* Items below may differ depending on the release. Review Topping practically every critic's poll as one of the best rock records of all time, with many counting it as the best, Exile came out at a time when people thought the Stones had been taking too many drugs, losing too many friends and making way too much money for too long to really be able to pull off another great record.
- Exile on Main St. Is a studio album by English rock band the Rolling Stones. It was first released as a double album on 12 May 1972 by Rolling Stones Records and was the band's tenth studio album released in the United Kingdom.
- Features Song Lyrics for The Rolling Stones's Exile On Main St. Includes Album Cover, Release Year, and User Reviews.
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Release Date
26 May 1972Length
18 tracks
Exile on Main St. is an album by the English rock band The Rolling Stones. It was released as a double LP in 1972 and drew on influences from rock & roll, blues, country and soul. Initially 'Exile' was greeted with lukewarm reviews, but is now widely considered among the band's finest work and one of the defining masterpieces of the rock era. In 2003, the album was ranked number 7, the band's highest position, on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
Exile on Main St. is an album composed of outtakes and tracks written and recorded over the period of four years, from 1968 to 1972. On those earlier songs, singer Mick Jagger said in 2003, '…After we got out of our contract with Allen Klein, we didn't want to give him ,' as they were forced to do with the songs 'Brown Sugar' and 'Wild Horses' from Sticky Fingers. Most were recorded between 1969 and 1971 at Olympic Studios and Richard's Stargroves country house in England during sessions for Sticky Fingers.
By the spring of 1971, the Stones chose to abandon their home country of England to avoid the amount of taxes the British government expected the band to pay. The Stones would have to leave by 5 April, or the government would have seized their assets. After much consideration, the Stones chose to settle in France at Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice, where guitarist Keith Richards had rented Nellcôte, the 'Gestapo headquarters during the Second World War,' according to Richards, complete with swastikas on the floor vents. It was here that the Stones would begin work constructing their next album.
Recording began in earnest sometime near the middle of June. Bassist Bill Wyman recalls the band working all night, every night, from eight in the evening until three the following morning for the rest of the month. Wyman said of the times, '…not everyone turned up every night. This was, for me, one of the major frustrations of this whole period. For our previous two albums we had worked well and listened to producer Jimmy Miller. At Nellcôte things were very different and it took me a while to understand why…' By this time Richards had begun a daily habit of using heroin. Thousands of dollars of heroin flowed through the mansion each week in addition to a contingent of visitors that included the likes of William S. Burroughs, Terry Southern, Gram Parsons, and Marshall Chess (who was running the Stones' new label). Contrary to popular belief, Parsons does not appear on the album and was asked to leave Nellcôte in early July 1971, the result of both his obnoxious behaviour and an attempt by Richards to clean the house of drug users as the result of pressure from the French police.
Richards' steadily growing addiction began to inhibit his ability to perform, often leading the band having to record in altered forms without every member present. A notable instance was the recording of one of Richards' most famous songs, 'Happy'. Recorded in the basement, Richards said in 1982, 'Happy' was something I did because I was for one time EARLY for a session. There was Bobby Keys and Jimmy Miller… We had nothing to do and had suddenly picked up the guitar and played this riff. So we cut it and it's the record, it's the same. We cut the original track with a baritone sax, a guitar and Jimmy Miller on drums. And the rest of it is built up over that track. It was just an afternoon jam that everybody said, 'Wow, yeah, work on it'.
The basic band for the Nellcôte sessions is believed to have consisted of Richards, Bobby Keys, Mick Taylor, Charlie Watts, Miller (a notable drummer in his own right who covered for an absentee Watts on the aforementioned 'Happy' and 'Shine a Light'), and Jagger when he was available. Wyman did not like the ambience of the Richards' villa and sat out many of the French sessions. As Wyman appeared on only eight songs of the released album, the other bass parts were played by Taylor, Richards, and, on four tracks, upright bassist Bill Plummer. Wyman noted in his memoir Stone Alone that there was a clear dichotomy between the band members who freely indulged in drugs (Richards, Miller, Keys, Taylor, engineer Andy Johns) and those who more or less abstained (Wyman, Watts, and Jagger).
