Going back into 'Exile'

ROLLING STONES
EXILE ON MAIN ST

And I’m lookin’ out my window baby
And I’m standing by my door
Have you ever had the feeling baby
That you been here before?
— “I’m Not Signifying”

MICHAEL E. ROSS 
05.21.2010

In May 1972, back when the Rolling Stones could lay legitimate claim to being the best rock and roll band on the planet, it was difficult to see where “Exile on Main St” belonged in the group’s catalog, much less the rock canon. A year or so after “Sticky Fingers” and the group’s launch of its own label, in the midst of internal dissension and Keith Richards’ persistent drug problems, and with the music industry making the first real push to being an Industry, it seemed to be as hard for the Stones to get a handle on anything as it was for a fickle, changing public to grasp the intention of the Stones. Or so it seemed.
What a difference tree-ring time makes. We can see clearly now how “Exile on Main St” distills their rough, ragged, streetwise greatness. They appeared to be the sloppiest fricking rock band around, all rough edges and scruffy angles, three chords and sharp elbows, songs like barbed wire, their words rife with danger and passion, debauch and rage. In this is their genius — to have transmuted the base metals of rock, the blues and the singularly keen edge of life in the postwar age into a stunning document by turns historical and contemporary, raw and refined, braggart and confessional, sprawling and precise: one of the greatest recordings in the history of rock.

Thirty-eight years after it was released, the band has re-released the original 18-track album remastered, along with 10 unreleased tracks. And of course there’re other options: the obligatory mondo package of CDs, DVD, artwork and ephemera for the diehard collector.

The big attraction is the 10 “bonus” tracks added to the original “Exile” lineup; their addition is being marketed (in typical Stones fashion) with portent, as if it were the Eleventh through Twentieth Commandments Moses brought down after a second trip to the Mount. But hearing these additional songs against the totality of the original album, it’s striking how, in ways you don’t expect until you’ve heard them, they do nothing more — can do nothing more — than reinforce our sense of the power of the original article.

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Some of the birth of “Exile” occurred in one of those classic “forged in the crucible” occasions. From July to November 1971, the Stones, literally made tax exiles due to the crushing British tax laws of the era, decamped to Nellcôte, a French villa then owned by Keith Richards and partly converted to a recording studio. The time at Nellcôte gave the Stones, numerous friends, fellow musicians and associates both privacy and an expansive physical laboratory for various indulgences, musical and otherwise.

The music that resulted from that voluntary rock ‘n’ roll incarceration, and from earlier sessions recorded elsewhere, has stood the test of time; the bonus tracks (the focus of this piece) are novel additions to our sense of how EOMS came to be, but partly because of how long it’s taken for them to see the light of day, it’s easier to hear some of these tracks in the context of the Stones’ next phase or an earlier one, rather than in the context of the classic we’ve known and partied with all these years.

When you consider that Jagger recorded new vocals over instrumental tracks on the bonus disc, it’s clear the Stones hope to lift this reissue beyond being just a revisitation of an old sound; with tracks whose vocals and lyrics leapfrog in and out of a logical chronology, there’s an attempt to infuse the past with the present. Jagger and company have often used their vaults of unreleased music as artist’s canvas, as motion picture, and as their own personal TARDIS, a la the time machine of “Doctor Who”: releasing records that seek to defy the convenience of chronology for its own sake. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so much.

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For example, “Pass the Wine (Sophia Loren),” which opens the bonus disc, has a drive and a vaguely Latin ethnicity that feels like New York City in the late 70’s, to these ears dovetailing more with the Stones of “Some Girls” and “Tattoo You,” both recorded some years after “Exile.”

On “So Divine (Aladdin Story),” the first notes — a lick copied from the opening of “Paint It Black” (from 1966) — lead into a moody, ethereal melody possessed of an arresting exoticism and a hazy languidity that feel like something native to “Sticky Fingers.”

“Following the River” – a Stones approach to the classic break-up song — bears some of Jagger’s most heartfelt lyrics; the arc of the monologue in the lyrics feels real; not the rant of a millionaire registering a complaint with his latest conquest, but the real and lamented end of a relationship. It acquires additional resonance when you consider Jagger added the lyrics and vocals years later, when the fading of love’s glory has presumably taken on more depth and meaning than it did when he was in his prime.

The bonus album ends with “Title 5,” an R&B-flavored instrumental rave-up featuring Richards, founding bass player Bill Wyman, and drummer Charlie Watts, a song that’s diverting in its reveal of the relationship between Watts and Wyman as the group’s rhythmic anchors.

