bass (agile, as always) and what sounds like Keith on electric guitar—tumble in, driven by Charlie Watts' authoritative drum fill at about fifty seconds into the song. The activity of the day begins picking up: "well I can run and jump and fish but I won't fight / you if you want to push and pull with me all night," a particularly satisfying poetic line break. This all leads to one of my favourite middle-eight bridges in pop music, the group just about dropping out, screeching to a halt with bits of stray vocal improvisations carrying over as the arrangement strips down to just the percussive elements holding it all together. The section opens up for the regal horns of Jim Price and Bobby Keys ("I feel so humble with you tonight just sitting in front of the fire"). It is an intricate, lush horn arrangement, a cross between a New Orleans funeral and a sublime martial ceremony; a soaring, uplifting, almost holy moment, like a fanfare for a king (albeit, one in exile). Then the band picks up again, Hopkins begins to hammer the keyboard as Charlie counts time with increasing volume, leading to the fills that spill onto one of the record's most memorable couplets, voiced forcefully by Jagger and Richards in harmony: "well I am nitty, gritty, and my shirt's all torn / but I would love to spill the beans with you 'til dawn."
These lines, as with the lyrics of "Happy," suggest a clever update to Tin Pan Alley-era turns of phrase, but the whole song breezes along with an ease of language that betrays such cleverness, with Mick singing an uncomplicated lyric in natural vernacular. Listen carefully and you can hear Jagger singing the "spill the beans" line as an overlap to a previous line on one of his unison parts. Earlier versions of the song (they ran through it at Muscle Shoals in 1969 and a facsimile of it was played at the Hyde Park concert as "Give Me a Drink") have the bridge occurring twice; one time Mick sings "dirt, gritty..." and "I would love to push and pull with you 'til dawn," which is probably what remains under there on the final mix. But previous recordings sound plodding and overly loose. The final version, as with "Tumbling Dice" and so many others, rides one of those perfect Stones grooves.
The horns return for the coda ending section, with a far more raucous chart than the bridge, adding a trombone in the low register. Nicky plays high-octave triplets, while the backing singers (Gram Parsons again rumoured to be among them) do a call-and-response with an improvising Mick. And as I write this, wearing headphones, I experience one of those moments of discovery, finding yet another texture. I could swear I hear a subtle steel drum part, or something that sounds a lot like one, down in the mix, from 3:38 until the end of the song, playing a rhythmic and melodic counterpoint to both the "gimme little drink" chorus and the horn part. Listen for yourself; it's on the left side.
Ultimately, the day cycle of the song empties onto the dawn of the next. While Exile on Main St. has the image of a bleak and dark record, there are plenty of moments when the sun is allowed to seep in, with "All Down the Line" and "Happy" also representing the light alongside "Loving Cup."
Nick Hornby, discussing
pop music in general, wrote in 2004, "there is still a part of me that persists in thinking that rock music, and indeed all art, has an occasional role to play in the increasingly tricky art of making us glad we're alive," which is exactly how I feel about "Loving Cup." My newest convert is my daughter, who has insisted since age three that we listen to the song daily on our drive to her preschool. I gladly oblige. The cycle continues.
Happy
On "Happy," the Human Riff unleashes one of his absolute classics. Keith opens with that sort of tension-filled guitar figure that bops and weaves all around the beat, making the listener wonder how he is finally ever going to make it into the beat itself. He has a way of swinging guitar riffs so severely that they sound like false starts, paying as much mind to the upb
eat as the down, small aural tricks that dip and rise dynamically. Taking his sweet time to introduce the song, his open-G-tuned guitar ringing that identifiable four-note lick on one side, doubled by a slide part off on the other, the song is all Keith, almost literally:
That happened in one grand bash in France for Exile. I had the riff. The rest of the Stones were late for one reason or another. It was only Bobby Keys there and Jimmy Miller, who was producing. I said, I've got this idea; let's put it down for when the guys arrive. I put down some guitar and vocal, Bobby was on baritone sax and Jimmy was on drums. We listened to it, and I said, I can put another guitar there and a bass. By the time the Stones arrived, we'd cut it. I love it when they drip off the end of the fingers. And I was pretty happy about it, which is why it ended up being called "Happy."