Additional basic tracks (most probably only 'Rip this Joint', 'Shake Your Hips', 'Casino Boogie', 'Happy', 'Rocks Off', 'Turd on the Run', and 'Ventilator Blues') were begun in the basement of Nellcôte and taken to Sunset Sound Recorders in Los Angeles where numerous overdubs (all piano and keyboard parts, all lead and backing vocals, all guitar and bass overdubs) were added during sessions that meandered from December 1971 until May 1972. Some tracks (such as 'Torn and Frayed' and 'Loving Cup') were freshly recorded in Los Angeles. Although Jagger (who had recently wed Bianca Jagger) was frequently missing from Nellcôte, he immediately took charge during the second stage of recording in Los Angeles, arranging for keyboardists Billy Preston and Dr. John and the cream of the city's session backup vocalists to record layers of overdubs. The final gospel-inflected arrangements of 'Tumbling Dice', 'Loving Cup', 'Let It Loose' and 'Shine a Light' were inspired by Jagger and Preston's visit to a local evangelical church.
The elongated recording sessions and differing methodologies on the part of Jagger and Richards reflected the growing disparity in their personal lives. During the making of the album, Jagger had married, which was followed by the birth of their only child, Jade, in October 1971. Richards was firmly ensconced with partner Anita Pallenberg, yet both were in the throes of heroin addiction, which Richards would not overcome until the turn of the decade. Even though the album is often described as being Richards' finest moment, Jagger was already expressing his boredom with rock and roll in several interviews at the time of the album's release.
With Richards largely beholden to heroin, the group's subsequent 1970s releases—directed largely by Jagger—would experiment in varying degrees with other musical genres, moving away from the thoroughly roots-based sound of Exile On Main St.
With Richards largely beholden to heroin, the group's subsequent 1970s releases—directed largely by Jagger—would experiment in varying degrees with other musical genres, moving away from the thoroughly roots-based sound of Exile On Main St.
Released in May 1972, having been preceded by the Top 10 hit 'Tumbling Dice', Exile On Main St. was an immediate commercial success, hitting #1 worldwide just as the band embarked on their famed 1972 American Tour, their first in the U.S. in three years, and during which they played many songs from the new album. 'Happy', sung by Richards, would be a Top 30 US hit later that summer.
Although critics judged Exile on Main St. to be a ragged record at the time of its release, its reputation has since grown. On the critical and commercial reaction, Richards said, 'When came out it didn't sell particularly well at the beginning, and it was also pretty much universally panned. But within a few years the people who had written the reviews saying it was a piece of crap were extolling it as the best frigging album in the world.'
However, music critic Robert Christgau concluded in 1972: 'Incontrovertibly the year’s best, this fagged-out masterpiece is the summum of Rock ’72. Even now, I can always get pleasure out of any of its four sides, but it took me perhaps twenty-five listenings before I began to understand what the Stones were up to, and I still haven’t finished the job. Just say they’re 'Advancing Artistically', in the manner of self-conscious public creators careering down the corridors of destiny. Exile explores new depths of record-studio murk, burying Mick’s voice under layers of cynicism, angst, and ennui…'
In 1994 Exile on Main St. was remastered and reissued by Virgin Records and is scheduled to be remastered and reissued as a Deluxe Edition later in 2009 by Universal Music.
At the time of Exile's release, Jagger said, 'This new album is fucking mad. There's so many different tracks. It's very rock & roll, you know. I didn't want it to be like that. I'm the more experimental person in the group, you see I like to experiment. Not go over the same thing over and over. Since I've left England, I've had this thing I've wanted to do. I'm not against rock & roll, but I really want to experiment… The new album's very rock & roll and it's good. I think rock & roll is getting a bit… I mean, I'm very bored with rock & roll. The revival. Everyone knows what their roots are, but you've got to explore everywhere. You've got to explore the sky too.'
In 2003, Jagger said, 'Exile… is not one of my favourite albums, although I think the record does have a particular feeling. I'm not too sure how great the songs are, but put together it's a nice piece. However, when I listen to Exile it has some of the worst mixes I've ever heard. I'd love to remix the record, not just because of the vocals, but because generally I think it sounds lousy. At the time Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies… Of course I'm ultimately responsible for it, but it's really not good and there's no concerted effort or intention.' Jagger also stated he didn't understand the praise amongst Rolling Stones' fans because the album did not yield very many 'hits'.
Of the album, Richards said, 'Exile was a double album. And because it's a double album you're going to be hitting different areas, including 'D for Down', and the Stones really felt like exiles. We didn't start off intending to make a double album; we just went down to the south of France to make an album and by the time we'd finished we said, 'We want to put it all out'… The point is that the Stones had reached a point where we no longer had to do what we were told to do. Around the time Andrew Oldham left us, we'd done our time, things were changing and I was no longer interested in hitting Number One in the charts every time. What I want to do is good shit — if it's good they'll get it some time down the road.'
