Talkin' Exile on Main Street

By Don Everett Pearce

The Audacious Claim

The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main Street is the all-time greatest rock and roll album by the all-time greatest rock and roll band.

I know that's an annoying, case-closed sort of statement...but it just happens to be true.

Discovering the Stones

My own experience with Exile on Main Street is that of a Southern California teenager who came of age in the New Wave 80s. I was essentially ignorant of blues, country, gospel or folk music. My record collection was made up of the UK guitar bands of the day; U2, The Police, The Clash, Simple Minds, The Pretenders, The Alarm & Big Country.

1986 was my senior year at San Dieguito High School in Encinitas. With a GPA of 1.8, I was well on my way to failing the 12th grade, yet I was strangely unconcerned about it (which was likely part of the problem!) At the time I was so focused on my guitar playing and on writing songs for my band that falling behind in my schoolwork just seemed inevitable.

My exposure to the Rolling Stones came about at the urging of one of my classmates, a surfer guy named Chad who sat behind me in World Civ. ("Dude, 'Sympathy for the Devil' ...hoo hoo!") Huh? To me, the Rolling Stones were just another one of those 70s dinosaur rock bands whose albums my friends' long-haired older brothers and sisters had lying around their bedrooms.

Chad's enthusiasm was enough to convince me to part with enough of my meager Wendy's wages to buy Hot Rocks, a compilation that covered 1964-1971. I recognized a few of the hits, and I decided that I liked it enough to want to check out more. I had read that Exile on Main Street was supposed to be not only the best Rolling Stones album, but one of the best rock albums of all time. I bought it at Lou's Records in downtown Encinitas.

First Listen

My first listen to Exile was through headphones on my dad's stereo while I recorded it to cassette so that I could have a copy for the car. The cover was a collage of odd little photos of circus freaks and God-knows-what, as if from some Guinness Book of the Grotesque. The record sleeves had duotone shots of members of the band in film strip style against a backdrop of 1950s America (jukeboxes, cars, movie posters and people) with hand-scrawled album credits.

My immediate impression of the music had to do simply with how it sounded...more like punk than I'd expected. The mix was dense and dry, the guitars were crunchy and punchy, and Mick Jagger slurred his words so that his voice came across as not much more than just another instrument. The first track was something about "rocks off" and I thought I heard a couple four-letter words flash by here and there in the churning adrenaline rush of it all. I was more puzzled than impressed at this point.

The second track, "Rip This Joint," was a blazing Chuck Berry-style rockabilly tune that featured Mick unintelligibly tearing up his vocal chords for the entire 2 minutes and some-odd seconds, like "Twist & Shout" at double tempo. The third song, "Shake Your Hips" (a Slim Harpo cover), started off with little stabs of finger-plucked electric guitar, holding to one chord, while instruments dropped in one-by-one and Mick drawled the root note over the top, slurring variations of "move your lips," "move your hips," and "shake your hips." It was a monotonous, hypnotic groove that picked up steam as the band played harder and faster toward the end of the tune.

"Casino Boogie" had lurching, call-and-response guitars and weird, high harmonies in hillbilly strains that I found a little jarring, but also compelling.

This is not going to be a song-by-song review, I'm just recounting the process by which I came to realize that I was listening to something pretty cool that I'd never really heard before. Side One closed with "Tumbling Dice." If any rock band before or since has matched the swinging groove perfection of this track, I've never heard 'em. And that was just the first side...three more sides followed that one!

"Sweet Virginia" set the country tone for Side Two, starting out with a dry acoustic guitar picking a lazy rhythm while a harmonica melody rose, all reedy and lonesome, from the dust.

What It Felt Like

This sure was no "Tea in the Sahara" or "Don't You Forget About Me."

The sound and feel of this music stood in stark contrast to the album that up to that point had been the most heavily spun LP in my collection, U2's Unforgettable Fire. But as different as these two records were, they still had one thing in common; both Bono and Mick seemed to be not so much enunciating actual words as forming approximations of words, and their vocals were low in the mix. This music works its magic on the subconscious in a way that more overt, recognizable lyrics in songs don't quite allow for. This music was raw, powerful, soulful, sublime, gritty, graceful and utterly natural all at once.

Of course I recognized that this album was built on long established styles, and that there was some pretty heavy borrowing and vocal affectation going on, but as I was not yet acquainted with John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed or Hank Williams, Mick Jagger was as authentic a bluesman as any so far as I could tell.

For me, as a young guitar player, hearing Keith Richards slash and burn his way through an encyclopedia of blues/rock styles was a real eye-opener. My days of learning from The Edge were over!

During those last few weeks of my less-than-stellar high school career, I would drive to school and back in my hand-me-down 1974 AMC Javelin listening to Exile constantly, almost to the exclusion of everything else. That last quarter, which would see me matter-of-factly fail to graduate with my class, consisted of a string of seasonally overcast, gray-sky days that Southern Californians refer to as "June gloom."

The music felt good. The word "spiritual" isn't the first word that comes to people's minds when thinking of the music of the Rolling Stones, but there was something so earthy and primal in this music that it cut to the heart and soothed just as much as did the more ethereal yearnings of Bono.

My favorite track at the time was the bordello-gospel tune "Shine a Light". It's a tender, if slightly vindictive, backstreet lullaby to some tragic figure who's fallen from grace. It's got rich harmonies, a swelling organ and a reggae lilt in the chorus. The song builds and breaks down in the way that the Stones do so well.

A Doorway to American Music

For a SoCal kid in the mid-80s, this album was an open door to the great American musical tradition. Never mind that this album was recorded in a mansion on the French Riviera by wealthy English musicians. Here, they are the hard-up bar band in a Dodge Tradesman van, rolling down dirt roads from East Texas, through the Mississippi Delta, up to Chicago and back down to Tennessee. Maybe it's because this stuff was recorded in a sweltering basement, using rented mobile equipment, and fueled by whatever the Stones may have had in their systems in the summer of 1971 that fills it with such authenticity. It's a testament to the utter confidence and nerve of these guys to try their damnedest to match, and even surpass, their musical mentors.

The Stones weren't just imitating the old motifs and playing hokey covers (as they had done on some previous albums). There's no "train" or "chain gang" or "cotton field" anywhere to be found in spite of the fact that these things run aplenty through the American songbook. They weren't pretending to be anything they weren't. They were a scruffy bunch of decadent rock and rollers and the songs are full of the wine, women, gambling, courtrooms, VD, lear jets and back rooms that likely made up their world.

Rollin' On

By the end of '86, I had not only made up credits and belatedly got my diploma, but I'd also caught up on just about every (post-1966) record in the Rolling Stones catalog...used LPs were cheap!

A few years ago, for some reason, I put a metronome to a few of the songs from Exile and I discovered that on this, the greatest rock album by the greatest rock band, more than a few of the songs end up at a significantly faster tempo than that at which they start out. I don't know what this means exactly, but there must be a lesson in there somewhere for me and for my fellow musicians of the click-track era. I'm guessing it's that there's a hell of a lot more to good music than perfect meter. I'm just saying.

Exile on Main Street was the final installment in a 4-album streak (Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers) that pretty much stands as the artistic peak of the Rolling Stones. It is, for me, the living definition of a rock and roll record just as Keith Richards is the living definition of the rock and roll guitar player.

In case you haven't guessed, I highly recommend it.