But to my ears, two bonus tracks early in the lineup —“Plundered My Soul” and “I’m Not Signifying” — seem to truly emerge organically from the “Exile” sessions, in spirit if not in specifics. The first of these is Jagger in full-throated she-done-me-wrong mode, with a soulful (and recent) vocal delivery undimmed by the years.

“I’m Not Signifying” is stealthier in its strength. Building from a terrific piano riff by the late, great Nicky Hopkins, the Stones weigh in slowly but powerfully. Punctuated by the horns section of Bobby Keys and Jim Price, “Signifying” swings into the kind of bluesy shuffle that characterizes so much of “Exile’s” original mood.

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There are some disappointments: It’s safe to say “Good Time Women” either inspires or is inspired by “Tumblin’ Dice.” We can’t know which came first, or whether or not “Good Time Women” was a test drive for “Tumbling Dice.” As it is, and either way, you can vocally superimpose the vocal phrasing and lyrics of that rock classic on this new track and not miss a beat.

The alternate version of “Loving Cup,” deliberate to a fault and recorded before the bunkering at Nellcôte, has none of the romp and bite of the classic version.

Likewise, the alternate take of “Soul Survivor” is something of a throwaway, with Keith Richards’ lyrical meandering, there’s none of the narrative focus that could make this rough draft more than a footnote. He recognizes how much of a discard this version is when he starts saying “et cetera, et cetera,” where the real lyrics would be (and maybe already were) on the gold-standard version.

Et cetera indeed. Keith’s offhand phrase distills one of my reactions to the “Exile” reissue; the bonus tracks themselves seem to reinforce their own “et cetera”-ness. They’re music out of context, songs whose willful rattling of the comforts of chronology finally come to frustrate any sense of organically belonging here at all.

Or maybe it’s just hard to imagine the Stones improving on the spark and velocity of ”Rip This Joint,” “Rocks Off,” “All Down the Line,” “Happy” and “Tumbling Dice — then and now the emotional tentpoles of “Exile.” The fact of when and how the original “Exile” tracks were recorded — or whether the “forged in the crucible of Nellcôte” narrative is even valid — pales in comparison with what they’ve come to mean after a generation of scrutiny and exegesis.

They’ve held up after all these years because their sense of risk, of struggle and even danger, typifies not just rock’s essential core but also the essence of modern times, the risk and danger and struggle inherent in the world we live in.

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Richards’ deepening heroin addiction, Mick Taylor’s departure and Jagger’s social climbing distractions would become some of the forces that seemed to pull the Stones apart by the early 70’s. You can make the case that the band never fully, creatively coalesced again until 1978, with the release of “Some Girls” — an album whose raw, unvarnished production values were much like those of “Exile” six years before.

You can’t help but wonder what else we haven’t heard (yet?) from the “Exile” period. It’s been reported, but maybe too easily forgotten, that Gram Parsons, former member of the Byrds and founder of the Flying Burrito Brothers, stayed at Nellcôte before the “Exile” sessions began.

In his excellent 1983 biography of the Stones, the musicologist and journalist Robert Palmer (a former colleague of mine at The New York Times) wrote of Parsons’ relationship with Richards:

“Parsons ... taught Keith the songs, the sad inflections and other expressive fine points of country & western and particularly honky-tonk music. Parsons stayed at Nellcôte for months, playing informal duets with Keith almost every day.”

Parsons wasn’t credited for a note of music on the “Exile” reissue. A tantalizing idea: Were any of those “informal duets” ever captured on tape?

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In the stripped-down version of the reissue, without the bells and whistles of the special edition, is a photo booklet that shows the Stones in rehearsal — the closeness, the relentless intimacy, the sweat and stink of the creative process underway, absent the bells and whistles of celebrity.

More than anything else, this is the value of the new improved “Exile,” not only as a musical portrait of a great band as it literally evolved and bloomed in a veritable hothouse in the south of France, but also as a freshly burnished historical artifact, a (slightly) wider window on what we’ve already heard and witnessed and celebrated for literally generations, in arenas and dorm rooms and living rooms and bedrooms, lighters aloft, glasses raised, bongs afire, passions ablaze.

Why does “Exile” persist in the culture, the memory, the heart and soul? It’s rock and roll at its highest state of grandeur, which ultimately means reflecting not so much grandeur as recognizing the weight of the world and our collective intent to endure that weight, to strive for indomitability, to be “soul survivors” in spite of everything (or maybe because of everything). Thirty-eight years after the original fact, that’s the triumph of “Exile.”

And if you’re still around to hear it, congratulations. It’s your triumph, too.

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Michael E. Ross is the editor of Culcha.