In 1998 Q magazine readers voted Exile on Main St. the 42nd greatest album of all time, while in 2000 the same magazine placed it at number 3 in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever. In 1987 it was ranked #3 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the greatest 100 albums of the period 1967-1987. In 2003, Pitchfork Media ranked it number eleven on their Top 100 Albums of the 1970s. In 2001, the TV network VH1 placed it at number 22 on their best albums survey. The album was ranked number 19 on the October 2006 issue of Guitar World magazine's list of the greatest 100 guitar albums of all time.In 2007, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame placed the album #6 on the 'Definitive 200' list of albums that 'every music lover should own.'
The album and its title has frequently been referenced by other bands in their own album titles. For example, the British acid house group Alabama 3 titled its debut album Exile on Coldharbour Lane. Perhaps the most notable reference comes from indie singer/songwriter Liz Phair's debut album Exile in Guyville. Phair herself claims the album to be a direct song-by-song 'response' of sorts to Exile on Main St. Confrontational garage-trash noise-rock band Pussy Galore released a complete cover of the album that reflected their own personal and musical interpretations of the songs, as opposed to paying tribute to the original sound. Post-grunge band Matchbox Twenty paid homage to this album by titling their 2007 retrospective Exile on Mainstream. Industrial Rock band Chemlab named the leading track from their album East Side Militia, 'Exile on Mainline', in reference to the Rolling Stones album.
In the HBO series The Sopranos, Tony uses the title phrase to let his sister Janice know her husband's disloyalty will never be forgiven: 'As for your husband, Janice, 'Exile on Main Street'.' (Season 6, Episode 8 )
![Bleed Bleed](/uploads/1/2/6/0/126026076/658491917.jpg)
In the 2000 German comedy film 'Sonnenallee', about a group of teenagers growing up in 1970s East Berlin, a side plot involves one of the main characters trying (in vain) to obtain a copy of 'Exile on Main St'.
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Rolling Stones Exile On Main Street 2010 Rarity Game
A LESSER-KNOWN version of the Rolling Stones ’ “Loving Cup,” found on the bonus disc of the new reissue of the band’s 1972 album, “Exile on Main St.,” seems to me the best thing the Stones ever did.
It’s country gospel gone lurid, and it seems to rise up out of a nap. Nicky Hopkins’s piano chords circle around a G at slow tempo in an echoey room. Charlie Watts starts pumping a bass drum at the third beat of the second bar; he’s either late or early, but finding his way. Piano and drums roll up to the D chord at the beginning of the first verse, and Mick Taylor bends two guitar strings under Mick Jagger ’s opening line: “I’m the man on the mountain — yes, come on up.” Onward, Mr. Watts weaves around the beat, smashing down on his high-hat, forming weird and clattering snare-drum fills. He both shapes and follows the group’s euphoria and the music ’s subtle acceleration. The Stones gather around the song like pickpockets, jostling and interfering with it. Keith Richards , playing rhythm guitar and singing backup, quits harmonizing and starts to shout.
This performance represents to me the sound of “Exile” in idealized form: a dark, dense, loosely played, semiconscious tour through American blues, gospel and country music, recorded in a basement in France . “Exile” was made around the Stones’ creative peak and in unusual circumstances: they were tax exiles, forced to live away from home.
It is often called one of the best rock records ever made, and framed as an after-the-fact concept album: a wise horror show, an audio diary of rock stars finally facing the rigors of marriage, children and addiction. (“ ‘Exile’ is about casualties, and partying in the face of them,” the critic Lester Bangs wrote in 1972. “The party is obvious. The casualties are inevitable.”) The notion of the record as story also comes from the strong documentary images around its creation— Dominique Tarlé’s black-and-white pictures of the Stones at Villa Nellcôte, shirtless and dazed in the stifling air of a basement in the South of France. These images dot the 64 -page booklet and the DVD film included in the reissue’s deluxe edition and have been part of the avalanche of press around the reissue, released by Universal on Tuesday.