We all know it as the signature Keith Richards tune, a declaration of self, his calling card. And if Keith is "Happy," then the band is happy. This is where the rock star myth collects some validity, and it is ground zero for Keith wannabes. Here is the joie de vivre that rock & roll is supposed to reflect.
Keith mixes old blues themes in lines like "didn't want to be like Poppa / working for the boss every night and day" with a more nuanced update on Cole Porter:
Get no kick from champagne
Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all
Some they may go for cocaine
I’m sure that if, I took even one signature sniff
It would bore me terrifically too
But I get a kick out of you
—Cole Porter, "I Get a Kick Out of You"
Never got a flash out of cocktails
When I can get some flesh off the bone
—Keith Richards, "Happy'
/ get no kick in a plane
Flying too high with some guy [gal] in the sky
Is my idea of nothing to do
Yet I get a kick out of you
-Cole Porter
Never got a lift out of Lear jets
When I can fly way back home
I need a love to keep me happy
—Keith Richards
These thematic parallels may be coincidence, but Keith has always claimed to have his "antenna" up, ready to soak up whatever was in the air. And he has been known to play "I Get a Kick Out of You" later in his career, and bootleg recordings exist of a performance or two of the Porter song.
In addition to a funky, inspired bass part, Richards gives a highly spirited vocal performance on "Happy," supported by prominent backing vocals overdubbed by Jagger, who takes over the ad-lib section at the end, which Keith seems to accede gladly. The song benefits from yet another dazzling mix of many layered components, including dual slide guitar parts, split in stereo.
Jimmy Miller's drums and percussion drive the back-beat. In addition to Bobby Keys' baritone sax, it sounds like he added a tenor horn as well. He had actually just been playing percussion during the basic tracking. Jim Price added trumpet and trombone lines and the arrangement builds to a real horn-heavy drone as the song ends, with interweaving and overlapping horn parts. It all results in a raging hard-rock, maximum R&B attack. Nicky Hopkins hammers away on Wurlitzer electric piano, creating the sort of part that Ian McLagan became known for with the Faces.
As I noted earlier, the sessions for Exile on Main St. saw the actors in the drama drifting in and out of Nell-cote at various times throughout the project, and it was often difficult to get the Stones all in one place at one time. But even with this in mind, "Happy" is an extreme case, with one member alone taking hold of the reigns. (Though this was not unheard of: Jagger and Mick Taylor pretty much recorded all of "Moonlight Mile" on Sticky Fingers while Keith was away from the studio, or, in his words, "out of it.")
But the way "Happy" went down points to a difference between Keith and Mick in preferred working methods. According to her various accounts, Anita Pallenberg reckons that, not long after the band and their respective families were pulled closer together by their mutual exile from their homeland, a widening gulf started developing between the band members as the time recording Exile went on, especially between Mick and Keith. "I never really saw Mick and Keith sitting together and working like they used to in the old days, when they used to rely on each other," she told Mojo, further dispelling my closely guarded myth of the sessions. Mick seemed to have the most trouble with the situation, as there was little for him to do when the band was still in the nascent stages of a song, developing from a riff that might have come to Keith in a midnight or morning burst of inspiration. Only as an idea started to gel and it became apparent it would grow into a real song would Jagger start to concentrate on writing proper lyrics, otherwise he was wasting precious resources and inspiration. Mick preferred hatching ideas first with Keith before bringing it to the band at the next stage. Keith, however, liked to catch inspiration as it struck, doing all in his power to capture and exploit whatever magic might happen.
