The Rolling Stones are into a new thing: music. Well, that's not quite fair, because they've always been more than competent, but Exile on Main St. does tend to bury Mick Jagger's vocals in the band's sound and stress the group's eclectic musical abilities at the expense of words and messages. Which is too bad; we miss Jagger's mean, smartass trenchancy in most of these tunes. The zingers are on the jacket covers, in photos of assorted freaks, in penciled notes ("I gave you the diamonds, you give me disease") and in the montages of Mick and the band. In the process of exposing the black roots of the Stones' music (Gospel, blues and boogie), the album shows how well the Stones can play in a variety of styles. "Shake Your Hips" is a dark, heavy-sounding boogie with a fine ricky-tick riff; Gospel comes on strong in "Just Wanna See His Face" and "Shine a Light"; there are good vocal tracks, like "Let it Loose" with Clydie King, Vanetta Fields, Dr. John, et al.; and the straight-ahead rockers, such as "Soul Survivor," were never better. But where are the Stones of yesteryear?
- Playboy, 9/72.
Bonus Reviews!
There are few things this year that have been as eagerly anticipated as the new Stones LP (with the exception of their upcoming tour). Their satanic majesties produce a cacophony of sounds, having changed quite perceptibly since Sticky Fingers. Their sound is less clear and the lyrics less discernible but the ragged guts and driving beat is still apparent and it's sure to end up gold.
- Billboard, 1972.
The best album by one of the two best rock & roll bands in the world. Aural film noir, the richly textured Exile is to most records what The Big Sleep and Casablanca are to made-for-TV movies. And "Tumbling Dice," an anthem about taking a chance on chances, probably the Stones' greatest song.
- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 12/15/77.
More than anything else this fagged-out masterpiece is difficult -- how else describe music that takes weeks to understand? Weary and complicated, barely afloat in its own drudgery, it rocks with extra power and concentration as a result. More indecipherable than ever, submerging Mick's voice under layers of studio murk, it piles all the old themes -- sex as power, sex as love, sex as pleasure, distance, craziness, release -- on top of an obsession with time more than appropriate in over-thirties committed to what was once considered a youth music. Honking around sweet Virginia country and hipping through Slim Harpo, singing their ambiguous praises of Angela Davis, Jesus Christ, and the Butter Queen, they're just war babies with the bell bottom blues. A+
- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.
When informed that Exile on Main Street was the highest-placed Rolling Stones album in a 1987 critics' poll of the Top 100 Rock Albums, former bassist Bill Wyman remarked with irony that it had received the roughest reception of any Stones album at the time of release. It set itself up for the obvious criticism of all double albums that it would have been better had the best tracks been distilled on to one disc. There were remarks that the sleeve was particularly obnoxious, featuring a gallery of freaks in passport-quality photos and the Stones' name only in handwritten scrawl. Though a number one in both the US and UK, Exile stayed near the top for a shorter time than its predecessor, Sticky Fingers, and "Tumbling Dice," the lead single, did nowhere near as well as "Brown Sugar."
So what, say today's critics. Exile is one of the Stones' greatest albums, with some of their hardest rockers and plenty of bad boy attitude to go around. "Turd on the Run," "Ventilator Blues" and "Rocks Off" showed they were not yet ready to clean up their act. Besides, this record contains Keith Richards' best vocal performance, "Happy."
"Emotion and style, beauty and sleaze, depth and glamour," prominent German journalist and broadcaster Wolfgang Doebeling once exulted. "In short, pure genius."
In 1987, Exile on Main Street was chosen by a panel of rock critics and music broadcasters as the #11 best rock album of all time.
- Paul Gambaccini, The Top 100 Rock 'n' Roll Albums of All Time, Harmony Books, 1987.
Rock vérité -- basement rock & roll, call it what you will -- it is the scuzziest, dirtiest, most chaotic album release of a great rock band at the height of its powers, driving home ironically detached cynicism with undiminishing arrogance. It is one of the ten greatest rock records of all time (Rolling Stone ranked it third in its August 27, 1987, critics' survey of the best recorded releases of 1967-87). Literally recorded in a basement with a mobile unit, it may have been another calculated statement, but like most of the Stones' messages at the time, this one rang true on many levels. Exile on Main Street is tough, dense music which pertains to its times and to the continuing spirit of rock & roll. The CD improves the clarity of the sound (which some may find equivalent to colorizing a black-and-white movie), but the murky power persists, pulsing with its carnival rhythms. All that, and it's got "Tumbling Dice," too. A+
- Bill Shapiro, Rock & Roll Review: A Guide to Good Rock on CD, 1991.
The Rolling Stones had already traveled farther than any band when they recorded this masterpiece of grunge. Except for Their Satanic Majesties Request, their brief, unfortunate flirtation with psychedelia (while the Beatles were around, their influence extended even to the Stones), all the albums the Rolling Stones recorded, from Around and Around to Sticky Fingers, were full of trashy vitality, enlivened versions of soul and blues classics side by side with the most brilliant, nasty distillations of lust and rebellion the band could imagine. But the Rolling Stones were a significantly different band in 1971, when they recorded Exile on Main Street, than they were in their salad days. For one thing, they had fired the man who started the band, Brian Jones, who promptly drugged himself into oblivion and death. For another, their age was dragging on them. Nowadays rockers in their late twenties seem relatively young, but in 1971 a twenty-eight-year-old rocker seemed ancient. The Rolling Stones felt old when they recorded this record, and they found solace in the blues.