Recently, thinking about this alternate “Loving Cup” and why it’s not on the original album made me wonder what the ideal of “Exile” really is. I find most of “Exile” good, but not great. (That era of Stones music, fantastic. The album, not so much.) I can’t see it as a masterpiece, not only because I distrust the idea of masterpieces, but because I especially don’t want one from the Stones, who make songs and albums like birds ’ nests — collaborative tangles with delicate internal balances — and have a history of great triage work, assembling bits and pieces recorded over a long period. But “Exile” remains the preference of the most judicious Stones fans. Why? What is its essence?
Continue reading the main storyIt’s a tricky question. “Exile” can seem like a unity of sound, place and time; much has been made of the fact that one of its greatest songs, “Ventilator Blues,” was inspired by the discomfort of the basement studio at Nellcôte, Mr. Richards’s rented mansion on the French Riviera, with its one small air vent. You can make yourself hear that heat, if you want.
But the recordings for “Exile” didn’t all happen in that basement. They stretched from 1969 to 1972, across the making of two other excellent and, to me, superior records — “Let It Bleed” and “Sticky Fingers.” It’s not always the band you know and, perhaps, love: there are a number of “Exile” tracks whose parts are not played by the usual suspects. (That’s Jimmy Miller, the producer, playing drums on “Happy” and “Shine a Light,” not Mr. Watts. That’s Mr. Taylor, or Mr. Richards, or Bill Plummer playing bass on about half the record, not Bill Wyman.)
As it happens, the “Loving Cup” described above was not recorded in Nellcôte’s basement but at Olympic Studios in London in the spring of 1969. (The album version — more laid back, not as good — comes from Los Angeles , after the French sojourn.) The Nellcôte experience was important to “Exile,” there’s no question. But the work of several Stones researchers indicates that more than half the album was recorded at other places, under more normal working conditions.
The new reissue both enshrines “Exile” and questions it. The first disc — a sharper version of the album itself, sounding far better than its last remastering in 1994, with deeper bass and greater detail — strengthens the idea of “Exile” as an inviolable document, dense and atmospheric and brilliantly post-produced, a thing unto itself. But the second bonus disc blows that idea apart, with new vocal tracks by Mr. Jagger over old instrumental tracks of “Exile”-related provenance, and other material that seems to come from the general era. So now you’re getting “Exile” from two perspectives: first as a finished 18-track entity, a masterpiece, if you want; then as something broader and more amorphous. If I’m reading the signs correctly, these two perspectives have some relation to how Mr. Richards and Mr. Jagger think about the album.
Mr. Jagger, who has criticized the album’s production over the years and wondered aloud about the strength of its songs, is more willing to dispense with Nellcôte as the album’s central force.
“You mean what is the album’s esprit?” he asked, rephrasing a question in a recent telephone conversation. The idea of Nellcôte as the album’s unifier is “three-quarters true,” he explained.
“It wouldn’t be the same record without Nellcôte,” he added. “But then it wouldn’t be the same record without what we did in London. Nellcôte was more hothouse, it was more living-in-the-studio. But what would the difference have been if we recorded ‘Ventilator Blues’ at Olympic or at Nellcôte? Who knows, and who cares?”
Miller, the album’s producer, died in 1994. So Mr. Jagger commissioned the producer Don Was to investigate extra studio material from the period. (“When Mick first called me about it,” Mr. Was said, “it was like he was asking me, ‘Can you do me a favor, man? Can you take the garbage out?’ ”) But then Mr. Jagger got caught up in the search himself, trying to determine what other tracks might qualify as extra matter for “Exile.” Mr. Jagger said he thought only in terms of time period, not by style, sound, location, or any other criterion. For him, “Exile” is less a specific sequence of tracks than an era of recording, starting with that “Loving Cup” at Olympic Studios.
“It’s a good story to say that what was created at Nellcôte was a result of the incredibly decadent atmosphere,” Mr. Jagger said. “Well, yeah: it’s probably true that the atmosphere affected the feeling of the music, and the sound of the studio. But you’ve no idea how much or how little. And in the end, it’s just a sort of myth, really.”
Can he hear the sound of the Nellcôte studios when he listens to the album?
“I’ve no idea which is the Nellcôte stuff and which isn’t, to be honest.”
Ah.
Mr. Richards feels differently. “All of the bone and the muscle of the record was done down in that basement,” he said when asked the same question. The rest of the work he considers “fairy dust.”
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It’s the opposite interpretation, but if you read the literature — particularly Robert Greenfield’s book “Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones” (Da Capo Press) — it makes sense. Nellcôte was Mr. Richards’s house, and he was one of its mainstays that summer, with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg and their son Marlon. The other band members came and went; Inasmuch as “Exile” has an esprit of place, Mr. Richards lived in it, and Mr. Jagger visited.
