The Rolling Stones were fucked up drug-addled minor royalty by 1972. They’d been ejected from the United Kingdom due to unpaid taxes – a strikingly banal and bourgeois reason to get kicked out of any country, though perhaps indicative of the fact that, like all libertines, the Stones were impeccably middle-class, and through their excesses, they were fitfully endeavouring to imbibe something of the effortlessly cool, couldn’t-give-a-fuck, essentially tragic self-abandon of the urban proletariat. But I digress. In 1971, they decamped to the South of France, took up residence in a resplendent £1000 a month villa that had been occupied by the Nazis during the Second World War, and then transformed the basement into a makeshift recording studio, with a view to creating their tenth album.
Mayhem ensued, of course. Jagger married a glamorous human rights activist in a famously catastrophic ceremony at the local church, giving rise to scenes of civil unrest reminiscent of the 1968 student uprising. The increasingly unhinged Richards and his equally intoxicated, heavily pregnant wife passed out on the bed while smoking spliffs, setting fire to the duvet and almost torching the gaff. Recording sessions were routinely interrupted by the police, who rightly suspected the band of single-handedly funding the illicit drugs trade of the entire French Riviera. The likes of John Lennon and Eric Clapton occasionally popped in to marvel at the unfolding car crash or, in Clapton’s case, to watch football on TV and bore everyone to death with his guitar wankery.
In such ways were the abiding myths of 60s and 70s drugs, sex, and rock’n’roll fomented. But as already argued in previous Rolling Stones reviews, I’m inclined to believe that these myths, rather than the music itself, largely explain the enduring popularity of albums like Exile on Main Street. For my money, there’s nothing all that special about the songs here, most of which sound somehow half-finished. Reviewers are contractually obliged to append adjectives such as “sprawling” and “murky” to this album, but if you want my opinion, it’s as objectionably ramshackle as most of the Stones’ other records – except that it lacks the one singular, inescapably killer standout moment, the “Paint It Black”, “Gimme Shelter” or “Sympathy for the Devil”. As a listening experience, it’s the equivalent of being intermittently raved at and then cried on by a drunken fool for 90 minutes, and in order to enjoy it, you first have to buy into the foundational rock’n’roll narrative surrounding its creation.
The original album was split into four separate sides and, if you squint hard enough, it represents a kind of narrative tale of a band’s spiritual, moral, and physical deterioration. Side 1 is peak, splenetic rock’n’roll hedonism; dirty, deranged opener “Rocks Off” describes “zipping through the days at lightning speed”, while the remaining four tracks reinforce the pills-and-liquor fuelled mania, particularly the careening and nonsensical “Rip This Joint”. Side 2 slows things down a bit, but not necessarily for the better, as songs like “Sweet Virginia” and “Sweet Black Angel” once again see the Stones treating the listener to their familiar and baleful impersonation of a string-plucking, straw-chewing hillbilly, a baffling routine that blighted their earlier albums.
Sides 3 and 4 are where the band deign to get “experimental”, with unexpected gospel numbers and bizarre lyrics infused with spiritual, even pseudo-Christian sentiments that sound like they’ve been directly lifted from the minutes of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, which they very possibly have been. In order to remind us that this is a Rolling Stones and not an Aretha Franklin album, they occasionally remember to throw in swampy, harrowingly hard-edged, admittedly enjoyable anthems to rockstar self-destruction such as “Torn and Frayed” and “Ventilator Blues”. They revert to type for the closer, “Soul Survivor”, with its abrasive guitars and heavy-handed metaphor of a soon-to-be shipwrecked crew of doomed seamen.
Overall, and despite my scepticism about the Rolling Stones, I can’t deny that Exile on Main Street is intriguing. It’s a historical document of and paean to a band quite obviously in the midst of a chemically induced meltdown, at a point in time when rock was still a relatively unknown quantity. The Stones were forging a new path, both musically and ideologically, and it shows in the chaotic, unrestrained, almost wilfully unprofessional nature of the recordings that make up this shambolic double album. As a collection of songs unmoored from their historical context and significance, Exile is merely passable; as a rock’n’roll statement and experience, it’s the real deal.
Overall rating: * * *
Standout track: “Rocks Off”