Turd on the Run
"Turd on the Run" takes its place next to "Ventilator Blues" and "Casino Boogie" as one of the churning-urn blues numbers on Exile, the songs that seem to have risen out of the torrid basement jam sessions, sweat dripping from the musicians in the middle of the humid Riviera nights. It would really surprise and impress me if Jagger overdubbed his lead vocal part in Los Angeles later, because I want to believe that he was just down there howling his way through it while the rest of the band ground out the mostly one-chord drone. Jagger offers the kind of hooting, screaming, growling vocal— the essence of raw blues—that punk blues artists like the Cramps and White Stripes worked decades later. Here are the Stones near their most primordial.
This song could never have had any commercial potential, and it might have never even occurred to the Stones that such a raw, decidedly non-pop "song" would even make it onto an album—and if it were any other album, it might not have. But this is Exile on Main St., so the band sounds like they are playing for the sheer exhilaration of it, playing as if the music just needed to come out. Thankfully, it was documented and mixed properly on an official recording, not just tucked away on some murky bootleg. And here is precisely what makes the album so special, and why talk of cutting it down to one record is misguided; where else, aside from bootlegs and in rare live situations, do we get to hear a mainstream, massively successful band stretching out and having fun? And yet, this is no insufferable prog-rock or jam-band experimentation that you will never play again; no, "Turd on the Run" would sit well on a compilation next to Howlin' Wolf, the Clash, or even some faster hardcore punk rock. In fact, the song gets my vote over "Rip This Joint" for the record's most punk rock song. The narrator on "Rip This Joint" sounds like he is just out to have a good time raising hell at the union hall. On "Turd on the Run," Jagger sounds desperate, in pain, driven over the edge, menacingly so. And he sounds like he is going to make someone pay:
Begged, promised anything if only you would stay
Well I lost a lot of love on you YEAH! THATS RIGHT!
. . . Diamond rings, Vaseline, you gave me disease
Well I lost a lot of love on you!
Mick blasts away some harp fills right out of the Junior Wells playbook, when he's not yowling like a banshee. Keith is right there with him in a close harmony on choice lines. Stray bits of reverberating vocal, guitar, and harmonica parts drift in and out between the lines. One such spare part that jumped out at me recently is heard at around 0:32 to 0:34: a guitar sound that comes out of nowhere to make a teetering three-note figure repeats, then disappears until the instrumental break, from about 1:01 to 1:35, just droning on with a slight variation on the main riff that Keith is chugging down. Nicky Hopkins bangs away at the piano, boogie-woogie style. Charlie keeps it austerely simple, just swishing away at the snare drum with a steam train beat, allowing the others to rage away on their jam. The ensemble includes Bill Plummer on an overdubbed upright bass, who hides the fact that he overdubbed in LA; he sounds like he might well have been there in the basement, furiou
sly slapping away at the strings, clacking them against the fretboard. But Plummer adds far more than any sort of rockabilly cliché; his part is more like an amphetamine-blues bass. The band sounds possessed by a mutual spirit. As the instrumental parts swirl up into a frenzy, like it's the end of a Baptist church gospel vamp—all they are missing is someone speaking in tongues. But then Mick ups the ante near the end, covering his mouth in rapid taps as he howls a bone-chilling falsetto like a Comanche warrior heading into battle, bringing the song into a haunting fade. You can almost hear the Cramps' Lux Interior presaged here.
Ventilator Blues
Now, deep within the bowels of the album, we find the most malevolent sounding song on Exile. "Ventilator Blues" takes a Chess Records template, a hard electric blues worthy of Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, or Muddy Waters. And for one of the few times in his tenure with the Stones, Mick Taylor gets a songwriting credit next to Jagger/Richards. He created the insistent slide guitar lick that runs in an almost nightmarish loop through this claustrophobic song, relentlessly cornering the listener as if in one of the windowless rooms in the mouldy basement of Nellcote—which was, in fact, the inspiration for the immediate lyrical theme. Pointing out some typically small basement windows in a photo in Exile, Andy Johns explained, "See these windows here? That was the only air that would come in, so everything would get so hot. The guitars would go out of tune constantly because of the heat. That's why they played 'Ventilator Blues.'"