“I don’t think we were conscious of making a record that was gonna be about that place and the way we felt at the time,” Mr. Richards said in a phone interview. “But the word ‘exile’ does describe pretty much the atmosphere and the conditions that we were recording in. I mean, we’d all had to leave our places in England . Not that the Stones were particularly patriotic — I know better than that — but it was really a jerk, when you’re working with a team of guys and you all have to uproot at once.”
Mr. Richards contributed little to the extra tracks on the bonus disc and distrusted altering even the outtakes and unused tracks; as he said to another reporter earlier this year, “I didn’t want to interfere with the Bible.”
“My job was to enforce the no-fiddling rule,” he told me. “I didn’t want to play around with it at all. It’s all analog, and of course the remixing involved a change to digital, but otherwise, if anybody came up with a bright idea, I said no.”
It’s not clear that Mr. Jagger heard him. He put new vocals on four of the bonus tracks: “Plundered My Soul,” “Following the River,” “Dancing in the Light” and “Pass the Wine .” In “Plundered” — after some newly tracked guitar in the opening by Mr. Taylor — you hear a 66-year-old voice singing recent lyrics: an aging aristocrat describing a younger man’s appetites, over what appears to be the Stones sounding worn and wracked in their 20s.
Sticky Fingers
Mr. Was believes that nobody, not even the Stones themselves, can remember when the backing tracks for “Plundered My Soul” were recorded.
The strange thing is that “Plundered My Soul” is very good: the most soulful and energetic Stones track I can think of in almost 30 years. Until recently, the Stones have been reluctant to release their unheard archives. Perhaps that’s because they’re so good at putting old scraps into new patchworks — the then-three-year-old songs retooled in 1972 for “Exile,” the then-nine-year-old songs ( “Tops” and “Waiting on a Friend”) given new vocals and new life in 1981 on “Tattoo You.”
Let It Bleed
The rest of the bonus disc is very good, too, patchwork, mysteries and all. According to Mr. Was, two tracks come from Nellcôte — a petulant shuffle called “I’m Not Signifying” and an alternate version of “Soul Survivor,” sung by Mr. Richards. One other, a nasty R&B instrumental called “Title 5,” came from a tape box marked “1969,” though Mr. Was suspects it was made earlier. So do I.
I don’t know if a great album must serve as an accounting of where the band members’ heads were at, or where they were geographically, or when they made it. But in the Stones’ case, I do want to hear the group sound, as much as possible. I want a minimum of detours, absences and static longeurs, with introductions and bridges and codas. The Stones wrote and arranged carefully, but this is a record that favors jamming over composing; though only one track is longer than five minutes, many quickly drag from indirection: “Happy,” “Casino Boogie,” “Stop Breaking Down,” “Shine a Light” — half the record, really.
Still, because of its rolling eccentricity, “Exile” always wants to be heard in full, or at least in small groupings, including the two great segues: the hard “Rocks Off” into the harder “Rip This Joint”; the angry gnarl of “Ventilator Blues” into the menthol drift of “I Just Want to See His Face.” Throughout, I love Mr. Jagger’s yapping voice, determined to be heard, feeling its way through cultural appropriation. I think Mr. Richards’s limping rhythm in “Tumbling Dice” is one of the great energies in popular music, even if I’ve never worked up much love for the song.
But back to the alternate take of “Loving Cup,” which still seems like the star of the whole enterprise.
I asked Don Was what he thought. “There’s a sound that’s identified with ‘Exile’ that’s become part of the vocabulary for every rock ‘n’ roll musician subsequently,” he said. “And this is the ultimate track of the style that characterizes ‘Exile.’ It’s not sloppiness; it’s width, in terms of where everyone feels the beat. You’ve got five individuals feeling the beat in a different place. At some point, the centrifugal force of the rhythm no longer holds the band together. That ‘Loving Cup’ is about the widest area you can have without the song falling apart.”
What leapt out was the phrase “the style that characterizes ‘Exile,’ ” especially in connection with a track that’s not actually on the record. For me, “Exile” works best as a suggestion, not a fact.
Correction: June 6, 2010 An article on May 23 about the Rolling Stones’ album “Exile on Main St.” misidentified the chord at the beginning of the first verse of the group’s song “Loving Cup.” It is a D chord, not an A chord.