Mick Jagger sings lead on all but one number here, and his performances are his steadiest and least affected ever. Much of this double-record was recorded in the basement of guitarist Keith Richards's house, and the informal surroundings saw to it that Mick didn't prance (the unlikely setting also contributed to the muddy sound). Mick talks directly. And Keith! Keith Richards is the greatest harmony singer in the history of rock and roll, mostly because he is the only one who can sing in several keys at the same time. Like his Fender lines, his voice darts through spaces in arrangements and fills without cluttering. His solo vocal piece, "Happy," is one of the lighter songs on Exile on Main Street, though the chorus line "I need love to make me happy" is a pretty damn desperate one under the right circumstances.
Of course, that's assuming you can get at the words. After you figure out all the lyrics -- a task that takes years -- then you have to figure out what they mean, which is impossible. "I only get my rocks off while I'm sleeping," "My mouth don't move but I can hear you speak," "The sunshine bores the daylights out of me": Those lines are all from only the first of these eighteen dissolute compositions. Sex and independence are the major issues here, but what comes though clearer than any words (except on "All Down the Line" and a luxurious cover version of Robert Johnson's "Stop Breaking Down") are the caressing bass of Bill Wyman and the shotgun drums of Charlie Watts. The music completely overpowers the lyrics on Exile on Main Street. You decipher "Wham bam, throw a ham/Alabam dn't give a damn"; I'll just sing along.
When its advocates term Exile on Main Street one of the sleaziest albums of all time, we're not only talking about the words. Producer Jimmy Miller has since disowned the sound of this record, blaming its sonic impenetrability on recording circumstances. But how this record sounds is inextricable from what it's whispering behind its mammoth snarl. Be it an all-out rocker like "All Down the Line," a frank blues like "Let It Loose," or a dark fusion of the two like "Torn and Frayed," the Rolling Stones turn Exile on Main Street into an extended deliberation on how to live like teenagers forever. For all its maturity, Exile on Main Street is about grown men discovering that the road can go on forever, though they occasional line does leap out -- "You can be my partner in crime" is about the friendliest -- such an existence seems not only desirable but necessary, even if it is drenched in doubt, fear, and mud.
- Jimmy Guterman, The Best Rock 'n' Roll Records of All Time, 1992.
Originally rock's most musically successful double album, this epic collection has aged magnificently. Includes the hit "Tumbling Dice," as well as "Rocks Off," "Happy," "Rip This Joint" and "Sweet Virginia." * * * * *
- Bruce Eder, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.
Exile on Main Street got some bum reviews when first issued for its muddy sound and decadent atmospherics. It's now rightly hailed as a masterpiece, and from the passionate yearning of the gospel-tinged "Let It Loose" to the demon fury of "Rip This Joint," it remains a towering survey of the Stones as they reinvent their influences. * * * * *
- Greg Kot, Musichound Rock: The Essential Album Guide, 1996.
Gritty, grimy, glorious -- it doesn't get any Stonesier than this sprawling killer recorded during Keith's heroin days in a castle in the South of France. The perfect soup captures them at their most elegantly wasted, translating their sex-and-drugs lifestyle into some of the raunchiest R&R offset by horns aplenty and pal Gram Parsons, who strongly influenced their flirtations with C&W ("Sweet Virginia," "Torn and Frayed") -- you can almost smell the Jack Daniels coming through. * * * * *
- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.
A dirty whirl of blues and boogie, the Rolling Stones' 1972 double LP "was the first grunge record," guitarist Keith Richards crowed proudly in 2002. But inside the deliberately dense squall -- Richards' and Mick Taylor's dogfight riffing, the lusty jump of the Bill Wyman/Charlie Watts rhythm engine, Mick Jagger's caged-animal bark and burned-soul croon -- is the Stones' greatest album and Jagger and Richards' definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit. In the existential shuffle "Tumbling Dice," the exhausted country beauty "Torn and Frayed" and the whiskey-soaked church of "Shine a Light," you literally hear the Stones in exile: working at Richards' villa in the south of France, on the run from media censure, British drug police (Jagger and Richards already knew the view from behind bars) and the country's onerous tax code. The music rattles like battle but also swings with clear purpose -- unconditional survival -- in "Rocks Off" and "All Down the Line." As Richards explained, "The Stones don't have a home anymore -- hence the Exile -- but they can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck, improvise, overcome." Great example: Richards recorded "Happy" with just producer Jimmy Miller on drums and saxman Bobby Keys -- while waiting for the other Stones to turn up for work. Exile on Main Street is the Stones at their fighting best, armed with the blues, playing to win.
Exile on Main Street was chosen as the 7th greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.
- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.
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